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Olga Nicholson: Nursing on the Home Front

Before the war I was a librarian in Coventry. I loved that city. I worked at WH Smith, which had a private library for subscribers. There were three categories of subscriber and, depending on what they paid to belong, they got different levels of service. So, for example, category A would be offered the very latest new books. The children’s writer Angela Brazil lived just down the road from where we lived. I was also helping to place evacuee children from Liverpool down at the YMCA. One evening a young man suggested that we go for a walk afterwards and he became my husband eventually. At that time I was 20 and he was only 18. After some time, I could see he was becoming a bit ‘serious’ and I told him he was too young, and that he should go off and have some fun with more girls before deciding to marry anyone. Later on, he was injured by a bus, and I came across him again. In early 1939 the IRA exploded a bomb in a trade bike carrier in Coventry. Two of my friends disappeared that day and were never heard of again, so all that IRA business has been going on much longer than people realise.

My nurse training began at Cross Houses in 1940, because I wasn’t tall enough to be accepted by the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital. In the beginning we were dealing men returned home after Dunkirk who needed prolonged nursing. We had no facilities there for advanced medical procedures. Dr Samuel Burke was the marvellous doctor in charge, and he was developing techniques to help women who had difficulty giving birth to their babies, so there were plenty of babies there who would never survive long after birth. We also had TB patients. I remember a German airman one day who’d come down near Cressage and was brought in with a broken leg. He demanded that I wash him but I refused. All he had was a broken leg. He got very nasty and threatened us all with all sorts of terrible things he would do to us after the war. He was sent to the POW camp as soon as he was mobile.

I had just over a year at Cross Houses, then continued my training at New Cross Hospital where I received an excellent general training in every department. I spent a good deal of my time in theatre and particularly enjoyed surgery work. Staff shortages meant that I was often called out at night after a full day’s work. There was a wonderful sister on the children’s ward there. When a baby wouldn’t get to sleep, she asked us to hold it and make a swishing sound to it, similar to the sound the baby would have heard while in the womb. It made them go off to sleep.

There was a Dutch hospital attached to ours, and Dutch men were brought in from ships that had been attacked. Most of them were in a dreadful state, many in wheelchairs or worse. So many of them were very young, and very brave. One Dutch nurse arrived who had escaped from Holland, found some papers belonging to a dead French boy, disguised herself as the French boy and travelled right across France to the Spanish border and got herself over to England. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and later died.

Doctor McKindoe was the man who noticed, while treating burns, that sailors who had been in sea water healed better than men who had not, so he devised the saline bath for burns treatment — and it worked. I saw the very beginning of this procedure. I also saw the first use of antibiotics, before M and B came in. No one knew how it would work but it was worth a try. I remember it being tried out on a woman patient. It turned her bright orange and she died soon afterwards.

When I was working at Cross Houses I was out for a walk in the winter with Nurse Jones. It was deep snow and we came across a car stuck in a snowdrift. Off we went and got some shovels to help dig them out. It turned out to be Lloyd George and his sister, who later wrote to thank us for our help. On other nights walking up high near Atcham I could see and hear Coventry and Liverpool being bombed and burning. There weren’t so many tall trees and things in the way in those days and we had a very clear view all that way.

In the hospital I had the greatest respect for Matron who kept such a close eye on everything, and knew everything she ought to about each individual nurse. There were two Austrian-Jewish doctors who were much more experienced and advanced than our own sister-tutor, and they helped me enormously from all their knowledge. Many of my nurse friends married men from different European countries who’d escaped to England, and the Internet has enabled me to trace and contact several old friends after so many years. I was the first nurse to marry during training — my husband volunteered fro the Royal Navy — and you had to give up your job if you married because the job was needed for a man. Our matron managed to get round this regulation if she thought a nurse was too good to lose, so she called us back to continue working there. There were plenty of women doctors at that time but no male nurses at all.

After the war, rationing continued for years, and our food was awful. We had an occasional egg or a single rasher of bacon, and would often queue for two hours just to get a bit of meat. People grew vegetables and kept their own chickens. There was the black market in foodstuff but it was expensive. It was a strange time, but you got on with it and made the best of it. You had to. I never had any time for the moaners.

This story was collected by Genevieve Tudor and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Olga Nicholson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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