I had written down some of the things the children said. We would repeat them at staff meal times and perhaps to a friend outside the nursery but so many of their quirky remarks are long since forgotten. Of course we never ridiculed them but some of the things they did were so sweet. The children all had their own individual combs and although they were marked with their names, they were supposed to keep them in their own pocket, which was hung over the radiator guard in the bathroom. I can still see Paul, standing with his legs akimbo and his hand on his hip in exactly the same way Matron Thomas did. He’d even captured her cross face as he boomed out across the playroom, ‘Julie, let me tell you somesing. You have left your comb on the top of the raid-it-ator card!’
Or Gary, who was dragging his feet when we were out for a walk. Knowing that Matron would complain if he scuffed his shoes, I said languidly, ‘Gary, pick up your feet.’ He stopped walking and looked behind him. Turning back to me, he said with a quizzical expression, ‘But I haven’t dropped them.’
Then there was Kelvin, who ate only the middle of his sandwich.
‘Kelvin,’ said Hilary, ‘Cook cut you some lovely sandwiches but you always leave the crusts.’
‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘She just doesn’t get it.’
I managed to get a day off on my seventeenth birthday in April. No one else was off so I had to spend the day alone. I went up to London and did some window shopping. At some point I walked past a cinema. It was showing High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra. It was by no means a new film, as it had been released in 1956, but I had never seen it. When I walked into the cinema, it was like walking into another world. The usherettes wore black uniforms with a frilly apron like a maid and in the interval, they actually served tea on a tray, with a teapot and china cups. I had no idea you could order it alongside your ticket, so I made do with the usual Lyons Maid ice cream! The Pathé News was full of stories about East Germans escaping the Berlin Wall. It had been built to prevent the massive defections of East Germans to West Germany. It was an horrific time but somehow it appealed to my sense of romance, with brave young men risking their lives and all that.
Being an institution, we were legally obliged to have regular fire drills. When the fire bell went off, the person in charge of the room had to make sure every child was taken to the assembly point. Matron or Sister would have a clipboard with everyone’s name on it and they had to be checked off. In this way, every person in the home was accounted for and safe. The nursery nurses and assistants helped with the children and Mary was given the job of making the 999 call. She took her responsibility very seriously.
‘When I was in the ’ospital,’ she used to say, ‘they told me that if I saw a fire, I was to grab one of the ’oses, and ‘ang out the winder and ’oller for ’elp.’
I held my hand to my face to suppress a giggle.
‘Well, there’s no need to do all that,’ said Matron sniffily. ‘Just make sure you’re in the cupboard under the stairs (where the telephone was housed) to ring for the fire brigade.’
One day we had a surprise fire drill. All the staff and children gathered at the assembly point and in due course we were checked off.
‘Are you in the cubby hole, Mary?’
‘I am Matron,’ came the reply.
Matron was pleased with the plan and we all started going back to work. But then we heard the sirens and the next minute two fire engines hurtled down the drive. In her enthusiasm to get it right, Mary had actually made the call.
When I got back from my long illness, nothing much had changed. Matron Thomas was still totally neurotic. She was always complaining of a ‘headache’ – at least it seemed that way whenever she appeared on one of her brief sorties to the nursery. In fact, she really didn’t need to put in much of an appearance because the day-to-day running of the place was such a well-oiled machine. Nobody questioned or altered anything. The mantra of the day was, ‘We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.’
Hilary, my roommate, developed a huge sty on her eye. As soon as Matron saw it, she said all in the same breath, ‘Oh, Hilary, it’s huge! It’s as big as a shilling (about the same size as a five pence piece) but you can’t go off sick because we don’t have enough staff.’ Hilary soldiered on in great pain but was forced to go off sick a few days later when she not only had to contend with the enormous sty but had also developed yellow jaundice!
With Hilary off sick, I made a new friend. Evie Perryer, a pretty, bubbly girl, arrived. We hit it off straight away. She had a real joie de vivre and we were always laughing. Evie was the kind of girl all the boys fell over to be with. In fact, she was never without a boyfriend and the two of us started going to the International Friendship League meeting.
I think someone my mother worked for must have told us about the International Friendship League (IFL). The Sixties saw a big rise in the numbers of foreign students coming to Britain, especially from the African continent and India. The IFL had branches all over the country and was run along the lines of a church youth club. They promoted clean, healthy interaction between young people and the one we attended was held in a church hall. The meetings usually began with a ‘talk’ by someone who was an expert in his/her field and then, after a cup of tea, the rest of the evening was given over to a dance. The only talk I can remember was one given by an ex-policeman, who shared a story of how a murderer was caught by a spider’s web on the victim’s trouser leg. Using this, the police pin-pointed the spot where the murder had taken place and even found the exact spider who had made the web. Fascinating.
The dances gave everyone the opportunity to meet boys from just about every country in the world. There were no English boys there and the people we met were polite and knew how to make a girl feel like a princess. One was an Italian boy, immaculately dressed in a suit with its own waistcoat and a camel coloured coat. He was good-looking and a brilliant dancer. The only trouble was, he was much, much less than five foot. I watched him going around the hall, asking the girls to dance and every one of them refused him. He finally got to me and I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. I said ‘yes’ and from that moment he kept coming back. Finally, he wanted to walk me home and tried to persuade me to come out on a date but that was a step too far for me. Nice as he was, I didn’t want to date him. Later, I met Chaw, a boy of Asian extraction who came from North Africa, Joe (I think he was called Joe because no one could pronounce his name) from the Yemen and Nafis from Pakistan. Evie met Coover. I don’t know where he was from but he was breathtakingly handsome and made me go weak at the knees. I fancied him like mad. No one had any money. Although their parents had sent them to England for an education, most of them had sacrificed everything they had to be there. Their meagre money covered the cost of their digs and the tuition fees so a date might be an evening at the pictures, or a walk in the park.
I was luckier than most. When Chaw asked me out, he had a Vespa scooter. It terrified me – it backfired all the way up the hill and it was a wonder it got us back to the nursery. When it came to knowing the facts of life, I was rather naive. At school we had studied the reproduction system of the frog. I could tell anybody about what frogs do but it wasn’t much help when it came to men. I understood that you had to be married before you could have a baby, but after the wedding night quite what the man did, I hadn’t a clue!
I enjoyed being kissed so when we arrived at the gate, Chaw politely asked if he could kiss me goodnight. I eagerly agreed but as he kissed me, he pushed himself against me. I can’t say I felt the earth move but something did and I fled. Chaw was my first-ever date, and so all the girls had waited up to hear about it. When I saw them, I was so upset I couldn’t speak. I raced to my room, threw myself across the bed and wept.
After a few minutes, Hilary came in and sat beside me. ‘Whatever’s wrong?’
‘He’s done it,’ I wept. ‘I didn’t want him to but he’s done it.’
She asked me to be more specific and so I told her everything. Hilary may have been a vicar’s daughter but everyone agreed she knew just about everything there was to know. She was a bit concerned but she said she felt sure I would be all