Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

by Pam Weaver

  I applied for several jobs and for the first time in my life, I didn’t get them. I had been used to a prospective employer looking at my references and jumping at the chance to have me on board. Up until now, I had been spoilt for choice but this time it was different. One Matron actually told me off for not completing the course and told me to go back. I felt I really couldn’t do it so I sought the advice of my church leaders and they encouraged me to stay as well! It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear but gradually I began to see that I was gaining something else by staying. Firstly, I had made an agreement and I should stick with it. Commitment is important to me. Secondly, I was gaining backbone and the ability to cope, no matter what the circumstance, became more important than my immediate happiness. I was also enjoying a totally different type of social life. I had the opportunity to go on mission with various groups and Saturday night at Hockley was fantastic. We gathered in a small rundown church hall, where the drip-fed oil heaters bounced on the floorboards as the meetings, always loud, crowded and eventful, went on until way past eleven o’clock. I loved it.

  I had just made the decision to carry on and complete the course when, out of the blue, I had a phone call from Mrs Bancroft.

  ‘Pamela, I am going abroad for the summer. We shall be there for six months. We’re staying at a lovely place and I have rented a bungalow in the grounds. You can have your own car and plenty of free time. It’s going to be wonderful! Do say you will come.’

  As I stood in the phone booth, I had just come off night duty and I was dog tired. I watched the rain pouring down the window and I was cold and hungry. What a perfect solution. Sun, sand and sangria …

  ‘Sorry,’ I heard myself saying, ‘but I’m staying here to complete my course. Have a lovely time, won’t you.’ I think I realised at that moment that it’s not always having a bed of roses that makes us happy. I couldn’t let this course beat me; I wanted to succeed more than I wanted a way out and a cushy life.

  The hospital was famed for its human milk bank and part of my duties was to spend some time there making up the feeds. They ran it a bit like a space capsule. We had to scrub as if we were about to enter a theatre for surgery and we wore white gowns and masks. The feeds were measured out and put into bottles, which had been autoclaved and then sealed before getting them ready to send to the wards. Breast milk was a lifeline to some of the smallest babies. Their digestive system may not have been mature enough to cope with some of the milk substitutes and so without sounding too dramatic, having breast milk could have been a case of life or death. Any mum who had been on the unit was only too happy to supply the human milk bank with any spare milk she might have. Although she was paid a nominal sum of money, for most mums it was a way of paying back what had been done for her baby. For the mums who perhaps through no fault of their own didn’t have enough milk for their babies, it must have seemed like the most generous of gifts.

  Once we had taken the feeds to the unit, I put on my nurse’s cloak and went with the district midwife to collect the milk from the mothers. We travelled all over Birmingham, collecting containers of expressed breast milk and each ounce donated was charted in a book. We took miniscule amounts from some mothers and large quantities from others. The hospital provided each mum with a hand pump and she was told to keep any expressed breast milk in the fridge. As soon as the milk was brought back to the milk bank, it was strained through muslin to remove any hairs or fluff from the mother’s clothing. All the milk was put into special vats to be pasteurised in just the same way as the Milk Marketing Board pasteurised cow’s milk from the farms. It all went in together but as we opened some of the bottles, the strong smell of spices filled the air.

  ‘This comes from an Indian mother,’ the Sister told me with a smile. ‘Their babies get a subtle taste of curry in the breast milk, as that’s what their mothers are eating.’

  The pasteurisation took away the smell altogether and the milk was fine to use. Pasteurisation didn’t take that long. The milk was heated to 133°F (56°C) for thirty minutes and then cooled rapidly to 50°F (10°C).

  At the end of the month, the amounts contributed to the milk bank were all calculated and each mother was paid accordingly.

  ‘One of my mums paid the deposit on her house with what she got for her breast milk,’ Sister told me proudly, and when my eyebrows shot up, she added, ‘she’s had seven babies and is pregnant with her eighth.’

  All the mothers donating breast milk had to be screened. Any mother who had Hepatitis B or antibodies to syphilis was not accepted and if their baby was ill at any time, or for that matter, the mum herself was unwell with a cold or something, she was told not to donate breast milk. Care was also taken to screen out anyone who smoked more than ten cigarettes a day or was taking regular drugs.

  The midwives often told us stories about what happened out on the district. My friend Judy was called to a farm to deliver a baby. The labour was going along nicely and she and the mother were enjoying the experience. Every now and then, the farmer would crash into the kitchen and shout up the stairs. ‘’Ow’s it going then?’

  ‘Fine,’ Judy called down the stairs. ‘Mother and baby are doing very well.’

  ‘Bairn ain’t there then?’ yelled the father.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Judy with a smile for the mother.

  After about two hours, the farmer was getting exasperated. ‘’Ow much longer is thee goin’ to be?’

  Judy tut-tutted and frowned. ‘We can’t hurry these things,’ she called downstairs. ‘It shouldn’t be long now.’

  ‘Tell ’er to get a move on,’ shouted the farmer irritably. ‘I needs ’elp wi’ milking!’

  Another friend, Sally, was called to an Asian family. When she arrived there were three little girls huddled together in the kitchen and the father was pacing the floor. Upstairs, the mother was in tears.

  ‘Please,’ she said in her broken English, ‘you make it a boy.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can do nothing about that now,’ Sally laughed. ‘The die is already cast.’

  The woman began to cry again. ‘If the baby is another girl,’ she sobbed, ‘he will send me back to India.’

  Sally felt terrible, but what could she do? She comforted the mother as best she could and prayed that everything would be all right. The baby was delivered just before midnight, a healthy child with a lusty cry and best of all, a boy! The mother immediately kissed Sally’s hands. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she gasped.

  ‘No, really,’ Sally protested, ‘it was nothing to do with me.’

  A little later the father came upstairs. Seeing his wife’s tears, he expected the worst. His lips were set in an angry line as he walked to the crib and pulled back the covers. When he saw the baby was a boy he was elated. He kissed his wife and called his other children upstairs. They came in cautiously, but when their father’s joy was obvious, they rushed to the crib to see their new baby brother. While Sally cleaned the mother up and washed the baby, the father went out into the neighbourhood. By the time Sally came downstairs, half the Asian men in Birmingham were crushed into the small sitting room. As she left, the father pushed something into her hand.

  ‘You be sure to come next time,’ he beamed. ‘You are very good midwife.’

  Outside in the street, Sally looked down at her hand. He’d given her fifteen pounds.

  Mrs Dominic had a ‘small for dates’ baby. That was the term given to a baby who had gone to full time but when he had been born, he was obviously a lot smaller than he should have been. The birth was normal but within hours, Mrs Dominic was as large as ever. The doctors discovered she had a cyst in the womb. The cyst had restricted the baby’s growth and now that the baby and the placenta were gone, it had swelled to fill the whole space left behind. When she came to see her baby, one nurse who didn’t realise who she was sent her away with, ‘This is the ward for mothers who have already had their babies.’

  With tears in her eyes, Mrs Dominic kissed her baby goodbye and went f
or surgery. Happily, she made a good recovery and her cyst was caused by an imbalance in her hormones.

  Mrs Behari had been safely delivered of a baby girl but she couldn’t bond with her. Nurse Evelyn Ross, a tall willowy Jamaican girl, and I were tidying the baby’s room. We looked into the baby’s cot and we both cooed. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ I said.

  ‘Look at all that beautiful hair,’ Evelyn smiled. ‘She’s gorgeous.’

  Mrs Behari looked up sharply. ‘You like?’ she said to Evelyn. ‘You take!’

  We made a hasty retreat. I knew enough about her circumstances to know that she and her husband already had two girls and they had desperately wanted a boy. Mrs Behari hadn’t had a single visitor since she’d come in and it was highly likely that she would be beaten when she got home with the baby. Her husband would blame her for having a girl and say she was not a good wife. As Evelyn and I walked past the window on our way to the nurses’ home, Mrs Behari banged on the glass.

  ‘You come back for baby!’

  Baby Davies was born by caesarean section. He was perfect from the eyes down but the top of his head had not been formed properly. He had a lusty cry and was a hungry baby; he weighed nearly eight pounds. The mother was still in recovery when Baby Davies was brought to the nursery. He was put into isolation and his father came to see him shortly afterwards. The doctors told him Baby Davies could not possibly survive. There was nothing they could do to help him and the father should prepare himself for the worst. Sister had put a towel over the top of the baby’s head to spare his father’s feelings but the poor man wept when he saw his son.

  Things have changed a lot since the 1970s. Back then people made decisions which in this day and age would be unthinkable. ‘If you want your wife to have more children,’ the doctor advised, ‘don’t let her see this one. It will put her off totally and she will never want another baby.’

  ‘How long will my son survive?’ a distraught Mr Davies asked.

  ‘It’s not an exact science,’ said the doctor shaking his head, ‘but I would say a few hours at the most.’

  Baby Davies’ mother would be ‘out of it’ for the rest of the day anyway, so Mr Davies agreed to do what the doctor advised. The truly awful thing was, Baby Davies lived for another three weeks. His father came to see him regularly but when she finally woke up from the operation, the nursing staff told his wife the baby didn’t survive the birth. The poor man was on the horns of a dilemma.

  ‘I have never lied to my wife in my life,’ he wept, ‘but how can I tell her now? She will hate me if I do, and she will hate me even more if she ever finds out what I’ve done.’

  My heart went out to him. It never should have happened. Baby Davies died peacefully but whether or not his mother ever knew that he had lived for three whole weeks, I couldn’t say.

  On a much happier note, it was always a bit of an occasion when a baby went home for the first time. Sometimes other members of the family turned up on the ward. I remember one occasion when a family came with Mum to take the baby home. Everyone was looking at the baby as she was being dressed and telling the mum how beautiful she was. Fearing her older sister might be feeling left out, her grandfather gave her a side hug and said, ‘And you’re absolutely gorgeous.’

  ‘No, I am not,’ said the big sister indignantly. ‘I’m Susan Victoria Sewell!’

  When I was in the children’s nursery doing my training, I’d had to do child observations. Here in the premature baby unit, I had to do the same thing, but this time to observe a baby. I was given Baby Nye. Admitted to the unit following a normal delivery, she was a first baby and the labour was quite quick, lasting only four hours and eighteen minutes.

  I took Baby Nye’s temperature and it was 95°F (35ºC). She felt cold and was cyanosed (blue) all over. When the Sister in charge saw the baby she told me to apply oxygen via a face mask. Three minutes was all it took to have a good effect. She was nursed naked apart from a nappy in an incubator, with the oxygen flowing at five litres. Once I had weighed her and cleaned her up, I put a heat shield over her to help raise her temperature. She weighed four pounds, eleven ounces and her heartbeat was one hundred and forty beats per minute. Her dextrostix was forty-five milligrams per cent. I was supervised as I put a feeding tube in her stomach and then Sister gave her a stomach wash out. She obtained three millilitres of thick mucus; she left ten millilitres of dextrose, ten per cent, down the baby’s stomach.

  The doctor examined the baby and concluded that Baby Nye was about thirty-four weeks’ gestation and she was to be fed by her weight so I worked out what she was to have. The next day, her dextrostix remained steady but Baby Nye was ‘jittery’. That meant that her arms and legs shook involuntarily with short, jerky movements. She took her feeds half by bottle but the rest down the nasogastric tube.

  That night, the night staff reported that Baby Nye appeared to have a slight fissure (hole) in the anal margin but the doctor ordered no special treatment. She had a lumber puncture and a blood test but there were no abnormalities except that her calcium levels were a bit low. She was prescribed calcium chloride, one hundred milligrams every six hours, to be mixed in with her feeds. Her overall improvement was already showing less than twenty-four hours later. When she was weighed the next day, Baby Nye had lost eight ounces since birth, which didn’t give any cause for concern because all babies lose weight to begin with. They usually start to gain weight by the sixth day and any weight loss after that would be worrying. She was moved from the unit into the small, hot nursery, where the temperature was kept at 80°F (27°C) and she continued to be both bottle and tube fed, but by her seventh day, Baby Nye had lost even more weight. She was now only four pounds but everyone was confident that she would thrive because she was feeding well. Her parents came and asked a lot of questions. I observed that they loved their baby very much and this was plainly a very difficult time for them.

  However, five days later the baby was ill and the doctor was called. He prescribed ephedrine nasal drops for her nose because she was snuffly, although her chest was clear. He gave the baby a thorough examination and ordered an abdominal X-ray because her abdomen was distended. Her condition was giving rise to some concern and so she was put on penicillin and kanamycin. Her mother came with the grandmother because the husband was abroad, visiting a sick relative. The priest accompanied them and because there was some concern about her condition, Baby Nye was christened Anita.

  Now back in the incubator, happily Anita’s condition slowly improved overnight. She was kept on three hourly observations and once she had passed a good stool, her abdomen was not nearly as distended. The staff were asked to collect her urine for twenty-four hours, (not that easy for a female!) and now she was passing loose stools.

  By the beginning of May, Anita was taken off the antibiotics after she had had a full dose of seven days. I went off duty for four days and when I got back, she was upstairs in the nursery where we put the more healthy babies. She was crying lustily for her feeds and I noticed straight away that she had at last put on weight. She weighed five pounds, two ounces and both her parents came to see her. Six days later, Mrs Nye came to stay in the unit to get used to handling her baby. She stayed in the unit for two nights. When she went home, Anita Nye looked very pretty in her pink and white outfit. Her clothes had been lovingly handmade. Her discharge weight was five pounds, twelve ounces and her mother was asked to bring her back to the baby clinic in a month’s time for a check-up.

  The story of Anita Nye was one of the many happy endings, or should I say beginnings, we gave to the babies in the nursery. It wasn’t hard to let them go when they were healthy and obviously much loved. And even if you weren’t too sure about a baby’s home conditions, you knew there were other agencies around to keep an eye on them. Besides, there was always the next baby to care for or giving cause for concern. The turnover was so quick there was no time to form any lasting bonds.

  Chapter 20

  I had fallen into the pattern of spen
ding some of my days off with my old friend Evie Perryer. She was now married and had children of her own. They were delightful children and I loved them to bits. Working with small babies meant that I missed the funny little quips children come out with. Staying with Evie’s children reminded me of them and they gave me some wonderful memories. We were in the kitchen one day when her little girl came in, carrying the plate with an apple her mother had just given her. She was about three or four at the time and her little face was screwed up in disgust. ‘Mummy,’ she announced, ‘This apple is really shark!’

  We’d already been chuckling over something Evie’s little boy had said. He had been to Sunday School and was singing a chorus as he was playing with his farm animals. The actual words were, ‘Let’s all get together in communion sweet, walk, walk in the light …’ When children don’t understand something, they transpose words that they do understand, and so we heard him belting out, ‘Let’s all get together in a chewing-gum sweet …’

  One time when I was staying with Evie, she introduced me to an RAF officer, who sometimes came to spend his off duty in their home. Evie and her husband had an open house and people like me (and Ben too) enjoyed their company and a small share in family life. Ben invited me, just as a friend, to go with him to a meeting in London, which was organised by a Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen’s Christian Fellowship. We were to have a meal in a London hotel, followed by a talk in one of the large meeting rooms given by Colonel Dobbie, who had been the Governor of Malta during the siege of 1940–42. Under his leadership, the whole island had been awarded the George Cross for their bravery in resisting the enemy. I thought he’d be a very interesting person to listen to because not only had he been a part of something remarkable in Malta during the Second World War but as a young staff officer on 11 November 1918, it was he who signed the order at Advanced GHQ to the effect that all troops on the Western Front should cease hostilities at 11 a.m. That marked the official end of the First World War and in doing so, he was always quoted as saying, ‘I stopped the beastly thing!’