Читать книгу Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes: The memoirs of a nursery nurse in the 1960s - Pam Weaver - Страница 10

One early morning we got a call. It was an emergency admission. A mum had been rushed to hospital with internal bleeding. It was possibly a miscarriage so there was no telling how long or short her stay would be. If Mum had already lost her baby, it would only be for a few days. If the baby had survived, it may mean months of complete bed rest until it was born. Whatever happened, someone had to look after her other child, a little boy. The problem was that Mum and Dad were Polish and only spoke Polish.

We had never had a Polish child before, and the prospect of such a child coming to the nursery threw everyone into a complete flap. It was nothing to do with prejudice – after all, we had children whose parents had come from the four corners of the world. They might be West Indian, African, mixed race, English, Irish or Welsh but they were dealing with the same problems as everyone else. Homelessness, illness and unemployment can come to anybody. The problem here was that nobody spoke Polish. How were we going to communicate with the poor child? Our sympathies were aroused. To be torn from the arms of your mother would be bad enough, but to be thrust into a situation where you were unable to communicate or make yourself understood would be horrendous.

We wanted to make the usual preparations but even that wasn’t possible. Usually by the time a child arrived in the nursery a pile of clothes would be waiting, and once we were sure of the size, each item marked with the child’s name. The child’s personal clothes would be put into a box and kept until he or she was ready to leave the nursery for good. No one had told us the name of the child or whether we were to expect a boy or a girl.

About half an hour later, a police car drew up outside and a WPC climbed out of the back seat with the child in her arms. To everyone’s surprise Robin Kowalski turned out to be eight months old and his mother was English so there was no need for an interpreter after all! He was a delightful baby. As bald as a coot, he was quite content even though his mother wasn’t with him. Robin only stayed a while. Sadly his mother had a complete miscarriage and she would nurse her pain and loss for years to come. Robin accepted his lot and smiled his toothless grin as a few days later we waved him goodbye and good luck.

I had only been in the nursery a couple of months when I began to feel increasingly ill. I was born with narrow Eustachian tubes in my ears and so a cold quite often resulted in me going deaf. Usually after a few days, my hearing would return and I’d be back on top but in the winter of 1961–62 my cold simply got worse and worse, and I remained completely deaf for more than a week.

I desperately wanted to go to the doctor but I was under the impression that I needed Matron’s permission to do so. She exploited that belief and kept me working. In fact, rather than address the problem, she put me on night duty. It was not a good move. She had removed the problem of everyone having to shout at me and the irritation people feel when they can’t make a deaf person understand what they want, but how could I possibly look after the children properly if I couldn’t hear them? At least in the daytime there were other people about to cover my back and make sure the children were well cared for.

One night, as I was preparing the children’s morning orange juice, Miss Carter appeared in the kitchen. It was the wee small hours of the morning and she was in her night clothes and dressing gown. Using hand signals, she made me go into the night nursery. When I switched on the light, every child was sitting up in bed and screaming. I have no idea who or what started them off, probably one child waking up after having a bad dream, but I hadn’t heard a thing. Even when I was standing in the room, I still couldn’t hear them.

By the time I came to the end of my ten nights, I was feeling a tad better. I went home to West Moors and a couple of days of Mum’s cooking and pampering had me feeling a lot better. However, as soon as I got back into the nursery, I was ill again and before long, I had two lumps in my neck. The pain was becoming unbearable but still Matron turned a blind eye. I should have just gone to the doctor myself but by then I had learned that the way you spelled the word Matron was G-O-D. She cleverly avoided my pleas to have time off to go and see him.

One day, I had two hours off duty in the afternoon and I was feeling so lousy I went to bed. I was supposed to be back on duty at 4.30 but when someone came to find me, I refused to get up. ‘I’m too ill to get up,’ I whined. ‘I need a doctor.’

The girl went away and about half an hour later, one of the more senior staff came to summon me to Matron’s office. To say that Matron Thomas was unsympathetic would be an understatement. She gave me a right rollicking, threatening to write to my mother to say I was not fit to be a nursery nurse and to ask her to take me home. I was devastated. To get a qualification was the only thing I really wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought of failure. How could I go back to the village with my tail between my legs? I’d endured months of homesickness, which still hadn’t fully gone away, and the slave-like conditions and now she was threatening to stop me from going for my training. She finished off by telling me to go back on duty at once.

‘But I need a doctor,’ I whimpered.

‘Then go,’ she said. ‘And when he sees you, he’ll tell you you’re making it up. He’ll tell you there’s nothing wrong with you.’

I crawled away in tears. The doctor was a bus ride away. My head was banging, I felt dizzy and sick but if I was to get that sick note, I had to get there somehow. I had to make my own way and I was unfamiliar with the roads. Being completely deaf didn’t help either. If I asked directions, I couldn’t hear them and it will surprise you how often people turn their heads away from you as they give directions. Without seeing the person’s mouth, with perhaps the small hope that I could lip read, it was useless. The night itself was foggy and dark. The Clean Air Act had been in force since 1956, so the fog wasn’t as bad as the infamous London pea soupers but it certainly added to the stress of the journey.

Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my turn, I only knew I’d been called when several other patients gesticulated towards the doctor’s office. He examined me and told me off for coming out with a temperature of 102ºF, but he signed me off sick. I was so relieved.

Next I had to find a chemist to get the prescription made up. I dared not turn up without my medication. Matron Thomas would have left it until the next day before sending anyone out for it and I was desperate to be well again.

With my medicine safely in my pocket I set off for the nursery again but in my misery, I got on the wrong bus and added a half-hour walk to my destination. Matron was furious when I got back and gave her the sick note. She snatched it from me and the look on her face said it all; she obviously hadn’t expected the doctor to sign me off. Her pet worry was that the nursery would be short-staffed and so girls worked all the time when they were unfit and should have been in bed. Back in my room, I crawled under the covers. My roommate was away for a few days, so I was alone. No one came to see me all the next day and frankly, I was too ill to care. Luckily I was right next to the bathroom so I managed to get to the toilet and I drank water from a tooth-mug on the window ledge. It was a miserable time.

Things get a bit hazy after that. I had a pot under the bed and because I felt too ill to go into the bathroom, I used it. No one came to see me or to ask if I wanted food or drink and when the pot was full, I was forced to stagger to the loo with it myself. My salvation came in the form of the doctor. He must have been slightly concerned about me because he turned up a couple of days later, unannounced. That was the first time Matron Thomas came to my room, and she stayed while he examined me. There was a heated discussion at the foot of my bed and they both left. A few minutes later, Matron came back up again, this time with a bowl of water, a flannel, a towel and one of her own nightdresses. She washed me and changed my bedclothes and an hour later, I was in an ambulance and on my way to hospital.

It turned out that I had an abscess on each eardrum and at last Matron understood that I wasn’t making it up, nor imagining it. I was put onto four-hourly penicillin injections and given heat treatment on my neck. Both abscesses were so large, I had already discovered that when I lay on my side, I rested on the lump and not my neck. The only way I could sleep was to lie on my back. Matron Thomas’ uncaring attitude was extended to my parents. No one informed them that I was in hospital, or ill for that matter and it was only after I’d been in hospital two days that they discovered I was there. A working-class home with a telephone was virtually unheard of back then. My mother had asked the local farmer, Mr Wellman, if she could use his phone in a case of emergency. When the hospital decided to operate, because I was still a minor, they needed my father’s permission, so they rang him.

When the call came, Mr Wellman set off from Woolslope Farm to find my mother. She was at work but she left immediately and used the public telephone to call my dad’s boss. My dad was a builder and Mrs Hayward ran two miles across open fields to reach the bungalow Dad was working on at Ashley Heath, near Ringwood. There was panic all round but Dad gave the hospital verbal permission and the next day he and Mum came all the way from Dorset by train. Ward sister allowed them in, even though it wasn’t visiting hours until the afternoon, and I was overjoyed to see them.

By now, the penicillin was taking effect and I was making a slow improvement. Matron had invited Mum and Dad to go to the nursery for tea and Mum told me afterwards, she put on the performance of her life. She appeared distraught, wringing her handkerchief and saying, ‘If only Pamela had told us she was ill. We had no inkling she was unwell.’

Mum bit her tongue. She knew I was terrified Matron would stop me doing my training, so much against her better judgement, she said nothing. Years later she told me just how hard that had been. ‘I was furious with that Matron,’ she said. ‘Everything in me wanted to confront her and tell her I knew she was lying, but you had asked me not to say anything.’

Once I started getting better, I made some friends in the ward. It was very large and if I close my eyes I can still smell the floor polish and disinfectant. The girl in the bed next to me had had an illegal back-street abortion and almost died. I think she was about twenty. She seemed so sophisticated, so grown up, and she wore her make-up in the most amazing way. Her mascara was halfway down her cheeks like a spider’s web, making her eyes look enormous. She had the palest pink lipstick, giving her an almost ghostly look, and her bouffant was parted down the middle and framed her face. It was a look which was soon to become very fashionable.

As my health improved, I was able to join in the fun and laughter patients share on a ward. We were all made to rest after lunch and I woke up one afternoon to the sight of a female patient, aware that men might be around, backing out of her bed to go to the toilet. She told us afterwards she did it that way because she didn’t want to swing her legs over the bed because she had no panties on. The only trouble was, she was wearing a hospital gown which opened down the back and only one of the tapes, the one at her neck, was tied!

Then there was Nurse Driver on the ward. She was an SEN (State Enrolled Nurse, a title given to girls who had completed the three-year training course but had failed their exam. They were limited to general duties and were not allowed to do the medicine trolley). One day, the morning drinks had just been served when she turned up at my bedside.

‘Have you got a headache?’

‘No.’

A little later, after the ward round, she was back.

‘Do you need something from the medicine trolley? Shall I tell Sister?’

‘No, thank you. I’m feeling a lot better today.’

Just before lunch time I saw her coming back again.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you.’

In the end, she was driving me potty so in the vain hope that she would go away, the next time she made a beeline for my bed I said, ‘Actually, I have got a bit of a headache.’ I lay down, thinking she would leave me alone to sleep.

Five minutes later she was back with two enormous pills and a cup of water.

I didn’t want them, or need them so I refused as politely as I could. ‘And in any case,’ I smiled, ‘I couldn’t manage to swallow anything as big as that.’

She hurried off only to reappear with the pills crushed in a dessertspoonful of blackcurrant jam. As I forced the disgusting mixture down she gave me a loud lecture about not suffering in silence.

It was Nurse Driver who had an accident with her stocking suspender. She was busy on the ward when it broke. I think the whole thing had come away from her girdle because usually if only the button at the end came off you could put a sixpenny piece in its place to keep your stocking up. Nurse Driver had tied a bandage around the top of her stocking to keep it up. During her shift, it gradually came undone and we had to bite our cheeks so as not to laugh as she dashed up and down the ward with a long trail of dirty bandage trailing behind her uniform.

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.