Chapter 3

GROWING UP

All through my childhood my mother had told me what a wonderful vocation nursing was because she loved it herself and was a very good nurse – probably what they call a `born nurse’. I grew up believing that that was to be my vocation too but it didn’t work out that way.

When I finished my Leaving Certificate at the age of fifteen, I could have gone to MLC Hawthorn to do matriculation but I didn’t want to and saw no need as I had no intention of going to university – after all, I was going to be a nurse and nurses didn’t go to university, they trained in a hospital where they had lectures and a great deal of practical experience. Not a good decision perhaps but my parents put no pressure on me to continue with school, they thought I was old enough to make my own decisions. Because I was too young to enter nursing, I decided that I would do mothercraft nursing first – but I was too young for that too, the entry age was 17. So I went to Emily McPherson School of Domestic Economy for a year to do an all-round course with the dreadful name of the Housewives Course – comprising cooking, sewing, millinery, laundry work, invalid cookery, budgeting and other subjects that I cannot remember now and didn’t particularly like but I made some good friends and enjoyed myself.

Half way through that year my beloved father died. One day I was a child and the next I was an adult. I have a terrible memory of the day Dad had his first stroke. He was eating breakfast and I was about to leave for Emily Mac. I held out my hand to him and said `Can I have some money please?’ and he gave me £5. I don’t even remember kissing him Goodbye. During the morning I was called to the administration office and one of the men from Dad’s office was there with his car to pick me up. Dad had collapsed at the table soon after I left the house. Mum called an ambulance and he was taken to a private hospital in Brighton. He was paralysed and had lost the power of speech.

After a few weeks Mum was told she must take him home so she hired a nurse to `special’ Dad. She came highly recommended but in fact was an alcoholic who drank every drop of alcohol in the house in the first 24 hours and Mum had to call a taxi to take her away.

That was on a Saturday. Mum and I managed to care for Dad that day and night and on the Sunday afternoon he seemed a little better. We put some music on the radiogram that he liked and he enjoyed that. We were nursing him in a bed that had been set up in the sitting room and he asked Mum when he could move back into their bedroom. Only minutes after that I heard Mum cry out – Dad had had another stroke and had lost consciousness. The doctor came and John and I huddled in the dining room out of the way for the next few hours listening to the terrible sounds of the death rattles as they are called – the heavy intermittent breaths that always seem the last until the next one comes. At last he died and the undertakers came to take him away. My memories of the next few days are only of Mum in bed all the time, absolutely prostrated by grief and me trying to look after her. Her younger brother Geoff made the funeral arrangements. I was not allowed to go to the funeral as I had to stay home and look after Mum who was only 46 and just wanted to die herself, she was so miserable.

I knew that my life as a child had ended. I had some posters of band singers stuck on my bedroom door and I tore them down and threw them in the rubbish. I had suddenly had to become an adult but didn’t know how to be one. The next year was hard. Mum and I both felt that we were suffering more than the other; now that I am a widow myself, I realise how wrong I was but Dad and I had been very close and I was devastatingly sad so we could do nothing to help one another emotionally. Only a few weeks after Dad’s death a man came to the door carrying the lifeless body of my little dog Puppy. He had run over him and was very apologetic and offered to dispose of Puppy’s body. I had had him since my 4 ^th birthday and was heartbroken. I now felt completely friendless.

Just to add to Mum’s woes she was very short of money. There was a small debt on the house to Dad’s father who forgave the debt so that was a help. The Legacy Club, of which Dad had been a long-term and hardworking member, donated some money and Mum’s brother Geoff volunteered to manage that fund so that Mum would get some interest but it was certainly not enough to live on. Her nursing training was well and truly out of date but she had retained her ability to care for people so she decided to try babysitting for money. She registered with a babysitting agency and began to get jobs. Most of her clients liked her so much that they would not have anyone else so she built up a good clientele and kept busy. She had always kept in touch with the Children’s Hospital where she trained, had been to their annual reunions and knew the matron well so when the new Nurses’ Residence was built the matron asked Mum to be the sister in charge which she accepted gladly, thereby beginning a whole new chapter of her life.

But back to the year Dad died. Not long afterwards John began to visit a cousin who was connected with the Oxford Movement, a religious group, and not very long after that he decided to train for the ministry and left home to enter the Congregational Theological College. I missed quite a lot of school at Emily Mac after Dad’s death, in fact I think I hardly ever went. A friend taught me how to thread pearls and I began doing that for a local jeweller as we were very short of money. Some weeks I made £2 which was a lot of money in those days. At the end of the year I knew I must get a proper job so that I could help Mum financially and I applied for clerical work at the Colonial Mutual life insurance company, where I worked as a filing clerk until I turned 17 and could start mothercraft nursing at Berry Street Foundling Home in East Melbourne.