Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes: The memoirs of a nursery nurse in the 1960s. Pam Weaver
to the parent so hard that we had to drag them off. The parents had no privacy when they came to visit either. Sometimes that was deliberate. If they were suspected of being cruel to their children, nobody wanted to leave them alone to repeat the offence. Others felt embarrassed by their own tears when they saw their children, or self-conscious with all of us hanging around the room. Most of the parents had their children taken into care because of homelessness or maybe an illness had incapacitated them for a while. These people loved their children and they were grief-stricken to be separated. For that reason, I hated ringing the four o’clock bell, which signalled the time to say goodbye.
The house was set in quite large grounds. There was plenty of space for the children to run around, but they had few toys. Miss Carter, the nursery warden (a kind of nursery teacher), kept the better things under lock and key. Some of them only put in an appearance on special occasions, usually when someone important came to visit the home. Appearances were all-important, and money was tight. I remember one time when we had had a delivery of something in three large boxes. We put the boxes in the playroom and the children had a wonderful time playing in them. It all came to an abrupt halt when Cassie fell over and sliced the top of her finger off on the edge of the box. Of course Matron Thomas went bananas, not only because the poor child had been injured but also because the powers that be would be onto her like a ton of bricks. Cassie was rushed to hospital for treatment (she was fine and amazingly, her fingertip grew back) but the boxes were removed and banned.
The nursery backed onto a park and we often took the children for walks there. We never simply ‘fancied a stroll’ – each walk had to have an objective in view. It might be to pick flowers, or to spot how many different kinds of car we could find, or to look for wildlife in the park. The idea was to teach the children how to be observant and to help them foster a keen interest in what was going on around them. Of course in talking to them we were also giving them a good command of language and understanding. Sometimes a child’s comment would raise a bit of a smile. Mark was nearly two years old. Back in the nursery, we were showing the children pictures of the things we had seen on our walk. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘a tree.’
Mark studied the picture and beamed. ‘One, two, tree,’ he said.
Because they were so young, we couldn’t do much with the babies. We sometimes took them for ‘walks’ but of course they slept a lot. When they were awake, I was taught to speak to them even if they didn’t understand and I began to see that it was a wonderful way of creating a bond between child and carer. The big prams meant that the baby always faced the person pushing it so it was easy to keep up a conversation with the baby. The modern buggies have the child facing away from the person pushing it and although it means the child can see what’s coming rather than what has passed, something is lost in the relationship he can have with his nurse. I didn’t stay in the Baby room all the time. We were constantly being moved around so that we could have a well-balanced understanding of the needs of the children in our care. When I was with the toddlers, the girl in charge of the room even wanted them to listen for and recognise bird song when we went out for walks. I had lived in the country all my life so I could easily recognise the birds we heard in the park – blackbird, pigeon and the occasional robin, but those who had been city dwellers all their lives struggled a bit. The nursery warden never liked us to use slang words either. For instance we had to teach the children that it wasn’t a ‘conker’ tree but a horse chestnut tree and it was never a ‘doggie’ but a dog.
Being observant wasn’t exclusively for the park setting. We had to use the same values when we walked about in the built-up areas or down the town. Thus the children knew all about zebra crossings, pillar boxes and the blue and white police box (made famous in later years by Dr Who), where members of the public could dial 999 were all part of our outdoor classroom.
When we went out we were expected to walk in such a way that the children felt happy to talk to us. Of course if the staff went out in convoy or just two prams, with toddlers walking beside it, we would talk to each other but the children took priority and we would answer any question as fully as we could.
Whenever we crossed the road we took time to teach the children Kerb Drill. The mantra was ‘Halt! Look. Quick March!’ The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents issued a booklet about the adventures of Tufty Fluffytail, a red squirrel, in 1953. Tufty was the invention of Elsie Mills MBE and proved to be so popular that in 1961 they formed The Tufty Club for under five-year-olds, which in its heyday had two million members. Kerb Drill was eventually replaced by the much simpler The Green Cross Code – ‘Stop, look, listen and when it’s safe, cross carefully’.
I enjoyed the walks in the park best. I remember running with the children through the autumn leaves and together we’d throw them in the air. Sometimes we stood as still as statues to watch a deer walking in the distance and in the summer we’d see the day-trippers and families having picnics. We tried to encourage the older children to run whenever they could do so safely to burn up their excess energy and also to strengthen their legs. Often the home conditions they’d come from meant that so far they hadn’t had a very healthy upbringing. They may not have had a healthy diet before they were brought into care and that could have affected their mobility and climbing skills. Some had been stuck in high-rise flats with no play areas or in one room with several other siblings and a sick parent. Being in the park always brought fun times and laughter. One day we found some blackberries. It was late in the season so they weren’t all that wonderful and some had maggots but we managed to eat a couple straight from the bush. I was also taught never to laugh at a child, so when Alice got back to the nursery and she told one of the other girls all about it, I suppressed a grin.
‘Did you bring some back for me?’ asked Hilary.
‘Oh no,’ said Alice gravely. ‘They were full of magnets!’
It was important to make sure we allowed enough time for the walk home. If we had been running about in the park, the children might be feeling tired. If we had a pushchair all well and good, but for the children walking beside the pushchair we had to make sure we didn’t overtax them.
When we were out for walks it was a good opportunity to talk about stranger danger and that the man in the policeman’s uniform is our friend. Back in the nursery, we would sometimes create a street in the playground and give the children the opportunity to practise crossing the road in front of a child in a pedal car or on a bike. It was done in such a way that it was a fun game but we were reinforcing attitudes and understanding which would be invaluable as they got older.
Up until I’d wanted to be a nursery nurse, I had always regarded play as something children did to while away the time. It had never occurred to me that play was important to a child’s development. I began to understand that play was not simply a way of letting off high spirits and excess energy but it was also an outlet for emotions and helped children to prepare for life. We often learned a lot about a child’s history by the way he or she played. When Sarah was in the Wendy house, she handed a dolly by the foot to Ian, saying, ‘Here, you can have the little bugger – he’s driving me bloody mad!’ It didn’t take much imagination to work out what might have been going on in her home before she was taken into care.
The staff in the nursery helped me to notice how children played. I began to see that play helped them develop social skills as well. Up until a child is about two years old, they mostly play on their own. From two years onward, they are aware of another child and play in a parallel way. In the Wendy house, for example, they’d still play their own game, but they were now conscious of the other children with them. It’s only as they get older that children learn the concept of sharing, taking turns and finally creating a world of their own together.
I began to see how concentration developed. It might start with building a short tower of bricks or making a simple puzzle, but it would gradually move to more complex games. By the time a child had progressed into Toddlers, it was possible to play simple board games like Lotto, where you match animal cards, with an adult. Play not only helped the children develop intellectually but it also helped with their physical progress. Their large muscles were strengthened by climbing, jumping, running, pushing and pulling, while their smaller muscles developed by picking up and placing things or painting, modelling with clay