大象传媒

My mum,Iris was born in 1922 and died last year. She and my grandmother,Laura used to tell me some stories of the war, although my grandfather, John would rarely speak of it. He was an ARP warden.When my mum's brother joined up she had to go to tell his employers. He was a butcher's delivery boy and she ended up doing his round for the day, on the bicycle.
My mum said she had longed to be an adult because the world would be her oyster, and then the war came.She became an auxiliary nurse, working in hospitals in and around Birmingham. She worked at Barnsley Hall, and the friends she made there were friends for life. Her nickname was Kenny, from her maiden name Kendrick. She worked with "Aunty" Bayliss from Ebrington in the Cotswolds, with Vi, who later lived in Norwich,"Kola", who came originally from Eastern Europe, Joyce and Nancy. They always spoke of a particular sister who terrified my mum because she was so strict. They had to light the ward fire in the mornings before they set to with the patients and mum was always all fingers and thumbs if this sister was around. They used to have a lot of laughs. They would put bicarbonate of soda in the men's urine bottles and then wait for their reaction when they used them and they fizzed.But the work was hard; mum said she often fell asleep in the bath because she was so tired and night duty was really difficult.There were high standards of care in the hospitals. Mum was horrified when my granmother developed a bedsore when she was in hospital in the 1980's, as when she was an auxiliary great emphasis was placed on caring properly for patients so they didn't get bedsores.At one hospital they were given very little food to eat, even less than their ration. The matron warned the nurses not to get involved with patients but by 1943 my mum had married a patient my father and gave birth to my eldest sister in 1944.
I remember she and Aunty Bayliss talking of the time Aunty, thus named because she was older than the other girls, visited the family in Birmingham. She arrived at the house and banners and all sorts were out. She wondered if they were for her but in fact they were to welcome Iris's brother, John home from the war. He was captured at Dunkirk and was a prisoner of war. Mum used to have a postcard he had sent, written in that strange purple pencil. It just said that he was coming home, no obvious emotion in it and yet it was incredibly poignant.
Mum's family had lived in Ashley street in Birmingham and nanny would occasionally speak of when they were bombed out. She said the house was more or less destroyed and yet a bowl of eggs in the larder remained perfectly intact. She hated the war because of the worry about her son and all the bombing.My mum was in Coventry the day after the cathedral was bombed. I think she always felt that the work done by nursing staff in the war was rather taken for granted and that history had tended to focus on battles and taken little account of the lives of the civilian population.

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