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

So we did.

‘We’d better tell Matron,’ said Staff nurse, looking straight at me.

‘You tell her,’ I said. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her we’d all made a mistake – I knew what she was like. She’d do her nut and take it out on me for weeks. The others didn’t argue. They were just as cowardly as me.

A week later, Barbara went for her appointment. It was just as well that we hadn’t told Dickie and had her cancel it because they did find a small degree of hearing in Barbara’s ear and she came back with a hearing aid. They couldn’t fix it in the normal way because with no ears, there was nothing to latch on to. Barbara was given what looked like a radio announcer’s head phones, which were attached to a battery on her chest by a specially made harness. For the first few days, she walked around with a slightly bemused expression on her face, sometimes stopping to listen to a sound she clearly had never heard before. A whole new world was opening up for Barbara and she began to change. However, she never lost her personality. If she was upset or angry with us, she would pull the plugs out of the battery, effectively ‘switching us off’.

Christmas 1962 will go down as the most miserable I ever spent. The atmosphere was somewhat subdued after Hilary’s departure but we were all making an effort to get back to some kind of normality. Dickie spent Christmas afternoon alone in her office. We caught the odd glimpse of her walking through the hall and she seemed to be in a bad mood. We didn’t see her properly until we all assembled for Christmas dinner at six and she swept into the staff dining room. We had a splendid meal – turkey, sausage, stuffing, Brussels sprouts and peas, roast potatoes, followed by flaming Christmas pudding and custard – but the atmosphere was so bad, the whole meal was eaten in utter silence. I felt as if everyone could hear every mouthful going down. We couldn’t look at each other and the meal seemed tasteless and instead of being a long fun-filled chatty time, the whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. Even with such tiny wages, we had all clubbed together to buy Matron and Sister a Christmas present. One of the staff nurses had spent ages in the town looking for something nice and we were pleased with her efforts, but Dickie didn’t even bother to open it. As soon as she’d finished her pudding, she stood up and we all stood up as well.