Hilary and I moved back into our newly painted room. It was much better although not quite as wonderful as we had been led to believe. The wallpaper was the same all around the room, which was a blessing, but it was large turquoise blue poppies. We had new curtains in turquoise, although not the same shade of colour and we still had the same mismatched purple counterpanes. As we still hadn’t reached the psychedelic atmosphere of the 1970s, it seemed rather odd.
There were a few girls who never did make it to do their training. Isolde, the girl who laughed in the sitting when Nurse Adams missed her date, left a couple of weeks after the event. Another girl was Laura Duncan. She was older than me, about nineteen, and had lived a very sheltered life. She became the butt of comment and jokes and for a time, I joined in, but then I could see that she was really struggling. I remembered my own struggles with homesickness and the sheer relentless hard work and I began to feel ashamed. As a result, when we worked together I tried to help her whenever I could. She was a plain-Jane who looked a lot like Joyce Grenfell, with big teeth and a long face. She was gawky and awkward in her movements and although obviously well educated, she was totally impractical. One morning we were assigned to sweep up one of the playrooms and Laura almost fell over the long-handled brush. I actually had to show her how to use it!
Because I was kind to her, she stuck to me like a limpet. I liked her but we had little in common. Her parents were very over-protective and would come to the nursery to spend her off-duty with her. They never gave the poor girl a chance to be her own person. Sometimes they would take her into town for a coffee and a look around the shops but if it was raining, they would simply sit in the car together on the driveway. It wasn’t her fault but it was little wonder that people laughed at her. A couple of times, when we shared the same off duty, she would come with me into town or to the pictures. That’s why her mother invited me to their house. Laura was on holiday and I had a day off so I caught the Green Line bus to Dorking, where she lived. I had asked for the name of her road and the driver called it out as we arrived. To my dismay, Laura wasn’t there waiting for me as she had promised. I didn’t realise but the road was in the shape of a large horseshoe; I had got off at one end and she was waiting at the other.
Still, I had the name of the house and the number so I set off to find it for myself. The houses in her street were very large with huge gardens. It was clearly the sort of place where bankers and pop stars lived. Laura’s house was a tad smaller than the others in the road but it was detached and in its own grounds. As soon as her mother opened the door, she almost had an apoplectic fit. She put her hand to her head and leaned dramatically in the doorway.
Slightly confused, I introduced myself. ‘Hello, I’m Pam, Laura’s friend.’
Putting both hands on her head she cried out a tirade of words, ‘Oh Pamela, poor Laura! She’s waiting for you at the bus stop. She went that way and you’ve come up from the other side. She’ll be devastated that you haven’t come. Oh, I can’t bear it! You must go and find her. You must go to her, Pamela. Go. Go now!’
Bewildered and a little shocked by the amateur dramatics, I turned tail and ran down the road. I met Laura coming back. ‘Your mother was terrified that you’d think I hadn’t come,’ I smiled awkwardly.
Laura seemed unperturbed. ‘I guessed what had happened,’ she said.
When we got back, her mother fussed over us like an old hen. She offered us coffee and went to the kitchen to prepare it. When she came back, she set up a folding stand and put a big brass table on the top of it.
‘We live very humbly here, Pamela,’ she assured me. ‘People think because of the area, we are rich but as you will see, that is not the case.’
Well, she certainly looked well off to me, not that I cared one jot.
Laura and I had quite a nice day but her mother was totally overbearing. She gave us coffee in the sitting room, insisted we sat in the garden until lunchtime, and after the meal, sent us up to Laura’s bedroom until it was time for the brass table and a pot of afternoon tea.
It was shortly after that that Laura left the nursery. We simply got the message that she wasn’t coming back. I really hope it was nothing to do with me, but I can’t help wondering. Perhaps after our day together, her mother decided that she didn’t want her well-bred daughter mixing with the likes of me. I felt sorry for Laura and even more sorry that I never got to say goodbye.
Things were about to change. It was the end of August 1962 and I had completed my year as a nursery assistant. Latterly, I had enjoyed my time there and I think I had gained a little more confidence. I had finally overcome my homesickness, made new friends and I had taken on board some of the more important aspects of childcare. Now I was moving to the nursery, where I was to begin my two-year nursery nurse training. I was keen to get on with the job and a little nearer that all-important qualification. If I’d thought I’d had it hard as a nursery assistant, life had been a picnic compared to what I faced now.
Chapter 5
My new nursery was a large bleak building surrounded by rolling lawns. The rest of the grounds that had surrounded it when it was a private house dwelling had been sold off. Some had been developed and given over to council housing and shops. The whole estate was entered by a long sweeping driveway, ending in a cul-de-sac and the house.
The home was run by a Matron who was very large. She always wore a navy nylon overall and because of her great weight, she lumbered along. She had short dark brown hair, a round face and looked a lot like the Queen Mother before she grew very old; she also had a rather high-pitched whiney voice. The day I arrived, she called us new girls into the office, one by one. There were four of us who began as students together. Hilary had come with me to the same nursery but Evie had gone to another one, somewhere else in the county.
When it was my turn to meet her, Matron Dickenson (we called her ‘Dickie’ behind her back) gave me a limp lettuce handshake and puffed up her ample bosom. ‘We are all happy in this nursery,’ she barked. ‘And you will be happy.’ It was more of a command than an invitation.
Hilary and I were faced with more or less the same kind of routine so it didn’t take us very long to settle in. The hall landing and stairs were very dark and even in bright sunlight we had to have the light on upstairs. There was a lot of dark wood panelling; dark parquet floors and the mahogany doors were heavy. Once again the children were divided into three groups, Babies, Tweenies and Toddlers, and we spent most of the day cleaning.
We may have been slaves to the routine in the new nursery but there was still a lot of fun to be had. The day began at 7 a.m. when we arrived in the nursery to begin dressing the children. Every child had a wash in the morning. The babies and tweenies were ‘topped and tailed’ and the older children went to the bathroom to make a valiant attempt to wash themselves. We had to get everyone dressed by 8 a.m. when it was time for breakfast. The children ate in their own groups. Babies were bottle-fed in the baby room, while the tweenies and the toddlers were together in the children’s dining room. The meals were enormous. For breakfast they would have either cereal or porridge, then a cooked breakfast, which might be bacon, egg and half a slice of fried bread, or maybe scrambled egg on toast. The night nurse had made marmalade sandwiches for everyone. Tweenies had half a slice of bread made into a sandwich each, and the toddlers a whole slice of bread (two sandwiches). They drank milk or milky tea. After breakfast, everybody went to the toilet. At 9 a.m. the girls who had had their breakfast at 8.30 a.m. came back to relieve those who had stayed to look after the children. There was free play in the playrooms until 9.30 a.m. In the tweenie room, the children, after another visit to the toilet, then went into their prams outside. Sometimes we took them for a walk, but mostly in the morning, they slept in the pram shed or out in the garden while we cleaned the nurseries. The toddlers had the better toys under the supervision of the nursery warden. We also had water, sand and painting for them to do. They were divided into two groups and half the morning was spent with the messy stuff, and the other half in the playroom. If it was fine, everybody was outside in the garden. Lunch was around twelve noon and they would have two courses. After lunch, it was time for a rest.