At the end of a rather unsatisfactory week off, I returned to the nurses’ home to find that I was to work on gynae for three months and then there would be another college session. Joan, the Welsh girl with whom I had become friendly, was assigned to the same ward. Things were looking up.
The next day there was a letter from Mum to say that they were going to visit Uncle Jake and family for two days, so I wouldn’t be able to go home for my day off.
‘Why can’t you go home if you want to?’ Joan asked.
‘They won’t be there,’ I said, matter-of-factly.
‘So?’
I looked at her for a moment and then realised what she meant. I was seventeen, nursing sick people, earning money, and I certainly knew how to behave in the home. Why was I not to go home, even if they were not there? It had never occurred to me, but I now saw that I had never stayed in the house without them. I had babysat Robert while they went out for the evening but had never been ‘let loose’ alone in the house for any other reason.
When I looked at the rest of her letter, I saw she had written: ‘While we are at uncle’s, we shall visit Auntie Jinny.’ It was like a smack in the face! Why could Mum go to both Uncle Jake’s home and Auntie Jinny’s, when she could not go to see Auntie Jinny because of headaches in the car?
‘Never mind,’ said Joan. ‘For some reason, they have given me the same day off, so why don’t you come home with me?’ Joan grinned as she said, ‘Mum will be there.’
I knew that she was teasing.
So I went with her to the little cottage way out in the country not far from Raglan. We had to go by train, which went through the Severn Tunnel. This was a weird experience, especially when we stopped because of some hold-up on the line ahead. The silence was eerie and broken by the steady drip, drip of water from the walls and roof. This is apparently normal but is a little worrying when you remember that above you are hundreds of gallons of sea.
The cottage was tiny, with just the two bedrooms, so a mattress was put on the floor for me in Joan’s room. There was no inside toilet or washing facilities. We had to go to a wash house in the garden, where there was plumbing and a huge boiler for hot water or to boil the linen. I loved the hot steamy atmosphere and smell of clean linen in that little place.
Joan’s father worked on the railway and always left very early in the morning, so we only saw him in the evenings, when we would sit in front of the fire and tell stories or we would play board games. This was long before television. A lot of people had radiograms to play their records, but there was no sign of such a thing here. There was an old radio, but it didn’t work anymore. In spite of the lack of such entertainment—or perhaps because of it—these were jolly, cosy days, with lots of chat. It was a little family of three people, each as important as the next. They lived and ‘worked’ as a unit. I was so impressed!
I spent many happy days off there and only lost contact with Joan years later when we were both married and living in different parts of the world.
When I told Mum where I had spent my day off, she seemed disapproving, but I don’t know why. I asked after Aunt Jinny and was told that she was ‘all right’ but nothing more.
‘Did she send me any message?’
‘No. Why should she? You didn’t send her one.’
‘But Mum, I didn’t know you were going until your letter …,’ I explained.
‘You could have rung us.’
‘I only got your letter when I came off duty—it was too late. You would have been on the way by then.’
‘Oh, we didn’t go when I said. We went the next day.’
I gave up and dropped the subject. There was no point in trying to have a proper conversation. Mum had made up her mind to be grumpy, it seemed.
There seemed to be an odd atmosphere on my next day off. I tried to ignore it, but something was wrong.
‘I’ll take Robert round the green with his car,’ I said.
‘Don’t you mean, May I take Robert round the green?’
I looked at her and at Robert. I turned and went upstairs to the room that I stayed in when at home. The guest room—I had not had a room of my own since leaving for training.
What was happening? Things were worse than ever.
And was I not to be able to take Robert out to play when he or I wanted?
Church
Joan and I were wandering round the town, off duty, one afternoon.
‘Let’s go and look at the church,’ she said. ‘I have been in there before and it is beautiful.’
So went in to St. Mary Redcliffe. As we walked quietly round, we became aware that a service of some sort was in progress in a side chapel. We slipped in at the back, looking and listening in awe. The church was beautiful and grand—so unlike the church in my village. The service was littered with sung prayers, and bells were rung now and again. Finally, we realised that people were taking communion.
That day made us both think. We wanted to know more.
We had both been to church schools: I to Church of England, Joan to a Welsh Nonconformist school. At the first opportunity, we saw one of the clergy, who was very solemn and well-spoken, but welcoming in his restrained way. We made a date to see the Canon with a view to being confirmed.
We attended classes (not always together because of duty) and learnt the catechism, and answered questions about our reasons for wanting to be confirmed.
What were my real reasons? Not just that I liked the church, or the solemnity of the services, but that I had left behind my childhood association with the Christian faith when I left the village church school. The assembly services in the Grammar school had been brief and not inspiring, and I missed the simple faith that I had been taught in the junior school.
Mum professed herself to be a Methodist but rarely attended chapel. She had arranged for me to be christened, however, when she discovered from my father that this had not happened when I was a baby. I was nine at the time and I was now grateful to her, as I was able to tell the Canon that I was baptised. He was a rather splendid man—quite frightening, but he taught us well. We were confirmed by the bishop, together with about a dozen others, at a special service in this splendid church.
Mum was not too pleased that I had chosen Church of England as my faith rather than Methodism (Dad was an atheist—so he said, but I wonder if he really was just undecided), but Auntie Lizzy had a white dress made for me and bought me some pale grey shoes. The three of them and Joan’s parents came to the service. The classes and arrangements had taken about a year, so the confirmation was held when we were both in our second year.
I wrote to tell Auntie Jinny about it all, and she was very pleased, saying that Mummy would have been pleased. I had never heard that my mother went to church very much, so I asked Auntie about this in my next letter. Her reply was typical of her unquestioning faith: ‘Even if Mummy had not chosen Jesus, He had chosen her to be with Him because she had been a good and loving person.’ She sent me a white prayer book with the date of my confirmation on the front. I treasured it for years and carried it as a bride.
I wish I could say that I followed the faith well and regularly, but I frequently ‘fell by the wayside’. We had a lovely little chapel in the hospital, and I sometimes went to the Sunday service or just to be quiet if there had been a sad case, or if I felt that I had not dealt with something well, or if I was upset when things were not good at home.
Looking back, I think I must have had a rather frivolous side, so my faith was perhaps not always to the forefront of my life.
Swimming
The next college session was during a spell of superb weather. We finished lectures at six p.m., then about five or six of us rushed to the nurses’ home for supper, gathered our swimming costumes and boarded a bus for Portishead, a small town on the Bristol Channel.
The sea around the Severn Estuary is brown and would be considered uninviting (and possibly polluted) now, but it was the nearest place accessible to us. And we love
d it!
It would have been seven before we arrived, but, undeterred, we normally found a low rocky headland and stripped off. We had been there at low tide, so we were aware of the depth of water at high tide and spent the rest of the evening throwing ourselves into the murky water from a fairly high point. We dived, jumped, ‘bombed’, separately or hand in hand, for an hour and a half, then dried (a bit) and jumped on the last bus back to Bristol. I wonder now that we found it worthwhile, but oh we did!
Of course the times of high water were not always in our favour, but we had a little yellow book of tide times, and as soon as it seemed possible again, off we went.
I don’t know when we fitted in the necessary ‘swotting’ for first-year exams, but, to my surprise, I did very well. Matron always took an interest in promising nurses and must have considered me to be worth her attention, as she sent for me to talk about my continuing training.
Matron was a round Scottish woman with a well-developed sense of duty to the hospital. Our uniform rules included keeping one’s hair short or ‘up’. Should a few locks stray below the permitted length, Matron would steam down a passageway, shouting, ‘Keep your haaair off your collaaaar, nurrrrse,’ and some frightened, tousled-headed nurse would scuttle to the nearest bathroom mirror to perform wonders with bobby pins.
On this day, I went before her mightily pleased with my results.
After a few preliminaries, Matron asked, ‘And what do you like best about your nursing so far?’
I had already decided in what direction my future would lie. ‘I like the college time and the lectures, Matron.’
Instead of being interested, she looked shocked. ‘You should never enjoy lectures better than looking after patients, Nurse. This is a disgrace!’
I tried to tell her that I wanted to be a Sister Tutor—that was my ambition—and that was why I wanted to learn how to teach as well as how to nurse, but she had made up her mind that I was… what? Unfeeling? Lazy? I was dismissed without being able to defend myself. I was unhappy to be so misunderstood, but I had had good training in this at home.
Looking back, I think this was all part of my really wanting to be a doctor. But that was never going to happen.
Plans
I began to save up again. I wanted to go to see Auntie Jinny and it seemed that, for some reason, I was not going to be taken with Mum and Dad, so I set about finding out about train times and fares and the connecting bus. I had never done this before and found it rather confusing. The main problem was the cost. I could walk to the station in Bristol, catch a train to Cheltenham and then a bus to Winchcombe, but a return journey like this would take most of my month’s salary and would take longer than my day off. I would have to ask Mum if I could miss spending my next week’s holiday at home. I knew instinctively that she would not like it: there was something strange going on, to do with the non-visit before and my mother. How did I know all this? I had worked it out from snippets of conversation I had overheard between Mum and Dad.
It seemed that, for some reason, Auntie Jinny had written (she was no great letter writer) and had been unwise enough to mention that I had sent her a photo of me in uniform and how much I looked like my mother.
At about the same time, Mum had got it into her head that Dad was inclined to talk about my nursing rather than Robert’s childish achievements. Dad had never been good at noticing things, but I was the first woman in the family to have a career, and he was quite proud of me. This came as a surprise to me, but, whilst I was glad, it was obviously causing trouble.
When I mentioned my plans to Mum, she said, ‘Well, you can’t go this next holiday because Grandma and Granddad are moving and I want you to help.’
I did not have any more holiday for a while but continued to save for the next one. I finally wrote to Auntie Jinny to say that I would be with her in two weeks’ time. I did not hear from her, but a few days later there was my letter in the nurse’s home box, returned to me.
I rang Mum and Dad. Mum answered, saying that the letter had probably just gone astray because of my bad writing. I didn’t know what to do, so I wrote again—very carefully this time.
Goodbye
Auntie Jinny was dead.
What I felt was the last link with my mother had gone.
I was selfish enough to cry for myself, for the chats that we would never have, for the visit I would never make, for the assurances that I had been loved and so on.
After a while, I cried for the right reasons. That Auntie was no longer alive, going to her church, meeting her friends, living in her lovely cottage. That she just wasn’t any more. She was no longer in the world.
Later still, I began to remember that she was sure that she would see ‘dear Frank’ when she died. Was she with him now? If so, I should be glad for her. But this was difficult.
Some friend of Auntie’s, going through her address book, had written to Dad, and he, who never put pen to paper, had written to tell me.
I ended up going home at the beginning of the week that I had planned to go to Auntie’s, but my parents were not there. I had no key, so I walked down through the village to see Grandma, Granddad and Auntie Lizzy. They told me that Auntie Jinny’s friends had asked Dad to go and sort out her possessions, as she had no surviving relatives. That was where they were.
So after all that I spent my week off at the nurses’ home. I went to Gloucester Road swimming baths, I wandered around Bristol, met up with some nursing friends and medical students and went to a pub for the first time. I went to church in the hope of gaining some comfort, but the place was in uproar and the services disrupted because there had been a scandal and one of the clergy had been ‘defrocked’. Understanding nothing of the implications, we giggled about the term ‘defrocked’; I went to the hospital chapel instead.
It was summertime and so there were no dances or balls, but a group of us took picnics onto the Downs and walked across the suspension bridge to the woods beyond. I went to the pictures twice because Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet was being shown. My favourite actor and my favourite Shakespeare play all together! And, of course, I had some money to spend because I had been saving for the trip to Winchcombe that would never happen.
I said very little about Auntie Jinny because most of the girls would not have understood quite how much she had meant to me.
When I went home the following week, Mum seemed a bit less grumpy and showed me one or two plates that she had brought away from Auntie Jinny’s cottage. Then she said, ‘Auntie Jinny wanted you to have her sewing machine, but I knew you wouldn’t want it, so we sold it.’
‘I would have liked it, Mum.’ Oh dear, I was arguing.
‘What? Where do you think you were going to keep it? I don’t want it here.’
So that was that.
I missed Auntie for a long, long time, but eventually I enjoyed remembering her and her cottage and all the lovely talks we had had about my mother and Jesus. As Mum and Dad rarely mentioned her, she became a kind of secret thought. If she was mentioned at all, Mum’s mouth took on the screwed-up position that she kept for people of whose opinions or lifestyle she didn’t approve.
But without the bridge that Auntie provided between the times before my mother died and after, I was gradually finding it more painful to think about my mother and all the years that I felt I should have had with her. I didn’t speak of her, either. Who was there now to hear me? My life was full of work, new experiences, new friends. I was forming opinions and had much to occupy me. I was growing away from the past and gradually building a future.
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but about then there was another sad event, when Tiggy had to be put to sleep. How I missed him! He had been so much a part of my childhood; so loved and cuddled, and the willing recipient of tearful confidences. His dark eyes and stubby tail said it all.
Better Times
I was now well into the second year of my training and therefore was given more responsibility and more inte
resting tasks to do such as administering different types of injections and other medication, putting on dressings, rehabilitation after operation, keeping of records and observation of the progress or otherwise of treatment.
Carrying out renal or rectal washouts were no one’s favourite jobs, but they had to be done. Another procedure that I now did was ‘Last Offices’—or ‘laying out’, to the layman. There was a very precise way of all aspects of this sad task. After washing and dressing the patient, you wrapped him in a crisp white sheet, which was pinned in place. Seven pins in all, facing the feet. This was most important! All this happened on the ward, no matter how busy we were, tending the living.
Today, all this is done in the mortuary or by the undertaker. But although it was time consuming and, perhaps, not the best thing to be doing among patients (albeit behind screens), at least the deceased was attended at his end by those who had known and nursed him.
Another night duty passed, thankfully with less drama than the first, and another college session was enjoyed—at least by me (in spite of Matron’s disapproval)—and then I was assigned to theatre.
I was delighted, Bristol was at the forefront of budding technology and anaesthetics and was one of the very first hospitals to perform the famous, but now almost routine, ‘blue baby’ operation.
I was what was known as a ‘runner’. We all started that way. We laid up the sterile trolleys with all the instruments for the ‘scrub nurse’ (more senior) to hand to the surgeon during the procedure. We learnt about sterile procedures and the correct order for everything, such as which masks and gloves had to be put on, and how to assist the surgeons and scrub nurse into their sterile gowns.
The Country Nurse Remembers Page 25