The Country Nurse Remembers

by Mary J. Macleod

  With the gas cut off, Mum had to cook on the old Rayburn-type range, which she had not used before, but she made things like stews and mince with heaps of vegetables and bottled fruit with custard. Catering for the sudden influx of people must have been very difficult, as our rations had to stretch until our visitors could get their new ration books. The old ones were somewhere in the ruins of their homes.

  Mum must have been exhausted, but she seemed to be in a good mood as she hurried around. Dad looked grey with tiredness and the worry of the pipes in Bath, but Grandma was the only one who showed how upset everyone must have been feeling inside. I know that I enjoyed having lots of people around and being needed instead of being sent off to bed early.

  The following night it was just as noisy. The planes could be heard approaching before it was properly dark.

  ‘They are early tonight. There won’t be anything left in Bath at this rate,’ said Daddy, but he was so tired that he fell asleep in the fireside armchair.

  Normally we would all have gone to the shelter, but Mum said to leave him. She tried to get Grandma into the shelter, but she refused, saying that she would not be able to breathe in there and she would take her chances in the house. She wouldn’t let Granddad leave her either, and Harry could not get there at all. So Mum decided to stay with them, and I was the only one in the shelter.

  I hated it. The bombs and guns seemed much worse when I was alone. I think it was Harry who suggested that Tig should join me. That was a bit better, but he was too frightened and barked to be let back into the house. Eventually, Dad woke.

  ‘Where’s Julia?’ he asked.

  ‘In the shelter,’ said Mum.

  ‘All by herself? That’s not right, Mildred. The child will be terrified. I’ll go and lie on my bunk.’

  So Dad came into the shelter, lay down and, in spite of the fearful noise, was instantly asleep. That was better, but Mum was not pleased.

  Life at Meadow View was quite chaotic with so many people living there, but I enjoyed the company, especially Harry’s.

  There was no school the next day, but I don’t recall whether it was because it was a day off anyway or because it had been decided to keep the building closed. I know that some of the windows had been shattered either by the blast from bombs in nearby fields or the shockwaves of the roaring guns. It was an old granite building, and bits of mortar had been dislodged by the Bristol raids; now the Bath raids were causing more and more to fall out.

  The coal had not arrived for the boiler either, but I don’t think we would have had the heating on in April anyway. There was one big fat radiator in each of the two classrooms, and these were fed from the coal-fired boiler. The boiler man came in every morning before school to clear out and stoke the furnace. Sometimes he was late and the fire had gone out altogether, and then he would say some bad words and growl a lot, so we kept well away from him. On these mornings, it would be dinnertime before the rooms warmed up.

  The boiler was located in a dark passageway near the girls’ lavatories, thus ensuring that those facilities stayed frost-free in winter. The boys’ lavatories were outside in the playground and froze up, so that they could not be used until the thaw came—which meant the boys had to use the girls’ lavatories. We hated this, of course, because as far as we were concerned, boys were dirty and made the floor wet and didn’t pull the chain or wash their hands. They jeered at any girls they happened to meet on the way in or out. The girls always complained to Governess, who wrinkled her nose and stalked off to the lavatories, her high heels clicking threateningly on the stone floors. She muttered in disgust at the mess and sent for the boiler man to clean up. He did some more grumbling and growling and Governess kept all the boys in after school. But it was all just as bad the next winter.

  I remember a lady in an overall cleaned the classrooms. There was no vacuum cleaner, so she swept the old boards—which seemed to produce more and more dust, the more she swept. Sometimes she brought a handful of wet, used tea leaves which she scattered over the floor before sweeping. Curious, we asked her why.

  ‘Don’t you girls know nothin’?’ she replied. ‘These be to lay the dust. Gawd knows what yous lot’ll do when yous grows up.’ (Luckily, ‘Gawd’ had given us vacuum cleaners by then.)

  The overall lady flicked a duster about as well, and Governess tutted a lot because her desk was always covered in chalk dust.

  Dad had rushed off to Bath again early the next morning and came home for lunch. I heard the car and wanted to go to greet him, but I was dusting and tidying the other room, which was now referred to as ‘Harry’s room’, while Harry was stomping to the door to go into the hall. He had reached the doorway but was so slow that I ran out of the other door, into the greenhouse, out into the yard, in the back door, through the kitchen and dining room and into the hall to say ‘Hello’ to Dad while poor Harry was still getting through the door.

  Harry was singing. It was one of the war songs, and when Dad heard it he joined in, as I did, and we all sang together: ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’.

  Harry, who was never going to get better, was an inspiration to us all, said Dad.

  When Mum heard us, she just shouted, ‘What a row!’

  I was allowed to eat with everyone else now because it was easier for Mum to serve us all together. I seemed to be getting a little more food, too. Granddad S. had some very strong views about the Germans, the British Army, the Ministry, the War Office, Mr. Churchill and just about everything else, and he thumped the table to emphasise his points. Mum thought he’d break the crockery, but Dad just smiled and wagged his head. I thought it was all good fun. In spite of Dad’s worries, Mum’s short temper (not always directed at me, now), Grandma S.’s hysterics and Granddad S.’s funny views, I liked these meals. Although not allowed to speak, I felt part of what was going on rather than being told to get along, get out of the way, as before.

  After we had finished, I always did the washing up. Harry insisted on drying up. So long as he could remain standing and leaning on something, he was able to help. So he dried and piled the dishes up until they looked precarious, and then he’d stop and I would put them away. Then we’d start again. There was something real and necessary about this work, and Mum had too much to do to time me doing things. Harry was such fun!

  Busy Times at Meadow View

  The next night was much quieter. The Germans had got fed up with Bath, now they’d nearly finished it off, Dad said.

  We heard the thump of a distant bomb now and then, and the guns went crump-crump when the search lights, endlessly sweeping the sky, picked out an enemy plane, but Dad and Mum and I were able to have a much-needed sleep in the shelter without the worry of the bombing being too close. I don’t know if Grandma S. and Granddad S. stayed in their bed or came downstairs. Harry claimed that he slept through ‘anything and everything’, but I think he must have been in a lot of pain, because the pills by his bed were always gone in the morning.

  Dad was at the Works ‘catching up’ the next day but went into Bath again in the afternoon, taking Granddad S. with him to see if they could arrange for some furniture to be rescued from the house and put into storage. Granddad’s piano, a smart modern one, was dusty but in one piece.

  ‘Will need tuning,’ he grumbled.

  Somehow, they found someone to bring it to Meadow View. There, it went into the other room, joining our own piano—much older and larger—Harry’s bed and chair and bedside table, two armchairs and a settee. It was a very big room!

  Granddad was an organist and pianist, and he played every day. Grandma said that he thumped so hard that it made her head hurt. Mum said, ‘Phooee.’ Granddad had been far enough into Bath with Dad to see the burnt-out shell of the church where he played the organ. He was very upset, but Dad said it was better that than people’s homes. That church was never rebuilt.

  On Dad’s way into Bath, two ladies, walking along the road, had asked for a lift by waggling their thumbs, like th
e soldiers on leave did. Dad had picked them up, thinking that they were Bath people going back to get things from their ruined homes, like Granddad. He chatted with them and asked if this was the case.

  ‘Oh, no,’ they said. ‘We don’t live there. We just want to look at all the damage.’

  Dad was furious. He stopped the car and ordered them out.

  ‘People like that are just sightseers,’ he raged, when he came home. ‘They are glorying in other people’s misery and just cluttering the place up. The authorities have enough to deal with. They ought to be shot! Everyone is trying to get things moving again, and they don’t need idiots like that around the place!’

  Dad rumbled on and on until Mum told him to eat his tea. But more exciting and unbelievable was his next tale, which he told us after he had eaten his tea.

  In one of the areas worst hit, the bomb-disposal men had located an unexploded bomb almost buried under the remains of a large building. Dad had to assess the damage to the pipes going to and from this building, and he got out of there as soon as he could, he said. But the disposal men had dug around the huge bomb, shoring up the muddy walls of the crater with boards. It was dinnertime when Dad was there, and he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw ‘those two fools’ sitting on the bomb to eat their sandwiches! Later, when they were told off by whoever was in charge, they said that they were pretty sure that, doing the job that they did, they were going to get blown up at some time, so why worry. I thought that was very sad. Dad said that they had a death wish.

  After the war, we heard that many of the crews of the fighters and bombers felt the same. They said it was the only way to cope. I tried to imagine how that would feel, but I couldn’t.

  Gradually, more and more of Grandma’s clothes arrived at Meadow View. Mum said she had far too many, and where were we going to put them all? The big wardrobe on the landing was filled, and still there were more posh coats and feathery dresses and sparkly jackets, so some things were hung on the back of my bedroom door.

  Among these was a fox-fur. It was a fur cape that ladies wore around their shoulders over a coat or jacket. It had a long ‘body’, with a tail and a head with glass eyes. This was horrid. The eyes caught any ray of light and were quite frightening in the night, as they seemed to stare at me in my bed.

  I don’t remember why I was sleeping in my bedroom again instead of the shelter. The sirens still went almost nightly, and bombs and guns could be heard until daybreak, so why we were back in the house I do no know. I have always thought that we spent about a year sleeping in the shelter—or it certainly felt like it.

  In the end I found the courage to ask Mum if the fox-fur could go somewhere else, but she just told me not to be silly. Harry was there, however, and winked at me behind Mum’s back. When I went to bed, the fox had gone.

  Harry seemed to be on my side. Granddad said very little, Grandma sometimes told me to do things in a way that I knew Mum would not like, and that was awkward, but Harry watched and listened and understood how things were.

  ‘Try to stick up for yourself a bit more,’ he said to me.

  But I didn’t.

  Animals

  During the early years of the war, Dad decided to get a cow so that we would have milk and possibly meat, if she had a calf. Everyone thought that food might get very scarce; in fact, starvation on a massive scale was deemed possible. People would be eating rats and cats, it was said, and—horrifyingly—dogs.

  ‘But we wouldn’t eat Tig,’ I stated with confidence, as we discussed these issues.

  ‘Yes, we would,’ said Dad. ‘If we had to.’

  ‘We wouldn’t! No, we wouldn’t!’ I forgot that I was not supposed to argue. I felt sick!

  ‘Only if we were starving. Really starving,’ replied Dad. He seemed to understand.

  ‘No, no, no …,’ I went on screaming, but only in my head. I was outwardly in control again, but inwardly I was horrified. I could not get this awful possibility out of my mind. It just would not happen! Poor Tig had more cuddles over the next few days than even he knew how to cope with.

  The cow was a Friesian—black and white and huge. Friesians are apparently good milkers. We must have given her a name, but I cannot recall what it was. I had very little to do with her. In common with many girls at that time, my role was almost exclusively domestic (except for weeding), and I was kept busy indoors—much, much busier than any of my school friends. On the occasions when I was allowed to help outside, I was very happy. All my life I have preferred outside work. Given the things I enjoyed doing the most, I often used to think that I should have been born a boy!

  I was certainly involved in the making of butter, however. Dad turned what had been a coal-house into the dairy. It took a lot of cleaning and a lot of paint! We had big round pans about six inches deep, into which the warm milk was poured. It was allowed to settle for a short while, and then I had to skim off the cream, which was thick and yellow. I had a sort of metal saucer with which to do this. If you dipped it in too deeply, you got milk mixed with the cream, and then the butter would not ‘turn’. The cream was put in a big jar called a ‘churn’, which had a wooden lid with a handle on the outside and paddles attached to the inside. You patiently turned the handle, sometimes for hours, so that the paddles swished through the cream, gradually making it thicken and eventually turning it to butter. It was a boring job in a way, but I liked doing it: I would be churning away in the dining room, with Dad and Mum, rather than in the other room by myself.

  I think we had the cow for about two years; she didn’t have a calf, and her milk eventually dried up. By then Dad and Mum were a bit fed up because there was usually too much milk—even making some into butter didn’t use it all up.

  ‘Not worth all the work,’ said Dad.

  Then Dad thought that it would be good to have pigs. They could live on scraps from our kitchen and those of our neighbour; they would not have to be milked and should have lots of piglets—ensuring a good meat supply if things got bad. So an enormous and very bad-tempered sow arrived. I like pigs, but she was quite scary, and I was glad to keep away from her.

  She was due to farrow on a particular date, and Dad said that he would stay up all that night with her to see that nothing went wrong. Several weeks went by, and then, one morning, I heard a lot of shouting. When I came downstairs to go to school, Dad was sitting holding one pink little pig and trying to spoon some milk into its mouth.

  ‘I got the date wrong,’ said Dad, sadly. ‘Well, it was the right date, but she had them the night before, not the night of … She has killed the lot except this little chap. He rolled under the bars, and she couldn’t reach him. She bit their heads off as they were born.’ Dad called her a few bad names then … at least I think they were bad names. I was so sorry for all the little dead piglets.

  I asked what would happen to this one. Evidently, Dad was going to the chemist to get a baby’s bottle to try to keep the little pink scrap alive.

  So we brought the little fellow up on the bottle. And because of the funny noises he made, we called him ‘Chuggy’. He was very demanding and needed feeding every few hours. Tig was intrigued and watched Chuggy when he tried to run about; Chuggy seemed to think that Tig was his mother, following the dog everywhere. This was a good thing, because although Chuggy was kept in the house (for warmth and convenience for feeding), he didn’t make any mess. He would potter to the back door with Tig when Tig wanted to go out, and he would follow him, presumably watching and understanding that he was ‘spending a penny or tuppence’, and copy him. No one believed that a little pig could train himself in this way, but that was what happened, and, after the first few days, we had no puddles or mess at all. He was very clean and pink; not at all smelly, as people think pigs can be.

  Tig and pig ran around playing together, barking and grunting and knocking each other over, and, for a few weeks, they had good fun. One morning I was allowed to take Tiggy for a walk down the private road towards the Works. Chuggy
objected to being parted from him and started to make a terrible noise in protest, so I asked if I could take him, as well. All was well for a few yards, and then Chuggy got homesick and ran all the way home, squealing with terror, while Tig had run off in the other direction. I eventually caught Tig, and when we got home, there was Chuggy on the back doorstep, patiently waiting to go in.

  But a pig grows very quickly and Chuggy was soon big and heavy, and Tig became frightened of him. He would also butt the backs of our legs with his hard snout. This was not comfortable. He was off the bottle now but still tried to get onto our laps expecting his milk, as he had before.

  One evening, he was running around in the other room and decided to rub himself against the back of the settee, which was traditionally placed in front of the fire. He pushed so hard that the settee moved swiftly forwards, ending up in the hearth. Thankfully Mum saw what happened, or we would have had a burnt settee—or worse, perhaps. He had to go!

  Dad built a pigsty in the lean-to greenhouse. We left the windows open for air, but he was quite warm … just very cross at being turned out of the house.

  He went on growing until he was enormous. Eventually, we could keep him no longer, and he was sent to the butcher. I was very upset, as I had become fond of him. Dad had decided that pigs were not easy, so the sow went, too. I was not so very sorry to see her go and was glad that she took her bad temper with her!

  Petrol rationing was getting severe, and often there was none even for folk like Dad, who had an allowance for work trips. Private outings had stopped altogether. So the next animal to arrive was a pony. Again, surprisingly, I do not remember his name. A beautiful, well-sprung carriage came with him. It was very smart and comfortable and had a coat-of-arms painted on the side. I was most impressed, but I never did find out whose arms they were or why the carriage was sold to us with the emblem still on the side.