The Real Band of Brothers: First-hand accounts from the last British survivors of the Spanish Civil War

It was during a Zeppelin air raid that my brother Georgie was born. There were now two babies instead of one. For some reason, my older brother and sister were always scrapping with each other, and, besides, Jim was a boy, so that I had most of the responsibility for looking after my young sister, Rosie, and Georgie, the baby. Oh Lord, what a burden it was! What I remember now of the war years is not the excitement, and not even standing in the food queues, but always being saddled with these two unfortunate kids wherever I went. Soon after Georgie was born, I began missing days at school. I now slept with two others in one small bed and got so little sleep that I often dropped off during class. In this way I was soon the dunce at school and, because I lost my temper when the teachers spoke sharply to me, I became sullen and obstinate—even though I didn’t want to be.

On 14 July 1919 an election was held in our district, and voting cars with huge posters were touring the streets, telling people like my parents—who knew nothing of politics or social conditions—who they were to vote for. We children were playing out in the streets and somebody dared me to jump on the back of one of the voting cars, which was moving pretty fast. Because I was always game for a dare, I did, and hung on and turned my head back triumphantly. But, just as I did so, I looked straight at an enormous policeman standing on the kerb not six feet away, who gave me such a glare that in my terror I let go, falling flat on the paving stones and grazing my arms and knees so badly that once again I was taken off to hospital to have my cuts and grazes dressed. This took time, and when I came home late, creeping quietly through the door for fear of the hiding I thought was in store for me, I had a new surprise. My mother’s room was locked again, the house was full of neighbours and I was told I had just been presented with twin brothers! My mother had been told I’d been run over, and the shock had precipitated the birth. I don’t know why I hadn’t realised she was pregnant—somehow lots of children never did. But when I heard the news—not only one new baby but two—everything seemed to go black before my eyes, and in my mind, too. Now I would never be free. It would always be like this. I just went out and sat on the doorstep, though my cuts and bruises were still sore, and I wept and wept. Now, instead of having two youngsters to look after, I had four.

Nearly all my memories are connected with the pram my mother bought on the never-never [a system of hire purchase], pushing the old thing up and down the street with two kids inside and a third one hanging onto the crossbar below, and a fourth one perhaps hanging onto my frock; if ever I tried to park them and sneak off on my own, there would be loud yells and I would have to dash back to them.

I had got interested in my schoolwork, but now it was goodbye to any hopes I had of catching up with my lessons so that school hours shouldn’t be such a misery to me. With so many kids at home, I felt I hadn’t a chance, and the least thing made me feel bitter and resentful. Everything was against me.

At school I could never make up for the days I had missed. When figures were on the blackboard I didn’t know whether to go upwards or downwards, or start at the pounds end or the farthings. I was usually tired and my mind used to go quite blank, as though I wasn’t seeing anything on the blackboard, and when asked a question I just became sullen. Certain teachers disliked me because I seemed dull and backward.

One teacher was always making me a laughing stock. She used to stand me up before all the class and ask me questions I couldn’t answer, so I just remained dumb, or said I had forgotten—which angered her so that she often caned me. One day, when I didn’t answer she said, ‘Come up here, Phelps,’ as she advanced towards me with her cane.

At that, rage seized me, and I picked up an inkpot. The whole room gasped, including the teacher.

Then she said, ‘How dare you, Phelps? Put that down.’

I said, ‘I’ll dare anything if you touch me with that stick again.’

She still advanced towards me with the cane, so I shied the ink bottle straight at her. The bottle didn’t hit her, but all the ink did. My goodness: what a mess, all over her dress and the room. I got caned for this—but by the headmistress herself—and I was given a letter to take home to my father.

When the twins were born I was much older; we were a large family, always quarrelling—but we always made up afterwards. We used to play rounders, skipping, and the boys used to join in the skipping. And we played hide-and-seek and touch. I was always a daredevil—with all my brothers I was up to scratch with them. All the same, I used to be scared stiff of my own shadow. In those days they used to keep the dead at home in their coffin and put them on the table in the parlour—and shut the door. My brothers knew I was scared of shadows and the dark, and I would never go into the parlour on my own. I had a feeling that there was something in that end room and that I mustn’t go in. I think it was a thing between me and my sister, little Emily, who died. I knew there was something in that room that I didn’t understand—and I used to toddle to the door and get just up to the handle, then I’d be pulled away sharply. That was a shock to me. I didn’t know what I was doing—just turning the handle—but as I opened the door it was very dark, then someone pulled me aside. From that time on I was afraid of the dark, until I was quite old—even until going up to nursing. It was only night nursing that cured me.

I left school at thirteen. When you left school you were supposed to produce your birth certificate, and the teacher said to me, ‘I haven’t got your birth certificate—I must have it.’

So I said to my mother, ‘I want my birth certificate.’

She said, ‘I’ll have to go and get it.’ Everything was always, ‘I’ll get it.’

Days and weeks went by and still she was ‘going to get it’. She never got it—so at the end of term I just left and never went back.

When I was a kid of just thirteen, my mother made me put my hair up and sent me into service. It was in Orpington, and to me it was like being on the other side of the world. I was scared of my own shadow even then. I used to write to her, ‘Please take me out of here.’ I would get up in the early hours of the morning to whitewash the steps and blacklead the kitchen ovens. It was cheap slave labour. But eventually my mother did come and bring me home—and then I started going into factories.

The Eagle Pencil factory was one of the first ones, but my mother took me away from there. Getting work for children was easy—it was the grown-ups who found it difficult. So I would join another factory making pencils or furniture. I went on to Leavis’s furniture, where I used to push heavy furniture—plane it—then go over it, fill up the cracks, and then push it on further, through all the stages of polishing. It was very hard work but I quite enjoyed it because I was making contact with other girls. Always being new at a job was hateful. I couldn’t settle down, and in between there was so much housework and looking after the children that I was glad to be off again. But all the jobs were blind alleys leading me nowhere, and when I discovered I had left school a year too soon I felt really bitter towards my parents.

I loved crochet and needlework. I used to make loads of lace and tray cloths for neighbours—they’d buy the cotton and I’d make it for a few pence. Even up until recently I was still doing cloths for people. I’ve still got some of the little bits of lace and tray cloths. I did wide lace for the church, too. I used to go to the park opposite the Prince of Wales Hospital, Tottenham, and I’d sit there with the twins and crochet, while my mother was doing her washing. I used to see the nurses come out and walk round to their home.

There was a lady in the road who used to do dressmaking, and take her stuff to the West End in London. She would employ a few girls like me and my neighbour to sew at her house. It was slave labour, really—a sweatshop. She was a very good dressmaker and she did all the D’Oyly Carte Company’s dresses—beautiful costumes—and she taught me how to do fly-running stitch. After I went into the hospital at Charing Cross as a student, I used to get theatre tickets from Theatreland, and I’d see the D’Oyly Carte and wonder if those costumes were stitched by me.

Of a Sunday, all us crowd were at home. My mother and father used to like to have a sleep after dinner—and we used to be sent off. I was a bit of a rebel—no angel—and I could fight as well as my brothers. It was nothing for me to be in a fight with one of my brothers and him getting the worst of it. Not far from us, in Broad Lane, stood the corrugated tin chapel of the Plymouth Brethren—I suppose the strictest Christian sect in England—bearing a board on which was written, ‘How shall I be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou SHALT be saved’.

I had always been sent to Sunday School, chiefly because my mother didn’t know what to do with us on Sunday afternoons after the midday meal. At Sunday School we sang hymns and learnt Bible lessons, and finally I became converted to the Plymouth Brethren. For three years I kept every rule and belief of what I was told was the only Christian religion that could help me be saved. I never went to the pictures, nor to dances, never went walking with boys, stopped swearing and even thought I ought to change my job because it was sinful to be working on stage clothes. In a way, this religion and denying myself all worldly pleasures, as even cinemas were called, was a passive rebellion against my environment, and gave me a sense of virtue and satisfaction. At home I acted superior, and was sneered at and laughed at, and was nicknamed ‘the Bible-Puncher’. Looking back, I think I must have been an awful prig, but I still have a soft spot for the Plymouth Brethren. In a poor and ignorant district like ours they did a tremendous amount of good.

Through religion I taught myself self-control, which was all to the good. I came to mix with people who spoke better English than I did, and I learnt to imitate them. I was also encouraged to better my education and go to evening classes. On the other hand, I was among a lot of pretty badly repressed women, with no outlet for their emotions, leading monotonous lives, and apt to turn queer and bitter, making me in some ways even more repressed and unnatural than I was before.

One of the teachers befriended me and took me under her wing. She used to invite me to her house after Sunday School for tea, and in the evening she would take me home. There was another one who was very motherly, and who had a daughter, and I used to try to imitate her. She went to the Tottenham High School and, me being a cockney, I used anything but the right words, so she always used to correct me. I always remember learning my first words of French with her, which were ‘Fermez la porte, s’il vous plaît’—she was just a young kid, but she taught me.

That stayed with me—and so did the Scriptures. I can still quote the Bible—but I never felt right into it, although I used to go to Bible-preaching meetings, and it did have an influence on me. I got very attached to the people, so even when I went into nursing I stayed in touch with them. I have a lot to thank those outside influences for. Somehow I always came under the influence of the right type of people. There was one Sunday School teacher who worked in a good position in a factory, and I asked her if I could join—but she said no, I shouldn’t go into factory work.

As I got older I got fed up with the job I was doing—it was no good. I didn’t make friends very easily. There were two other girls—and there was always an odd one out, and that was me. I used to pass these roads to the factory and see the girls working in the offices, and I used to think, ‘I’d like to do that—do some typing’. I went round to the school and they said I could join for shorthand and typing—and I was very keen and worked really hard. I was determined to make up for the schooling I had not made use of or missed altogether, and at the chapel I was encouraged to do this. I was fifteen when I first went to evening classes. I was one of the keenest attendees. We had no exams, but weekly tests, and to my surprise I found I often came out top.

There was a Mr Turner, and, at the end of the period, he would give away free theatre tickets to the one who came top. I always seemed to be getting the theatre tickets—but I never went to the theatre because I was a Plymouth Brethren and you didn’t go to theatres and you didn’t go with boys—so I used to give them away.

One day Mr Turner said, while he was marking our notes: ‘Tell me, Miss Phelps, I’m very curious—you don’t use your theatre tickets, do you?’

I thought I’d been caught out, but I said, ‘No sir.’

He asked ‘Why not?’

I said, ‘Because I’m a Plymouth Brethren, and we don’t go to the theatre.’

‘Oh, I see.’

So he left it at that for the time being, but another time he said, ‘Miss Phelps, would you like to come home to lunch with us? I’ll give you an address to meet you on a Sunday.’ It was some station in central London.

So I went home, and my elder sister was very suspicious of young girls and young men, and she said to my mother, ‘You’re not going to let her go at her age—to meet a man at a station, who’ll pretend he’s going to take her home for lunch?’

I said, ‘But he is.’

But she said, ‘Don’t you believe her.’ And my mother took her side and wouldn’t let me go.

I didn’t quite know what to do. I couldn’t go back to school in the evening for quite a while, but eventually I plucked up courage. I knew I was going to tell a lie—and I met Mr Turner, and he said, ‘Miss Phelps, I’m sorry we missed you.’

And I said, ‘I didn’t know your address or where you lived, so I couldn’t tell you that I wasn’t well.’ That was the only excuse I could make.

He said, ‘Oh, well, perhaps another time,’ but, from that time on, when he mentioned the wife, that made me mad—because I had a very quick temper.

When I got home I went for my sister. I said, ‘He wasn’t trying it on—he was married and had a nice wife—and they went there to meet me, and you spoilt it all.’ But still he took an interest in me, and so did his wife—they were the first people who really encouraged me.

During the next two years I visited the Turners frequently, and both Mr and Mrs Turner continued to take a real interest in my career, helping with all possible advice. Mrs Turner helped me to become more human by getting me to moderate my religious tendencies. I had always said cinemas were sinful, but Mrs Turner said she could see I was not happy—that I oughtn’t to go on leading a dull and uninteresting life. I denied this, saying that I was perfectly happy—but without conviction. Then, one day, I broke the rule and went with the Turners to the cinema, feeling frightfully guilty about it, but very soon this sense of guilt passed. Once I had broken through this one restriction, others went too, though it was still some years before I went to the theatre.

One day Mr Turner said to me ‘Miss Phelps, wouldn’t you like to change your job from working in factories?’

I said, ‘What can I do?’

He said, ‘You could do an office job.’

I said, ‘But I’m not trained to do it—the arithmetic.’ But he and his wife helped me quite a lot.

Then, one evening, with the Turners’ advice, I made the decision to try to become a nurse. I was of an age now to do nursing, and I applied to the Homerton Hospital to do that because they took people a bit younger. I was too young for general nursing training, but not too young to do fever nursing. Following my application, I received a letter telling me I had been accepted on trial as a probationer nurse. This was January 1928. Living inside a big hospital, being part of its life and wearing its uniform, opened quite a new world for me. Now I had at last done what I wanted, and I seemed at once cut off from the life of our home and our street. At home the family doubted my chances, and said I was suffering with a swollen head if I thought I could go through with it—and I thought so myself—but I worked hard at the hospital and kept very quiet. The work was tiring, but I found it interesting and made good progress, particularly on the practical side. In the qualifying examinations at the end of the year I managed to come out top.

I got on very well. I only missed getting a medal by four marks for being half an hour late—and I’ll tell you what made me late. We didn’t have buses or taxis in those days—it was trams from Hackney down to Seven Sisters Road and down to Amhurst Road. I was playing tennis that morning in the grounds of the hospital at Homerton, and the sister passed by and I was representing the nurses, being the one picked out to compete with other nurses at the hospital. She saw me and said, ‘Nurse Phelps, don’t you be late!’

And I said, ‘I won’t, Sister.’

I was enjoying my game of tennis—but when I went I didn’t realise that buses didn’t run and it was just trams, and I was a bit late and I started to run. I never ran so much in my whole life as I did then but I arrived half an hour late—and when I went in I was sweating because I’d run all the way. The matron used to say I was a good runner, and I got to the hospital and found the room. The sister was sitting there, supervising the nurses, and she pointed to the first chair, so I went in—boiling—and sat down. She never even came and gave me a drink of water. I started reading, and the first words I caught were ‘oculogyral spasms’, which I knew about, and I was writing and I went all through that paper, and I was bang on time. It was over and the bell went to stop, and, instead of going to the top, she came to me first to collect my paper. I was just on the last sentence, and she wouldn’t let me finish—she was really a nasty bit of work—because I could have completed that last one. I knew about oculogyral spasms. But she took it away and so I lost out on the medal by four marks, for being half an hour late. I got higher marks than the medallist in the practical and oral—but I still didn’t get the medal.

For nearly five years I worked as staff nurse at different hospitals, but I was never altogether content because, after a while, hospital routine didn’t satisfy me. It was the social conditions attached to nursing that got me down. In my early years, a nurse’s pay was ridiculously small and the hours terribly long, and worst of all was the snobbish and hypocritical discipline, which I thought an insult to any intelligent woman. It was just exploitation. Nurses were often spoken to by members of the senior staff in a tone no factory girl would have put up with. What irritated me most of all was that, on duty, a nurse was supposed to be a woman with enough brains to carry responsibility, but off duty we were treated like children. We were given hardly any free time and made to keep absurd rules, particularly about seeing men friends, and all because of the Victorian tradition that nursing wasn’t work—it was a noble sacrifice—so we could dispense with decent hours and pay.

I finished my hospital training—I came top in the hospital—then I went on to apply to voluntary hospitals. I applied to one of the best hospitals in London but I hadn’t had the secondary education for it. It didn’t matter what my hospital experience was, even though I nearly always came out top. Eventually I applied to Charing Cross, and they did take me. I asked to have a talk with the matron before the interview. She was a motherly sort, and I was candid with her. She said she could quite understand how I felt—and she said she would give me a chance. ‘You can go to the hospital training school and see how you go—but if you’re no good, you’ll have to leave.’ And that was it. I went to Charing Cross for my training, which was a wonderful experience, and that was the beginning.

I was getting on well, but then I became very, very ill and my mother was called. I’d been to see a friend in Brentwood and was coming home late—you had to get in by twelve o’clock at the nurses’ home from your day off. I realised it was late and I was going to miss my bus to take me to Hackney, and I ran when I saw the bus coming. It slowed down and then went on again, and I ran after it, and, as I ran, I missed it and slipped. I had a big gash on my leg. Nobody had seen me fall, and I knew it was my own fault. Then a motorist came along and said he’d take me to the hospital, but I said ‘no’—with my nurse’s discipline, I was afraid not to get back in time—so he said he’d take me to the house where I could get something to clean my leg and put some iodine and a bandage on it. He took me as far as Hackney and I met one of my night nurses and I explained to her. She said, ‘Come on, Phelps,’—they always called you by your surname—‘that needs proper dressing and stitches.’ The night sister came along, bound my leg, ticked me off and put me in the sickbay.

I didn’t think much of the injury, but after a while my temperature went up, and I thought my neck and face felt queer. When the doctor came, I told him I felt a queer stiffness at the back of my neck. He asked me if I was sickening for mumps, but when I told him I’d had mumps he left it at that. But that night the stiff pain got worse—at times I felt as if the muscles of my face were being pulled out of their sockets—and I couldn’t breathe. Early in the morning I had some kind of convulsion. Another nurse who had served during the war was also in the sick ward. Immediately she saw my condition she ran to the telephone, calling the night nurse, ‘My God, the girl’s got tetanus! I saw it during the war and you can never forget it!’

The night nurse came just as I had a second convulsion. The doctor came rushing in and there was a lot of telephoning for serum. Suddenly they were charging around like mad, sending to the lab to get tetanus antitoxin. They even sent an ambulance to collect it. There was talk of desensitising me, and I was given chloroform and morphine to ease the convulsions, but all the time I was conscious and in worse pain than I had ever imagined possible. While I was given a spinal serum injection, I had such a convulsion that my hands and feet felt as if they were being torn off.

I suppose this should have been the end of me, because the survival rate for tetanus, if not treated in time, is pretty small. For a week I was critically ill, but I don’t remember much about it. My mother was called and the matron said, ‘You don’t know what tetanus is, do you? Well, it’s lockjaw’, and the next thing [my mother] knew she was being given some brandy. I was very ill, but they got to me in time. Tetanus was very rampant in those days.

I returned from convalescing and told the matron that hospital routine had become empty for me. She was sympathetic and suggested I take a whole year’s rest from nursing. She also knew of my home circumstances and that we had no money, and thought I shouldn’t return home but look for other work. I didn’t know how to set about it, but when staying with my elder sister Violet, long since married, I was lucky enough to meet Mr Turner again. He thought I should try to study and suggested I apply for a bursary at Hillcroft College for Women in Surbiton.

I found the principal there sympathetic and understanding and I told her how I felt something was lacking in my present life, and how I knew nothing about social conditions, and above all how I had great difficulties in expressing myself—which I wished to get over. She listened very patiently. I hadn’t much hope, but not long afterwards I had a letter saying that, while no regular bursary was available, an unforeseen vacancy meant they could offer me a place, and with a second bursary from the Middlesex County Council I would be provided for.

They were well equipped for adult education, university and degrees. One tutor was Miss Street—who was very strong—she’d put the fear of God into you if you so much as looked at her. Then there was Miss Ashby, the Principal of Hillcroft College, a loveable, kindly, intellectual person, very gentle. Then Elsie Smith, who was a philosopher. They also took an interest and encouraged me, and they helped and influenced me a lot.