Call the District Nurse

  Recently there have been a couple of television dramas exploring the lives of doctors and nurses working out in the community and these have reminded me of the numerous stories and anecdotes that my mother would tell of her experiences as a district nurse working along the edge of the Lincolnshire fens in the 1960s and 70s.

Nurse Jessie Temple (formerly Shaw) started her time on district work just when my brother and I had started at primary school. She was approached by a couple of local GPs to see if she would like to return to nursing, a career she had taken up during the Second World War. Before going off to study nursing she had worked on the family farm at East Keal for a time. She had tried out a few other jobs; acting as nanny to a couple of children at Langton Hall, cycling to work at a laundry at Skegness. She had not really enjoyed working on the land and talking to a couple of cousins, who had also chosen to train as a nurses, she found herself lodging with an aunt and uncle in Wisbech whilst she completed her training at the North Cambridgeshire Hospital. After marriage in the early fifties and a gap of 10 or so years she found it quite a challenge to pick up the reins of nursing again. However, she found working in the community was very different from working as one of a team in a hospital ward. Nevertheless, I think she was soon in her stride and remained on the district, in one capacity or another, until she retired in her late sixties.

 The job brought her up against many of the people with whom she had grown up; the farmers and folk who made their living from the land. She was less impressed by wealthy townies who had bought up country cottages only to ‘gut’ them and turn them into characterless weekend retreats. When she started out we didn’t own our own phone so every evening about a quarter to six she would stand in the telephone box which stood about fifty yards along the road waiting for the call telling her who required a visit the following day. It sounds odd but it was about two years before the health authority agreed to install a phone in our house. Oddly enough we were given a 2-party line so every time we needed the phone we had to press a button to take over the line. Curiously she was only supposed to use the phone for the first 30 minutes in every hour before our opposite number had precedence. As before the senior district nurse, Nurse Taylor, who lived within the grounds of Tattershall Castle, would ring daily to dole out patients to the three or four nurses under her charge. I recall in the mid sixties a Nurse Jackson covered the Woodhall Spa stretch and later on Nurse Mitchell, Nurse Eyre and my mother were brought in to share the increased work-load. My mother was not a midwife so she usually attended geriatric cases and long-term patients. The geographical area covered by my mother’s team was vast.  It stretched from Anton’s Gowt in the south (just outside Boston) to Horncastle and from Burgh le Marsh near Skegness to Billinghay just over the River Witham in the west. During the summer holidays I would travel with her on occasions reading my comic or listening to the radio whilst she visited some remote farm cottage out in the fen.

 On one occasion however I found myself in a right mess when, having fiddled with the car’s ignition, I caused the car to burst into life and it shot like a ferret after a rabbit right across a gravelled yard and through a low privet hedge. Although dramatic amazingly my escapade did little serious damage to both car and garden although my mother was none too pleased.

 As district nurse she visited some quaint places and met dozens of interesting characters over the years.

One lady she nursed, a member of the Lilley family, had been born and brought up in Teapot Hall, a unique, most curious example of vernacular cottage construction that stood just outside Dalderby off the Horncastle road. It was supposed to have been owned at one time by a retired captain of a tea clipper- hence its name. It was a timber-framed, thatched building shaped a bit like a section of Toblerone -  a prism in fact. Sadly it stood empty by the time of the Second world war and was burnt down in a fire in 1945 thought to have been started by some airmen celebrating the end of the war. The lady explained to my mother that at one time there were eight children living in the cottage with an outside privy (also thatched) and water only available from a pump outside the back door.

 Another patient was a former gamekeeper from Revesby Abbey who, at the time, still lived on the estate. He regaled mother with tales about shooting parties and grand dinners at the abbey when he was a young lad. Before the war his mother had worked in the kitchens of the great house and he would earn sixpence for assisting the chauffeurs polishing the cars of all the guests whilst visiting the Hall. He told her one story about a young lad from a local farm who was normally paid a few shillings to assist in ‘beating the bushes’ when visitors to the hall were invited to join a shooting party on nearby land. The lad was unlucky enough to get sprayed with shot on one occasion by one of the house-guests.  Fortunately he wasn’t badly hurt and as consolation for his injuries received a silver watch and chain from the guilty party.

Another of her patients was a descendent of George Jennings, one of the pioneers of the flush lavatory. I remember her telling me they still had a toilet and cistern decorated in blue peonies which they were still using every day in the 1970s.

After she retired she was still involved in caring when she joined the ranks of The Marie Curie and Macmillan nurses looking after terminally ill in the local community. She was also employed doing something that at the time I felt quite uneasy about; she would go out, often in the middle of the night, to assist the local undertakers, J.W. Sivill, in the laying out of the deceased. Only now can I look back and appreciate how hard she worked and how dedicated she was to serving her patients.