Sometimes when I was alone with him, Dr Weizmann talked quietly of the country still called Palestine and I listened and remembered the obscenity called Belsen.
‘One day, N. Andrews, one day, when we have our new Jewish State of Israel, you must come and visit us. One day.’
One morning I sat at his bedside helping him with his breakfast. ‘Please, Dr Weizmann, can I ask you something that I’m afraid may sound rather daft?’
‘But, of course, and I’m sure it will not sound daft. It is—?’
‘I’ve been wondering how it must feel to be you and know you’re founding a new State, a new world, for your people. How does it feel?’
Dr Weizmann, his eyes still shaded, reflectively swallowed the final teaspoonful of boiled egg and continued to reflect for some seconds. ‘Troublesome, N. Andrews, troublesome.’
(I have not yet been able to visit Israel. In 1968 my daughter Veronica (Vee), between grammar school and Cambridge, was awarded one of the scholarships provided by The Bridge In Britain and spent six months in Israel working first in Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi and then Jerusalem. On her return she said she had never mentioned my having briefly nursed the late Dr Weizmann (1874–1952) until near the end of her stay at a party in Tel Aviv. ‘Ma, I could’ve won the Six-Day War single-handed. I shot top of the pops over Moshe Dayan and I didn’t need an eye-patch!’ And I remembered the frail propped up figure with bandaged eyes saying, ‘One day …’)
In the autumn of 1946 instead of, as I had planned, spending all my spare time writing, I spent most of it visiting a patient in the Brompton Chest Hospital. He was a young doctor, J, whom I had known slightly at Hydestile in 1943, and he had a lung abscess. He was a heavy smoker, and on all my visits his single-bedded side-ward was clouded with tobacco. ‘Come on, Lucille, try one. I hate smoking alone. No, don’t suck it, breathe in.’ One of the many lasting consequences of my visits to the Brompton that autumn has been my addiction to nicotine.
Early in 1947, J was well enough to return to full-time work as a junior registrar in a mental hospital and hoped to specialize in psychiatric medicine. I continued in full-time nursing until two days before our marriage on 1st May 1947. On the evening of 30th April, I tore up and burnt the unfinished novel I had begun after leaving St Thomas’s. It was dull, pompous, rubbish, and I knew it. I had intended making a fresh start when we returned from our honeymoon but in the event had other matters on my mind. By the second week of our honeymoon I had learnt, with a distress beyond description, that my husband suffered from a condition my training and every professional instinct insisted must be fatal.
At the first opportunity I consulted privately a certain medical specialist. ‘He doesn’t believe it’s so serious, Doctor.’
‘“Physician, heal thyself.” Alas, so seldom.’ He talked at length and kindly. Finally, ‘I’m afraid all we can do is devoutly hope we’ll be proved wrong.’
For over two years hope died slowly and hard. Eventually, the day that had been inevitable from the first week of our honeymoon arrived. On that day, in August 1949, Vee was four months old, and I had to accept reality and take over as both parents and breadwinner for us both. Our home in a small London flat had to be abandoned and as I had neither income nor savings I had immediately to find work. And a roof. The Welfare State was just over a year old. There were no supplementary benefits, no family allowances for the first child. The allowance for every child after the first was 5s. (25p) per week. State recognition of the existence, much less the problems, of the one-parent family was a quarter-of-a-century ahead. (The Finer Report on The Problems Of The One-Parent Family, July 1974.)
In 1948 Mother had sold our St Leonards’ house and moved into a top floor rented flat.
‘Of course you and the baby must come for a holiday by the sea …’
‘My dear, I’ve got the perfect answer! There’s a cottage down our lane going furnished for only six guineas a week and just a bit more for the daily, who’s a treasure!’
‘Are you not over-dramatizing? Why can’t he be cured? Everyone knows doctors are working miracles with this penicillin stuff …’
‘Only too happy to advise you, m’dear, having known your late father and all your family these many years. So your sister’s got herself a job as a secretary in London? Most enterprising you young ladies these days! We old fogies who think a woman’s place is in the home are having to shake up our ideas, eh? And young brother now a medical student? Excellent things these new government grants for the ex-service youngsters. Fine profession for a man, medicine. Now what precisely is your financial situation … no savings? Surely, during your nursing years you managed to put by … no, possibly not. Indeed, yes. Regrettably your late father was unable to leave more than the mortgaged house and the small widow’s pension. The many years of travel and school-fees took their financial toll of too many of those long-exiled in our now sadly defunct Empire. House had to be sold to pay off the mortgage and provide a small supplement to your mother’s slender means. Unfortunately many a pension that appeared adequate in the twenties and thirties is being rendered increasingly inadequate by the rising cost of post-war living. Bluntly, m’dear, the last war cost this country much more money than it could afford. We’ll be in the red for years – but I mustn’t bother your pretty little head with these sordid financial matters. Leave them to us mere males, eh! However, we should discuss the income you’ll doubtless be receiving from your husband … oh. Nevertheless m’dear, you mustn’t take such a pessimistic view! No cloud without a silver lining! You haven’t a bank account? Well, what you must do is put some money in, then you’ll be issued with a cheque book and can draw it out as you please. Only don’t forget – ha, ha – you’ve to put the money in first!’
‘Yes, madam. We can offer you forty pounds for this engagement ring. Sign here, please, madam. Thank you, madam. Good morning.’
‘You have an S.R.N. Part I C.M.B., and Nightingale Certificate? Yes, indeed, I am sure I can offer you a junior ward Sister’s post … oh. Oh, no. I’m afraid we have no créches – this is a general hospital, you’ll remember – and I’m afraid we cannot adjust staff day hours to accommodate domestic responsibilities. Oh, no, we never employ part-time trained staff – but if you can arrange to board out your baby, please come and see me.’
By day, the voices in reality; by night, in the mind. The nights were the worst. Anxiety, fear, sadness and the throttling helplessness induced by the growing realization of my limited education and the limited salary and long hours I would have to work if I returned to hospital nursing, gripped the throat and haunted sleep. From our first day alone, I remained determined Vee should not lose both parents because she had had to lose one. I knew I was the one figure that provided continuity in her already disturbed life and refused to contemplate breaking that continuity throughout her childhood.
‘I think you’re right, but I’m afraid you’re going to find this very difficult, Mrs … Useless to pretend this isn’t a tough world, or, it must be admitted, a man’s world. For a young woman to bring up a child alone it can be a very tough world. How are you going to manage?’
‘I don’t know. But as I have to, I will.’
The stranger from whom I had sought professional advice looked at me over his desk, then nodded. ‘Yes. When one’s got to do something, one does it.’ He avoided my eyes and fiddled with his blotter. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware – that is to say – there is now something called National Assistance. You’d certainly qualify for help in my opinion, but I doubt it would be – at the most – more than ten shillings a week. Would you like me—’
‘No thank you. I’ll earn the ten bob a week for myself.’
He nodded again. ‘So would I.’
The Welfare State was too young for either of us to have outgrown the conviction deeply ingrained in all British social classes that all public assistance was charity and existed only to help the physically disabled very poor. As ingrained and widespread was the belief
that even when an individual was poverty-stricken it remained the fundamental responsibility of that individual to right the situation as best he or she could by his or her own efforts.
‘All very well to say you’ll manage, but how? How can you ever be financially independent? How can any woman, unless she’s had the luck to inherit money or to have had enough education to be something like a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher? Teachers mayn’t earn much, but at least they have the long school holidays and weekends free with their kids. How many women doctors and lawyers do you know?’
In 1949, amongst all the girls and women I had known since boarding-school, two doctors, one lawyer. The last, a war widow with a small son, was the only woman I knew able to support a child and herself in their own home on her earnings. She had qualified as a solicitor just before she married.
In the three weeks I took to find work I formed the two resolutions that preset the course of our entire future. The first was that Vee must have a first-class academic education and a university degree, whether she later wanted marriage, a career, or both. The second was that I must be earning enough by writing to be able to work from home by the time she was old enough for school. I had no idea, nor did I attempt to plan, where our home or her school would then be. I made the last future plans of my life, and for the last time escaped temporarily into my fantasy world, in the first week of May 1947.
I knew Vee was far too young for me to assess her intelligence, and that even if she were not, I loved her too much for a balanced judgement. But I knew, had nursed and seen in normal and abnormal circumstances by the hundreds, my fellow-women. I had observed how high was the average intelligence of ‘the average woman’, and simultaneously, how often this tended to be underrated not so much by ‘the average man’ as by the more academically educated esoteric minds of both sexes. I had also observed the fact that the old medical maxim ‘Commonest things are the most common’ was true. I saw no reason why Vee should be a non-average baby girl. If she was an average, I was convinced she could get into a university and that one of the two basic reasons why millions of women (including Betty and myself) when trying to earn livings found themselves surrounded by locked doors and were only able to open those that led into the poorly paid – and usually – blind alleys, was not lack of intelligence but lack of education. The second reason, of course, was – and is – that women bear babies.
From a chance encounter with old friends I heard of the existence of a new babies’ residential nursery and rang the Matron to ask if she needed trained staff.
‘And what’s a young Tommy’s lass with midder want with a job here? Can’t be a general hospital in the country that’ll not snap you up, gladly!’
I braced myself for the eighth time, ‘I want to bring my baby to work with me, Matron.’
‘Oh aye? With your qualifications, lass, bring five, so long as all are under one year. First birthday law says they’ve to go. Nought to one for my bairns. Come and see me this afternoon.’
I put down the receiver and wept.
The Matron was a youngish married woman who wore a white overall, a baby under each arm and an astute expression. She looked us over. ‘Right, lass, let’s get it out the road. No husband or bad husband?’ And after, ‘Only one end there, lass. Got a problem or two ahead, haven’t you? Could be worse. You’ve a training.’ She handed over her babies to a nurse, unhitched and lifted Vee from her borrowed pram, weighed her on flattened hands as if guessing the weight of a cake at a fête. ‘You’ve a right PRO in this little lass. No problems here. Come into office. Hours eight to six, Mondays to Saturdays, Sundays free, non-resident – pay, three-and-a-half guineas a week paid Saturdays, lunches and cups of tea on the house and you can feed the little lass at her usual times.’
The relief of her attitude was almost comparable to the relief of having the job.
The nursery was supervised by the local authorities and a training school for nursery nurses. It was large and airy, well-equipped with fitted baby baths, good cots, prams, playroom, milk-room, central heating and plate-glass windows overlooking the large back lawn. Most of the babies were from London and sent in either by the local authorities or private welfare organizations with whom they had been placed in care. A very few were entered privately by parents or other relatives. No difference at all was made in the care all the babies received.
I worked mainly in the Prem Room. None of the babies there in my time were in fact ‘prems’ – i.e., newly born and beneath five pounds at birth-weight. In later years the room would probably have been renamed the Intensive Care Unit. It was the smallest nursery and clinically equipped to accommodate the babies admitted grossly underweight and suffering malnutrition caused by parental neglect, ignorance, or poverty. Some had unmarried mothers who, occasionally, I met.
‘I tried, Staff, honest I did. Couldn’t even get a room nowhere. Landlady takes one look and slams the door in me face. “Not having the likes of you here! This is a decent house!”’
Some mothers were married and deserted by their husbands. ‘They says to me best go see the National Assistance. So I goes. Ten bob a week, they says. Be thirty bob most like, they says, if you wasn’t married. You can get maintenance, can’t you? You tell me how, I says, seeing as he’s scarpered and don’t pay up. You catch up with him, they says, he’ll have to do time if he don’t pay. And what good’s that to me? Bunging him in jug won’t pay me rent nor buy the baby’s milk. Ten bob. I ask you! And handed over like I was trying to nick it. You can’t manage, they says, have to put him in care, won’t you. I’ll never, I says – but I had to, didn’t I? Couldn’t get work with him. Couldn’t keep him without working. Had to, didn’t I?’
Other babies who first came into the Prem Room had been found abandoned by the police. Where the parents remained untraced we called the babies by the first names of their rescuers. Stevie was found in a carrier bag on the floor of a telephone booth; Johnny in the lower half of a shoebox left on the front steps of a police station; Martin in a shopping-basket in a railway waiting-room; Patrick in another carrier-bag on a park bench. Very occasionally, as for Patrick, a tragic little note was safety-pinned to a grubby shawl. ‘Please call my baby Patrick and be kind to him. I am very sorry.’ That note, as all similar that I saw, was unsigned.
I never heard if Patrick’s mother was traced but often thought of her when feeding Vee. On admission, Patrick looked about three months old and weighed just over six pounds. He did not look like a baby. He looked a tiny, yellow, wizened old man with sad, adult eyes. I learnt to recognize those tragic eyes in babies too young for milk-teeth, but not for an adult apprehension no infant or child in either a supposedly civilized or a primitive community should possess. ‘Seen it all, Staff, and don’t fancy owt – and who’ll blame the poor bairns? You ever met the bairn as asked to be born? Me, neither.’
Slowly, after weeks of regular warmth, sleep, milk, orange juice, cold liver oil, cleanliness, fresh air and a kindness that if sometimes impersonal was invariably kindly, the pale worried crinkled miniatures of old age turned into healthy babies. Patrick progressed with astonishing rapidity.
‘No surprise to me, Staff. Maybe his mam hadn’t nous or cash to feed him rightly, but she’s not starved him of love. Bairns need love as they need milk. Some place now that poor lass is likely still crying herself to sleep. Rum world. Half the lasses are crying as they’ve not borne bairns and other half are crying as they have.’
The nursery was good for Vee and myself. Vee was born a gregarious extrovert and enjoyed the companionship in the day nursery, playroom and the back lawn. As every baby of my experience, she flourished physically under the fixed daily routine of our lives. Throughout infancy and early childhood she slept unbroken twelve- to fourteen-hour nights. She was a cheerful sturdy baby with curly hair. ‘Don’t know why you bother to work, Staff – just get Fairy Snow to use the little lass in their advertisements. Dead spit of the one that walks round in a nappy.’
I liked, a
s always, working with babies. The ‘prems’, I loved. It was a joy to watch them grow into health and content, turn their heads like a Wimbledon crowd when I moved about the Prem Room, grin toothlessly when talked to, and drop off to sleep when sung lullabyes. I discovered how much they had helped me the evening I heard myself singing in slow time as a lullabye, the waltz ‘The Girl That I Marry’, from Annie Get Your Gun, a show J and I had seen in London early in our marriage when, very briefly, the optimism of the will had triumphed over the pessimism of the intelligence.
‘What’ll you do now, Staff?’
‘Move us in with my sister and brother in Chelsea and work as temporary Night Sister in a pie-factory if the personnel manager approves. One of my old set at Thomas’s has the job and wants a longish break. She’s been asked to find a temp. Pay and hours are stupendous. Eleven quid for five nights a week, Sundays to Thursdays only nine to seven.’
The woman personnel manager had the well-scrubbed forthright air of a good ATS administration officer. ‘And what happens the night your child suddenly gets ill just as you’re about to leave for work?’
No Time For Romance Page 23
