Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes: The memoirs of a nursery nurse in the 1960s

A little later, after the ward round, she was back.

‘Do you need something from the medicine trolley? Shall I tell Sister?’

‘No, thank you. I’m feeling a lot better today.’

Just before lunch time I saw her coming back again.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you.’

In the end, she was driving me potty so in the vain hope that she would go away, the next time she made a beeline for my bed I said, ‘Actually, I have got a bit of a headache.’ I lay down, thinking she would leave me alone to sleep.

Five minutes later she was back with two enormous pills and a cup of water.

I didn’t want them, or need them so I refused as politely as I could. ‘And in any case,’ I smiled, ‘I couldn’t manage to swallow anything as big as that.’

She hurried off only to reappear with the pills crushed in a dessertspoonful of blackcurrant jam. As I forced the disgusting mixture down she gave me a loud lecture about not suffering in silence.

It was Nurse Driver who had an accident with her stocking suspender. She was busy on the ward when it broke. I think the whole thing had come away from her girdle because usually if only the button at the end came off you could put a sixpenny piece in its place to keep your stocking up. Nurse Driver had tied a bandage around the top of her stocking to keep it up. During her shift, it gradually came undone and we had to bite our cheeks so as not to laugh as she dashed up and down the ward with a long trail of dirty bandage trailing behind her uniform.

And then there was the window. Someone said they felt hot. It was probably because she had a fever, but never one to rest on her laurels, Nurse Driver tried to open one of the windows. Being an old-fashioned building, they were of the long sash cord variety. Short, but undaunted, she found a step ladder and yanked the window down. Now we had half a gale blowing through the ward and of course, the window was jammed and so no one could shut it. It stayed like that for about an hour until two men came from the workshop to fix it.

After a week or so in hospital, I was allowed to go back home to Dorset. I can’t remember who took me home but I’m sure I wouldn’t have been expected to travel by train or coach. My recovery was hampered by a bout of glandular fever and it was three months before I returned to the nursery. I was keen to go back but once I began to feel better, I did enjoy my time at home. As usual, Dad went to the pub every night, so Mum and I watched The Avengers, Juke Box Jury and of course the handsome Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. I spent some days over at St Leonards with my Aunt Betty, just ‘chilling out’ as they say now. I met friends and we went to Bournemouth to the pictures or shopping. I went to a Tramp’s Ball at the West Moors youth club, which turned out to be the last time the kids I grew up with got together. By now, we were all out in the world of work and beginning to make new friends. I remember the time fondly for so many reasons, not least because one of the lads tried to get on the bus to get to the youth club but his tramp’s outfit was so convincing the conductor chucked him off! We had a great time.

The following Monday, I went back to my GP and was signed off. The silly thing is, if Matron had let me go to the doctor right at the start, I would probably have needed only a couple of days off sick but because of the delay in getting treatment, she had been without a member of staff for three months. There was also an assumption that we would do anything to ‘skive’ off work. What a shame she didn’t trust us more. If she had, she would have seen that we were loyal, both to the nursery and the children, and would only have taken time off if it were really necessary.

Chapter 4

Not everyone who lived in the home looked after the children. Some were unmarried mothers, who worked as cleaners or in the kitchens. Back then, having an illegitimate child still carried an awful stigma, but the first faint rays of change were coming into the care services. Most mothers were forced to give up their children for adoption. I have been told some very harrowing stories by my contemporaries in life, who were badgered and browbeaten into signing their babies away. A popular mantra was, ‘You want the best for your baby, don’t you? What could be better than to give him a Mummy and a Daddy who will love him and give him the best in life?’ Under duress they signed their babies away and some girls were actually locked in a room at the mother and baby home when their child was taken, in case they made a scene. These women may be in their sixties and seventies now but recent programmes on TV show only too well that they are still traumatised by events that happened when they were young. It hurts them all over again when they finally meet their offspring and they don’t really believe their mother put up enough of a fight for them. For those who wanted to keep their child, there was little or no public money to support children staying with them. Today’s society has little or no concept of how difficult it was, especially if the family were too ashamed to help. I have heard young people saying, ‘There’s no way I’d have given up my child. Nothing would have got in my way.’ But one wonders how they would have managed with no family support, no day nurseries, virtually no social security, and back in the sixties even the most caring of employers were reluctant to offer work to women with children, especially young children.

The mothers living in the nursery may have been only offered very meagre wages in exchange for their services but the system meant that they could at least keep their babies with some dignity. The children stayed in the nursery itself, and were well cared for by trained staff. Best of all, the mothers had them to themselves in their off-duty hours.

We may have all been far more subservient to authority than today’s society, but that didn’t mean we were passive doormats. Everyone developed ways of getting their own back on the powers that be and one of the best ways to do so was to shock. One of the mothers we had in the house was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. Social services spent a lot of time with her, pressurising her into naming the father of the baby. In the end, she retorted, ‘Look, if you’d eaten baked beans on toast and you got indigestion, would you know which bean gave it to you?’ Matron Thomas nearly fainted and the child care officer (which was what they called the social worker back then) almost fell off her chair.

That story was repeated in every nursery I worked in until it became legend. We all admired anyone with real spunk. The best of it is, the girl may have still been at school, but she’d only had one boyfriend and, as young as they were, they loved their baby and planned to marry as soon as she was sixteen. I often wonder if they did.

The unmarried mothers weren’t always young. Mary wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but she had a good heart. She had led a sheltered life, first in an orphanage and then in a hospital. She was the sort of girl hardly anyone notices. When she was discharged from the home where she grew up she was placed in the local hospital, where she worked doing routine chores and errands as a ward orderly. She enjoyed her work and people liked her. Her corny jokes were legendary. ‘I’ve got a frog in me throat and it won’t jump up,’ was one of her favourites, and if you said, ‘Are you all right?’ she would reply, ‘No, I’m half left,’ and think it hugely funny.

Mary met the love of her life towards the end of the Fifties. He paid her a lot of attention and she fell hopelessly in love. Though her teenage years were by now far behind her, Mary was an innocent; he was more worldly wise. Their love affair was brief but intense and before long she began to notice the changes in her body. A visit to the doctor’s confirmed her worst fears: Mary was pregnant.

At first, although she was upset, she wasn’t unduly worried. After all, her man had declared his undying love every time he had climbed the back stairs to her room. She was confident he would ‘do the right thing,’ but her whole world was shattered when she found out what the rest of the world knew, that he was already married. For the first time in her life, Mary’s gentle spirit was crushed. She was ill for some time but thankfully, the world was moving towards more enlightened times. Twenty-five years before, in the 1930s, girls like Mary were still declared insane and shut up in mental homes, sometimes for the rest of their lives, but the doctor dealing with Mary was a lot more understanding.

As part of this fairly new initiative, as soon as Jennifer was born, Mary was moved to our nursery. She worked in the kitchen while her daughter was looked after in the nursery. It was an ideal arrangement. The council had a ‘permanent’ member of staff (where else could Mary go with her baby?) and Jennifer was with her mother.

Mary was a loving and devoted mother. Nearly all her hard-earned cash was spent on her daughter and she also spent every spare minute of her off-duty time with Jennifer. They made a contented pair and the light had returned to Mary’s eyes. Because Mary had what we now call ‘learning difficulties’, she needed the guidance of others to help her with her child’s upbringing. She was also a bit scatty. One evening she called me into her bedroom. She had knocked a water glass off her bedroom table and absent-mindedly stepped straight onto a small shard of broken glass, which was embedded in the sole of her foot. One of the other girls called Matron, who wasn’t best pleased, because she worried constantly about staffing levels. Mary went by ambulance to the local hospital and once X-rayed, the doctor gently pulled the glass out and there was no lasting damage. When Mary came back, complete with bandaged foot, she dined out on that tale for weeks to come.

For women working in the nursery with their children, it could only ever be a temporary arrangement. The nursery only catered for children until they were five. Once they were ready for school, they either moved to another children’s’ home or into foster care. I left the nursery in 1962, when Jennifer was just over a year old. Mary may have been offered a similar situation in another children’s home when Jennifer was five. I hope so –they belonged together.

I wish now that I had written down some of the things the children said. We would repeat them at staff meal times and perhaps to a friend outside the nursery but so many of their quirky remarks are long since forgotten. Of course we never ridiculed them but some of the things they did were so sweet. The children all had their own individual combs and although they were marked with their names, they were supposed to keep them in their own pocket, which was hung over the radiator guard in the bathroom. I can still see Paul, standing with his legs akimbo and his hand on his hip in exactly the same way Matron Thomas did. He’d even captured her cross face as he boomed out across the playroom, ‘Julie, let me tell you somesing. You have left your comb on the top of the raid-it-ator card!’

Or Gary, who was dragging his feet when we were out for a walk. Knowing that Matron would complain if he scuffed his shoes, I said languidly, ‘Gary, pick up your feet.’ He stopped walking and looked behind him. Turning back to me, he said with a quizzical expression, ‘But I haven’t dropped them.’

Then there was Kelvin, who ate only the middle of his sandwich.

‘Kelvin,’ said Hilary, ‘Cook cut you some lovely sandwiches but you always leave the crusts.’

‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘She just doesn’t get it.’

I managed to get a day off on my seventeenth birthday in April. No one else was off so I had to spend the day alone. I went up to London and did some window shopping. At some point I walked past a cinema. It was showing High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra. It was by no means a new film, as it had been released in 1956, but I had never seen it. When I walked into the cinema, it was like walking into another world. The usherettes wore black uniforms with a frilly apron like a maid and in the interval, they actually served tea on a tray, with a teapot and china cups. I had no idea you could order it alongside your ticket, so I made do with the usual Lyons Maid ice cream! The Pathé News was full of stories about East Germans escaping the Berlin Wall. It had been built to prevent the massive defections of East Germans to West Germany. It was an horrific time but somehow it appealed to my sense of romance, with brave young men risking their lives and all that.

Being an institution, we were legally obliged to have regular fire drills. When the fire bell went off, the person in charge of the room had to make sure every child was taken to the assembly point. Matron or Sister would have a clipboard with everyone’s name on it and they had to be checked off. In this way, every person in the home was accounted for and safe. The nursery nurses and assistants helped with the children and Mary was given the job of making the 999 call. She took her responsibility very seriously.

‘When I was in the ’ospital,’ she used to say, ‘they told me that if I saw a fire, I was to grab one of the ’oses, and ‘ang out the winder and ’oller for ’elp.’

I held my hand to my face to suppress a giggle.

‘Well, there’s no need to do all that,’ said Matron sniffily. ‘Just make sure you’re in the cupboard under the stairs (where the telephone was housed) to ring for the fire brigade.’

One day we had a surprise fire drill. All the staff and children gathered at the assembly point and in due course we were checked off.

‘Are you in the cubby hole, Mary?’

‘I am Matron,’ came the reply.

Matron was pleased with the plan and we all started going back to work. But then we heard the sirens and the next minute two fire engines hurtled down the drive. In her enthusiasm to get it right, Mary had actually made the call.

When I got back from my long illness, nothing much had changed. Matron Thomas was still totally neurotic. She was always complaining of a ‘headache’ – at least it seemed that way whenever she appeared on one of her brief sorties to the nursery. In fact, she really didn’t need to put in much of an appearance because the day-to-day running of the place was such a well-oiled machine. Nobody questioned or altered anything. The mantra of the day was, ‘We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.’

Hilary, my roommate, developed a huge sty on her eye. As soon as Matron saw it, she said all in the same breath, ‘Oh, Hilary, it’s huge! It’s as big as a shilling (about the same size as a five pence piece) but you can’t go off sick because we don’t have enough staff.’ Hilary soldiered on in great pain but was forced to go off sick a few days later when she not only had to contend with the enormous sty but had also developed yellow jaundice!

With Hilary off sick, I made a new friend. Evie Perryer, a pretty, bubbly girl, arrived. We hit it off straight away. She had a real joie de vivre and we were always laughing. Evie was the kind of girl all the boys fell over to be with. In fact, she was never without a boyfriend and the two of us started going to the International Friendship League meeting.

I think someone my mother worked for must have told us about the International Friendship League (IFL). The Sixties saw a big rise in the numbers of foreign students coming to Britain, especially from the African continent and India. The IFL had branches all over the country and was run along the lines of a church youth club. They promoted clean, healthy interaction between young people and the one we attended was held in a church hall. The meetings usually began with a ‘talk’ by someone who was an expert in his/her field and then, after a cup of tea, the rest of the evening was given over to a dance. The only talk I can remember was one given by an ex-policeman, who shared a story of how a murderer was caught by a spider’s web on the victim’s trouser leg. Using this, the police pin-pointed the spot where the murder had taken place and even found the exact spider who had made the web. Fascinating.

The dances gave everyone the opportunity to meet boys from just about every country in the world. There were no English boys there and the people we met were polite and knew how to make a girl feel like a princess. One was an Italian boy, immaculately dressed in a suit with its own waistcoat and a camel coloured coat. He was good-looking and a brilliant dancer. The only trouble was, he was much, much less than five foot. I watched him going around the hall, asking the girls to dance and every one of them refused him. He finally got to me and I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. I said ‘yes’ and from that moment he kept coming back. Finally, he wanted to walk me home and tried to persuade me to come out on a date but that was a step too far for me. Nice as he was, I didn’t want to date him. Later, I met Chaw, a boy of Asian extraction who came from North Africa, Joe (I think he was called Joe because no one could pronounce his name) from the Yemen and Nafis from Pakistan. Evie met Coover. I don’t know where he was from but he was breathtakingly handsome and made me go weak at the knees. I fancied him like mad. No one had any money. Although their parents had sent them to England for an education, most of them had sacrificed everything they had to be there. Their meagre money covered the cost of their digs and the tuition fees so a date might be an evening at the pictures, or a walk in the park.

I was luckier than most. When Chaw asked me out, he had a Vespa scooter. It terrified me – it backfired all the way up the hill and it was a wonder it got us back to the nursery. When it came to knowing the facts of life, I was rather naive. At school we had studied the reproduction system of the frog. I could tell anybody about what frogs do but it wasn’t much help when it came to men. I understood that you had to be married before you could have a baby, but after the wedding night quite what the man did, I hadn’t a clue!

I enjoyed being kissed so when we arrived at the gate, Chaw politely asked if he could kiss me goodnight. I eagerly agreed but as he kissed me, he pushed himself against me. I can’t say I felt the earth move but something did and I fled. Chaw was my first-ever date, and so all the girls had waited up to hear about it. When I saw them, I was so upset I couldn’t speak. I raced to my room, threw myself across the bed and wept.

After a few minutes, Hilary came in and sat beside me. ‘Whatever’s wrong?’

‘He’s done it,’ I wept. ‘I didn’t want him to but he’s done it.’

She asked me to be more specific and so I told her everything. Hilary may have been a vicar’s daughter but everyone agreed she knew just about everything there was to know. She was a bit concerned but she said she felt sure I would be all right. Putting her arms around me she said quite seriously, ‘I know you can do it with your clothes on, but I don’t think you can do it with your coat on, especially when it’s still buttoned up.’

I was so relieved to have the benefit of her experience and she certainly reassured me that it would be all right but I was more than relieved when my period began a couple of days later. As for the coat that saved me, it was thick brown mohair with three coaster-size buttons down the front. Boy, was I glad I was wearing it!