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 16th, 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
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