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

      Chapter 6

      Having a baby should be a joyful occasion but Mrs Field knew the minute her baby was born that there was something wrong. The nurse whisked her away without showing her to her mother. As they waited for the placenta to come, Mrs Field’s stomach was in knots.

      ‘Can I see my baby?’ she asked over and over again.

      ‘In a minute … nurse is just seeing to her …’

      She still hadn’t seen her child when the midwife had cleaned her up. As she finished, she leaned over and whispered, ‘Before you see your baby, Mrs Field, the doctor wants a word.’

      ‘I’m so sorry my dear …’ was all she heard. His mouth was working but she had already shut the words out.

      After he’d talked to Mrs Field, they brought the baby, washed and wrapped in a snowy-white towel. She regarded her mother with an unfocussed stare but Mrs Field turned away and faced the wall.

      Barbara Field had been born with no ears. She had a dip on one side of her head where her ear should have been and a sealed hole on the other side. Her birth defects were caused by her mother taking Thalidomide, a sedative which was introduced in the late 1950s and used to treat morning sickness. It was prescribed by doctors from 1957 until 1961, and at the time scientists didn’t think any drug taken by a pregnant woman could pass across the placental barrier and harm the developing foetus. Sadly it proved to be the cause of many horrific birth defects. As many as ten thousand children from forty-six countries were affected, many of them dying at birth. Barbara was one of the four hundred and sixty-six survivors born in the United Kingdom.

      Barbara was Dickie’s favourite. She would take her into her office-cum-sitting room and give her special toys to play with. She was an adorable kid, cheeky and with a mischievous streak.

      One day, while we were bathing the children, Barbara grabbed a bottle of shampoo and drank some. My roommate Marilyn managed to snatch it away before she’d taken too much but it gave her the hiccups. Barbara was quite literally blowing bubbles.

      ‘Blimey,’ said Marilyn. ‘Now what shall I do?’

      There was no way of getting the shampoo back so I said, ‘Give her something else to drink. She probably grabbed it because she was thirsty anyway.’

      Marilyn gave Barbara some of her bedtime cocoa. Now she was hiccupping chocolate bubbles.

      ‘Is she going to be alright?’ Marilyn asked anxiously.

      We kept a close eye on her and happily she was fine.

      Things took a definite turn for the better for Barbara when she was three. During a play time, one of the girls blew a toy whistle behind her head. Barbara immediately turned around and grabbed the toy for herself. We were so excited. Barbara could hear after all. The whole thing was repeated several times, with exactly the same result. It was time to call Matron. Staff nurse blew the whistle behind Barbara’s head and she duly turned around. Dickie was thrilled. She immediately called the doctor and an appointment was made to see an ear specialist. Surprisingly, apart from her babyhood examinations when Barbara had been declared profoundly deaf, no other follow-up examination had been set up. Barbara was to stay in care all her life anyway. Her mother blamed herself so much for her daughter’s defects that she’d had a complete breakdown. Barbara would be sent to a home for the deaf as soon as she was five.

      We waited in quiet anticipation for the appointment with the specialist and at last it was only a week away. One afternoon, I used the same toy whistle to play the game with Barbara. As she turned towards the sound, she put her hand up to her neck and a horrible realisation began to dawn. Barbara probably couldn’t hear the whistle at all, but she could feel the rush of cold air from the toy as it was blown. Marilyn and I looked at each other in shocked surprise.

      ‘We’d better tell staff nurse,’ said Marilyn.

      So we did.

      ‘We’d better tell Matron,’ said Staff nurse, looking straight at me.

      ‘You tell her,’ I said. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her we’d all made a mistake – I knew what she was like. She’d do her nut and take it out on me for weeks. The others didn’t argue. They were just as cowardly as me.

      A week later, Barbara went for her appointment. It was just as well that we hadn’t told Dickie and had her cancel it because they did find a small degree of hearing in Barbara’s ear and she came back with a hearing aid. They couldn’t fix it in the normal way because with no ears, there was nothing to latch on to. Barbara was given what looked like a radio announcer’s head phones, which were attached to a battery on her chest by a specially made harness. For the first few days, she walked around with a slightly bemused expression on her face, sometimes stopping to listen to a sound she clearly had never heard before. A whole new world was opening up for Barbara and she began to change. However, she never lost her personality. If she was upset or angry with us, she would pull the plugs out of the battery, effectively ‘switching us off’.

      Christmas 1962 will go down as the most miserable I ever spent. The atmosphere was somewhat subdued after Hilary’s departure but we were all making an effort to get back to some kind of normality. Dickie spent Christmas afternoon alone in her office. We caught the odd glimpse of her walking through the hall and she seemed to be in a bad mood. We didn’t see her properly until we all assembled for Christmas dinner at six and she swept into the staff dining room. We had a splendid meal – turkey, sausage, stuffing, Brussels sprouts and peas, roast potatoes, followed by flaming Christmas pudding and custard – but the atmosphere was so bad, the whole meal was eaten in utter silence. I felt as if everyone could hear every mouthful going down. We couldn’t look at each other and the meal seemed tasteless and instead of being a long fun-filled chatty time, the whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. Even with such tiny wages, we had all clubbed together to buy Matron and Sister a Christmas present. One of the staff nurses had spent ages in the town looking for something nice and we were pleased with her efforts, but Dickie didn’t even bother to open it. As soon as she’d finished her pudding, she stood up and we all stood up as well.