Pam Weaver - Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes - The memoirs of a nursery nurse in the 1960s

The hand-knitted baby cardigans and other delicates were washed in soap flakes but they were the industrial type and the devil to get to melt in the water.

If the weather was too damp or wet to dry the clothes outside we used to hang them in industrial driers, which were lit by gas. It was little wonder that the laundry had its own unique smell but the one blessing of laundry duty was that it gave a homesick sixteen-year-old a few moments to cry alone without being castigated or ridiculed. I was embarrassed to be seen to be upset and felt I should be grown up enough not to want my mother, but it was a struggle.

The person directly in charge of the Baby room, Sister Weymouth, had a staff nursery nurse and a nursery assistant to help her look after six babies. Sister Weymouth was an older woman, perhaps in her fifties. She was a skinny woman with a stooped back and spindly arms. Although a little distant, she was fair. She wore a navy coloured sister’s uniform but without the cap and cuffs. With such a high level of staffing it’s easy to understand how we managed to keep the place looking so spick and span and the reason why the type of children’s home I was working in became a thing of the past. That number of employees would cripple today’s councils with their ever-tightening budgets.

Working in the milk kitchen was like being in a pure white space capsule. We wore masks and gowns. We were taught to wash our hands between each feed preparation and the whole milk kitchen was washed from floor to ceiling every day. Incidentally, all the babies were fed on National Dried Milk, a government issue basic milk powder. I had been in the nursery for three months before I was allowed in the milk kitchen and even then I was strictly supervised. Sister Weymouth peered at me over the top of her facemask. ‘Level each scoop exactly,’ she said. ‘Too much and the baby will overdose on his vitamins and may become very ill. If you don’t fill the scoop right to the edge, the poor baby will starve.’

I was still so scared of putting a foot wrong, it never occurred to me she might be exaggerating. Three grains of National Dried Milk powder too many and I’d blow the kid up. Three grains too few and I could be accused of running a concentration camp … oh Lord, what a responsibility!

The system of child care by today’s standard was very old fashioned. For instance, meal times were rigidly adhered to for even the tiniest baby. If a baby had to be fed at six o’clock, that’s exactly what happened. I was once made to sit with a crying baby on my lap, willing the stubborn hands of the clock to move from 5.50 to 6 p.m., but not daring to put the teat in his mouth until the appointed time. If I had been caught feeding the baby before 6 p.m. it would be back to the nappy bins and floors for me. Of course it was totally ridiculous for the baby. If he had been crying for twenty minutes, he was often too exhausted to take his bottle anyway, but the rules were the rules.

My turn for being on ‘Lates’ came around again and Nurse Adams was still on night duty.

‘Don’t forget to wake the night nurse this time,’ smiled Isolde and I went to get my early supper.

She had to be kidding. After the fiasco of the week before, that was the last thing I would do. My supper was steamed cod roe on toast. It looked horribly grey and was swimming in milk, which had made the toast all soggy again. I had never experienced such ‘delights’ before but first of all I had a job to do. I took a cup of tea to Nurse Adams, making absolutely sure it was just the way she liked it, milky with no sugar. My hands were trembling slightly as I walked up the back stairs to the pokey little room in the attic where the night nurse slept. At the top of the stairs, I steadied my nerves, tipped the small spill in the saucer back into the cup, knocked lightly on the door and walked in.

‘Good evening, Nurse Adams,’ I said.

At exactly the same moment as I walked in the door, her alarm clock went off. She stirred slightly, reached out and switched it off but she said nothing. I stood still, waiting for her to sit up and take the cup but she didn’t.

There was a small locker on the opposite side of the bed. The room itself was so small I would have to squeeze my way past her clothes at the end of the bed to get round there so I decided to lean over her to put the cup on the table. It seemed to be the path of least resistance. And after all, she was still half asleep.

But wouldn’t you know it? At the precise moment the tea was halfway across the bed, she flung her arms up to stretch and yawn. There was a loud clatter as the cup and saucer parted company and the lukewarm tea fell onto the bed. ‘Oh! I’m sorry …’

‘You!’ she shrieked, opening one bloodshot eye. ‘Get out, get out!’ A soggy pillow followed me out of the door and I had gained the reputation of being the village idiot.

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