by Pam Weaver
Her advice seems delightfully old fashioned now and she answered my concerns about love (and sex!) with care and sensitivity. It must have struck a chord with me and obviously meant a lot because I kept it in a box alongside old love letters and other items of sentimental value.
Chapter 16
I loved working in the hospital but I was ready for a change. I was beginning to feel bored by the same old routine and now I wanted a new challenge. I applied for several jobs and eventually went to work in Middlesex in another children’s nursery. After our terrible experiences in the training nurseries, my friend Evie Perryer, who was by this time married and with her own children, was horrified. ‘How can you bear to go back?’ she asked in hushed tones. We both had bad memories of the old nurseries where we had worked when we were young but I was happy to tell her that this nursery was totally different.
The landmark I had to look for was a road called Honeypot Lane and as I set out for my interview, I imagined a tree-lined lane with fields on either side. It turned out to be a fast dual carriageway dotted with huge factories and industrial estates. The nursery, consisting of two large buildings – one a house and the other a purpose-built nursery, joined together by a covered walkway – was tucked away behind the big main road. It was in its own grounds and almost as soon as the door was opened, I liked it. It had a good atmosphere, the Matron was friendly and the children ran up to her when she appeared. In the other nurseries where I had worked, either the children were indifferent or they moved away when Matron came into the room. As Miss Armstrong showed me around, we collected a couple of children. They held her hand as we walked through.
The children were looked after in family groups. It was the model we had learned about in college, the one my Matron and nursery warden in the Surrey County Council nursery were so sure would never work. The girl in charge of the room had up to eight children in her care. Their ages ranged from eighteen months to five years old, although there was some flexibility even with that. When I arrived there to work, I discovered that one room actually had a seven-year-old child who had been allowed to stay until he and his younger brother were both old enough to move together. Kevin went to the local school just up the road.
I was put in charge of the baby room. We had six cots and three members of staff, with two of us were on duty together at any one time. The duty hours were totally different. We had three days off a week. They were taken together, so you might work Monday and have Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off. Of course it was never the same day off each week so you might end up with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off one week and Friday, Saturday and Sunday off the next. That meant you’d work for eight days on the trot before getting a day off but somehow, it didn’t matter. With three days off each week, it meant that we could all have a life outside of the nursery. We worked from seven until seven and there was a permanent night nurse so I didn’t even have to do night duty.
The milk kitchen was next door to the baby room, so once again we were a self-contained unit within the nursery. When I started, the walls were plain and the floor was grey and red tiles. We had flowery curtains and there was a small hatch which connected the baby room with the milk kitchen. The room was spacious enough for a playpen and we could also put down a rug for the babies to lie on.
It didn’t take me long to get to know the children in my care. Sadly their stories were the same as they had been in other nurseries. Alison was six months old. Her mother was West Indian and had abandoned her in the hospital where she was born. Alison had a huge hernia on her umbilicus. It protruded about three inches and although it didn’t seem to bother her, it was unsightly. As I have already stated, the child care officers would relax when they knew that a child was happy and well-cared for in the nursery because they had far more pressing cases. Time would slip by and a child would sometimes wait until it was too late for whatever was needed, but not in this nursery. This Matron was a real champion of the children; she wouldn’t let any child in her care languish or be forgotten. Alison should have had that operation ages ago. Miss Armstrong started ringing up and badgering for something to be done and less than two months later, Alison was in hospital being patched up. When she came back to us, she was a different little girl. She still had a protrusion but it was only slight and although the hernia had apparently never seemed to bother her, now she was more active and eager to be on the move all the time.
The staff wore their own nylon overalls. C&A Modes was the best place to get them, and so we all looked different. I chose a floral one but the girl working with me, Valerie, was in pale blue. She was a rather plain girl, with fair hair swept back in a French pleat and dark-horn-rimmed glasses. The third member of staff was an Irish agency nurse called Maxine. She was Irish and had freckles. She wore a maroon nurse’s dress but no apron. Because of the way the off duty worked, I would be working with one of them but we were seldom all together. The routine was much the same as it had always been: we fed the babies, cleaned the room, made up the feeds, took the babies out in the prams, either to a shady spot in the garden or out for a walk, and washed nappies. Our meals were cooked for us in the kitchen by two women who lived out. Win and Rob came in every day at around seven-thirty and cooked us breakfast and a midday meal. We had a bread-and-butter tea and a light supper, which was prepared by another woman who came in during the afternoon.
In just the same way as we had done in the other nurseries, every child had a special tea in their honour when their birthday came around. They would ‘invite’ all the others to come and we’d have a big birthday bash. We would play games like musical bumps or musical statues and pass the parcel. Everyone clapped and cheered when it came to opening the presents and the staff took photographs. The climax was to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and then the cake would come in. Win was an amazing cake maker and when any of the children had a birthday, she would always ask them what sort of cake they wanted. Some of them set her a really hard challenge but she always rose to the occasion. She once created a grand piano with black liquorice piano keys and a chocolate finger biscuit holding up the lid, or it might be hedgehogs with chocolate button spines, or a space rocket and a lady with a crinoline dress. When it came to cutting the cake on Gloria’s birthday, the lady with the crinoline dress had to be taken back to the kitchen to be cut up. As soon as the knife was produced, Gloria burst into tears.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Matron asked.
‘Don’t cut the lady’s legs!’ Gloria sobbed.
Mrs Roberts (Rob), the woman who worked in the kitchen alongside Win, told us she had the same birthday as Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I was born on exactly the same day and in the same year,’ she said. ‘We were the same age until I got to be thirty but she stayed at twenty-five.’ So when Rob celebrated her fortieth birthday while I was working in the nursery, Miss Taylor still had five years to go.
I soon made new friends. Sylvia was a pretty Scots girl, who worked in another room. She was madly in love with Nick, who was in prison. Nick had been accused of stealing from his employers. Sylvia protested his innocence and I have to say that we took what she said with a pinch of salt. She and I became friends although we didn’t go out together much; she kept to her own circle of friends outside the nursery and I was busy visiting old friends. I had kept in touch with Mrs Bancroft and I often went up to London and spent the day with Rupert.
Sylvia’s friends used to go to a club near the airbase where the Americans were stationed there with US Air Forces Europe and she went out with a man they called ‘Sky-Hi’. I never met the chap but apparently he was very tall and quite beefy too. He was also a great one for spinning a yarn. He told Sylvia that the US forces were issuing their soldiers with the world’s first male contraceptive pill and that it was one hundred per cent effective. Needless to say, Sylvia succumbed to his charms.
Then Nick wrote to say that he had got an appeal hearing in court. Sylvia asked me to go with her because she didn’t think she could face it if the convic
tion was upheld and he had to go back to prison and serve the rest of his sentence. I of course agreed to go with her.
We sat nervously in the public gallery while everybody filed in to their places. It transpired that Nick was accused of going back into the supermarket where he worked, via a small window in the toilet area. The window was accessed by a flat roof and apparently Nick’s palm print was found on the inside of the window. The prosecution didn’t make a very strong case and the barrister complained that he had only received the brief that morning. He floundered when the judges asked questions. In his defence, the barrister pointed out that Nick had an unblemished character, no money problems but he had ruffled a few feathers in his job by making sure everyone did their work properly. Having heard all that, the judge said that he was appalled that Nick’s case had even gone to court, much less convicted him. The case was quashed and he was set free immediately. Sylvia was jubilant.
We all met in the corridor and as Nick and Sylvia walked out with their arms around each other into the sunlight, I was left with his solicitor, and guess what, he dated me!
I should like to say the story had a happy ending but there was more to come. A week or two later, Sylvia was devastated to realise that she was pregnant. There was no way she could pass it off as Nick’s baby (passing a baby off as another man’s child was a common practice back then) because he had been locked up when the deed was done. The baby was clearly Sky-Hi’s, so either the fail-proof male contraceptive didn’t work, or it didn’t exist. I favour the latter reason.
After a lot of soul-searching and worry on Sylvia’s part, she and Nick did a lot of talking. They resolved the problem for a while when they decided that she would give the baby up for adoption but by the time her son was born, she and Nick had already gone their separate ways.
There was a double standard when it came to morals. If a man was unfaithful he was regarded as a bit of a ‘Jack-the-lad’ but if a woman strayed, she was cheap. Sylvia was lonely and missing Nick when she succumbed to the charms of Sky-Hi and that one evening cost her dear. I was a little more cautious and I’m glad I was: the solicitor turned out to be married.
Having a special relationship with one particular child was always frowned upon but for the first time in my life, I let my affections get the better of me. I couldn’t help myself. Miranda was such a lovely little girl – bouncy, full of fun and a joy to be with. There was a chemistry between us from the word go. She was in the baby room when I started in the nursery but she was moved into a family group when she was just over a year. I shamelessly spoiled her and Miss Armstrong didn’t stop me. I bought Miranda clothes; I took her out on my day off and had her in the staff room with me watching the TV when I was off duty so it was hardly surprising that by the time she was fifteen months, we had become very close.
Miranda had been abandoned in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery when she was eight months old. Her mother had gone there to ask if someone could look after her because she was finding it hard to cope on her own. Someone showed her to a seat and told her to ‘wait here’ but when they came back, Miranda was sitting in her pushchair, quite alone. They had no address and no idea who Miranda’s mother was. All they had to go on was a name on a piece of paper attached to her coat: Miranda Green. It took Social Services some time to track Mrs Green down.
I had been at the nursery for a year when I was allowed to take Miranda to my parents for a week’s holiday. It was all good experience for her and she loved being spoiled. Miranda was West Indian in origin and because they lived in a sleepy Dorset village, my cousin’s children had never even seen a black child before. Miranda was younger than they were but it was interesting to note that she ruled their games and they did everything she wanted. The only comment anyone made came from my cousin’s five-year-old daughter. She had long silky blonde hair but at bedtime she asked her mother to brush her hair ‘very, very hard so that it would be curly like Miranda’s’. The whole time they were together, the children didn’t even notice that they had different coloured skins.
When I left the nursery about three years later, I kept up my visits to Miranda. We had some happy days out to the zoo, or to London but just as she turned five, her mother turned up again and wanted her back. I was delighted for her and the social workers arranged for visits so that Mrs Green could get to know her daughter again. Miranda finally went to live with her mother and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Although I missed her, I was glad she was with her own family and I thought she would have a good life. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Her mother abandoned her again a few years later. I had just got married and so I was at a pivotal period of my life. Should I go and see Miranda or let the past stay in the past? I also had to consider the feelings of my new husband. We had no children of our own. Was it right to ask him to be a foster parent at such short notice and so early on in our marriage?
One of the girls from the nursery went to see Miranda in her new home and reported back that she didn’t even seem to know her, nor did she react when my name was mentioned. Everyone was convinced she had forgotten me and that it would be best not to rekindle something which had died. For that reason, I let her go. Looking back, I’m not so sure. It was perfectly possible she had forgotten me – after all, she was so young (only four when I last saw her) – but perhaps she hadn’t. I felt sad that perhaps in her eyes I too had been one of the adults who had abandoned her, and I have often wondered if she had tucked the memories of me away because they were just too painful. I wish I had the opportunity to find out.
Like my cousin’s child, nobody in the nursery noticed the colour of someone’s skin until Miss Armstrong employed a certain agency nurse from the Caribbean. Within days of her arrival, she had single-handedly brought racial tension in through the doors. Whenever one of the white staff told a child off, she would take that child into a corner and tell him, ‘She only talk to you like that because you is black.’ It confused them and undermined what little security they had. Suddenly every child was suspicious of everyone and before long they were running around giving black power signs. They clearly didn’t understand what they were doing because they were only three and four, and everybody, regardless of their colour or ethnicity, was doing it. The same woman was angry with me because I was going out with a white man at the time (I am mixed race myself), and Kevin, who was seven and going to school, told the girl in charge of his room that he didn’t want to drink his cocoa at night because it made him black. The whole business made everyone so uncomfortable that we were pleased when the woman, of her own choice, decided she didn’t want to work in the nursery any more, but it took some while to help the children regain their confidence.
Our children’s heads were always kept scrupulously clean and regularly checked but occasionally the school would report a case of head lice. One day Kevin came back from school and sought out his favourite nursery nurse, ‘Maria, can you see my traffic lights?’
Maria was puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My teacher said to tell you to look out for headlights in our hair.’
I especially loved the run-up to Christmas in that nursery. We were given real choice about the toys we gave the children and who better to know and understand what they would like than the girls who looked after them every day? It was such fun buying and wrapping the presents in the run-up to the big day. Every child had a completely new outfit as part of their Christmas present. On Christmas morning each girl had a beautiful dress and the boys looked very smart in their new jumpers. Little Chris was thrilled with his brand new tee-shirt. As soon as he saw me he yanked up his jumper and pulled the tee-shirt down to show me the picture on it. ‘Look,’ he said proudly, ‘a piller-cat!’
The children helped with putting up the decorations and they really enjoyed the excitement of season. We had Christmas carols playing throughout the nursery and at midnight, Miss Armstrong and a couple of other girls went around the nursery swapping the empty pillow cases for full ones and leaving t
hem at the end of the beds. When Miss Armstrong got to Kevin’s room he sat up and stared at her. It was dark and he was black so all Miss Armstrong could see was two bright eyes as big as saucers watching her. She threw the pillow case with his toys under the bed and said, ‘Oh hello, Kevin. I was just checking that your pillow case is tied on properly.’ She persuaded him to lie down again but when we got up in the morning, all the children were telling us that Kevin had caught Matron trying to steal the children’s toys!
We had the same old problem of no man to be Father Christmas so one of the girls (Maria) and I made a pantomime horse. She was the front end and I was the back. We did it in the staff room in our off duty and made it out of some hessian sacking. It wasn’t brilliant and it didn’t look much like a horse but hey, it was a pantomime horse! On Christmas day the horse turned up and gave the children presents. At one point, someone spotted Miranda searching the corridor for me because she was worried I would miss the horse. By this time we were giving the children ‘rides’ on the horse and even when she was put on my back, Miranda never once realised that I was the one underneath her. To keep up the pretence and the fun, Maria and I dashed back to the house to discard the costume and then returned to the small kitchen and did some washing up. The children came running up to us, telling us about the horse.
‘A horse?’ we teased. ‘Are you sure?’
