Sometimes I’d get so fed up with my mother and her rules that I’d try to run away. When I was about fifteen I’d been in trouble again about something or other, and my mother had walloped me, so I decided that was it, I’d had enough, and I was off. It was dark, and we weren’t allowed out at night, only to benediction, at the church. My mother was always suspicious of me, and rightly so, as usually instead of going to benediction (as I told my mother) I would meet up with a couple of girls from my class, fetch a purple Miners lipstick we had hidden in the hedge wrapped up in newspaper, and put it on, hitch up our skirts, and then go down to the quay to meet boys and smoke Woodbines. I had already started this filthy smoking habit very early, at about thirteen years of age, and I remember how they rasped your throat. It was like smoking a disgusting bonfire, but I felt I was very cool and ‘grown-up’, and we loved meeting up with the boys and feeling naughty. I’d rush back to the Friary at seven in the evening to see which priest was doing the ‘Blessing of the Blessed Sacrament’, then run home, wiping the purple off my lips with my sleeve, and wrapping the little lipstick back up in newspaper before popping it back in the hedge. When I got in my mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re back. Who said the blessing?’ and I would rattle off the priest’s name, sweet as you like. We sucked Polos to cover the tobacco smell. I don’t think my mother guessed, although she always suspected.
Anyway, this miserable evening I was determined I was off for good. So I got some bread and wrapped it in a big handkerchief, as well as a snub of candle and two Woodbines, before taking my father’s big old bicycle, with the upright handlebar. I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m never coming back. See if they miss me.’ My feet could hardly reach the pedals and it was only when I got to the other side of the town, and was near the cemetery, that I began to get the wind up, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Oh, God, where shall I go?’ I suddenly felt very alone, very spooked and scared. Then I met my father coming out onto the road (he must have been looking for me), and he said, ‘Ah, there you are. Where do you think you’re going on that bike without a light?’ I said, ‘I’m running away … but when I got to the cemetery, I got scared.’ He looked at me and said, ‘It’s not the dead you fear, Mary, it’s the living. Go home, and get that bloody bike in.’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I said, secretly pleased he’d come to find me. So that was the end of my rebellious running away.
But now, today, in September 1952, at seventeen and all alone, I was finally on my three interminable bus journeys towards Putney in south-west London. I knew I wanted to be a nurse: I was utterly determined to succeed, whatever the odds. I could hear my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, from all our endless fights, that England was ‘taboo’ and that ‘no way was I to go to that Godforsaken Protestant country’. But here I was, defying her again. My mother had a friend called Pat Wall, who lived in Wimbledon, and she wanted me to get in touch with her once I landed – ‘She’ll keep an eye on you.’ Yes, I bet she would, as everyone always was keeping an eye on me, one way or the other. I said I would, but I knew I would try to avoid her like the plague, if I could. I didn’t want any reports of my misbehaviour (if there was any, of course) to get back to my mother, as I knew she would be unbearable or, worse, drag me back, if I put a foot wrong.
Although I knew nothing about leaving home, nothing at all about travelling, or the world, for that matter, I knew I had to take this big step for myself. Eventually I found my way to Putney Hospital on that very long first day, and, as I rang the doorbell of the nurses’ quarters, round the back of the enormous red-brick hospital on the edge of a huge common, I held my breath until the large wooden door opened. A small woman appeared, in a crisp navy uniform and stiff white cap – she gave me a quick once-over while I explained who I was. After a pause she said, ‘I’m Sister Matthews, your Home Sister,’ in clipped English tones. ‘Come on in, you’ve had a long journey. I’ll show you to your quarters.’ And without a moment’s hesitation, in I jolly well went.
2
When I arrived in 1952, Putney Hospital was a rather handsome, red-brick Edwardian sprawl on leafy Putney Common in south-west London. The three-storey nurses’ home was at the back, on the north side, and when I got there part of it had only just finished being rebuilt after being firebombed during the war in 1944 (it was the first incendiary bomb to land on London, in fact). I also found out, soon after, that there was supposed to be a ghost of a man dressed in a convict’s uniform (including broad black arrows), who had apparently drowned in a pond, and now glided across the common on dark nights, seemingly intent on committing a crime. The story was he had been in Putney Hospital and now local people spoke of his haunting the place from time to time. But even further back it seems the hospital was built on old plague burial grounds, where people who died of the ‘Pest’ in 1625 were taken out of London and buried, so the link between Putney Common, illness and death seemed to have a long, tragic and mysterious history. The place was green and spacious, but could also feel a bit eerie at night.
Anyway, by day there were nurses and sisters scurrying everywhere, being briskly busy in their starched, neat uniforms. It did strike me as ironic, momentarily, that I’d finally escaped the overly strict and pious regimes of home and convent in Ireland, only to end up with women wearing very similar outfits, albeit overseas and in a different context. However, I told myself, sternly, if I wobbled in my resolve, that I had battled to get here, and this was my own new adventure, so I was going to make it work, whatever I had to do – or wear. And no matter what anyone was like (they surely couldn’t be worse than Sister Margaret). A recent memory of fighting with my mother was still ringing in my ears, with her screaming, ‘You’re not going!’ and me shouting back, ‘Yes, I am, I am, I AM going to England. You can’t stop me!’ (accompanied by another walloping and loads of tears). We were like two cats in a bag, with my sisters and father needing to intervene before we drew blood.
My first few days in Putney went by in a blur: it was all a bit like going to boarding school (or so I imagined). First, I had to be fitted out for my uniform. On the ground floor of the nurses’ home, at the back of the main hospital, away from the road, there was a sewing room, with three middle-aged women stuck in it all day, sewing away happily at their Singer treadle machines. Lily, Gladys and Grace had to measure me up. They also worked out what each nurse needed individually, and then made it on the spot. It was a real home from home, for me, as I could imagine my mother being there, too, tape-measure round her neck, pins in her mouth, peering critically at their handiwork and ‘tutting’ at their sloppy stitches (‘Will you take a look at that – really!’). The women’s job was to actually make our uniforms, and then adjust them or re-use them, passing them on from nurse to nurse (definitely familiar ‘make-do-and-mend’ territory for me, especially reminiscent of the lean war years).
I was to be issued with three uniforms, so I would have one on, and one off in the hospital laundry, which was also on site, and one spare (as they always got dirty somehow). The dresses were pale-blue and white fine pinstriped,