Where's Bobby's Girl? Music of the 60s.

I have been thinking lately about the songs of the 60s, when lyrics seemed to fall into two categories: boy lyrics and girl lyrics. Not the fast tunes, I'm talking about the heart breaking, sad, slow dance songs that I believe had a theme. Boy lyrics revolved around unrequited love in the style of Roy Orbison and Bobby Vinton or death and sadness songs such as Tell Laura I Love Her. The boy loses the love of his life because she dies, he dies or he simply loses her to someone else. If it's the latter, he always sees her again and that's when we hear his plaintive song, 'Yes, now you're gone, And from this moment on, I'll be crying, Crying, crying, yeah crying'

Girl lyrics leaned toward desperation. Desperation to find true and lasting love. Songs of such neediness the singer throws herself at the feet of the object of her undying love. Songs like I Will Follow Him “I will follow him, Follow him wherever he may go.....” Or the hit, Johnny Get Angry, the lyrics begging the boyfriend to be more manly and get angry and....”I want a brave man, I want a cave man. Johnny show me that you care, really care for me.” The song implies that an angry boyfriend who yells at you and punches other people to show his love for you is desirable. In Bobby's Girl – the singer implores the heavens...”If I was Bobby's girl, If I was Bobby's girl, What a faithful thankful girl I'd be.” The word 'thankful' is just a little disturbing.

Now, don't get me wrong. I loved those songs back then, I still do today. But I wonder what impact those kinds of words had on impressionable young girls. The words seemed to be telling us, the females of the species, we needed a man to look after us no matter what. We needed a man to validate our existence and make our lives full and meaningful and we should have been thankful when it happened. Were we so desperate for love we would throw away any other ambitions and simply wait to be married to Johnny or Bobby or Bill thinking that was the end? Marriage was the end and there was nothing else beyond that? Kind of like fairy tales that end with the line, “And they lived happily ever after.”, taking for granted that the story ends right there with the marriage. Mission accomplished, nothing left to attain.

What happened to we girls from the 60s who listened to 'desperation songs'? Did we start out staring dreamily at a boy with a big head of Fabian type hair willing him to notice us? When he noticed us, did we forsake all others, even our closest girlfriends, and live only for his calls and our Friday night dates? Did the inevitable happen and we too got a fairy tale ending that read, 'And they lived happily ever after'? 

Personally, I've never believed that the words of a song could mold someone's life. I think those of us who danced to Johnny Angel in the arms of our high school sweethearts knew it was a song. When you're young, swaying to a slow song with your boyfriend is about as romantic as it gets. Once the music stopped or the song dropped out of the top 20 we moved on to the next hit. They were only words, after all, simple words meant to rhyme and fit the music for which they were written.

And what of us girls who swayed to those songs with the dreamy look in our eyes? What became of us? Many of us believed the dream and married our high school sweethearts at a young age; some successfully and some not so successfully. Some who were not successful moved right along through life and changed and grew. Some were college and university graduates who paved the way for women behind them in traditionally male professions. Many fought, marched for and brought about change. Those same girls became legal minds and doctors and executives while raising families. Women with a purpose.

Of course we swayed to the sentimental words, clutched to the boyfriend of the moment. That's what being young was, but, that didn't, in any way, mold or define our lives. At least, I don't believe it did. We were smart enough to know they were just words. Goofy, sentimental, simple, yet compelling words set to lyrical music so we could dance. Now, when we hear those same songs on some oldie station, memories transport us back in time. Once again, wearing our culottes, madras shirts and penny loafers, we feel the arms of our high school sweetheart around us and, once more, dance to our favourite slow song.

A Mother's Day Tribute

       

     She was a slender, elegantly dressed woman of English birth living in a small village of twenty or so families in an outpost of Newfoundland. She had wonderful posture and she crossed her legs when she sat, was always stylishly dressed and she drank vodka and orange. She played the piano and the accordion, she smoked with a certain elegance reminiscent of a 1940s movie star, she had a sarcastic and fast wit and she was a nurse. She was also my mother.

      My earliest recollections of her involve skirts that were worn mid-calf, below which were always high heeled shoes. I was small and the skirts seemed to me voluminous and were, at the age of three, the essence of her, my mother. When she wasn't wearing dresses and high heels she was in her white nursing shoes and a crisp white, cotton nursing uniform. People came to her so that she could dress their wounds, vaccinate their children, remove fish hooks and deliver babies. The district doctor visited our village and all the other little villages only periodically and when he made his rounds she went with him.

      Wearing a rain slicker and hat and her white nursing shoes she hopped into a dory in the dead of night to help the doctor as he ministered to the sick and dying. Gone was the well dressed young woman from London. Gone was my mother of the skirts and high heels. In her place was a nurse, all business and professionalism. Gliding across the ocean in the dory or perhaps rocking violently in a raging sea, off she went to be the nurse. It was her calling and no one could have done it better.

      When she wasn't rowing off to other out ports she conducted office hours in the surgery that had been set up in our home. She had an x-ray machine back there, scales, lots and lots of gauze and bandages, splints for setting broken bones, medicines, the makings of casts and lots and lots of thermometers. She removed thousands of fishing hooks from various parts of fishermens' bodies. She delivered babies, performed appendectomies, tonsillectomies, helped nurse the children through measles, mumps, chicken pox and consoled the families when someone did not survive. She made house calls in the manner of a rural doctor taking with her potions and lotions and medicines. Her surgery was large and well stocked and always locked. I was allowed in only when some child was frightened of the needle and I was to set a good example by being vaccinated first.

      She was a good nurse and she loved her profession. She loved everything about it. She loved her sturdy, stiff nursing hat that indicated by its shape and the colour of its band from which hospital she graduated. She loved her clean white and starched uniforms with her graduation brooch pinned safely to her bosom, just above her stop watch. She loved her white nursing shoes with their thick crepe soles and her white stockings. All of these things were to her proud symbols of the hard work and dedication she had put in during war time London. They were her reward for sleeping in a nurses dorm next to a hole in the wall made by an enemy bomb. They were her reward for never going underground to the shelters during the heaviest bombing of London, but staying above ground to help. They were her reward for the sacrifices she had made and the sacrifices she had yet to make.

      Training to be a nurse during WWII was no picnic. It was gruelling, frightening and alarming coupled with a certain excitement, momentary thrills and a live for the moment attitude. You were never sure you would live to see the end of this day and tomorrow – well tomorrow you might never see. There were rules to live by that students of today wouldn't tolerate. There were curfews, dress codes and personal conduct was called into question all in the name of upholding the reputation of the nursing profession. Nursing students were required to live in dormitories in the hospital and they weren't particularly comfortable or accommodating. You were to respect your elders and did as you were told.

      Upon graduation she nursed at Basingstoke Hospital, a renowned and well-known hospital that treated burn victims, of which there were many during WWII. While nursing there she met a young man, a Canadian sailor from Newfoundland. He had been very badly injured in a bombed building and she was assigned to be his nurse. Over the weeks months and years that he slowly mended and endured hundreds of operations she nursed him. In addition to her nursing duties, she wrote letters home for him, she read to him and they talked. On February 16^th, 1946, my mother married her patient and my father married his nurse.

      My mother continued to nurse right up until she became ill in 1984. She saw changes that she liked and changes that she didn't like. Advancements in medicine and modern convenience that extended life, she liked. She hated that white cotton uniforms were being phased out in favour of polyester pastels. She felt there was a lack of discipline in the young nurses when compared with her training. Mostly though she lamented the decline of the nurses hat. Starched, stiff, sitting proudly on her head, the band indicating from which hospital she graduated, that's what she really missed. She loved nursing and was proud to wear her cap