Sister Helen Reid lived in No 3 above Mrs Bosique's flat. The stairs to the 2 upstairs flats were beside my room and my friend John and I loved to bump all the way down on our bottoms. There was one light bulb dangling in the stairwell, so it was very dim in there, and whenever the bulb died it was almost pitch black and you would have to feel your way up and down by clinging onto the rail.
Sister Reid was a Scott with a lovely soft brogue. She had come from a well-to-do family who had relegated her to the servants' quarters because they thought she was mentally deficient. She hadn't learnt to read, couldn't play suitable ball games or play cards so was hidden away and considered hopeless. All her life she was desperately upset that her mother hadn't loved her.
Eventually Helen was sent away and it was discovered that she was extremely short sighted. As soon as she was given suitable glasses and was able to see, the world opened to Helen and it turned out that she was really very bright.
She trained as a mothercraft nurse and migrated to Australia. She had a regular Friday morning radio program with another nurse providing information on baby and childcare. In the 1930s there was a gastroenteritis outbreak and Sister Helen Reid made over 300 housecalls. She ran various clinics around the Sydney area and was always very busy.
She made some enemies in the medical profession with her radical ideas. Outrageous at the time, she expressed her belief that fathers should be present at the birth of their children. She thought it would help fathers bond with their infants. Fathers in many societies had been excluded from this 'women's business' for untold generations, and her ideas were generally condemned. To my mother, very conservative, the thought of having the father present at the birth was pretty radical and 'not very nice'. Also, bottle feeding had become fashionable. Sister Reid frowned on the practice and she may well have been the one who coined the phrase 'breast is best'.
One day my friend John and I were sitting on the lawn having a long serious talk about Sister Reid. We must have been about 4 at the time. She was such a loving kind person that we decided we wanted to call her Aunty Helen. When she came down to check on the mail we asked her if we could. She was so thrilled she nearly squeezed us to bits and then delightedly told everyone that she had come down the stairs as Sister Reid and gone back up as Aunty Helen.
Aunty Helen had very strong lenses in her glasses which made her brown eyes huge and glistening. Like an owl's. I was used to her gigantic eyes and got a massive shock one day when she took her glasses off. Where had her eyes disappeared to? To me her spectacle free eyes looked like tiny black pinpricks. Luckily I didn't say anything.
Aunty Helen would often go and spend time in private houses caring for new mothers and their babies if there was any sort of problem. She poured all the love that she had missed out on into those babies in her charge and into other children such as John and me.
If she had a house visit to make Aunty Helen would be picked up by car. She would wear her white uniform and starched nurse's veil. I thought she looked wonderful and briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a nurse simply because of the outfit.
Aunty Helen was one of the first neighbours to buy a television. Everyone came to admire the set and to watch a program. I even think there was a celebratory drink accompanied by savouries, no doubt cheese, pineapple and pickled onions on toothpicks stuck into a grapefruit. On Friday nights I was always invited to watch the Mantovani orchestra followed by 'Dr Kildare'. I thought Richard Chamberlain gorgeous and lusted after him as much as an 11 year old can lust. Aunty Helen used to take my pulse to make sure I wasn't getting too excited, bless her.
In her 50s Aunty Helen married a psychiatric nurse, John Mullins, everyone called Johnny Boy. He was quite a bit older than she was and had white hair which he dyed a most startling yellow in the hope it would make him look younger. Johnny Boy maintained that the residents of Clitheroe flats were crazier than the patients in his care at the asylum where he worked.
Talking about crazy, Aunty Helen believed that morning dew was very health giving and could often be seen tiptoeing and dancing on the lawn in bare feet very early in the morning. If she wasn't feeling too well she would go a step further and would roll on the grass in the nude, a sight to startle early risers.
We all had allocated bits of garden and Aunty Helen had two beds of glorious roses. One year we had big storms and masses of kelp was thrown up on Balmoral Beach. Johnny Boy had a funny little car and Aunty Helen got him to bring many carfuls of the seaweed back to put on her roses. The pong was eye watering. We couldn't open the windows on that side of the flat for weeks until it dried and dissipated. The roses were spectacular after that though.
Johnny Boy died after we moved away and Aunty Helen lived at Clitheroe until she was too old to look after herself and had to move into a nursing home. My mother and I visited her there on one of my trips to Sydney. She was so excited to see us and had dressed up especially in her moth eaten fox stole with the fox tails and fox head hanging down at the back. She graciously served afternoon tea and we had a good old catch up as well as sharing fond memories of the times we had spent together.
We only found out by chance that Aunty Helen had died. Someone had gone to visit and she was no longer there. Yet another Clitheroe resident who had no family in Australia. We had been her friends but she hadn't left instructions for anyone to be contacted in case of any emergency because she didn't want to be a bother. Dear Aunty Helen. I hope she knew how much we all loved her.
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