The Country Nurse Remembers Read online

  Then one day Daddy came to the school during dinner time and went into the study with the two ladies. When they all emerged, I was told to pick up my pencils and drawing books and say goodbye because I was going to go to a different school. The ladies were rather stiff with Daddy but were kind to me and said that they hoped I would like my new school. These days a child would ask questions, I’m sure; make objections, possibly indulge in tears or tantrums and undoubtedly explanations would follow. But I did nothing, asked nothing and possibly felt nothing. I was just a child being told what was to happen, so I just collected my things and followed my father to the car. I remember an empty feeling as I waved to the ladies, but I just did what was expected of me. I was there to be taken or sent wherever it was deemed right.

  When I look back I think surely I must have asked why I had to go to another school. But no! I just climbed dumbly into the car.

  Another shock awaited me at Grandmother’s house.

  In the hall was a little case with my heavy coat draped over it and, beside it, a basket with my dolls and books. Grandmother bustled me into the kitchen for milk and biscuits while my father put my case and toys into the car. Only then was I told what had been decided for me.

  ‘You are going to live with Auntie Doris, now.’

  I would have nodded and accepted the news, even though I hardly knew Auntie Doris. She was Mummy’s sister—I had been a bridesmaid at her wedding to Uncle John only a few months earlier. I had worn a yellow dress and a floral headband and had carried a little silk purse that matched the dress. I still have the tinted photograph. I had been so proud and happy then, and my aunt and uncle had seemed nice. But we hardly ever saw them now, as they lived in Bristol.

  Bristol and Bath seem very close these days, but the road from one to the other was narrow and winding then, and the towns themselves were much smaller, with large stretches of countryside in between, so the distances seemed greater. And now, suddenly, I was going to live with virtual strangers in a different town.

  ‘Are you going to live there too, Daddy?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘No, I’ve got to go to work. And I’ve got to finish the bungalow.’

  Daddy was building a bungalow beside the river in the village where Grandma and Grandpa lived. He had been planning for us to live in it—it was nearly finished—but Mummy had died before we could move in. Looking back over the years, I can see how that must have been an added blow to my father: to be building, in his spare time, a home for his wife and family, and having that wife die before he could take her there. Typically, he said little, but I wonder what his thoughts were later, when we did eventually move in.

  ‘Where are you going to sleep, Daddy?’

  ‘At Grandma and Grandpa’s house,’ he replied.

  It seems odd, looking back, to see that I asked questions about my father’s personal plans while accepting without question the plans for me. He would not be close anymore, so I expect I was scared, but it did not occur to me to say so.

  I think by then I felt a bit dead inside.

  The ‘After’ Time

  The Stucco Bungalow

  I suppose that car journey marked the beginning of another paragraph in an already fractured childhood. How long after my mother’s death this was, I do not recall; perhaps a month or two.

  Auntie Doris and Uncle John lived in a stuccoed bungalow. (I came to know those walls well because there was a very slippery path leading around the building to the back door and every time I fell I seemed to scrape my hands and elbows on the stucco.) I was taken to the spare room. There were only two bedrooms: both had double beds, with satin counterpanes, pretty curtains and a smell of paint. I do not remember feeling anything at all—just an acceptance, as I watched Daddy bring in my clothes and the few toys that had come with us. Then he went, exhorting me to be a good girl. He said he would come to see me and perhaps take me out the following weekend. The dead feeling might have increased a little as I saw him leave, but there was no time for thought or tears as Auntie Doris addressed me firmly.

  I was told that there were rules in this house. Mummy had apparently allowed me to get away with too much, and now I would find things very different. At this point, the fog in my brain must have lifted because I know that I was scared. I sensed that neither my uncle nor my auntie wanted me there.

  Daddy had gone away. Would he come back? Or would he forget about coming to see me? Did he want to see me? Daddy was always busy: would he be too busy to come next weekend, whenever that was?

  I can now see that this whole scenario, of having to take on a small child, albeit her sister’s daughter, was probably seen as a problem for my auntie. My uncle and aunt had only been married a few months; they were in their new home and were probably set for a year or two of quietly getting used to married life. I would have been an unwelcome addition to the household.

  Auntie Doris already considered me over-indulged, and, who knows, perhaps there had been scenes and arguments between them. Perhaps my uncle did not want to take me on at all but had been shamed into doing so; maybe he did not consider the amount that my father was paying for my maintenance to be sufficient. From my adult perspective now, I can see that this was a difficult time for everyone and that I was the main problem. Taking me on, however, did not present one difficulty that such a commitment would involve these days: Auntie did not have to give up working or pay for child-minding (a concept unheard of at that time), as she had stopped working when she married, as most women did, to keep house for her husband.

  A few days went by, and then I was roused early one morning and told that I was starting a new school.

  But first Auntie Doris and I were to tramp across a field—it certainly wasn’t school as I had known it during my brief attendance in Bath. We climbed some wooden steps to a timber building that seemed to have legs. Auntie opened the door, and I was amazed to see that it was, indeed, a school classroom. I was welcomed by a large man who turned out to be the one and only teacher of about twenty children of both sexes and all ages, from small to big. I had come from a tiny school of six girls run by two nice ladies in a large, smart house!

  The class was made to say ‘Hello’ en masse, and I sat down at the front.

  Then Auntie left.

  Daddy came to see me the next day, which must have been a Saturday. I was in bed—in the big double bed—when Daddy came into the room.

  ‘You not up yet?’ he said.

  ‘No, Auntie says—’

  ‘She has a cold!’ Auntie Doris took over. ‘So she must stay in. You won’t be able to take her out today.’

  Daddy looked at me. ‘You look all right.’

  ‘Yes, I’m—’

  Auntie Doris sounded firm: ‘She is in my care and I think she should stay in bed.’

  They left the room. I stayed in bed. Daddy came in later to say goodbye and then went, promising to return the following weekend.

  I stayed in bed all weekend but was taken to school on Monday. Daddy came the next Saturday as planned, but this time I was deemed to have a sore throat. I seemed to be living on a diet of porridge. Once more Auntie Doris would not let Daddy take me out. I knew that he was cross, and he kept asking me about school, but Auntie said that I should not talk because of my throat.

  However, when he came in to say goodbye, she was in the garden doing something, so she was not with him, and I remember we had a chat: I must have seemed all right, for he encouraged me to talk. I told him that the school had legs. After laughing at first, he looked puzzled and asked me more. It seemed that Auntie Doris had chosen the school: Daddy had not seen it and he did not seem happy with what I told him, probably about the building and the fact that we had a man for a teacher—most unusual for infant schools at that time.

  I remember hearing raised voices in the living room just before he went and Auntie was very tight-lipped when she came into the bedroom.

  I was taken to school on Monday as usual, but when we approached the field where
the school hut was situated, it was full of water. It had rained heavily in the night, and some nearby stream or river must have overflowed. There were lots of parents and children there, looking at the marooned building. No one could get to it, so we went home.

  Daddy came to see me on Tuesday. I was surprised—it was not Saturday. He wondered why I was not at school. Was I still not well?

  ‘We can’t get to it because of the water,’ I said.

  Auntie Doris must have been out; I know she was not there and Daddy was not pleased about the fact that I had been left alone. He stared at me, and I wondered if I had said something wrong.

  ‘I want to see this school,’ he said.

  We waited for Auntie to return and then went to the school, which was still stranded in the water. Daddy was beside himself: he was so cross with Auntie for sending me to a ‘wooden hut’ instead of a ‘proper school’. Those are the only words that I remember, but there were a lot of angry voices. Later, when Daddy came into the kitchen where I was playing, he said, ‘You will be going to a decent school next week.’ Then he left, banging the door behind him.

  I think he must have arranged it then and there, for I have memories of being taken the very next day to a long, low red-brick building with a big playground.

  Saturday arrived, and I was told that I had a chill and would have to stay in bed again.

  ‘But, I’m all right, Auntie,’ I protested. I must have gathered a little courage.

  ‘I shall tell your daddy what a naughty girl you are, if you argue,’ she replied.

  I kept quiet but was still sent to bed, and I know I cried because Daddy would not be able to take me out. But this time when he came he was not alone. He had brought the doctor with him. He must have been unconvinced by all these so-called chills and colds.

  The doctor looked in my mouth. I said, ‘Ahh,’ and then he listened to my chest, felt my tummy and asked me lots of questions. After a bit, he took Daddy to the end of the bed and I heard him say, ‘I can find nothing wrong with the child. She is perfectly fit—rather thin, but … ’ I don’t remember any more and they left the room.

  I sat in bed, wondering what was going to happen to me now. Then the door opened, Daddy came in and took my case down from the wardrobe, stuffed my clothes into it, gathered my dolls and books together, and then picked me up.

  ‘We are going to Grandma and Grandpa’s,’ he said.

  ‘I’m in my nightie, Daddy,’ I objected.

  Without answering, he wrapped me in a blanket from the bed and strode with me to the car. I was plonked in the front seat, and he went back for my belongings. No one said goodbye to anyone and we drove away.

  Looking back over the years and trying to make allowances for the difficulties of being landed with a child to care for and the trauma of my mother’s (her sister’s) death, I still cannot see why my aunt should have wanted to prevent my father from spending time with me. One would have thought she would have welcomed a respite from the responsibility of a task she had not wanted and a break from a child whom I am sure she did not like.

  Another puzzle was why she chose the wooden school with legs. It would have been a private school—perhaps it was cheap, less than my father was paying her for it. An unworthy thought, perhaps, but it is a mystery to me. By the time I was old enough to wonder and maybe ask about these things, the home situation was such that I was not able to ask my father anything about the time before my mother died or the time immediately after.

  Perhaps I had not been a very good girl. I was five and had just lost my mother, who might have over-indulged me; I was with people who had no children of their own and who had their own ideas about my upbringing. They had their rules, but I was not told what they were until I broke them. In other words, I was lost and confused. I felt I had been moved from one place to another, from mother to grandparents, to aunt and to three different schools in a matter of months. There had been a lot of worrying shouting between Aunt Doris and Daddy. I had not had time to make friends, and I spent most of the time at home by myself. Did I get into mischief—real or assumed? Perhaps. Of course, I would have done or said things that would have been considered naughty and not known why. But I still did not think my situation strange. It just was. Had I been able to see the future, I might have realised that, in many ways, it was not going to change much.

  So maybe my aunt felt she had good reason to shut me in the cold passageway by the back door until I learnt how to behave. I have no memory of what I had done on the first occasion, but I do know what I did to make Uncle John call me a ‘blasted kid’.

  He was trying to repair the wire to the back-door bell. This stretched round the outside of the house from the front door and must have had some sort of electrical supply. (Perhaps it was not the bell, but some other device.) I was standing nearby and was told not to touch anything while he went indoors. I thought he meant his tools, which he had left on the path beside me, so I decided to have a closer look at the wire that was running along the wall at just my height. I could see a break, and, being inquisitive, I picked up one end to look at it more closely. It seemed to bite me! I screamed and fell onto some cabbages by the path. I just sat there—probably dazed. My aunt and uncle came rushing out, hauled me up and marched me indoors. Back to the passageway! That is when I was called a ‘blasted kid’. Perhaps I deserved it …

  Having come so recently from Mummy’s gentle and loving ways, I would not have really understood that I would have to live and behave very differently now. There were memories of my mother everywhere, which comforted rather than upset me.

  Auntie Doris had some clothes that had belonged to her. A cardigan lay on the arm of the sofa one day—I had buried my face in it to smell Mummy’s scent. It must have been her perfume—one that seemed to be specifically hers.

  The sense of hurt I feel now is for the child I was then, trying uncomprehendingly to recapture a lost mother in the scent of her clothes.

  After this discovery, I realised that there must be more things that had been hers, and so I sought them out whenever I was unobserved. I found some of her pretty dresses and a coat, and for a long time her scent lingered on them all. I can almost remember the perfume now, all these years later. It smelled like flowers. But, of course, the jumpers were washed, the coat cleaned and gradually even that tenuous link with my mother was lost.

  On one occasion while I was still living at the stucco bungalow, I had just watched with sadness as another of my mother’s jumpers, a familiar beige one, was taken from the washing basket to be ironed. At that moment I realised that her scent on that one at least would be gone forever.

  ‘That was Mummy’s, wasn’t it?’ I said to my aunt.

  As soon as I had said it, I was afraid she would be cross, but amazingly she wasn’t. She actually looked at me with a kind little smile and said, ‘Yes, it was.’

  Those were the kindest words that I remember her ever saying to me.

  So maybe she was not the ogre I remember. Or if she was, maybe everything to do with her sister’s death had been too much for her. I shall never know.

  Even after I had grown up and was married, and I paid an occasional ‘duty’ visit, she seemed remote. Polite, but unfriendly. And I don’t think she and Daddy ever spoke again after the day he took me away from the stucco bungalow … Back to a house that I knew well.

  To Flossie’s house.

  To Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  Return to Meadow View

  Meadow View was at the end of a lane that ran beside the river for most of its way. Grandpa was the manager of the Works, and the house was the manager’s residence. It had a big garden with a tiny orchard of about ten apple trees, a vegetable patch and lots of lawn. There were fields in front and behind it, and a weir roared past when the river was in spate or chattered quietly by when the water level was low. Sometimes there was so much water flowing that the weir became almost flat and the river overflowed its banks onto the field in front of the house. W
hen this happened, the lane flooded as well and it was usually impossible to use it to get to the house or the Works, so everyone had to tramp up over the fields behind us, towards the village, which was on higher ground. This must have been a great nuisance to the grown-ups, but I thought it was fun!

  The ground rose on the other side of the river, too, to form hills where the tiny village with the smithy nestled under a rounded, tree-topped outcrop. From Meadow View, we could just see the village church. There were a few houses on the opposite bank of the river, by the weir, and on our side there was only one bungalow, near the big gates that led to the Works. Apart from these and our attached neighbour, the foreman’s home, the place was isolated. I know it must have been quiet and beautiful, but to me it was just somewhere familiar, where Daddy had lived as a boy and where I knew I would be all right.

  My father said that as we drew up in the car: ‘You will be all right here.’

  So I knew that I would be.

  I have hazy memories of a house on a road higher up in our village. We had lived there when Mummy was still with us, but I must have been very young because I remember so little about it. There was a garden and a wooden garage where my father kept his Austin 7. I had a little friend next door and I recall playing with her, or perhaps just sitting and staring at her as she stared back at me, as very small children tend to do. That house would have been convenient for Daddy, as he was the assistant manager of the Works. Why we moved from there to Bath will always be a mystery to me.

  Meadow View was just the same as it had always been on the day we arrived back from the stucco bungalow. I had been so afraid that something would have changed and it would not be so familiar. In fact, it was probably only a few months since I had been there, but that was before Mummy had died.

  Flossie came to greet me, and I sat on the floor under the table, cuddling her. That table was used for dining, for playing billiards (it was so big) and as a den for me, Flossie and Crib—when Crib was not busy killing rats or chasing cats.