Mrs Marie Barlow

Thank goodness I’ve only been in hospital only the once when I broke my hip but apart from that I have followed through nursing because both of my daughters are nurses, and of course, there is a vast difference now.

In my day, it was really more brawn you needed, today its all brain. Certainly we had more contact with the patients but the girls of today, I think they would run rings around our crowd.

When I was nursing, 18 was the minimum age to nurse. Most people were about 20 when they started. They didn’t want young girls at all. Some girls might have worked in offices or something like that. We had one girl who was 18 when she commenced training and the rest of us were all 20 years of age. I worked in a state insurance office for the government for three years. I didn’t like office work at all.

Well, thank God, I hadn’t had much to do with hospitals but I thought the patients would be pleased to have me looking after them. That wasn’t always the case I can assure you.

One of the worst things that happened to me was a little paper boy and I had been very good to that kid. Anyway one of the chores was you had to cook the breakfast before you went off to all your patients. I cooked these eggs, and I hadn’t done any cooking. Anyway, you can imagine, some eggs were hard and some were soft and some were God knows what! So this kid got his egg and about 10.30 I was called up by the Night Staff to report and he had kept that egg to show the doctor the hard egg he was given for breakfast. It just shows you how the patient was always right. I got into trouble for this. The punishment was you were put on a "scrubbing pass" and you got to scrub the toilet backs.

We were in a sort of institution, I suppose. You had to be indoors by 10.00 pm at night and we had one leave until 11.00pm. Everyone lived in quarters which I think was a good idea and we had the community life and made great friends and we had a lot of fun. Well, that’s all gone today.

We always broke that 10.00 rule. We had a patient, a Mrs Dean who was in a plaster cast from her neck to knees – it was back and front – well poor Mrs Dean died so we took the plaster cast and used to put that in our beds and cover it up with blankets. When matron did rounds, well there you were in bed. We used to go out dancing, to parties.

We did all the bedside nursing. If you had your appendix out in those days, for seven days after that you were bed bathed and lifted. The patient wasn’t allowed to get out and walk. Then for another seven days you were in bed but you could get out. With a gall bladder or hysterectomy, those patients were bed bathed for two weeks and lifted onto their pillows and then another week before they were mobile. You really got to know your patients.

You had to make your own time to study. We used to work about 9 hours a day. We used to clean the wards, dust the lockers - everything in those days. During the week, we had to go to eight lectures by a doctor and then the rest of the time you had your books and you just studied. We had exams as well. It is very different from nowadays. Nurses look after the patients, cleaners clean the rooms and other people serve the meals.

My daughters are nurses but not bedside nursing. One daughter has a degree in Nurse Education and Administration. When she did her university studies, there again, I think she was one of the youngest people. There were women who had been matrons of hospitals and up to around 30 years of age who came to do these courses. She was at Princess Alexandra Hospital and she was fortunate enough to get a chance to get a scholarship.

Some years ago when I was at Northam with my daughter, I nursed at the aged clinical centre of the Northam Hospital. It was what I was used to, just showering the patients and looking after them and seeing that they ate their food and things like that.

I think in one way, the conditions are better, but what with all they can do and the amount of jobs they can take, it's still that way that you have to work the shift work – you might want to go somewhere at night but you're on dayshift. I admire them because I think they could have chosen other things with no more study and have a freer life so I do think that there are here to be admired, the nurses of today. They’re not getting good pay, these nurses. They deserve more.

One of the funniest things that happened to me was we used to have all the old people in what we called a back ward – there were none of these homes, or anything – anyway one man, he was there for quite a long time and he died. So, another nurse and I were laying him up and on the locker was this set of false teeth. We thought that the family would like them in. So we tried to get those teeth in, well they jumped in and out, in and out. Somehow, we got a chin strap around him and we got them in. Such a job. We always liked to see people looking nice for their families. So the next day he was buried. The day after that, Sr Louise came up to me and said his wife was there and she said "she (the wife) would like to see you." So I thought, oh, that’s nice, obviously going to thank me for what I had done for him. Anyway, lo and behold, she said "I’ve come to get my teeth. I left my good teeth on the locker." "Oh," I said Mrs …… - I couldn’t speak. I said "We thought that they were his teeth that you had brought in." "No, they weren’t" she said, "they were my new teeth. I took them out that morning because they were hurting me". "Oh" I said, "Look, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but we buried them with him." Well, she screamed at the top of her voice, "First we lose poor daddy and now I’ve lost my beautiful teeth".

We had a lot of fun, we really did. I don’t know how you could have existed without a sense of humour. If you had a sense of humour, there was something you could laugh at every day. We used to have patients in there and you would have pleasure in seeing them improve. It seems to me that you don’t get that pleasure today. We had no penicillin in those days but eventually we did have the M&B 693 – sulphur tablets. They came in and we used to use those. It was marvellous to see the pneumonias mend. Antibiotics came in during the war.

We also used to nurse children. Some poor kids though, you’d ring up and tell mother they could go home now and she’d say that she wouldn’t pick them up till tomorrow because they’re going to someone’s place. We half reared a lot of those kids.