I started college at 17. Nursery Nurses College was run by Miss Bastien. A very proper older woman. We were taught about how to put our clothes in Moth Balls for the summer and how to basket weave.
(Shame it wasn't tyre changing!)
We learnt how to project yourself when reading stories. We wore lilac leotards for dance and Movement. We studied the environment and read poetry.
For the first year I was a model student.
I liked the placements. I spent a year in deepest Knowle with the council kids. But the nursery was run to the highest standards and when they entered the building their behaviour was expected to be of the most respectable fashion... guess what? They behaved. A lesson to be learnt there.
I felt like I didn't belong there though. A College. I wasn't posh enough. I wasn't finishing school material.
In the second year I'd worked out that with a fraction of common sense you could walk that course and gave up trying.
I'd hide in the basement with Janie, Sarah and Elaine. Janie was posh but also didn't like the Establishment way of thinking. Churning us out like little Posh Nannies to the rich.
Janie was a smoker. When I look back, that college house was a tinder box. With its narrow wooden stair cases and old victorian fixtures. A grade 1 listed building. No fire exits and full of young silly girls.
I passed my exams and took a job as a Nanny. To Lucinda and Charles. Two very spoiled and mixed up kids. Their mother was some relation of Winston Churchill. They lived in Bath by the park. Sion Hill, very smart. Mother didn't work. She just wanted someone to help with the kids and around the house. And show off as a staus symbol.
The kids didn't like me, particularly Charles who was really a baby and only wanted mummy.
I didn't like his mother. She was cold and unfriendly and I was homesick.
One day she made me iron 24 of her husbands shirts and berated me for not knowing how to make a basic rout sauce.
Then one day she sent for my parents. Told them I was not what she expected. I'd come so highly recommended and she was shocked at how useless I was.
My Dad gave her short shrift and took me home.
My sisters had rearranged our bedroom (3 of us shared one room) I didn't have a bed anymore. I felt like a failure.
I signed on the dole. My one and only time. I took a job as a supply nursery nurse. To places that needed staff because of sickness etc.
I got a job at Morning Place Day Nursery. Maybe 2 days a week but the cook went off sick and I got her job.
It was the making of me. I had to cook for 30 kids and the staff. Simple stuff like Cheese and potato pie and fish fingers but it was a feat. It meant organisation and planning and I liked it.
I also worked in the nursery.
One of the little girls (Bryony) was a favourite of mine. Aged 3 blonde and quiet.
One morning she didn't turn up for nursery... we didn't see her for days then the police came.
Her dad had killed her.
The nursery was privately run and the boss was all about money money money. I didn't like him or his wife and felt nervous around them.
Nervous people don't project themselves well and I knew I wouldn't get a full time job with them.
I went with my mum to go to the doctors with my little sister one day. There was a health visitor there. She got talking and suggested I think about going into nursing.
I thought about it.
Nursery Nursing was hard work and little pay and around Bristol, there wasn't much opportunity for full time employment unless you wanted to be a Nanny. I didn't.
I applied to the BRI and got an interview. I went through the whole fiasco. A medical, measured for my uniform, tours, references and a final interview. I went to a small airless room with a panel of women all looking at me.
A stern looking senior nurse asked me questions.
Then she asked "So tell me what you think Nurses do?"
I froze. I thought about nurses on TV, things I'd seen. My voice clammed up and the room swam.
"Arrange flowers" I croaked.
I didn't get accepted.
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