A little thing happened, I won a recent writing competition and got to attend a Life Writing Course with Faber: Professional Writing academy/ New Writing North. Thought I’d share my little piece here. It’s about me starting my nursing career as a 17 year old in a nursing home.
Welford Nursing Home 1997
1997: Princess Diana chased to her death by the media, Tony Blair takes the helm of the UK, a year of both national sadness and hope. I am just 17 years old; Ms Herdwick is 86. We have an almost daily ritual that unbelievably we have both come to enjoy. She is a woman well lived, experienced and worldly, I naive, immature and have just started my first job as a trainee health care assistant. While my friends are doing A levels, drinking in the student union, and dancing to Nirvana, I’m painting the nails of elderly hands. On starting in the care home, the matron had informed me that I must always address the residents by their full name, by their title; I must never use nicknames of ‘my luv or dear’. She informed me that all the residents I would be caring for must always be respected. I’d blushed thinking of my declaration to my girlfriends that I was going to be caring for ‘cute little old people’.
I was unaware of how the body ages; how the mind can stay sharp as the bones become brittle. When the heart starts to fail, fluid pools at the ankles, causing them to swell, thick and bulbous like an elephant’s leg. The aging process, illness – as a 17-year-old these things had never occurred to me. Now each shift I observe Ms Herdwick’s muscle wastage, her loose excess skin, flaccid and pale. Watch the blood running through her visible veins, the paper-thin skin only just able to contain them. Initially I hid my disgust, my distaste at what becomes of us. The contrast between the beautiful young woman, head tilted to the side and smiling at me from a silver photo frame on her dressing table, to this woman now who sits hunched and contracted. Her hair once a thick brunette bob now sits short grey and wispy on her head. But after a few weeks in the job, I quickly failed to see what I’d once been shocked by and scared of, once stared at awkwardly, unknowingly. The fragility of Ms Herdwick stopped being so blatant. Soon I see the life left in her, I hear the stories she has, the opinions she’s formed. I hear the life she has lived. I witness her determination to continue living. Each day we grow older together.
A beautiful, bright spring day. Daffodils dance on the window box, as sunrays blast through just opened curtains. I roll up Ms Herdwick’s stockings, a new nylon tea-brown skin hiding her ailing flesh. I’ve never worn stockings, yet she wears them every day, even in summer. Kneeling on the floor, my hands move up to her thighs as I unravel the stockings. Such an intimate yet innocent task. I need to clip the white buttons into the catches that hang from her girdle. There are two clips at the front and two at the back. Ms Herdwick stands slowly, her bones weak and brittle, branches of an aging apple tree. Moving my hand around to the back of her thighs I attach the clasps. Click, click, both in place, her stockings secured. She sits back on her armchair, a little thud as she lands. Returning to the floor, I put on her shoes tying the laces in a tight bow, just the way she insists. I know her well now.
‘Were you ever married?’ She has many photos on her cabinet. The photos are black and white, or a faded gritty pixelated colour. Her in Paris, on a beach, in tennis clothes, a thick head of brown hair neatly bobbed. In all the pictures she smiles brightly at the camera but is alone. Sitting crossed legged at her feet, waiting to hear her stories. My blue uniform neatly ironed by my mother is hunched above my knees, this is how I sat at primary school story-time less than a decade ago.
‘I almost got married, but I changed my mind.’ Smiling, I can see no regret in her wrinkled face. She tells me how in her early 20s she met a man; he was considered a catch. He drove a car, had a good job in the council. He took her dancing, to cafes, they went on drives in the countryside. Once engaged they drove down to Derbyshire to visit his sister and brother-in-law. They stopped off in a shop to pick up the Sunday papers, his sister had requested he did so. But on handing the papers over, he gave her a bill. Ms Herdwick described how she couldn’t have possibly married a man who after being given a lunch of two courses, and an afternoon of wonderful company, would then try to retrieve the cost of a newspaper. At that moment she decided she would not and could not marry such a man. Her parents never forgave her. Although she thrived in her career, made money, and a reputation for herself in TV (she wrote scripts). The one hope her parents had for their daughter, to be a good wife, was the one thing she never became.
‘One could not possibly marry a man with such lack of generosity or etiquette.’ She mumbles. ‘Apparently I broke his heart, or so his mother wrote to tell me some time later.’
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I look up at this woman with admiration as her younger self looks on from the silver photo frame. Ms Herdwick is teaching me that I have choices; I can create my own pathway. Smiling down at me sitting child-like at her feet like the child sat in story time I was, she strokes my hair. Smiling, lost in her memories from over sixty years ago, the life she chose not to have, the man she chose not to marry. The heart she broke to save her own. I could see no regret on her face.
NURSEMUMNATURE 