Sixty Years a Nurse

At the age of four I was sent to the Nuns of the Presentation Convent in Clonmel. They lived in a huge, gloomy grey-stone place, with a cloister in the middle in Irish Town, an outer part of Clonmel. I hated and detested it right from the very start until I finally left for England, at seventeen. All four of us sisters were sent to the Presentation Nuns, while my brother Peter Joseph, who everyone called P-J, went to the Christian Brothers. The nuns were cruel and vicious, and we were ‘murdered’ (by which I mean belted and walloped) regularly by them; and sadly P-J was equally cruelly treated at his school. Worst of all was Sister Margaret, who was tall, gaunt, with glasses, and who had a ghostly aura about her. She was particularly horrible, especially to me, or so it seemed. She was the Devil incarnate, and I used to come home crying to my mother after a bad day at school saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and my mother would snap at me, ‘You mustn’t talk like that. You should try to be patient – why do you think she’s a nun?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I guess her family hates her.’ And my mother would ‘tut’ and then say, ‘Nobody loves her, she has no family probably,’ trying to make me feel sorry for her (which I didn’t), as she always seemed to have it in for me, unfairly. We all knew that nuns were often farmers’ daughters, who were shoved out into a convent when there were too many to marry off or feed and clothe – so they solved the problem by hastening them into the folds of the Church.

Anyway, I was always in trouble at school. I was a bit naughty, I admit; I remember there was a very goody-goody girl with a long plait, the end of which I stuck into an ink-well, and it went all black. I got into trouble for that, although I tried to play the innocent at the back of the class. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it, but I think I was always in need of exerting myself against unfair authority. Sister Margaret would take us for knitting, sewing and the like, and one day she was teaching us moss stitch. I was sweating away, struggling to keep my stitches on my needle, while Sister Margaret prowled up and down the rows between the desks. She was in her long black uniform, with big sleeves, and a huge crucifix clunking round her waist, with her big starched hat, and a white starched bib down her front. On her hand she had a huge silver Bride of Christ ring. She hovered over me menacingly as I was struggling with the knitting, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’ve lost a stitch. What am I going to do?’ ‘Having trouble, are we?’ snarled Sister Margaret, and she got her big ring and ground it hard against the side of my head. It hurt like hell. But if that didn’t make me contrite enough, she’d take out her pencil, which had a sharp point, and would push it into my ear lobe as hard as she could. My eyes would spring with tears and I’d yelp. Then she’d drag everything off my needles in fury and throw it onto the desk, in front of everyone. Then I would be told to stand on my seat, and as we had glass partitions everyone in the adjoining classrooms would see me standing there, humiliated and blubbing. It was terrible. I would run home and tell my mother what had happened, but she’d just say I should ‘pray for Sister Margaret’s body and soul’ and I would say, again, ‘But, Mammy, I want to kill her, so I do.’ I swear my ears were pierced before I was fourteen years of age.

Although my mother was quite tough, she was also very skilled and she could do anything with her hands. As she was a dressmaker, she was very nimble with her fingers, so at school I was wearing a black gym frock, with box pleats and a red sash, which had been let up and down endlessly as it had been worn by all my sisters before me. When I was about fourteen, the gymslip hem came just to my knees. Anyway, on this particular day Sister Angela, who was dumpy, with a big bust and wire glasses, was taking us for singing. She was a strict old thing, very punitive and cold, and I didn’t warm to her. ‘Stand out, Mary Francis,’ she suddenly shouted at me, ‘and look at the Virgin Mary – she’s about to weep at your immodest legs.’ I was jolted out of my musical reverie and looked at the statue on the wall and wondered what on earth I’d done now. Sister Angela came and stood over me and then made me get out in front of the class. I wanted to die. She then went and got a big sheet of brown paper and knelt down and stitched it to the hem of my frock, right down to the ankles. I felt so humiliated. My best friend, Jo Mulochny, who sat beside me, looked at me with big eyes and mouthed at me, ‘Jesus, your mother’ll go mad!’ It was well known that my mother was proud of her family and skills.

At the end of the class Sister Angela snapped at me to stay behind, but I didn’t – I ran out of the door like a bat out of hell, brown paper crackling as I went. It was pouring with rain, and I had to walk a mile home from school. So I was half walking, half running, with all this brown paper slapping round my legs, all wet and flapping. When I got in my mother was sat at the treadle sewing machine in the kitchen and I said, ‘Look what she did to me.’ My mother jumped up and said, ‘Jesus wept, who did that?’ ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, crying. ‘She humiliated me over my gym frock. She said it was “immodest”.’ Well, that was it. My mother was enraged. She couldn’t bear any of us being humiliated like that. She was a proud woman, especially about her dressmaking and mothering skills. She didn’t care if we got belted, as she thought we probably deserved it, whatever happened, but this kind of deliberate public humiliation was the last straw for her. ‘That’s it!’ she said. And it was – it was war. Her feather hat was on in a trice – she never went anywhere without her hat and her gloves – then she said ‘Come on!’ and we were out the door. My mother had a lame foot, but she was on fire, so we had to march right back to school, with it still raining, and my brown paper still slapping off my legs. She was going so fast that I was half-running, half-walking, as she was half-dragging, half-pulling me behind her. My mother was fuming, incendiary and about to explode.

When we got to the nuns’ part of the school, to their living quarters, on a big, long corridor, we could hear them all singing piously at prayer. Butter wouldn’t melt at all, so my mother rapped loudly on the door, and a little nun came limping out, the wizened housekeeper, Mother Anthony, leaning on her stick, all serene. In fact, she was the Reverend Mother, and she knew my mother well because my mother had gone to the school there, before me, also when she was little. I was tugging at my mother’s coat, whispering, ‘Mammy, let’s go, she’ll kill me tomorrow.’ But my mother was adamant, and firmly planted to the floor: ‘No, she won’t. You leave this to me.’ So when Mother Anthony said, ‘Mrs Powell, how nice to see you. What can we do for you?’ my mother exploded. ‘Look what Sister Angela has done to my daughter. How dare she humiliate me and my family!’ On and on it went, and I was so red, so embarrassed, I wanted to die.

Mother Anthony kept calm in the face of this and simply said she would deal with it, but my mother was not to be put off. ‘You get that Sister Angela out here right now,’ she insisted, eventually. Out Sister Angela came, looking sheepish and bland, and my mother let rip. ‘Did you do this to my daughter’s frock?’ Sister Angela said not a word, but looked terrified. ‘Get a pair of scissors and undo it now!’ The paper was all dripping and flapping round my legs by now, creating a puddle on the floor. So Sister Angela removed the paper, obediently, but after that, and until the day I left, she totally ignored me. She made sure I was shoved down to the bottom of the class, however. But I was happy, because she left me alone.

I always liked people, and I was always interested in learning, although I often didn’t pay attention to what my mother said, as I respected and feared her in equal measure – in fact, I usually did the opposite to what she wanted, quite cheerfully. When I was eleven we went on our usual summer caravan holiday in Tramore, which was an idyllic place by the sea, on the south-east coast of Ireland, just outside Waterford. This was probably the first time I ever learned about the evils of ‘the Protestants in the North’. I made friends with a sweet girl there called Ann Jarvis and would go down and clamber over the rocks, then fish in the rock pools, and go swimming. It was lovely and I got on really well with this girl. Anyway, I was late back one evening and I brought Ann with me. My mother asked her where she was from and she said innocently, in her strange sing-song accent, which was different from mine, ‘Belfast,’ and ‘We come down here every year.’ My mother’s face was like thunder as she pulled me into the caravan and pushed Ann out and slammed the door. ‘Don’t ever talk to her again,’ she raged right in my face. ‘She’s a black Protestant from the North. We don’t associate with those people. They are not God-fearing people – they’re all hypocrites.’ And that was it. I was forbidden to talk to her ever again. It was really confusing as I’d thought she was a lovely girl, and I couldn’t see her black soul, not at all.

Sometimes I’d get so fed up with my mother and her rules that I’d try to run away. When I was about fifteen I’d been in trouble again about something or other, and my mother had walloped me, so I decided that was it, I’d had enough, and I was off. It was dark, and we weren’t allowed out at night, only to benediction, at the church. My mother was always suspicious of me, and rightly so, as usually instead of going to benediction (as I told my mother) I would meet up with a couple of girls from my class, fetch a purple Miners lipstick we had hidden in the hedge wrapped up in newspaper, and put it on, hitch up our skirts, and then go down to the quay to meet boys and smoke Woodbines. I had already started this filthy smoking habit very early, at about thirteen years of age, and I remember how they rasped your throat. It was like smoking a disgusting bonfire, but I felt I was very cool and ‘grown-up’, and we loved meeting up with the boys and feeling naughty. I’d rush back to the Friary at seven in the evening to see which priest was doing the ‘Blessing of the Blessed Sacrament’, then run home, wiping the purple off my lips with my sleeve, and wrapping the little lipstick back up in newspaper before popping it back in the hedge. When I got in my mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re back. Who said the blessing?’ and I would rattle off the priest’s name, sweet as you like. We sucked Polos to cover the tobacco smell. I don’t think my mother guessed, although she always suspected.

Anyway, this miserable evening I was determined I was off for good. So I got some bread and wrapped it in a big handkerchief, as well as a snub of candle and two Woodbines, before taking my father’s big old bicycle, with the upright handlebar. I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m never coming back. See if they miss me.’ My feet could hardly reach the pedals and it was only when I got to the other side of the town, and was near the cemetery, that I began to get the wind up, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Oh, God, where shall I go?’ I suddenly felt very alone, very spooked and scared. Then I met my father coming out onto the road (he must have been looking for me), and he said, ‘Ah, there you are. Where do you think you’re going on that bike without a light?’ I said, ‘I’m running away … but when I got to the cemetery, I got scared.’ He looked at me and said, ‘It’s not the dead you fear, Mary, it’s the living. Go home, and get that bloody bike in.’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I said, secretly pleased he’d come to find me. So that was the end of my rebellious running away.

But now, today, in September 1952, at seventeen and all alone, I was finally on my three interminable bus journeys towards Putney in south-west London. I knew I wanted to be a nurse: I was utterly determined to succeed, whatever the odds. I could hear my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, from all our endless fights, that England was ‘taboo’ and that ‘no way was I to go to that Godforsaken Protestant country’. But here I was, defying her again. My mother had a friend called Pat Wall, who lived in Wimbledon, and she wanted me to get in touch with her once I landed – ‘She’ll keep an eye on you.’ Yes, I bet she would, as everyone always was keeping an eye on me, one way or the other. I said I would, but I knew I would try to avoid her like the plague, if I could. I didn’t want any reports of my misbehaviour (if there was any, of course) to get back to my mother, as I knew she would be unbearable or, worse, drag me back, if I put a foot wrong.

Although I knew nothing about leaving home, nothing at all about travelling, or the world, for that matter, I knew I had to take this big step for myself. Eventually I found my way to Putney Hospital on that very long first day, and, as I rang the doorbell of the nurses’ quarters, round the back of the enormous red-brick hospital on the edge of a huge common, I held my breath until the large wooden door opened. A small woman appeared, in a crisp navy uniform and stiff white cap – she gave me a quick once-over while I explained who I was. After a pause she said, ‘I’m Sister Matthews, your Home Sister,’ in clipped English tones. ‘Come on in, you’ve had a long journey. I’ll show you to your quarters.’ And without a moment’s hesitation, in I jolly well went.

2

Joining the Regiment

When I arrived in 1952, Putney Hospital was a rather handsome, red-brick Edwardian sprawl on leafy Putney Common in south-west London. The three-storey nurses’ home was at the back, on the north side, and when I got there part of it had only just finished being rebuilt after being firebombed during the war in 1944 (it was the first incendiary bomb to land on London, in fact). I also found out, soon after, that there was supposed to be a ghost of a man dressed in a convict’s uniform (including broad black arrows), who had apparently drowned in a pond, and now glided across the common on dark nights, seemingly intent on committing a crime. The story was he had been in Putney Hospital and now local people spoke of his haunting the place from time to time. But even further back it seems the hospital was built on old plague burial grounds, where people who died of the ‘Pest’ in 1625 were taken out of London and buried, so the link between Putney Common, illness and death seemed to have a long, tragic and mysterious history. The place was green and spacious, but could also feel a bit eerie at night.

Anyway, by day there were nurses and sisters scurrying everywhere, being briskly busy in their starched, neat uniforms. It did strike me as ironic, momentarily, that I’d finally escaped the overly strict and pious regimes of home and convent in Ireland, only to end up with women wearing very similar outfits, albeit overseas and in a different context. However, I told myself, sternly, if I wobbled in my resolve, that I had battled to get here, and this was my own new adventure, so I was going to make it work, whatever I had to do – or wear. And no matter what anyone was like (they surely couldn’t be worse than Sister Margaret). A recent memory of fighting with my mother was still ringing in my ears, with her screaming, ‘You’re not going!’ and me shouting back, ‘Yes, I am, I am, I AM going to England. You can’t stop me!’ (accompanied by another walloping and loads of tears). We were like two cats in a bag, with my sisters and father needing to intervene before we drew blood.

My first few days in Putney went by in a blur: it was all a bit like going to boarding school (or so I imagined). First, I had to be fitted out for my uniform. On the ground floor of the nurses’ home, at the back of the main hospital, away from the road, there was a sewing room, with three middle-aged women stuck in it all day, sewing away happily at their Singer treadle machines. Lily, Gladys and Grace had to measure me up. They also worked out what each nurse needed individually, and then made it on the spot. It was a real home from home, for me, as I could imagine my mother being there, too, tape-measure round her neck, pins in her mouth, peering critically at their handiwork and ‘tutting’ at their sloppy stitches (‘Will you take a look at that – really!’). The women’s job was to actually make our uniforms, and then adjust them or re-use them, passing them on from nurse to nurse (definitely familiar ‘make-do-and-mend’ territory for me, especially reminiscent of the lean war years).

I was to be issued with three uniforms, so I would have one on, and one off in the hospital laundry, which was also on site, and one spare (as they always got dirty somehow). The dresses were pale-blue and white fine pinstriped, thick cotton, and down to our ankles nearly. We were also issued with seven white, starched aprons, one of which had to be pinned at the bib, at the front, and tied round the waist (I’m proud to say that mine was a tiny sixteen inches then). There were also starched collars and cuffs, which we had to keep absolutely spotless. Both aprons and cuffs had to be changed immediately they got mucky, which they obviously did on the ward, as we didn’t have plastic aprons or rubber gloves back then. Also, if we rolled up our sleeves to the elbows, we had to put on elasticated white cuffs to keep them up and smart.

Underneath the uniform we were to wear thick black Lyle stockings, which had to be darned immediately if you got a run or snag (we did the darning at night, ourselves). This was all finished off by black lace-up sensible shoes, which had to be buffed until they shone. There was an absolutely ‘no jewellery’ rule, except for a brooch-style Smiths watch that I pinned on my right apron breast. This was to be used for taking patients’ pulses. Also, definitely no make-up allowed, and our nails had to be inspected daily for cleanliness. Then hair had to be scrimped back tightly under our hats and any wayward hair (and mine was extremely wayward, like the rest of me) had to be pinned tightly into place. In fact, I’d cut off my beloved black plait, which reached nearly to my waist, in Ireland before I came, to my mother’s horror, so I had a newly manageable short style with a fringed bob.

Most importantly, our belts reflected our status: a virginal white belt for our first year, a royal blue one for our second and a serious black one for our third. This last belt had a special silver buckle which denoted we’d made it through, once we’d passed all our exams and had qualified – and survived. But what I really loved, most of all, were the outdoor capes. We had waist-length navy-blue woollen capes with a fabulous crimson lining, which we wore over our uniforms. It was a real Florence Nightingale touch and I felt wonderful in mine. They had red cross-over tapes to keep them in place – oh, I did feel like a proper nurse as I flounced along, my cape swishing in the wind. Very heroic, like something out of a film like Gone with the Wind.

But, horror of horrors, there were the hats. At first, making my hat correctly (which I had to most days) seemed like trying to climb a mountain like Everest (which wouldn’t be conquered until the next year, in 1953). We were given a fiercely starched square of white linen and we were taught by Sister Tutor (our lovely teacher, Angela Frobisher, who was kind, motherly and stocky), over and over, how to fold it into proper nurse’s attire. It seemed a total impossibility at first and I was all fingers and thumbs. I was half waiting for Sister Margaret’s ring to grind itself into my fumbling fingers or thump me in the temple, as I struggled to fold the blasted thing into a butterfly shape resembling a pukka Putney nurse’s hat. I had to fold it on my knee, and then pleat it, and it had to be pinned to my head, perfectly. The air would turn blue while I struggled, at first. In the third year, when we became staff nurses, we got two strings and a bow under our chins, as did the sisters, so the hats looked like little bonnets. The hats also changed in shape according to status: so staff nurses’ hats were different from Sister’s, which was different from Matron’s, whose was the most elegant and refined. We did look a sight, but I was secretly pleased and proud at finally being eligible to wear a trainee nurse’s hat at all.

The nurse’ home was at the north end of the hospital, and was three storeys high. We first years were on the middle level, with the second and third years on the top floor, and the doctors’ on call and sisters’ night duty sleeping rooms (separate, of course) on the ground floor. Our own bedrooms were small, cell-like but pleasant; clean, but very basic. I could see a large rambling lawn out of my window and, beyond it, Putney Common’s trees and bushes and local red-brick terraces. There was a single bed, with a wooden headboard, a tiny gas fire (no central heating then), an ottoman (storage chest), wardrobe, a little basin under the window and a small brown dressing table and mirror. I had two pairs of flowery winceyette pyjamas and a vest, which my mother insisted on me wearing to keep warm.

I had to learn a whole new routine. A maid knocked on the door at six thirty every morning, and I had to get straight up, spit spot, no messing. In the winter, it was tough to get up to no heating and in the dark. I had a quick wash at the basin, then it was on with all the uniform, and a clean apron (which crossed over at the back) every day. There were no tights then, so the Lyle stockings were held up with suspenders which hung from a suspender belt, which we wore over our knickers. When we lost our suspenders, we used buttons or pennies which we twisted in the tops to keep our stockings up. We were allowed silk as we got more senior, and tights (American Tan, of course) didn’t come in until the early 1960s – so thick, mendable stockings were the rule. In my pockets I always had to have a pen and a pair of scissors – and my only allowed adornment was my little pinned-on watch. When our clothes were dirty we put them outside the door, in a marked laundry box, and they were taken away and laundered and brought back crisply starched and ironed in a week. It all had to be absolutely perfect.

Then I had to make my bed, using ‘hospital corners’ at the ends with the sheets and blanket, folded over tightly like an envelope shape, to keep everything in. Then I had to tidy my room for daily ‘inspection’. There was no privacy at all, as Home Sister would suddenly burst in, unannounced, and if your room was not tidy, or the bed corners not made properly, she would rip off all the bedding and throw it on the floor and shout, ‘Do it again, nurse, not good enough!’ Or she would throw open my dressing-table drawers and, if things were not tickety-boo, tip the contents out onto the floor, and snap, ‘No, no, no, this will never do – now tidy it up, nurse. Jump to it.’ I was actually quite tidy by nature – my mother had trained me well – so I was pleased when Home Sister pronounced after a couple of weeks, ‘Tidiest drawers in the whole place, Powell. Well done.’ It was like one of those Carry On films, very Hattie Jacques. It was hilarious. After so many years with the nuns I felt there was nothing I couldn’t handle, although Home Sister was very scary at first.

On Sunday mornings we went to church. So it was up at seven, and then we would be trooping down the road together to mass. We had to put money in the collection, but because we were broke most of the time we’d put in our stocking buttons or anything else that came to hand, much to the Father’s disdain. Then we had to be in bed by ten o’clock at night and there was official ‘lights out’. It was a complete institution and there was no messing about it. It was certainly like my home all over again. In fact, the nurses’ home was like I imagined a strict boarding school would be like in the kind of Angela Brazil book that I had loved reading back home. I’d run away from the overly pious and unforgiving strictness of Ireland only to land in another fierce regime.

We earned ten pounds a month while we were training. Right from the beginning we needed to buy Woodbines from Bert the porter. I had learned to smoke surreptitiously at thirteen, and, sad to say, smoking had already become an essential part of my life, ironically for someone concerned about health. Of course, we didn’t make the connection between smoking and health back then, as doctors often recommended cigarettes to patients to relax them. It was seen as a sophisticated pastime and almost everybody did it, without thinking. Plus, I was always hungry and tired, so smoking was a way of quelling my appetite and exhaustion. Buying the Woodbines, which were fiercely strong, was a total secret, of course, but we knew when we got our wages the first person we paid was Bert – and at four old pennies for a packet of eight, it soon mounted up. Bert would keep a tab when we didn’t have any money, and we’d have to cough up (literally) once our wages came in. He would also get us the Merrydown cider that we liked to drink illicitly after lights out, to relax and have a giggle, so we could easily spend a third of our wages without even going out of the nurses’ home. Our daily food was served in the hospital dining room. It was cooked on site, and was very basic. It was always quite plentiful and hearty, but stodgy: pies, puddings, potatoes, lots of starch. I remember we were always starving, and always demolished what was on our plates.