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