conversations with grandma: part 1

‘goleen’: original artwork by Melanie Grandidge.

On the 70th anniversary of the NHS, I thought I would interview someone who was there at the beginning - my Grandma. Now 94, she was a nurse in the health service during the war, before the NHS was founded. My grandma was born in 1924, near a small town in the West Coast of Ireland called Goleen. In 1943, when she was 19, she left Ireland to come to London to train as a nurse. The worries I had about leaving for university at 19, now seem silly in comparison.

‘Well the truth is, everyone has a different experience… leaving home is the thing isn’t it.’

She says her mother wanted her to go to America, as she had aunts there and they could get her work. However, she knew if she went to America she would never come home. I ask her how she coped with the homesickness, coming from a tiny, idyllic village in rural Ireland to a city where bombs were falling, and she knew no one.

‘I had to close my mind to it or I’d never have coped. I remember saying to somebody once, ‘How long does it go on, the homesickness?’ They said, ‘25 years’.

The first hospital my grandma was placed in was in South Mimms, Middlesex. It was a hospital for Tuberculosis patients, mainly soldiers returning from war with the disease. Treating these patients was not without its dangers and catching TB soon became a very real possibility for the nurses too.

‘We had to have an X Ray every 3 months. And every time you had to sit and wait for the results. We were sitting there waiting for the results and they’d say, ‘You can go’, to me. ‘No you must wait’- they had a shadow on their lungs. McCarthy, from Skibbereen was one, Sullivan from Kerry another. There was 4 of them with a shadow on their lung. They had to go off duty, go into the sick ward, Block N, and be treated for TB. It was cruel.’

 As well as the risk of catching TB, there was the constant fear of bombs hitting the hospital.

‘Those V1s and V2s could have dropped any time on us. You’d hear them coming, but they said when you heard them it was too late. Because where would you go? You’d run, you’d throw yourself on the ground, cover the back of your head, keep your face down like that. I remember, the sort of blessed place, the laws they had, rituals. We threw ourselves down, one went over, and it dropped on another hospital near us, Shenley, which was a psychiatric hospital. It was at 7.15 in the morning, we were going from Ceder House where we had our rooms, up for breakfast. After we just went to the wards, without having breakfast and the sister said to me, ‘You look a disgrace’. You had to fall down to the ground at a minute's notice. I told her that and she said, ‘Oh that’s no excuse’. She was a right cow, kid. So, whatever you done, you couldn’t be right. I think we were just glad to be alive.’

Despite the desperate circumstances my grandma and other nurses were working under, they received little to no respect for the work they did from their seniors.

‘You see if you were going down the corridor and there was someone behind ye, you were supposed to stand at the wall and let them pass, make yerself small. That’s what was expected and if you didn’t do it you’d been in for a telling off or sent to matron’s office. Our matron then was Miss A.R Spall. You never forget them you see. Even the A. R., Amelia Rose or something, god she didn’t look much like that. She did a round on the wards now and again and she’d come up and ask a question about a patient and you wouldn’t know she was there, we got no notice. You wouldn’t know what to say to her. You’d be flummoxed, helpless. And then she’d report you to the ward sister and say, ‘she doesn’t know what she’s doing, that girl’.   

She talks about a man named Jones.

‘He disliked me, I don’t know why. Whenever he came on the ward he’d make a beeline for me and say, ‘How many patients have you got on that side ward?’ And you see there could be some discharged that day and you wouldn’t know, you couldn’t answer it right then. I messed up one of his phone calls one day, accidentally. He said to have I put him through to the gate porter but of course we didn’t have that facility on the wards-on the wards we could only call from one ward to another ward and to the doctor’s office. But the gate porter? Why couldn’t he do it himself? ‘You’re stupid’ he said.’

However, ‘there were very nice people too’. One doctor, Dr Jackson, said to her ‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here, you should be on the medical! You’re wasted, you wouldn’t be if you were on the medical’. She says she would have studied medicine if her family had had the money. Instead, she became a nurse in what must have been the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

She worked tirelessly and received little thanks, like so many young Irish women that came to Britain during the war.