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

My two new roommates were Marilyn, a bubbly girl with short dark curly hair, who loved sailing, and Paula, a rather austere-looking girl. The old feeling of homesickness came back but this time I was better able to cope with it. Off duty was more or less the same as it had been in my nursery assistant days, with the same long hours and one day off a week. The big difference was that now I was going to college as well. That meant I would work two weeks in the nursery and then have one week in college. To get there, I would leave early in the morning to travel to Guildford by train, returning to the nursery at about 4 p.m. We had to work until 7 p.m when we got back to the nursery but the best bit was that we’d have Saturday off as our day for that week and Sunday off for the next week. A whole weekend every three weeks, what bliss! It meant I could catch the Royal Blue coach from Guildford High Street to Ringwood in Hampshire and then the bus to West Moors and be back with Mum and Dad at around 9.30 on Friday night. I’d be back on the bus to Ringwood at three on Sunday afternoon and I’d arrive in the town at around eight. It was a tidy walk to the nursery, but it didn’t matter, not even when it was dark and lonely. Back then it didn’t bother anyone being out alone at night.

We trained at Guildford Polytechnic, doing childcare and child education. I had hoped Evie Perryer might be there, but she went on a different week so I met and made friends with whole new set of girls. They were a friendly lot; one, Elspeth, was very elegant and had expensive clothes and Arlene was the class swot. Another girl ended up being called ‘Brown Susan’. Her name was Susan Brown and as top of the list on the register, whenever our lecturer called her name, she always got it round the wrong way and it stuck. Our lecturers were Mrs Davies, who taught us child education, and Miss Mountford, who was an ex-district nurse and taught us child development.

Miss Mountford was very forthright and she loved to shock. The first time we ever met her she swept into the room and said, ‘Dear, dear, somebody in here smells! Which one of you didn’t wash her knickers last night?’

We all froze to the spot, dreading that she might point to one of us with a much more personal remark. She was perfectly capable of doing that. She once drew me aside and advised me to buy a new underarm deodorant. I was so mortified, as soon as I got back to the nursery, I threw the handknitted jumper I was wearing into the bin.

Almost as soon as I settled in, I realised I had a problem. Marilyn was alright, but Paula and I didn’t get on. She was volatile and I always managed to rub her up the wrong way. She would make snide remarks and I rose to the bait every time. What began as a prickly relationship quickly deteriorated into not speaking and vindictiveness. The thought of spending two years in the same room together was pretty daunting for both of us. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but in the end we made an agreement not to antagonise each other. It was quite incredible because we stuck to the arrangement and although I can’t say we were ever best friends, there was a kind of mutual respect between us and we learned to rub along together.

As time went on, Paula found herself a policeman boyfriend and he got her pregnant. Back in the early Sixties, people still ‘had to’ get married, but we students had signed an agreement with the council. Our parents had promised to pay back whatever expenses the council had incurred for our training, if we left before our two-year contract was up. This left Paula in a tricky position. She not only faced being an unmarried mother and homeless but she would also be landed with an enormous debt. In the twenty-first century, homelessness is considered a misfortune, nobody cares about being an unmarried mother anymore and debts are an inconvenience. Back then, all three carried a huge stigma of shame. Paula was at her wits’ end.

Surprisingly, she confided in me. She burst into tears and wept on my shoulder. As I comforted her, we worked out that if she could continue to work until her due date and then take the couple of weeks’ holiday she was owed, that meant that she would be able to complete her contract. That was one problem solved. Next I encouraged her to tell her boyfriend what had happened. She was terrified at the thought but when she told him, he was keen to marry her anyway and as a policeman he could get help with housing. Another problem solved. In fact, the council waived the contract, having decided that a heavily pregnant girl on the premises would be a bad influence on the rest of us! Paula left to get married in her seventh month of pregnancy.

Once again, it was time for me to work in the baby room, this time with a Nurse Astley, who was lovely. The routine was as rigid as it had previously been but now I was allowed to handle the babies straight away. I would come on duty, wash the babies and dress them in their day clothes. Then they would have their feed or breakfast. I would then go to the staff dining room for my breakfast. After breakfast, the babies would go out in their prams and then it was time to clean. The baby bathroom, milk kitchen and playroom all had to be spotless. The washing had to be taken downstairs to the laundry room for whoever was on laundry duty. Then it was time to make up the feeds in the milk kitchen. Lunch time was another round of feeding, and then time for my lunch. In the afternoon, after the babies had had a rest, we might take them for a ‘walk’ or park them in their prams in the garden. At 4 p.m. it was tea time and then we would bath the babies and give them their night feed before settling them down. In between times, I might be the girl on laundry duty, or perhaps I’d be cleaning prams. Life was still hard work but I was doing what I wanted at last, training to be a nursery nurse.

We had to keep a file on a child in our care. It was to be a kind of diary, charting the child’s progress day by day. My first child study case was a five-month-old boy called Peter Chippers. I had to keep a record of when he fed well, any illnesses he had, the day he first crawled and sat up on his own, when we began his weaning and keep a check on his weight. I was allowed to take photographs of him and I made an attractive album out of a scrapbook. The object of the exercises was to make me observant. Sadly the scrapbook was destroyed once I had finished my training and I often think how sad it was that nobody kept it for him. His mother, who through no fault of her own had put him in care, wasn’t offered the opportunity to have that diary, nor did she know it existed. It should have been easy enough for the powers that be to keep that record with Peter’s personal papers and he would at the very least have had some record of his childhood. He was a sweet child and made good progress. I watched him roll over for the first time and eventually begin to crawl as I encouraged him by putting a toy just out of reach. He had a warm chuckle and he loved eating the homemade rusks they made in the kitchen. Cook would soak bread fingers in milk and then put them on a baking tray in a very slow oven. The children loved them and they were a lot cheaper than the shop-bought varieties.

When I began my case study book, Peter was only four months old. I thought it would be hard to find something interesting to write but I soon discovered the value of the exercise I had been given. As it turned out, I didn’t have to look for interesting things, Peter was interesting. He enjoyed his bottle, giving little grunts of pleasure as he drank it, and sometimes he patted the bottle or stroked it as well. His eyes were beginning to focus and if I talked to him, he managed a lopsided smile. When I offered him a toy he could distinguish between us. He would study the toy and then look to me for guidance. Of course, I would be smiling so he would know the toy was something good. By six months he was beginning to pick things up or manipulate toys within his reach. He loved to be bounced on my knee as I sang nursery rhymes. He especially loved ‘This is the Way the Ladies Ride’ and he would chuckle uproariously as I jigged my knees faster and faster with each verse.

We were moved around the nursery during the two years I was there. This was to ensure we had an all-round education. The next child I had as a case study was Keith Devlin. He had a sister in the Tweenie room called Jane and they were very close. Keith was in Toddlers and he had a more active life. He loved painting and what might have looked like a blob on the paper had real meaning for him.

‘What’s that, Keith?’ I would say.

‘A man on a bike,’ he’d say proudly. Or ‘Our Jane eating a biscuit.’

Keith and Jane were in care because of homelessness. Their parents were East Enders who had fallen on hard times. Slum landlords were charging extortionate rents and unscrupulous landlords such as Peter Rachman (who didn’t achieve notoriety until a year later during the Profumo Affair) built up their property empires on the backs of people like Mr and Mrs Devlin. If they couldn’t pay the rent, they were intimidated or evicted. The council was duty bound to take in a homeless child while the parents had to fend for themselves. Mr and Mrs Devlin were probably on the council house waiting list but with Britain only just coming out of the austerity years after the Second World War, they might have a long wait.

Keith could count up to ten and he was learning the concept of size. ‘Mine is bigger than yours’, he’d say. He enjoyed reading books and could do just about every puzzle in the toy cupboard but he hated playing with clay. I can’t say I blame him – I’ve never liked the feeling of clay under my fingernails either.

Gradually, I settled into the routine but it was during one of my weekends at home that Dickie began a reign of absolute misery in the nursery. During her final rounds of the day, she found a small window open in the sluice room and demanded to know who was responsible for leaving it open. Nobody owned up so with everybody gathered in the staff dining room for supper, she marched in and announced that she had stopped everybody’s off duty. Everyone was upset about it. It was the weekend and some of the girls had planned to meet friends. We weren’t allowed to have telephone calls at all and they were forbidden from going down the village to use the public call box.

Hilary led a rebellion of the disgruntled girls. Everybody was upset about having to work a twelve-hour day with no break. It seemed unfair and besides, she was sure it was illegal.

‘If I go into the office and tell her it’s illegal, will you all stand by me?’

‘Of course we will,’ they said.

Psyched up by their encouragement, Hilary strode to the office and knocked on the door. Dickie listened to her complaint and told her to go back to work. Then shrewdly, she called the other girls into her office, one by one. When faced by Matron on her own, every girl denied knowing anything about it; Hilary was left out on a limb.

When I came back from home after my weekend in West Moors, the whole nursery was tingling with suppressed resentment and anger. The girls had worked the whole weekend without any off-duty periods and they were all exhausted. Dickie had spent most of Saturday and Sunday in her office and the whole atmosphere in the place was awful.

On Monday, Miss Fox-Talbot, the nursery supervisor, turned up in her red Mini and Hilary was summoned to the office. We all waited anxiously, wondering what her punishment might be. I was convinced she’d be asked to give up her weekend after college but in the event, they told her she might not be allowed to continue her training. She was sobbing with fear when she came out of the office but we all felt that this was merely a threat to pull her into line.

‘If they were really going to do it,’ I assured her, ‘they’d have done it straight away. They wouldn’t leave you wondering about it.’

Hilary decided she would spend the week buttering up Miss Hill, the nursery warden – a middle-aged, bony woman with a passion for tea.

‘If I can get her on my side,’ she said, ‘I reckon it’ll be all right.’

Sadly we were both wrong. Miss Fox-Talbot came back on the Thursday and Hilary was once again summoned into the office and told she was sacked.

It’s still never very pleasant to be sacked but in 1962, it could ruin a career. Angry as she was, when given the choice of leaving immediately or working her month’s notice, Hilary realised that it would be far more difficult for Dickie if she stayed, so she elected to work the month’s notice.

I was still in the Baby room. She came to me in floods of tears and I just couldn’t believe it. I had mixed feelings as well. She was my friend. If I had been there that weekend, I would have gone in the office with her and that would have meant I would have been sacked as well.

From that moment on the whole atmosphere of the nursery changed. Dickie must have sensed a great deal of hostility. Hilary’s decision to work her notice only served to increase the tension. She left at Christmas, her career blighted forever. She had managed to get a job as a mother’s help but because her employer was ‘taking a risk’ her wage was reduced to three pounds a week (which was very low, even for a mother’s help) and for that she was expected to do just about everything. It was imperative that she got a good reference from her new job, because the one she got from the nursery was so damning. Dickie had certainly vented her spleen when she wrote it. Poor Hilary had a very hard time but give credit where credit is due, she stuck it out for a couple of years. We stayed friends and met up quite often on our days off, and she was still fun to be with and daring in what she did. Matron and the nursery supervisor had tried to break her spirit but they never succeeded.

I have already mentioned having the dressing-up box out when we put on a record or had music on the radio but there were other ways of stimulating the children’s interest in music. Of course we had a lot of singing of nursery rhymes but we would also get out the percussion instruments and the children would bang a drum or shake a set of bells to the music. The nursery had a piano but nobody could play it.

We also improvised with instruments. A cigar box with a series of strings tightly drawn over it made a good sound. We would put a little dry rice in a tin or a few pebbles and then glue down the lid so that nobody could eat them or stick them up their noses. Then we would paint them bright colours. The children loved to shake them in time to the music. A string of buttons or beads and even some Formica samples on a chain from the kitchen shop made great shakers. Somebody stuck some glass paper onto two blocks of wood. When rubbed together, they made a great rasping sound although I’m not sure today’s Health and Safety police would approve of that one. We had a music corner in the playroom. It had pictures of musical instruments on the walls and the nursery warden had three recorders, which she produced every now and then for the children to play. The all-time favourite was ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ and when we sang it, we would all march around the playroom with the instruments. It worked for the children and it worked for us too. For a few minutes we could forget our aching backs and our tired feet. We didn’t care about our hands rubbed raw by washing nappies – with everything banging and blaring out loud, we could stamp our feet and march up the hill and back down again with the rest of them.

Despite the way Matron had separated us over Hilary, for the most part, whatever we were doing, we had a feeling of us ‘all being in this together’. We supported each other whenever we were in trouble or covered up to prevent someone getting told off. Whenever a girl needed a shoulder to cry on, she didn’t have to look very far. We enjoyed beating the system whenever we could, although our acts of rebellion may seem a little tame by today’s standards. Watching the end of a TV programme that finished at 10.15 p.m. when we were supposed to be in our bedrooms by 10 p.m. or skimping on the cleaning if we were behind time, or even letting someone go off duty a bit early so that she could catch the early bus, they were all on our list of achievements. I was there to learn about the care of children but I also learned about loyalty and camaraderie, compassion and friendship, lessons which would hold me in good stead for the rest of my life.

Chapter 6

Having a baby should be a joyful occasion but Mrs Field knew the minute her baby was born that there was something wrong. The nurse whisked her away without showing her to her mother. As they waited for the placenta to come, Mrs Field’s stomach was in knots.

‘Can I see my baby?’ she asked over and over again.

‘In a minute … nurse is just seeing to her …’

She still hadn’t seen her child when the midwife had cleaned her up. As she finished, she leaned over and whispered, ‘Before you see your baby, Mrs Field, the doctor wants a word.’

‘I’m so sorry my dear …’ was all she heard. His mouth was working but she had already shut the words out.

After he’d talked to Mrs Field, they brought the baby, washed and wrapped in a snowy-white towel. She regarded her mother with an unfocussed stare but Mrs Field turned away and faced the wall.

Barbara Field had been born with no ears. She had a dip on one side of her head where her ear should have been and a sealed hole on the other side. Her birth defects were caused by her mother taking Thalidomide, a sedative which was introduced in the late 1950s and used to treat morning sickness. It was prescribed by doctors from 1957 until 1961, and at the time scientists didn’t think any drug taken by a pregnant woman could pass across the placental barrier and harm the developing foetus. Sadly it proved to be the cause of many horrific birth defects. As many as ten thousand children from forty-six countries were affected, many of them dying at birth. Barbara was one of the four hundred and sixty-six survivors born in the United Kingdom.

Barbara was Dickie’s favourite. She would take her into her office-cum-sitting room and give her special toys to play with. She was an adorable kid, cheeky and with a mischievous streak.

One day, while we were bathing the children, Barbara grabbed a bottle of shampoo and drank some. My roommate Marilyn managed to snatch it away before she’d taken too much but it gave her the hiccups. Barbara was quite literally blowing bubbles.

‘Blimey,’ said Marilyn. ‘Now what shall I do?’

There was no way of getting the shampoo back so I said, ‘Give her something else to drink. She probably grabbed it because she was thirsty anyway.’

Marilyn gave Barbara some of her bedtime cocoa. Now she was hiccupping chocolate bubbles.

‘Is she going to be alright?’ Marilyn asked anxiously.

We kept a close eye on her and happily she was fine.

Things took a definite turn for the better for Barbara when she was three. During a play time, one of the girls blew a toy whistle behind her head. Barbara immediately turned around and grabbed the toy for herself. We were so excited. Barbara could hear after all. The whole thing was repeated several times, with exactly the same result. It was time to call Matron. Staff nurse blew the whistle behind Barbara’s head and she duly turned around. Dickie was thrilled. She immediately called the doctor and an appointment was made to see an ear specialist. Surprisingly, apart from her babyhood examinations when Barbara had been declared profoundly deaf, no other follow-up examination had been set up. Barbara was to stay in care all her life anyway. Her mother blamed herself so much for her daughter’s defects that she’d had a complete breakdown. Barbara would be sent to a home for the deaf as soon as she was five.

We waited in quiet anticipation for the appointment with the specialist and at last it was only a week away. One afternoon, I used the same toy whistle to play the game with Barbara. As she turned towards the sound, she put her hand up to her neck and a horrible realisation began to dawn. Barbara probably couldn’t hear the whistle at all, but she could feel the rush of cold air from the toy as it was blown. Marilyn and I looked at each other in shocked surprise.

‘We’d better tell staff nurse,’ said Marilyn.