A Primary Teacher's Experiences 3

At this time (1944) I was living at home in Essex, and just before Christmas, my stepmother was expecting her fourth child while I was practising the piano and trying to prepare for an external LRAM exam. My father’s sister, who looked after us before he re-married, was also part of the household, and as the house was not very large, we had plenty of practice in living together - on the whole successfully, as none of us were the quarrelsome kind.
Mum put up with my practising and I was fond of the children and aunty helped a good deal in the house, but as it was war-time, the policy was to send expectant mums to a hospital in the country some miles away, a fortnight before the expected birth-date. My stepmother went at the beginning of December, and we waited and waited, but at last her little girl arrived on Christmas Eve. So she was away all over Christmas and, in all, about six weeks.
One of the problems we had was where a pram would go. We had moved from a much larger house and the furniture was bigger than needed, particularly an old settee to seat four. Dad and I decided to saw it up and make it into a two-seater and started doing this out in the garden, but the weather turned bad, and we had to come in. You never saw such a mess in your life, but eventually it was fixed together again and served very well, leaving a space for the pram beside it. Soon after this, a friend of the family had her son leaving home to join the army, and asked if I would like to lodge with her so, by general agreement, I moved a few streets away, and left them a bit more room at home, though I went back fairly frequently to see them.
There was not much normal social life going on, due to the blackout, fire-watching and the dearth of young men around. But I enjoyed some musical activities and got a little job playing for a choir one evening a week. I also joined an orchestra, scraping away not very competently at the back of the second fiddles. The lady who ran the choir and who taught singing kept Open House on Sunday afternoons for her musical friends and also invited a number of Czechs who were stationed in the town and other musical protégés. It was at one of these musical afternoons that I met my future husband. He had been discharged from the army on medical grounds after spending a year or so playing in a dance band at night and being excused parades on that account in the morning. When it came to shooting he had turned out to be nearly blind in one eye or something of the kind, so he was now in the Land Army helping on farms as an alternative to military service. I sat next to him on a couch and the first thing he said to me was ‘Sorry I can’t talk, I’ve got awful hay fever” and he certainly had! But I must have sounded sympathetic and before we left, he had agreed to give me some violin lessons.
He came round to my digs and gave me the one lesson but refused to take any money and remarked casually “How would you feel about marrying me?” I had the shock of my life, but managed to reply: “Well, we don’t know each other very well yet do we?” To which he answered: “Well, let’s hurry up and do that. Are you doing anything to-morrow evening?” From that time until the day we were married, we never missed a day doing something or other together.
We had planned to get married in about six months’ time, but in the meanwhile, we heard of a flat becoming vacant that we had to take or leave, and this decided us as we couldn’t afford to pay two lots of rent. We were blissfully happy at having found each other and as one never knew when there might be an air-raid that would finish off either ourselves or our property, there was very little fuss about setting up a smart home. All we wanted was to be together and, in fact, we managed very well with gifts of second hand furniture and what meagre effects could be bought in the shops at the time. The saucepans were terrible just like big tins with handles stuck on, and one handle broke off while I was lifting it off the stove, full of porridge. But it was all fun to us at the time. Until the war teachers who married, that is women, were automatically dismissed. It seems incredible now, but I suppose there was such a surplus of women after the first war and so little help for unemployed men that this seemed right at the time.
However, the second war made it necessary for married women to stay on so the authorities sent me a letter of dismissal, accompanied by an offer of temporary employment the following term. They sent me to another school though, after we were married in the summer holidays. I was given charge of what was called a class of ‘backward’ infants but this was a euphemism for a group of gipsy children whose families had been recently housed in bungalows on the outskirts of the town.
They were absolutely sweet, all affectionate and glad of attention, and though getting them reading was a slow business they loved singing and did very well in the Christmas concert to the surprise of the rest of the school. It was just before the concert when I began to get sly looks from the staff for going off my usual tea and coffee at break and they all seemed to know before I did that I was pregnant. I was not allowed to go on till Easter, but had to leave, though I was really quite fit and it was quite difficult to manage on the little my husband got in the Land Army. So I looked round for what I could do and found a part-time job collecting library books for a private library. I went round on my bike, and rounded up a good many missing books so making myself redundant after a month or so. Then I got a job in the kitchen of a small cafe preparing cabbage and potatoes mainly, and serving soldiers through a hatch with cups of tea. I wasn’t supposed (in my condition) to meet the public, but staff numbers were so short, I often had to be waitress as well. Meat was only served one or two days a week and on the two days I worked, I used to have to go round saying: ‘Sausage or sausage meat?” and making it sound as interesting as I could. It was surprising how long it took for some people to decide and how difficult it was for me to remember their choice!
After another month or two I decided that I had better try and find a job I could do at home and took some knitting specimens to a place where they were advertising for outworkers. I was received with scorn by a most unpleasant woman, who rejected my squares on the grounds that I had washed and pressed them and I would have to learn to keep them clean without this, so had better do another set. I never wanted to see that place again, so went instead to a factory which said it would teach you to smock and give work to do at home. They were very nice here and I soon managed to do what they required, though I never got quick enough to earn more than a few shillings a week at it. You were given just the front of children’s frocks or blouses and earned something like the equivalent of 50p a dozen for putting a couple of inches of smocking down the front. An extra pound a week paid the rent in those days, and I quite enjoyed doing it and found it quite a useful skill later on, though I suppose it was really ‘sweated labour’.
My baby was born on the first night of the flying bombs, most of which passed over the hospital en route for London. No-one-know what was happening, as first the siren went, then the all clear, then the siren again. They stuck me all alone in a ‘labour room’ until the last minute, and when I asked a nurse who popped in what was the matter with a woman I could hear screaming her head off in the next room, she said, ‘Oh she’s further on than you’ and popped out again. Luckily, I have, never been of a nervous disposition or I should probably have joined the hullabaloo straight away. As it happened, I had what was called a ‘rapid’ delivery and I found that so traumatic without anaesthetics that I prayed fervently that if a bomb were going to drop on me it would do it quickly. The food was very meagre and the potatoes were old and black. I could have eaten anything and shall never forget a nurse saying, ‘Look how good Mrs. S. has been, she’s eaten all her greens!’ It was unbelievable the way they treated you like a complete moron. As it was a teaching hospital, every time you were examined, a troop of students had another poke at you, as if you were a sort of inanimate training punch bag. But I was somewhat comforted by the tutor saying: ‘Now this woman is just as she should be.’ When my baby was born, the trainee nurse told me in confidence that it was only the second she had done but I was past worrying, and at least there was an older person watching her and giving instructions.
It was in midsummer and extremely hot all the time, especially at night when the windows had to be completely blacked out. The babies were only brought to you for four-hourly feeds, and in between you could hear them all yelling at once in the next room. In spite of everything, after ten days I emerged perfectly well and the proud mother of a nine-pound girl. My husband was wildly excited at becoming a father and rushed to the hospital without changing out of his working clothes - husbands weren’t allowed to be with you in those days. Although delighted to see him, I did rather wish he had looked a bit smarter, as all the mums were looking to see what your husband was like when he arrived. I think he had visions of producing a family chamber orchestra because before we got home he had bought a small-sized cello all ready for our daughter to learn as soon as she was able. She never took to it and in the end it was our third child who learnt to play on it. They were obsessed with tidiness in the hospital and I was constantly in trouble for having knitting on the bed or books under the pillow. After teaching for five years, it was something of a culture shock to be at the receiving end of authority. I was not a particularly good housewife either, I’m afraid, though I could cook reasonably well. I had my own ideas on priorities and, after bathing the baby in the morning I would feed her without clearing and then take her out and clear up afterwards when I’d got her to sleep. I had given my stepmother a key to our flat so she could go and get anything I might need while I was away and I was somewhat horrified when she told me she had called to show a friend what a nice flat we had and found the bath and its various accoutrements on the hearthrug and breakfast things still on the table. However, the baby thrived! At first, I was keen to breast-feed, but it seemed to produce an awful lot of wind and indigestion. My husband and I were well supplied with baby books and would grab one each but one would decide it was over-feeding another underfeeding so the baby hiccupped somewhat painfully through the first few weeks before being put on to National Dried when it happily subsided. Delighted as we were at being the proud parents of a fine daughter, it was very hard to manage to make ends meet on the Land Army money alone, so my husband began to think of trying to get a teaching job again. The only places a man could really make a living at music teaching were boarding schools where there was a captive clientele, and as this was what he had done before the war, he sent off to these, and landed a temporary post at a school in Shropshire. He was asked to start as soon as possible and offered a room in a guesthouse with use of kitchen etc. until we could find better accommodation.
In the space of a couple of weeks we let our flat furnished and moved up to Shropshire. Luckily, we soon got a furnished house that was just right for us, except that we didn’t really have the money to pay for it, so we let two rooms to a teacher at the Girls’ High School on a bed -and-breakfast basis. She went away every weekend, which was very nice, and kept me company in the evenings when my husband was usually working. On the whole it was a very happy time.

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