Sixty Years a Nurse

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Foreword (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

I first met Mary Hazard at my local GP’s surgery, the Bounds Green Group Practice, when I moved into the area in 2000. She took my blood at the surgery one day, and I was immediately struck by her vibrant personality, her amazing manner and her fantastic sense of humour. It soon became very clear that Mary was an institution. Everyone at the surgery revered her, and when she took blood it was a painless experience, accompanied by laughter and goodwill. One day she told me a story about how the women come in and say to her, ‘Will it hurt?’ and she says, ‘Yes, it’s a little prick,’ and they say, ‘OK, go ahead,’ and they’re fine. And then the men come in, ask the same question, look brave and then, ‘Boom, they’re on the floor.’ Mary is a larger than life, wonderfully warm, amazing character, always smartly dressed and up for anything (clubbing in a tiara in Leicester Square), and the surgery was not the same at all once she left in November 2013.

While writing this book I visited Mary one night at home and found a crowd of people round her front door, anxiously peering in her bay window. ‘Where is she?’ a worried neighbour said. ‘Oh, she might be unconscious on the kitchen floor,’ said another. Then some colleagues were visiting from the GP’s surgery, and were worried: ‘Where’s Mary? We hope she’s all right.’ The friends and neighbours, colleagues and passers-by were so worried about losing Mary, they forced her front door open, only to hear her loud, commanding voice booming from the pavement: ‘Sweet Jesus, what in hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t even go for a drink without being invaded?’ This was then accompanied by a raucous laugh, and we all knew that Mary had been off on her own, doing her own thing, having a quiet drink with friends down the pub, her little dog in tow. Mary is a total people magnet, who belies her age. Her neighbours call her ‘Queen Mary’ as she knows all the business in the street, is everyone’s friend, but always speaks her mind. Even at 80 she is never alone, since the doorbell goes constantly, as the phenomenon that is Mary Hazard attracts all comers.

This book only really scratches the surface of Mary’s sojourn from Ireland to England in the early 1950s. The most amazing part of the story is that she is still here to tell the tale, and is still a force to be reckoned with, after 62 years working in the NHS and 80 years of amazing, boisterous and, sometimes, tragic life.

Corinne Sweet

Acknowledgements (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

To Ivan Mulcahy, without whom this book would not have happened, and Sallyanne Sweeney, for your excellent assistance. To Natalie Jerome and Kate Latham, for brilliant feedback, editing and guidance. Thanks also for background research to Sgt Mark Bristow, of RAF Northolt. To my family, friends and NHS colleagues for being there for me down the years. To Rufus Potter and Clara Potter-Sweet for patience and forbearance as ever with the writing process.

1

Arriving from Ireland (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

It was so exciting: my first plane journey, ever. Also, my first proper time away from home, especially overseas. It was 10 September 1952, I was seventeen, and only a week away from my eighteenth birthday. I was so proud and independent to be sitting on this silver and dark-green Aer Lingus Bristol 170 Freighter, engines throbbing, propellers whirring, all the way from Dublin. I felt very grown-up, all on my own, with my little bag neatly stowed overhead and my new shiny black Clarks shoes on my feet. My heart was racing the whole time: I was finally on my way to fulfil a life-long ambition. As we descended through dank, grey clouds towards Northolt Airport, west of London, my stomach started churning and jumping in a wild fandango of fear and anticipation. What had I done? What would it really be like? What if my mother was right, and I wouldn’t last a month? I slipped my hand into my skirt pocket, and there was the folded £20 note (about £400 today) for my return fare if I couldn’t stand ‘that evil, black Protestant Godforsaken country’. My mother had screamed, then sulked at me, right up until the last minute, when she had given me a reluctant, brisk kiss on the cheek goodbye. ‘You’ll need this for your return journey, you stupid, wayward girl.’ She’d pushed a rosary, crucifix and little prayer book into my other hand, and stalked off, straightening her hat with its pheasant feather, with an irritated air. On the other hand, my father had folded me into his big arms saying, ‘Let her go, Agnes, she has to find her way,’ which made me sob into his firm, tweedy shoulder. ‘Yer bladder’s in yer bloody eyeballs,’ he teased, as always, which made me laugh through my tears, cheering me up no end.

Now, as the plane descended noisily, bumping through the dense clouds, I noticed the airport buildings rushing up towards me. I leaned towards the window and held my breath: I could just make out dark-grey silhouettes of the Nissen huts, a huge black hangar and a lit-up runway through foggy, late-afternoon light. Suddenly, a front page of the Irish Times flashed across my mind of a fatal air crash only back in January, when the same kind of plane as mine had smashed dramatically into a Welsh mountainside. It was a very rare event, but the memory of twisted wreckage, fatalities and the image of a child’s doll sinking into a bog made me shudder all the same. What on earth was I doing coming all alone to England? Maybe I was mad, like my mother said? Then I made myself get a grip: ‘Come on, Mary, pull yourself together,’ I scolded myself. ‘What are you thinking? It’s all going to be fine. You’ll see.’

Once in the busy airport, I had to find my way to Putney, wherever on earth that was. It was a long, long way from Clonmel, in the south-west of Ireland, that’s for sure. Everything looked so strange and grey, concretey and dull, after the lush green and spreading apple orchards of my beautiful home town. However, I made myself focus, as I wasn’t going to be beaten at the first hurdle (I wouldn’t give my mother that kind of satisfaction), and I soon managed to find a Greenline bus. A friendly conductor explained in broad Cockney I had to change twice to get to Putney: once in Ealing, and again in Richmond. His accent made me laugh, because it sounded so funny – the first English I’d ever really come across in person. All my life I’d dreamed of this moment, of going off to be a nurse. My mother had wanted me to study nursing in Dublin, under the beady, watchful eyes of relatives, but after a lifetime with the nuns, in convent school, I knew I could not bear another moment under their rigid, cruel control. This is where my mother and I came to bitter loggerheads, and the fight was set to continue, even though I was now in England, facing my first six months of State Registered Nurse (SRN) training. As I climbed aboard the coach, I realised it was going to be a long and memorable journey, in more ways than one.

Looking out the window, watching the unfamiliar English streets unfold, I realised I was finally escaping the confines of my home and upbringing to make this new, exciting but scary foreign start. It was 1952, and I was setting out on three years of intensive training. Ireland had been shielded, relatively, from the war, but as we drove towards London I could see bomb damage and that things were still quite austere in England. I was used to the green, lush land of Ireland, the river running past the end of our road, with its neat houses; England looked grey, suburban and a bit dreary. But it was all new to me, an adventure, and I’d finally escaped those religious, social and moral constraints that had driven me to become quite a rebellious girl.

Back home, I was the youngest of five children: four daughters, Una, Betty, Joan and me, Mary Francis, as well as a son, Peter Joseph – all of us with good Catholic names, of course. My mother, Agnes, was a seamstress and milliner, and had left school at fourteen to go into service at first. My father, George, had also left school early, but was bright, and had managed to get a good job in Customs and Excise, going around the bonded stores (which were like government-controlled warehouses), testing the specific gravity of all sorts of things, like rum and whiskey, so people didn’t get short-changed or prosecuted for doctoring goods. We lived in a big, white-painted house opposite a weir on the River Suir, on the Raheen Road, five minutes outside of rural Clonmel. It was a lovely family house, with an apple orchard down the side of the house, and a huge rambling garden with wild roses and heather, high hedges and white metal gate. On one side of the house there were my mother’s raised vegetable and fruit beds, and on the other there was a big lawn where my brother had created a little nine-hole putting course. We were quite well off, and my dad had a car (which few in the town had), a black, four-door Morris 10, which he would steer proudly up the drive, while being greeted noisily by our two liver and white Cocker Spaniels, Ivor and Vanda.

I’d wanted to be a nurse for as long as I could remember. I was always bandaging people, and pushing dolls and babies in my little black pram. I even helped a neighbour with Parkinson’s, Mrs Roach, up the road. I didn’t know what it was in those days, and there was no cure for it. This little old lady shook all the time and dribbled, and her daughter, Nora, gave up her life to look after her. I used to sit with Mrs Roach while Nora, who was a spinster in her fifties, went shopping, and I used to think, ‘I wonder why she’s like that? I wonder what can be done to help her, poor thing?’ I hadn’t a clue, but I was fascinated, and I wasn’t put off at all. I have to admit that I was a bit of a naughty child, a bit wild, I suppose. I liked climbing trees, and we nicked apples out of orchards. I loved wheeling real babies out in their high Silver Cross prams, too, and we used to wheel this baby, Frank, around, when he was about nine months old, and gradually fill up his pram with all these apples and pears we were stealing. One day, a man at the gate of an orchard stopped us, and when he pulled back the blanket, which was covering a huge lumpy heap, including a crying Frank, I was in big trouble. As my punishment, I got a walloping with a rolled-up newspaper from my father and was never allowed out with the big pram and baby Frank again.

We did go back in the orchards, though, for a different purpose. Magners and Bulmers were the local cider makers, they still are, and they had masses of huge apple orchards in Clonmel. We used to go round, in gangs of kids, with aluminium buckets and fill them up with windfalls. Then we’d get tuppence a bucket, and after a long day doing this we’d have two and six, or something like that. My father would match whatever I ‘earned’ and then I was told to put the money in my Post Office account. We did eat the apples sometimes, but they were so sour they made you wince. We rather preferred the hard cash instead – and this is the way my father taught me to save (for which I am very grateful). And it was fun – long days larking about in the sun, or rain, scrumping away, giggling and throwing rotten apples at each other.

Although there was rationing in Ireland, there was no bombing. In fact, the Irish usually sided with the Germans over the English, back then, because of our long history of strife. Because my father worked for Customs and Excise, he was well in with people, and got butter and other stuff on the black market, so we didn’t go short. We were very lucky, where others weren’t (which my mother was always reminding me of, of course). Plus, my mother was a great gardener and she would grow carrots, cauliflowers, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, rhubarb, everything. I remember one day, when I was quite young, she had shouted at me about something, and, annoyed, I went out and pulled up all the baby carrots in one of her huge, beloved raised beds. I ruined the entire crop. My mother went ballistic and shouted the usual ‘Wait till yer father gets home’ threat. I tried to put the carrots back, but they were only like little fingers, and they were all floppy, and it was hopeless. I knew I was in for it, and I did get walloped – again with the rolled-up newspaper.

I think my parents loved each other, although they had quite a temperamental relationship. My mother was the ‘boss’, a ‘matriarch’, while father was the most gentle of gentlemen (at home, at least), apart from when he walloped me, which wasn’t as often as my mother, who did it a whole lot more. Although she threatened us with father’s ‘tellings offs’, she would meanwhile pick up the sweeping brush and make use of it by shaking it at us threateningly, or even hitting us, when pushed to the limits.

We all had to muck in and make the house nice, as she was very house proud, and she did everything herself. There were no ‘mod cons’, so the washing had to be scrubbed and wrung in the mangle on a Monday, the house cleaned and swept scrupulously, and the rag rugs, which my mother made by hand, had to be beaten on the line. I hated this job as the dust went in my mouth and eyes, up my nose, absolutely everywhere it possibly could. One day, when I was about ten, I was sitting on the stairs, grumpily, having to clean the brass stair rods, which held the stair carpet in place, one by one. I was supposed to pull each rod out, rub it with Brasso, put elbow grease into them until they shone, and then put them back in, at the base of the stair, through metal loops. The stairs were long and there were so many rods, so being me I tried to cut corners, but, of course, my mother caught me. Well, I was in for it. ‘Mary Francis!’ she shouted at me, and I tried to ignore her, until she was on me, pulling me off the stairs, and I was being hauled out for a walloping. I was supposed to go to the cinema that afternoon in Clonmel for sixpence, which I loved, and I was told there was no way would I be going out that day. I had to clean all the stair rods properly, all over again, through gritted teeth, until I could see my face in them. I knew I deserved it for being cheeky, but it still felt terribly unfair, so I blubbed the whole time I rubbed.

Another day, when I was about eleven, it was my turn to go and fetch the newly baked bread from the shop across the road. We had these large pan loaves and I loved the smell of freshly baked bread. Anyway, I couldn’t resist, despite my mother warning me, ‘If you eat that bread, I’ll give you a bloody good hiding.’ But the bread was not wrapped up, it was so lovely and fresh, so tempting and warm, and I tore off the end and gnawed it greedily on my way back home and up the garden path. When I got there, I knew I would be in trouble. My mother was very strong-willed, and she would hit me with whatever came to hand. Knowing this I popped the loaf in the porch and ran down the garden, out of harm’s way. I thought, ‘God, I’m going to get it now.’ However, I then heard ‘Mary, yer tea’s ready,’ and, being me, I thought it was all right and she’d not noticed. However, when I rushed in the front door I was immediately met by a blow to the head – with the loaf of bread. I tried to get away but she was shouting ‘Mary, get in here, you evil little child,’ and was hitting me hard. She got me in the eye. ‘That’ll teach you not to do this again,’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to eat this bread.’ So I ran outside, crying bitterly, and I found Ivor, our dog, and sat on the wall outside. He came and sat with me, so I lifted up his long furry ear, and blubbed into it, ‘I hate her, I hate her,’ very dramatically: my little heart was breaking. Then I saw my dad coming up the road. My saviour! Ivor would sense him coming and would go mad, wagging his tail and barking. So I was rubbing my eye all the time, pinching the skin and being vicious, making it all the colours of the rainbow. When he got out the car I went crying to him. He used to call me ‘Moll’, and he asked, ‘What’s the matter, little Moll?’ and I replied pathetically, ‘Look what she’s done to me. She hit me with a loaf of bread, all for nothing.’ I put on a good show, and he lifted me up and walked into the house. I remember his Anthony Eden hat (a Homburg), worn at a rakish tilt, which he tipped up with his thumb as he said to my mother, ‘Agnes, can you not control your children? Do you have to maim them?’ So with that she got a dishcloth and threw it at him.

Then she wouldn’t talk to him at all, and we all seven of us sat round the big square scrubbed wooden kitchen table in total silence (sometimes one of us, in disgrace, would sit at mother’s sewing machine to eat). Today, it was me in the doghouse, obviously. She wouldn’t talk to me either, as I was the ‘evil trouble-maker’. As she dished out she’d say things like, ‘Betty, pass the salt to yer father,’ or ‘Will you ask yer father what he wants on his plate.’ And then my father would say to Betty, ‘Can you tell your mother the dinner was rotten.’ I would also be sent to Coventry by my sisters, who blamed me for all the family trouble – so I would be in agony as well. All this would go on for at least a couple of weeks, until one of my big sisters would slap her cutlery down on the table and say in front of my parents, ‘For God’s sake, stop it, the pair of you!’ And all the while I’d be sitting there, with my head down, feeling like I was all the cause of the trouble – which, of course, I was.

Then they’d make up and it would all be OK again. They had their traditions: once a year my parents would dress up and go to the policemen’s ball or county farmers’ ball together and have a grand old time. Father would also go out to the pub every night at nine o’clock sharp. McPhelan’s, it was. My mother would get grumpy, but my father went, regular as clockwork, to meet his five handsome brothers, also known as the ‘terrible five’ locally, who would have pints and whiskeys, smoke smelly Passing Cloud cigarettes, and talk and plot politics late into the night. My mother would say to him, ‘If I was dead in my bed, you’d still go to McPhelan’s,’ which was true, probably. Meanwhile, at home, she would be bottling fruit, making jam, doing sewing, knitting or crocheting, or giving us ‘question time’ round the table. She would be asking where Finland was on the map, or setting us tests. I learned more from her about geography and history than I did eventually at school. Mother was also great at playing cards and teaching us games. We all had to play a musical instrument (mine was the piano), and we’d put on little operettas, with all the costumes and everything, which my mother would run up beautifully.

My father also liked pheasant and grouse shooting, and he’d go out with his shotgun folded under his arm in his tweed jacket and big boots. He used to hang the smelly old dead birds up in the shed afterwards; I’d see all the blood running down into dark pools on the floor, and I’d hate it. My mother used to pluck them, and we used to eat them (there was loads of shot to pick out). One time he shot a cock pheasant and the feathers were absolutely beautiful. He had the bird stuffed and it would sit on top of the old piano that we all learned on, and my mother put the long tail feathers in her hats. However, my father hated having to go and ask for permission to shoot up at the big local estate, which used to be owned by the Duke of St Albans. ‘It galls me to have to go cap in hand and get permission from those bastards. I don’t see why I have to get permission from the bloody English to shoot on our own land.’ There was a lot of animosity towards the English in Clonmel, going back in history to a particularly terrible siege in 1650, with Cromwell massacring the locals willy-nilly. They found the bodies of mothers with babes in arms, and all sorts, in a mass grave, which caused a huge stir locally once the details were revealed in the 1950s. In his youth my father had been a fighter for Ireland’s freedom, and he’d tell how the youths would get the Black and Tans and push them up against doors with their pitchforks and worse. I loved to hear these stories; they were thrilling and my father was a wonderful talker.

For instance, he told me that he was in the IRA as a young man, and he had a little silver gun, a revolver, which he kept down his sock. He said he was one of Michael Collins’s men. He would tell wonderful stories, about men in Cork and the IRA, during the 1914–18 war and the twenties, which left me spellbound. He told me about escorting the Black and Tans out of prison. One day he was walking down a lane with my mother, hand in hand, when they were courting, and a ‘Peeler’ (an English policeman) jumped out of the bushes and confronted him on the road. My father said the Peeler made him strip down to his combinations (old-fashioned long-johns), and then he searched him, which was all done in front of my mother. It was hugely embarrassing for my mother, humiliating for my father, and then it all got ugly so she ran away in fear. When my father was bending down to undo his boot laces, he took out his little silver gun from his sock and shot the Peeler dead. The local men hid the body and it was an ‘unsolved crime’. He was later decorated by the President of Ireland for shooting the policeman. When he died he was buried with full military honours, with the IRA flag draped over his coffin and shots fired over it. He was a hero in many people’s eyes, including mine.

At the age of four I was sent to the Nuns of the Presentation Convent in Clonmel. They lived in a huge, gloomy grey-stone place, with a cloister in the middle in Irish Town, an outer part of Clonmel. I hated and detested it right from the very start until I finally left for England, at seventeen. All four of us sisters were sent to the Presentation Nuns, while my brother Peter Joseph, who everyone called P-J, went to the Christian Brothers. The nuns were cruel and vicious, and we were ‘murdered’ (by which I mean belted and walloped) regularly by them; and sadly P-J was equally cruelly treated at his school. Worst of all was Sister Margaret, who was tall, gaunt, with glasses, and who had a ghostly aura about her. She was particularly horrible, especially to me, or so it seemed. She was the Devil incarnate, and I used to come home crying to my mother after a bad day at school saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and my mother would snap at me, ‘You mustn’t talk like that. You should try to be patient – why do you think she’s a nun?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I guess her family hates her.’ And my mother would ‘tut’ and then say, ‘Nobody loves her, she has no family probably,’ trying to make me feel sorry for her (which I didn’t), as she always seemed to have it in for me, unfairly. We all knew that nuns were often farmers’ daughters, who were shoved out into a convent when there were too many to marry off or feed and clothe – so they solved the problem by hastening them into the folds of the Church.

Anyway, I was always in trouble at school. I was a bit naughty, I admit; I remember there was a very goody-goody girl with a long plait, the end of which I stuck into an ink-well, and it went all black. I got into trouble for that, although I tried to play the innocent at the back of the class. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it, but I think I was always in need of exerting myself against unfair authority. Sister Margaret would take us for knitting, sewing and the like, and one day she was teaching us moss stitch. I was sweating away, struggling to keep my stitches on my needle, while Sister Margaret prowled up and down the rows between the desks. She was in her long black uniform, with big sleeves, and a huge crucifix clunking round her waist, with her big starched hat, and a white starched bib down her front. On her hand she had a huge silver Bride of Christ ring. She hovered over me menacingly as I was struggling with the knitting, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’ve lost a stitch. What am I going to do?’ ‘Having trouble, are we?’ snarled Sister Margaret, and she got her big ring and ground it hard against the side of my head. It hurt like hell. But if that didn’t make me contrite enough, she’d take out her pencil, which had a sharp point, and would push it into my ear lobe as hard as she could. My eyes would spring with tears and I’d yelp. Then she’d drag everything off my needles in fury and throw it onto the desk, in front of everyone. Then I would be told to stand on my seat, and as we had glass partitions everyone in the adjoining classrooms would see me standing there, humiliated and blubbing. It was terrible. I would run home and tell my mother what had happened, but she’d just say I should ‘pray for Sister Margaret’s body and soul’ and I would say, again, ‘But, Mammy, I want to kill her, so I do.’ I swear my ears were pierced before I was fourteen years of age.

Although my mother was quite tough, she was also very skilled and she could do anything with her hands. As she was a dressmaker, she was very nimble with her fingers, so at school I was wearing a black gym frock, with box pleats and a red sash, which had been let up and down endlessly as it had been worn by all my sisters before me. When I was about fourteen, the gymslip hem came just to my knees. Anyway, on this particular day Sister Angela, who was dumpy, with a big bust and wire glasses, was taking us for singing. She was a strict old thing, very punitive and cold, and I didn’t warm to her. ‘Stand out, Mary Francis,’ she suddenly shouted at me, ‘and look at the Virgin Mary – she’s about to weep at your immodest legs.’ I was jolted out of my musical reverie and looked at the statue on the wall and wondered what on earth I’d done now. Sister Angela came and stood over me and then made me get out in front of the class. I wanted to die. She then went and got a big sheet of brown paper and knelt down and stitched it to the hem of my frock, right down to the ankles. I felt so humiliated. My best friend, Jo Mulochny, who sat beside me, looked at me with big eyes and mouthed at me, ‘Jesus, your mother’ll go mad!’ It was well known that my mother was proud of her family and skills.

At the end of the class Sister Angela snapped at me to stay behind, but I didn’t – I ran out of the door like a bat out of hell, brown paper crackling as I went. It was pouring with rain, and I had to walk a mile home from school. So I was half walking, half running, with all this brown paper slapping round my legs, all wet and flapping. When I got in my mother was sat at the treadle sewing machine in the kitchen and I said, ‘Look what she did to me.’ My mother jumped up and said, ‘Jesus wept, who did that?’ ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, crying. ‘She humiliated me over my gym frock. She said it was “immodest”.’ Well, that was it. My mother was enraged. She couldn’t bear any of us being humiliated like that. She was a proud woman, especially about her dressmaking and mothering skills. She didn’t care if we got belted, as she thought we probably deserved it, whatever happened, but this kind of deliberate public humiliation was the last straw for her. ‘That’s it!’ she said. And it was – it was war. Her feather hat was on in a trice – she never went anywhere without her hat and her gloves – then she said ‘Come on!’ and we were out the door. My mother had a lame foot, but she was on fire, so we had to march right back to school, with it still raining, and my brown paper still slapping off my legs. She was going so fast that I was half-running, half-walking, as she was half-dragging, half-pulling me behind her. My mother was fuming, incendiary and about to explode.

When we got to the nuns’ part of the school, to their living quarters, on a big, long corridor, we could hear them all singing piously at prayer. Butter wouldn’t melt at all, so my mother rapped loudly on the door, and a little nun came limping out, the wizened housekeeper, Mother Anthony, leaning on her stick, all serene. In fact, she was the Reverend Mother, and she knew my mother well because my mother had gone to the school there, before me, also when she was little. I was tugging at my mother’s coat, whispering, ‘Mammy, let’s go, she’ll kill me tomorrow.’ But my mother was adamant, and firmly planted to the floor: ‘No, she won’t. You leave this to me.’ So when Mother Anthony said, ‘Mrs Powell, how nice to see you. What can we do for you?’ my mother exploded. ‘Look what Sister Angela has done to my daughter. How dare she humiliate me and my family!’ On and on it went, and I was so red, so embarrassed, I wanted to die.

Mother Anthony kept calm in the face of this and simply said she would deal with it, but my mother was not to be put off. ‘You get that Sister Angela out here right now,’ she insisted, eventually. Out Sister Angela came, looking sheepish and bland, and my mother let rip. ‘Did you do this to my daughter’s frock?’ Sister Angela said not a word, but looked terrified. ‘Get a pair of scissors and undo it now!’ The paper was all dripping and flapping round my legs by now, creating a puddle on the floor. So Sister Angela removed the paper, obediently, but after that, and until the day I left, she totally ignored me. She made sure I was shoved down to the bottom of the class, however. But I was happy, because she left me alone.

I always liked people, and I was always interested in learning, although I often didn’t pay attention to what my mother said, as I respected and feared her in equal measure – in fact, I usually did the opposite to what she wanted, quite cheerfully. When I was eleven we went on our usual summer caravan holiday in Tramore, which was an idyllic place by the sea, on the south-east coast of Ireland, just outside Waterford. This was probably the first time I ever learned about the evils of ‘the Protestants in the North’. I made friends with a sweet girl there called Ann Jarvis and would go down and clamber over the rocks, then fish in the rock pools, and go swimming. It was lovely and I got on really well with this girl. Anyway, I was late back one evening and I brought Ann with me. My mother asked her where she was from and she said innocently, in her strange sing-song accent, which was different from mine, ‘Belfast,’ and ‘We come down here every year.’ My mother’s face was like thunder as she pulled me into the caravan and pushed Ann out and slammed the door. ‘Don’t ever talk to her again,’ she raged right in my face. ‘She’s a black Protestant from the North. We don’t associate with those people. They are not God-fearing people – they’re all hypocrites.’ And that was it. I was forbidden to talk to her ever again. It was really confusing as I’d thought she was a lovely girl, and I couldn’t see her black soul, not at all.

Sometimes I’d get so fed up with my mother and her rules that I’d try to run away. When I was about fifteen I’d been in trouble again about something or other, and my mother had walloped me, so I decided that was it, I’d had enough, and I was off. It was dark, and we weren’t allowed out at night, only to benediction, at the church. My mother was always suspicious of me, and rightly so, as usually instead of going to benediction (as I told my mother) I would meet up with a couple of girls from my class, fetch a purple Miners lipstick we had hidden in the hedge wrapped up in newspaper, and put it on, hitch up our skirts, and then go down to the quay to meet boys and smoke Woodbines. I had already started this filthy smoking habit very early, at about thirteen years of age, and I remember how they rasped your throat. It was like smoking a disgusting bonfire, but I felt I was very cool and ‘grown-up’, and we loved meeting up with the boys and feeling naughty. I’d rush back to the Friary at seven in the evening to see which priest was doing the ‘Blessing of the Blessed Sacrament’, then run home, wiping the purple off my lips with my sleeve, and wrapping the little lipstick back up in newspaper before popping it back in the hedge. When I got in my mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re back. Who said the blessing?’ and I would rattle off the priest’s name, sweet as you like. We sucked Polos to cover the tobacco smell. I don’t think my mother guessed, although she always suspected.

Anyway, this miserable evening I was determined I was off for good. So I got some bread and wrapped it in a big handkerchief, as well as a snub of candle and two Woodbines, before taking my father’s big old bicycle, with the upright handlebar. I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m never coming back. See if they miss me.’ My feet could hardly reach the pedals and it was only when I got to the other side of the town, and was near the cemetery, that I began to get the wind up, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Oh, God, where shall I go?’ I suddenly felt very alone, very spooked and scared. Then I met my father coming out onto the road (he must have been looking for me), and he said, ‘Ah, there you are. Where do you think you’re going on that bike without a light?’ I said, ‘I’m running away … but when I got to the cemetery, I got scared.’ He looked at me and said, ‘It’s not the dead you fear, Mary, it’s the living. Go home, and get that bloody bike in.’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I said, secretly pleased he’d come to find me. So that was the end of my rebellious running away.

But now, today, in September 1952, at seventeen and all alone, I was finally on my three interminable bus journeys towards Putney in south-west London. I knew I wanted to be a nurse: I was utterly determined to succeed, whatever the odds. I could hear my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, from all our endless fights, that England was ‘taboo’ and that ‘no way was I to go to that Godforsaken Protestant country’. But here I was, defying her again. My mother had a friend called Pat Wall, who lived in Wimbledon, and she wanted me to get in touch with her once I landed – ‘She’ll keep an eye on you.’ Yes, I bet she would, as everyone always was keeping an eye on me, one way or the other. I said I would, but I knew I would try to avoid her like the plague, if I could. I didn’t want any reports of my misbehaviour (if there was any, of course) to get back to my mother, as I knew she would be unbearable or, worse, drag me back, if I put a foot wrong.

Although I knew nothing about leaving home, nothing at all about travelling, or the world, for that matter, I knew I had to take this big step for myself. Eventually I found my way to Putney Hospital on that very long first day, and, as I rang the doorbell of the nurses’ quarters, round the back of the enormous red-brick hospital on the edge of a huge common, I held my breath until the large wooden door opened. A small woman appeared, in a crisp navy uniform and stiff white cap – she gave me a quick once-over while I explained who I was. After a pause she said, ‘I’m Sister Matthews, your Home Sister,’ in clipped English tones. ‘Come on in, you’ve had a long journey. I’ll show you to your quarters.’ And without a moment’s hesitation, in I jolly well went.

2

Joining the Regiment (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

When I arrived in 1952, Putney Hospital was a rather handsome, red-brick Edwardian sprawl on leafy Putney Common in south-west London. The three-storey nurses’ home was at the back, on the north side, and when I got there part of it had only just finished being rebuilt after being firebombed during the war in 1944 (it was the first incendiary bomb to land on London, in fact). I also found out, soon after, that there was supposed to be a ghost of a man dressed in a convict’s uniform (including broad black arrows), who had apparently drowned in a pond, and now glided across the common on dark nights, seemingly intent on committing a crime. The story was he had been in Putney Hospital and now local people spoke of his haunting the place from time to time. But even further back it seems the hospital was built on old plague burial grounds, where people who died of the ‘Pest’ in 1625 were taken out of London and buried, so the link between Putney Common, illness and death seemed to have a long, tragic and mysterious history. The place was green and spacious, but could also feel a bit eerie at night.

Anyway, by day there were nurses and sisters scurrying everywhere, being briskly busy in their starched, neat uniforms. It did strike me as ironic, momentarily, that I’d finally escaped the overly strict and pious regimes of home and convent in Ireland, only to end up with women wearing very similar outfits, albeit overseas and in a different context. However, I told myself, sternly, if I wobbled in my resolve, that I had battled to get here, and this was my own new adventure, so I was going to make it work, whatever I had to do – or wear. And no matter what anyone was like (they surely couldn’t be worse than Sister Margaret). A recent memory of fighting with my mother was still ringing in my ears, with her screaming, ‘You’re not going!’ and me shouting back, ‘Yes, I am, I am, I AM going to England. You can’t stop me!’ (accompanied by another walloping and loads of tears). We were like two cats in a bag, with my sisters and father needing to intervene before we drew blood.

My first few days in Putney went by in a blur: it was all a bit like going to boarding school (or so I imagined). First, I had to be fitted out for my uniform. On the ground floor of the nurses’ home, at the back of the main hospital, away from the road, there was a sewing room, with three middle-aged women stuck in it all day, sewing away happily at their Singer treadle machines. Lily, Gladys and Grace had to measure me up. They also worked out what each nurse needed individually, and then made it on the spot. It was a real home from home, for me, as I could imagine my mother being there, too, tape-measure round her neck, pins in her mouth, peering critically at their handiwork and ‘tutting’ at their sloppy stitches (‘Will you take a look at that – really!’). The women’s job was to actually make our uniforms, and then adjust them or re-use them, passing them on from nurse to nurse (definitely familiar ‘make-do-and-mend’ territory for me, especially reminiscent of the lean war years).

I was to be issued with three uniforms, so I would have one on, and one off in the hospital laundry, which was also on site, and one spare (as they always got dirty somehow). The dresses were pale-blue and white fine pinstriped, thick cotton, and down to our ankles nearly. We were also issued with seven white, starched aprons, one of which had to be pinned at the bib, at the front, and tied round the waist (I’m proud to say that mine was a tiny sixteen inches then). There were also starched collars and cuffs, which we had to keep absolutely spotless. Both aprons and cuffs had to be changed immediately they got mucky, which they obviously did on the ward, as we didn’t have plastic aprons or rubber gloves back then. Also, if we rolled up our sleeves to the elbows, we had to put on elasticated white cuffs to keep them up and smart.

Underneath the uniform we were to wear thick black Lyle stockings, which had to be darned immediately if you got a run or snag (we did the darning at night, ourselves). This was all finished off by black lace-up sensible shoes, which had to be buffed until they shone. There was an absolutely ‘no jewellery’ rule, except for a brooch-style Smiths watch that I pinned on my right apron breast. This was to be used for taking patients’ pulses. Also, definitely no make-up allowed, and our nails had to be inspected daily for cleanliness. Then hair had to be scrimped back tightly under our hats and any wayward hair (and mine was extremely wayward, like the rest of me) had to be pinned tightly into place. In fact, I’d cut off my beloved black plait, which reached nearly to my waist, in Ireland before I came, to my mother’s horror, so I had a newly manageable short style with a fringed bob.

Most importantly, our belts reflected our status: a virginal white belt for our first year, a royal blue one for our second and a serious black one for our third. This last belt had a special silver buckle which denoted we’d made it through, once we’d passed all our exams and had qualified – and survived. But what I really loved, most of all, were the outdoor capes. We had waist-length navy-blue woollen capes with a fabulous crimson lining, which we wore over our uniforms. It was a real Florence Nightingale touch and I felt wonderful in mine. They had red cross-over tapes to keep them in place – oh, I did feel like a proper nurse as I flounced along, my cape swishing in the wind. Very heroic, like something out of a film like Gone with the Wind.

But, horror of horrors, there were the hats. At first, making my hat correctly (which I had to most days) seemed like trying to climb a mountain like Everest (which wouldn’t be conquered until the next year, in 1953). We were given a fiercely starched square of white linen and we were taught by Sister Tutor (our lovely teacher, Angela Frobisher, who was kind, motherly and stocky), over and over, how to fold it into proper nurse’s attire. It seemed a total impossibility at first and I was all fingers and thumbs. I was half waiting for Sister Margaret’s ring to grind itself into my fumbling fingers or thump me in the temple, as I struggled to fold the blasted thing into a butterfly shape resembling a pukka Putney nurse’s hat. I had to fold it on my knee, and then pleat it, and it had to be pinned to my head, perfectly. The air would turn blue while I struggled, at first. In the third year, when we became staff nurses, we got two strings and a bow under our chins, as did the sisters, so the hats looked like little bonnets. The hats also changed in shape according to status: so staff nurses’ hats were different from Sister’s, which was different from Matron’s, whose was the most elegant and refined. We did look a sight, but I was secretly pleased and proud at finally being eligible to wear a trainee nurse’s hat at all.

The nurse’ home was at the north end of the hospital, and was three storeys high. We first years were on the middle level, with the second and third years on the top floor, and the doctors’ on call and sisters’ night duty sleeping rooms (separate, of course) on the ground floor. Our own bedrooms were small, cell-like but pleasant; clean, but very basic. I could see a large rambling lawn out of my window and, beyond it, Putney Common’s trees and bushes and local red-brick terraces. There was a single bed, with a wooden headboard, a tiny gas fire (no central heating then), an ottoman (storage chest), wardrobe, a little basin under the window and a small brown dressing table and mirror. I had two pairs of flowery winceyette pyjamas and a vest, which my mother insisted on me wearing to keep warm.