The Country Nurse Remembers Page 5

  Grandpa was about to retire, so Daddy and some others had been building a house for them about halfway up the lane for when they moved from Meadow View. The new house, called Homelea, was built high up to avoid flooding, but this meant that there were lots of steps and terraces. There was much talk about how they should not have built it so high up; but I grew to love running up all the steps, round the terraces and down again. They were due to move in about a year, though I didn’t know any of this as I sat under the table cuddling Flossie, believing that I was ‘home’.

  Aunt Lizzy

  How could I not have mentioned Auntie Lizzy? She became a big part of my life for a while. She had been there all the time, with Grandma and Grandpa. Auntie Lizzy was my father’s sister and lived with her parents at Meadow View. She had never married, and, when I was much older, I heard her sad story.

  She was the only daughter and the oldest in the family. Even as a child she had helped Grandma, who was already going blind. They lived near Manchester when she and her brothers were young, and from the age of about sixteen she had worked as some sort of clerk with the local council. When Grandpa obtained the job of manager near Bath and the family moved south, she remained behind with an aunt because of her job. She got to know a colleague and eventually became engaged to him.

  About that time Grandma’s sight worsened so that she became totally blind. Meadow View, a fairly large house, had no electricity or gas, and with no modern appliances, such as a refrigerator or vacuum cleaner or washing machine, Grandma was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with two boys in their late teens and look after Grandpa and the home. So one day Grandpa wrote to Auntie Lizzy, asking her to come back. ‘Your mother needs you!’ he said. There was no thought for Auntie Lizzy’s life and job in Manchester or her plans to marry.

  My grandpa was the product of a Victorian upbringing and wielded a rod of iron on his family. My father and his brother had felt ‘the belt’ many times. Auntie—never! But the iron will behind the iron rod brought her back from her fiancé and her roots in Manchester.

  By the time I was around, she had been living at Meadow View for many years, helping Grandma to look after Grandpa, the ‘boys’ (until they left home) and the house. She also worked in Bath for the council’s rates department and travelled five or six miles by bus each way, with a thirty-minute walk to the bus stop, often coming home at lunch time to make her parents something to eat and rushing back for the afternoon. The fiancé had faded away when she had moved back. Perhaps his job prevented him from following, but she probably had to choose between marriage to him and her duty to her parents. Whatever the reason, she remained a spinster to the end of her days. She was loyal to her parents, loving her mother and obeying her father, always sure that her two brothers could do no wrong and protective of her nephews and nieces. She was fussy and nervous, but she always had the best interests of the immediate family at heart. This did not always suit her brothers’ wives!

  She would occasionally take a holiday with two other ‘maiden ladies’, as she called them, but apart from those rare times her life was one of duty and caring. I think Grandma probably appreciated her, but all the men accepted her role as the unmarried daughter whose job it was to look after the parents. She got little thanks. I didn’t know all this when I was young, of course, and just accepted her as another aunt, but one who was very much a part of my early life.

  Although single and childless, she coped with frequent visits from my uncle Jake, his wife and my four (later five) cousins, producing meals for all, getting beds ready, trying to join in the conversations but never having time—and looking after her parents as usual. Now she was suddenly, and without warning, presented with me.

  Apparently, my father’s decision to remove me from the stucco bungalow had been a spur-of-the-moment thing: understandable in the circumstances, but, with no telephone at the bungalow, he was unable to let Auntie Lizzy know that he was taking me to Meadow View.

  I know she was not there when we arrived: she was probably at work. What a shock it must have been when she got home to learn that the care of a child had been added to her burden! I remember a great deal of worried discussion among the grown-ups about how she would manage and what would happen to me when she was at work. She would have to leave me with a disabled grandfather who was trying still to work himself, although only part-time—my father made up the time for him—and a blind grandmother. Would Grandma be able to cope with having a young girl, whom she could not see, running about the house and garden? Grandpa’s disability made him frustrated and short-tempered—how would he deal with a small child on an everyday basis?

  By this time, I was about six. I do not remember a birthday, but there must have been one somewhere among all the chaos. I do not know why I did not immediately start attending the local church school; it was perhaps the problem of getting me there. It was in the village beside the church and the manor house and was nearly a mile distant, most of the way alongside the river. With Grandma blind, Grandpa disabled, Auntie working, Daddy doing his own job and half of Grandpa’s, building the bungalow and finishing Homelea, it was probably impossible for anyone to find the time to take me to school. They must all have known that the situation could not continue as it was.

  Daddy and Mildred

  While I was living at Meadow View with Grandma, Grandpa and Auntie Lizzy I became aware that something was going on that I didn’t understand, and, because of snatches of conversation and a general feeling of unease, I started to feel worried. Something was going to happen … But did it involve me? I think I was beginning to realise that most things that caused the grown-ups to have whispered conversations usually concerned me.

  I heard Auntie Lizzy say to Daddy, ‘It’s too soon. It’s not right.’

  Daddy usually had his meal in the evening with us all, but now sometimes he wasn’t there.

  Grandpa would say, ‘Huh! Out again?’

  I knew he didn’t like Daddy going out. Grandma did a lot of tutting, and Aunt Lizzy looked worried. Then one day there was a lady there when I came in from the garden.

  Daddy said, ‘This is Auntie Mildred. Say “Hello”.’

  I was sure that I didn’t have an Auntie Mildred, but there seemed to be so many aunts that I was probably unsurprised to meet another. I would have done as I was told (I almost always did) and was then sent into the garden again to play, while the grown-ups talked. After Daddy had taken Auntie Mildred back to her home, Grandma asked the others what she looked like.

  ‘All right,’ was all Grandpa had to offer.

  Aunt Lizzy said nothing.

  What seemed only a few days later Daddy took me to a house in Bath. Aunt Mildred was there, with two old people who turned out to be her parents. They were told who I was and asked me a lot of questions, which I tried to answer, but it was all about things that I knew nothing of: town things. Every time I stopped speaking, there was a long silence. Nobody seemed happy.

  It seemed only a week or two later that we were suddenly sitting at a table in a hotel in Newquay. Daddy, Auntie Mildred and me. We were on holiday, I was told.

  I recall we spent a lot of time on the beach, so it must have been nice weather. Then we would return to the hotel and wash and dress nicely to have tea—only they called it ‘dinner’. Then we’d go for a walk along the front. Lots of people did the same, all nicely dressed. I shared a room (and a double bed; there were no twin-bedded rooms then) with Auntie Mildred, while Daddy had a little room right at the top of the building. He showed me the view from the window: sea, rocks and sand. Sharing a bed with Auntie Mildred was not fun like sharing with Auntie Jinny, who would laugh and cuddle and chat. Auntie Mildred came to bed very late and slipped in so quietly that I often didn’t know that she was there until the morning. I wished it were Auntie Jinny instead.

  Then the holiday was over and we all went back to Meadow View, before Daddy took Auntie Mildred home to Bath. We were telling Grandma, Grandpa and Auntie Lizzy all abou
t the beach and the hotel.

  ‘Mary slept with me,’ explained Aunt Mildred. ‘Maurice had a little room on the top floor.’

  I joined in. In that moment I banged the first, and by far the largest, nail in the coffin of any hope that I might have had of a little affection from Auntie Mildred. And I didn’t know how very important that was going to be!

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Daddy slept all by himself. Auntie Mildred and I slept together, but on the last night Daddy and Auntie Mildred slept together and I slept alone.’

  There was a gasp and then a stunned silence.

  Auntie Mildred turned, ‘No, you didn’t. We didn’t. You … ’

  Daddy took a deep breath, ‘Mary fidgets about in her sleep and Mildred was tired, so I slept with Mary to give Mildred a good night’s sleep. Mildred went up to my room.’

  ‘Yes, yes. The child is mistaken … ’ Auntie Mildred was very red. She was stammering. Daddy looked straight at me and said, ‘I was with you.’

  I was frightened. I had said something awful. But what? I must have looked puzzled. Daddy said, ‘You were asleep when I came to bed and still asleep when I got up, so you thought you had been alone.’ Daddy always rose very early.

  I was sent out of the room, and the grown-ups stood in silence for a while. The door was not shut, and I heard Auntie Lizzy say, ‘Why would the child say it, if it were not true?’

  Daddy turned and shouted, ‘I have told you why she said it. She thought she was alone because I had got up and gone down before she woke. Mildred and I did not—repeat, did not—sleep in the same room.’

  He took Aunt Mildred home without saying goodbye to me. She just frowned as she passed me in the garden. I sat and cuddled Flossie. I had done something awful but obviously had no idea what. Why was everybody so upset about it?

  It must have been a terribly embarrassing moment for my father and Auntie Mildred. And at least at first no one seemed to believe them. In the long term, it did a great deal of damage to me rather than to them, as everyone believed them eventually. My father must have been furious at the implication, as he was a pillar of rectitude about such matters. The episode was not raised again in my hearing, and for a short while things seemed to be returning to normal at Meadow View.

  A New Mother

  One September day, Daddy said to me, ‘We will be moving in to the bungalow now that I have finished it.’

  I must have had an idea that something different was planned because I asked, ‘Is Auntie Mildred coming to live there, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daddy. ‘Mildred and I were married this morning. We shall go to the bungalow today, and I will fetch you tomorrow.’ He smiled. ‘So you had better start packing up all those dolls, hadn’t you?’

  Out of kindness, various relatives had given me presents at the time of Mummy’s death, and everyone seemed to have decided that a doll was the most likely thing to interest me. So now I had about ten dolls of various shapes and sizes, though Margaret was still my favourite.

  Daddy gave me a great big hug and said, ‘Now we are going to be a proper family again.’

  I know I would have accepted this and the marriage and the move without question, but of the move itself I remember nothing, and the first few days of life at the bungalow are a mystery to me. I wonder, now, how my father felt about having built the bungalow for one wife and then taking a different wife to it. He was not an imaginative man—he was intensely practical—so I think he would have just done it.

  Suddenly, I was going to school again. Daddy took me to the church school in the village on the first day of the autumn term. All my life, I have been glad that I went to that little school. It gave me a grounding in Christian principals and the Christian code of behaviour, as well as a good early education in basic subjects. This meant that I was able to get a scholarship to a Grammar school at the age of eleven.

  I think Auntie Mildred took me to school for a few days, too, and then I was deemed to be able to go by myself. I was admonished to walk on the side of the lane away from the river and to go straight to school and come straight back home again. I must have had some catching up to do, as, except for my short experiences at the dame school, the school on legs and the red-brick school—none of which lasted more than two weeks—I was almost a year late in starting school. Although I did not have an enquiring mind, I did have a retentive memory, and this must have helped me to make up the shortfall in reading and writing, but I remember that when it came to sums it was always a struggle.

  Looking back down the years at that tumultuous time, I can see why my father’s hasty remarriage, less than a year after my mother’s death, was never going to be idyllic. And it was all because of me: the problem.

  In his early twenties, before his marriage to my own mother, my father had had a group of friends in Bath with whom he and Uncle Jake would go dancing or to the cinema; the pictures, it was called. My mother, whose name was Phyllis, and Mildred were part of the same group. They all had good times together, and eventually Daddy and Mummy married. At the time of my mother’s death, Mildred was one of the very few women from that group not already married. And she was twenty-nine. In the days of the ’30s and ’40s, almost every woman wanted to marry, have a home and perhaps a family, and if she reached thirty without doing so, she was often considered to be ‘on the shelf’.

  Spinsterhood was something to be pitied in those days. Aunt Lizzy, for instance, was always ‘Poor Lizzy’. So Mildred was probably delighted when my father started to take notice of her. Did she pause to think, here is a widower with a child and I am about the only woman that he knows who is not already married? Did she not wonder if he really only wanted a mother for his child and a housekeeper for himself and his home? Or did she persuade herself that he had suddenly fallen in love with her at that very convenient time?

  And did my father not stop to think that there might have been alternative ways of looking after me (perhaps involving more input from him) rather than rushing into a marriage so quickly? Did he not think that this remarriage might alienate him, and therefore me, from Mummy’s family and from most of the friends and neighbours who had known him then?

  The answer is no. To my traditional and unimaginative father, who was also worried and bereft at the time, a new wife was the only way. Did he, perhaps, make it fairly plain to Mildred that part of his interest in her was to do with me? He was an honest man. But perhaps she realised all this without him saying so.

  All this sounds very Freudian and cynical, but even taking me—the problem—out of the equation, it was not likely that the marriage would have been entirely made in heaven. Mildred was probably lonely. She had lived in town before they wed and had worked with a cheery bunch of girls and had fun with them. Now she was in the country, with a man who worked long, hard hours, living in a bungalow beside a river (she disliked the water), and instead of starting her own family with a baby, she had a ready-made family to adopt.

  Added to all this was the fact that my father was demonstrative towards me and liked to sit me on his knee. Mildred gradually became very jealous, perhaps sensing that she came second in his affections. In subtle ways, she began to diminish this relationship, and I wonder now if jealousy was at the root of everything that happened from then on.

  It was many years, however, before I realised any of this; in fact, I would have been almost an adult when I at last began to question, in my mind, why things were the way they were.

  Life at Daddy’s Bungalow

  There was a lawn in front of the bungalow and a short driveway that led down to the narrow lane beside the river. The back door was at the side and led inside into a small passageway. This, in turn, led through into the living room, which had windows facing the river. The little kitchen, which we called our ‘kitchenette’ because it was so small, and the tiny bathroom opened off this room. The two bedrooms were at the back and were rather dark, the steep garden cutting out some of the light. There was another room, accessed from the front porc
h and called the ‘sitting room’. Daddy levelled off a small patch in the steep back garden and grew some vegetables there, but it was quite a climb to get a cabbage or a few carrots. That was my job, and I loved it because I could see right over the top of the bungalow roof to the river and the hills.

  From the windows or the front garden, I used to watch ‘the chaps’, as my father called the men who worked for Grandpa, go home on their bicycles. When I saw them, I knew that it would not be long before Daddy came home, too—perhaps on his bicycle or maybe in the blue Ford that we called Bluebird. I decided to wait for him outside the gate, on the grass verge, so that I could see along the lane.

  ‘What are you doing out there? Come into the garden at once,’ Aunt Mildred shouted from the window.

  ‘I’m waiting for Daddy,’ I replied, in answer to her question.

  ‘I don’t want you running about in the lane. Just come into the garden.’

  Puzzled, I walked the five or six steps back into the garden and stood on the lawn. I couldn’t understand. I had not been ‘running about’, I had been standing still. And I had just walked all the way home from school down that lane. But my instinct warned me not to mention this, and I just waited in the garden from then on.

  Some months passed, and then it was Christmas 1937, our first in the bungalow. Aunt Mildred and Daddy put up the trimmings—I remembered doing this with Daddy and Mummy the year before, and I was sad when I thought back to the laughter we had shared. This year, it was all done after I had gone to bed.

  In the morning they told me to go into the sitting room, and they stood in the doorway, watching me. I looked into the room but could not see anything unusual.

  ‘Don’t you like the tree?’ Daddy said.

  It was then that I spotted a small Christmas tree, which they had obviously trimmed with glass baubles, but there were no lights on it (we had no electricity at the time). It was on a fairly high table, and, from my height, I had not seen it at first. I was delighted when I saw it and must have shown it, but Aunt Mildred did not seem pleased.