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My mother was born on March
22, 1912, in the coal-mining village of Hednesford,
Staffordshire. She was the eleventh of thirteen children, with five older sisters (Eliza, Laura, Sally, Nell, Win) and five older brothers (Bill, Joe, Jack, Harold and Ernest).
She was named "Esther", after her mother, and "Alice" after a neighbor and friend of her mother's.
Her older brothers and sisters played a big part in her upbringing
— especially her sister Nell, with whom she was very close.Mother did well at school, but there was no money for her to stay beyond the minimum leaving age (which I think was 14), and she went into domestic service. She was assistant children's nurse to a wealthy family who lived at Atherstone Hall, a large country house in Warwickshire. She did some other uncredentialed nursing work, too, I believe.
She seems to have been an outgoing and popular young woman. Several photographs survive which Muriel, asked recently to look over them, could only identify as "Tess with some feller" — a different feller in every case. One of these fellers was named Jack Morgan, and my mother seems to have been seriously attached to him. However, he died suddenly from rheumatic fever and she was broken-hearted over it. Half a century later, when I drove her to visit Muriel, Win and Harold, she pointed out a street where the mourning store had been, "where we went to buy black for Jack Morgan's funeral." (In those days — it would have been around 1930 — there were stores that just sold mourning attire; an interesting comment on comparative mortality rates then and now.)
In 1932, at the age of 20,
Mother became a student nurse in Wolverhampton, at £18 a year, plus room and board.
Her recollections of her nursing training make it sound like a U.S. Marines boot camp.
Discipline was tremendous. In part, no doubt, this was because most of the senior nurses had done their own training on the battlefields of the Great War.
(See Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth for insight into what this involved.)
All bed linen was bleached, starched and changed daily. Daily inspections of the wards were carried out like a military parade:
for example, all the open ends of the pillow-cases had to be facing the same way.
"Sister Tutors" (the senior nurses in charge of training) were objects of terror, house surgeons were figures of reverential awe.
Trainee nurses lived in a residential block known as "Virgin Villas", guarded by unblinking concierges . . .
And so on. Nursing at that time was not a job, and certainly not a profession:
it was a vocation. "A nurse's work is to keep the patient clean and comfortable," said my
mother.1Hospital work in the early 1930s, when Mother did her training, had not altogether shaken off the mentality of the pre-modern era, when hospital was a place where poor people went to die. Surgical procedures — the introduction of anesthetic was well within living memory — consisted mostly of cutting things out, and there were few other treatments for serious diseases. Antibiotics were very new. Hence, of course, the obsessive attention to cleanliness.
Mum remembered the early years of penicillin: "It was a thick milky liquid. You had to use an extra wide needle to inject it, and the injection hurt the patient horribly." TB was widespread but incurable until the arrival of streptomycin in the late 1940s, and TB treatments amounted to little more than quackery. Most popular was the fresh air treatment, under which patients were put in wards open to the elements. Mum remembered brushing snow from the patients' blankets. Sepsis was routine; sputum, pus and feces the raw materials of a nurse's working day. If you asked Mother "What's the matter?" in any context, she was liable to reply: "It hasn't come to matter yet. When it does, I'll put a poultice on it."
This was a hard school for a dreamy, sentimental young woman.
Before the age of twenty-five Mum had seen many people die
— more than I shall ever see, I hope; more, probably, that most soldiers see in wartime.
I recall her saying that she got inured to everything except the death of children.
That she could never bear easily, and I think it was for this reason that she did every kind of nursing except pediatric.
(I am not counting the uncredentialed spell at Atherstone Hall.) During WW2 Mum worked for a while at an eye hospital in (I think) Wolverhampton. It was the time of the "black-out": houses, streets and cars were forbidden to show any light at night-time, to avoid helping German bombers get their bearings. One result of the black-out was that in the pitch dark streets people were constantly walking into lamp-posts and other obstacles. This made for a lot of eye injuries. So, of course, did war-time factory work, with splinters of wood and metal leaving various manufacturing processes at high speed.
Mum told me once that at one point in her training she had been walking up the driveway of the hospital when she was overcome by a feeling of connection and belonging: this is what I was meant to do; this is where I belong. I don't think that feeling ever left her. By the evidence of my own eyes, and by all the third-party accounts I have heard, she was an exceptionally dedicated and conscientious nurse.
Mum moved to Northampton when Dad's work took him there.
She did several kinds of nursing work in the town. When I was very small, she worked at the General Hospital on Billing Road, and at the maternity hospital attached, whose name escapes me.
Later she worked at Manfield orthopedic hospital, out at the north-eastern edge of the town. She also did a stint as a "district nurse",
traveling around the town visiting invalids in their homes. This latter work supplied her with some hair-raising stories about the living conditions of the poorer townspeople.Eventually, around 1955, she got a job at St Edmund's geriatric hospital on the Wellingborough Road in Northampton. She worked there until she retired in 1972. At that point she was Assistant Matron, which is to say the second in command of the hospital's nursing staff, reporting to the Matron,2 one Mrs Aldritch (whose husband was at some point Mayor of Northampton). For a collier's daughter, starting out with little to expect from life but marriage and childbearing, this was no mean achievement.
Mum planned an active retirement,
traveling to Europe and, in 1976, to the United States, where I was living.
She stayed with me a month, took tours of U.S. hospitals, and watched the Tall Ships sail up the Hudson River on the
Bicentennial
— July 4, 1976. She improved her house and garden, enjoyed all kinds of needlework, and helped raise her granddaughter Tessa when Judith came back to England in 1974.
In 1987 she was partly disabled by a stroke. She struggled on in the house at Friars Avenue for three years, then admitted herself to a residential-care home in Kingsthorpe, Northampton, where she died in 1998.
1. How far we have come. Staying a week in Huntington hospital in 1996, for injuries received in an auto accident, I had state-of-the-art surgery and excellent follow-up care from the surgeon; but I was not bathed, nor even asked if I wanted a bath, the whole week. Nor was my bedding changed in that time. Nor did anybody (other than the surgeon) express any interest in my comfort. Friends and colleagues give similar reports. Medical science has made great and wonderful advances since 1932, for which we should go down on our knees in thanks; but nursing, as my mother understood it, has disappeared from the face of the Earth. In fairness, though, it must be noted that the second of these developments has in part been a consequence of the first.
2. Until the very end of Mum's career the old nursing titles were used in English hospitals. The person in charge of a ward was "Sister"; the supervisor of a hospital's entire nursing staff was "Matron". Nowadays, in the interest of removing all human associations from hospital work (perhaps to ease the conscience of the nurses as they leave us accumulating dirt in unmade beds), these titles have been translated into bureaucratic Esperanto: "Clinical Associate Grade 3A" and so on. Male nurses, by the way, were rare in Mum's day and were assumed to be homosexual unless they presented compelling evidence to the contrary.