My first recollection of wanting to be a midwife was when I was just three years old and I can clearly recall sitting in my Nana and Grandpa Jones’s front room wearing the dress up new nurses outfit I had been given for Christmas telling everyone that I was going to be a midwife when I grew up!
Now don’t ask me how I knew this or even how I even knew what a midwife was when I was just three years old, yet clearly I did! It may have had something to do with the fact that my Nana’s sister, my Great Aunty Fanny was a midwife so I had heard the word being banded around and I knew it had something to do with babies, and of course what three year old doesn’t love babies?
I can clearly recall one conversation about how upset Aunty Fanny had been when she had “lost” a mother, though obviously at that time I had no actual understanding of what that actually meant and or the true devastation that she and the family concerned must have gone through. Thank goodness to this day I have never “lost” a mother myself, although unfortunately I did have a very 'near miss" which I will come on to later in my story.
I grew up as many of us did back in the late 60's and early 70’s within a large extended family and weekly visits to both sets of grandparents was the norm. It was always a Tuesday at Nana Jones’s for a lunch of fritters and chips with plenty of bread and butter to fill us up, followed by a visit to Aunty Nora and Uncle Albert’s house where Aunty Nora always seemed to be wearing a woolly hat, no matter what the weather was like. I recall they had a huge swinging gate that led up to their house and Aunty Nora was always sat in the same armchair by the fire and Uncle Arthur was always smoking his pipe.
As children, we were always sent to play outside whilst the adults chatted inside. It was the time of "children should be seen and not heard". Quite often our cousins Anita and Darren would arrive too with my Aunty Margaret who was my mum’s younger sister and me and my brother Mark and sister Jane would all play outside together. Michele was not yet born. For the record I am the eldset of the four children which seemed to carry with it great responsibilty and lots of "paving the way" as any eldset chid will understand.
Nana and Grandpa Jones were not rich, but they were not poor either. They lived in Tunstal in the Potteries and were extremely religious. Grandpa was a baker and although Nana did not work when I knew her she had been a hand painter for Royal Dolton and use to paint the Dolton Lady Figures in her younger days which I think was just incredibly cool!
Thursday afternoons after school always meant a trip out to the country to see Nana and Grandpa Milward for tea as it was Dad’s half day from his Chemist Shop. He would pick us up from school and off we went, driving through narrow country lanes and beautiful scenery seeing plenty of animals along the way.I loved it.
It was always salmon and cucumber sandwiches and pony rides in Fulford as Nana and Grandpa Milward were much more afffluent than my Mum's side of the family and it was a very different experience altogether visiting them. They lived in a great big house with acres of land and even had a huge lake in the garden too. Nana had grown up in the country and always had had horses, which she reguarly fell off it has to be said, and we often rode bareback along the country lanes, stopping to pick blackberries for Nanas pie fillings which was great fun and looking back we were extremely free and easy. I loved visiting both sets of grandparents equally and look back on these times with really fond memories.
My grandparents are sadly no longer with us, but they all lived to ripe old ages and I am so grateful to be able to say that all of them were at my wedding and they all met my sons Tom and Jack which was really just so lovely. Nana Jones was the last to go aged ninety nine and ten months! We all thought she would make a hundred as she was a very strong woman, but sadly she didn't.
I'm not going to lie when I say I was secretly relieved though as I had told her if she made a hundred I would do a parachute jump with her on my back! I say this because anyone who knows me knows my biggest fear is flying and getting on a plane is hard enough for me, so God knows how I would ever have jumped out of one, and especially with her on my back as she wasn't the most dainty of women it has to be said!
Swiftly moving on. Michele, my youngest sister was born when I was eight years old and I can clearly remember going to visit North Staffordhire Hospital to see her with my Nana Milward and my dad. Well when I say visit, I mean I sat on a grass bank outside the maternity unit and waved to my mum who had a baby in her arms through a window about four floors up! Children were not allowed in hospitals back then and so that was as close as I could get.
Michele had a few complications when she was born so was in the SCBU for a while, but she soon came home and here is when I really started my journey towards becoming a midwife I believe.
As the eldest child, I had jobs to do and I used to change MIchele’s nappies regularly and I'm not talking the easy disposable ones we now have, they were the Terry Towelling nappies with rubber pants and a great big huge sharp nappy pin was used to secure them! It was all part of daily life back then, older children helping out with the younger siblings and trust me you don't ever forget these things and I can still whip up a few different ways to fold this type of nappy now if need be, but if I'm honest I always prefer the ‘kite” method as it seemed to work very well!
I can also remember helping to make up Michele's daily feeds and sometimes being asked by my mum to add a rusk into the bottle if Michele was particularly hungry. Now this is something that would be totally frowned upon today, but it was very common back then to help the babies sleep better, and I can even remember Mum cutting off the top of the teat so that the rusk could pass through it with more ease!
I also took Michele to the shops reguarly in her pram having to buy bread, ham and of course because it was the Potteries, oatcakes were always on the list as well. Alongside this I also had to pay the weekly newspaper bill at the local Newsagents too!
When I look back on this time, it seemed so normal, yet in todays society we would have been referred to Social Services for sure for allowing such a young child to take a newborn out in a pram and cross main roads along the way, but back then it was very normal and I really enjoyed playing Mum to my baby sister and I really believe it helped to shape me into the midwife I am today as I can't remember a time really where I wasn't caring for babies and helping Mums.
Being the eldest grandchild as well as the eldest child, I was also sent to stay with my Aunties when they had their babies who were my cousins. They were in their postnatal period resting and I was sent to help them. And yes new mothers were made to rest back then and rest they did.
I would stay with them for a few days and feed, change and cuddle the babies for them and I absolutely loved it! `I can also clearly recall the daily visits from the midwife during this time when she would come in and wash her hands before taking my aunty upstairs to check her over on her bed. These were very happy times for me as I felt needed and that I was useful and of course I just loved spending time with the babies too.
I also recall that when one of my cousins was born it was the summer and all of my auntie's neighbours were outside mowing their lawns. It was a lovely sunny day and children were playing outside and all was well until her next door neighbour accidently ran over the wire to his lawn mower, electrcuted himself and tragically died. It was absolutely horrendous, but sadly was shall we say,was not a common accident, but it certainly wasn't an uncommon one either.
Time moved on and of course I went to school and for whatever reason I totally forgot about wanting to become a midwife. In fact I can’t remember actually wanting to become anything at all whilst I was at school!`
We were extremely blessed growing up as my dad was a Pharmacist and had his own shop Milward's Chemist, and so me and all of my siblings went to private schools and in true religious form, I was sent to an All Girls Private Convent School at that! This had its good as well as bad points, but is something that I look back on now with fondness and am very grateful for. We won't dwell on how cruel the Nuns could be with their at times brutal punishments and extremely strict ways right now.....I will save that for later on!
I was not clever at school and didn’t really try too hard if `I’m honest. I was more of a joker and did mess around in class a fair bit with my friends who were as equally naughty and I quite often didn’t do my homework or revision, despite my dad locking me in the dining room on many occasions! I would just sit there, looking into thin air and day dream. One of my teachers actually wrote on my school report the one time that I was a like a “Butterfly” who just flitted around place to place and would never achieve anything!
My teachers never expected me to do very well with my O’ Levels as they were back in the day, so when the results came out and I had actually passed seven O' Levels, everyone was taken aback, no one more than myself it has to be said!
I did however fail Religious Studies with a clear Unclassified result! How ironic that despite having to say prayers before every lesson, being in the church choir and playing the organ in church when I was eight years old and going to weekly Mass all of my school life....I failed the one exam we were all meant to pass! It did not go down well!
I now decided that if I was more clever than everyone realised, well I could do some A' Levels after all. The decision was made that I would actually go into Sixth Form, but I was rebelling back then and didin't want to go into the sixth form at St. Dominic's and demanded I go to the local comprehensive school instead. I wanted to be with all of my village friends as I was sick of being known as the "posh girl" and all the nonsense and bullying that went with that.
The Convent school was called St Dominics and so we had the nick name of “Dom Doms” and as I travelled to school daily on the train with around three other "Dom Doms" and over a hundred comprehensive school kids, had been subjected to a lot of bullying which included having stones thrown at us; name calling; tripping us up and our ‘berries ” being taken off our heads and thrown around. We wereb spat at, had eggs smashed on our heads and on one occasion I was even pushed out of a train as it pulled into Barlaston station as doors didn’t lock back in the day. Quite frankly I had had enough of it and jsut wanted to feel like i belonged.
Mum and Dad eventually agreed and I enrolled at Alleyne’s school in Stone and bought myself a fashionable uniform selection and started there in the September 1983 - I lasted less than two weeks!
This was not what I was used to and I have to admit I found it totally overwhelming and just couldn’t cope with the huge amount of pupils that were in the school. I could never work out where I was meant to be going and the style of teaching was just not what I had been used to in my previous small classes at St Doms. So I left, just like that!
I had been speaking to one of my old friends from St Doms. and she was telling me that she was on a Pre- Nursing Course at Stafford College. She was doing four A’ Levels and getting one day a week out of college to work at a local hospital to gain work experience on the wards as part of the course.. Well this sounded like a great idea to me and at that point precisely I decided I would like to become a Nurse! I just had to work out how to get on this Pre- Nursing course now.
My dad knew one of the lecturers at Stafford College from his Gun Club, so he made a call and I started the course the following week. I’m sure I would still have been able to join the course without this call, however it made it a lot quicker. As with everything in life it’s not always what you know, but who you know. This was probably the only time this has worked in my favour though as you will see later on how much I have been discriminated against throughout my whole life for just being me.
I loved my time at college and made lots of new friends, I coped with the work better, but most of all I absolutely loved my day release to Trent Hospital in Stone every week. We were given an actual nurses uniform dress to wear, so apart from not having the frilly cap and belt it made me feel like I was actually a real nurse and I was in my element. I even bought a black smock coat so that I could pretend in my head that I was wearing a cape over it!
Trent Hospital was a Geriatric Hospital, now we call it Care of the Elderly, and I was put onto one of the female wards thank goodness, as I don’t think I could have coped with bed bathing a man at sixteen! I learnt lots of basic care there and as well as having the time to sit and talk to the lovely old ladies and help to give them their cups of tea and feed them, I would help the nurses to bath them and take them to the toilet. I loved it so much that I also started to go in at weekends too and do voluntary work, and even went in on Christmas Day after Church. It was just fabulous.
After around eight months of working at Trent Hospital I heard that there were jobs going at St Mary’s Home in Stone, which was the private old people’s home that was joined to my old Convent School and Church and was ran by the Nuns too. I applied and got a paid job there, which I did alongside my college work at weekends and evenings. It was also at that time a ladies only home and was also where all the old nuns went when they needed caring for in their old age.
The care at St. Mary’s was another level. They were served amazing food, bathed and dressed every day and were cared for extremely well and I loved it there too. It was tricky in the beginning though learning how to dress the old Nuns in their habits and get their veils and wimples on straight. But I got there in the end and remember having some amazing conversations with these ladies as they were not ill, they just needed looking after. Older people certainly do have wisdom to share with young people who are willing to listen and I love spending time with the older generation even now wherever I am in the world.
It was here I saw my first dead body though and I can remember it to this day, I don’t think anyone ever forgets this moment and all as I could think was that Mrs Smith was there ........but not there .......and it was the strangest thing I had ever witnessed and to be honest I couldn’t work it out in my head. I remember too that we had to open the window next to where she had died to let her spirit out, which is a practice that is still done in hospitals and care homes around the UK to this day.
I don’t recall being frightened of death at this time as when I saw Mrs Smith she had been laid out so well by the Nuns that she really did just look like she was sleeping, and so when I saw my second dead body as s student nurse and I just walked behind a curtain on the ward and a man was dead in front of me it was a real shock and took me totally by surprise and I'm not going to lie, that vision still haunts me to this day with his face clearly etched in my memory.
For the record I also had another part-time job when I was sixteen. I wanted to go on holiday with my friend Ruth and her family that summer. Her mom and dad were extremely rich and had a Villa in Puerto Banus where we would be staying and so although I wouldn't need to pay for accomodation, I would need some spending money to take with me and therefore I had to find a way to earn it. As dad had always taught me, money didn't grow on trees now did it!
I heard on the grapevine that they needed cleaners at the nearby Wedgewood Factory and so I got a second job there after school too, alongside my job at St. Mary's Home. This job however was not for the faint hearted and certainly not the best place for an innocent St. Dominic's girl to be, but somehow the older cleaners took a shine to me and took me under their wings and showed me the way. Thank God for small mercies is all I can say! They taught me all the tricks of the trade and showed me how they fooled their supervisors into thinking they had cleaned areas they clearly hadn't! It was great fun and I learnt a lot from them.
It wasn't hard cleaning the offices, but I absolutely hated cleaning the mechanic's area which was full of grime and grease. Mopping the floor in there was hard and almost impossible to do properly, but cleaning the toilets was nothing short of horrific! Not only were the toilets disgustingly dirty, questionable reading material was strewn everywhere for all to see and when I say it was graphic beyond belief, it really was graphic beyond belief!
I got on with the cleaning ladies so well that once the summer came they asked me if I wanted to go fruit picking with them instead of doing cleaning. They told me it was good money and there was a little mini bus that would pick us up and bring us back. They said it would be much better for someone like me, whatever that meant, adding that they didn't really think I should be working as a cleaner in a factory at my age. They really did have my b est interests at heart bless them.
I did go fruit picking with them and had a ball whilst making a small fortune picking goosberries all day every day, whilst getting the most amazing tan of my life at the same time .The only downside to this job was that my arms looked like I had been savaged by a group of ferral cats, with all the daily cuts and tears from the very sharp goosberry bushes and yes they were very painful too!
At this point I'm still at college and had gotten really friendly with a girl called Helen who was in the year ahead of me. She had secured a place on the RGN course at Nottingham City Hospital and was going to be starting her nurse training in the January.
When I look back I was a total “follower” as a young teenager and never thought about planning my own life out, so of course I thought that this also sounded like a great idea and I applied to Nottingham School of Nursing too straight away!. It would also be good to have a familiar face in a strange city I thought, clearly never doubting that I wouldn't get accepted!
II wore one of my Mum's dresses and to the interview and was successful and they offered me a place to start in May 1985. This caused a bit of a dilemma as my College Course didn’t finish until the end of August, but I was so keen to get started that I decided to leave my Pre Nursing Course and therefore A' Levels behind me and get going on the real thing. It was not easy trying to convince my parents that this was the best thing to do, but finally they conceded and in May 1985 I was officially a Student Nurse on Course 85/ 06/SR in Nottingham.
My journey had begun.
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