Finally found...

 When my parents were children there weren’t any well-constructed  playgrounds with grass and climbing frames and swings to play on. The cobbled street was their playground. When Auntie Ron and her friends were playing skipping games with the long rope that stretched almost across the street. “All in together girls, never mind the weather girls.”

 Much of Mum’s childhood was spent in and out of hospitals.  Mum’s sister said it was with diphtheria and pneumonia as well as asthma.  She remembers being taken out of school a lot to go and visit her. There was a convalescent home in Buckinghamshire that Mum spent a long time in. It was here that the nurses would walk Mum around outside so that  Nan and my aunt  could watch her from behind the trees, because they weren’t allowed to see her to talk to. I suppose this was because the belief back then was that it was better not to upset the child by seeing the parents and having them leave again at the end of visiting time.  Perhaps it was when she came home from this hospital that my aunt remembers.

“She was always having illnesses. First of all it started when she was just a baby. After she came home from hospital one time, I can see our Mum pacing up and down with her and  Jean  saying `I want my mum’ and Nan saying `but I am your mum’, she’d been away for so long that she’d forgotten her ...later she just seemed to grow out of it, she still had the asthma but it didn’t seem to be so bad.”

Nan would take my aunt out of school and they would go visit. She was in a fever hospital and they would regularly go all the way

 up to Covent Garden, and then bring home big plants on the open top buses to take up to the hospital when they visited.

My Aunt remembers:

“She was always having illnesses. It started when she was just a baby.

 I can see our Mum pacing up and down with her one time when she came home from hospital and Jean saying `I want my mum’ and Nan saying `but I am your mum’. She’d been away for so long that she’d forgotten her

When I was training to be a nurse, one assignment had me completely stumped.

We were asked to identify our ‘Nursing Role Models’. I think I just made something up, because I couldn’t figure it out. No one in the family was involved with nursing and as far as I could remember I’d had no contact with any ‘nurse’

Later though as I got more interested in finding out about my family history I realised that Mum was my role model. She was my ‘nurse’ when I was sick and her own ‘role models’ would have been the nurses who cared for her during her own childhood experiences in hospital.

In my ramblings during the last almost twelve months I might have written about this before.

I’m writing about it again because I have finally found another nurse in my family tree she was a maternal Great Aunt.