And then there was the window. Someone said they felt hot. It was probably because she had a fever, but never one to rest on her laurels, Nurse Driver tried to open one of the windows. Being an old-fashioned building, they were of the long sash cord variety. Short, but undaunted, she found a step ladder and yanked the window down. Now we had half a gale blowing through the ward and of course, the window was jammed and so no one could shut it. It stayed like that for about an hour until two men came from the workshop to fix it.
After a week or so in hospital, I was allowed to go back home to Dorset. I can’t remember who took me home but I’m sure I wouldn’t have been expected to travel by train or coach. My recovery was hampered by a bout of glandular fever and it was three months before I returned to the nursery. I was keen to go back but once I began to feel better, I did enjoy my time at home. As usual, Dad went to the pub every night, so Mum and I watched The Avengers, Juke Box Jury and of course the handsome Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. I spent some days over at St Leonards with my Aunt Betty, just ‘chilling out’ as they say now. I met friends and we went to Bournemouth to the pictures or shopping. I went to a Tramp’s Ball at the West Moors youth club, which turned out to be the last time the kids I grew up with got together. By now, we were all out in the world of work and beginning to make new friends. I remember the time fondly for so many reasons, not least because one of the lads tried to get on the bus to get to the youth club but his tramp’s outfit was so convincing the conductor chucked him off! We had a great time.
The following Monday, I went back to my GP and was signed off. The silly thing is, if Matron had let me go to the doctor right at the start, I would probably have needed only a couple of days off sick but because of the delay in getting treatment, she had been without a member of staff for three months. There was also an assumption that we would do anything to ‘skive’ off work. What a shame she didn’t trust us more. If she had, she would have seen that we were loyal, both to the nursery and the children, and would only have taken time off if it were really necessary.
Chapter 4
Not everyone who lived in the home looked after the children. Some were unmarried mothers, who worked as cleaners or in the kitchens. Back then, having an illegitimate child still carried an awful stigma, but the first faint rays of change were coming into the care services. Most mothers were forced to give up their children for adoption. I have been told some very harrowing stories by my contemporaries in life, who were badgered and browbeaten into signing their babies away. A popular mantra was, ‘You want the best for your baby, don’t you? What could be better than to give him a Mummy and a Daddy who will love him and give him the best in life?’ Under duress they signed their babies away and some girls were actually locked in a room at the mother and baby home when their child was taken, in case they made a scene. These women may be in their sixties and seventies now but recent programmes on TV show only too well that they are still traumatised by events that happened when they were young. It hurts them all over again when they finally meet their offspring and they don’t really believe their mother put up enough of a fight for them. For those who wanted to keep their child, there was little or no public money to support children staying with them. Today’s society has little or no concept of how difficult it was, especially if the family were too ashamed to help. I have heard young people saying, ‘There’s no way I’d have given up my child. Nothing would have got in my way.’ But one wonders how they would have managed with no family support, no day nurseries, virtually no social security, and back in the sixties even the most caring of employers were reluctant to offer work to women with children, especially young children.
The mothers living in the nursery may have been only offered very meagre wages in exchange for their services but the system meant that they could at least keep their babies with some dignity. The children stayed in the nursery itself, and were well cared for by trained staff. Best of all, the mothers had them to themselves in their off-duty hours.
We may have all been far more subservient to authority than today’s society, but that didn’t mean we were passive doormats. Everyone developed ways of getting their own back on the powers that be and one of the best ways to do so was to shock. One of the mothers we had in the house was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. Social services spent a lot of time with her, pressurising her into naming the father of the baby. In the end, she retorted, ‘Look, if you’d eaten baked beans on toast and you got indigestion, would you know which bean gave it to you?’ Matron Thomas nearly fainted and the child care officer (which was what they called the social worker back then) almost fell off her chair.
That story was repeated in every nursery I worked in until it became legend. We all admired anyone with real spunk. The best of it is, the girl may have still been at school, but she’d only had one boyfriend and, as young as they were, they loved their baby and planned to marry as soon as she was sixteen. I often wonder if they did.
The unmarried mothers weren’t always young. Mary wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but she had a good heart. She had led a sheltered life, first in an orphanage and then in a hospital. She was the sort of girl hardly anyone notices. When she was discharged from the home where she grew up she was placed in the local hospital, where she worked doing routine chores and errands as a ward orderly. She enjoyed her work and people liked her. Her corny jokes were legendary. ‘I’ve got a frog in me throat and it won’t jump up,’ was one of her favourites, and if you said, ‘Are you all right?’ she would reply, ‘No, I’m half left,’ and think it hugely funny.
Mary met the love of her life towards the end of the Fifties. He paid her a lot of attention and she fell hopelessly in love. Though her teenage years were by now far behind her, Mary was an innocent; he was more worldly wise. Their love affair was brief but intense and before long she began to notice the changes in her body. A visit to the doctor’s confirmed her worst fears: Mary was pregnant.
At first, although she was upset, she wasn’t unduly worried. After all, her man had declared his undying love every time he had climbed the back stairs to her room. She was confident he would ‘do the right thing,’ but her whole world was shattered when she found out what the rest of the world knew, that he was already married. For the first time in her life, Mary’s gentle spirit was crushed. She was ill for some time but thankfully, the world was moving towards more enlightened times. Twenty-five years before, in the 1930s, girls like Mary were still declared insane and shut up in mental homes, sometimes for the rest of their lives, but the doctor dealing with Mary was a lot more understanding.
As part of this fairly new initiative, as soon as Jennifer was born, Mary was moved to our nursery. She worked in the kitchen while her daughter was looked after in the nursery. It was an ideal arrangement. The council had a ‘permanent’ member of staff (where else could Mary go with her baby?) and Jennifer was with her mother.
Mary was a loving and devoted mother. Nearly all her hard-earned cash was spent on her daughter and she also spent every spare minute of her off-duty time with Jennifer. They made a contented pair and the light had returned to Mary’s eyes. Because Mary had what we now call ‘learning difficulties’, she needed the guidance of others to help her with her child’s upbringing. She was also a bit scatty. One evening she called me into her bedroom. She had knocked a water glass off her bedroom table and absent-mindedly stepped straight onto a small shard of broken glass, which was embedded in the sole of her foot. One of the other girls called Matron, who wasn’t best pleased, because she worried constantly about staffing levels. Mary went by ambulance to the local hospital and once X-rayed, the doctor gently pulled the glass out and there was no lasting damage. When Mary came back, complete with bandaged foot, she dined out on that tale for weeks to come.
For women working in the nursery with their children, it could only ever be a temporary arrangement. The nursery only catered for children until they were five. Once they were ready for school, they either moved to another children’s’ home or into foster care. I left the nursery in 1962, when Jennifer was just over a year old. Mary may have been offered a similar situation