Cultureshock

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Video transcript

It was at the beginning of the war. I was a children's nurse and the team's nursery for children. It was a place where the mothers used to go to work in the ammunition factories and they used to leave their children with me and other people like me. I worked there for three years and I couldn't carry on any longer because I was taking too much to heart with the children because the children used to come in, the mothers used to bring the children into the nursery and the babies in the prams were never washed, never cleaned, dirty, full of flea bites and hungry. So as a children's nurse I had to bath them, feed them and make sure that they were well fed and well looked after and there was one family in particular and they had a little girl and she was only a tiny tot in the pram and she used to come in every morning and she was always dirty and we used to have to start by giving her a bath and feeding her and everything and her father was an elderly man, not very tall, quite stout. His image still lives with me right to this day and we had to bring a case up against him for what he used to do to his little girl and she was only a baby in a pram. It was after all that, that I just couldn't take any more and I had to give the job up but I'll never forget that and I couldn't cope with it and I had to give the job up. A lot of the children who used to come in and we used to put a play-pen up and they used to be crawling about in it and they used to be balls in for the children to play with and everything and we used to get in to the play- pen on my hands and knees and play with the children and they used to giggle. So there was a lot of pleasant stuff going on as well with the children but the main thing was the children was being looked after while their mams was working in the factories. It was a job what you really loved because if you've got a love for children, you love that job just looking after them and hearing the giggles from the babies. It's a sound you never forget.