The memoirs of Cissie Ewen

Most of the doctors were very nice, but one in particular I took a great dislike to; he was a small, arrogant Indian doctor. He must have heard from Laura Crow one time that I was at Mass when she, instead of me, was seeing to them. The next time I saw him was when I was serving them their meal, and he said, "Well, have you confessed to your confessor?" or some such thing in a sarcastic voice, which naturally upset me. When he was leaving, he left five shillings for me with Laura Crow. I told her I did not want it. She was very surprised (that was half a week's wages), and asked what she should do with it. I said she could give it back to him but he had already left, and she did not want it, so I got her to give it to the dining room maid who was elderly, and had to support a widowed mother and a handicapped sister. When they enquired why I would no take it, I said it was because I did not like him.

While the job was not as heavy work as corridor maid, I often had to hang around in the evenings, waiting until the matron returned after she had been out, just to take her up a glass of hot milk. I suppose, if I had complained about it, I might have been able to get one of the night nurses to take it up.

Mam must have found things still a struggle; Eddy and Alex in Doncaster, Maggie and Joseph (if he was working then), would have been on poor wages. There would have been only their wages, apart from my £1 a month, going in unless Eddy and Alex were able to send her anything. That would have been hard because they were in board and lodgings. I know that even then Mam used to borrow from me to pay the rent. It eventually happened, the family had to leave Silkey's Lane because she had got behind in the rent, and they went to live in two big rooms in North Shields. It was a big old house let in flats, and they were there for a year or two until they moved back into Silkey's Lane; this time no.37.

Before working at the hospital, when I was working for Mrs Wood, and Eddy and Alex were home, Eddy and John Ewen used to be friends. I think they knocked around together for about five years: it was after Dick Ewen left for New Zealand. John spent quite a bit of time in our house while waiting for Eddy to get ready to go out so we had seen quite a lot of each other. He asked our Eddy if he minded him asking me to go out with him; I was in my 18th year. His family lived only a couple of doors from us, and he used to be one of the crowd when a group of us used to go dancing together. While I was working at the hospital, for part of the time, he worked at a bakery in County Durham and just came home at weekends.