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I was very young when I first became aware that not all people were given an equal share of this world’s wealth and opportunities. A great man called Keir Hardie had travelled to the coal valleys of South Wales and encouraged the miners to stand up for themselves and demand better pay and conditions. My father worked in the mines as a young boy of 12 years old but as soon as he was big enough, at the age of 15, to pass for the Army he chose that way of life and was sent out to the Boer War as a bugle-boy. My father preferred the Army to the coal-pits for most of his adult life. However, his family remained in the Rhondda Valley and one of his brothers used to visit us in the sea-port city of Cardiff. Uncle Enoch was a great favourite of my brother Danny and myself. He told us stories of the terrible conditions that the miners had to put up with and how their pleas for help were ignored by the extremely wealthy and absentee aristocrat who owned vast areas of land, including the coal mines.
I was very young when I first became aware that not all people were given an equal share of this world’s wealth and opportunities. A great man called Keir Hardie had travelled to the coal valleys of South Wales and encouraged the miners to stand up for themselves and demand better pay and conditions.
I was a very shy, introverted child who preferred reading to social activities and I spent hours in our local public library. Twice, my father had to get an official to unlock the doors and get me out late at night. My favourite books were very serious heavy works like Carlyle’s French Revolution, and, of course, I discovered Marx and Engels---I became inflamed with slogans like ‘‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." I cannot remember the details of how I came to join the Young Communist League but I was very proud of my party card and felt it was my mission in life to change the world for the better. I first expressed my newfound views by standing outside the Trade Union Hall and selling the Daily Worker until my poor father came by on his bike, gave me a clip around the ear and sent me packing home. I had won a scholarship to a Catholic High School, the first member of my family to receive a secondary school education, but I found the outlook of the nuns and lay teachers very narrow-minded and conservative. We even had our own version of the Bible which had all the sexy bits left out; I sat at the back of the class next to a Jewish girl who was allowed to bring her own Bible so I read hers and she told me what to say if teacher asked me a question. Nonetheless, my teachers managed to instill some knowledge into my reluctant brain and I was grateful for a little Latin in my nursing career. And I have always had a great affection for the bit of French I learned, which I mangled with an atrocious accent. However, my progress came to an abrupt end when one of the nuns caught me reading Engels (tucked inside a comic book) and my father was asked to remove me from the school before I became a bad influence on the other girls. Although I was very glad to leave the school, I regarded the reason as an insult - most of the girls preferred reading comic books and true romances and the nuns approved of that level of reading matter as our recreation. As I was still too young to start work, I was sent to what was called a Labour School and I thought I was very wicked when the whole school was assembled in the morning and we sang real Protestant hymns like ‘‘Onward Christian Soldiers" - I thought it was smashing but I would not dare tell my ultra-catholic relations. Then I did some training as a shorthand-typist but found office work boring, and I was glad when the opportunity arrived for me to work as a laboratory assistant in the Pathology Lab at the Welsh National School of Medicine. This work was very heavy---the test-tubes, plates etc. were then made of glass and I had to carry loads of them from the labs to the cleaning areas and do everything by hand. The boys who usually did this work had all been called up for National Service so I was one of the first girls to do the job. First thing in the morning I had to collect the rats that had been taken from the foreign ships in port---they had been nailed to wooden boards and my job was to slit their abdominal skin, take out their pancreas and lay it on top of the rat so that the pathologists could see it---evidently plague showed up as spots on the vital organ. One day there was a big scare over one rat and before I knew where I was, a doctor was dousing me with a very strong solution of Lysol and my hands were being scrubbed raw. Fortunately, it was a false alarm.. My favourite job was to go into work on Sunday morning and feed the rabbits and guinea-pigs. I hated to see the doctors stick big needles into their abdomens and inject them with substances, so I made a fuss of them when it was my turn to do the Sunday feeds---also it got me out of Mass. I could have been exempted from National Service in this job but I was 18yrs old in 1942 and I wanted to get away from home and see the bright lights of London. No matter that London was deep in blackout and getting bombed every night---I forged my father’s signature to my enrollment form and set forth on my career as a nurse. My first impression of my new home in London was one of acute disappointment---I had imagined St. Stephen’s Hospital to be a grand white building with a statue of the Saint on top of it. It turned out to be a decrepit old blackened building which was said to be an almshouse in the time of Queen Victoria but it had quite a history (rumour had it that an illegitimate child of the Duke of Clarence had been born there---he was suspected in some quarters of being the real Jack the Ripper and the mother of the child was one of the street women he favoured.
I had joined a Socialist group at the hospital but as the war dragged on, most of the members dropped out---they were too busy having a good time with the Yanks and collecting nylon stockings, chocolate, cigarettes etc. So I continued with my affiliation to the Anti-Franco cause and joined demonstrations to Downing Street etc.
Anyway, the war had also done a fair amount of damage to the building, fortunately for me, before my arrival. Land mines had destroyed every other section of the hospital which meant that Block 1, Block 3, Block 5 and Block 7 were standing, the even number Blocks were rubble and there had been large loss of life which included the entire children’s wards and many doctors, nurses and other staff. There were rats running through the rubble which came to my attention forcibly when I soon went down with a bad case of dysentery - the rats had got to the sacks of porridge. I had chosen a London County Council Hospital because student nurses were paid a wage of two pounds a month plus board and lodging---I had come from a very poor working-class background and could expect no help from my family. The major hospitals in London like Guys and Barts regarded teaching student nurses as a privilege; their staff was largely made up of doctors’ daughters etc. from a more affluent background and they were given pocket-money from the hospitals of about five shillings a month. London County Council Hospital nurses also were given a morale boost in the form of new modern uniforms designed by Norman Hartnell, couturier to the Queen, so no more aprons, starched collars and cuffs. However, the food for the student nurses was appalling, even for war-time. We had porridge for breakfast, usually a kind of thin sliced sausage-meat (ironically called German sausage) and cold boiled potatoes for other meals, and once our small ration of butter had run out, there was a horrible new item called margarine which was coloured a vivid yellow and smelt and tasted disgusting. People have often remarked that in wartime England, all the classes were equal and we all suffered from the same stringent conditions. This was definitely not true and after seeing how the doctors and senior staff fared, I decided to lead a deputation to the matron to demand better food. I exhorted my little band of followers and although we were all petrified of facing our very domineering and unapproachable matron, off we set one morning to beard the dragon. I knocked loudly on her door, and then turned around only to find that my co-conspirators had disappeared---I was the sole voice of dissent. I think I made a good case, but I can still remember the way that woman wiped the floor with me, ending by identifying me as an aggressive, trouble-maker and declaring that a description of this incident would be on all my future records and I would not get a reference from her when and if I finished my training. There was an election coming and I worked for the Labour Party, putting forms in envelopes, licking stamps etc. A lot of my fellow student nurses came from the south of Ireland and they were obliged to vote. As they had no interest in who governed the United Kingdom, I took it upon myself to go with them to the polling booths (strictly illegal of course) and I showed them where the Labour Party required their mark. I had joined a Socialist group at the hospital but as the war dragged on, most of the members dropped out---they were too busy having a good time with the Yanks and collecting nylon stockings, chocolate, cigarettes etc. So I continued with my affiliation to the Anti-Franco cause and joined demonstrations to Downing Street etc. About this time I met a Welshman who worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) - he invited me to his home which was close to the hospital and I became a frequent visitor and friend of the family. He was also aligned to the Anti-Franco cause and I met some very interesting people at his house. I remember one meal in particular---there was a very charming Spanish gentleman sitting opposite me and our hostess had served us a salad in the Spanish style, dressed with olive oil. This was more than my unaccustomed stomach could take so I did my best to hide the way I was trying to wipe the oil off my tomato with my napkin. The man sitting next to me did not interest me until he started being extremely rude and abusive about the uneducated way I spoke, and especially about my horrible Cardiff accent---the way I dragged my vowels etc. Admittedly, he was drunk at the time but I had never before met someone who took an absolute delight in hurting and humiliating another person. I noticed that although he was very well dressed, his finger-nails were dirty, he needed a shave and his hair was greasy and unkempt. He also made obscene remarks about women in general and that confused me because this was the first time I had ever been in contact with a homosexual and I had no idea of how to handle the situation. The other men at the table passed his remarks off as just his "little ways" and it seemed the done thing to laugh. Afterwards, I was told the man’s name was Guy Burgess, which meant nothing to me until much later when he was exposed as one of the infamous Cambridge spies. How I came to be recommended to another of their group has never been clear to me but I was saving up to go on holiday with another nurse and I had started doing house-work in my time off. Somehow I landed up at the house of Donald Maclean, and while I was cleaning the bath, his wife, Melinda, came in to speak to me. She wanted to know why if I preferred a cleaning job to nursing, that I did not come and work for them full-time and give up my hospital job. That remark floored me. I knew they were Communist sympathizers like myself but I had come from a very poor background and these were people who had never known what poverty was like. The idea that someone in my situation had to work at two jobs to save money did not even occur to her. My way to get ahead was to succeed in obtaining a professional status as a trained nurse; I could not afford a university education and had no wealthy relations, so if they were Communist sympathizers, why did she not understand that I was down on my knees cleaning her bath for the money? ...the whole one shilling and sixpence an hour of it! I had these ideas that Communists came from the same origins as myself---I could not understand why people from affluent, upper-class backgrounds were interested in socialist movements and what I gathered from Burgess and the Macleans was that they had nothing but contempt for the working-class. My next attempt to earn extra money in my spare time saw me applying for a job as a waitress; somehow I managed to get myself employed at the Senior R. A. F. Officers Club in Piccadilly. I had no previous experience but they were desperately short of staff and would take anyone who applied. At eighteen I weighed twelve stone and was very awkward and clumsy, I had very big feet and wore comfortable, clod-hopper shoes---three strides would take me clear across the room. As we were strictly forbidden to take any work outside our hospital duties (on pain of being sacked), I gave the manager a false name as I knew the hospital Matron had an airman friend and often dined at the club. So "Daphne" started work---the only trouble was that when the manager and maitre d’ wanted to call my attention, I had forgotten my assumed name so "Daphne" went sailing past them, blithely oblivious that I was being summoned. Most of the clients were very senior officers, and one night I found myself having to serve Air Marshal Lord Tedder who ordered his meal in French which left me in a blind panic---I had no idea what he wanted so I went down to the kitchen and burst into tears! Fortunately, I had a good friend in one of the chefs who came from Port Talbot in South Wales and he said, "never mind, I know what he likes" and the great man was served to his satisfaction. Another night, I had a narrow escape when I noticed that my hospital Matron was in the club, but I managed to get out of that situation by pleading that I was incapable of working in the "silver service" section owing to my clumsiness. One night, however, I was serving a table of very young junior officers when I overheard one of them say, "the Irish - they breed like rabbits" Somehow, the full bowl of very hot tomato soup I was carrying "accidently" fell straight into his lap, and that incident put an end to my not very promising career as a waitress to the rich and powerful. I was not sorry to go but I regretted saying farewell to my Welsh friend in the kitchen who always made sure I had a good feed before I went home The food in the officers dining rooms was excellent, war-time or not, and there was no shortage of good French wine either. I never felt afraid that I was going to be killed in an air-raid but I was quite sure that I was going to die of starvation---my life revolved around getting enough to eat. My best friend was a waitress in a Greek restaurant in Soho and some nights I would go there to wait for her to finish work. Having no money to order a meal, I would sit at the end table and look pathetic, and eventually the large hairy Greek head-waiter would put a bowl of spaghetti and meat-balls in front of me. The meat-balls were probably horse-meat but they were well seasoned and I was in no position to be fussy, I ate every scrap.
Ellen Clifford at Trigg Beach in Perth, Australia, 2006 EDITOR’S NOTE: Look for Ellen Clifford’s account of her aborted trip to the United States in 1954, during the McCarthy Era, in a future issue. |
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