Many years ago, I met one of the children I’d looked after as a little one. He was in his twenties and he enjoyed reminiscing about his stay in the nursery. One thing puzzled him.
‘You used to make us sleep on the table,’ he told me.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and then realised he’d obviously thought the stretchers were tables!
After lunch it was back to the playroom, going out for a walk, or having a spell playing in the garden. Tea was at 4 p.m. and they had bread and butter, maybe a boiled egg, and cakes. After tea we told them stories until it was time to get ready for bed.
Two of us did the bathing from 5 p.m. Another girl collected the children from wherever they were (in the playroom or the garden) and brought them upstairs for us. As soon as they were undressed, we gave them a short time of free play in the bath. I loved bath time. The children had toys to play with and sometimes we’d splash and make a mess. Bearing in mind some of the awful conditions these children had come from, there was nothing nicer than putting a warm, happy child, smelling deliciously of talcum powder, into a clean bed. The children themselves were usually keen to come up for their baths. I remember the time when Mark came upstairs from the garden, where he’d been running about in the evening sunshine. He looked hot and sticky. I went to help him undress but he told us he was a big boy and could get undressed himself. As he whipped off his trousers he looked down at himself and said, ‘Awww, look. My willy has gone to sleep!’
Everybody had a milky drink and they would have a bedtime story in the nursery before we kissed them goodnight. After that, we sorted their clothes ready for the morning and then it was time to go for our supper at 7 p.m.
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