unsympathetic would be an understatement. She gave me a right rollicking, threatening to write to my mother to say I was not fit to be a nursery nurse and to ask her to take me home. I was devastated. To get a qualification was the only thing I really wanted. I couldn’t bear the thought of failure. How could I go back to the village with my tail between my legs? I’d endured months of homesickness, which still hadn’t fully gone away, and the slave-like conditions and now she was threatening to stop me from going for my training. She finished off by telling me to go back on duty at once.
‘But I need a doctor,’ I whimpered.
‘Then go,’ she said. ‘And when he sees you, he’ll tell you you’re making it up. He’ll tell you there’s nothing wrong with you.’
I crawled away in tears. The doctor was a bus ride away. My head was banging, I felt dizzy and sick but if I was to get that sick note, I had to get there somehow. I had to make my own way and I was unfamiliar with the roads. Being completely deaf didn’t help either. If I asked directions, I couldn’t hear them and it will surprise you how often people turn their heads away from you as they give directions. Without seeing the person’s mouth, with perhaps the small hope that I could lip read, it was useless. The night itself was foggy and dark. The Clean Air Act had been in force since 1956, so the fog wasn’t as bad as the infamous London pea soupers but it certainly added to the stress of the journey.
Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my turn, I only knew I’d been called when several other patients gesticulated towards the doctor’s office. He examined me and told me off for coming out with a temperature of 102ºF, but he signed me off sick. I was so relieved.
Next I had to find a chemist to get the prescription made up. I dared not turn up without my medication. Matron Thomas would have left it until the next day before sending anyone out for it and I was desperate to be well again.
With my medicine safely in my pocket I set off for the nursery again but in my misery, I got on the wrong bus and added a half-hour walk to my destination. Matron was furious when I got back and gave her the sick note. She snatched it from me and the look on her face said it all; she obviously hadn’t expected the doctor to sign me off. Her pet worry was that the nursery would be short-staffed and so girls worked all the time when they were unfit and should have been in bed. Back in my room, I crawled under the covers. My roommate was away for a few days, so I was alone. No one came to see me all the next day and frankly, I was too ill to care. Luckily I was right next to the bathroom so I managed to get to the toilet and I drank water from a tooth-mug on the window ledge. It was a miserable time.
Things get a bit hazy after that. I had a pot under the bed and because I felt too ill to go into the bathroom, I used it. No one came to see me or to ask if I wanted food or drink and when the pot was full, I was forced to stagger to the loo with it myself. My salvation came in the form of the doctor. He must have been slightly concerned about me because he turned up a couple of days later, unannounced. That was the first time Matron Thomas came to my room, and she stayed while he examined me. There was a heated discussion at the foot of my bed and they both left. A few minutes later, Matron came back up again, this time with a bowl of water, a flannel, a towel and one of her own nightdresses. She washed me and changed my bedclothes and an hour later, I was in an ambulance and on my way to hospital.
It turned out that I had an abscess on each eardrum and at last Matron understood that I wasn’t making it up, nor imagining it. I was put onto four-hourly penicillin injections and given heat treatment on my neck. Both abscesses were so large, I had already discovered that when I lay on my side, I rested on the lump and not my neck. The only way I could sleep was to lie on my back. Matron Thomas’ uncaring attitude was extended to my parents. No one informed them that I was in hospital, or ill for that matter and it was only after I’d been in hospital two days that they discovered I was there. A working-class home with a telephone was virtually unheard of back then. My mother had asked the local farmer, Mr Wellman, if she could use his phone in a case of emergency. When the hospital decided to operate, because I was still a minor, they needed my father’s permission, so they rang him.
When the call came, Mr Wellman set off from Woolslope Farm to find my mother. She was at work but she left immediately and used the public telephone to call my dad’s boss. My dad was a builder and Mrs Hayward ran two miles across open fields to reach the bungalow Dad was working on at Ashley Heath, near Ringwood. There was panic all round but Dad gave the hospital verbal permission and the next day he and Mum came all the way from Dorset by train. Ward sister allowed them in, even though it wasn’t visiting hours until the afternoon, and I was overjoyed to see them.
By now, the penicillin was taking effect and I was making a slow improvement. Matron had invited Mum and Dad to go to the nursery for tea and Mum told me afterwards, she put on the performance of her life. She appeared distraught, wringing her handkerchief and saying, ‘If only Pamela had told us she was ill. We had no inkling she was unwell.’
Mum bit her tongue. She knew I was terrified Matron would stop me doing my training, so much against her better judgement, she said nothing. Years later she told me just how hard that had been. ‘I was furious with that Matron,’ she said. ‘Everything in me wanted to confront her and tell her I knew she was lying, but you had asked me not to say anything.’
Once I started getting better, I made some friends in the ward. It was very large and if I close my eyes I can still smell the floor polish and disinfectant. The girl in the bed next to me had had an illegal back-street abortion and almost died. I think she was about twenty. She seemed so sophisticated, so grown up, and she wore her make-up in the most amazing way. Her mascara was halfway down her cheeks like a spider’s web, making her eyes look enormous. She had the palest pink lipstick, giving her an almost ghostly look, and her bouffant was parted down the middle and framed her face. It was a look which was soon to become very fashionable.
As my health improved, I was able to join in the fun and laughter patients share on a ward. We were all made to rest after lunch and I woke up one afternoon to the sight of a female patient, aware that men might be around, backing out of her bed to go to the toilet. She told us afterwards she did it that way because she didn’t want to swing her legs over the bed because she had no panties on. The only trouble was, she was wearing a hospital gown which opened down the back and only one of the tapes, the one at her neck, was tied!
Then there was Nurse Driver on the ward. She was an SEN (State Enrolled Nurse, a title given to girls who had completed the three-year training course but had failed their exam. They were limited to general duties and were not allowed to do the medicine trolley). One day, the morning drinks had just been served when she turned up at my bedside.
‘Have you got a headache?’
‘No.’
A little later, after the ward round, she was back.
‘Do you need something from the medicine trolley? Shall I tell Sister?’
‘No, thank you. I’m feeling a lot better today.’
Just before lunch time I saw her coming back again.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you.’
In the end, she was driving me potty so in the vain hope that she would go away, the next time she made a beeline for my bed I said, ‘Actually, I have got a bit of a headache.’ I lay down, thinking she would leave me alone to sleep.
Five minutes later she was back with two enormous pills and a cup of water.
I didn’t want them, or need them so I refused as politely as I could. ‘And in any case,’ I smiled, ‘I couldn’t manage to swallow anything as big as that.’
She hurried off only to reappear with the pills crushed in a dessertspoonful of blackcurrant jam. As I forced the disgusting mixture down she gave me a loud lecture about not suffering in silence.
It was Nurse Driver who had an accident with her stocking suspender. She was busy on the ward when it broke. I think the whole thing had come away from her girdle because usually if only the button at the end came off you could put a sixpenny