Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes Page 10

  Perhaps the starkest reminder of how different the children in a residential nursery were came to me after a visit to a nursery school in Bermondsey, Southeast London. I went as part of a group from college in 1964.

  Nursery schools were under the Ministry of Education. They were staffed by a head mistress, teachers and assistants in class 1 and class 2. Open from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., they took school holidays. Parents paid five shillings (twenty-five pence) a week for meals, plus a fee. The children were from two and a half to five years. Some schools had a nursery class attached to the school itself. It was staffed and run in the same way as the nursery school although in that case, the Head of the school was also the Head of the nursery class. The children who went to nursery school and nursery class were usually in a settled home environment. They might find it difficult to adjust to a new environment but it was nowhere near as traumatic as being taken into care.

  The children took no notice at all of visitors whereas the children in the residential nursery would crowd around a stranger and try to get their attention. There was a long corridor which linked the rooms but each room was run independently from the others. There were sixty children who were full time in two of the rooms and the other room cared for those who were part-timers. We only had twenty-five to thirty children on our books whereas the nursery school had one hundred and twenty!

  My first impressions were of a vibrant, noisy and fast-moving place, where the language was a bit ripe at times. One child pushed another away from the car he was playing with and issued a resounding, ‘Fuck off!’

  The layout of the rooms was similar to the ones in the residential nursery except that they remained static. We spent a large part of the day putting one lot of things away and getting something else out. Here, each room had a Wendy corner, book corner and music corner, as well as table toys and dressing up things on a clothes horse. The children moved freely among them. The Wendy corner had a real telephone in it, and the book corner had a table for the children to sit at, with more books on it and it also had an old car seat for comfort. In the centre of the room, there were groups of tables with playdough, puzzles and cutting- out things. The scissors were tied to the leg of the table with string. There were also floor toys, such as bricks and floor puzzles. A sand tray was available and an adult was supervising some painters, each working at their own easel. In just the same way as the residential nursery was decorated, the walls were covered in paintings. The children in the nursery school had a pet goldfish and a budgerigar.

  Outside in the paved area, a water trolley was available for any passing child who wanted to play and there was even a wooden work bench complete with hammers and nails and, of course, wood. One of the teachers was grating carrots with the children and some were washing toy boxes. We had the same sort of equipment but it was rotated so that the children wouldn’t get bored with it all. That meant it would be the sand tray on Monday, the water trolley on Tuesday, the painting easels on Wednesday, etc. Here, everything was available all the time.

  The children moved from toy to toy with the bicycles and cars freely available and they also had a life-size United Dairies milk float someone had donated to the school. There was also a small car (real) in a far-off corner. The doors had been removed to prevent any squashed fingers and the engine was gone as well. The boys in particular loved ‘driving like Daddy’.

  The thing that struck me most was how independent the children were. They enjoyed helping each other to wash and often refused any help from an adult. Our children were far less sure of themselves. They waited to be told what to do and seldom had the confidence to boss another child around. For the first time in my experience I became starkly aware that the residential child was damaged by the experience. They were well looked after and apparently happy in their environment, but meeting the Bermondsey children showed me how rudderless the residential nursery children were. It aroused a deeper understanding and a greater sense of loving concern for them.

  The three big sandpits outside in the play area were movable and at one point the children decided to push one of them out of the sun. Some boys in another part of the play area had a large flag and a box. The game appeared to be to run in and out of the box and avoid being touched by the flag. It lasted a long time, maybe as long as twenty minutes, and I realised then that the degree of imagination was way beyond the boys of a similar age in the residential nursery.

  At lunch time, the children helped to lay the tables and we were all struck by the fact that they had glass wine glasses and a glass water jug. We were so safety conscious in the nursery that would never have happened. Everything in the residential nursery was plastic or Bakelite. It had never occurred to me before how limited their experience was. The meal itself was beef, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, carrots and gravy … the same sort of meal our children would have had but the nursery teacher made no attempt to encourage table manners, something which would have been anathema to my Matron. The meal time was noisy and full of conversation. That was lacking in the residential nursery situation too. Our children were allowed to talk at meal times but there wasn’t so much excited chatter around the table. The children had a rest on stretchers after dinner, in much the same way as our children did, but once again they helped the teachers and classroom assistants to put the stretchers up. Our children would be in the toilet while the nursery student put up the stretchers for them. After their rest, the children played again. One girl had some home-made stilts made out of tin cans and string. I have no idea if she had brought them from home, but I resolved to try and make some with the children in the nursery when I got back.

  The whole visit made a lasting impression on me. Now I could see what our lecturers meant when they talked about the residential child being a deprived child. Our children lacked confidence and initiative. They had been damaged by their experiences and it was going to take a long time to help them back into ‘normal’ life. We all came back from Bermondsey with a renewed determination to try and make a difference for the children in our care. It wasn’t easy because Matron resisted change but I do remember making some stilts out of some empty Robinson’s jam tins and the children had great fun with them.

  Outings for the children were something of a rarity but they did have them. I went with Sister and six children to Brighton for the day. The children were very excited as we waited in the car park of a local pub for the coach to come.

  ‘Is it coming soon?’ asked Gary, his face glowing with excitement.

  ‘Soon,’ I said.

  Two minutes later he asked again. ‘Is it here yet?’

  ‘Keep looking that way,’ I said, pointing in the direction from which it would come. ‘You’ll see it coming along the road.’

  Sure enough the coach was on its way but Gary was still looking. As it pulled into the car park I said, ‘Here’s the coach.’

  Gary looked a little disappointed. ‘But there’s no horses.’

  It must have been obvious that we came from a home because when we got out of the coach along Brighton seafront, the driver had started a collection. He handed us a hat full of coins and we were able to buy everybody a second ice cream! The biggest disappointment was that Brighton is a pebble beach. Coming from Bournemouth, I was used to miles of golden sand but luckily the children enjoyed themselves with what little sand they had and at least we didn’t get it in our sandwiches.

  We could also take the children out on our days off. I took four-year-old Freda and her younger sister Angela to Chessington Zoo for the day. They had a great time. At one point, I bought two bars of identical chocolate and handing them out, I said to Freda, ‘Which one would you like?’

  ‘Angela’s.’ came the reply. Now that was a tricky situation.

  My roommate Marilyn had a tricky experience on the Greenline bus as she brought a child back to the nursery after a day out. While she was at home, she had had a bath. The child had seen her getting dressed but at the time made no comment at all. Coming home on the b
us, they were sitting on the long seat right at the back. Her small charge waited until the bus had stopped at a bus stop to let on new passengers. Conversation had died and the only sound was that of the engine ticking over until a small megaphone voice piped up, ‘Auntie Marilyn, why have you got hairs between your legs?’ And then every head in the bus turned towards the girl with the scarlet face on the back seat.

  Matron Dickenson never really changed but she did mellow a bit. We were never allowed telephone calls but one day I was called into the office. Hilary was on the phone and asking to speak to me.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you we can’t pick you up until seven,’ she told me.

  We had arranged that I should stay the night at her house and go out together the next day. ‘Okay,’ I said, anxious to make it short because Dickie was in the same room. ‘See you then.’

  As I hung up, I expected Dickie to shout at me and tell me Hilary shouldn’t have phoned in the first place, but she didn’t. I turned around and to my utter amazement, she was crying. I stood there like a lemon, not knowing what to do.

  ‘She’s such a nice girl,’ Dickie blurted out. ‘She asked about the children and how they were.’

  I was feeling really uncomfortable by now. Something in me wanted to comfort her and yet since that limp lettuce handshake she’d given me the day I’d arrived in the nursery, I’d never touched her. How would she take it if I was nice to her anyway? I had a feeling there was a boundary line here and she had just crossed it. I was still on the other side and too unsure of her reaction to respond to her tears. She blew her nose noisily.

  ‘That business about her sacking was so awful,’ she went on. ‘It was terrible for me too. You have no idea what I went through, going to County Hall every day.’

  All at once I felt a sense of indignation rising within me. Awful for her? She’d been the one who had insisted on Hilary getting the sack and in effect she had ruined my friend’s prospects for years to come. And yet, here she was, trying to make me feel sorry for her!

  ‘Is she still working with that family?’ Dickie said, dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but she’s just handed in her notice because she’s got a much better post.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Dickie, looking down at the floor. ‘I wish her well.’

  I hovered for a while not knowing what to do. ‘You can go now,’ she said. I never told anyone what had happened in the office that day but I think she must have thought I had. She was particularly unkind for the next few days, throwing all my clothes and bedding all over the floor again and picking fault with everything I did.

  We never invited friends to the nursery because we felt Dickie would do or say something unpredictable. She probably wouldn’t but somehow we all thought she would. We weren’t allowed visitors when we were on duty anyway but one evening Joe from North Africa called with something I had left behind at a friend’s house. Dickie walked passed as we talked in the hallway and when he’d left, she accosted me in the corridor.

  ‘Does your mother know you go out with coloured men?’ Innocent question but not when it’s said with an obvious look of disapproval and with a strong emphasis on the word ‘coloured’.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘She’s met him and he came home with me.’

  As she lumbered off it was a good job for me that she didn’t turn round suddenly. I’d stuck out my tongue to her receding back. She was no judge of character anyway. There was a teacher who worked in the village and several of the girls had been out with him. He was quite good-looking and Matron Dickenson thought he was wonderful because he buttered her up every time he came to the nursery to pick up his date. But without exception, every girl who went out with him only did it once.

  ‘He’s got about eighteen arms,’ one complained after she’d been to the pictures with him. ‘I was too busy fighting him off I didn’t even get to see the film.’

  ‘He even tried it on at the bus stop,’ another complained. ‘He had his hand up my skirt and was pulling my knickers down before the bloomin’ bus came!’

  ‘What, go out with him?’ I heard a third girl say. ‘Not bloody likely – the man’s a sex maniac!’

  I told Hilary what had happened with Dickie after her phone call. ‘Silly cow!’ she giggled. ‘I only asked after the children because I knew she’d say no if I asked to speak to you first.’

  Our daily duties were much the same as they had been in the previous nursery with the exception that the girl on ‘Lates’ had to put coke in the boiler during the winter. The boiler man came in every day to stoke it up and rake away the ash, but it had been agreed that we should put the last bit of fuel in for the evening. I hated that job. The boiler room was downstairs and the cockroaches used to jump at your legs as you went down. It terrified me that I had to open this furnace and tip the contents of the coke scuttle inside. The heat was fantastic and, as I have a vivid imagination, I could always see myself falling over something and banging my head on the boiler or something. Fortunately nothing like that ever happened although one time when I was down there, I was staggered to realise that Barbara Field, the little deaf girl, had followed me to the stairs. She had been having a tantrum in the playroom and managed to dart out when the staff nurse wasn’t looking. She had run blindly but seen the stair door opening and charged down. Everyone was shocked to think what might have been if I had not been there to stop her going any further and almost immediately a two-way high bolt was put on the boiler-room door. It meant you could lock it by turning it on both sides. It was the right thing to do, of course, but it only added to my loathing of the place because now the girl on ‘Lates’ had to lock herself in the boiler room while she filled the boiler.

  Barbara was always one step ahead of us. After lunch, the children were expected to have a rest. We put them on stretchers and covered them with a blanket. They only took off their shoes. The playroom curtains were drawn and we spoke in whispers. Most children were ready to sleep and soon nodded off. The older ones were allowed to quietly look at books and those nearly ready for school sat in the book corner.

  Barbara had the propensity to lie on her stretcher and make silly noises. This meant that the other children couldn’t get to sleep, so Staff Nurse said Barbara should be left in the children’s dining room on a stretcher to sleep. That worked for a couple of days but there came the day when the staff dinner gong went and Barbara was still wide awake. Of course, she was running around the room as soon as we’d gone. Staff Nurse got one of us to put long tapes on a liberty bodice (an old-fashioned sleeveless bodice made of a warm, fleecy fabric). We put the bodice on Barbara and then tied her to the stretcher. She could sit up but she couldn’t get off. That worked for a couple of days too, until she discovered that she could rock her body in such a way that the whole stretcher moved along the highly polished floor. We came back into the room some twenty minutes later, having left the ‘sleeping’ Barbara, only to find she had scooted to the cupboard and emptied a couple of packets of baby rice and a bottle of concentrated orange juice all over herself.

  I suggested that we fix the stretcher to the radiator (it wasn’t on – this was late spring) and everybody thought I was pretty clever to come with the idea. When we got back to the dining room, Barbara had done a huge poo and posted it in between the slots on the radiator. Guess who was given the job of cleaning it up!

  Of course, these days the idea of a child being strapped to anything is abhorrent, and quite rightly so. After that incident, Dickie decided to have Barbara in her office at lunch time, so that solved the problem.

  It was around that time that I had spent the whole of one morning in the laundry, washing nappies. As I took a very large basket of nappies outside to hang up to dry, I put my foot on the iron grating by the door and the whole thing moved forward. My leg went from under me and I landed painfully on my bottom. The nappies I was holding went all over the place. Some were on the floor and some were even flung onto the low roof of the laundry. At exact
ly the same moment as it happened, Dickie appeared by the back door. Scowling with disapproval, she said in her sing-sing voice: ‘Really, Nurse! Now you’ll have to do them all again.’ Then she turned away and walked back into the house. I got up and rubbed my sore backside. Miserably, I picked up the nappies and took them back in the laundry to rinse them all again. I thought some pretty dark thoughts towards her as I did it. How could she be so callous? She hadn’t even bothered to ask if I was all right.

  I’m not sure why the Matrons were as they were. I’m sure none of them started out like that, and yet somehow, years of institutional life had made them vindictive, insensitive and very often needlessly cruel. It was less than twenty years since the end of the war, and perhaps they’d suffered in some way. People were never encouraged to talk about things, so although it doesn’t excuse them, these women may have carried a lot of inner pain or maybe it was simply because they had no life of their own outside the nursery. Perhaps they were bitter because life had dealt them a bad hand, I don’t know. I thought they were all like that but years later I was to meet one Matron who was entirely different. She’d worked in children’s homes all her life and yet she was kind and caring and a real champion for the children in her care.

  There was sometimes a conflict of interest between what we were being taught at college and what was actually happening in the nursery. Both nurseries I’d worked in thus far had divided the children into three distinct age groups. Babies, Tweenies and Toddlers was now considered ‘old fashioned’. The new thinking was to recreate a family group. The idea was to have fewer children together (maybe only six or at a push eight) with their own carers. They would retain the playroom for the older children and the nursery warden but everything else should be done in the family group. The big advantage would be that brothers and sisters at the moment separated by age would be able to stay together. It would also help with child development if the younger children could learn from the older ones. The older children would gain confidence and a feeling of generosity towards the little ones they helped. It would foster a feeling of belonging, especially for children who had been taken into care some time ago and might have lost the continuity of family life. The disadvantage might be that the older children could feel frustrated if the younger ones disturbed their play time, or a smaller child may feel overwhelmed by a boisterous, bigger one.