A Nurse and Mother

Brought up in Lincolnshire, Evelyn Prentis (real name Evelyn Taws) left home at eighteen to become a nurse. She later moved to London during the war, where she married and raised her family. Like so many other nurses, she went back to hospital and used any spare time she might have had bringing up her children and running her home. Born in 1915, she sadly died in 2001 at the age of eighty-five.

Evelyn published five books about her life as a nurse, and Ebury Press is reissuing them all. A Nurse in Time, A Nurse in Action and A Nurse and Mother are the first three, and the next two books will follow shortly.

Precious time off-duty for Evelyn, Barbara and Judith.

Evelyn and Barbara grappling with Olympic rings, summer 1952.

About the Book

At the end of the Second World War, as husbands came back to Civvy Street their wives had the luxury of staying at home with the children. For a short while at least. Soon Evelyn realised she had to find part-time work to make ends meet, and to her astonishment she was offered part-time hours at her old hospital.

The day-to-day job hadn’t changed much, but she was now a nurse and mother. Whooping cough and measles could still kill a small child, and the early ’50s polio epidemic left the whole country in shock.

But the nurses worked hard, moaned incessantly about their aching feet and yet found things to laugh at, just as they did from the start of their training. If old soldiers never die, then neither do nurses.

Part One

Chapter One

THE WAR WAS over. It had taken two curtain calls before it finally came to an end, the second more final and more dramatic than the first.

When we heard the news about the bomb on Hiroshima the event was too distant to have us trembling with fear as some of us had done while our own bombs were falling around us. The shock waves that resulted from it took a long time to travel from Japan, and when they eventually reached us I was one of the many who secretly wondered whether enough good had come out of the evil to justify it. It was a question we were to ponder over and argue about for a long time, without getting any nearer an answer that would satisfy all our doubts. But at least the bomb brought the war to an uneasy end, which even I had to admit was a blessing, however much I disliked the way the blessing was disguised.

The first Victory Day was a splendid affair; an occasion for rejoicing unmarred by lingering doubts, vain soul-searchings or sleep-disturbing guilt complexes. A time for the lifting of the blackout and the raising of hopes that tomorrow – and all the tomorrows thereafter – would be perfect. They weren’t but the thought that they might be kept the people dancing in the streets and falling into fountains far into the night, determined in the shortest possible time to make up for the dreariness of the past six years. Children were put into fancy dresses and funny paper hats, flags were found and frantically waved and jealously hoarded jellies were produced from the backs of dark cupboards to be cunningly transformed into wobbly rabbits or castles on the point of collapse, adding blobs of watery colour to the Union-Jack-draped trestle tables and making the children’s eyes grow round with the wonder of it all. It was the first chance most of them had had for such unbridled gluttony and would perhaps be the last for a long time to come. Though the war was as good as over rationing was still with us; coupons were almost as important as money, and there were quarrelsome queues for potatoes.

I might have made a paper hat myself or even a wobbly rabbit but for the fact that my infant daughter was still at an age where anything weightier than a woolly bonnet would have sat uneasily on her silky head, and the thought of the harm a spoonful of jelly might do to her tender tummy was enough to make me tremble. It may have done no harm at all, but I had been a nurse for too long to think of exposing her to such a terrible risk. I kept strictly to the rules I had been taught to keep in hospital and fed my child, and later my children, with the right and proper things, which didn’t include extras like jelly while they were still at the dried milk stage. I also turned a deaf ear to their pleading when they tried to tell me they were hungry less than five minutes before their next feed was due. I knew that such childish rebellion had to be put down from the start if they were ever to become balanced and responsible adults. Both my children were going on for twenty before I discovered Dr Spock and learned how sadly I had mismanaged the whole thing. By denying them the luxury of feeds on demand, total exemption from potty training and uninhibited self-expression I had done untold damage to their emotional development. But it was too late then. What was done was done.

I brooded over it while I was drinking a cup of tea one morning, and then put the Spock book back on the shelf and comforted myself with the thought that millions of mothers past and present had brought up their families without guidance from the good doctor and seemed to have made a reasonably good job of it. But I still watched anxiously for signs of emotional damage. I kept remembering the hours I had made them sit on potties and the scoldings I gave them if the result of the sitting hadn’t justified the bright red rings they wore almost permanently around their dimpled little bottoms.

As well as not making a paper hat or a wobbly rabbit I didn’t dance in the street or fall into a fountain throughout the entire Victory celebrations, though I lost at least one of my inhibitions before the revelling was over. When my neighbours came knocking on my door and invited me to a party they were having I told them that I was teetotal and didn’t go to parties. I didn’t bother to explain that the main reason I didn’t go to parties was because I never got asked. Or at least I never got asked a second time. Being strictly teetotal had always been something of a drawback to me on festive occasions, or on any other occasion that called for a little loosening of the inhibitions. I didn’t loosen easily, which made me less than an asset at any informal gathering that depended on more than a cup of tea for its success.

But the neighbours who knocked at my door refused to take no for an answer to their invitation and at last, much against my better judgement, I bundled my sleeping angel into several shawls, put her in her pram and went next door, already dreading the debauchery I knew I would be faced with when I got there. We parked the pram in the pram-packed kitchen and went into the front room where the party was in full swing. I was greatly relieved when somebody offered me a glass of orange juice. It was only after the glass had been refilled twice that it began to dawn on me that the orange juice I was drinking had a subtly different flavour from the juice that was handed out to us every week at the Welfare Clinic. The headache I woke up with the next morning told me beyond all doubt that my teetotal days were over; it also made me vow never to drink more than two glasses of anything that looked like orange juice but tasted subtly different. I didn’t always keep the vow but I never broke it enough to get more than a headache the following morning, and after years of being strictly teetotal I was forced to admit that the party I went to on Victory night was the best I had ever been to.

Soon after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima the servicemen began pouring off the trains clutching their final travel warrants in their hands and looking very dapper in their chalk-striped demob suits. The homecoming wasn’t always the ecstatic reunion they had dreamed about while they were away. Returning husbands who had grown accustomed over the years to the comradeship of danger often found themselves missing the comradeship, some even missed the danger. Those who had dreamed of civvy street from a long way off were amazed how drab civvy street could look when viewed from one of its terraced houses. And however fearful the encounters with the enemy or the Regimental Sergeant Major had been, the encounters with the clerks behind the desk at the labour exchange were never the happy little get-togethers that had been promised the war-weary men. There were pinpricks which if less painful than bullet wounds could still cause a lot of discomfort.

Neither were the wives always as jubilant as they had expected to be once they had their man about the house again. Those who had become proficient at unblocking a sink in minutes were apt to grow tetchy with husbands who spent hours on their hands and knees searching for a stopcock, especially when the result of the search was a pool of water on the newly scrubbed kitchen floor and a sink as blocked as it had been before the search began. Many a wife had gone right through the war without a stopcock. Some didn’t know that such a thing existed. A knitting needle long enough to poke down the plug hole and some hot water with a lump of common soda dissolved in it were all they ever needed to dislodge whatever was lodged in the pipes. But it was a waste of time trying to tell a demobbed husband this. He had just come out of the army, the navy or the air force. He knew all the scientific ways of dealing with blocked-up sinks. He threw scorn on the bucket of soda water and spurned the offer of a knitting needle, however unsuccessful his scientific methods turned out to be.

Nor were the children immune from it all. Those who had been warned what life with father would be like unless they mended their ways and crept round the house like mice when he came home hadn’t looked forward to having him home. The ogre with the belt they had so often been threatened with loomed menacingly in the background, making it hard for father to change his image however loving he set out to be. Not every father had the patience to go on being patient in the teeth of his children’s hostility. Some gave up trying and became the ogre with the belt instead.

Even the babies didn’t find the war-to-peace transition easy. Those who had heard no other sound in the night but the soft murmur of their mother’s voice took instant fright when a strange harsh voice came out of the darkness. They also took umbrage. Though they couldn’t possibly have understood a word of what was being said in the dark, their instinct told them that none of it was being said to them. By the same sixth sense they were able to deduce that none of what was currently being done in the dark was being done for their benefit. Suddenly having to take a back seat in the house where for so long they had been the central character caused them uncontrollable grief. They gave vent to their grief with fits of screaming which left the neighbours in no doubt that they were being murdered. The screams caused as many rifts between frustrated husband and anxious mother as they did between resentful father and furiously jealous baby; they had a tendency to break out at the most inconvenient moment.

It was usually while I was feeding the pig-bin with my household scraps that I heard of the post-war problems that were besetting my neighbours. We lived in a tiny terraced house not far from the house where we had first lodged when we got married. Nance, our landlady, had startled me one day by telling me that she was going to be divorced. Until then I had only read about divorce in the newspapers. Nobody I knew had ever done anything as daring. If any of my married acquaintances found themselves growing a little disillusioned with their partner they kept quiet about it and went on lying on the lumpy bed they had made for themselves, getting what comfort they could from it, or they continued living with the lumps for the sake of the children. Nance had no children, which was perhaps one of the reasons for her refusal to put up with the lumps any longer.

It was Nance who had helped me to find the small house and had let us have a few bits of furniture and a mat or two at a price which she assured us were well below their market value. She had also kindly offered to help me with the distempering. She said that reaching up wasn’t good for somebody in my condition: it could get the cord round the baby’s neck quicker than anything. Since the baby was due any minute, it was a matter of supreme importance that nothing dire should befall it. Nance distempered the whole house in a shocking shade of pink, then went over it all again with a piece of lace curtain which she dipped into a bucket of distemper of a darker shade of pink and dabbed it across the walls. She said it was called stippling and assured me it was the latest thing in interior decorating. It was a lot cheaper than wallpaper, she said. When I suggested timidly that maybe the walls should have been stripped of the old paper before the new distemper was applied she reminded me tartly that she was doing the job, and if I thought I could do it any better she would be quite happy to stand aside and watch while I put the baby’s future in jeopardy by getting the cord entangled. I mixed another bucket of distemper and tried not to think of my mother’s frenzied attacks on the walls in the spring and autumn.

When my husband came home to the little terraced house for his first long leave he didn’t take kindly to the shocking pink background, or to the lace-curtain dabbed cabbages that ran amok across every wall. After he had gone twice through his repertoire of bad language suitable to be used in front of a woman he tore into the town and bought packets of distemper of a less vivid colour and a proper distemper brush. He worked non-stop throughout his leave and, at the end of it, though the blotches could still be faintly discerned, they were at least a little easier to live with. He went back to camp a tired man, ready for the comparative leisure of square bashing, picket duties and brisk marches round the perimeter. He had only just gone when the bump that I had been carrying round under my smock for nine long months went slowly and painfully down and our first daughter was born.

The pig-bin was shared by all the other houses in the terrace. Every day a farmer drove up, hoisted the bin on to his cart, replaced it with another and went off with our contributions to the obesity of his pigs. The pig-bin played an important part in the war-effort; it was also a popular meeting place for airing views, commiserating happily with the woes of a mutual friend or rejoicing sadly over the downfall of a common enemy.

Until the Victory-night party when I had been accepted by my neighbours and proved to them that I wasn’t as stand-offish as they had always thought I was, the founder members of the discussion group at the pig-bin had stood in tight lipped silence waiting for me to go away before they continued with what they were saying before I arrived on the scene. From the way their voices tailed off when I got within earshot I could only conclude that I was the chosen topic for the day. The suspicion was confirmed after I became a group member. I quickly learned that when one was there we ran down one who wasn’t and when the other was there we picked on the absent one. The circle was wide but seldom vicious.

Many of the problems that were discussed over the potato peelings seemed trivial and easily solved to those who didn’t have to solve them. Those who did were sometimes thrown into despair by them. When Edna who lived at the top of the terrace told us about her son who had started cheeking his father, Selina from down the other end saw nothing in the situation to get alarmed about. ‘All he needs is a clip round the ear’ole,’ she said, throwing a shovel full of red hot cinders into the pig-bin. We were not allowed to throw cinders in the bin but Selina lived by her own rules.

‘It’s easy for you to talk,’ said Edna in a defeated way. ‘You don’t have to put up with it. Besides he’s fifteen and bigger than his dad. He wouldn’t stand still long enough to be clipped round the ear’ole.’ Selina slammed the lid down on the smoking bin and stormed off leaving a strong smell of burning cabbage stalks behind her.

Neither size nor age had ever been things to be reckoned with in her house. That she was their mother raised her in stature far above her sons, whatever age and however tall they were. She had brought up six boys, clipping them round the ear’ole whenever she thought they would benefit from it. Each of them was a credit to her.

When Edna’s son came to an inevitable bad end, Selina said she had always said he would, then she went off to do what she could to comfort poor Edna.

Dilys was the first in the terrace to show signs of cracking up under the strain of the armistice. This delighted Edna. She and Dilys were sworn enemies. They had quarrelled over something so long ago that neither of them could remember what it was they had quarrelled about but they hadn’t spoken to each other since. They turned their heads and looked pointedly in opposite directions whenever they came within snubbing distance.

Dilys was a well-built girl. She had a pair of sturdy knees that rubbed together when she walked. Her legs had a purple mottling from being huddled too close to the fire in winter and despite her youth they were already knotted with varicose veins caused by a serious weight problem. While the war was on she had spent her days sorting out ration-book problems in the local food office and her nights dreaming of her soldier husband who should have been snoring beside her instead of somewhere in the middle of Salisbury Plain cooking terrible meals for his battalion. Now that the war was over and he had been demobbed, Dilys still worked in the food office by day but her nights hadn’t quite come up to her expectations, or rather we gathered they had surpassed her wildest dreams.

At first we were unaware of the havoc that peace had brought to Dilys’s love life. For a day or two after the reunion she had kept us enthralled with a blow by blow account of the breathtaking variations on a similar theme that her lusty young husband had thought up for their mutual delight the night before. Some of the gymnastic feats she described to us could only have been performed at the risk of damaging something and, with a figure like Dilys’s, none of them could have been easy. But, as Edna said spitefully after we had been left marvelling: ‘Her husband being an army cook all them years he’s probably used to humping bloody great sacks of potatoes about.’

Edna had a daughter as well as a no-good son. The daughter was as thin as a rake and had been loosely engaged to a Scottish Highlander since the night right at the beginning of the war when he put his hand on her knee in the pictures. She was still waiting for the invitation to go to Scotland to meet his family. We of the discussion group had decided long ago that the closest family he was likely to have would be his own sons and daughters, and he wouldn’t be too eager to invite Edna’s daughter to meet them, especially if their mother happened to be around when the meeting was planned. It took Edna a long time to face up to the fact that her daughter’s Highlander was never going to marry her. When he stopped sending a card at Christmas we felt very sorry for Edna: we realized she’d lost a lot of face. We felt sorry for the deserted daughter as well.

Selina expressed our sympathy in a few well-chosen words. ‘I should forget about him if I were you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s as I’ve always said, good riddance to bad rubbish, and there’s as good a fish in the sea as ever came out of it.’ She paused for a moment and looked thoughtful. ‘I don’t suppose she ever got the chance to look up his kilt either, which is a pity.’

Edna’s daughter eventually married someone else, but he was in a wheelchair at thirty and dead by forty. After that she came home to live with her mother and didn’t get married again. Neither did she ever put on any weight.

It was only a week or so after Dilys’s husband was demobbed that she startled us with her outburst. We were all in Selina’s house when it happened. She had asked us in for a cup of tea. ‘Come informal,’ she’d said, as if we were in the habit of climbing into a ballgown to partake of a cup of tea.

We were halfway through our second chocolate finger – Selina had a friend who worked in the Maypole and could occasionally get hold of a few extras without having to surrender coupons for them – when somebody asked Dilys if she was feeling all right. She had been looking a bit pale lately and not her usual happy self. To everybody’s horror Dilys put her cup and plate down on the floor and burst into tears. We looked away. None of us had seen Dilys in tears before, and we were not prepared for the sight.

‘It’s him,’ she gulped after she had blown her nose on the handkerchief that somebody hastily drew from a knitting bag. We pricked up our ears. We could only assume that she was referring to her husband and any disclosures she made about him were bound to be interesting.

‘He never gives over,’ sniffed Dilys sadly. ‘It’s last thing at night, first thing in the morning. I don’t mind telling you I’ve just about had enough of it.’ She yawned widely leaving us to hazard a guess at what she’d just about had enough of. There were no prizes offered for guessing correctly.

Selina got up from her chair and went across to the sofa. ‘There now, don’t fret, Dill,’ she said kindly, patting Dilys’s hand. ‘After all, considering all he went without while he was away he probably thinks he’s got a right to do a bit of catching up.’ Selina was always telling us how she’d given that sort of thing up after she’d started the change. She’d had to put her foot down very firmly in bed she told us.

Some of us had doubts about the duration of Dilys’s husband’s celibacy but we nibbled our fingers and said nothing.

‘Well, all right I’ll grant you that,’ conceded Dilys yawning again, even more cavernously. ‘But he surely didn’t have to catch up with it all in one week, did he?’

There were nods of sympathetic agreement from some of her listeners, mostly from those who had taken comfort from snuggling down with a good book after the sleeping partners had forsaken the marriage bed to answer the call of duty. When the time came for the book to be laid aside in favour of other pursuits it hadn’t always been easy to switch from a little light reading to a lot of heavy breathing.

Dilys lost more sleep and even a little weight adjusting to the switch. She only went back to being her old fat happy self when she told us she was expecting and her mother had said it might be twins seeing as there were twins on her father’s side. It was twins. They were fat and happy just like Dilys. They kept their parents far too busy in the night making feeds and changing nappies to leave much time for anything else. But they were worth all the sacrifices he was having to make for them, said Dilys’s husband proudly, as he pushed the pram his mother had given them in honour of the twins being her first grandchildren.

Even Edna had to admit the babies were lovely. She started knitting little pink and blue things and soon she and Dilys were the best of friends, their hatchets buried, their differences forgotten.

I had my own post-war problems but none of them as noteworthy as Edna’s or Dilys’s. I went on reading in bed after my airman husband came home but chose books from the library that could be put down without losing the thread. I continued to unblock the sink with a knitting needle and a handful of soda thrown into a bucket of water, but I was happy to get help with lighting the fires. I wasn’t good at lighting fires. However carefully I arranged paper and sticks, and however many matches I applied to the arrangement the results were invariably the same – a crackling great flame shooting straight up the chimney, then nothing and the whole process to be gone through again. Once, disheartened by successive pyrogenic failures, I threw a can of paraffin on the smouldering sticks, but the flames shot out instead of up and I amazed my friends for a long time with a jagged fringe and no eyebrows.

There were other things I wasn’t terribly efficient at. Being a nurse had not given me a light hand with pastry or a sure touch with a sewing needle. I could have whipped round a ward with a trolley full of bedpans in less time than it took me to attach a button to a shirt. Not one of the sponge cakes I made after I got married weighed an ounce less than the linseed poultices I slapped on the patients while I was doing my training. I got into a greater muddle with the household accounts than I did with the complicated sums that used to have to be done to work out the required dosage of a dangerous drug. Being a nurse had not prepared me for the tragedies and disasters of being a housewife. I wept bitter tears over the apple pie that slipped through my scorched fingers and landed upside down in a squashy heap on the hearth. I watched with heavy heart as my cakes sank slowly in the middle, and I shrieked with hysteria when a mouse pattered across the kitchen floor. Though I had seen a million cockroaches congregated together in a hospital kitchen they were as nothing to the one solitary mouse that careered across my own kitchen floor.

Nurses learn many things while they are training to be nurses but little of what they learn is of much practical help when an apple pie falls to the ground only seconds before it is due to be dished up, or when a wellsprung mouse trap needs to be baited with cheese. Knowing how to give an enema is no substitute for not knowing how to turn a sheet sides to middle. The mysteries of housework gave me as many headaches as had the mysteries of anatomy and physiology when I was grappling with them. As with the anatomy and physiology, many of the finer points of housework were to remain a mystery to me for ever.

Chapter Two

HOWEVER GRIEVOUS WAS the tragedy of the apple pie, there was an even greater tragedy to follow. If the catastrophe of the sunken cakes had been no act of God, the floods that came to ruin many of our fixtures and fittings most certainly were. They followed a bleak and bitter winter that sent the fuel bills soaring almost into double figures and made bed the warmest place to be in, though even bed wasn’t always proof against the icy blast which didn’t take long to find its way through a utility blanket.

There were two children to share the floods with us. The second, fitting nicely into her sister’s shrunken woollies, gave me the chance to boast about ‘my daughters’ with the utmost satisfaction.

The flood waters rose rapidly. One minute they were a silver shimmer in the distance between two rivers swollen with melting snow and lashing rain, the next they were across the road and we were awash. Soon there were waves lapping the table legs and creeping along the carpet. A chair leg floated, a cupboard door fell off, stuffing oozed wetly from beneath the sofa and a mat fell to pieces before our eyes, proving how right Nance had been to undercut the junk shops with her few mats and bits and pieces of furniture.

My husband paddled home from work and splashed into the living room, where I stood on a table with a wriggling child under each arm. He joined me on the table and we clung together waiting for rescue to come.

The man who volunteered to rescue me was of less than average height and well below bantam weight. He looked as if another inch or two of flood water would have totally submerged him. He waded in, his thigh-high boots making terrible squelching noises as he walked, did a quick calculation of my body weight, greatly enlarged with two babies and too many apple pies, then braced himself. ‘You’ll have to straddle me back,’ he said, sounding not too keen on the idea. Any hopes I might have had of being swept up in a pair of manly arms, in the way that the women in Gone with the Wind were always being swept up, went with the wind. I straddled the poor little man’s back and after one or two false starts made a less than dignified exit from my waterlogged home.

Going back there again after the waters went down was a sorry business. The lower floors were encrusted with mud, and a dado of inky slime marked where the high water line had been. Streaks of rising damp rose almost to the ceiling and the paper on the walls, which Nance and I should have torn off, now hung in soggy ribbons. Again I wept, but for more than a shattered pie crust. I wept for what I then foolishly thought was the worst blow that life could deal us.

‘Put it down to experience,’ said my husband philosophically as we were shovelling up the mud. I tried but it still hurt. It went on hurting for a long time. The sofa was never the same again.

After the floods came chicken pox, measles and whooping cough, all in quick succession and all in duplicate. The chicken pox and measles we could have lived without but the whooping cough was very much worse, especially in duplicate. At least with the earlier scourges there had been a short breathing space between one child throwing off her final itchy spot or scab and the other catching it, but with the whooping cough there was no such respite. Hardly were we back in bed after swinging the youngest by her heels to save her from choking than there came a terrible whoop from her sister’s cot and the whole terrifying cycle began again.

We sent for the doctor, but he told us that it would have to run its course and suggested that we bought a bottle of cough mixture from the chemist. He didn’t call again. He might have been a little more attentive if we hadn’t fallen a week or two behind with our contributions to a family medical scheme. We should have paid a shilling a week with unfailing regularity but a shilling was a lot to lay out unless you could be reasonably certain that somebody was going to be ill enough to benefit from it. We hadn’t reckoned on chicken pox, measles and whooping cough all in quick succession and all in duplicate. If we had we would most certainly have willingly handed over our shilling, instead of pretending we were out when the collector called.

Because the neighbours had discovered that I was a nurse before I became a mother, they expected me to have some miracle cure for the coughs that racked our children and wrecked our nights. I had no such cure. Being a nurse didn’t help at all; it only made things worse. I knew from experience that children could die of the simplest things, even of something as simple as whooping cough. I had watched them die while their mothers stood at their cot sides praying for them to live. Prayer wasn’t always enough to clear a path through congested lungs and choked-up throats. I remembered one terrible night when I was doing my training. The ambulance had brought in a child with whooping cough. He was a beautiful boy. His mother was older than most mothers of children of his age. She had waited a long time for him, and when he arrived he was the answer to all her hopes and dreams. She refused to believe that the same God who had given her her son was about to rob her of him. Her prayers for his life were not answered. Immunization and antibiotics came too late for her child; until such things became available to everybody we dosed our children with useless cough mixtures and went on praying that they would reach the climax of a whoop and start breathing properly again before it was too late.

Selina knocked on the door one morning to enquire how the children were. I had invited her in, and she kindly offered to pass on to me some remedies for whooping cough which she assured me were never known to fail. They only failed that day because we didn’t have any of the things that the remedies required to make them a success.

‘We need a bit of hot tar,’ she said, as she held one child’s head over a wash bowl while I pounded the other on the back. ‘A bit of hot tar would get right down into their lungs and do the trick in no time.’

‘Where would we find hot tar?’ I asked, not because I had any faith in it as a remedy but simply because I had got to the point where I would have welcomed a whole cauldron of tar in my sitting room if it would only have stopped the children coughing.

‘It’s a pity there isn’t a bit of road works going on somewhere in the vicinity,’ said Selina. I could think of no road works going on in the vicinity and neither could she.

‘What about the gas works?’ I said. ‘There would be some hot tar there, perhaps.’ I didn’t know whether there would be hot tar at the gas works or not but I stopped wondering about it when I remembered that the nearest gasometer was ten miles away.

Selina went off to empty the wash bowl ready for the next bout of coughing to fill it again. She came back with another card up her sleeve.

‘Taking them up in an aeroplane would be the next best thing,’ she said. I looked at her over the youngest’s navy blue face. The youngest must have beaten all records for the length of time she held her breath during a spasm of coughing. The idea of taking them up in an aeroplane was as far fetched as suddenly coming across a cauldron of hot tar behind the kitchen door. Despite the glories of the Battle of Britain, and all the things that Mr Churchill had said about the many owing so much to the few, the many were still not too blasé about aeroplanes. A single one flying over the rooftops could have us staring at the sky with interest. There wasn’t the remotest chance of getting our poor little whoopers up in an aeroplane. I waited for Selina’s next infallible cure for whooping cough. I didn’t have to wait long.

‘Goose-grease,’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘My poor old mother used to swear by goose-grease when we were kids. She always kept a basinful of it in the larder and when any of us had a chesty cough she used to spread some on a bit of old flannel, slap it on and leave it to soak it in. It worked like a charm.’

Under my close interrogation Selina admitted that her poor old mother hadn’t sworn by goose-grease for a long time. Succulent roast goose wasn’t a regular feature of anybody’s diet and without the goose there could be no basinful of grease in the larder ready to be slapped on at the first croak or wheeze.

‘Oh well, not to worry,’ she said, grinning. ‘It’s perhaps just as well there isn’t any. It used to smell terrible after it had been soaking in for a day or two. Nobody would sit next to us at school when we had a cough.’

She went off home and I resigned myself to more sleepless nights and more terrifying moments waiting for the youngest to draw breath again.

Like the flood waters the coughs gradually went away, leaving none of us unscathed by the experience. The children were pale and sickly and we were weary after so many broken nights.

‘Do you think we should take them to visit your parents for a few days?’ my husband said, with an annual holiday due. I tossed and turned throughout the night in an agony of doubt as to whether or not the effort of taking two young children on the manytrained journey from the outskirts of London to the depths of Lincolnshire would be worth whatever benefit they might get from it. In the morning I looked at their small pale faces, remembered the abundance of fresh air that abounded where my parents lived and started making plans for the holiday.

The very small smallholding where I had spent most of my childhood had changed little over the years. When the war came it swept like a flurrying wind over cottage, barn and pigsty, leaving no trace that it had ever been there except for the patches of milk-white arabis, or snow-in-the-mountains as the country folk call it, which the soldiers had planted and left as a perennial memorial to their temporary occupation of my father’s field. The little brook ran as it had always run, beside the house, past the nettle-bedded privy and on through the gorse bushes in the paddock. Trains rumbled by puffing white smoke and whistling an amiable greeting to the level-crossing keeper. The Co-op man called on Thursday but in a motorized vehicle now and not the horse-drawn covered wagon that had made Thursday so special when I was a child and left us with a warm and pungent top dressing to put on the rhubarb. The horse had been a creature of habit. It never failed to deliver the top dressing while it waited patiently for the Co-op man to deliver the groceries.

My mother washed on Monday, did the bedrooms on Tuesday, relentlessly scrubbed and polished on Wednesday and again on Thursday, baked on Friday, prepared the Sunday dinner on Saturday and went to church twice every Sunday. If it were ever possible for time to stand still, then it almost certainly stood still in the little house down the lane and up the cart track where we were planning on taking the children to convalesce after the winter of floods, chicken pox, measles and whooping cough.

The plans had to be made with meticulous attention to detail. Though we had done the journey with both children in their infancy, taking two at the walking stage required considerable forethought. We bought shoes and socks with the rent money, paid the rent with the coal money and didn’t answer the door when the coalman came knocking. With fares to pay and sundries to buy there was nothing left for him in the tin marked ‘coalman’ which we kept on the shelf beside the tin marked ‘milkman’. In the hope of softening the blow a little we dropped a note through his letter box apologizing for being out when he called and promising payment in full the next time we saw him. We were pleasantly surprised when he didn’t rush round at once to re-claim what was left of the last lot he delivered. We had never owed the coalman money before; we didn’t know what steps he would take.

The holiday was lovely. There was as much fresh air as anybody could have wished for. The children sniffed it in noisily realizing that it had a different smell from the air they were used to sniffing in. My mother smiled indulgently while they did things that I would have been smacked for doing when I was their age and my father called them his little birdies and doted on them. Neither of them fell down the well in the garden, though they lived dangerously teetering on the edge looking for the toad that their grandfather told them lived down there. He had told me the same story when I was a child, but I never saw the toad. He said that every well needed a toad to purify the water. It had always seemed to me to be an odd way of purifying water but certainly not as complicated as the sewage system I had to learn about after I became a nurse.

Contents

About the Author

About the Book

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two