Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

by Pam Weaver

  It was all academic for us anyway. Matron Dickenson frowned on the idea and dismissed it out of hand without even bothering to give it a try. She and the nursery warden decided ‘it wouldn’t work’. We students were frustrated as well. Maybe she was right and it wouldn’t have worked but we would have loved the opportunity to give it a try.

  People working with the council I worked for really were beginning to understand the importance of the family unit. If children were available for adoption, they were starting to try and keep siblings together. Much has been written about brothers and sisters being separated, sometimes sent as far away as Australia and Canada in what turned out to be a mistaken idea that they were giving the children a fresh start and the chance of a better life. Terrible mistakes were made out of sheer ignorance. The country was still struggling with the aftermath of World War Two. My own childhood in the Fifties was a happy one but my parents didn’t have it easy. When Dad was laid off because of the bad weather it was tough. He had no money and there was no allowance he could claim. Yes, councils shipped children abroad. And yes, it did save the ratepayers from having to keep children in expensive long-term care, but the child care officers honestly thought they were sending the children to countries where they would have a better life.

  Marion and Monica made it difficult for the new policy of keeping family together to work. They were twins but they hated each other. The animosity in their relationship would rival that of Jacob and Esau in the Bible. As soon as they saw each other, they would begin to cry or to snatch the toy the other was playing with. In fact, the only physical contact between them was a punch or a kick. They were supposed to be together in the Tweenie room but quite often the girl in charge would swap one of them with someone in Toddlers, simply for a bit of peace and quiet. The girls had little chance of a new life in a real family. If they were to be kept together, who would want to adopt or even foster such female warriors!

  Attitudes and ideas were changing but new ideas take time to catch on. An American paediatrician called Dr Benjamin Spock had brought a whole new way of thinking into childcare. He had published a book in 1946 and by 1958 onwards his message started to filter through the British childcare system. The girls I trained with and I were part of the first wave, I guess. The way Matron and the nursery warden worked was fast becoming ‘old school’, which was why they found it so hard to adjust. Dr Spock was the first person to actually study children and the dynamics of family life. He taught parents and child carers to be more proactive with the children in their care and to treat them as individuals. He also changed the focus of the family from the provider (i.e. the father) to the child. The former was an excellent idea but I didn’t agree with everything he taught because I think by making the child central in everything, we created a very self-centred and greedy generation. The world is desperately trying to put right the wrongs that generation has done. On the plus side, he made us realise how precious childhood is and that we should guard it for our children in whatever way we can.

  Chapter 9

  If I’ve made it sound as if we had a terrible time, all the time, we didn’t. There were lots of laughs along the way. I made a good friend in a girl called Evelyn. A very neat and tidy girl, she was the sort that never had a hair out of place. She was well respected, efficient and loving towards the children. I’ve forgotten her surname but she moved to Wimbledon when we left the nursery. I nicknamed her ‘Evil’, which rather horrifies me now, but it was all done and taken in good fun.

  It was while I was at the nursery that I met a boy called John. I can’t remember how we met but for our first date, we had a very romantic day out on the River Thames in a punt and I fell hopelessly in love. He was a bandsman in the Army and went abroad. We dated all the time and I used to visit his parents who lived nearby and they were lovely people. I had high hopes that John and I would marry one day but obviously he didn’t feel the same. I was very miserable for a few weeks when I realised he had come home on leave and not bothered to contact me but then it was time to bounce back – and the best person to help me was Hilary.

  Hilary and I did some mad things and it was a wonder that we didn’t put ourselves in danger. Soon after John dumped me, she and I both had a day off together. It was the day of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. We met somewhere near Hammersmith Bridge but decided that was too near the start so we walked along the river towards Barnes Bridge. It was magic. People in the huge houses along the river were having champagne parties and for the first time in our lives we could see how the other half lived. I hardly remember the race itself except that Oxford won (1963) but then we walked through the crowds. At one point we met some Greek boys and we were in effect ‘picked up’. That makes it sound rather sordid, but we had a fantastic time. When I say we did stupid things, we got into their car and drove into central London with them. It never once occurred to us that they might not take us into London or that we risked being driven somewhere lonely where we couldn’t get help. It obviously didn’t occur to them either. There were already five boys in the car when we squashed in (no seat belts back then) and they took us to a Greek restaurant. The driver had the unlikely name of Caroli Bambos and Hilary liked him a lot. I was a bit of a gooseberry but the restaurant was wonderful. They gave us a meal and the men did some amazing Greek dancing. We ended the date by driving to Heathrow Airport in the middle of the night to watch the early flights. No one had thought of hijacking back then so you could go up on the roof and watch the planes. It didn’t cost anything and there were no security checks. All you needed for a great time was the occasional cup of coffee to help you stay awake all night. Tired but happy, the Greek boys drove us back into central London and we caught the early train back to Hilary’s house. Life was good again.

  In the summer of 1963, I went on holiday to Hemyock in Devon with an old school friend. We visited my Auntie Laura, whose son still lived in a prefab. They were never intended to be more than a temporary stopgap to help with the acute housing shortage after the war, but nearly twenty years after they were first put up, people still lived in them. It was a cosy little house – much better, I felt, than my mother’s two-up, two-down cottage, which was riddled with damp and still had no main drainage. Mum and Dad had their toilet at the bottom of the garden. It was only a bucket under a wooden seat and Dad used an earth closet for disposal. That’s a polite way of saying he dug a six-foot hole and when the bucket was full, everything went in it. Unbelievably, they stayed in those conditions until 1970, when I got in touch with their MP, the Medical Officer of Health and their GP. With a letter from their doctor, they were finally able to have proper facilities. In the nursery, for all its privations, I was used to proper toilets and hot baths whenever I wanted them.

  We also stayed with my friend’s aunt in Sidmouth. I don’t think we did anything very exciting, the most eventful occurrence being the time I accidentally knocked her aunt’s picture off the wall. When we picked it up it said, ‘Turn from evil and do good’, which gave us both a laugh. The Swinging Sixties was still a London-based thing which had only just got started. It took a while to reach the sleepy backwaters of Devon.

  1963 also stands out for the world events. On the whole, we were all too wrapped up in the day-to-day workings of the nursery and our own limited off duty to be bothered about what was going on around us but there were some things which made an impact on our lives. It began with the Great Train Robbery, an audacious theft of £2.6 million (£40 million in today’s money), which took place in August. Then came the Profumo Affair, which opened a huge can of worms for the Government.

  We had only just stopped talking about that when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November. It was hugely scary at the time. It was upsetting that he had died, but somehow the event made the whole world seem a very unsafe place to be.

  ‘Do you think it was the Russians?’ was the question on everybody’s lips.

  We were bewildered and unable to believe what had happened.
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 had the same kind of impact as far as the grief went, and although we in this country didn’t line the streets or place banks of flowers in public places when Kennedy died, there was that same sense of loss and confusion. My roommate had come to West Moors for the weekend but it spoilt it a bit. When I met her off the bus, she already knew. Someone at Southampton coach station had got on the coach and told all the passengers and the local bus from Ringwood was agog with it all. The television schedule was ditched and we had wall-to-wall Kennedy, going over and over the same grainy pictures of nothing in particular. Somehow Jackie Kennedy in her blood-stained suit said it all. Marilyn and I did go to Bournemouth the next day and later to the pictures but our thoughts were dominated by the events in Dallas, Texas.

  Back at the nursery, the Christmas of 1963 was a lot better. I was dreading it because the previous year had been so awful but Matron Dickenson pulled out all the stops and we had a good time. In the run-up to Christmas, I spent my off-duty hours with the other girls, wrapping presents for the children. We would put a pillow case at the end of their beds and during the night, the night nurse would swap the empty case for a full one. The toys were marked with their name once the children opened it. It was a much better arrangement than before and the powers that be were beginning to understand the need for personal things. Each child had a ‘Christmas outfit’, a completely new set of clothes from central stores which he or she could wear straight away. On Boxing Day, while the festivities went on around us, a couple of us girls were scratching names onto tape and sewing them into the jumpers, trousers or a dress they’d worn the day before.

  I was used to looking after children from deprived backgrounds so it came as a surprise to encounter someone with a double-barrelled name – three actually. Georgie, Dawn and Diane Maxwell-Hayes had accents a cut above the rest, or at least Georgie did. He was nearly five and the twins were nearly two. Georgie was a supremely confident child, used to demanding and getting his own way. He apparently knew everything before you even told him and according to him, he was the toughest kid around. The twins were slightly bewildered, but they had each other. They came to the home just before Christmas. Their parents had been arrested for some sort of fraud and because the authorities were afraid they might abscond, they were likely to be in jail for some time. I suppose their extended family were too appalled to want to help so the children were placed in care until a more suitable solution could be found. So while the child care officers worked behind the scenes, Georgie and his sisters spent their first and only Christmas in a children’s home.

  The nursery was wrestling with the same perennial problem. We needed a man. Nobody cared what he looked like but every member of staff was asked to find one. We had the costume but we didn’t have a Father Christmas. I didn’t even have a boyfriend I could call upon and everybody else’s men were unavailable.

  But how could we have Christmas without Father Christmas? At the very last minute, Sister Hemmingway volunteered to do it. She had no Wellingtons and the Father Christmas tunic ended at her knees. The trousers were far too big and too long and there was no time to do any alterations. We gathered the children in the hallway as we heard the sleigh bells (a set of hand bells from the music corner) on the roof. Everyone was fixed on her face as she came sweeping down the staircase with a loaded sack. She certainly looked the part, with her long flowing beard and the hat pulled down over her forehead. She even sounded the part with lots of ‘ho-ho-hos’ although they were perhaps a little too high-pitched. The children didn’t seem to notice and she was very convincing. So convincing in fact, that Georgie took flight. He ran into the playroom and hid behind the rocking horse, refusing to come out even when his name was called.

  ‘Father Christmas has brought you a lovely present,’ I told him. ‘He wants you to come and get it.’

  ‘You go and get it,’ he told me, and I could see he was visibly trembling.

  All my reassurances were to no avail. I had to collect the present on his behalf.

  Eventually, the sack was empty and Father Christmas went back upstairs on his way to the roof and his waiting sleigh. His back view was even more stunning than his front view. The large cushion stuffed up his tunic had lifted the hemline at the back. The children were busy with their new toys but the staff had more than a glimpse of Sister’s stocking tops and suspenders as she ‘ho-ho-hoed’ and lumbered back up the stairs.

  Georgie and his sisters left the home in the New Year. Two sets of relatives had agreed to take them in until the court case was settled. They were to be separated, the twins with one family and Georgie with another, but the child care officer had exacted the promise that they would meet up on family occasions.

  That Christmas was a lot more fun for both the children and the staff. The children had a great day and their presents had been better thought out. We ate a scrumptious meal – roast turkey and all the trimmings – and we pulled crackers and the table was buzzing with lively conversation. In the evening I organised a show in aid of the Save the Students Fund and out of politeness I sent Dickie an invitation. To our amazement, she wrote an acceptance and came. We spent several evenings working hard on our show. We looked for talent and discovered girls who could sing or ‘do a turn’; we also did the tramp’s sketch. Four people on a park bench, along comes a tramp. He sits on the end and begins scratching. He gets out a paper and starts to read, but one by one the people leave until at last he has the whole bench to himself. Then he spreads out the newspaper, covers himself and lies down to sleep. It was probably an old music-hall sketch and I don’t know if Dickie had ever seen it before but she laughed heartily. We also sang songs. I changed the words to the pop song ‘Bobby’s Girl’ by Susan Maughan, which was in the charts at the time, making a joke of how much we all wanted our NNEB:

  Each night I sit at home

  Hoping Fox-T will phone.

  But I know she’s got somebody else,

  Still I will hope and pray

  That soon will come the day

  When I can be a staff nurse myself …

  I want the NNEB,

  I want the NNEB

  That’s the most important thing for me

  And with the NNEB,

  with the NNEB

  What a fabulous staff nurse I will be!

  Matron was enthusiastic about the show and we all relaxed. Perhaps now she would be a little different in the coming year? We could but hope, but our expectations were quickly dashed as her mean-spiritedness quickly returned. Several times I returned to my room (as did other girls) to find the contents of every drawer, my wardrobe and my bedding in a huge pile in the middle of the room. It was worse when she did it on a day off. If you’d been looking forward to doing something, you were faced with wasting two and half hours of your precious off-duty time tidying your room before you were allowed to go out. Once you’d tidied your room, you had to find Matron and ask her to come and see if she was satisfied with your efforts. You had to wait outside the closed door until she came back out again and pronounced that your room was now tidy. Once when she did it to Marilyn, the poor girl spent ages making it right again only to find that Matron wasn’t happy with something and had done it all over again! How soul-destroying is that? Marilyn was so upset that the girls who were off duty helped her do it all a second time. There was no rhyme or reason why Dickie did it, but I wonder if she’d had some sort of army training. We were always tidy because we knew what would happen if we weren’t, but it made no difference. She did it anyway.

  Suzanne, a student who came a year after we started, introduced us all to Radio Caroline when it began in 1964. Suzanne idolised Dusty Springfield. She copied her hairdo and her make-up, and played her record, ‘I Only Want To Be With You’, endlessly on her record player.

  People don’t realise what a fantastic thing it was for young people when Radio Caroline began. We followed the tussle between the station and powers that be, namely Ernest Bevins, the Post
master-General who did his best to prevent Radio Caroline from broadcasting. The government appealed to the International Telecommunications Union, the body which regulated frequencies and transmissions throughout the world, but it was to no avail. The ship was three miles off the coast at Felixstowe, just outside territorial waters. The first record they played on air was The Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and for the first time in our lives, we had wall-to-wall pop music all day long. Bliss … It was a good time for music as well. ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ by The Beach Boys, ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ by The Cascades, ‘He’s So Fine’ by The Chiffons, ‘It’s My Party’ by Lesley Gore, ‘If I Had A Hammer’ by Trini Lopez … Of course The Beatles were still big and the Stones, Roy Orbison, The Four Seasons, Ray Charles … I could go on and on. Brenda Lee, Sam Cooke, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Cash … Radio Caroline played them all. Mine wasn’t the only nursery to be hit with Radio Caroline fever. My friend from my nursery assistant days, Evie Perryer, told me of an occasion when the Matron of her home was going on holiday. As soon as she’d gone, off came the lisle stockings and on came Radio Caroline. They had it blasting away when ten minutes later, there was absolute panic in the nursery because Matron was coming back up the drive. She’d missed the bus!