I actually received my re-sit results whilst I was on holiday in Turkey with Natalie, Patsy and Mary. We had booked what we thought was a well desrved holiday after taking our Finals and had decided to treat ourselves to some sunshine and relaxation before starting our proper jobs as Staff Nurses.
Although I still had not had my results at this point in time, I remained confident that I would be a Staff Nurse one day too and would be working alongside my lovely dear friends on the wards.
Of course I had to find a local telephone box and make an International call home to get my results, which was not as easy to do in 1988 as it is nowadays, but I needed to get my results the second I knew they were available. I think this was one of the most nerve wrecking calls I have ever had to make and it was only after this call that I could actaully relax and start to enjoy being on my first and only ever Girl's Holiday abroad.
It was great news of course, and I had passed my re-sit and so I was now qualified and was actually a RGN.
I was finally a Registered General Nurse!
I had done it! All that time in the library revising and doing past papers had paid off dividends, and to this day I tell anyone preparing for any kind of exam at all......they must do as many past papers as they can as I truly believe it is the best way for anyone to prepare for an exam. I do have this annoying habit that if anything works for me, well I want to share it with the world.........I mean why wouldn't you want to help as many people as you can in this life? Plus I genuinely also believe that if I can do it ......well anyone can do it!
So I knew the first thing I needed to do once I got back from Turkey was to get my first job as a Staff Nurse. This did not worry me however as the eighties were a great time to be in nursing. There were plenty of jobs for nurses everywhere and hospitals liked to keep their students on where they could and so following an interview I got a job on Winnie One Ward at Nottingham City Hospital and chose to do regular night shifts working Sunday - Wednesday every week. I could finally wear my frilly cap with my belt and of course my shiny new silver buckle that I was so proud of. I was finally where I had dreamed of being.
Dreams really do come true as they say .........but I always add in .....only if you work hard towards them! Even more importantly do rmember that a dream with a plan actually becomes a goal!
Once we were qualified we did have to move out of the Nurses Home and so a few of us girls decided to rent and share a house together near to the hospital in Basford. Sammy had unfortunately failed her exams a second and third time which none of us could understand for love or money, but this meant that she had sadly moved back home and so me, Mary, Patsy and Maria who was Mary's friend moved in together.
It was a very basic student type rental.and I can't even remember if it had a garden. I had a large room downstairs which had a double mattress on the floor to sleep on and the other girls were upstairs as they worked mainly day shifts. We had the best time ever and for the most part all got on really well with us all working different shifts and we had some lovely fun times. We felt very grown up now we were all finally Staff Nurses!
I'm going to backtrack slightly now and return to our Turkish holiday, as it was in Turkey that I met Tony my husband, who was also on holiday with his five friends from Birmingham. It was not a holiday romance as many might imagine ......in fact I thought he was quite boring and the sensible square one of the group to be honest when I first met him and I have vivid memories of him sitting reading the newspaper of all things every morning as he had his cup of tea and a cigarette.
It was a very small motel type of place where were all stayed and it only had five rooms in total, which we filled between us. We had two of the rooms and they had the other three. We befriended the six boys from Birmingham basically because we were quite intimidated by the forwardness of the local Turkish boys as we were all young and naive back then and actually too scrared to go out on our own......we needed support!
I’m a great believer in the Law of Attraction, but I only really started to get into it when my life started to fall apart when I was in my forties.........however I am mentioning it now because even though I didn’t particularly like Tony, I can remember looking over my balcony one morning at him reading his newspaper and drinking his tea and said to Natalie “Im going to marry him”!!!
Now where that came from still to this day I have no idea, however what I do know is that Natalie thought I had gone mad, but I did indeed marry Tony literally two years later and we were together for twenty six years and had two gorgeous boys Tom and Jack who are my entire world and make my life worth living.
So how did me and Tony actaully get together then if it wasn't a holiday romance?
Well following our holiday in Turkey the boys from Birmingham kept in touch and we saw them most weekends. We either drove down to Birmingham and stayed at Dave's Mom's House or they came up to Nottingham and they stayed with us. We had so much fun going out as a large group of friends and I'm not saying that nobody fancied each other, but it was just one big party back then and we all just had a great time being together as a group. I think the boys loved coming to Nottingham because of the 5:1 ratio of girls to boys and we loved going to Birmingham because after three years of going out in Nottingham we felt that there were boys everwhere we looked! This continued for six months and we just had a blast dancing in nightclubs, going for curries and just generally being young and silly.
The late eighties and early ninties really were such a great time to be young and carefree when I look back. No phones, no social media, nobody filming everything they were doing or everything you were doing, no selfies, no botox, no lipfillers and so much less pressure to be beautiful and look picture perfect. We just slapped on the blusher (literally) sprayed ourselves with the deepest fake tan we could find and then made our hair as big and messy as we could, glued it in place with Silvikrin hairspray and off we went mainly to dance......fags in hand of course! It was really quite simple back then, but I'm not going to lie, when I look back at old photos, even I have to admit that having a filter or too could have really benefited us all on many an occasion!
Christmas then loomed and we decided to have a Christmas Fancy Dress Party at the house we were now living in and we invited lots of our nurse friends along and of course the boys from Birmingham too.
The party was going really well until I received a call telling me that one of my very close friends from Barlaston had been involved in a very seious car accident and he was in Intensive Care extremely poorly. I was besides myself hearing this awful news and Tony was a great comfort to me that night and it was following this that we actally realized we did like each other and had a lot in common and so started as we used to call it "going out together". We got engaged rather quickly it has to be said, just four months after this on my 22nd birthday in Rhodes.
People were sceptical to say the least and everyone said it wouldn't last, but it did last and although it didn't last forever as I think we both had hoped it would, it did last for twenty- six years. We are not together now, however we do remain very good friends and when push comes to shove we do have each other's backs. Most importantly too, Bruce is still with us thankfully, but he did have life changing injuries.
When I was young I slept like a log on nights and really enjoyed doing them too. Working set nights was great and of course my rota meant I finished on a Thursday morning every week which meant I could still go dancing at the Irish Centre on a Thursday evening with the girls and it also meant I had every Friday and Saturday off too which also meant I could see Tony. This was a very happy time. Me and Tony were now “courting” as my Nana Jones used to say and planning our wedding too.....what did I tell you Natalie?
I really enjoyed working on Winnie One. It was a ladies medical ward and we had many regular patients who we got to know really well and I had a lovely auxiliary nurse Pam who used to work the same nights as me each week and we got on like a house on fire and had lots of laughs amongst the hard work. She was a lot older than me and a real mother figure to me as well as my support worker.
I worked on Winnie One for around ten months in total and during this time me and Tony continued to date and of course planned our wedding .....( in reality I think the only thing we chose was the actual date we wanted to get married on though and of course I did chose my own wedding dress, but apart from that my mum chose everything else,even down to the Guest List and we basically just turned up on the day)
So how did we date and keep in touch back then inbetween seeing each other at weekends? Well we did have landlines and so we would call each other every few days, but we also wrote letters to each other all of the time too. So many letters!
It seems so old fashioned now with texting and watsapp and all of that, but trust me there was something exciting and beautiful about a letter dropping on the mat and then sitting down to open it and read it.....and luckily for me Tony's handwriting wasn't too shabby either!
I would really look forwards to getting the letters and I would write straight back to him and mainly did this when I was on my breaks at work during my night shifts.
It was however time to decide now where me and Tony would live once we were married and because I wasn’t native to Nottingham and because I wanted to become a Children’s Nurse ........Birmingham seemed the ideal place to move to and Tony was a Brummy after all.
I applied to Birmingham Children's Hospital and was successful at interview and secured my place on the course, however it wouldn't be to start for another 18 months as there was such demand for places on this course and therefore there was a long waiting list to train as an RSCN (Registered Sick Children's Nurse) back in 1989.
It was great news that I was going to be able to train as a Children’s Nurse of course....... but what was I going to do for eighteen months whilst I waited? Oh I know! Let me train as a midwife whilst I wait! Midwives care for babies I gathered .....and babies are small children!
How naive wasI? Thirty six years later on I know this is the furthest thing from the truth.........Midwives care for women and babies are the result of this care!
Anyway, no matter who cares for who, in true Caron style I jumped from pillar to post again and applied to do the midwifery course and started my student midwife training at Birmingham and Solihull College of Midwifery at Birmingham Maternity Hospital, now known as The Women's Hospital, just three weeks later and this time I wore my own dress for interview!
I must just say at this point that it's as I start to look back at my life that I honestly believe I have ADHD and a lot of my at times, irrational behaviour and ways are starting to add up and make more sense to me. I've never truly felt as "normal" as everybody else and I people have always described me as "different"which used to upset me, I'm not going to lie........however the longer I live, I realise I really dont want or need to be just like everyone else! Anyway I just thought I would add that in here for the record.
I was sad to leave Nottingham and all my dear friends who I had become so close to, but life keeps us moving and I duly packed up my room from the house I shared with Mary, Patsy and Maria and drove to Birmingham to move back into another Nurses Home, this time at the Birmingham Maternity Hospital. It was called Norton Court.
It’s now June 1989 and I am twenty two years old. I arrived in Birmingham, engaged to be married and ready and eager to start my Midwifery training. I felt excited and ready to take on the world. What I hadn’t taken into account and really should have done was to ask the question of whether or not I was ready to take on midwifery? .....and even more importantly was I ready to take on midwives?
Commentaires