大象传媒

I came out here to Cross Houses to start off with because I thought, before I apply anywhere else, I knew they'd take me here, I'd applied to Shrewsbury, they said they'd take me here but at the Royal Shrewsbury, because I wasn't tall enough. So I thought well I can find out whether I like it or not and if I like it I鈥檒l try and move onto a bigger hospital and so that's what I did.

This was in 1940, just the beginning of the war. I was out here when the people came back from Dunkirk. We took the soldiers in who had been left in the water and one or two of them had been machine gunned, but we didn't get the badly injured ones out here. We just had the ones who just wanted prolonged nursing for the skin problems. Because out here we just didn't have the facilities for advanced medicine at all, it was filling in gaps so that other hospitals had plenty of room for people who really needed a lot of care. And that's what Cross Houses was for. The wonderful Jewish Doctor Samuel Burke, he was in charge of it and he built it up, it became quite a centre for women who couldn't have babies, they kept losing children. In one case he had a woman in who'd lost five children, she was in her thirties, they'd all been born while she was pregnant and lost, and he had her in when she was about two to three months pregnant and he kept her in and she eventually had a baby. He was absolutely wonderful. He had a Chinese lady as a Doctor's Assistant, a Doctor Chin. He wasn't a surgeon himself, but a Mr Edwards who was a surgeon at the Royal Shrewsbury, used to come out and he had an operating theatre built, so Mr Edwards used to come out and do the Caesarians, and he was wonderful. Most of it was we had children who weren't going to recover, things like Spina Bifida and of course their heads just got bigger and bigger until they died. So that most of the children we knew they weren't going to recover either, and then the TB patients we had in the huts in the grounds. Then we had, I don't know if I should tell you this, but we had a German pilot brought in, his aircraft had been bombing Liverpool, I don't think he was shot down, but he came down near the river between here and Cressage, and so he was brought onto the ward. And when I was on duty one day, of course he had a soldier on guard, and I knew this soldier, he came from Wellington, and I took the water to this man and he said, "You will wash me", and I said no you've only got a broken leg, you're quite capable of washing yourself, "You will wash me, you will do as you're told!鈥� and I said no, I don't wash people with broken legs. He said, "When this War is over I will have the names of every body here and the filthy little Jewish Doctor and when we are finished with you, you will be glad to die", and the soldier who was on duty got his whistle out and said, "You say another word like that to the nurse and my God I鈥檒l shoot you". I walked away I didn't wash him, but that's the sort of experience you don't forget in a hurry. I'd be on the ward for two months, and he'd only been in for a month, just long enough for his splint, and then he was sent to a Prisoner of War Camp of course, no reason why he shouldn't he wasn't ill in any way. So I don't know what happened to him, I don't really care either.

I was at Cross Houses for just over a year, and then I thought well if I鈥檓 going to train I鈥檇 better get going. So I wrote to Wolverhampton, to the Royal hospital, and they wouldn't have me there because again I wasn't tall enough, but they referred me to Newcross where they took me. And I was very happy there too. You do every sort of nursing there it was a general hospital and there were something鈥檚 you wouldn't do that only places like the Royal would do, they did all the inventive and exploratory, but on the other hand we had quite a wide range. I was in theatre quite a lot, I did quite a bit of surgery and Matron always said that when I finished training she would find me a job in theatre, because I loved theatre work I really found it fascinating. You were often called out at night, after you'd been on duty all day in theatre if there was an emergency at night, an appendix or something you were called out at night as well. There wasn't the staff that there would be at other hospitals. There was a great long corridor from one end of the hospital to the other it must have been half a mile long and all the wards went off it, so in the morning you heard 'thump thump thump' all the way down this corridor when the nurses were coming on or off duty. We had a wonderful Sister on the children鈥檚 ward and the intreaging thing was she used to say, "Nurse when you've finished whatever you're doing", we had children in with the most awful Eczema and we had no treatment for them, she said, "Pick that child up and make the sound it heard before it was born in the Uterus, 'schwoosh schwoosh' and it will probably go to sleep". And all these years later my little great grandson when he was born he was a Caesarian he didn't sleep well and said let me have him, and I held him and I made the noise and he used to cuddle up to me and go to sleep. All those years later that Sister's wisdom worked, and that was the quality you had even in a hospital like that. We had a Dutch hospital attached to Newcross, and we often had to go and help there because they would bring in a young man or two or three, and they were all Dutch and they had been on board ships and been sunk in the North Sea and most of them had been machine gunned and killed as well in the water, but some of them, the Norwegians used to go out and fish them out of the water, but of course sometimes they'd been in the water for a long time and then somehow they used to get them across to Scotland and eventually came down to the Dutch hospital. By the time they got to us they'd lost arms, legs, noses, ears, they were in the most dreadful state, but they were only young about eighteen or nineteen, and as long as they鈥檇 got a wheelchair and had got a stump or something or use their chin to press the button, they'd come careering down the ward trying to knock you over. Then we had a Dutch nurse who came to train with us actually, and she'd escaped from Holland in a most fantastic story, the only paper she could get was for a French boy of about eighteen or nineteen so she had to learn to speak really good French and also to smoke like a man and walk like a man, and she traveled from Holland all the way across France by train to the Spanish border and of course the Germans were coming on board all the time, and they used to take people off the train and shoot them then and there or take them away if they'd got no papers. But eventually she got to Britain and then she started having problems walking and she'd got a brain tumour and I used to special her and she used to imagine she was back on the train and she would sit on the bed and shrink against the wall and jabber away in French, and I used to talk to her because my French was quite good in those days, I used to talk to her in French to calm her down and get her down but then I left to have Jill (her daughter) and so she died when I left. I felt a bit guilty leaving her really because I was very fond of her but there were all these weird stories of what was going on, you wouldn't have known what was going on without these contacts would you, it was strange. Newcross was, considering it wasn't a Royal and in those days the Royal hospitals were the places to go you didn't go to the others, but by the time I went there they were in a very good position you got general training, a very good level of training.

I was saying to Jill I was watching the other night the article about McKindo the man who worked on all the badly burnt RAF men and it mentioned that when he used to put ointment onto the sores and they tried to take it off it used to take the skin off as well and he suddenly thought from what he'd seen, men who come down into the sea badly burnt, recovered, that there skin was in far better condition, so he started using saline baths and I saw the first patient at Newcross put into a saline bath after they'd been burnt and they said then it was McKindo, so I saw the first. I saw the first Antibiotics used, we had a woman who'd had five children in about six years and she's developed a condition and she was only twenty-seven but we didn't think we could save her because without Antibiotics she couldn't do anything. They decided to try this very early one and she turned bright orange but it didn't save her life unfortunately but this was before M and B came in, I can't remember the name of it, that's my head at my age. But the thing was of course it was worth a try and then they rang her husband at work, he wasn't in the Army or in the forces, to say that she wasn't going to live through the night, and would he like to come out and he said, "Oh no you look after her she's no good to me if she can't have kids". Nice men! But these things stick in your mind more than the ordinary every day things, you remember them.

When I had any contact with the Matron she was always so lovely and I had so much respect for her, and well you did have respect for your Matron, even if she was an old devil I suppose you did. She knew what she was doing and heaven help you if you put a foot wrong. She used to do three trips on the ward, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, often after midnight so she knew what the ward were like and often she'd do a midday one as well. You wrote reports, you reported on all your patients especially those who were on medications and treatments, you itemised everything, and she'd read your reports and question you about them and occasionally she'd ask you what are doing in lectures at the moment, and what did you learn this morning. But for every nurse she knew exactly what was going on. But we were very lucky, we had two Austrian-Jewish Doctors, Dr Weiss and a Dr Viel, they were very very good doctors and we also had a Polish one, Dr Pulitzer but he wasn鈥檛 as friendly. But when they came round at night, and when it was quite you'd write some lectures out, "What are you doing nurse?" they'd give you a totally new view on what it was you were doing, and because they were much more advanced than you were and I always said that those two really helped me, because some of the nurses used to say, "Oh they get on my nerves", and "What have got a Sister tutor for?鈥� and I would say well they can tell you something she hasn't told you.

There were so many strange things going on in the hospital, it wasn't like peacetime because you had all these other factors. Then we had a Dutch friend who happened to be in England when the war started and so she stayed here, she was in her thirties and she was engaged at the time but her husband was taken as slave labour by the Germans to work in one of their big factories down in the South of Holland and she had a message from somebody who'd escaped, like the other nurse I told you about, that he'd tried to escape but he'd been shot so she lost her fianc茅e. She married a Dutch Naval Officer later on, much older than herself and she went out to Jakarta, the Dutch East Indies, so I lost track of her, but she and another and I were very great friends, they came to our wedding, then this other girl Kay Bristoe, she married a Dutchman, who'd been blown up, he had his head shattered just like when you tap the shell of an egg that was his skull was like when she was nursing him, but he recovered and they married. Then in 1959, when we came back to Wolverhampton to live because my husband had been given a job over there, when we went back, I heard someone shouting "Harry", they used to call me Harry, because my name was Harrison before I married, "Harry, wait a minute", and it was Kay Bristoe, she's seen me going by the house and asked what I was doing in Wolverhampton, they went out to Canada, she went as matron on a mission in Canada. Jill (Daughter) found her on the internet and I phoned her and after all those years I was able to talk to her and she'd got two sons and I never thought I鈥檇 ever met them again and I said "Did you know what happened to Wilma Fredricks?鈥� and she said no that when she went out to Jakarta we lost touch so I鈥檝e never known what happened to her, but we had some wonderful times together. These memories aren't revived all that often, makes you feel very lucky.

This story was submitted to the People's War by Carlie Swain of the 大象传媒 Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Olga Nicholls and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Nicholls fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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