of the Baby room, Sister Weymouth, had a staff nursery nurse and a nursery assistant to help her look after six babies. Sister Weymouth was an older woman, perhaps in her fifties. She was a skinny woman with a stooped back and spindly arms. Although a little distant, she was fair. She wore a navy coloured sister’s uniform but without the cap and cuffs. With such a high level of staffing it’s easy to understand how we managed to keep the place looking so spick and span and the reason why the type of children’s home I was working in became a thing of the past. That number of employees would cripple today’s councils with their ever-tightening budgets.
Working in the milk kitchen was like being in a pure white space capsule. We wore masks and gowns. We were taught to wash our hands between each feed preparation and the whole milk kitchen was washed from floor to ceiling every day. Incidentally, all the babies were fed on National Dried Milk, a government issue basic milk powder. I had been in the nursery for three months before I was allowed in the milk kitchen and even then I was strictly supervised. Sister Weymouth peered at me over the top of her facemask. ‘Level each scoop exactly,’ she said. ‘Too much and the baby will overdose on his vitamins and may become very ill. If you don’t fill the scoop right to the edge, the poor baby will starve.’
I was still so scared of putting a foot wrong, it never occurred to me she might be exaggerating. Three grains of National Dried Milk powder too many and I’d blow the kid up. Three grains too few and I could be accused of running a concentration camp … oh Lord, what a responsibility!
The system of child care by today’s standard was very old fashioned. For instance, meal times were rigidly adhered to for even the tiniest baby. If a baby had to be fed at six o’clock, that’s exactly what happened. I was once made to sit with a crying baby on my lap, willing the stubborn hands of the clock to move from 5.50 to 6 p.m., but not daring to put the teat in his mouth until the appointed time. If I had been caught feeding the baby before 6 p.m. it would be back to the nappy bins and floors for me. Of course it was totally ridiculous for the baby. If he had been crying for twenty minutes, he was often too exhausted to take his bottle anyway, but the rules were the rules.
My turn for being on ‘Lates’ came around again and Nurse Adams was still on night duty.
‘Don’t forget to wake the night nurse this time,’ smiled Isolde and I went to get my early supper.
She had to be kidding. After the fiasco of the week before, that was the last thing I would do. My supper was steamed cod roe on toast. It looked horribly grey and was swimming in milk, which had made the toast all soggy again. I had never experienced such ‘delights’ before but first of all I had a job to do. I took a cup of tea to Nurse Adams, making absolutely sure it was just the way she liked it, milky with no sugar. My hands were trembling slightly as I walked up the back stairs to the pokey little room in the attic where the night nurse slept. At the top of the stairs, I steadied my nerves, tipped the small spill in the saucer back into the cup, knocked lightly on the door and walked in.
‘Good evening, Nurse Adams,’ I said.
At exactly the same moment as I walked in the door, her alarm clock went off. She stirred slightly, reached out and switched it off but she said nothing. I stood still, waiting for her to sit up and take the cup but she didn’t.
There was a small locker on the opposite side of the bed. The room itself was so small I would have to squeeze my way past her clothes at the end of the bed to get round there so I decided to lean over her to put the cup on the table. It seemed to be the path of least resistance. And after all, she was still half asleep.
But wouldn’t you know it? At the precise moment the tea was halfway across the bed, she flung her arms up to stretch and yawn. There was a loud clatter as the cup and saucer parted company and the lukewarm tea fell onto the bed. ‘Oh! I’m sorry …’
‘You!’ she shrieked, opening one bloodshot eye. ‘Get out, get out!’ A soggy pillow followed me out of the door and I had gained the reputation of being the village idiot.
Chapter 2
Mr Swinnerton was a man with deep-set eyes and a serious expression. He’d married late in life but to his great joy his Hungarian wife had presented him with a baby girl. They called her Geraldine and she was the light of his life. Mona, his wife, loved her daughter but since the birth of the baby, she had changed. She found it stressful, particularly when Geraldine cried at night. Mr Swinnerton did his best to help, but he had a full day’s work ahead of him and needed his sleep. The baby was what they called ‘colicky’. They tried home remedies and Mona took her to the health clinic for advice, but she still struggled with the complexities of English.
The Swinnertons lived in a small flat surrounded by lots of neighbours. At first, they welcomed the little baby but their joy soon turned sour. She disturbed their afternoons and their evenings with her continual crying. Mona became more and more depressed. They had no family that could help them. Mr Swinnerton’s mother had died some years ago. Mona’s family still lived in Hungary, or at least they had done until the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Mona had escaped the troubles but her family stayed behind. She had never heard from them since and she supposed they were among the two hundred thousand people who perished when the Soviets crushed the rebellion. Then one evening Mr Swinnerton came home to find that his beloved wife had killed herself. Nowadays we understand a lot more about post-natal depression but back then, a mother would be told, ‘you’ve got a beautiful baby girl and a loving husband, what more do you want? Pull yourself together and get on with it.’ Geraldine was taken into care and came to live in the nursery where I worked. Her father had to pay a percentage of her childcare costs but she got over her colic and began to thrive. Visiting hours were only on a Sunday, but Matron Thomas felt sorry for the quiet man. He used to cycle to the nursery after work to see his little daughter, who grew into a serious-faced toddler and the spitting image of him. Eventually Geraldine moved from the Baby room to Tweenies (the rooms where the children between the ages of one and two were looked after) and still he kept coming, riding up the hill on his battered old bicycle. Social workers tried to persuade him to let her be adopted, but he just couldn’t do it: he loved her too much to let her go.
I was on duty when Geraldine was admitted. All the children’s clothing came from a central store and so the same jumper often popped up in various sizes throughout the building. However, the one redeeming factor was that everything was labelled, so no child actually wore somebody else’s outfit. We scratched the child’s name onto white tape with a rusty old pen dipped into indelible ink and sewed it inside each garment. It was a long and tedious job, doing every single item of clothing.
At first, Mr Swinnerton found the ‘no personal things’ rule a little hard to take. The children had no private space of their own but they had their own individual combs and hairbrushes, etc. Geraldine was allowed one personal toy, which was usually kept on the bed. He didn’t make waves, but he would give you this ‘injured’ look which made me realise the pain he was going through.
At the time Geraldine came to the nursery the children’s personal pegs were identified by a picture of a teddy or a spinning top or something similar. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the practice was stopped after some visiting dignitary knelt in front of a child and asked a child, ‘and who are you?’
‘I’m the golliwog,’ came the reply.
Once she’d settled down, Geraldine was a contented little girl, although she never lost that serious expression. When I left the nursery, she was still there and her father still cycled up to see her. I’d like to think that he eventually found another wife and made a home for his little girl but maybe that is only a pipe-dream. Back then, bringing up a child as a single parent was even more difficult for a man because the woman was always considered the primary carer.
On Sundays some of the parents came to visit. This was a mixed blessing; the children who had nobody to visit them must have envied those who did. It was wonderful for the visitors who came to be together as a family but then everyone had the grief of parting again. They would linger as long as they could to have a protracted farewell but we had to persuade them to say goodbye and leave at once. Everybody