Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024.

Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Born into War

Chapter 2 - “Holidays Away”

Chapter 3 - The High School Years

Chapter 4 - The Interview

Chapter 5 - Preliminary Training School

Chapter 6 - First Year Nurses’ Training

Chapter 7 - Finding Her Stride

Chapter 8 - General Nurses’ Training

Chapter 9 - Gaining Experience

Chapter 10 - Arriving in Canada

Chapter 11 - Namu

Chapter 12 - Prepared for Anything

Chapter 13 - Salmon Feasts and Cold Water

Chapter 14 - Becoming a Registered Nurse in Canada

Chapter 15 - Returning to Liverpool

Chapter 16 - A Fresh Start in Canada

Chapter 17 - Melting Snow, and Other Work-Arounds

Chapter 18 - Left Speechless

Chapter 19 - A Garden, a Visitor, and a Few Tense Flights

Chapter 20 - Puppies and Proposals

Chapter 21 - Changing Seasons

Chapter 22 - Leaving

We hope you have enjoyed reading Trish’s story!

The experience of working with my parents to write their stories has been more rewarding than I ever imagined when we started this undertaking in the spring of 2024.

If you would like to read Dad’s story, you can find it here:

If you want to see whether or not the apple fell far from the tree, you can listen to the first chapter of my memoir “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir” here:

Stayed tuned for what’s coming next in this project!

Trish peered out the window as the heavy darkness slowly turned to grey. There would be no flight that day, either. It had snowed through the night, and it was still snowing. Visibility was terrible, even in the village.

After letting Waldo outside to do his morning business, Trish made breakfast. She thought about what to do in this situation. She was no longer employed–at least on paper. But, if she couldn’t leave, and her replacement couldn’t arrive, someone needed to be available to the people in the village. She didn’t have any further health promotion activities scheduled, or special clinics planned, but she could run her usual open clinic hours. That would at least give her something to do until the weather lifted, though she doubted anyone would venture out in this weather to come to see her anyway.

The storm lasted through that day, and the next, and the next. Trish finally had no choice but to make the expedition down the hill to the Hudson’s Bay store. She and Richard were running out of groceries, as they had been eating down their supplies in anticipation of leaving. Also, she wanted to see if there were any updates about the weather, and the flight schedule. Christmas was only a few days away, and she had been anticipating being in Terrace with Walter.

The snow was deep, but others had walked down to town before her, so there was a trail she could follow. Waldo bounded along beside her, seeming to love every minute, while Trish struggled. She thought again about the winter coat she was supposed to have received when she started her job. It had never arrived. Her own jacket was certainly warm enough, it was just one of those things that came to mind from time to time–another one of the quirks of working for the government, Trish decided.

The selection at the Hudson’s Bay store was worse than usual. That made sense–the stock arrived by air, if there were no flights, there were no groceries. Still, she found tinned meals and a few other non-perishable items that could be re-heated. Being socked in for days at a time was not uncommon, and the community was prepared. Trish bought some essentials and asked if there was any update on the weather and flights. It wasn’t good news. The clerk told her the latest forecast predicted the storm would last a week or longer. There were no flights scheduled for the foreseeable future.

If this was the case, Trish and Richard would be spending Christmas in Telegraph Creek, not in Terrace as planned. Trish was disappointed, but she had lived in Telegraph Creek long enough to know there was nothing to be done. She might as well just go about her business and wait the storm out.

Christmas came and went. It was just another day. Trish and Richard passed the time by taking Waldo for a short walk in the snow, eating a rather basic meal with the non-perishable items the Hudson’s Bay store offered, and playing cards.

As Christmas drifted into New Years, and the clouds still clung to the treetops, sometimes sinking right down to the ground, there were still no flights. Trish was beginning to get impatient. She had put off much of the wedding planning, anticipating she would have a month to do it after moving to Terrace. Now, almost two weeks of that month had passed. Nothing was planned, she didn’t even have a dress, and she was completely cut off from the outside world. She kept herself busy during the days by keeping the Nurse’s Station open for walk-in patients, but her anxiety was building.

Finally, more than a week into January, the weather lifted, and the first flight in weeks was anticipated. The whole village showed up at the airstrip to welcome the plane. When Walter finally landed the Beech18 on the snowy runway, Trish and Walter only had a moment to greet each other. Trish needed to meet the new nurse, and show her around quickly, as Janet had done for her. Walter would come back for her, Richard, Waldo, and any other passengers after making quick visits to the other communities on the sked.

Trish scanned the disembarking passengers for the new nurse and was surprised to realize that she was a he–the new nurse was a man. Trish almost laughed out loud as she recalled the comments the employment officer made during her own interview for this job, about the nurses always getting married and leaving the job, as she was also doing, and she imagined that was the reason he hired a male nurse this time around.

She gave the new nurse a brief tour, introduced him to Mary, who met him with wide eyes–she too was surprised to see a male nurse. It wasn’t common in the region. While she was going over the basics of the Nurse’s Station, Richard was carrying their suitcases to the airstrip. When Trish heard the engine of the plane, she said farewell to Mary, who wished her well, and she said goodbye to the rather hesitant-looking nurse. She called to Waldo to join her, and she walked to the airstrip one final time.

When she settled into the co-pilot’s chair next to Walter, he apologized for how long it had taken to get a plane in. He had tried the route several times over the past few weeks, but the weather was just too heavy, and each time he had to turn back. Trish was touched by how hard he had tried to come and get her.

After arriving in Terrace, Trish and Richard waited while Walter handed the plane over to the ground crew for the night. He then helped them load their possessions into the back of his truck, and he took them to the basement suite he had rented for them. It was basic but had everything they needed. They would now only be there for two weeks, rather than the month that they had planned.

Over dinner that night, Walter brought Trish up to speed on wedding details. He had booked the Mennonite church for the ceremony, that was where he had been going to church while living in Terrace. Unfortunately, the pastor was on vacation on their wedding day, but Walter wasn’t about to move the date without being able to discuss it with Trish. Instead, he had approached the minister from the Lutheran church in town, who agreed to conduct the service in the Mennonite church.

The venue for the dinner after the service was also solved. When Trish was stuck in Telegraph Creek, and the days were ticking by, Diane, the dispatcher for TransProvincial, and Roger took matters into their own hands. They decided the dinner would be at Roger’s home, and they began planning the basic details, while they waited for Trish.

Trish was feeling more relaxed, many of the big details were looked after, though she still needed a dress.

Walter had one more update. He looked a bit sheepish as he asked if she would be up for a road trip in a few days. She was curious. He explained that his family wanted to meet her before the wedding. Most of his family lived in Kelowna, but they had agreed to meet in Burns Lake in a few days. Trish realized the plans had already been made, so there wasn’t much to do but go along.

She was quite worried about finding a dress in time. The next morning, she went to a fabric shop and chose a pattern for a simple, but elegant winter wedding dress. Rather than a veil, the dress had a hood. It had long, wide sleeves, and the hood and the hem were trimmed with white fur. Trish liked it, she just hoped it would be ready on time. She took the pattern and the fabric to a seamstress, who confirmed she could finish the dress in time for the wedding. What a relief!

Burns Lake was about a five-hour drive from Terrace, and Trish and Walter set off early the following morning in Walter’s Ford pickup truck. Richard stayed behind to look after Waldo, as the trip would be an overnight one due to the distance. Walter said his parents, his sister Margaret, his brother John, and John’s wife, Shirl would meet them in Burns Lake later in the evening, as they had a longer drive from Kelowna. They would stay in a motel in Burns Lake and have dinner together.

The drive from Terrace to Burns Lake was pleasant. Almost everything Trish had seen of British Columbia so far had been from the air. The road followed the Skeena River, with jagged, snowy mountains rising up across the river. They passed through several villages and towns, and after moving away from the Skeena River for some time, the road snaked back toward the water, picking up the Bulkley River briefly, as the mountains gave way to rolling hills and stands of poplar trees. Trish marveled at how far away everything was. In England, a five-hour drive would take you all the way across the country. Here, they would have needed to drive south for another full day to get to Vancouver, or east to the border with Alberta. The distances were vast.

Trish was nervous about meeting Walter’s family. She wanted to make a good impression, obviously, but she wasn’t sure how to achieve that. She had no experience with this sort of thing.

Trish and Walter arrived in Burns Lake first and checked into their rooms. When Walter’s family arrived, Trish’s nervousness intensified. Standing beside Walter, she smiled, ready to greet her soon-to-be family. Walter introduced her to his parents, Jake and Mary, his sister Margaret, and his brother and sister-in-law, John and Shirl. His oldest sister Gerda, and his youngest brother Bobby hadn’t been able to make the trip. The meeting was awkward; no one seemed sure of what to do. Trish was surprised that Walter’s mother spoke low German throughout most of the visit. She knew the family spoke low German at home, as Walter had told her many Mennonite families spoke Plautdietsch, a dialect of Low German, as his did, but she had assumed they would speak English with her. Sometimes Walter translated, but it was hard to follow the conversation, and it added to the awkwardness. She was grateful for Shirl’s warm smile, and efforts to make conversation. Trish immediately liked her, but overall, the meeting was uncomfortable.

It was a relief when the visit was over, and they were on the road back to Terrace. She didn’t know exactly what she had expected, but the meeting had not felt like a warm welcome to the family. She wondered how her parents would have reacted had they been the ones meeting Walter. How would her dad have responded? She honestly didn’t know. She concluded that families were interesting things, and one navigated them the best one could. Then, she turned her attention back to Walter and the road ahead.

The next two weeks went by in a whirlwind of planning, meeting with the minister, and social calls. Trish met Walter’s best man, another pilot named Stuart Livingstone. Stuart worked as a flight instructor at the local flying school, where Walter was the chief flying instructor.

Trish’s friend Roger was indispensable in helping her plan the reception dinner. She chose a cake and ordered flowers. The day before the wedding, people began arriving in Terrace–Walter’s family, and her friend Judy, who would stand with her as her maid of honour. Trish didn’t have time to be nervous as she was carried along in the flurry of people and activity.

The day of the wedding went smoothly­–their friends made sure of it. The ceremony was simple and lovely, and the dinner at Roger’s house was relaxed and pleasant. Trish met more of Walter’s family, including some of his young nieces and nephews, and she was glad Richard was there to welcome Walter into her family.

In moments of quiet, she thought of her mum, and her friend Jean. She wished they could be there with her, but she knew they would settle for reading all the details in her next letter. She also wondered what her life would be like the next morning–after the wedding, when all the planning was over, and daily life as a couple was all that remained. She supposed she would find out one day at a time, just as she had in the past, each time she had set out on a new adventure in her life.

THE END

Previous chapter / Start at the beginning

It may amuse you to know that a few months after Trish resigned her job in Telegraph Creek and moved to Terrace, she received a parcel to the cabin she and Walter lived in at Lakelse Lake. It was her government issued parka.

Better late than never, as they say!

If you enjoyed reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Over the coming days and weeks, once the shock wore off, the planning began. Walter was renting a cabin near Terrace, at Lakelse Lake. Trish would resign from her job and live there with him once they were married. They were planning a winter wedding, they chose the date of January 27, 1973, just five months in the future.

Trish needed to notify her family and friends, so after she returned home to Telegraph Creek and told her brother the news, she sat down and began writing letters. The first was to her mum. She wasn’t sure how to start. Although Florence hadn’t said much when Trish announced she was moving to Canada permanently, it must have been upsetting. And again, when Richard wrote to tell her he wasn’t returning home from his visit to Canada, what did her mum think? Two of her three children had left the country, and traveling back and forth to visit was a costly and infrequent event.

Now, Trish was telling her mum that her only daughter was getting married, knowing it was impossible for her parents and youngest brother to attend her wedding. Trish decided to deliver the news just as her mum would–directly and without fuss. Once that letter was tucked in an envelope, Trish started on the letter to Jean. She knew Jean would be surprised by the news. Getting married was Jean’s dream, not Trish’s. Still, Trish knew her friend would be happy for her, and would wish her well. She had a few other friends she also wanted to notify, but those letters were easier.

Next, Trish needed to confirm a Maid of Honour for the wedding. Back in England, Jean would have been her clear choice, but in Canada, she wasn’t so sure. Susie, in Vancouver, had been a good friend over the years, but Trish wasn’t willing to ask her to take time off work and travel to be in the wedding. Trish next thought of Judy, one of the nurses she had worked with in Bella Bella. Trish and Judy had become friends and still stayed in touch through letters. Trish put pen to paper and asked Judy to stand with her at her wedding.

When Trish told her news to Mary, after the obligatory congratulations, Mary mused that Trish was marrying the pilot. Janet, the nurse before her, married the doctor, and the nurse before her had married the RCMP officer.

“Who’s left?” asked Mary, throwing her hands in the air in feigned despair.

Trish laughed as she remembered the Employment Officer telling her the very same story during her recruitment. Back then, sitting in his office, Trish had just smiled when he went through the list. Then he paused, looking across the desk at her. She wasn’t sure if he was expecting a response from her or not. Marriage wasn’t on her mind, but that was none of his business. Now, less than a year later, she knew he would have had to add the pilot to his list when he hired her replacement. As she wrote her resignation letter to her employer, she paused to wonder who would take her position and how long they would stay before following the pattern. She had decided her last day of work would be in December, before Christmas, even though the wedding wasn’t until late January. She thought it would be nice to spend Christmas in Terrace with Walter and have time to plan the wedding without having to manage the details from afar. Still, she was giving her employer ample notice–more than three months–and she hoped that would be enough time for them to find someone who would be a good match for the community and the work.

Life in Telegraph Creek felt different for Trish now that it had an end date. At times, she forgot she would soon be leaving as she went about her work, but at other times, it felt surreal–like when she and Walter discussed their wedding plans and life together beyond that day. Those moments reminded her of the feelings she had back in England once she had made up her mind to come to Canada. It felt as though she had one foot solidly planted at home, while the other was striding forward, and she wasn’t quite sure what sort of ground it would land on.

Although Telegraph Creek felt like home in many ways, there were still surprises that caught Trish off guard. Surprises like waking up one autumn morning to Richard telling her she needed to go outside and take a look at her garden. She did as he suggested, and saw hoof prints all around the Nurses’ Station, and the plants in her garden eaten down to the roots. The hoof prints had been left by horses, but there were no horses to be seen by the time Trish surveyed the wreckage of her garden. Later that day, she recounted to Walter what happened.

He told her the horses belonged to the Glenora ranch. They had been out in the bush all season, on guiding and hunting expeditions, and now they had been set loose for the winter. The return of the horses added an element of excitement for Walter and the other pilots as well. The horses liked to graze on the already hazardous airstrip, and the pilots had to be careful. A pilot on the approach had to hug the treetops, then as the runway came into view, if the horses were grazing where he needed to land, he had no choice but to pull up and hope the horses would be scared off by the sound of the engines and the airstrip would be clear for the second pass. It was just another quirk of the community that required alertness and quick thinking to navigate, not dissimilar to her experience as the village nurse, Trish thought.

She had come to the realization that Telegraph Creek had the most interesting patients she had seen in her career. It was very isolated, and she thought that was a factor in the number of strange cases that she didn’t think happened elsewhere. Halloween that year offered up two such cases in one evening. The first, a girl about 12 years old, with an obvious developmental disability, slipped on ice while trick-or-treating. She fell, dislocating her knee. Her family took her home, then called Trish. Trish went to the home, noting it was nearly bare of furniture. The girl sat on a bed that had no sheets or bedding, with her knee at a very unnatural angle. She smiled at Trish as she entered. A dislocated knee is usually very painful, but this girl appeared to have no distress at all. Trish’s questions about which way the knee twisted at the time of injury were met with the same smile. It was already evening, and the light was gone, so there were no flights out until the following day, Trish felt she had no choice but to relocate the limb. She asked one of the men in the house to hold the girl at the top of the bed, while Trish applied traction to the leg, hoping the joint would slip back into place. She braced herself for screams as she began to manipulate the leg, but the girl didn’t react. The knee slipped back into place, and Trish checked for pulses, and any neurological deficits. Though the knee was very swollen, everything seemed ok, so Trish applied a full plaster cast to the leg, from thigh to ankle, to keep the knee stable until the patient could be flown to Terrace the following day. The girl calmly watched Trish work, then went back to sorting her Halloween candy. Trish was relieved she had been able to relocate the joint but was bewildered at the girl’s lack of response to the situation. Any other patient would have been screaming when she manipulated that knee, and the house would have been in chaos.

Later that same night Trish was called to another house, where a woman was reported to have fallen and broken her leg at a party. By the time Trish arrived, the woman in question was in the middle of a sexual encounter with a man on the lower of two bunkbeds, and Trish had to wait until they finished. Once the fellow left, Trish prepared to assess the injured leg. She unwittingly gave her flashlight to an older woman who was occupying the top bunk, asking her to hold it so Trish could see what she was doing. Instead, the older woman began hitting Trish on the head, with her own flashlight, muttering “damn you, nurse,” over and over. Amidst the chaos, dodging blows to her head, and in poor light, Trish set the woman’s leg and applied a cast. The following day she sent both the woman and the girl out on the same flight to Terrace. Given the circumstances of the injuries, and the treatment environments she ended up in, she was very relieved to learn from the receiving doctor in Terrace that both injuries had been set well and were expected to heal without complications.

Christmas was fast approaching, and Trish and Richard were preparing to leave Telegraph Creek. Walter had rented a basement suite in Terrace, where Trish and her brother could live until the wedding. Trish hoped that once they were in Terrace where there were more opportunities for work, her brother could find a job and become independent. In the meantime, the plan was for him to stay with Trish in the basement suite, and then, if need be, he could move into Walter’s cabin with them after they were married until he found work. Trish was relieved that a new nurse had been hired and would be arriving the same day Trish was scheduled to leave. There would only be a short time to show her the Nurse’s Station, just as it had been when she herself arrived nearly a year earlier and took over from Janet.

As Trish tidied the examination room after her final afternoon of open clinic hours, she reflected back on all the circumstances and events that had brought her to this place, and this time in her life. Her decision to duck out of her work of punching cards at the AT&E factory when she was 17 years old, to attend an interview to become a nurses’ aide, had triggered a series of events and put her on a path that her 17-year-old self could never have anticipated. Her only goal back then was to escape a boring job her father had chosen for her in favour of a more interesting one, and in doing so she had completely changed the course of her life.

She was knocked out of her reverie when she heard Mary come into the building, kicking snow off her big winter boots.

“It’s starting to snow,” Mary said. She didn’t say more, but her meaning was clear. Flights in and out of Telegraph Creek were weather dependent–there were no flights when it was snowing. The new nurse was to fly in on the sked the next day, and Trish was to fly out. If the snowstorm lasted, her departure would be delayed. There was nothing to be done about it, the weather was as the weather was. They bid each other a good evening, Mary beginning her evening work of giving the clinic a good cleaning, and Trish retreating to the kitchen to feed Waldo, who always seemed to be hungry–he was still growing, and full of energy. She commented to Richard about the snowstorm; he had already discussed it with folks in the village, and had heard it was going to last for a few days. Trish hoped that wasn’t the case. Now that her last day was here, she was keen to leave, there was no sense in lingering when it was time to move on.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

As summer drew to a close, Trish received a visit one afternoon from Helmut, the schoolteacher. He told her he had received an application from a white family who wanted to enrol their kids in the village school that autumn, and he had concerns.

The family were Americans, he explained, and the father was a draft dodger. They were living illegally in the bush, camping in a teepee quite a distance from Telegraph Creek, a long hike or a short helicopter ride away. Trish had heard of them; people knew they were around but had little to do with them. Helmut was worried about the children’s condition and asked Trish to assess them before allowing them into the school. She was curious, she had never encountered a situation like this before.

Not enthusiastic about walking several miles to the family’s camp, Trish and Helmut approached their friends who had the helicopter in the community. The pilot agreed to fly her to the camp the next day, as a favour.

It was Trish’s first time in a helicopter, and the experience was quite different from the bush planes she was accustomed to travelling in. The small Bell-47 helicopter seemed to be all cockpit. As Trish sat beside the pilot in a glass bubble, she could see out in all directions. After the pilot started the engine, and did his pre-flight checks, the helicopter lifted straight up into the air. Trish watched, mesmerized, as the ground dropped away below them, then the helicopter tilted, turned, and set off over the wilderness. They flew low over the trees so when they came to a clearing, it seemed to appear out of nowhere. The helicopter slowed, hovered, then lowered straight down to the ground. Trish looked out the window, clutching her medical bag, as she waited for the pilot to shut down the engines. She saw a young man and woman, no older than herself, standing by a teepee at the end of the clearing, and three young children peering out from behind them. A faint wisp of smoke drifted from the peak of the teepee.

The rotors slowed, then stopped, and the pilot opened the door. He exited the helicopter and extended a hand to Trish to help her step down. Once her feet were on solid ground, she assured him she would be quick since he was waiting for her.

Trish turned to the family and waved; they waved back and started toward her. After introducing themselves, and the children, they walked together toward the teepee. As they approached, a dog emerged, barking, followed by several puppies, some staying close to their mother, others playfully wrestling with each other.

Trish’s attention was pulled back to the woman, who was asking if she would like coffee. Not wanting to be rude, Trish agreed. The woman walked to the teepee, and, holding the flap of heavy canvas aside, gestured for Trish to enter.

The teepee was basic, with a dirt floor. There was an open fire in the center, which was the first thing Trish saw as her eyes adjusted to the dark, hazy interior. A large pot hung from a tripod over the fire, and beyond it, a few piles of blankets lay in careless heaps on the ground. There was little else. The family seemed to have few, if any belongings. This didn’t seem like much of a life for the kids. Trish didn’t see any food around, though she realized they would need to cache their food to avoid attracting wildlife to their meagre camp.

The woman scooped a black, tarry glob from the pot over the fire. The sight of the goo made the acrid smell of smoke and stale air even more pungent in Trish’s nostrils. Watching the woman add water from another pot to the tarry lump in the cup and attempt to stir it, Trish deeply regretted agreeing to have a cup of coffee.

Trish thanked her for the cup she was holding out to her and, buying time before she would have to take a polite sip, she asked if she could talk with the children.

The woman agreed, and they stepped back outside into daylight. Trish filled her lungs with fresh air, and eyed the thick, muddy mixture in the mug. It didn’t look any more appetizing in daylight. She took the smallest sip she could manage. It was certainly unlike any coffee she had tried in the past, but she was pleased she didn’t visibly recoil at the taste.

Trish turned her attention to the children, who were chasing the puppies around. The youngest appeared to be about five years old, and the oldest no more than seven or eight. All three were grimy, dressed in dirty, ill-fitting clothes, and constantly scratching at their tangled hair. Trish didn’t need to pull out the nit comb to know they were infested with lice.

She looked back at the woman, who was as unkept and grimy as the children. Trish asked if she could begin the health check, and the woman agreed. Trish took another small sip of her coffee, then, after looking around for somewhere to set it down and seeing no options, she handed it back to the woman, who cheerfully accepted it. Trish opened her medical bag, as the woman called the children over.

The kids were curious and showed no shyness as Trish explained what she was going to do. She checked their vital signs and looked in their ears and eyes before finally bringing out a nit comb and a sheet of white paper from her bag. She ran the fine-toothed comb through their tangled hair, and her own scalp tightened at the shower of nits and live lice falling onto the white paper with each tug of the comb.

As she worked through each child’s hair, the oldest–a boy–excitedly told her about their dog’s recent litter of puppies. He claimed their dog had been mated by a coyote. Trish thought he was telling her a tale, and said as much, but then, speaking for the first time, the father confirmed the pups were a cross between their malamute mother, and a coyote.

Trish found this interesting and wondered if such crossbreeding happened often. Perhaps some of the village dogs were similar. They often ran freely, and there were many coyotes around–she frequently heard them howling and yipping at night. But it was only the distance of the sounds that suggested they were coyotes, rather than village dogs.

Turning her attention back to the task at hand, she combed out as many nits and lice as possible from the children’s tangled hair. She left the fine-toothed comb with the mother, after showing her how to carefully comb through her children’s hair to rid them of nits–the egg casings that lice hatch from–and the lice themselves. She provided specific instructions to the parents about cleaning the bedding, their clothing, and the family itself to keep them free of lice. She also gave the mother a bottle of medicated shampoo, instructing her to wash the whole family’s hair according to the directions on the bottle.

From what Trish was seeing, she understood Helmut’s concerns. As they were, the kids were not in a condition to attend school. They seemed healthy enough, but at the very least they needed to be cleaned up, washed and in clean clothes, and free of lice before Helmut would allow them into his classroom. Trish told the parents as much. She told them she admired their desire to enrol the kids in school, but they had work to do to get them ready. The parents seemed grateful that there was a chance to get their kids into school and agreed to follow Trish’s instructions to rid them of lice and keep them clean.

As Trish packed up her medical bag and prepared to leave, the man asked her if she would like to take a puppy. They couldn’t keep them all, so if she wanted one, she was welcome to it. Her first impulse was to say no, but the pups were friendly and old enough to leave their mother. When she thought about it, she realized there was no good reason to refuse. Having a dog would be useful–if nothing else, it could alert her to wildlife when she walked the trails near the village or made house-calls at night.

She accepted their offer and chose the puppy that seemed the most excited to see her.

Before leaving with a squirming puppy in her arms, she reminded the woman what needed to be done to get the children cleaned up and ready for school. Then, as she started back across the clearing to the waiting helicopter, her attention turned back to the wriggling puppy.

The pilot was far less enthusiastic about the pup than Trish was, but he reluctantly agreed to take it along. She settled into her seat, strapped in, and held the puppy on her lap.

As soon as the pilot started the engine, the puppy yelped and shot out of Trish’s grasp, scrambling over the controls and jumping up the glass bubble windshield! The pilot yelled, and they both lunged to catch the puppy. Trish managed to grab hold of the frightened little dog, then kept him tightly in her arms until they were safely back on the ground in Telegraph Creek.

The pilot was furious. More than once, he asked if Trish had any idea how much it would cost to replace the glass bubble if the dog had scratched it. Trish hadn’t known the first time he asked, nor the subsequent times, but she didn’t think it was the right moment to be cheeky. Instead, she apologized profusely for the unexpected passenger and sheepishly thanked him for the trip. Only after confirming that the windshield was undamaged did she take her new little charge to the Nurse’s Station.

As she and the puppy got to know each other, Trish settled on the name of “Waldo” for him, and it didn’t take long before he was a part of daily life, as if he had always been there. He followed Richard around during the day while Trish worked, and in the evenings he explored nearby as she worked in her little garden. Many of the vegetables she had planted were almost ready to harvest, though a few varieties needed more time, the broccoli and cabbage could wait until closer to the first frost. Overall, she thought, the garden was a success.

One day Trish received mail from her employer, it was notice she must attend a “mandatory” training course in Prince Rupert. She, along with all the public health nurses around the region, needed to report to Prince Rupert to attend an advanced driving course. Trish didn’t hold a driver’s license, or have access to a vehicle, nor were there any roads to drove on in Telegraph Creek. She thought the responsible thing to do was to remind her employer of these details so they could save the expense of sending her for a course she couldn’t benefit from. Besides, she had a new puppy at home that needed attention and training, though she didn’t tell her employer that part! In the next correspondence, which she received back surprisingly quickly, she thought, she was informed the details she outlined; no roads, no car, no license, were not pertinent and she must attend the training. She had heard anecdotes that there had been incidents involving nurses being sent into very remote areas, driving their government cars across narrow plank or log bridges, or maneuvering the cars through creek beds, where the poorly maintained roads had washed away, to get to some of the locations they were sent to. The nurses were returning the cars in rough shape, dented, and scratched. The solution was everyone needed to take the course, whether they drove or not.

Trish grudgingly flew to Prince Rupert, leaving Waldo in Richard’s care. Once in Prince Rupert, she checked into the hotel where she met with other nurses from around the region who were also staying there. It was interesting and enjoyable to meet other nurses who were working in remote locations and compare experiences with them. She had quickly learned there weren’t many opportunities for connecting with her peers in her current role, they were all too geographically spread out. They occasionally heard anecdotes about each other through the pilots, or the visiting doctors, but they didn’t get to sit down and talk to each other. Hearing firsthand accounts of how other nurses were handling cases similar to the ones Trish encountered was reassuring. Trish felt buoyed, as she reflected again that she was a very capable nurse, even, or perhaps, especially, in the unpredictable environments and situations she found herself navigating in remote villages.

Trish completed the classroom-based driving course that brought them all there, and she passed the written exam. When it was time to collect the certificate of completion, the instructor told her that when she obtained a driver’s license, she could apply for the certificate at that time, and she would get a reduced rate on insurance. Trish tucked that information away into the growing category of “government nonsense”. She bid farewell to her colleagues, exchanging mailing addresses with some of them, and took the next flight back to Telegraph Creek.

As the weather cooled and there were fewer daylight hours, there were more occasions where weather impacted the sked. Sometimes the clouds hung so low in the morning that the flight was delayed to late in the day. That meant that the plane might be grounded in one of the communities, as they couldn’t take off once it became dark. On occasion, Walter was grounded in Telegraph Creek, and when that happened, as Trish and Walter had become friendly, Trish invited him back to the Nurse’s Station. She would make dinner for Walter, Richard and herself, and they would sit around visiting. Walter slept in the spare bed in the second bedroom with Richard.

On one of those evenings, the conversation turned to the schoolteacher in the village, Helmut. As Trish had gotten to know Helmut, she had developed respect for him and his commitment to the kids in the village school, and Walter’s comments about Helmut only deepened that respect.

In Telegraph Creek, kids could attend the village school until they were about 11 or 12 years old. Then, they had to go to larger schools in Terrace, and some even went to Vancouver, if they had relatives there, for their junior high and high school years. Young kids from Telegraph Creek rarely, if ever, left the village, making the transition to school in a larger town even more traumatic. During their first year of school outside of the village, the kids often dropped out of school and returned home to the village at Christmas break, never going back to complete their schooling.

Helmut thought that if he could remove some of the fear of moving to a larger town, kids might do better and stay in school. Trish knew that he organized field trips each summer with the class of kids who had just completed their final year in the village school. Walter told her Helmut took the kids to Terrace and showed them around. He taught them how to buy a bus ticket, where to purchase things they might need, and provided other basic introductions to life in a larger town. After a few summers of such field trips, it seemed more kids were staying in school once they left the village, and the annual field trips had become a much–anticipated event. Helmut and this year’s class had been out of the village for a long time, but Trish hadn’t asked for details about exactly where they had gone.

Walter told her that this summer, Helmut had first flown to Terrace with the kids and shown them around there. Then, he had picked up his truck and camper, which he had been storing in Terrace until the road to Telegraph Creek reopened. Once he had the camper loaded with food and extra camping gear, he took the kids on a road trip all the way to Vancouver. They visited Helmut’s parents, explored the city of Vancouver, and saw many points of interest along the way. It was an exciting summer for the kids, and Helmut enjoyed watching them become more confident in different settings.

That autumn, just as Trish made dinner for Walter when he was stranded in Telegraph Creek, Walter joined Trish for dinner whenever she had to stay overnight in Terrace. Sometimes she had to accompany a patient to the hospital, and she needed to stay overnight as there wasn’t another flight that day. On those occasions, her employer paid for her to stay in a motel.

On one of her overnight trips to Terrace that fall, after having dinner together, Walter asked Trish if she would marry him.

Trish was surprised by the proposal. She liked Walter, and enjoyed spending time together, but she had never had marriage on her mind. She hadn’t thought Walter did, either. She was even more surprised when she said yes!

She was dazed, her mind reeling. She couldn’t imagine how her life might be as a married woman, she had never even tried to imagine that before. She had been independent since she was 17 years old, when she moved into the nurses’ residence at Alder Hey to begin her training. How would it be to live with Walter? Where would they live? What would she do? Surely, she couldn’t keep her job in Telegraph Creek. Could she find a nursing job in the hospital in Terrace? Did she even want that? Whatever came next, she knew her life was about to change again.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

As winter gave way to spring, Trish decided she wanted to plant a vegetable garden. When she mentioned her plan to her neighbour, Mary responded with a puzzled look. She said no one in the village had a garden. Trish pointed out that the vegetables sold at the Hudson’s Bay store were terribly expensive, and often bruised and battered by the time they arrived in the small community. She believed growing fresh vegetables could improve people’s diets, especially the kids, some of whom suffered from poor nutrition. Mary was skeptical.

Trish had helped her dad so much in his garden allotment when she was young that she had a good idea of what was needed to plant her own. She ordered packets of seeds from Terrace, as the Hudson’s Bay store didn’t carry any. Unsure about the local growing season, she stuck to reliable, easy-to-grow vegetables: lettuce, radishes, peas, and carrots. She would plant the basics, and just to see how they would do.

Surveying the ground around the Nurse’s Station with a critical eye, she found a flat patch of ground and started the work of turning over the soil. Residents walking by questioned what she was doing, their expressions suggesting they thought she was a bit crazy, but the local kids were intrigued. When the seeds arrived, they watched intently as she planted tidy rows, carefully labeling each one. The garden quickly became a novelty in the community, and Trish enjoyed tending to it.

Around the same time she planted her garden, Trish received news from home. Along with her mum’s updates about daily life, the letter announced that her brother Richard was coming for a two-week visit in June–he would arrive in about a month. As soon as she read the words, Trish cast her eyes around the Nurse’s Station and wondered how she would be able to host him for two weeks–and more importantly, what would he do for that time in such a remote location? She didn’t have any holiday time she could take to tour him around. Re-reading the letter, she supposed it didn’t matter, the word of his visit was a declaration, not a question. They would just have to figure things out when he arrived.

One pressing concern, however, was how she would afford to feed him. The prices at the Hudson’s Bay store remained outrageous. On her next trip to Terrace, she had an idea–she decided to visit a grocery store in the larger town and check the prices. Walking through the isles of the grocery store, she saw that the price of food was indeed much, much cheaper in Terrace. Trish went to the customer service counter, explained that she was the nurse posted to Telegraph Creek, and asked a staff member if they could ship a standing list of groceries to her once a month. The staff member said no, they didn’t do that.

Trish was disappointed, but unwilling to accept that it was impossible, so she visited another grocery store. The answer was the same. Finally, she tried the Overwaitea store, and to her relief, they said yes! Even better, they had a staff member who lived near the Terrace airport, who offered to deliver her groceries to the next plane, for no charge. Trish was thrilled! The difference in cost was astonishing. Even with the freight charges to fly the groceries to Telegraph Creek, her overall expenses were a third less than what she was paying at the Hudson’s Bay store, and there was much more variety of items to choose from. Trish felt incredibly grateful, though she was aware the residents of Telegraph Creek didn’t have the same opportunity to bypass the local prices. It reminded her of the special gifts and favours she’d received back in England for being a nurse, like tickets to the theatre or the local fair, but this was much more practical.

With her grocery concerns resolved, Trish felt better about her brother’s upcoming visit, though she still worried about how he would occupy himself while she was working.

Richard arrived on the sked, and Trish met him on the airstrip. Even then, she wasn’t sure how he would handle two weeks in such a remote place. She didn’t know him well enough to guess his interests, and Telegraph Creek was worlds away from Liverpool.

Her worries were unnecessary. After settling into the second bedroom at the Nurse’s Station, and catching up on sleep, Richard started exploring. Every day, he wandered through the village, the town below, and along the riverbank. He seemed in awe of the wilderness, though he wasn’t a fan of the black-flies, and he quickly became well-liked by the locals. His curiosity about their lives led to dinner invitations, and soon he was visiting people’s homes regularly. Trish was surprised, but pleased, as his independence meant she could focus on her work.

As his two-week stay came to an end, Richard announced that he planned to stay in Canada–in Telegraph Creek, to be exact. He explained there was nothing for him in Liverpool, and he was so taken with the wilderness and the way of life in Telegraph Creek, he planned to stay there with Trish. She didn’t know what to say, but she did understand her brother’s sentiments. They weren’t that different to her own.

The idea of him continuing to live with her at the Nurse’s Station, however, was another matter. Her living arrangement didn’t allow for personal guests for extended periods of time. She worked out a deal with her brother for the times when the second bedroom was needed for a visiting doctor, or the nurse supervisor came to stay–Richard agreed to find somewhere else to sleep on those occasions, and he did. She wrote a letter to her employer explaining the situation and asking them to take rent for Richard’s room from her salary. At the end of the month, as she was filling out the spreadsheet of expenses that needed to be submitted along with the checklist of her activities from the previous month, she included rent for Richard. When her paycheque arrived the following month, it was the same amount as usual, with no new deductions. Trish briefly wondered if there was something further she needed to do, but decided that she had notified them that he was living there, and she would continue to add his rent to the monthly spreadsheet. She had done all she could. There were never deductions from her pay for Richard’s stay, and when the second room was needed for its intended purpose, they made it work, so there were no complaints about the arrangement.

Over the next few months, Richard applied for Landed Immigrant status at the Immigration office in Prince Rupert. He was one of the last people allowed to obtain this status without having to return to his home country to apply, allowing him to officially remain in Canada.

Life in the village carried on. Richard continued spending time in nature, or with his new friends, and Trish worked. In the evenings she tended to her little garden. The garden was doing quite well, she thought. There were always a few kids who were eager to help her pull weeds along the rows, and they were impatient to see the grown vegetables, as was she.

Early that summer, Trish had another memorable encounter with Mrs. Fretwell, this time in Iskut. Trish had flown in with Walter on the sked, with the plan to stay for a few days on one of her regular health promotion visits. She knew her supervisor was planning to stay in Iskut with her, to observe her activities. The woman wasn’t on the plane when Trish boarded in Telegraph Creek, so she thought perhaps her supervisor’s travel had been cancelled. Walter cautioned her not to get too excited; his dispatcher, Diane had notified him there was a second plane arriving in Iskut that day, as there was a group of surveyors arriving in the area. Mrs. Fretwell might be on that flight.

As the second flight was arriving quite soon after Trish’s flight, she and Walter were standing together at the edge of the small airstrip, along with several residents from Iskut, when the second aircraft, a DC-3, approached. It seemed to Trish that the plane was coming in too fast, and Walter confirmed it was. When it touched down, it landed hard.

The airstrip in Iskut was not very long, more like a grassy notch cut into the wilderness, than a formal runway. The plane lurched as the pilot applied the brakes, and Trish noticed fluid begin to spray from a hose near one of the wheels. In an instant, the aircraft spun around, its engine roaring. After spinning 180 degrees, it came to a stop at the far end of the airstrip, facing the stunned onlookers. Walter was animated as he told Trish they had witnessed a ground loop, and the pilots were very lucky the plane didn’t flip over as it spun. Instead, it came to a stop, almost gently, against the stand of trees at the end of the airstrip. As soon as the dust settled, Walter hurried toward the plane, he was undoubtedly keen to talk to the pilots and learn what their experience had been in the cockpit on that landing. Trish and the others who were waiting followed more cautiously, as it was obvious the plane was disabled and would not be taxiing to its usual location to unload the passengers and their cargo.

After a long moment, the door opened and lowered toward the ground–it was hinged at the bottom and doubled as a staircase when lowered. Passengers began stepping out, visibly shaken. Even in Iskut, where people took adversity in stride, that landing had clearly rattled them. But not Mrs. Fretwell. She descended the steps without a care in the world, journal in hand, completely unfazed. She even paused at the bottom to jot down a few more notes, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she had just experienced what anyone else would call a crash-landing.

What an odd woman, Trish thought, as she scrambled to come up with an appropriate greeting, given the situation. Thankfully, the rest of the visit passed without incident. Mrs. Fretwell spent much of her time interviewing anyone she encountered, she seemed very interested in interviewing the surveyors who had been on the flight with her, for whatever reason, and taking an abundance of notes. As was becoming a pattern, Trish found herself much happier about Mrs. Fretwell’s departure than her arrival.

Back in Telegraph Creek, Trish began to see the unintended consequences of sending all pregnant women to Terrace for the last two weeks of their pregnancy. Many women avoided pre-natal care, and Trish herself, as their due dates approached, hoping to avoid being sent away from their families. One morning a woman in labour arrived at the Nurse’s Station. She had small children at home and had deliberately avoided Trish’s attempts to check on her as her pregnancy progressed, as she understandably didn’t want to be sent away to Terrace. Now, she was in labour, and although her previous pregnancies had been uneventful, this one wasn’t going as expected. When she finally arrived at the Nurse’s Station, contractions already in progress, Trish found the baby had shifted in the womb and was now positioned in what is known as a “transverse lie”. The baby was not facing down the birth canal, rather, it was laying horizontally. As soon as Trish realized the issue, she knew the baby could not be delivered naturally. The woman needed a caesarean section–she had to get to Terrace, and quickly.

Trish went down the hill to the Hudson Bay store to call the hospital to let them know she would send the patient out on the sked that day. Within a few hours, Walter arrived, and Trish met the plane, along with the heavily pregnant woman. Trish was not going to accompany the woman on the flight, there was no need. It was only a short flight, and although the woman was in early labour, the infant was not going to deliver. Walter helped the woman onto the plane, along with a few other passengers, and set off for Terrace.

The woman returned several days later with a healthy baby boy. Trish met them at the airstrip, where the woman introduced her to the baby–whom she had named Walter. Curious about the name, Trish listened as Walter, the pilot, shared the story of the outbound flight.

When the pregnant woman boarded the plane, Walter assumed she was simply going to Terrace to await her delivery. But shortly after takeoff, when she began showing signs of active labour, he grew alarmed.

Trish replayed the events in her mind, trying to remember if she had told Walter about the woman’s condition before putting her on the plane–obviously she hadn’t. She couldn’t have; she had been right there beside the patient, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to share her medical information to the pilot. The woman would have felt her privacy had been invaded.

Walter continued with his story. He noticed the woman was in labour, so he called another passenger, an off-duty RCMP officer, up to the front, and told him he was now the in-flight midwife. Walter chuckled as he said, “He didn’t take it very well, but he had no choice,”.

The woman’s contractions seemed to be getting closer together, and Walter was concerned they might have to deliver a baby in the small fuselage of the Beechcraft 18. As he was worrying about what was happening behind him, he suddenly noticed a new problem in front of him–the oil pressure was starting to fluctuate on the right-hand engine. He looked out, and saw oil coating the right wing, he was losing oil. Still about 100 miles out of Terrace, he was confronted with a decision. In this situation, he would ideally shut down the damaged engine, the plane could fly on just one engine. His concern though, was that the pregnant woman was sitting on that side of the aircraft. If she looked out the window and noticed the propeller wasn’t spinning, well, he didn’t want to cause her any more stress than she was already experiencing. That might accelerate her labour, and he was willing to do anything in his power to get that woman to a more appropriate place to have her baby. Rather than cutting power to the damaged right engine, he made the decision to sacrifice it instead. He trimmed the power to it, intending to run it until the oil was gone and the engine stalled on its own, hoping he could make it to Terrace before that happened. It was not a good option, and would be expensive for his boss, if the engine seized before they landed, but it seemed like the best choice at the time. The rest of the flight was tense for everyone; the labouring woman, the off-duty RCMP, who looked like he regretted ever getting on the flight, and Walter, as he willed the engine to keep going.

When he landed safely in Terrace, and the right engine had not stalled, nor had the woman delivered a baby in the plane, Walter finally relaxed. He thanked the RCMP officer, who was also incredibly relieved he wasn’t called on to do more than sit awkwardly with the labouring woman. Walter told him about the engine issue, and they agreed the outcome was pretty good for the situation. Later, the ground crew told Walter there was less than a cup of oil left in the right engine when he landed, but because the engine hadn’t seized, it could be fixed, which brought even more relief.

When Trish explained to him that the woman wouldn’t have been able to deliver the baby anyway, Walter looked a bit exasperated. That had been a very stressful flight, and he could have followed the usual procedure and just cut the engine, had he known. Trish felt bad for not telling him the more details of the case at the time, but maintaining patient confidentiality was a primary value of healthcare workers. Sometimes it was difficult to know where patient confidentiality ended, and safety began, in this environment.

Walter said he hadn’t spoken directly with the woman, so Trish presumed the woman must have learned of the lengths he went to protect her from further distress on the flight from the RCMP officer, or other passengers, and that was why she chose his name for her baby boy. She thought it was a nice way to honour his efforts to keep the woman as comfortable as possible in a difficult situation.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 17 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Suddenly, there was a commotion in the kitchen, Trish wondered with irritation why her mum was making so much noise. She heard her name; someone was calling for her. Pulling at her bedding, she tried to sit up but was unable, her sheets were damp and tangled around her. The door to her bedroom opened, and Mary’s concerned face peered in, followed by a woman behind her, holding a small baby. Why is a Mary bringing a patient into my bedroom, Trish thought with more annoyance. A wave of cool air wafted in through the open door, and she shivered, tugging again at her damp sheets. The woman handed the baby quickly to Mary, asking her to return him to his mother, before approaching Trish’s bed, and introducing herself.

“Trish, it’s Janet, I was the nurse here before you. We met briefly when you first arrived in Telegraph Creek. I just brought back the baby you sent out to Terrace two days ago; his X-rays were clear.”

That’s right, Trish thought, that’s where I’ve seen her before. She was still wondering why she was here, though, in her bedroom, as Janet began to take a set of vital signs, and asking Trish questions like “when did you begin feeling unwell?” She moved from vital signs to a more thorough physical assessment. As Janet worked and talked, Trish recalled the onset of laryngitis. Was that yesterday? She hadn’t thought much of it; she had experienced unexplained laryngitis so many times as a nursing student. The very last thing she remembered, was going to bed, and now Janet was telling her it was the afternoon of the next day. Her throat was so sore, her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

Janet finished her assessment and her questions and told Trish she had a large abscess in her throat, and a high fever. This probably accounted for her delirium and confusion, and certainly for her sore throat. Janet quickly helped Trish out of the wet sheets, soaked from her sweat, and into dry pajamas, before remaking the bed. The dry material next to her skin felt good, and the movement helped clear out more of the cobwebs. Janet opened the window to let some fresh air inside. She explained to Trish that she had arrived on the sked with the baby and brought him to the clinic. Finding the door locked, and seeing no sign of Trish, she went next door and alerted Mary, who unlocked the Nurse’s Station for her. Together, they found Trish in bed, sick and disoriented.

Trish needed medical attention, more than Janet could offer. Once Mary returned, Janet asked her to stay with Trish, while she went down to the Hudson’s Bay store to use the radio to report the situation to the Medical Services office in Prince Rupert.

When she returned, she updated Trish and Mary that Medical Services had contacted a doctor at the hospital in Terrace, who said Trish was to be sent there to be seen. The plane that had brought Janet and the baby to the village would return shortly for Trish. As Janet was familiar with the village, staff at Medical Services asked her to stay at the Nurse’s Station and cover Trish’s work until she returned. Trish felt bad that Janet would have an unexpected stay in Telegraph Creek, but she knew Janet was prepared. It was expected that nurses, when they traveled in and out of remote villages, always carried a bag of personal items, in the event they became stranded somewhere. In Trish’s own bag she had a few changes of clothes, and basic personal care items. She carried it with her whenever she left the village as she never knew when weather, or a mechanical problem with an aircraft could leave her stranded somewhere.

On this day, as Trish wondered if she had the energy to get to the airstrip, she was grateful to have Janet there, caring for her. Her throat hurt, she was weak, shaking even as she tried to hold a glass for a sip of water.

By the time the plane returned, Trish was dressed, had a packed overnight bag, and made her way slowly to the airstrip. She boarded the plane and slumped exhausted into a seat. Walter was not on the schedule that day, Ken, his colleague and friend was the pilot. Ken made sure Trish was comfortable and had her seatbelt on, before he settled into his seat in the cockpit and started the engine.

Jarred from sleep, Trish realized the little plane was being shaken by a patch of turbulence. She reached for something to hold onto, and as she did, she felt a twinge, and a burst of fluid in the back of her throat. Her abscess had burst. She felt immediate relief in her throat, though she desperately wanted a drink of water. By the time the plane landed in Terrace, she felt better, she thought her fever might even be subsiding.

When Trish arrived in the emergency department at the hospital in Terrace, she was relieved to see her friend Roger was the doctor on duty. She already felt quite a lot better since the abscess had ruptured and drained. She did still have a light fever, and Roger prescribed her antibiotics, being careful to avoid any that were in the penicillin family, as Trish was allergic. He also thought it best to admit her to hospital for observation.

Trish was moved into a four-bed ward that evening. As she settled in, she watched the nurses go about their evening routines with her and the other patients as she drifted in and out of sleep.

In the middle of the night Trish woke, again in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets. Her fever was back, and her throat felt like it was on fire. She pushed the call button she had been provided and waited. No one came. She pressed it again, and still, no one came. Finally, a nurse came to the ward, doing regular rounds, and delivering medications to some of the patients. She placed a small cup with a tablet on Trish’s bedside table, and said, “Here is your medication,” She pushed Trish’s cup of water closer, waiting for her to take the pill. Trish peered into the small cup, she knew that tablet, she gave them out often enough in the village, it was Penbritin–a broad-spectrum penicillin–and it was certainly not what she had been prescribed. Wincing, she pushed the words out, barely more than a whisper “I’m allergic to penicillin.” Her throat was so sore again.

Resigned to the fact that Trish wasn’t about to take the medication, the nurse turned away to the next bed, leaving the pill on the Trish’s bedside table. “Well, the doctor ordered it,” she said with some irritation before consulting her list for the next patient. Trish pushed the little cup with the pill further away from her across the small table and shivered in her damp sheets.

That morning, Roger came to see her. After a terrible night and having been given medication she was allergic to, she was relieved to see him. He saw the pill on the table, and Trish did her best to explain. As she pushed out a few painful words and he understood the problem, his brow tightened. He squared his shoulders and strode out of the room.

He returned to let Trish know the Penbritin had been prescribed to another patient with the first name “Louise”, and the nurse on duty confused it with Trish’s surname, “Lewis”. It was a dangerous mistake. Had Trish not been alert enough to question it, the consequences could have been severe. The error also meant she had not yet been treated for her infection, and a second large abscess had developed overnight.

Roger was still steaming, when he suggested to Trish that she should stay at his home while she recovered from her illness. Trish was surprised as it was an unusual suggestion, but she also didn’t want to spend another night in the ward. The idea of being under the care of a friend and a competent medical professional was comforting. She agreed, and he arranged her discharge from hospital. He filled her prescription for antibiotics, then drove her to his home, where he settled her into a comfortable guest bedroom. Once she started taking the antibiotics, the infection subsided, and she recovered quite quickly. In the evenings, once she was feeling better, she enjoyed visiting with Roger. She learned that he was friends with Diane, the woman who dispatched the pilots who flew the sked. Walter often talked about “Di”, and how well she looked after her pilots, always making sure they called in, and she knew where they were if they had to overnight somewhere. Trish was beginning to appreciate how connected everything–and everyone, was in the area.

Within a week, Trish was well enough to return to Telegraph Creek on a scheduled flight. Janet was pleased to see her, as she was eager to return home to Terrace. Trish was grateful Janet had found her when she was so unwell and had made the arrangements for her care.

After her ordeal, Trish quickly got back to work, and to her daily routines. She joined her neighbours to meet the next plane and chatted with Walter. After expressing concern over her recent illness, he had a story he was keen to tell her. It was regarding the flight with Mrs. Fretwell, and the baby in the incubator.

He said the flight had started smoothly, he frequently glanced over his shoulder to check on the baby and Mrs. Fretwell. At first everything seemed fine–Mrs. Fretwell even had a broad smile on her face as she sat beside the incubator. But partway through the flight, Walter looked back again and noticed the supervisor’s smile was gone. She now looked worried and was fiddling with the incubator’s controls.

Concerned, Walter caught the eye of another passenger and gestured for him to come forward. Walter asked him what was happening back there, and the passenger told him that the incubator appeared to have stopped working. Walter realized the potential risk for the baby at their current altitude. The oxygen levels and air pressure would be low, not noticeably so for anyone who was healthy, but if the infant did have compromised lungs, as was the concern, he could be in distress. He also worried that the baby would not be warm enough, if the incubator cooled. The Otter had a very robust heater, and Walter turned it up high while he considered what else he could do. It would be uncomfortably hot for the passengers, but it should keep the infant warm.

Next, he adjusted his course to follow the Nass River into Terrace. It was a longer route than flying in a straight line, but following the river allowed him to fly at a much lower altitude, just above the treetops, where the oxygen levels and air pressure were safer for the infant. Thankfully, the baby arrived in Terrace in good condition, and Walter said he doubted Mrs. Fretwell even noticed the route or altitude change, in fact, she didn’t mention the problem with the incubator at all. It had turned out well, as the infant was in fact healthy, but Trish appreciated Walter’s interventions, they would have kept the baby safe had it been developing an infection. She also made a note to herself not to leave her supervisor in charge of a patient again, regardless of her qualifications.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish was surprised by how far she’d wandered from the clinic, bucket in hand, without finding any clean snow to melt for water. Scanning the ground for an untouched patch, she wondered aloud just how many dogs lived in this tiny village.

Iskut, a small Native village about 50 kilometers east of Telegraph Creek by air, had no running water. The community had a water system, but it often froze in the winter, as it had now. Trish was visiting Iskut for the first time, accompanying a doctor who was running a clinic for a few days. Her role was to conduct health promotion activities while the doctor saw patients in the clinic, but even basic hygiene was proving to be a challenge. She collected the least soiled snow she could find, muttering under her breath that it wouldn’t even be clean enough to wash her hands. Back at the clinic, the doctor didn’t seem fazed by the sorry state of the snow in the bucket.

“We’ll filter out the worst of it, and see what we are left with,” he said with a shrug. Using a steel pail and several clean tea towels layered together to make a strainer that would remove the largest contaminants, they started melting the snow. As it melted, water filtered through the towels, and eventually they had a few inches of water that, after being boiled, would at least do for handwashing.

Eyeing the water suspiciously, Trish wondered how families in the village managed to cook, bathe, and get through daily life with such limited access to clean water. Collecting snow, melting it, then boiling it was an ongoing job to get enough water for basic daily needs when the water system wasn’t working.

Dirty water wasn’t the only hurdle Trish faced when trying to promote basic health in Iskut; the local priest was another. Based on conversations with the residents of Telegraph Creek, she had learned there was an interest in an educational clinic about birth control. Trish thought the residents of Iskut might have a similar need, so she advertised a birth control clinic during her visit. However, the priest caught wind of her plan. During Sunday mass in the village’s small Catholic church, he preached against her and the clinic, scaring the women who might have wanted to attend. When Trish heard what happened, she quietly rescheduled the clinic for the evening and spread the new time through word of mouth, inviting women to enter through the back door of the clinic if they wished to attend discreetly. The clinic went ahead at the new time with a discussion about safe sex, and birth control was provided to any women who requested it. Nonetheless, returning to Telegraph Creek when the visit was over was a relief. There, she might have to cook for the local minister occasionally, but at least she wasn’t the topic of his sermons, and she could be clear and direct about the services she provided at the clinic. She also had clean, running water.

As Trish learned more about life and work in Telegraph Creek, she became familiar with the “sked”–the term locals and pilots used for the scheduled flights serving the remote communities in the region. With no road access to the community, flights were the only way in or out. Much like in Bella Bella, where the whole community gathered to greet arriving seaplanes or supply boats, nearly everyone in Telegraph Creek headed to the airstrip when a plane was due, whether they were expecting a delivery or not. Trish often joined them, wondering if this would finally be the flight that would deliver the winter parka she had been measured for during her orientation. The jacket still hadn’t arrived, though with the weather warming, it was becoming less essential. Fortunately, Trish still had the heavy coat she had bought during her first winter in Bella Bella.

Whenever Trish flew in or out of Telegraph Creek, the pilot often invited her to sit in the co-pilot seat. Trish enjoyed the views from the cockpit, and chatting with the pilot. It was a great way to learn more about the landscape below and to hear news from the outside world or other nearby communities.

Not long after Trish arrived in Telegraph Creek, a new pilot named Walter arrived on the sked. He had recently started flying for TransProvincial–the airline serving the region–after working as a bush pilot in the arctic, based out of Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory. Like the pilot he replaced, he was friendly, confident, and always made time to chat with Trish when she met the plane or was a passenger. When she was a passenger on his flight, he always invited her to sit in the co-pilot seat. Walter’s regular appearance in Telegraph Creek helped Trish feel connected to the outside world, and she looked forward to seeing him.

The occasional social evenings and potluck meals at Helmut’s home also helped Trish feel like she was part of a social circle in the small community. Once, she casually mentioned a recent gathering at Helmut’s to Walter when they were chatting on the airstrip. Walter surprised her when he told her he and Helmut had been classmates at the University of Victoria, where they were both studying to be teachers. He liked and respected Helmut. Trish had seen the men greet each other at the airstrip before but hadn’t realized they had a prior connection. Somehow, that knowledge made Telegraph Creek feel a little bigger, a little less remote.

Trish also noticed how many people passed through the small community. In the spring, a few newcomers joined a dinner gathering at the teacherage. The two young men had arrived for the season to operate a helicopter out of Telegraph Creek. One was the pilot, and the other a mechanic. They were there to fly guides and sportsmen to and from hunting and fishing lodges in the area. They also served the large ranches in the area that Trish had heard of, but not yet seen for herself. Glenora was the nearest one, all Trish knew about them was that they had a lot of horses, many of which were used on guiding and hunting expeditions during the summer and fall. She realized there was a lot going on around the little community of Telegraph Creek, and the more people she met, and the more she learned about her new home, the less remote it felt.

Not all encounters, however, left Trish feeling connected or reassured. One such experience was the first “unannounced” visit from Mrs. Fretwell, the nursing supervisor–Trish’s boss, from Medical Services. The somewhat fussy, though not unfriendly woman arrived on a flight one afternoon, catching Trish off guard. Trish was at the airstrip to meet the plane, as usual, when a woman clambered off the plane, greeted a startled Trish introducing herself as the Nursing Supervisor, then made a beeline for the Nurse’s Station. Once the surprise wore off, Trish hurried to catch up to her, inviting her into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and showing her to the second bedroom to drop off her overnight bag. Meanwhile, Mary, who had also seen the supervisor arrive and recognized her immediately, had scooted back ahead of Trish and Mrs. Fretwell. She quickly slipped into the examination room and put away clinical equipment–equipment that Trish wasn’t supposed to be using. Mrs. Fretwell was checking up on the health promotion nurse, after all, not a clinical nurse.

The supervisor’s inspection of the Nurse’s Station was puzzling. She took notes about everything, including seemingly irrelevant things like the number of teaspoons and other flatware in the kitchen, and the inventory of postage stamps in the office. Was she trying to determine if Trish was losing teaspoons, or using government stamps for personal mail? Trish couldn’t help but feel uneasy.

The tension escalated when Mrs. Fretwell inspected the examination room and noticed a suture kit out on the counter–Mary must have overlooked it when tidying up.

“What on earth do you need a suture kit for? You are supposed to be running pre-natal clinics!” she said sharply.

Trish was at a loss for words. Surely the supervisor understood that patients came through the clinic, whether a visiting doctor was present or not. Their health needs didn’t come and go on a schedule, but in that moment, her explanations felt inadequate.

Unfortunately, that night Trish was unable to avoid the reality that she was providing clinical care when necessary. Late in the evening, after Mrs. Fretwell had retired for the night, a heavily pregnant woman arrived at the clinic in active labour. Trish quickly and quietly prepared the treatment room and got the woman settled.

Babies were not meant to be delivered in Telegraph Creek–especially without a doctor present. According to the direction at the time, all pregnant women were supposed to travel to Terrace two weeks before their due date and wait to give birth there. However, most women refused, preferring to stay home with their families as their due dates approached.

On this night, the labouring woman now occupying the treatment room was struggling, and not quietly. As this was the woman’s fourth pregnancy, and it had been uneventful, Trish expected the delivery to progress quickly–quickly enough, she hoped, that it would be all over with by the time Mrs. Fretwell woke in the morning. If the Supervisor found a wayward suture kit distressing, Trish could only imagine what she would think of this new turn of events.

With an even louder shriek, the woman bore down and pushed, and the baby’s head finally appeared–but something was wrong. For a moment, Trish wasn’t sure what she was looking at–the mass emerging from the woman did not resemble a baby’s head. As she stared, she heard a second shriek, this time from behind her. Mrs. Fretwell, woken by the escalating sounds of distress, had entered the room, and was also staring at the pulpy, misshapen mass. Within seconds, Trish realized the issue: the amniotic membrane was covering the baby’s head. She firmly told her supervisor to leave the room, and glancing quickly over her shoulder, she saw the woman was already scrambling toward the door. Trish turned back to the mother and newborn and carefully cleared the membrane away from the baby’s face before suctioning the tiny nose and mouth.

Speaking gently to reassure the mother, Trish guided her through the final pushes, and the baby was born without further complications. The baby boy appeared vigorous and healthy, but Trish was concerned that he might have aspirated amniotic fluid before she had cleared his airway. Aspiration can quickly lead to a life-threatening infection in newborns if not detected, or if left untreated, so the baby needed to be flown to Terrace for a chest X-ray to rule this out.

Trish had no choice but to discuss the case with Mrs. Fretwell. It was clear to Trish that her supervisor, who was still a registered nurse despite her administrative role, was neither comfortable nor confident in a clinical setting. Trish considered the situation, the newborn was not in any immediate distress, or in need of any urgent treatments or interventions, but he did need to be assessed in Terrace, so they could do a chest X-ray. Trish suggested transferring the newborn to the hospital in Terrace for assessment, with Mrs. Fretwell accompanying him as the medical escort on the next flight. After a thorough discussion of the implications of sending the baby to Terrace, and the risks of keeping him in the village, both the mother and the supervisor agreed the baby should be transferred to Terrace.

Later that morning, Trish walked down the hill to town to call the hospital in Terrace, requesting an incubator to be sent to Telegraph Creek on the sked later that day. After confirming the transfer, Trish climbed back up the trail to the village feeling relieved–the newborn would get the care he needed, and Mrs. Fretwell was leaving the village, earlier than planned.

When Walter flew in that afternoon, he personally delivered the incubator to the Nurse’s Station. He needed to carry on to another community, but he would return in a few hours to transport the newborn and Mrs. Fretwell. Trish plugged the incubator in to ensure it was warm and ready for use. Her previous experience in the Neo-Natal Surgical Unit in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool gave her confidence in operating the equipment and explaining how it worked to the mother, so she wouldn’t be alarmed when they placed the baby inside.

Trish explained the incubator was necessary for keeping the newborn warm and providing supplemental oxygen during the flight. The small plane Walter was flying that day, an Otter, didn’t have a pressurized cabin. That meant the oxygen level and air pressure in the cabin dropped as the plane climbed. If the newborn had aspirated amniotic fluid, and he was developing a lung infection, he may not be able to compensate for the changes.

When Walter returned, Trish carefully placed the infant into the incubator under his mother’s watchful eye, reassuring her that her son would be well cared for and back in a few days. Together, Trish and Walter carefully moved the incubator back onto the plane, secured it, and made sure Mrs. Fretwell was comfortable as the medical escort. She really shouldn’t have to do much on the transfer, other than keep an eye on the baby, and the gauges. Trish stayed and watched as Walter taxied the Otter down the airstrip and took off. As the small plane banked and disappeared beyond the hill, Trish became aware her eyes were dry and scratchy, and her limbs heavy, as if all her energy had just flown away like the plane. She had been up most of the night, and now that the baby was on his way to Terrace, and the visit from her supervisor had mercifully ended, weariness was taking over. She hoped there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for her at the clinic. She ran clinic hours every weekday afternoon for anyone in the village who had an ailment they wanted to show her. She still had to finish the documentation for the delivery during the night, and the transfer of the infant to Terrace.

She finished her workday in a haze of exhaustion and went to bed as soon as she could. The following morning, despite many hours of sleep, Trish still felt heavy and tired. She wondered why, she regularly was up through the night with patients, that wasn’t new. By afternoon she noticed she was losing her voice. The mysterious laryngitis that she had experienced so many times as a nursing student seemed to be back. She thought little of it, but tried to limit situations which would require her to do much talking. She hoped it would pass quickly. Still feeling tired, she went to bed early for a second night in a row.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Telegraph Creek and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish hoisted her suitcase onto the luggage stand in her hotel room and let out a tired sigh. She was utterly exhausted, but she knew better than to collapse onto the bed–if she did, she would be asleep within seconds. First, she needed to get ready for bed properly. As she unpacked her pajamas, she reflected on how grueling her journey from Manchester to Vancouver, and then to Prince Rupert, had been. It felt just as draining as some of the worst nightshifts she’d ever worked.

In the morning, she would meet with a staff member from the Department of Health, Medical Services and start her orientation for her new health promotion job. But tonight, all she needed was sleep.

The orientation was several weeks long. Trish had no previous experience with health promotion–her training had not covered it, and while it wasn’t exactly the “hands on” nursing she preferred, she found the opportunity to learn something new intriguing. Unlike her last job, where she’d worked for the United Church and had received no orientation, beyond where to pick up her ticket to get to Namu, her new position with the federal government came with a structured orientation. Through a series of meetings with staff, Trish learned about the structure and aims of the Dept. of Health, Medical Services, who she could contact, and how to reach them. She also learned about the specific health promotion activities she needed to do in Telegraph Creek. These included running pre-natal clinics, teaching school kids about oral hygiene, and checking them for head lice.

On the bright side, she would get a government-issued winter parka–a definite benefit since it was only February and freezing temperatures would linger for weeks, if not months, before spring arrived. She gladly provided her measurements. She was told the jacket would be shipped to her in the coming weeks.

During orientation, Trish joined a field visit to Klemtu, a village about 30 miles north of Bella Bella, where she had previously lived. She shadowed Dr. Ellis, assisting him in running a week-long health clinic. Smaller villages like Klemtu did not have a nurse living in the community, rather, a nurse from a nearby community would travel to the community to do health promotion. Sometimes they would join a doctor for a medical clinic, as Trish was doing now. She and Dr. Ellis arrived by seaplane, hauling an impressive amount of gear, including X-ray films and supplies to keep the clinic's equipment operational.

When they landed, a group of men and boys were on the boardwalk, leaning on the railing, watching as the passengers disembarked. To Trish's surprise, none of them offered to help unload the heavy cases. This was a stark contrast to Bella Bella, where lending a hand was second nature. Instead, Trish and Dr. Ellis wrestled the equipment up the ramp while the locals stood by and watched. The lack of help left her uneasy–a feeling that lingered throughout the week. By the time the clinic wrapped up, Trish was eager to leave. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of reception awaited her in Telegraph Creek.

After completing the orientation, Trish boarded a small plane, a Beech 18, for the flight to Telegraph Creek. There was a gravel road that had connected to the community to Dease Lake, a community about 70 miles away, but a bridge had washed out and not been repaired, so flying was the only way in or out.

The isolation of Telegraph Creek was breathtakingly clear from the air. As the plane flew over snowcapped peaks, frozen lakes, and endless wilderness, the beauty of the coastal mountains was spectacular. The landscape shifted as they followed the meandering Stikine River toward Telegraph Creek. Rugged terrain gave way to deep canyons and plateaus, and a small cluster of buildings came into view along the riverbank.

Trish had been warned that the landing would be quite exciting. The airstrip was located northwest of the village, surrounded by hills on both sides, and another on the approach. At the far end, a deep canyon cut through the landscape. The hill on the approach was so steep it felt like the plane was skimming the treetops, before it dropped sharply toward the short runway. The runway itself was uneven, with noticeable rises and dips. This was why, she learned only small aircraft, the Beech 18, and the Otter, were able to land there. Years later, the airstrip was moved to a more suitable spot, but in 1972, landing in Telegraph Creek was a gripping experience for both pilots and passengers.

On the ground, Trish was greeted by Janet, the nurse she would be replacing. Janet was leaving to get married–she was engaged to a doctor she had met when he came to the small community to run clinics. Trish had already known this, as the Employment officer who hired her had brought it up. He had told Trish that the nurse before Janet had married an RCMP officer, and now Janet was marrying the doctor. The thought flashed through Trish’s mind that her friend Jean might have better odds of marrying a doctor in the Canadian wilderness than in a big Manchester hospital!

There wasn’t much time to talk, as the plane was making a quick trip to deliver mail and supplies to a nearby mine before returning to pick up Janet and other outbound passengers. Janet hurried to show Trish the Nurse’s Station, which doubled as her home. It had two bedrooms–one with a single bed for her and another with twin beds for visiting doctors–a kitchen, a bathroom, a treatment room stocked with medical supplies, and a small office for meeting with patients.

As Janet quickly went over the essentials of running the Nurse’s Station, Trish realized that, although her job was supposed to focus on health promotion, there was no other healthcare provider in the community. Just like in Namu, she was the only health professional in Telegraph Creek. Occasionally, a doctor would visit, and a nursing supervisor might show up unannounced to check that Trish was completing the required health promotion tasks. But most of the time, she would be alone. She wondered if, once again, her experience in the busy casualty department in Hull, and her midwifery training, had been a factor in her being hired to this job. It was not legal for a nurse to perform procedures like starting an intravenous, suturing a wound, or delivering a baby without a doctor present, but as in Namu, if those circumstances arose, it wasn’t always possible to get a doctor on site in a timely manner. At least Trish had experience if she needed it.

Janet also introduced her to Mary and Jimmy, the Native couple who lived next door to the Nurse’s Station. They took care of the clinic's cleaning and maintenance. Mary would also work as Trish's assistant during the day when needed. Their warmth and friendliness were a comfort to Trish, who was acutely aware of just how far she was from home. When the sound of the Beech 18’s engine signalled the plane’s return, it was time for Janet to leave. Trish turned her focus to settling into her new home. Telegraph Creek, home to about 400 people, was divided into two areas: the buildings along the riverbank ("town"), and the plateau above ("the village"), where the Nurse's Station was located. On her first walk down the steep trail into town, the first building she came to was the Hudson's Bay store, where residents shopped for everything from groceries to household supplies. Trish was stunned by the prices–they were outrageously high. When she voiced her surprise, the clerk explained that the damaged bridge meant everything had to be flown in, drastically driving up the costs. Trish wondered how people afforded food with such high prices.

Leaving the store, Trish continued on along the river, coming to a church–St. Aiden’s Anglican Church–according to the weathered sign out front. There were more buildings along the riverbank; some were obviously abandoned, while she couldn't tell for certain if others were still occupied. Janet had told her that the RMCP officer and the minister lived down in town, but it wasn’t obvious to Trish which houses were more lived in than others.

After returning to buy a few food items from the Hudson Bay store, she braced herself for the strenuous hike back up the trail to the village. She was relieved that the Nurse’s Station was in the village, rather than down below on the riverbank. The fewer trips she had to make up and down the steep trail between town and the village, the better. Still, she knew she’d have to make the trek for groceries and to use the radio at the Hudson’s Bay store–the only way to contact the doctor, or anyone else outside of Telegraph Creek.

As she trudged up the slope with her bag of groceries, the trail took Trish through the cemetery. It rested on a smaller plateau halfway up the steep bank. Further along, there was another bench in the hillside, and that was where she came across the school and a house where she presumed the schoolteacher lived. Once back in the village, she walked along the gravel road that paralleled the river along the plateau, before looping back on itself. This area was home to the Native families, and Trish.

After familiarizing herself with the layout of the village, Trish turned her attention to the Nurse’s Station. She thought about the health promotion activities that comprised her new job. Even with her limited knowledge of the community, many of the activities didn’t align with the actual needs or interest of the residents. For example, she was to conduct regular pre-natal clinics, but Janet had mentioned there was only one pregnant woman in the entire village, and this wasn’t her first pregnancy. It seemed highly unlikely she would avail herself to a pre-natal clinic once, let alone regularly.

It didn't surprise Trish that her days quickly filled with walk-in patients arriving at the Nurse's Station, seeking medical care for both new and ongoing medical issues. Mary's help was invaluable. Although she had not been formally trained as an aide, she had been working in the clinic alongside nurses for some time and had a common sense approach to the daily activities, as well as a subtle sense of humour. Trish enjoyed working with her, it was nice to have someone to talk to. Mary was curious about Trish and her background. She and her husband had two grown children, and she regularly shared updates about them with Trish. Their eldest daughter worked as a hair dresser in Dease Lake, and their eldest son was a pilot. They also had two teenagers who were away in Terrace for school, they came home on the holidays. It was obvious to Trish that Mary and Jimmy were proud of their kids, particularly the careers of their eldest two kids. Mary also knew each family in the community, which was helpful as Trish became oriented to the needs of the village.

The homes in Telegraph Creek didn't have electricity. This information surprised Trish, since the Nurse's Station had electricity, but Jimmy told her that was because it was powered by a generator, as was the school and the teacherage. It was his job to look after the generators and make sure the buildings had power.

Trish soon found a routine to her work, treating wounds, managing infections and illness, setting broken bones, and arranging transportation for patients who needed advanced care in Terrace. She also prepared a bag of medical supplies for house calls, as occasionally she needed to see patients in their home, or elsewhere in the village. These home visits gave Trish the opportunity to meet more members of the community and see their living conditions firsthand. Although the village was small–less than a half mile from one end to the other–the difference between homes at either end were striking. At one end, homes were clean, children were well-fed, and they performed well in school. Homes were tidy and welcoming; Trish instinctively took her shoes off at the door when visiting.

At the other end of the village, however, many homes were in an alarming state of neglect and disarray. Alcohol-fueled parties were common, and some children suffered from developmental issues. In these homes, Trish kept her shoes on–for safety. It was also at this end of the village where she was most often called to deal with serious injuries, often in the evenings, when the parties started in earnest.

On quiet evenings, Trish prepared herself a simple meal in the kitchen of the Nurse’s Station before finishing the day’s reports and clinical notes. Having lived most of her adult life in nurses’ residences, save a few months when she had her own apartment, cooking was not something she had paid a lot of attention to in the past. There also wasn’t much variety in the groceries available in the Hudson’s Bay store, so she just did the best she could with what she had. She decided it didn’t need to be fancy, only edible. Some evenings, however, as she was about to sit down to eat, there was a knock at the door. It was the minister, a frail old man, dressed in threadbare clothes, with uncanny timing. He lived down in the town, and Trish knew he had climbed the steep trail to arrive at her door at dinner time, so she could hardly turn him away. She served him a plate of dinner and chatted with him, musing to herself that the Anglican Church had probably forgotten about him decades ago and simply left him there. During one of their chats, the minister told Trish about Miss Whiteside, a retired nurse who lived in a rundown cabin down in town. Miss Whiteside had been the nurse for many years in Telegraph Creek, working in two part time jobs that made up a whole salary. Now, in her retirement, the pensions from her part time service were so small the minister said she couldn’t afford to leave the community. Or perhaps, he mused, she had just been there so long, she had nowhere else to go. Trish wondered if that was his situation, as well.

When doctors came to the village, they stayed at the Nurse’s Station, and Trish had to cook for them as well. She particularly enjoyed the visits from the ophthalmologist, who came on a regular schedule. He brought groceries with him, which not only added variety to her meals but also spared her the steep prices at the Hudson Bay store.

She met Dr. Phil D’Entremont, the doctor her predecessor, Janet had married, he came to the community quite regularly to run clinics. He was French-Canadian, and in the evenings, he liked to challenge Trish to play a game of Scrabble in French. Trish was keen to play Scrabble, but not in French. Fortunately for her, he agreed to play in English.

Other doctors came to the village more occasionally. One, Dr. Roger Page, left an impression with Trish. Roger had previously worked at the hospital in Bella Bella, so they shared that in common. He was also very caring toward his patients, and the residents who came to see him in Telegraph Creek clearly liked him. Trish appreciated being able to have practical conversations with him about cases she had managed, and about providing medical care in remote locations in general. After a few visits, they had become friends. Roger worked in a clinic in Terrace, and also did shifts in the emergency department at the hospital there. Trish appreciated the growing friendship, and the feeling that she was part of a bigger health community.

She was also starting to feel more connected within the small community of Telegraph Creek. Sometimes, Helmut, the schoolteacher, hosted a potluck and musical evening at the teacherage, and invited her to join. The gatherings were lively and filled with laughter, as locals and the small group of non-Native residents came together to share food, stories, and musical performances. Trish welcomed the evenings, and the social connection.

Other evenings, when Trish knew of elderly villagers who were not well, she visited them in their homes. Many of them were cared for by family, using traditional remedies passed down through generations. For example, families believed in treating fevers by bundling the sick under heavy blankets in small, overheated bedrooms, with roaring fires to help them "sweat it out."

This approach clashed with Trish's medical training, which emphasized cooling the patient, identifying the source of the fever, and treating the root cause. Despite her gentle attempts to persuade the family to lower the temperature and remove the blankets, they remained firm in their tradition. They were, however, open to accepting antibiotics if Trish recommended them. Although there was ongoing disagreement on fever management in the village, Trish was relieved that no one succumbed to fever-related illnesses during her time in Telegraph Creek–and that was what mattered most.

Near the end of her first month, Trish received a package from the Medical Services office in Prince Rupert. There were memos and updates, but there was also a checklist. It listed all the health promotion activities she was to have completed over the month. The instructions were to check off the activities she completed and return the list to the office. Trish stared at the list; she had done few of the activities–only the ones that had made sense. She had spent the rest of her busy workdays treating the patients who came to the clinic. Regular nursing duties.

She thought back to her orientation, but she didn’t recall any mention of a checklist. She couldn’t imagine that there would be a penalty for not checking all the boxes, but then again, she had not expected to be fired from Bella Bella for speaking her mind, so anything was possible.

“Fair enough” Trish thought, if she was being paid to check boxes, she would check the boxes. It would not change her day-to-day approach to receiving the patients as they presented themselves to her at the Nurse’s Station, or when they called for her to come see a family member who had fallen ill in their home. There were no other health services in the community, she wasn’t about to turn them away. She quickly filled in the checklist, sealed it in an envelope ready to be sent out on the next flight, and went about her day.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Klemtu, Telegraph Creek, and Iskut, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

The Village of Klemtu sits on the traditional territory of the Kitasoo Xai'xais First Nations, and the communities of Telegraph Creek and Iskut sit on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nations. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish’s short trip to Holland was just what she needed to shake off any lingering sadness about leaving her job in Bella Bella. Her friend Ben welcomed her at the Amsterdam airport and took her to his grandparents’ home in the countryside. Her days were busy visiting Ben’s family and exploring the local area.

It was winter and the canals that threaded across the landscape were frozen. As the two friends walked along the canals talking about what might lay ahead for each of them back in Canada, they paused to watch and laugh as ducks crash-landed on the ice in their clumsy, unbalanced way. The days passed easily, and Trish enjoyed her time with Ben and his family. Meeting new people, and glimpse of an unfamiliar country gave her the space she needed get out from under the shadow of her final weeks in Bella Bella, before returning to England.

By the time Trish arrived back in Liverpool, she was looking forward to the familiar sights, smells and sounds of the city, as well as the comfort of the Lewis family home on Crofton Crescent. She couldn’t wait to see her friends and imagined they would have plenty of exciting stories to share, just as she did. There would be so much to talk about from the last year!

Reuniting with her family was indeed wonderful–particularly seeing her mum, Florence, again. A cup of tea in hand, chatting with her mum, and everything felt familiar and right with the world. Her brothers had both completed apprenticeships, Richard had gone into carpentry, while her youngest brother Phil had taken an interest in bricklaying. The family’s main topic of conversation was the boys’ search for work. Once she caught up on the latest happenings, however, it seemed there wasn’t much new to talk about—Florence’s letters had already filled her in on most things.

Eager to reconnect with her friends, Trish planned a visit to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. The moment she stepped off the bus near the hospital gates, a lump formed in her throat and a wave of nostalgia left her feeling a bit emotional. She had spent more than half her adult life living at Alder Hey. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, but she remembered it so clearly. The decision to accept a position in the Alder Hey nurses’ training had been an impulsive decision when she was just 17, sparked by a desire to escape a boring factory job, but now nursing had become her life. Her fellow nurses were her second family.

As she walked the hallway of the residence, pausing at the doors of the different rooms she had called home over the years, memories flooded back of antics with her classmates and later, colleagues. She remembered the exhilaration of passing exams, of getting promotions, the lows of difficult shifts and tragic cases, and the friendships she had been part of there over the years.

The hospital itself was still the busy, mostly cheerful place she remembered. Peeking into the wards, it felt like she could just roll up her sleeves and get right back to work.

Reuniting with her friends was lovely at first–they all seemed so happy to see her! After initial greetings, and a few surface-level questions about her flight back to England, the conversation turned back to the day-to-day concerns in her friends’ lives, and Trish began to feel like an outsider. As she sat and listened to her friends talk about this ridiculous hospital policy, that handsome doctor, or what to do on their next night out, Trish realized how much her life had changed in just one year–and how little theirs had. It wasn’t only her circumstances that had changed; she herself had grown and experienced so much. Meanwhile, her friends seemed to be in the same place, doing the same things as before.

What surprised Trish even more was that her friends showed little interest in hearing about her adventures in Canada. Back home, still feeling a bit disheartened, she shared her thoughts with her mum. Florence suggested that perhaps her friends didn't want to confront the fact that they felt stuck in their routines. Hearing about Trish’s exciting new life might have made them reflect on their own, and maybe that was uncomfortable.

This experience, combined with the familiar routine of her time in Liverpool, made Trish think deeply about her future. She had a job waiting for her in Canada, was that what she really wanted?

Trish knew she could easily find a job in a hospital in England, but her visit to Alder Hey, while it felt like home in many ways, had only strengthened her desire to return to Canada. She wasn’t the same person she had been a year ago, back when she was already searching for something more in life. Going back to that time wasn’t an option.

Her goal in taking the job in Bella Bella had been to do hands-on nursing, and it had delivered exactly that–plus so much more. Now, the job waiting for her in Telegraph Creek offered a similar opportunity. That was what she truly wanted. Still, she hadn’t expected the emotion that had bubbled up when she walked the halls of Alder Hey again, after being away for only a year.

Trish’s friend Jean now lived in Manchester, and Trish went to stay with her for a few days. She knew talking things over with Jean would help her sort through her jumbled thoughts. Jean WOULD be interested in hearing about her life, and Trish was eager to hear more about her friend’s aspirations, too.

Jean lived in a flat in a complex that mostly housed seniors. Her flat was on the ground-level, facing into a quadrangle that was surrounded by two-story blocks of small flats. The two friends talked non-stop during their time together. Sometimes they went for drives, as they had in the days before Trish moved, other times they sat in the comfort of Jean’s flat with a cup of tea.

Although they had written frequent letters over the previous year, Trish realized what a gift it was to have the time together to really talk through the issues that were top of mind in each other’s lives. Jean didn’t want Trish to move so far away, even though she understood how enticing the opportunities in Canada were. She had her own dream—marrying a doctor and perhaps traveling abroad together as a missionary couple. The life in Canada that Trish was so excited about just wasn’t what Jean was looking for. Still, she didn’t try to talk Trish out of it, she supported her in taking this chance to use her nursing skills in a new environment, and steer her life in a new direction.

One evening, after returning from a day out, Jean decided to take a shower. It had been a warm evening, and the french doors that opened out into the common space between the buildings were ajar to let in a bit of air. Trish settled into a chair to read.

Moments after she heard the shower turn on, her attention was pulled from her book as a man quickly and quietly stepped into the room where Trish was sitting. She had not been visible through the open doors from the outside, but now the man was inside, he stared wide-eyed at her, and she at him. He had something in his hand–she glanced at it to see what it was. It was a pop can. In a second, the man gave it a shake, his thumb covering the opening, then sprayed a jet of liquid into her face. She yelled out, wiping her eyes. By the time she cleared her eyes, the man had run back out into the night, and she could hear Jean scrambling to get out of the shower.

Trish closed and locked the french doors by the time Jean emerged, dishevelled from her interrupted shower. She called the police, while Trish rinsed the sticky liquid off her face and from her hair, relieved that it wasn’t anything more noxious.

The women were rattled, and grateful that the police attended quite quickly. The intruder was long gone by the time the constables arrived; but one of the policemen said there were many opportunistic thieves in the area and reminded Jean to keep her door closed and locked. The intruder, knowing there were a lot of seniors who lived alone in the complex, probably heard the running water and thought Jean was an old woman who had forgotten to secure her door while she went in for a shower. If Trish hadn’t been there and startled him, he may have slipped into the flat, robbed Jean, and disappeared with her never knowing what happened. In the end, the ordeal, though alarming, had turned out harmless and became yet another mishap for Jean and Trish to recount during future visits.

Before her time in England ended, Trish told her family with certainty that she was returning to Canada–and this time, she planned to stay. Her mom didn’t show much reaction, seeming resigned to the news. Her brothers also didn’t seem too surprised. By then, they were young men with their own lives and concerns. The age gap between them and Trish meant they weren’t particularly close.

Her dad, however, was genuinely shocked, "But who is going to look after me when I'm old and sick?" he asked.

"Get old and sick, then call me,” Trish fired back.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.2: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

When Trish arrived in Canada, she was hired as a “graduate nurse,” a position with lower pay than a Registered Nurse (RN). Determined to advance, Trish prepared to take the registration exams required to become a Registered Nurse. These exams were held every spring at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, coinciding with the graduation of new nursing students. Trish and other internationally trained nurses took the exams alongside the UBC nursing graduates.

In the spring of 1971, after nearly a year in Namu and then Bella Bella, Trish returned to Vancouver. She booked passage on the freight boat that traveled along the west coast delivering supplies to remote communities. The boat also took a few passengers on each trip. Shortly after the journey began, Trish struggled with seasickness. To help her, the crew gave her a job. While underway, the deck crew was doing light maintenance on the vessel. That included painting areas above deck, and they gave Trish the task of painting the ship’s funnel to help distract her from her seasickness. The distraction worked, turning an unpleasant experience into a fun and memorable one.

Once in Vancouver, she focused on preparing for her registration exams—four in total, spread over three days. She was pleased to learn the pediatrics exam would be the first one she would write. Pediatrics was her specialty; she thought it would be a good way to ease into the process.

On the morning of the exams, Trish sat nervously at a desk in the UBC School of Nursing exam hall. Her usual “exam day” nerves quickly turned to dismay when she opened the exam booklet and discovered the questions were in a multiple-choice format, a style she had never encountered before. In England, exams were always written in longhand.

As she tried to process the unfamiliar format, the sound of a chair scraping across the floor caught her attention. Trish looked up to see a fellow candidate gathering up her exam papers and marching to the front of the room. Everyone watching in stunned silence as the woman tore the papers in half and dropped them on the adjudicator’s desk.

“This is an insult to English intelligence,” she declared in a crisp English accent, before striding out of the exam hall.

Trish stared after her, amazed. She shared similar frustration, but knew she needed the qualification. Obviously, the other woman didn’t, whatever her reasons. Resolving to stay, Trish turned her attention back to the exam. The multiple-choice format was confusing—sometimes more than one answer seemed correct, depending on the context—but she pushed through. Over the three days, Trish completed the pediatrics exam, followed by the medical, surgical, and midwifery exams.

Upon returning to Bella Bella, Trish went back to working her shifts, enjoying the companionship of her colleagues, and occasionally getting out to explore the areas around the village. There was a water reservoir up in the hills behind the village, and an access road, barely more than a trail, really, that led to it. Trish enjoyed walking in that area. Most days, a big fluffy dog from the village who had befriended Trish, joined her. One day, Trish and the dog were walking the perimeter of the walled reservoir. As they rounded a corner, they came face to face with a brown bear! They turned and ran—Trish in one direction, back down the trail, while the dog sprinted into the forest in another direction. After running a distance, Trish stopped, breathless, and looked back. She could still see the bear, it was lumbering away in yet another direction. As Trish caught her breath and the thumping in her chest slowed, she thought, so much for my “guardian” dog, he’s probably already back at the village!

Throughout the summer, another interesting distraction arrived from time to time, in the form of two fishermen living aboard their abalone boat. The young men were harvesting abalone in the area, spending the entire season on their boat. They confided in a nurse they met, while stopping in Bella Bella for fuel, that they ate only abalone. That disclosure secured them an invitation to dinner at the nurses’ residence. The lads arrived with a gunnysack of abalone, in exchange for a roast beef dinner. They even graciously showed the women how to cook the abalone so that it would become tender, and less like eating shoe-leather. Abalone was a delicacy, but it needed to be cooked properly to be truly enjoyable. The consensus was everyone won in the exchange—the young fishermen had a break from a diet of straight abalone, and the nurses had a brief break from the ever-present salmon that was regularly donated to the hospital and the nurses’ residence.

Finally, when Trish received her exam results later that summer, she first confirmed that she had passed them all, then she noticed her marks improved with each test she took. Although pediatrics was her specialty, it was her lowest-scoring exam since she wrote it first. She suspected her marks on subsequent exams showed her improving ability to navigate a multiple-choice exam, rather than her knowledge of nursing. Regardless, she had officially become a Registered Nurse in Canada, though the registration certificate wouldn’t arrive until September. Her new RN designation came with a substantial pay increase and offered more job opportunities.

With a better salary, Trish began thinking about traveling back to Liverpool to visit her family and friends. She had decided to stay in Canada long term, and she wanted to tell her parents in person. Though she and her mum frequently exchanged letters, important conversations were difficult to have this way, as the back-and-forth made discussions feel disjointed. Trish wrote to her mum to share her plans for a visit, she also reached out to her friend Jean and a few other friends.

As she considered her travel plans, she mentioned her upcoming trip to her colleagues, and to Ben, one of the pilots who flew into Bella Bella from time to time. Ben was younger than Trish but always very friendly whenever they saw each other. When she told him about her upcoming vacation, he looked surprised, then a grinned, like he had an idea. He told her he had vacation planned at the same time, and had already booked a flight to visit his grandparents in Holland. When Trish said she hadn’t booked her travel yet, he invited her to meet him in Amsterdam for a few days, before continuing to Liverpool. He said his grandparents would be delighted to have one more guest. Trish had never been to Holland, so she eagerly accepted his spontaneous offer, and booked her flights to include an extended stop in Amsterdam.

With her vacation still some weeks off, Trish faced an unexpected issue at work. Each shift, she was paired with a nurse’s aide. Most of the aides were skilled and hardworking, and seemed to enjoy the job; most, but not all. One aide stood out from the others—the daughter of the hereditary chief. The woman was well-known and respected in the community. She and her husband owned the local store, where she worked during the day, while also caring for their children. On top of this, she worked night shifts as a nurse’s aide at the hospital. Trish thought she must have been given the job for political reasons, not because she needed or wanted the work.

When assigned to work with Trish, the aide began the shift with the usual tasks—such as feeding the babies. However, she then retreated into the office, curled up in a chair and slept for most of the night. This left Trish to handle the entire night shift on her own, including cleaning and preparing everything for the in-coming day shift—tasks that were usually shared with the aide.

One morning, near the end of the shift, the aide woke up later than usual and asked Trish to help her feed the babies. Trish, who had spent the night doing both her own work and the aide’s, was behind on her duties and couldn’t assist. The aide had to rush to feed the infants herself before the day shift arrived and was unhappy about it. She later filed a complaint with the hospital administrator, claiming that Trish wasn’t helping her enough on the night shifts.

The administrator discussed the complaint with the Matron and Dr. Henderson, and Trish was called in for a meeting to explain her side of the story. To Trish, the issue was straight-forward—the aide hadn't been hired to sleep through the night, and providing proper care to patients was more important than local politics. She argued that the night nurse couldn’t be expected to handle all the cleaning and other basic tasks on her own; she needed to be available for new patients and managing existing patients as needs arose. That was why aides were part of the team. Trish firmly told the administrator that if they believed otherwise, they should fire her.

The administrator, Matron, and doctor had a brief discussion before announcing their decision—she was fired. Trish was dismayed but remained defiant. She believed the job should go to someone who valued it, especially since many of the women in the village would take pride in the work and benefit from the extra income. To her, it was unfair for someone who already had a job and a role in the community to take the opportunity from someone else, particularly if they didn’t take the role seriously.

Trish chose not to appeal the decision and instead began preparing to leave Bella Bella. She had already been planning a trip to England to visit her family, so she booked her ticket and arranged her travel to Vancouver.

She also began looking for a new job. Trish wasn’t interested in working in a large hospital, as that felt too similar to the roles she could have taken back in England. Her experience in remote locations had challenged her in ways that went beyond nursing, and she wanted more of those opportunities.

Trish found a job posting for a public health nurse in the remote village of Telegraph Creek, in northern British Columbia, near the Alaskan border. The position was through the Federal Government and focused on health promotion rather than direct nursing care. Still, both the job and the location intrigued her, so she applied.

To interview for the position, Trish flew to Prince Rupert, where the Department of Health, Medical Services had its office. During the application process, she explained why she left her previous position in Bella Bella—she had been fired. To her surprise, the interviewer simply nodded and moved on to the next question, signalling that it wouldn’t be an issue. After the interview, Trish returned to Bella Bella to pack her belongings and prepare for her journey back to England, with a brief stop in Amsterdam.

Although the circumstances of her departure were unsettling, she recognized how valuable her time in Bella Bella had been. She had made friends, applied her nursing skills in new ways, and gained insight into a way of life completely different from what she had known before.

On the day Trish left Bella Bella for the last time in late 1971, Dr. Henderson walked with her to the wharf where she would board the float plane for the last time, helping her carry her belongings. He had become a good friend in the time they had known each other. Trish felt a sadness as she boarded the plane. It helped that she knew the pilot, and others on the flight. They helped her feel like it was just another flight out of the village.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

When Trish arrived in Bella Bella the second week of September 1970, it was still fishing season. The local men left the village daily on their fish boats to fish the salmon that would feed their families through the winter. In Bella Bella, where the residents preserved fish for personal consumption, using traditional Native practices, they barbecued the fish over an open fire, then canned it. They cleaned each fish, splayed it so it lay flat, then wove the thin flexible ends willow boughs around some of the fish, like a cage, to hold them open, leaving the stronger ends of the boughs as a handle. When they were done, the strong ends of the willow were dug into the small rocks of the beach, until the fish stood around each of the fires, looking a bit like circles of oddly shaped tennis rackets, ready to be barbecued. Other’s used larger sticks to hold several fish open and standing around a fire at a time. The fires crackled, and the aroma of fresh fish cooking wafted through the village. People gathered and enjoyed a meal on the beach around the fires. They invited Trish and the other hospital staff to join in for the open-air feast of salmon, seaweed, and fish eggs. The barbecued fish tasted as good as it smelled.

Eager to be useful, Trish shared the work in bringing wood to keep the fire burning on the beach. Driftwood, carried in on the tide and deposited beyond the high tide line was dry enough to burn. Trish clambered over large boulders and rocks searching for a good log to bring back to the fire. After finding a suitable one, she hoisted it onto her shoulder and began retracing her path back to the beach. At one point, she placed a hand on a boulder to steady herself. Suddenly, the log slipped from her shoulder and landed squarely on her fingers, which were outstretched on the rock. It rolled off moments later. Inspecting her hand, Trish noticed her fingers looked pale and flattened, like dough rolled with a rolling pin. Strangely, she felt little pain, despite the impact. She shrugged it off and carried on enjoying the evening on the beach.

By the time the feast was done, Trish’s fingers were swollen and painful. After returning to the nurses’ residence, she went to see Dr. Henderson. She showed him her hand. He prepared a bowl of ice water, plunged her hand into it. The pain cut through her like a knife. He held her hand in the ice water for what seemed like a lifetime, then gave her an analgesic and sent her to get some rest. The next morning Trish woke up to find her fingers swollen to the point of being shiny, with the middle one in particularly throbbing unbearably. Each pulse brought such intense pain that she feared the finger might burst.

She again showed her injury to Dr. Henderson, who took her into a treatment room. He heated a needle in the flame from a Bunsen burner and used it to pierce the nail on her middle finger. The moment he did, a jet of fluid shot up to the ceiling. The pain was excruciating, then, some relief. Satisfied with the outcome, Dr. Henderson wrapped her fingers. Trish carried on with her day and worked her shift.

That incident occurred during her first week in Bella Bella, and Trish took it as a sign of what life there would be like. She realized she needed to stay alert and agile in the rugged environment. Life was simple, but it was also raw, with more hazards around.

The small hospital was the only immediate resource, and outside help was far away. Bella Bella sat on the rocky shoreline of Campbell Island, some 400 miles north of Vancouver. In cases of serious illness or accidents, patients had to be flown to the large hospitals in Vancouver. Because of their isolation, the people who lived in the village had practical, often traditional solutions for challenges they faced.

In Bella Bella, the daily work of nursing felt more familiar to Trish than it had over the summer in Namu. She now lived in the nurses’ residence alongside other hospital staff. The two-story building was just across a boardwalk from the hospital.

The Matron of the small hospital, like Trish, was an English-trained nurse. Although the two other nurses were Canadian-trained, the Matron ran the hospital according to English nursing practices. Day shifts had two nurses and one nurses’ aide on duty, night shifts had one nurse and one aide. The aides were local women, Native residents of Bella Bella.

The Matron organized the schedule, which covered two 12-hour shifts per day. As employees of the United Church, the staff began their mornings with a brief church service before starting their hospital shifts. A small pump organ, requiring a child to crawl under the organ to pump air into the harmonium, sat in the main floor hallway, added a formal touch to the services. The hospital secretary played the organ on most mornings, and the staff joined in to sing. Dr. Henderson gave a short sermon, before the staff set about the work of the day.

The R. W. Large Memorial Hospital, newly built in 1902, was not well-designed for its purpose. The two-story building had its wards upstairs with about 12 beds, while the treatment rooms and the nursery were downstairs. There was no elevator. The stairs, comprising eight steps, a landing, then another eight steps, posed a challenge to the movement of people and equipment within the hospital.

When patients were admitted to hospital and couldn’t climb the stairs, staff had to carry them up to the wards. The village had an ambulance, but it also doubled as a delivery van, transporting supplies from the dock to the store, the hospital, and other locations. If a patient that needed to be carried upstairs in the hospital, the ambulance would be called. The nurses, the aide, and the van driver worked together to carry the patient up the stairs.

Nursing in Bella Bella was like nursing anywhere else, though the services were basic because of limited diagnostic tools. Dr. Henderson sent serious cases to larger cities where there were hospitals with more services, but there weren’t many seriously ill or injured patients.

Daily work included managing new admissions, making beds, providing personal care for in-patients, administering medications, cleaning and dressing wounds, and assisting Dr. Henderson during minor procedures and general surgeries. Dr. Henderson, a generalist physician, managed anesthesia and general surgeries. He was six or seven years older than Trish and had been working at the hospital for several years.

In both Bella Bella and Namu, Trish was an employee of the United Church of Canada. The church had a local presence in Bella Bella, with the pastor and the hospital staff all working as church employees. A Board of Directors, which included the pastor and the hospital administrator oversaw the local United Church and the hospital. They worked with the local band office and the provincial and federal governments on such matters as receiving and distributing government funds to the band office.

Bella Bella was home to two churches: The United Church, and the Pentecostal Church, on opposite ends of the village. Unlike the United Church, the Pentecostal church had a zero-alcohol policy for its members, but it had a well-known brass band that people wanted to be part of. In the past, the Bella Bella Brass Band was renowned across the province for its talent, winning competitions and earning respect. While the United Church didn’t have a band, they had a choir. Music was a vital part of the community.

Bella Bella was also known for its talented traditional artisans. Women and children created intricate beaded jewelry, bags, and decorations, while other artists crafted silver jewelry, wood carvings, and paintings. During her time there, Trish acquired several handmade pieces-some bought, others gifted, that she cherished through the years.

In November, two months after Trish arrived in Bella Bella, she and another nurse, Lorna, had a day off together. Lorna, a recent graduate of the University of Victoria nursing program, had also just started working in Bella Bella. The weather was beautiful—cool air and brilliant sunshine-so they decided to spend the day canoeing on the saltchuck.

By the afternoon, they had paddled nearly a mile up the channel, following the shoreline and chatting all morning. They noticed a tugboat approaching but thought little of it, assuming it would follow the speed limit designed to prevent wash from damaging wharfs and structures.

The tugboat, however, was moving much faster than expected. It was large, towing two barges, and created a massive wake. The women pivoted their canoe into the first wave of wash, holding it steady. They struggled, but held the canoe in position for the second wave, but the third wave struck harder. It turned them broadside, and the canoe capsized, the women thrown into the churn of the wash.

Trish felt the frigid cold of the Pacific Ocean pierce her as the water closed over her head. Disoriented, she surfaced, thrashing to grab something—anything. Neither woman had worn a lifejacket, the calm, protected water of the channel hadn’t seemed dangerous earlier.

Trish could hear Lorna screaming her name, but her voice sounded far away. Realizing she had surfaced underneath the overturned canoe, Trish hesitated. She had air, and as she clung to the beam of the overturned canoe, she felt safer, knowing she couldn’t swim. But Lorna, unable to see her, was panicking, thinking Trish hadn’t resurfaced. Hearing Lorna’s frantic calls, Trish knew she had to act.

Ducking back under the water, she pushed herself out from under the canoe, and surfaced where Lorna could see her. Gasping for air, she groped for the canoe’s gunnel with numb hands. Lorna was there and the two women clung to the overturned canoe. They tried to right it but couldn’t manage in the freezing water. Exhausted, they held on; it was so very cold.

The women watched as the tugboat continued on its course, its operator oblivious to their situation. The gravity of their predicament sank in. Trish knew the fishing season was over, and the fishboats were tied up and unmanned. Boat traffic in the channel was sparse this time of year. They considered trying to paddle their way to the nearest bank, but then what? Wet and cold in the chilly air, they’d likely succumb to hypothermia quickly. Their situation looked bleak.

Amid the sound of waves slapping against the overturned canoe, Trish thought she heard a boat engine. She and Lorna repositioned themselves to look toward the village. Sure enough, a fishboat was rumbling toward them. Help was coming, they just had to hang on. The large boat carefully pulled up alongside the overturned canoe. The captain leaned over the side, used a boat hook to catch Lorna by the waist of her pants and in one swift motion, hauled her onto the deck. Trish felt a sudden pull around her waist, and in an instant, she too sprawled in a heap on the deck beside Lorna.

Their rescuer was angry. He didn’t speak to them as he turned the boat and started back toward the wharf, but his anger was clear. Trish was well aware of his obvious disgust of the situation they had put themselves in, but she was so cold, and so relieved to be out of the water, she simply lay in a grateful heap on the deck.

At the wharf, a small group of people was waiting. They took the women straight to the nurses' residence, where Dr. Henderson quickly assessed them. Confirming Trish and Lorna were uninjured; he instructed the off-duty nurses who had gathered to put the hypothermic women in warm baths, clothes and all. The residence had two bathrooms, each with a bathtub-one upstairs and one downstairs. Their colleagues settled Lorna into one warm bath, and Trish in the other. Slowly, the water thawed their frozen bodies.

Trish was beginning to feel human again when she heard Lorna shout up from the bathroom below:

“Trish, are you still chewing your gum?”

Trish laughed out loud—she was. Both women had popped in a stick of gum shortly before their canoe capsized. Despite their ordeal, they had somehow kept chewing, even through teeth chattering with hypothermia.

That day taught Trish many important lessons. She became much more cautious around water, and on boats. She and Lorna realized just how lucky they had been. Someone in the hospital had seen them capsize and put out a “mayday” call over the hospital’s radio. The fisherman who rescued them just happened to be on his fishboat, with the radio turned on. He later said he didn’t know why he turned his radio on, there was no reason to do so. If even one link in that chain of events had been missing, the outcome could have been tragic.

Once the women were warm and dry, they received plenty of stern lectures about water safety, especially about wearing lifejackets. The police boat from Ocean Falls showed up the next day. The officer made sure Trish and Lorna clearly understood how stupid they had been, as did anyone else from miles around who had access to a radio. As for the tugboat operator who was speeding, there were no consequences. The vessel, registered in the United States, had already left the area by the time the police boat arrived in Bella Bella.

A few days later, on Remembrance Day, their colleagues and others in the village joked that Trish and Lorna celebrated their own “Remembrance Day” three days earlier, when they nearly became a memory themselves.

As November turned to December, the village became a hive of Christmas related activities. For Trish, this would be her first Canadian Christmas, and she missed her family more than usual. She wondered what Christmas would be like in such a remote location, but she wouldn’t have to wonder for long.

The choir at the United Church started rehearsing Handel’s Messiah, a huge undertaking. The idea was so exciting, a few of the nurses joined in. However, after a couple of practices they were asked to leave. Their soprano voices didn’t blend well with the deeper voices in the choir or suit the overall arrangement of the piece as it was being rehearsed. Trish agreed with the assessment so she and the others stopped going to the practices, but eagerly looked forward to the Christmas performance.

People in Bella Bella did their Christmas shopping through catalogues, and many had already placed orders for gifts and special food. Catalog orders arrived by boat, on a once-a-week schedule. On delivery days, most of the village gathered at the wharf to await their packages. To Trish, each delivery day felt like a connection with the outside world, making it a special occasion.

The nurses decorated both the hospital and the nurses’ residence, and Dr. Henderson dressed up as Santa, handing out gifts in both locations. Most patients went home for Christmas, and family visited those who stayed, treating them to good food, helping them enjoy the holiday as much as their circumstances allowed.

The Christmas service at the United Church was unforgettable. The choir, having practiced diligently, gave a stunning performance of Handel’s Messiah that added a special touch to the season.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish pulled on her jacket and shoes, before grabbing the bag she had prepared for house calls. It was late at night, and just minutes before, a young boy had banged on the door of Bill and Norah’s house. He had come to tell Trish she was needed in the village. By day, kids were not permitted past the boardwalk into the cannery area, but at night, in an emergency, a family might send their child to fetch Trish because someone had fallen ill.

By the time Trish stepped out of the front door into the night, the boy was long gone. She was alone as she started down the long, dark boardwalk to the village. This was her first trip to the village at night. She wasn’t worried about getting lost; the boardwalk ensured she was going the right way. It was the darkness that was unsettling. It was so dark it felt like a weight. Trish had a small flashlight she used to light the ground immediately in front of her, its beam swallowed up by the darkness just ahead.

As her flashlight cast its rays ahead of her on the boardwalk, suddenly, a loud swooshing sound accompanied a blast of wind that lifted her hair. Trish froze in her tracks, an unearthly vision before her. She was certain she saw shadowed forms rising in the darkness. She stood motionless. It was spooky, terrifying even.

As her adrenaline subsided, she realized what had given her such a fright. Ravens, some as big as chickens, roosted on the railing of the boardwalk at night. Her flashlight had disturbed them, and they rose off the railing. They settled again after she moved on.

In the coming weeks, even as she expected the ravens to be there, she was on edge whenever she had to make her way to the village at night. In time, one dog on the site befriended Trish, and would trot along beside her as she moved through her workday. He would also accompany her at night when she needed to make a trip into the village, which she appreciated.

Those first weeks of work in Namu were a shocking experience for Trish. She had come from a big city, working as part of a team in a large hospital to a remote worksite in the wilderness to operate a tiny, un-stocked clinic, where she was completely on her own. As those thoughts ran through her mind, a more powerful thought came to her. She had been trained well, and she was being decisive, even in very unfamiliar surroundings and circumstances. She decided which patients she could manage, and which needed to be sent to Bella Bella. The ones she managed in the clinic, she diagnosed their ailments and started their treatments. She had quickly developed a good rapport with Dr. Henderson in Bella Bella. She was a good nurse. The realization helped her approach new and unexpected situations with a clear head, and confidence in her skills.

Although the clinic sat next to the RCMP office on the big wharf, Trish saw little of the police officer posted there. He rarely poked his head into the clinic, though he was pleasant enough when they crossed paths. On one occasion, though, Trish needed his help.

It was a weekend evening, and Trish was already home for the night. A knock at the door suggested the evening was about to take a turn. One of the cannery staff was on the doorstep, he told Trish someone had cut himself, and she needed to come stitch him up. Trish quickly put her uniform back on and went straight to the clinic. As she approached, she saw two men, struggling to drag along a third, a European-sounding man she hadn’t seen before, toward the clinic door. The man was very inebriated, struggling against his would-be rescuers, and covered in an alarming amount of blood from his waist down. Trish quickly unlocked the door and scooted inside ahead of the trio of men. The rescuers, still struggling to restrain the injured man, told Trish they had seen him stumbling around with a bottle of whiskey in the back pocket of his jeans, and he had fallen on it. He had a deep laceration on his backside. He also wanted nothing to do with receiving any help for it. One of the men who had brought him in went to get the police officer. They needed all the help they could get to hold the fellow down so Trish could look after the wound. As soon as the patient saw the officer, he amplified his struggle, drunkenly swinging his fists around. His attempted punches were ineffective, but they added an extra element of risk to everyone involved.

After an extended skirmish, the officer and the other men held the patient down with great difficulty, while Trish sutured the laceration. It was deep; he had lost a lot of blood. Trish didn’t think they could manage him overnight at the clinic in his agitated state. She wanted to send him to Bella Bella on a fishing boat. The owner of the boat said he would take him only if Trish and the officer went too. There wasn’t another option, so they loaded the fellow onto the boat, the officer still ducking the wild drunken punches, and they set off. The fisherman stared straight ahead, never turning his head for the entire trip, despite the obvious sounds of the ongoing fracas behind him. Trish and the officer struggled for the entire trip, trying to contain the patient, who was still trying to slug anyone near him. A few days later, when the man sobered up and returned to Namu, Trish barely recognized him. He seemed to be a very nice man who expressed deep embarrassment about his drunken behaviour.

In contrast to the unexpected and challenging work at the clinic, evenings spent with Bill and Norah in their little house were calm and pleasant. They chatted, and Norah taught Trish some ways they preserved food as they prepared to stay in Namu over the winter. Trish learned how to use a pressure cooker to can fish and fruits. Norah also showed her how to hook rugs. Norah made large, colourful area rugs by latch-hooking short lengths of yarn through mesh canvas. Trish enjoyed the repetitive action of hooking a rug, one small piece of yarn at a time. It was a relaxing activity to do, while visiting with Bill and Norah in the evenings.

By the first week of September, Trish had spent five weeks in Namu. The cannery’s work was winding down for the season, and the workers were preparing to return to Bella Bella and surrounding villages for the winter. Trish would leave with them. Reflecting on her time there, she realized how those five weeks had felt much longer because every day yielded so many new experiences.

On her final day, Trish closed the clinic door for the last time, leaving it ready for the next season. She went to collect her belongings from Bill and Norah’s home, and to say goodbye to her hosts. They had become family in the short time she stayed with them; she knew they would stay in touch.

At the wharf, people and supplies were being loaded onto fishboats. Ronnie was there, too. He thanked Trish for her work at Namu and wished her well in Bella Bella, pointing out the boat she would travel on. Trish thanked him, and climbed aboard, joining families and their belongings, all bound for Bella Bella.

Once the boat was fully loaded, the engines came to life with a now-familiar rumble. The smell of exhaust mixed with the salty tang of the saltchuck, and the scent of the cannery itself, filled her nostrils for the last time. As the boat pulled away, she watched the cannery shrink into the distance and wondered what was waiting for her in Bella Bella.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. Workers came each summer to Namu from Bella Bella and surrounding territories including, but not limited to Klemtu, the home of the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation, and from River’s Inlet, home of the Wuikinuxv Nation.

If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

The next morning Trish went to the canteen for breakfast as Ronnie had instructed. She had lived in nurses’ residences for so many years, having her meals in a dining hall, or a canteen, as it was called at the cannery, seemed quite normal. What certainly did not seem normal, was the volume of food served to each person in the canteen. Pancakes were on the menu for breakfast that morning. A lot of very large pancakes. Each one filled a dinner plate, and the man behind the counter handed her a plate stacked high with six or more. Trish gaped at the heavy plate in her hands, then back at the server. He met her gaze and winked. Growing up in England, even after the war ended, food had been scarce. Long after the war ended, people still ate modestly and went to great lengths to avoid wasting food. As she grew older, she realized how fortunate her family was to have the vegetables from her dad’s allotment. Trish and her siblings had a much more nutritious diet growing up than a lot of kids had. Still, the portions were modest, and nothing went to waste.

She pushed the plate back toward the server, “I think just one will be enough, thank you,” she said. He grinned as he took the plate back, then smoothly flipped most of the stack back into the tray in front of him. He handed the plate back to Trish, this time just one enormous pancake filled it.

Trish looked around the canteen. It was large, with long rows of tables. There were about 30 people eating, spread around the tables. Some were in small groups, others sat alone. Trish took her plate and sat at an empty table. As she ate, she considered what she should prioritize after breakfast. The clinic needed a proper cleaning, and she needed to stock it with supplies. She still didn’t know exactly what to order, or who to order it from. She thought she would first walk around the site, maybe go see the village, and then perhaps she would have a better sense of the sort of work she would be doing.

Trish finished the last bites of her pancake and glanced around to see how others were handling their dirty dishes. She smiled when she saw Norah walking toward her. Norah offered to give her a tour of the cannery, and Trish eagerly accepted. Gathering up her dishes, she followed what others had done and placed her dishes on the rack by the door. As she did, the man behind the counter caught her eye and gave her an amused nod.

Back outside, sunshine warmed Trish’s face, and she breathed in the thick scent of the ocean and forest. There was another smell in the air as well, it came in wafts as she walked around the site. It was the smell of the cannery itself, the fish, their parts that were prepared for canning, and the parts that were discarded, blending to remind Trish of the docks in Hull where the trawlers brought in their catch. Norah asked if she was ready, and the women began walking.

Unlike the previous day where Trish and Ronnie had gone straight to the clinic, now Norah paused at each of the large warehouses, opened the doors, and let Trish have a look inside. There were only a few workers in the cannery. They were working on the machinery that was set up at various stations around the warehouse. Trish surmised they were setting it up for the upcoming salmon run. There were rows of large, tall tables near the door where Trish was standing. Norah said workers stood at the tables and cleaned, then cut up the fish, before it was canned. Trish shivered in the cool air that escaped the cavernous buildings. Norah explained the cool temperature in the building was to keep the fish as fresh as possible before it was canned. Cold water constantly ran over the fish to keep it clean and chilled. The water ran through the floor and back into the ocean below. Even though the workers wore rubber boots, their feet were always cold and wet. Their hands were cold and numb as they worked with the sharp knives to chop the fish to the correct size for each can. Each new tidbit of information helped Trish anticipate the types of illness and injuries she might encounter, and a list of the equipment and supplies she might need in the clinic formed in her mind.

The women stopped by the general store, stocked with groceries, marine equipment, and other basic supplies. They also looked in on the recreational areas. The cannery wasn’t all work, there were social activities too. Perhaps the most surprising were the bowling lanes. Norah said the bowling lanes were well used when all the workers were around.

Carrying on to the boardwalk that extended into the forest on the far side of the cannery, the women walked to the village where the seasonal workers and their families lived. There were rows of uniform wooden houses, simple in appearance but they appeared to be in good repair.

“By the end of the week, the Native families will come and move into the village,” Norah said. “They will be here for about a month until the salmon season is over.”

Returning to the main wharf, Norah left Trish at the clinic before carrying on back home to make lunch for Bill. Standing alone in the empty clinic, she decided the most sensible thing she could do in that moment was give the clinic a thorough cleaning. She found a bucket and a cloth and got to work cleaning all the surfaces. It seemed like no time had passed, but suddenly it was dinnertime. Norah had invited Trish to join her and Bill for supper at their house, rather than at the canteen. Trish was pleased, it was much more comfortable to eat with Bill and Norah, than to sit alone in the canteen. Besides, the meal portions were much more manageable.

The following morning Ronnie waved to Trish as she walked to the canteen for breakfast. When they met, he told her the doctor from Bella Bella was coming on the float plane later in the day to meet her. Trish was relieved. She could ask the doctor the questions that were swirling around in her head about operating the clinic.

That afternoon, Trish joined Ronnie to meet the float plane at the small wharf. Dr. Robert Henderson was indeed on the flight. After shaking hands with Ronnie, he greeted Trish and welcomed her to Namu. Trish noticed Dr. Henderson looked little older than her, and she also noticed he had only a small bag with him. She had been hoping he would bring supplies for the clinic, but it didn’t seem like he had. They chatted pleasantly as they walked to the clinic. Dr. Henderson had already been working in Bella Bella for a few years, and was very familiar with the area, and the patients that Trish would be seeing. He explained Trish would only be in Namu for a month, then she would move to Bella Bella, where she would work in the hospital. That sounded pretty good to Trish. A hospital, even if it was small, would be a much more familiar environment to navigate.

Once they arrived at the clinic, Dr. Henderson opened his bag and pulled out a handful of basic supplies for suturing and wound care.

“You might need these in case anything happens while the guys are turning over the canning line,” he said. Trish was grateful to have something—anything, in the clinic in case she was called on. He also thumped a thick book down on the counter. Though worn and dogeared, the book's title was clear, “Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties: The Canadian Drug Reference for Health Professionals”.

“I brought you my old copy of the CPS,” he said. “I get a new one every year, so you can keep this one.”

Trish gratefully accepted it. The doctor reiterated what the manager had told her a few days earlier, anything she thought she needed, she should order. If they had it in Bella Bella, they would send it on the next flight to Namu. If they had to order it in, it would take longer. Still, this was comforting to Trish, she was getting a sense of what resources she might have access to. He told her that depending on the weather and time of day, she could send more seriously ill patients by either plane or boat to Bella Bella, then, and only in the most serious cases, Dr. Henderson might decide to send them on to Vancouver.

That evening Trish sat down at Bill and Norah’s kitchen table with the CPS to make a list of medications she might need. It was arduous work. Even the most basic medications, like paracetamol, that Trish used in England to treat mild pain and fever, was different in Canada. She learned that acetaminophen was its equivalent. She started thinking about the medications she needed by their drug classification, rather than their name, then scouring the CPS for their equivalent. In time, she had a reasonable list of medications and supplies compiled, and she gave it to Ronnie the next morning. The following day, most of the supplies and medications she had ordered arrived, and Trish set up the clinic to receive patients. She also filled a bag with essential supplies in case the patient could not come to her, and she had to do a house call, or go directly to a patient in the cannery, or on a boat.

Late in that first week, although the workers from Bella Bella had not yet come to Namu, Trish’s first patient arrived in the freshly cleaned and stocked clinic, and it wasn’t a human. It was a dog, a Labrador Retriever. The dog belonged to Ronnie’s young daughter, and it had a messy wound on one of its legs. Trish had seen the dog roaming between the buildings but hadn’t known who it belonged to. The girl said the dog liked to jump off the wharf into the “saltchuck”, and she suspected the dog had gotten tangled up into some cables or debris in the water, or maybe on the shore. “Saltchuck” was a new term for Trish, she would learn it was the local term for the saltwater of the ocean.

Trish had never treated a dog before, but she couldn’t just leave it in its current state. The wound was nasty, and likely to get infected. With the girl’s help to hold the dog still, Trish shaved the area around the wound, administered a local anesthetic, and carefully stitched it up. She then wrapped the wounded leg in a neat bandage—so precise her St. John’s Ambulance Brigade instructor would have been impressed. Trish gave the girl simple instructions to keep the dog out of the water until the wound fully healed.

Later that evening, as Trish shared the story, Norah mentioned she knew the girl. The girl often spent time at their house during the day. She was a nice kid, but clearly bored. There weren’t many children in Namu, and her parents didn't allow her to play with the Native kids.

The next morning the child brought the dog back to the clinic. The dog was soaking wet, the bandage in tatters, and most of the sutures pulled out. Trish had expected that she would tie the dog up to keep it out of the water, but that had not been the case. The dog had likely spent the night chewing the bandage and the stitches then been back in the saltchuck first thing in the morning. Trish once again cleaned the wound, put in new sutures where it was possible, and wrapped the leg. This time she gave more specific instructions; the dog was to be tied up and kept out of the water.

It didn't surprise her when the girl brought the dog back the next day. This time, instead of a bandage, Trish applied a plaster cast to the wounded leg. She thought that might slow the dog down a bit. It didn’t. In the end, the wound healed as well as it could in the circumstances. Trish mused to Norah that the wound probably healed despite her efforts not because of them. The salt water from the ocean during the dog’s regular plunge off the wharf likely did more to keep the wound clean and free of infection than anything she could offer at the clinic.

One morning at the end of the first week, the rumble of engines from fish boats alerted Trish the workers were on their way. Workers from Bella Bella and surrounding communities; Klemtu, and River’s Inlet, and probably other places as well, began arriving in Namu. Whole families arrived, they would spend the summer at Namu, as many of them had done for years. The adults and teens would work, and the older generation would care for the younger children. By the day’s end there were dozens of large fishing vessels tied up in a row along the wharf, and families had moved into the village at the end of the boardwalk.

The next day Trish saw her first human patient. Trish was called to a house in the village near the end of boardwalk to see a “very sick woman”. The elderly Native woman had arrived in Namu the previous morning with her family. Her family was around her but not offering much information. Trish could see the woman was indeed very sick. She was pale, weak, and it was clear she was suffering from ongoing diarrhea and vomiting. Trish had no means of diagnosing her, and couldn’t get a proper history as the woman was so weak she could not speak, and the family was choosing not to. Trish arranged for the woman to be taken back to Bella Bella by boat to be seen at the hospital there.

Late the next day Trish received an update from the doctor at the hospital. Dr. Henderson told her the patient had botulism, he had given her the anti-toxin, and she was already recovering. Trish had been worried when she could not diagnose the patient, but botulism was not something she had encountered before, and she didn’t have the anti-toxin on hand. She was very relieved she had sent the patient out to Bella Bella instead of trying to treat her symptoms, which would have wasted time and not addressed the cause of the symptoms. Sending the woman to Bella Bella had been the right thing to do.

Dr. Henderson told her he thought the woman had picked up the botulism from fish eggs. It was a local custom to collect the eggs from the salmon that were caught and cleaned. They fermented the eggs, then washed them in running water to remove any toxins before eating them. If the eggs weren’t prepared correctly, they could be a source of botulism.

After fully recovering, the woman returned to Namu. Trish visited her for a follow-up. However, the moment the woman saw Trish, she was openly hostile toward her. She wanted nothing to do with Trish. Surprised and unsure what to make of it, Trish respected the woman’s privacy and left her alone. Still, she kept replaying their previous interactions in her mind, trying to think of anything she might have said or done that was offensive, or inappropriate. The next time she spoke with Dr. Henderson, she mentioned the troubling encounter. He then shared more of the woman’s story.

The woman had lost her husband about a month earlier and hadn’t had enough time to mourn him before being brought to Namu to look after her grandchildren, while her grown kids worked at the cannery. She had fallen ill soon after arriving, and as Dr. Henderson treated her and she began recovering, her anger grew. By the time she returned to Namu and saw Trish, she was furious. After hearing the story, Trish wondered if the grieving woman had actually wanted to be returned to Namu and treated, or just left in peace.

The rest of the week was more routine as the cannery scaled up into full operation. The fishermen left at dawn, the rumble of boat engines announcing their departure. Around 8:00am each morning, a steady stream of workers from the village arrived at the cannery. They began their day with breakfast at the canteen, before heading onto the canning lines. The fishermen came back late in the day with their catch. Workers unloaded the fish from the boats and readied the day's catch for processing the next morning.

Trish continued to eat breakfast with the other workers at the canteen, always marvelling at the amount of food being served. On occasion, when Bill and Norah didn’t invite her for dinner with them, she took her dinner at the canteen as well. Dinner portions were even more staggering than breakfast; instead of pancakes, massive steaks covered the plate, the biggest steaks Trish had ever seen. Some workers took two, or even three of the huge steaks. As Trish became more aware of the poor conditions the workers toiled in all day in the cold, always wet from slushing water to clear off the fish scales and standing in cold water, she thought they probably needed the extra food. The fishermen also worked hard in dangerous conditions; they too needed the extra calories. Trish did not. She was always relieved when Norah asked if she would be home in time for dinner.

Trish was soon busy as a variety of patients came to the clinic with cuts and other skin issues, coughs, and colds. One day, she was called down to the wharf to see someone onboard a fishing boat. It didn’t take long for her to realize how impractical her nurse’s uniform was—a thin white outfit with a skirt instead of pants - when she had to climb across several boats to reach a patient farther down the row.

Her unexpected popularity among the fishermen made her eager to resolve the issue. Back at the house, Norah showed her a Sears Canada catalogue. Along with everything you might need for your home; cookware, dishes, bedding, clothing, and even your tool shed, there was a selection of nursing uniforms. Aside from the inappropriateness of the uniform skirt, Trish was having more difficulty keeping her uniform clean throughout the day. She ordered three new uniforms—all with pants. As far as she was concerned, they couldn’t arrive fast enough!

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives”, was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked, have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. Workers came each summer to Namu from Bella Bella and surrounding territories including, but not limited to Klemtu, the home of the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation, and from River’s Inlet, home of the Wuikinuxv Nation.

If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish clenched her hands together as the gap between the plane’s window and the ocean below shrank rapidly. We are going to crash! Before she could react, the plane jolted slightly as it touched the water, and the engines roared louder than before. She glanced around. The other passengers, about a dozen, sat calmly looking out their own windows, as if this was completely normal.

Boarding the plane at Vancouver airport, Trish had assumed it would land on a runway, just like any other flight. The ticket clerk mentioned “the Goose”, but failed to explain it was a Grumman Goose—a wilderness seaplane that could land on an airstrip or water, without changing from wheels to floats. As the plane taxied through the choppy waters of Cousin’s Inlet, spray washed right over the fuselage and streaked the windows. The plane changed direction and taxied toward the shore. Trish exhaled, unclenching her hands and wiping her damp palms on her skirt.

Just as it seemed the plane was about to collide with the shoreline, it stopped sharply, and there was a loud ‘clunk’. The plane lurched forward again, slowly lumbering up onto land. After disembarking, Trish saw the concrete ramp under water that the plane had taxied over top of, before lowering its landing gear, and carrying on up the ramp onto shore. Once the plane came to a rest on dry land, the passengers disembarked. For some, Ocean Falls, the small village and pulp mill at the end of Cousin’s Inlet, was their destination. Others lingered on the nearby dock waiting for another short flight to the next community. Trish joined those who were waiting, as this was not yet her destination.

Her destination, the B.C. Packers “company town” named Namu, had been built around a fish cannery about 50 kilometres away, as crows fly. The first cannery had been built in 1883, and in 1970, almost a century later, B.C. Packers owned the cannery. They hired workers seasonally from Bella Bella and surrounding Indian villages, as well as Japanese workers from Vancouver. Trish was the new community nurse for the seasonal employees at the cannery. As she waited on the dock at Ocean Falls for her next flight, just a short hop really, into Namu, she thought about all that had happened in the two weeks she had been in Canada.

On July 4th, 1970, Trish arrived at Vancouver International Airport in British Columbia. She was excited to visit her friend Susie, who lived in Vancouver, and planned to spend a few days with her before heading to her summer job in Namu.

Trish had been hired by the United Church to work in the small coastal village of Bella Bella, located on the Bella Bella Indian Reserve No.1. The Church operated a hospital there, where Trish would ultimately work as a nurse, but for the first few months, she would work in a clinic at a nearby cannery in Namu. Before starting her job, Trish was eager to catch up with Susie, a friend she had met at Alder Hey.

Susie had been a third-year nursing student when Trish was a Ward Sister in the Neonatal Surgical Unit (NNSU). Susie was short, so short that when she had to do tasks like change an IV bottle, she had to stand on a stool. She had immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong with her parents, and when she finished high school, they sent her to do nurses' training in England. Trish had immediately liked Susie, as she was always cheerful and ready to help with any task. They had stayed in touch via letters after Susie returned to Canada at the end of her training. As soon as Trish had her travel plans, she had contacted Susie to let her know she would pass through Vancouver, and Susie had invited her to stay with her family.

Susie didn’t drive, but one of her sisters drove her to the airport to meet Trish. Susie lived with her mother and her sisters in Chinatown, in Vancouver. Her father had died some years before. Her sisters were studying at the University of British Columbia, and like Susie, spoke English. Susie’s mother didn’t speak English, but even with the language barrier, Trish felt warmly welcomed into the home.

Susie said a letter had arrived for Trish. Trish was immediately curious what it might be. She had provided Susie’s address to her new employer, so she presumed it would be from them. The letter was indeed from the United Church. It welcomed her to Canada, then explained there was an issue with her job - someone else had been scheduled into her position for the next two weeks. Trish’s job would begin two weeks later than expected. To compensate her for the delay, the Church offered her a two-week long job as a community nurse in Gander, Newfoundland. Trish calculated the travel time required to get to Gander, it was significant. She talked it over with Susie. Susie and her family proposed that Trish should stay with them in their home for the two weeks until her job in Namu began. Trish gratefully accepted the offer from Susie’s family and declined the job in Gander.

Staying with Susie and her family was a memorable experience. On her first morning, Susie presented her with a box of cereal they had bought just for her. Apparently, they weren’t sure if she would enjoy their usual traditional Hong Kong dishes. Touched by the gesture, Trish prepared herself a bowl of cereal—only to discover there was no cutlery in the house, only chopsticks. What followed was a valiant, but doomed attempt to wrangle cornflakes with chopsticks. Later that day, she bought herself a pack of plastic spoons. Over time, she learned to use the chopsticks—just not for cornflakes!

During the unexpected extension to Trish’s visit, Susie’s sisters took Trish around the city to see the sights. They were on a summer break from their university studies, so they had time. They visited Queen Elizabeth Park, the UBC lands, and Stanley Park.

Susie joined when she could, around her work schedule. She worked at Vancouver General Hospital in the laundry department. Although she had the same nursing qualifications as Trish, employers wouldn’t hire her, citing her short stature as the reason. When she had registered to write the equivalency exam to become a registered nurse in Canada, the exam’s administrators decided her English language skills were not adequate, and did not permit her to write the exams. It seemed unjust to Trish, she knew how capable Susie was as a nurse, and her language skills had been adequate to complete nurses’ training in Liverpool.

On Friday evening, friends and neighbours came to the house to visit Susie’s mom. After exchanging pleasantries, they cleared the table, and a mahjong set appeared. Susie's mother and her friends filled the rest of the evening with the clacking of mahjong tiles and chatter. They were still playing when Trish went to bed. To her surprise, they were still there when she woke up in the morning, and they just kept playing! Maybe they had napped in the night, Trish didn’t know, but their commitment to the game was commendable.

When Sunday came, the family invited Trish to join them at the Chinese Church at the University of British Columbia for a service. The service was in Chinese, Trish understood two words, “amen”, and “hallelujah”. As she looked around the congregation, she realized she was the only white person in the church. After the service, the family went to a Chinese teahouse for lunch, and again, Trish noticed she was the only non-Asian diner in the teahouse. She knew she was having a special experience.

Now, standing on the dock at Ocean Falls with her suitcase, Trish waited for the floatplane. She glanced around at the few others waiting nearby. They were all men, and she guessed they were workers headed to the cannery.

The second flight was much shorter, lasting only about 20 minutes. The Beaver flew low, offering breathtaking views of waterways and untouched wilderness. Trish marvelled at the dense blanket of trees that stretched endlessly over the hills, starting at the water’s edge and continuing as far as she could see. Inlets and channels carved into the wilderness like fingers. Trees grew right out of the shoreline, with only a few rocks visible between the forest and the water.

The cannery came into sight, Trish saw four large factory-like buildings perched on pilings over the water. Off to the left there was a much smaller wharf with a building on it that had “NAMU” painted on its roof in large block letters. This was certainly her destination.

As the Beaver circled to land, Trish could also see houses dotted along the shore. The float plane landed smoothly in the bay in front of the cannery, then taxied to the wharf with the NAMU building. Once the plane was tied securely to the wharf, Trish waited while the other passengers climbed out. When she emerged, there was a man walking directly toward her.

“You must be Trish. I’m Ronald, the manager here. The guys call me Ronnie. I’ve been expecting you.” He reached for Trish’s suitcase and took it from her. Ronnie told her he would show her around, then take her to the house where she would be staying. He gestured with his chin toward the large warehouses on the wharf further down the shoreline, “Let’s go.”

Trish followed along as Ronnie told her he worked for B.C. Packers, and he met each plane and boat that was dropping off or picking up supplies or people. Before they stepped onto a boardwalk that connected the small wharf to the large concrete slab of the big wharf, he gestured with his free hand toward three small houses set back in the trees.

“You will live there, with Bill and his wife. They will get you settled in. Bill is the engineer who runs the steam engines that power the operations here.”

Trish scanned the houses, uncertain which one he had been referring to. She took hurried steps to catch up as Ronnie strode on along the boardwalk. Trish glanced down and saw they were over water, it made her feel uneasy. She had never learned to swim, and although the July sun was warm, the water below did not look inviting. Ronnie was saying there wouldn’t be much for her to do for the next week, so she could spend the time getting oriented to the site.

“The Japanese workers are clearing out of the village heading back to the city. They aren’t your problem. Next week the Natives will arrive for the salmon harvest, they're who you're here for. This week is a break while we get the canning line set for the salmon,” he said.

Trish walked quickly beside him, stepping off the wooden boardwalk onto the concrete pad of the big wharf. It was massive, and Trish immediately forgot that it was suspended above the ocean. She followed Ronnie as he carried on between two large warehouses. When they emerged from between the buildings, there were two smaller buildings in front of them, on the seaward edge of the platform. One of them was the clinic. Ronnie pointed out the clinic was next to the cop shop, as he pushed the door of the clinic open, then waited for her to enter. She stepped through the door and stopped short. The clinic was empty, save a thermometer she could see on the counter at the back of the space, and a bottle that she thought looked like aspirin.

“What am I supposed to use to do my work?” she asked.

Ronnie looked at her and shrugged, “Just order what you need,” he offered casually, “it will come in on the next flight.”

The stark emptiness of the clinic was in contrast to the crowded thoughts reeling through Trish’s mind. Order from where? Who are my patients? What do I even need? Her eyes scanned the space, taking in the counter, the shelves, the desk, the treatment area. She tried to imagine it as a functioning clinical space. She couldn’t conjure up the image before the tour carried on. Ronnie said he would take her to the house where she would be staying. As they walked, he explained that she would have her meals in the canteen with the workers. She was only to sleep at the house where she was being billeted.

Trish followed him back between the warehouses, across the boardwalk, and over the small wharf where she had deplaned. They continued onto another boardwalk that led to three houses tucked into the trees. Ronnie stopped at the door of the house on the left and knocked. A round-faced woman, about thirty years older than Trish, answered the door. She introduced herself as Norah, and warmly welcomed Trish inside. As Norah closed the door behind them, Ronnie gave a quick goodbye and rushed off to his next task.

The interior of the house was simple, but clean. Trish removed her shoes as Norah explained that her husband, Bill, was at work but would be home in the evening. They were both pleased to host her. Norah showed Trish to a small, cozy bedroom and suggested she unpack her belongings into the drawers and closet.

After settling in, Trish joined Norah in the kitchen. The two women chatted-Norah was curious about Trish’s background, while Trish was eager to learn about Namu. She was surprised to discover that Norah and Bill lived in Namu year-round, as Bill’s job involved maintaining the cannery equipment during the winter. Norah said there were only a few people who stayed during the winter, but in the summer, Namu was a busy place. She told Trish that the Natives would arrive in a few days. They would come as families; the parents would work, and the grandparents would care for the children. The families would move into the village, on the other side of the cannery. Trish hadn’t seen the village yet, trees hid it from sight, but Norah said there was a boardwalk that Trish could follow if she wanted to go look around the next day. Norah had the manner of a mother figure, and talking to her was comforting. In the evening, when Bill joined them, and was just as warm and welcoming as his wife, Trish was grateful for their kindness and hospitality.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s Notes

N.B.1: In 1970, as Trish was introduced to the people of Namu, Bella Bella, and other communities where she worked, the language of the time, “Natives” was used. Today, the people living on the lands where Trish worked have reclaimed their traditional identities, leaving behind the nomenclature assigned them during colonization.

Namu and Bella Bella sit on the traditional territories of the Heiltsuk Nation. Workers came each summer to Namu from Bella Bella and surrounding territories including, but not limited to Klemtu, the home of the Kitasoo Xai'xais Nation, and from River’s Inlet, home of the Wuikinuxv Nation.

If you would like to read more about the identity and culture of First Nations people in Canada, including insights from Indigenous authors and advisors, here is a resource from the “First Nations & Indigenous Studies” program at the University of British Columbia.

N.B.2: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

N.B.3: If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

Trish wanted experience in a busy Casualty department, and Hull Royal Infirmary was certainly busy. When a Night Sister position in Casualty became available in 1967, Trish applied for it. Even on night shifts there were always a couple of doctors on shift, and several staff nurses. The Night Sister position covered the night shifts in Casualty from Friday to Monday, which suited Trish, as the weekends were generally the busiest nights of the week. Hull was a bustling fishing town, and fishing in the North Sea was dangerous work. Nightclubs had largely replaced the dance halls of the 1950s, and young people were experimenting with LSD and amphetamines. Sometimes those experiments landed late-night revellers in a bed in Casualty. The cases were interesting and varied.

One night, there was a commotion in Casualty as the staff received notification that several ambulances were on their way. They were carrying firefighters who sustained injuries while fighting a fire in a brewery. The acrid smell of smoke and sweat announced the arrival of the injured firefighters. As staff assessed the incoming patients, they learned more about the incident that caused the injuries. When firefighters first arrived at the brewery, they assessed the scene and saw that the fire was on the main floor. They determined they needed to get up to the next level with their hoses and spray water down on the flames. There was a conveyer belt in the brewery that, during normal operation, carried glass beer bottles from the main floor up to a second level. The firefighters turned off the conveyer belt, then walked up it toward the upper level, dragging their hoses with them. In the chaos, someone accidentally turned the conveyer belt back on. Several firefighters who were walking up the narrow track lost their balance and fell off, as many bottles had done before them. They fell into the broken glass below, many of them onto outstretched hands, and were badly cut.

The first patient assigned to Trish was a tall, burly firefighter. Aside from several nasty lacerations on his hands, he had escaped serious injury. After helping him shed his heavy outer wear, Trish asked him to sit in a chair across from her. She had positioned the chair near to her suture table, where a fresh suture kit was waiting. As Trish opened the pack, she noticed a shift in her patient. She looked up just in time to see him slump heavily out of the chair and onto the floor. Trish scanned her corner of Casualty for help, but everyone was busy with their own patients. Her patient’s pulse and respirations were normal now that he was laying on the floor. It was most likely he had fainted, probably at the sight of the forceps and other instruments inside the suture kit. The man was much too large and heavy for Trish to move on her own. She considered waiting for him to come around, then prompting him to get back in the chair on his own accord. Worrying he might faint again as soon as she got to work, she decided to just join her patient on the floor and sew him up while he was there. At least he couldn’t fall any further. The patient roused quickly once he was on the floor, and was rather sheepish about the situation. It took a long time to pick all the glass out of his hands, clean the wounds and suture the lacerations. Trish chatted with him to keep him distracted while she worked. When she had finished and bandaged his hands, there was another firefighter waiting with similar injuries. Trish again invited him to sit in the chair across from her, and he did so. Trish gripped the heavy top of the suture table and gave it a tug to move it closer to her. Rather than sliding along the floor, the top-heavy table tipped over and landed squarely on her toe. The suture kit went flying, and in the commotion of setting the table right, and getting a fresh kit, Trish didn’t give much consideration to her wounded toe. By the end of her shift, it was impossible to ignore her toe, it was throbbing. Trish considered the situation, even if she had broken it, there wasn't much she could do about it. It just needed to heal. Exhausted, Trish became singularly focused on returning to the nurses' residence, having a bath, and crawling into bed after the busy night. It was not to be. The Senior Casualty Sister stopped her at the doors to Casualty, instructing her to fill out an accident report and get an X-ray of her toe. Trish questioned if it was necessary to get the Xray, there was nothing that would be done with the toe, even if it were broken. The Sister insisted, so Trish wearily went to Xray. It took hours to get the Xray and see the doctor. The toe was broken, and nothing was done with it, just as Trish suspected.

Though that night had been exceptional, most night shifts in Casualty at Hull Royal Infirmary were busy and exhausting. Days off were always a welcome relief. In Hull, much like at Alder Hey, nurses socialized together when their schedules permitted. Even though Trish didn’t have close friends among her colleagues, as she did at Alder Hey, she still joined for outings from time to time. On one occasion, after a nice dinner of fish & chips at the hospital cafeteria, Trish joined a group of nurses for an evening out at the fair that had set up in Hull. The young women went on one of the biggest rides at the fair. They entered one of the passenger pods, strapped in, and the ride began. It didn’t take long as the pod spun wildly, and turned upside down, for the women to be relieved of their fish & chips. That experience alone was enough to make the outing memorable, but the women carried on, playing the various games the fair offered. For their efforts, three of the women won coconuts as prizes. Not having experience with coconuts, they eagerly took them home to the Nurses’ Residence to break them open. It didn’t take long to realize they lacked the tools to crack open the coconuts. One of them came up with the idea that they could simply drop the coconut from a third-floor window, and it would crack open nicely on the pavement below. One woman offered her prize and with the other women gathered around, she dropped it out the window. When they ran down the stairs and outside to gather the spoils, there was nothing but a wet spot on the pavement, with a smattering of brown grit in the area. The two remaining coconut owners were understandably resistant to offer their prizes for further experiments.

Although Trish enjoyed her work as a Ward Sister, she felt she wanted something more. In 1968, at 27 years old, she had risen through the ranks to where the next promotion would land her in a mostly administrative position. Most wards had junior and senior Sisters, the more senior the position, the less hands-on work they did, and the more time they spent managing the administration of the ward. Additionally, every hospital had about four Administrative Sisters, who oversaw the operations of the entire hospital. Moving up into more senior Sister positions was referred to as “rolling down your sleeves and putting on the hard cuffs”. Hard cuffs were part of the nurse’s uniform. They were worn when the sleeves of the nurses’ uniform were rolled down to the wrists, as they were when completing paperwork, walking through the hospital to the dining room, or doing rounds with doctors. When a nurse did hands-on work with patients, she rolled her sleeves up and secured them with a pair of soft cuffs. The more senior the role, the less time was spent with sleeves rolled up doing patient care. Trish had no interest in “rolling down her sleeves”, she preferred to continue with hands-on nursing. Despite her desire to stay in hands-on roles, she was aware of the press of fresh graduates moving up the ranks, waiting for staff nurse positions and Sister positions. Trish began investigating international options. She applied to a job in New Zealand, but when she received a response, it was rejection. The sender of the rejection letter advised her qualifications would not transfer to New Zealand, she would need to go back to school on arrival. Financially, that was not a possibility. She kept searching for opportunities in English-speaking countries. As she devoted more effort to looking for international opportunities, she noted that many of the positions advertised specifically mentioned midwifery training as a requirement.

In early 1968, Jean left her job in Hull and returned to a job in Manchester. She suggested Trish also take a position in Manchester. Trish considered it, it would be nice to live near her friend, but ultimately she decided against it. With restless thoughts about her future filling her mind, she instead returned to Alder Hey into a junior Sister position on the B3 Isolation Ward. She also applied to the Midwifery - Part I training program at Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. She was accepted into a class that started a later in the year.

While she waited, she settled into her new job on the B3 Isolation Ward. The senior sister in charge was Sister Bowen, and Trish and Sister Bowen didn’t have an easy relationship.

One day as Trish entered the ward office, Sister Bowen turned from her position at the desk and demanded, "Would you whistle if you were entering the Matron's office?"
Caught off guard, Trish asked, "Was I whistling here?"

"You were!" snapped Sister Bowen.

"Well" Trish said, "I probably would then, as I wasn't aware that I was whistling here!" With a grunt of disgust, Sister Bowen turned back to her paperwork.

The B3 ward consisted of rows of glass cubicles designed to isolate patients with infectious diseases. The patients were often babies with severe gastroenteritis. On wards with babies, and B3 was no exception, staff routinely boiled the rubber teats for baby bottles after each feeding to sterilize them. Only a certain number of the teats were issued to each ward, and the admin staff were reluctant to replace them without just cause. Staff were expected to carefully maintain the teats to make them last.

One hectic night, a nurse placed the ward’s entire supply of rubber teats on the stove to boil but got distracted and forgot about them. The acrid smell of burning rubber soon filled the air, alerting everyone to the disaster! Trish pulled the scorched pan off the stove. She and the staff nurse exchanged panicked glances, eyes watering from the overpowering smell. They now faced two major problems: how to eliminate the smell before the Night Sister made her rounds, and more importantly, how to replace the ruined teats for the next feeding.

They inspected the pan, wincing from the smell as they did so. It was ruined - caked with a thick layer of smelly rubber. They needed to get the pan out of the building, but simply throwing it out the window wasn’t an option. Instead, they tied a piece of string to the handle and lowered the pan out of the kitchen window, letting it hang there to air out. Thankfully, the cover of night hid their improvised solution.

With the pan temporarily dealt with, they turned to the more urgent issue: finding new teats. The task fell to the junior nurse, who was sent round all the wards to beg for a spare teat or two from each ward. While nurses from the other wards sympathized, most were reluctant to share, knowing they could easily face the same predicament. Still, enough teats were collected to cover the next feeding. For hours afterward, every window on the ward was thrown open, and all available fans were put to use, in an attempt to clear the lingering smell.

Because of the prevalence of gastroenteritis in patients on the B3 Isolation Ward, the bottom sheets on the beds were covered by thick, rubber half-sheets that were in turn, covered with another cotton sheet. The rubber sheets functioned as draw sheets, being placed under the patients’ buttocks. They often became so soiled the regular laundry service would not accept them. Once staff stripped a soiled bed, they put the rubber half-sheets in a bath of carbolic water, then through a mangle to wring out excess water. Trish hadn’t been working on B3 for long when she developed an itchy rash on her forearms. She thought it might be the carbolic water irritating her skin, so she went to the Dermatology Clinic at Alder Hey for a patch test. The patch test involved exposing her skin to several allergens to see which ones she reacted to. Her reaction to the patch test showed she was allergic to rubber. It wasn't the carbolic water that was irritating her skin; it was the rubber sheets. The dermatologist who did the testing had a field day with the results. He told everyone he met, “Lewis is allergic to her underwear!”

Intended as a clever joke, it was actually true; the waistbands of most underwear were rubber elastic. As news of her allergy spread, Trish was the recipient of at least two six-inch nails, with the instruction that she should push them through her bellybutton and hang her knickers on them, front and back - she was very thin in those days. Another thoughtful colleague gifted her two half coconut shells fixed together with rope, in case her bra also gave her trouble. She received enough packets of safety pins to last a decade. She wondered whatever happened to patient confidentiality! The bigger impact of the news was Trish needed to delay her upcoming midwifery training. Midwives wore rubber gloves for much of their work, and the dermatologist recommended Trish wait six months to let her skin heal before she could safely wear gloves again.

Six months passed, and the dermatologist cleared Trish to attend Midwifery training. When she gave notice that she would be leaving her position on the B3 ward, she was surprised to receive a good report from Sister Bowen. It had seemed they had been at odds most of the time. When Trish questioned the report, Sister Bowen said “I wrote what I wrote.” There was no further discussion.

The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital was a general hospital with a very busy maternity ward. As part of the training, midwifery pupils ran pre- and post-natal clinics in nearby Slough and Maidenhead, communities with large immigrant populations. During the practical component of the training, midwifery pupils had to first observe 20 births that were managed by a qualified midwife, then deliver 20 babies themselves. Once they had completed the requirements, they could take the exam. Where it wasn’t usual for medical staff to wear rubber gloves in a hospital setting, save the operating theatres, midwives did wear rubber gloves for their work. As Trish progressed through the required 20 births she needed to manage independently, she was relieved to find the rubber gloves didn’t bother her much. She also realized she didn’t enjoy midwifery, but she needed at least the Midwifery - Part I training for international nursing applications. She was keen to complete the Part I training but had no intention of becoming a fully qualified Midwife. Trish fulfilled the requirements of the Midwifery – Part I program and wrote the qualifying exams. She anxiously awaited the outcome.

To distract her from worrying about the exam, Jean invited Trish to a “Nurses Christian House Party”. Although Trish had been part of the Anglican church growing up - her mother had her baptized as an infant, and she had been confirmed at age 15 - she had struggled with the doctrine of the Church. Something was missing. She passed through the rites based on age, rather than beliefs, and wondered about the meaning of it all. Since meeting Jean, Trish had occasionally attended Jean’s Evangelical church and found the teachings resonated with her. People had a choice whether they believed in God. Being baptized was a choice; being a Christian was a choice.

Jean introduced Trish to the national organization called “Nurses Christian Fellowship” back when Trish was still in PTS, and Jean was a visiting nurse in her first-year nurses’ training. Nurses Christian Fellowship held events and gatherings for Christian nurses all over the country, often renting stately homes and hosting week-long get-aways. Jean and Trish attended several of those events over the years. Many of the events followed a similar pattern - a week with guest speakers, musical acts, and fun at the Herne Bay Court Christian Conference Center in Kent, or at Capernwray Hall in Yorkshire. Once, she went with Jean to the Annual Keswick Convention. The convention had been taking place since 1875, and by the 1960s it was so big it was held in several large tents, over the span of a week. Christians from all over the world attended to hear well known speakers and preachers. Trish and Jean met many other nurses at the convention, including nurses from Germany who they became friendly with.

Following Trish’s midwifery exam, at the Nurses Christian house party in question, Jean let it slip to other attendees that Trish was awaiting exam results. At first Trish was mortified, what if she failed and then had to explain that to all these women? Of course she didn’t fail, and instead when she learned her results, dozens of nurses congratulated her and cheered her success!

When Trish returned to Alder Hey, and moved into the Night Sister position in Casualty. She continued researching international job opportunities and in early 1970, she found a small advertisement in the Liverpool Echo for a remote nursing position in Canada. The United Church of Canada had placed the advert. Trish already knew that Canada would accept her training and hire her as a “Graduate Nurse” with a reduced salary. If Trish wished to become a Registered Nurse in Canada and receive a full salary, she needed to write the qualifying exams at the University of British Columbia.

She applied for the job and waited for a response. To her delight, she received a letter that was not a rejection, rather; it was a job offer! The offer letter stated her midwifery training, combined with her experience in Casualty made her application stand out from others. Even better, it said Trish’s travel to Canada would be paid for through an immigration initiative by the Government of Canada! Travel to Canada was expensive, and Trish wanted to have a bit of money in reserve, in case she needed it once there. With the cost of travel covered, there were no barriers to her accepting the job.

Offer letter in hand, Trish went to the immigration office in Manchester to obtain her travel documents. The immigration official behind the desk asked for all her information, including where she would work in Canada. Trish provided the offer letter, which said the job was in “Namu, British Columbia”. Turning to the wall map of Canada behind his desk, the official searched for Namu. He couldn’t find it, and Trish could offer no guidance, she had never heard of it before receiving the offer letter, either. The official sent her home, telling her he needed more time to confirm that Namu was an actual place, before he could provide her travel documents. He seemed reluctant to send a young woman to a location he could not locate on the map. A few weeks later, once he had done his research and learned that Namu was a commercial cannery on the west coast of Canada and there was indeed a clinic there, Trish returned to Manchester to collect her travel documents.

The last months at Alder Hey as Trish prepared for her departure to Canada were bittersweet. She loved the kids she was caring for, and the rest of the staff. Alder Hey felt like home, in fact, it had BEEN her home for nearly a decade, save the few years she was in Hull. Still, she was keen to see what the future had in store for her.

On her last shift at Alder Hey, Trish faced the most upsetting case of her career. It was a quiet night in Casualty. The doctor had gone to rest in the sleeping room that was provided for quieter nights such as this one, and the second nurse was in the dining hall for dinner. Trish was alone when the parents of a young boy arrived, distraught, carrying their unconscious child. When Trish approached them, they desperately shoved the limp boy into Trish’s arms. She immediately placed him on the nearest gurney and checked for a pulse and respirations – there were none. Acting quickly, she rolled him into the resuscitation room, pressed the alarm button to summon help, intubated the child, and began chest compressions. As staff arrived, they seamlessly joined the resuscitation efforts. Meanwhile, a nurse led the parents aside, and through their tears, they described what had happened. They had been saying goodbye to friends on the sidewalk in front of their home when their young son dashed between two parked cars and into the road. A passing car struck him. Instead of calling 999 for an ambulance, the panicked parents scooped him up and drove to Alder Hey. It was later revealed that Alder Hey had not been the closest hospital. The parents had driven for more than 20 minutes with their unresponsive child in his mother’s arms. Tragically, that delay meant the child had been without oxygen for too long. Resuscitation attempts were futile. The boy was pronounced dead.

Breaking the news to the parents fell to the doctor. At that time, the parents were in the waiting room, comforting the young woman whose car had hit their son. She had followed them to the hospital, shaken and distraught. When the doctor told the parents their son was dead, their anguish was terrible to witness.

Trish had trouble coming to terms with the fact there wasn’t a mark on that beautiful young boy, yet he had a fatal injury. The whole situation was tragic, and a grim send-off for what would be her last shift as a nurse in England.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Trish recovered from her illness in her old bedroom at her parents’ house. She appreciated the break, and the time with her mum, even though her relationship with her dad remained strained. Her brothers were teenagers, and when they weren’t at school they were out of the house with friends. Most days, Trish sat and chatted with her mum, watching her knit. Florence was an avid knitter. People in the neighbourhood knew her skill for making very detailed and brightly coloured dolls. They brought her bags of yarn to keep the production going. She had made and sold hundreds of dolls through the years. Trish had also learned to knit when she was little, but she lacked the patience to follow the intricate patterns required to make dolls like her mum. Instead, she watched and chatted. It was nice to have the time together.

As the weeks passed, Trish felt more like herself; her recent illness was behind her. She was keen to get back to life at the nurses’ residence. Although it was common for nurses to move out of residence after completing the training, it wasn’t necessary. Trish didn’t have money to rent a flat, even a shared flat with other girls, and she didn’t wish to return to her parents’ home on Crofton Crescent. She continued “living in” and moved into a new room at the far end of the residence with the other staff nurses. The new room was the same as her previous room, with one added feature, a heated towel rack! As it was the only source of heat in the room, it seemed like a real luxury.

Amidst preparations to write the State Examinations, Trish, and a few friends from her class chatted excitedly about taking a trip to celebrate graduation from nurses’ training. They discussed all the places they could go for a holiday away. The reality that they still had no money eventually dampened the excitement. Prior to passing the State Examination, and receiving their official registration, they continued to receive the student rate of pay in their new ward assignments. It was still a struggle to scrape together the funds for a shared bowl of fried rice on a night out. They knew that would soon change, though, and they eagerly anticipated the additional freedom a proper paycheck would afford them.

As soon as Trish and the other girls passed the State Examinations, they applied to the National Nurses’ Registration Board and soon received their official registration. They were now Registered Sick Children’s Nurses. Trish settled into Neo-Natal Surgical Unit (NNSU) and quickly got into the routine of a permanent role. The hospital had a new Matron, one who prioritized the care patients received, over careful adherence to tradition and rules. Working felt more relaxed, as rules such as “hair must be tucked into the nursing cap at all times,” fell by the wayside. The focus was on the work.

After becoming a Registered Nurse, and receiving the associated increase in pay, Trish reveled in the experience of receiving a salary that covered more than the barest essentials, even after paying for her room and board. For the first time in her life, she had actual spending money. She spent little of it, though. She and her group of friends were serious about taking a trip together, so they were all saving money. They still thought of it as their graduation trip, even though their graduation was now in the past. After several months of working, they had saved enough money for a trip to the Isle of Man. They flew there and spent a glorious, but soggy week together exploring the town of Douglas and the surrounding area. It rained hard for the week.

Not long after becoming a staff nurse, Trish had her 21^st birthday. She had reached the legal age of majority for that time in the United Kingdom.

Trish celebrated her 21st birthday with a party at the Knotty Ash Community Hall on Prescot Road. Her dad organized the event, as it was customary to have a party for such an occasion. Trish didn’t much like being the center of attention, and was not looking forward to the party. The attendees were mostly family members, and her parent’s neighbours. Some of her friends from Alder Hey came along to offer moral support on the day.

For her birthday gift, Trish had asked her parents for an upside-down watch—a type nurses pinned to their aprons to easily check the time while keeping their hands free. Instead, she received a large, fancy transistor radio. Her brothers assured her it was a high-quality one. While Trish was grateful for the gift, she couldn’t help but wonder how much she would actually use it. She still needed the watch.

Trish and her friends continued to make travel plans together whenever their schedules and budget allowed it. Another memorable trip was when the friends went to Norfolk Broads and rented a houseboat. They spent a week drifting by towns and villages, churches, the odd castle, and relaxing in each other’s company. Although Trish was friends with several of her former classmates, she and Jean had become close friends. Jean had moved to St. Mary’s Hospital in Manchester after completing the training at Alder Hey. Despite the distance, they would often go on day trips together, exploring little towns and villages around Britain. Jean had a car, and that meant they had quite a large area they could explore when they had a free day. Trish’s favourite town was Chester. It wasn’t far from Liverpool; it was a short bus ride. She returned there often to wander through the streets and peek into the shops.

One year and a month after starting her job as a staff nurse in the NNSU, Trish learned there was going to be an opening for a Ward Sister position in the unit. She applied and was the successful candidate. She started in her new position as Night Sister in the NNSU unit.

To mark the occasion, her Aunt Marion and Uncle George gifted her the silver belt buckle that was worn by Ward Sisters. Trish was delighted to receive the buckle, she had not been sure she could afford to buy it for herself. The buckle was not only recognition of her achievement to become a Sister, it was a very special symbol of her identity as a nurse.

Although her staff nurses’ salary had afforded her more freedom than she had as a student, it wasn’t a lot. She prioritized saving for trips and outings with Jean, and other friends, rather than buying items for herself.

One such trip was a week-long vacation to Tenerife with another nurse, Vera. Although Trish and Vera weren’t close friends, they had time off together and booked a trip together. However, once they arrived at the hotel in Tenerife, it became clear they had different ideas about how to spend their holiday. Vera quickly became friendly with the hotel staff, especially the waiters in the hotel restaurant. Within a few nights, they invited her out to the local nightclubs, as she was happy to pay for their drinks and meals. She went out each subsequent night. Vera settled into a routine of sleeping through the day, waking up in the late afternoon for dinner, and heading out to party until the early hours. Trish had no interest in the nightclub scene. She was more interested in exploring the island than lounging by the pool or staying out late. She began taking walks into the nearby town to look around, and she found a cafe that she visited daily. One afternoon, while enjoying a coffee and watching the passersby, the cafe owners, a husband and wife, struck up a conversation with her. They lived in a small village up a mountain road and invited her to visit them and see the village. They even gave her detailed directions for the local bus she’d need to take.

The next day, carefully following their instructions, Trish boarded the crowded local bus. Unaccustomed to riding a bus so crowded, people were standing on the platform at the door and hanging on to the frame of the open door to steady themselves, she tried to take up the least amount of space possible. As the bus lurched into motion, she observed her fellow passengers. Most were carrying bulky bags, and one passenger had a box of live chickens that squawked from time to time. The road was steep and rocky, winding up the mountainside of the volcanic island. Trish was relieved when they finally reached the village, and she spotted the friendly couple waiting for her.

She spent a lovely day with them, learning about life in the mountain village and the nearby banana plantation. They cooked her a traditional meal, and she enjoyed dining with their family. When it was time to leave, they exchanged mailing addresses and promised to keep in touch by writing letters. The visit to the village, and spending the day with the couple turned what could have been a disappointing trip to Tenerife into a special experience.

With her new Ward Sister salary, Trish could soon save enough money to move out of the nurses' residence and into a small flat nearby. It was 1964, and at 23, she was earning a decent income, living independently, and thinking about her future. Up to that point, she had only worked with pediatric and neonatal patients, so she knew that expanding her training to include general nursing would open up more career opportunities. She considered several nursing schools, but her friend Jean, who was now living in Hull and working as a midwife, suggested she apply to a program there. Jean thought it would be great for them to spend time together on their days off. Following Jean’s advice, Trish applied to the Hull School of Nursing and was accepted. Although she had only lived in her flat for a few months, she happily gave it up in 1965 to move into the nurses' residence in Hull, where she started her general nursing training as a "visiting nurse."

Nurses' training in Hull was going through major changes in 1965. Princess Margaret had recently attended a ceremony officially opening the brand-new Hull School of Nursing, and Trish was part of the inaugural class. The new school combined the nursing programs from Hull Royal Infirmary, Kingston General Hospital, and Western General Hospital. As part of their training, Trish and her classmates would rotate through all three hospitals, moving from one nurses' residence to another with each new assignment. A new hospital building was also under construction, intended to combine the services of the three existing hospitals. The new building was expected to be completed in 1967.

The general nursing training program was three years, just like Trish’s pediatric program had been at Alder Hey. However, since she was already a Registered Sick Children’s Nurse, she received credit for parts of her pediatric training, especially the general first-year courses. With this credit, she only needed to complete 13 months of classes and ward work to finish the general nursing program. If she passed all the required elements, she could take the State Examination in General Nursing and qualify as a State Registered Nurse.

The atmosphere in Hull differed from what Trish had experienced at Alder Hey, where she had felt very much at home. In Hull, the Sisters treated her cooly, as did her classmates. Trish concluded that as she wore a different uniform as a “visiting nurse”, and stood out visually from her classmates, that drew attention. As well, the Sisters knew Trish had already worked as a staff nurse, and a Ward Sister. Perhaps they expected her to be a know-it-all, or strut around like she was better than the other students. Trish did none of those things, but it still took a long time for students and staff to warm up to her in Hull. 

To escape the frosty interactions with her peers and superiors in Hull, Trish coordinated her time off with Jean. Jean was a fully qualified midwife and regularly had pupil midwives working with her to gain experience for their own qualifications. She lived near to Trish, in a house with two other midwives, and their respective pupil midwives.

Trish had no midwifery training herself, but she and Jean confided in each other about their respective work. Jean had two pupil midwives who were finishing their training with her. In a matter-of-fact way, Jean told Trish that when a call came for her to attend a home birth, Jean got in her car and drove to the home, and she left the students to attend on bicycles. Trish thought that was a bit mean and said as much. Jean thought it was just the way it was. She had a car; the students had bikes. That Jean had a car was unusual, most midwives responded to their patients on bikes, in all weather. The pupils needed to get used to it. Trish thought it was an unnecessary hardship for the pupils, but Jean was firm in her thinking.

Trish and Jean continued taking road trips around England, exploring places that others might overlook. While driving, Jean had a habit of spotting small side lanes and turning down them “just to see” what was there. The two friends often had lively arguments while planning their trips—debating where to go and what to do. Both had forceful personalities and weren’t afraid to speak their minds. Eventually, they agreed on a system: they would alternate days. One day, Jean would pick the activity, and Trish would join without complaining; the next day, Trish chose, and Jean would go along. This arrangement kept the peace and allowed them to keep exploring the country together. On Jean’s days, she almost always wanted to visit every antique shop in any town they passed. She would pick up and inspect what seemed like every item in the shop, check the price, then carefully put it back. She went through shop after shop in this manner, inspecting everything, and buying nothing. Trish found this puzzling and was often impatient, but she stuck to the agreement not to complain on Jean’s days.

They enjoyed finding interesting B&Bs to stay in. Sometimes they stayed in a castle or stately home, other times in a fisherman’s cottage. They also loved going to the coast. Some days, they would relax on the beach, while on others, they simply drove along the coastline and had a meal on the balcony of a small restaurant overlooking the North Sea. Every Christmas, they chose one Christmas fair at a castle or stately home to attend together.

One summer, Trish and Jean attended a “music and lights” performance at a castle. Throughout the evening an orchestra played on the castle lawns, and at dusk there was a light show. Attendees sat out on the lawns and listened to music. At intermission, most people ate a picnic dinner they had brought along in a basket. Some experienced patrons had bottles of wine chilling in the nearby pond. They tied a string and a float to the bottle, then left it in the pond to chill for dinner. It was very sophisticated. Into the evening, Trish and Jean sat on the carefully manicured lawns and watched the moon rise and carefully placed lights illuminate the castle. The two friends were surrounded by like-minded people enjoying the music and the mood. It was a lovely experience.

Back at Hull School of Nursing, Trish progressed through her training. There were differences between paediatric nursing and general nursing to be sure, and life lessons to be learned, such as the correct way to butter toast. When Trish did her rotation on the Diabetes Ward, she learned that the main intervention for managing diabetic patients was to weigh and restrict their carbohydrate intake. The Sister in charge of the ward insisted that every nurse learned how to butter bread and toast “the correct way”. She showed Trish how to butter the edges and the corners of the toast first, and the middle last. The Sister’s logic was diabetics had such a miserable, restricted diet, the least the nurses could do was make sure when a patient got to enjoy a slice of bread, it was well buttered!

During the 13 months of training in Hull, Trish and the other students had to move to a new hospital, and a new nurses’ residence three times, as they had ward rotations in each of the three major hospitals in the area. In each rotation, Trish thought she did as much of the cleaning and menial work as the brand-new, 18-year-old students, and perhaps more. She had a sense the Sisters were trying to put her in her place, as she had previous experience. She didn’t complain, and over time she was recognized as being capable and composed as she went about her work.

Trish completed her general training and wrote the State Examination. Again, she passed the exams and applied to the National Nurses’ Registration Board, this time to be qualified as a State Registered Nurse (SRN). Once qualified, she settled into a staff nurse position at Hull Royal Infirmary. Although her training was over, Trish still found the working atmosphere in Hull to be less harmonious than she experienced at Alder Hey. She had continued corresponding with the lovely couple she met in Tenerife a few years earlier. She noted with amusement that the first letter she received from them after forwarding her new Hull address was addressed to Trish Lewis at “Hell Royal Infirmary, Hell”. It wasn’t completely wrong.

Despite the less friendly atmosphere, the work itself was interesting, and Trish immersed herself in it. A Night Sister position became available soon after she received her registration, and Trish applied for it. The position was that of a Rounds Sister, who worked night shifts and covered several wards. The Rounds Sister did rounds throughout the night shift, checking in on the student nurses who were staffing the wards. Trish was awarded the position. When she had been a Ward Sister at Alder Hey, she had once overheard a senior student tell a more junior student, “Sister Lewis’s bark is worse than her bite, she’s good to work with.” Trish wondered what the students and other staff thought of her at Hull Royal Infirmary. It had taken a long time for Trish to feel comfortable in Hull, and she still often felt like an outsider. At least she hadn’t fallen victim to pranks, like some of the least popular Sisters had. In the residences, the laundry system for doctors and nurses differed from what she’d experienced at Alder Hey. There, everyone had labeled their uniforms with their names, and all laundry went into a shared bin to be collected. Everyone hand-washed their personal items in the washrooms. In Hull, each doctor and nurse living in residence had their own labeled box. All their laundry went into their specific laundry box, including their personal items, and the box was sent to the laundry service. If the nurses grew annoyed with a Sister, they sometimes switched her laundry out of her laundry box, and swapped it with that of one of the male doctors. When the clean laundry returned, the Sister would open her box and find it full of the doctor’s personal items, and he with hers. This forced the Sister into the awkward position of visiting the doctor’s residence to see who had her laundry, to ask for her knickers back! Fortunately, Trish never found herself in this situation, which she took as a sign that she was doing just fine.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“The shows are up, let’s be quick!” Trish nudged Jean and pointed with her chin toward the notice board ahead. Jean and Trish had become good friends, and on the rare occasions they had the same day off they spent the day together. Once a month, the local theatres donated 20 tickets for one of their performances to the students at Alder Hey Hospital. The girls had already gone to see Harry Belafonte perform by signing up for the donated tickets, so each month they eagerly scanned the new offerings. On a bulletin board just inside the dining hall, sign-up sheets appeared once a month with a brief description of the show on offer, and 20 lines below for students to sign up for the tickets. The performance dates had to line up with their evenings off, so it wasn’t always possible to take advantage of the free tickets, it was always exciting to see what was there, nonetheless. On the occasions where the dates aligned, Trish, Jean, and a few of the other girls they had become friendly with rushed to sign their names below their preferred show.

When it worked out, the girls who had tickets to the same show pooled their money together for the evening. Usually, they had just enough to catch the bus into the city, and a shared meal at a Chinese restaurant. There was very little money left over from their meagre student salary after the deduction for their room and board, and they had purchased the few personal items they needed. The staff at the Chinese restaurant had no issue with the girls ordering one large bowl of fried rice, and as many forks as there were girls. It became their “usual” restaurant whenever they had a night out. Nights out were something exciting to anticipate, they broke up the routines of studying and shift work.

There were other distractions to the routine, such as seasonal holidays, or the occasional sporting event. One such event was a field hockey match between the doctors and the nurses from the hospital. In the days leading up to the match, there was a lot of good-natured banter from players on both teams. Trish loved the competitive mood, and she was delighted to take part. The doctors had the advantage of size and strength; they used brute force to get the ball in the net. The nurses were smaller and tried to use their speed and finesse to outplay the doctors. It created a lopsided and amusing match up, and there were shrieks of laughter from both players on the field, and the staff and community members who were watching the rowdy match up. Hospital staff who weren’t on shift that afternoon cheered from the sidelines. People who lived in the houses along the street beside the field watched from their upstairs windows. In the end, the doctors won the match, but they left the field with just as many bruises as the nurses, and spirits were high all around.

On the wards, Trish became more confident in her skills and enjoyed the work. As second-year students, Trish and her classmates added a stiff green belt to their uniforms. Besides providing a bit more support to the rolls of extra fabric in her oversized uniform dresses, the belt let other staff know Trish was in her second year. It signaled what she should know and be capable of doing. Third-year students wore a green band on their caps for the same reason.

As she progressed through the training, Trish spent less time cleaning, and more of her time was focused on complex tasks. Sometimes she had to make decisions on her own, even in unusual cases. On one night shift in Casualty, a Chief Inspector from the local “nick”, or police station, came in. He was in great pain and covered in sweat. Alder Hey was a children's hospital, and the Chief Inspector was decidedly not a child.

“I’ve a bad case of indigestion, Nurse. Have you anything for it?”

Despite having no training in the care of adult patients, Trish knew better than to take his self-diagnosis as fact. The Night Sister was nowhere around, so Trish took his temperature, pulse and respirations, or TPR, and did a modified physical assessment. She knew his symptoms could be more serious than indigestion and told him so. His TPR seemed fine, and there was nothing physically that she could find wrong. She sent an aide to the kitchen to fetch some bicarb. The Chief Inspector went off with his dose of bicarb, and Trish spent the rest of the night wondering if she had done the right thing. The following evening, a young constable brought a large bunch of flowers and a basket of fruit into Casualty, a token of gratitude from the Chief Inspector. Trish was relieved to know it had turned out well; it had been weighing on her mind.

By the third year, Trish was pleased to note she liked most of the wards she was assigned to. The kids were great wherever she worked, and she enjoyed interacting with them and caring for them. The exception was the Operating Theatre. Seeing children prepped for surgery troubled Trish. It reduced them to just a body needing repair, rather than active, talkative, kids, full of life. When her class studied the theory components related to the operating theatre in second year, she was already dreading the rotation. Besides learning about the practices and procedures for working “on the theatre” students memorized the names of the basic surgical instruments used in the theatre, what they were for, and the order they needed to be set on the tray to form a “general set”. In the final evaluation, the tools were mixed up on a table and each student had to name each tool and lay them out in the correct order for a general set. It required memory and focus, but it was possible. Trish knew she would completely forget how to lay out a general set the moment the evaluation was over. Fortunately, in the third-year training, just before her rotation in the theatre, students had another opportunity to review the basic procedures for working in the theatre. They also reviewed the general set, as well as some additional surgical instruments they may encounter in their upcoming rotation. Despite her strong wish to avoid it, her rotation in the operating theatres began as scheduled, and to her dismay, it lasted longer than was usual. It carried on for several more weeks than her other rotations, and she didn’t like it one bit.

Despite disliking her time in theatre, Trish found inspiration on two occasions during her rotation when she assisted Miss Isabella Forshall, one of the few female pediatric surgeons of the time. During the war, Miss Forshall was one of the few pediatric surgeons left in Liverpool as most male colleagues had been drafted into the war. She worked tirelessly to serve young patients and advocated for improved post-surgical care. By the time Trish began her studies nearly a decade later, Miss Forshall had gained international recognition for her contributions to pediatric surgery. Seeing a woman excel in a male-dominated field and be acknowledged for it was deeply inspiring.

Trish assisted Miss Forshall and Sister Burns, the Senior Sister in the operating theatres, in two procedures: a cleft lip repair and a cleft palate repair. During both procedures, Miss Forshall sat on a high stool and used a large overhead magnifier as she skillfully created nearly invisible sutures on the small faces in front of her. She produced near-flawless results, like those Trish saw documented in before-and-after photos in Miss Forshall’s office, results would change that child’s experiences in life. Watching her work in each case felt very special, like Trish was observing a true master. From the perspective of a student, the other quality that Trish felt made Miss Forshall special was her kindness to student nurses. She explained what she was doing and why at every step of the procedure.

Other surgeons, though certainly just as skilled, were not kind to students, with some seeming to go out of their way to be unkind. One surgeon, Miss Forshall’s registrar, who clearly had adopted none of his superior’s kind ways, looked Trish square in the eyes as he squirted the remains of a syringe of “plastic skin” down the top of her dress as she held a baby’s head still for him. The liquid skin adhesive was icy cold on her skin, and she couldn’t move away, as she was holding the baby in position. She silently cursed her oversized dress, with its square neck that hid little as it gaped open, leaving her vulnerable to such pranks. She imagined he was smiling behind his mask as he did it.

The next time she encountered him, she was the one with the smile. She noticed he had rather hairy arms, so when she had a syringe of plastic skin in her hand, she gave a quick squirt of it onto his hairy arm. Trish smiled as she did so, thinking about the time he would have to get the adhesive out of the hair. She apologized almost immediately, but didn’t regret doing it. It was all part of the shenanigans that made working “on the theatre” more bearable, especially as her rotation there was more weeks than usual.

Finally, her time on the theatre was done, and Trish had just two more rotations before her third-year training was complete. Her next rotation was the Orthopaedics ward, on the girls’ side, where patients who had orthopaedic surgeries recovered. The young patients had to adjust to restrictions and treatments like traction, casts, and physiotherapy while their bones healed, but Trish was relieved that they were conscious, talkative, and nothing like the sedated bodies that had been so uncomfortable to see in the operating theatres.

Her last rotation was on the Neo-Natal Surgical Unit. Trish very much enjoyed working there. She felt no hesitation when working with the tiny babies, many of them premature or born with complications requiring surgery within 24 hours of birth. They had conditions such as diaphragmatic hernias, oesophageal atresia, spina bifida, or hydrocephalus. Trish found the work to be interesting and varied.

As the end of the three-year long nurses’ training loomed, when Trish and the other soon-to-be graduates weren’t worrying about final exams, and the State Examination, they were thinking about their first jobs as staff nurses. Before the end of her rotation on the Neo-Natal Surgical Unit, Trish was delighted to be offered a staff nurse position, pending her successful completion of the State Examination. She happily accepted the position as she enjoyed her rotation on the unit, and it seemed the Ward Sister had appreciated her efforts. Now the only thing standing between her and the staff nurse position were the school exams, and the State Examination.

The final exams in the Alder Hey nurses’ training were designed to help graduates with revisions by giving them an idea of what might appear on the State Examination. As was her practice, Trish prepared well for the school exams. Nonetheless, she was anxious to learn her results so she could begin revisions for the more intimidating State Examination.

When she woke the morning after the school exams, her marks were the furthest thing from her mind. A rash covered her from head to toe. Home Sister told her to report to Sick Bay, a ward, staffed like any other, where resident nurses and doctors received care when they fell ill. Trish went to Sick Bay as directed. The doctor assessed her, and other than the rash, found nothing wrong with her. Nonetheless, he kept her in Sick Bay, as an undiagnosed rash could not be left free to roam in a Children’s Hospital.

The following day she felt the flush of fever, and rather quickly went from feeling well, save a nasty rash, to being quite ill. The doctor said that she perhaps had German Measles. Even a fan blowing over a bucket of ice to cool her provided no relief. Through the day, the doctor's early diagnosis of German Measles was ruled out; there were no patients with that diagnosis in the hospital. Her joints became swollen and painful until she couldn’t tolerate the weight of even a bedsheet on her body. The new working diagnosis was that she might have Rheumatic Fever. She slipped in and out of awareness over the following days until finally the fever broke. Once the fever subsided, her condition improved quickly.

On her last day in Sick Bay, Trish noticed Sister Burns enter the ward, then walk directly toward the bed she was occupying. Trish’s rotation on the theatres had ended ages ago, and she hadn’t seen Sister Burns since. What on earth could the Senior Sister from the Operating Theatre want with her here? She didn’t have to wait long to find out as, without fuss, Sister Burns asked Trish if she would accept a staff nurse position in the operating theatres after she qualified. Trish couldn't contain her surprise. She realized Sister Burns may have kept her in the theatre for more weeks than usual because she saw something in her. Trish hadn’t thought she was excelling, she was simply gritting her teeth and getting through it. It had been her least favourite rotation. She felt honour to be asked, but relieved she could politely refuse the offer, as she had already accepted the NNSU staff nurse position.

After a week in Sick Bay, Trish was feeling better, and the doctor recommended she return home for three weeks to rest and recover completely. It wasn’t how she had imagined her time as a student at Alder Hey would end, but she was very much looking forward to getting back to work in NNSU. She would continue working as a third-year student, until she passed the State Examination, and applied for registration with the National Nurses’ Registration Board. Only then would she be a “Registered Sick Children's Nurse”, and she just couldn’t wait. But first, she would return to her parents’ home on Crofton Crescent and convalesce for three weeks, as the doctor suggested.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Trish twisted her hair absentmindedly as she stood at the bus stop near the front gates of Alder Hey Children's Hospital. She had her first break from training and was going home to visit her family. Alder Hey was only a ten-minute bike ride from the Lewis family home, but Trish didn’t have her bike. Her dad had kept it when she left for Alder Hey. Her bike was better than his; it had gears. The bus pulled in and Trish boarded, then after one change, she arrived at the bottom of her street.

She hadn’t been home in two months, the demands of Preliminary Training School had been overwhelming. Weekdays were busy with classes, and on weekends Trish and the other students were doing their washing, buying fresh stockings, and studying. So much studying. The Lewis family didn’t have a telephone at the house, so she had not spoken with her mum in two months. She wondered if everything would be as she remembered at home. Had the household changed? Had she changed? Was her dad still angry with her?

The house at 2 Crofton Crescent was familiar and active when Trish returned. Her brothers were 11 and 12 years old and they kept everyone busy with their antics. The boys were well into a new school year and came and went from the house in the evenings. Trish was dismayed to learn that the 8:30pm curfew that her father maintained for her was still in effect. She had nowhere specific to go in the evenings; but the fact that she wasn’t allowed felt unjust. At the nurses' home, the rules were also rigid, but they were fair between all the students. Day to day, Trish and her dad continued to ignore each other. Her mother kept Trish busy, and that gave her a means to avoid him as much as possible.

Midway through the week-long break, Trish received the letter she had been waiting for from Alder Hey. She had passed the final Preliminary Training School evaluations. The letter formally invited her back to begin First Year Nurses’ Training. She was delighted! She couldn’t wait to get started on the next phase of her training to become a nurse. A local family doctor who cared for Trish and her family through the years sent her a message to say he and all the doctors at the local surgery were very proud of her. It was all so exciting!

Returning to the residence at Alder Hey after the break signalled the beginning of nurses’ training in earnest. The girls who remained in Trish’s class were now officially First Year nursing students. Soon they would get their first ward assignments, and they needed to know where everything was in the hospital. The Alder Hey grounds were vast, and the main hospital building with its annexes and outbuildings filled a significant amount of that space.

The main building had three floors, and each floor had a long hallway that ran the length of the hospital. The hallway was very long, and at night it seemed even longer as it was eerily dark. The various wards branched off at intervals along the hallways. Most wards had a similar layout. There was a kitchen on the left as soon you entered from the main hallway corridor, with a linen room on the right. Next, a swing door led into the main ward. Most wards had one or two private single rooms, and the Ward Sister's office immediately inside the doors. The sterilizer for instruments sat just outside the Sister’s office. Cots and beds lined the ward on both sides, each with curtains around them for privacy. A few large tables usually ran down the center of the ward.

In the long-term wards, like the orthopaedic ward, there was often an aquarium and other visual distractions to keep the children occupied. The sluice, which held the bedpans and trolleys, was on one side while the toilets were on the other. The dayroom spanned the entire width of the ward. It was filled with tables and chairs, a toy box, and shelves of books and puzzles. The hospital teacher held classes in the dayroom or sometimes at the patients' bedsides in the long-stay wards.

The distances a student nurse might cover in a day were significant, yet the golden rule of ‘walk, never run’ was absolute. Ward Sisters often sent student nurses on errands to other wards, or to the Porter's Lodge, which was in the gatehouse of the hospital grounds. The nurses’ residence was in a building on the property near to the main hospital building, and a student may need to return there during the day. It all added up to a lot of miles. Trish was grateful she was fit from years of field hockey and riding her bike, it helped her keep up the pace through the day.

First year training involved blocks of theory distributed between three-month rotations on the hospital wards. Students would do rotations on several wards, each caring for children based on the discipline that was treating them. Some of the biggest wards such as the medical, surgical, and orthopaedic wards were separated into two; a boys’ ward, and another for girls. All other disciplines had boys and girls together on a ward; ENT (ears, nose and throat), ophthalmology, the burns unit, and an isolation ward. There were two operating theatres, a Neonatal Surgical Intensive Care unit, and an emergency department, formally known as Accident and Emergency, but more commonly referred to as “Casualty”. Opposite Casualty there was a dental department, and in a separate annex, there was a psychology department, but they weren’t part of the rotation for nursing students. Trish was curious about most of the wards, but she fervently hoped she would not get selected to work on the burns unit, as she knew she would have to refuse. She didn’t yet know much about the work of each ward, but she knew the burns unit was not for her. Fortunately, her first assignment was the ENT ward, which she was pleased about. She was keen to work with actual patients.

As Trish grew older, her nervous habit of chewing on her school tie developed into a more physical response to stress, and it became a nuisance during her time at Alder Hey. Whenever she started on a new ward as part of her training, she experienced laryngitis for the first week of the assignment. In the first instances where it happened, the Ward Sister sent her for diagnostic testing for infection, for allergies, for any medical cause for the symptoms. There was no obvious cause ever found, but the symptoms rendered Trish useless for the first week of each new discipline. She couldn’t talk to the patients or the other staff, and she couldn’t answer the phone. Each new ward assignment began with her cleaning linen cupboards, trolleys, bedpans, cleaning everything until her voice returned. She was not aware of being particularly anxious about new placements, rather; she was curious about each new ward, but the laryngitis symptoms occurred each time. It didn’t take long for her to become known for it. “We are getting Lewis, at least we will get clean cupboards”, the Ward Sisters quipped, and they made sure Trish was busy cleaning during the first week of each placement. No one could say she wasn’t useful, even if she was inexplicably silent for the first week of each rotation.

Maintaining cleanliness was a top priority for everyone at the hospital, and student nurses played a key role in keeping patients, wards, and medical equipment clean. Early in their training, they learnt by heart the procedures for sterilizing and managing medical instruments. It was a fundamental part of their work, and it had to be done in precisely the same way it had been done for years.

On each shift staff nurses or student nurses boiled all instruments that had already been used or might be needed later on the ward. After boiling the instruments for the required amount of time to disinfect them, the student nurse arranged the tools for a single procedure—for a dressing change, for example—on a sterile towel on a trolley. They then covered the trolley with another sterile towel. The process felt slow and labour-intensive. To be prepared, nurses planned ahead and set up everything they might need for the shift in advance, as disinfecting an instrument on the spot would take too long. A separate trolley was prepared for each expected procedure.

Trish watched the experienced staff nurses use the prepared dressing trolleys. The nurses worked in pairs, a ‘clean’ nurse and a “dirty” nurse, one on each side of the trolley at a patient’s bedside. The ‘dirty’ nurse removed the old dressing, swabbed and cleaned the wound, then the ‘clean’ nurse stepped in to redress the wound. It was smooth and fast, like a well-rehearsed dance. The two nurses moved from patient to patient in this manner, washing their hands between each dressing change.

Hospital staff did not wear gloves for day-to-day care, only staff in the operating theatres wore gloves. Instead, staff on the wards washed their hands multiple times a day using antiseptic soap. The soap of the day was Carbolic soap, and staff and students alike had very red, sore hands as they worked. There was always a tin of Lanolin on the ward and most staff applied it liberally to their hands as soon as their shift ended so they had a bit of relief before the next shift.

Staff and students had access to cotton three-layered masks to use when infection was a concern. The masks had two sets of ties, one set to tie behind the head above ear-level, and the second to tie behind the neck. The masks only came in one size, so they only seemed to fit properly on some staff. Trish wondered how effective they really were, as it was common to see the masks pulled down and hanging around the necks of staff between procedures. Staff reused their masks throughout the shift.

After the initial study block, Trish started on her first ward rotation with a three-month assignment to the ENT ward. She spent the first week on day shifts, cleaning and observing, due to her laryngitis. During the days, patients were admitted to the ward, and many were awaiting surgeries. As soon as a new patient arrived, they needed to be checked for nits, or head lice. Checking for nits was the lowliest of jobs on the ward, and it usually fell to the most junior student nurse. When it was Trish’s responsibility, she would end the morning with white, wrinkly hands as the metal nit combs were carried from patient to patient in a solution of carbolic to keep them disinfected. The kids called the students who checked for nits “Nitty Nora, the Bug Explorer”. The name had been passed down from one patient to the next for years! Trish noticed that little jokes like that helped lighten the mood on the ward for the patients, particularly during the day.

The night shifts were a different matter. On her first night shift Trish realized the ward was a completely different world at night. On dayshifts she had been the most junior person on the shifts, doing as she was told, and looking after the most menial of jobs. There were other staff responsible for the patients and the operation of the ward. On the night shift, Trish was alone on the ward with one nurses’ aid.

She arrived on the ENT ward at 8:00pm for her shift. She was met by the Day Sister who quickly read her a report for each patient on the ward. The Sister went through the reports mechanically, not pausing to see if Trish understood or had questions. She had to know Trish wouldn’t be able to absorb or remember the information. There was too much, and it was too unfamiliar. Trish stood in a fog, her mind racing and her heart pounding. When the Sister finished the report, she turned to leave. Trish moved to the door and held it open for her superior, as she had been trained to do.

“Goodnight Sister.” And there she was, ‘in charge’ of 30 sick kids.

Trish was 18 years old. She was only a few months into her training, standing in a dimly lit hospital ward, realizing she was in a completely alien world. During the day the ward was busy, patients were being admitted or discharged, and the porters coming for others to take them for their surgeries. Some patients were returned from their surgeries, still groggy from sedation. Younger patients played and were rowdy, and parents visited. It was lively.

At night, there was tension, and not just for Trish as she felt the weight of the situation. She looked around the ward. The patients who had their surgeries that day were uncomfortable. Younger patients were afraid and lonely, many were crying. The younger patients who had not yet had their surgeries were watching the ones who had, and they were afraid and crying too. They were all missing home, and their parents. It wasn’t such an interesting adventure once the sun had set.

There was a Night Sister on duty who oversaw several wards. Trish knew she would come by the ENT Ward two hours into the shift to do rounds. She could be called in the case of an emergency. Trish wasn’t sure if she really knew what constituted an emergency, everything seemed like a crisis in that moment.

Trish squared her shoulders, and she and the aide began checking on the most distressed patients. As she approached each one, she tried to learn, then remember, their name and diagnosis. Many of the patients needed help with bedpans, or to be helped to the toilet. Those who had their surgeries that day needed to be checked every half hour for signs of bleeding. Temperature, pulse and respiration, referred to as ‘TPR’, needed to be checked for every patient, then recorded in the ‘TPR book’ in the Sister’s Office. TPR needed to be recorded every four hours, Trish remembered she should check the TPR book to see when the last set had been recorded. When she had a moment later in the shift, she was to use a ruler to draw new columns into the TPR book for the next shift.

She and the aide assisted patient after patient, while trying to keep up with the scheduled tasks as well. Trish’s mind was in chaos. How on earth would she manage all this?

As they were at a bedside, Trish noticed the doors to the ward swing open, and a man walked into the ward. It was well past visiting hours; parents should no longer be on the ward. Finally, here was a problem Trish could capably manage. She approached the man, firmly told him visiting hours had ended, and sent him on his way. To her relief, he looked surprised but left without complaint.

A few hours into the shift, when she felt she was able, she retreated to the dining hall to get a quick coffee, leaving the aide to watch the ward for a few minutes. When she returned to the ward, her eyes fell on the Night Sister, who was standing at the foot of one of the beds. Beside her was the man Trish had removed from the ward not long before. Trish froze, he wasn’t a parent; he was the ENT Consultant. He was coming to check on the patients he had operated on that day. The bottom fell out of Trish’s world. Why had he left the ward, rather than giving her a good dressing down - he had the right to - and then carrying on with his work?

The Night Sister glared at her, and Trish felt the angry gaze burn into her. Heart pounding in her chest, Trish approached the Sister and the Consultant to learn her fate.

“Now Sister, don’t be cross,” the Consultant said as Trish stepped into earshot, “she was only doing her job. My wife is always telling me I look like the gardener!”.

Relief and gratitude left Trish feeling quite weak at the knees. She could see the Night Sister was still not happy but had to smile at the Consultant’s joke. She sent Trish on her way to carry on with her tasks.

The rest of the night passed with Trish feeling like she was swinging between one calamity to the next. Mercifully, most of the patients slept for at least some of the time. By the end of the shift, Trish grimly thought the only benefit of a night shift was that she had not been called “Nitty Nora” even once.

The ENT rotation continued. As the most junior student nurse on the ward, during day shifts Trish handled a lot of cleaning duties, helping the younger children to the toilet, helping them with meals, and joining other staff on rounds. She began to really enjoy working with the patients, as they were usually lively and often amusing. She also appreciated the sense of camaraderie with the staff on the ward, even as a First Year student. The wards had no designated staff area, except for the Sister's office, which was too small for breaks. To get around this, on some wards, the Sister allowed staff to take ‘two by two’ secret coffee breaks in the linen room. The routine started by brewing a pot of strong coffee in the ward kitchen and heating a large jug of milk by placing it in the boiling instrument sterilizer. Both were then carefully carried to the linen room and hidden behind a stack of bedsheets. The first pair to sneak in for coffee was the Sister and the staff nurse, followed by the student nurses and aides. Each pair had ten minutes to enjoy their coffee, rest, and chat before returning to work.

Night shifts became less terrifying. Trish became more confident that she could learn the kids’ names and diagnoses quickly, and she better understood what was expected for rounds. The ward slowly became more familiar at night.

The weeks and months flew by, even though the work was hard, and the days were long. The first year of studies passed in a fog of exhaustion. At times, Trish and her classmates felt like slaves. They were the ones to mop the floors every morning; they were the ones called to clean up vomit. The work was menial much of the time, but it wasn’t repetitive and tedious in the same way punching cards at AT&E had been. Trish could see how even the worst jobs were important, as she also worked with the patients those tasks were benefitting. The menial tasks weeded out some students, the ones that felt that kind of work was beneath their dignity. Those who persisted, like Trish, were tired all the time. Despite the exhaustion, she never entertained the thought of quitting. To say she enjoyed it was a stretch, but she was managing and could keep up with the pace of the work and the studies.

Not all her classmates could say the same. Some girls had little difficulty with the theory components of the training but lacked the practical abilities to think on their feet. One girl who, when told to sterilize the thermometers on a ward, boiled them. It took only moments to end up with a layer of mercury and broken glass at the bottom of the pot, and the ward was suddenly without thermometers. The girl was very bright academically, she just struggled to apply the knowledge to practical tasks. Girls like her were subject to pranks by the Ward Sisters.

When a Ward Sister wanted a break from one of the more scattered students, she would send her to the Porter’s Lodge for a long stand. The student would go out to the gatehouse and ask the porter on duty for a long stand. The porter would tell her to wait, and he would go back about his work. At some point, the student would find him again, and insist that the sister was waiting.

“Excuse me, but Sister is going to be annoyed, she sent me for a long stand.”  

“And you’ve just had it,” the porter replied. After considering what had just happened, the confused girl went back to the ward to be assigned some other undesirable or mundane task.

Some Ward Sisters would send hapless students to a ward at the far end of the long hallway with a stainless-steel pail, instructing them to ‘fetch a bucket of steam’. When the student arrived, the Sister in charge of that ward responded, feigning annoyance, "But you didn’t bring the lid," and sent the unlucky student all the way back down the hallway.

Trish was a quick thinker and approached even the most menial of tasks with practical thinking. She rarely drew attention for creating more work for anyone and she never got caught up in the pranks. She was, however, the cause of a few legendary one-liner ‘rules to live by’ at Alder Hey.

On her Ophthalmology ward rotation, Trish was working her second night shift of the rotation. On her walk around the ward to check on the sleeping patients after lights out, there was an empty bed. She checked the toilets, but the child wasn’t there. She then asked the nurses’ aide who was on the ward with her to help her look for the child. They searched the dayroom, sluice, kitchen, side-wards, everywhere, and saw no sign of the child. She decided there was no choice but to call the Night Sister. The Ophthalmology ward was on the ground floor, and Trish feared the child had been disoriented in the dark and could have left the ward completely, or worse, left the building.

The Night Sister arrived and decided to check the beds herself. She returned to the rather rattled Trish and the aide, with a grim expression. Trish’s heart sank. The Sister gestured for the girls follow her, and they walked down the row of beds, stopping when they came to a bed with two small figures in it, instead of one. It turned out the child had gone to the toilet in the night and returned to the wrong bed. The Sister said little as she left the ward, except, "Count heads, not beds, Nurse Lewis." The phrase stuck and was repeated often in the days and months that followed, as it was both catchy and important advice.

Another memorable aspect of the Ophthalmology ward for new nursing students was the ghost story. During the war, some wards at Alder Hey, including the Ophthalmology ward, had housed soldiers. The door to the ward had a fan light with a half-finished painting on the glass. On their first night shift, student nurses were regaled with the tale of the ghost of a soldier-painter who returned at night to finish his painting!

When Trish was on rotations on the wards, she sometimes had split shifts. On those days, she worked from 7:30 am to 9:15 am, then had the rest of the morning off before returning to work from 1:00 pm to 8:00 pm. During her break, Trish sometimes visited her mum. She placed a call to their neighbour, Mrs. Lamont, who would happily go over to tell Florence that Trish was coming. Florence then rushed to the bakery to buy potato cakes and two chocolate eclairs—Trish’s favourites. They enjoyed the treats together with a cup of tea. With her dad at work and her brothers at school, Trish and her mum had a nice time chatting before Trish returned to Alder Hey for her afternoon shift.

As the year progressed, students alternated between ward rotations and blocks of theory. At the end of each theory block, there were examinations. Sometimes the subjects being examined lined up nicely with the wards students had already seen, and they had a deeper understanding of not just the theory, but also the application of the knowledge. Other times they were evaluated on areas of practice they had not yet been exposed to. In those cases, the exams required rote memory of the content they had read, making them a bit more difficult. For example, being examined on the surgical care segment of the schooling, without yet having been on the Surgical Ward was challenging. The practical evaluations included setting up trolleys for general nursing activities such as, dressing changes, bed bathes and hair washing, and enema and suppository administration.

All the different layouts for the various trolley sets were in diagrams in her textbook, and Trish studied them to make sure they became second nature before being examined on them. She passed all the evaluations and continued progressing through the program.

At the end of the first year, there was larger, final evaluation, and again a brief break while the Sisters graded the examinations, and set the second year classes. Trish felt confident of her standing at the end of First Year and welcomed the break in her studies.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ann bounced down the hallway toward Trish, beaming,

“No more card punching!”

She had accepted an offer for nurses’ aide training. Trish had forgotten all about punching cards at AT&E. Her initial elation had already dissolved into dread as she realized the next thing she had to do was tell her parents she was going into nurses’ training.

She thought her father held old-fashioned views on the role of girls, even for the time. His mother had espoused very traditional views of decorum. Long after her children were adults with families of their own, and until her death in 1956, she had kept a tight hold on the family. Perhaps because of the ongoing influence of his mother, Harold had not softened his views as Trish had grown up. She knew her father would receive her news badly.

It was the middle of the workday when the girls left Alder Hey Hospital, their futures looking quite different from just a few hours earlier. There was no point in going to AT&E, clocking in that late in the day would only attract extra attention to their absence that morning. It was best to just go home.

They parted ways, and Trish went home to tell her mum about the interview. She was relieved she could tell Florence before having to face her dad when he got home from work. Her mum had little to say when Trish told her about the nurses’ training, other than to say Harold would not receive the news well. She was correct on that point.

Her dad was as upset as Trish had imagined he would be. He was angry that she had not been to work that day, angry that she seemed ungrateful for the job he had secured for her, and angry that she accepted the training position on the spot. He said she was selfish for only thinking of herself. Trish didn’t understand how she was being selfish, the training was free, and her small wage covered her room and board. There were no fees required from the family.

Florence stayed silent as Harold vented his anger. Trish wondered why her mum didn’t speak up for her, as she had done years earlier when Trish wanted to go to grammar school. She didn’t understand at the time but reflected on that moment many times later. Perhaps her mum thought she had already done her part to make Trish’s new future possible. This wasn’t her battle to fight.

The nurses’ training didn’t start until September, four long months away. Trish continued working at AT&E until it was time to start her training. Although the work was still miserable, there was an end in sight. When her end date drew nearer, she was pleased to provide formal notice about her impending departure from the job. She felt that was honourable; she appreciated her dad’s strong loyalty to the company and didn’t want to be disrespectful.

Relations at home were tense. She and her dad didn’t speak during those four months, and for some time after she started her nurses’ training. Trish did her best to stay out of the house when he was home, and out of sight when being home was unavoidable. Evenings were particularly troublesome. Although Trish was 17 years old, had finished school and was working, she still had a 8:30pm curfew. She had gotten older, but the curfew had never moved. Her younger brothers, only 11 and 12 at the time didn’t have a curfew. She spent evenings sitting in her room, out of sight, boiling with resentment about the unfairness of it. She couldn’t wait to live away for nurses’ training.

Years later, Trish reflected further on the unspoken impact of her impulsive decision that almost had certainly contributed to the fiery response from her father. Although the nurses’ training was indeed free, and the students drew a small salary, it wasn’t much. It covered their room and board, and enough pocket money to buy the compulsory black stockings that were needed to complete the student uniforms, but little else. When Trish had worked at AT&E, her dad had collected her pay on her behalf and given her an allowance from it. She hadn’t thought about it until much later, but the wages she earned punching cards were helping the family. After Trish began her training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, her mum started a menial job at AT&E. She washed dishes in the cafeteria where the factory bosses took their lunch. Trish’s two young brothers were growing boys, and the family had depended on Trish’s pay from AT&E to contribute to the family finances. Florence never commented on it, but when Trish realized the impact of her decision, she felt regret that she hadn’t given more thought to the reality of the family’s circumstance.

Finally, after four long months of anticipation, the first day of nurses’ training came. Not unlike the start of grammar school years earlier, the uniform proved to be the most concerning issue of the day. Although there was a process to get measured for the uniform - a green dress with white button-on cuffs and collars that needed to be starched - the dresses seemed to only come in one size. Trish, petite at 5'3" and slightly built, grimly concluded that the dresses were obviously sized for 7-foot-tall, 18-stone footballers. A green belt was part of the uniform, a critical element, Trish thought. The problem was, the belts were only issued to second-year and third-year students. Although the uniform fittings occurred in the sewing room, there was only so much alteration that was possible on such a large garment that was to be worn by such a slight person. By the end of the session, Trish accepted she would be swimming in her uniform, but at least it had her name carefully sewn into the collar. A small stack of white aprons, and a rather puzzling starched white piece of material with a button on one end, and a buttonhole on the other completed her uniform issue. The latter item was a nurse’s cap, and the staff member assured Trish it was more straightforward to wear than it appeared in its freshly laundered form.

There was also a heavy black cloak that Trish found more use for as a blanket in her unheated room in the residence than for anything else. Wearing the uniform outdoors, and particularly off the hospital grounds, was unhygienic, so there was little need for the cape. The last details of the uniform, ones that students needed to purchase for themselves, were black shoes and black stockings with a seam up the back.

Trish received the instruction that students must place their soiled uniforms in a laundry basket along with everyone else’s to be collected by the porter and taken to the hospital laundry for washing. When clean laundry was returned to the nurses’ home, Trish could identify her uniforms by the name label sewn on each item by the sewing room staff.

Once inside the nurses' home, where students lived during their training, Trish found the accommodations were adequate. Each student had their own room that had the basics: a bed, a wardrobe for their belongings, and a desk for their studies. Students had access to a communal bathroom. Third-year students had a sink in their rooms, so that was something to anticipate in the future. The rooms lacked heating, but the girls threw their heavy uniform cloaks over their beds when it was chilly.

The Home Sister, an administrative nurse assigned to manage the nurses’ home, assisted students with any issues that arose as the new cohort settled into their rooms. For most of the girls, this was their first time living away from home.

The first eight-week segment of nurses’ training was Preliminary Training School, or PTS as it was more routinely referred to. It was lead by Sisters (senior nurses, usually in administrative or teaching roles), and served as an orientation to the first-year nurses’ training and began with classroom sessions where the students learned the basics of the nursing profession. They studied the history of the discipline all the way back to Hippocrates, and the St. John’s Crusaders. The students learned about Florence Nightingale, considered the founder of modern nursing.

They listened to lectures about etiquette in a nursing context - for example, who is senior to a PTS student? The answer to that was easy - everyone was - even the cohort of students just ahead of you. A PTS student needed to give all senior students and staff the right of way in corridors, they needed to hold open doors for them, and they needed to always be polite, in all circumstances.

They studied the various roles and hierarchy within the medical staff. There were porters, nurse’s aides, staff nurses, Ward Sisters, Night Sisters, and the Matron. There were medical specialists, known as “consultants”, to be referred to as “Doctor”. Surgical consultants were addressed as “Mister”, or “Miss”, - there were a few female surgeons working in Liverpool.

The Sisters who oversaw PTS taught most theoretical lessons in a formal classroom, but sometimes students were required to perform a task while they listened to a lesson. On one occasion, Trish recalls sitting around a table rolling dozens of bandages that had just come from the laundry, while listening to a lecture on etiquette. While she rolled bandages, she learned the “Golden Rules” of nursing conduct, for example, nurses do not run. It does not matter what is happening, do not run. Nurses may walk briskly, but they do not run. Nurses always maintained a calm demeanour, regardless of what was occurring around them.

The values espoused by the nursing profession in that era were simple and bound in tradition. Doctors wrote orders and nurses carried them out. A nurse's job was to nurse people, to make a patient clean and comfortable, and carry out the doctors’ orders. There were no housekeepers, only nurses’ aides, nursing students, and staff nurses to keep the wards and medical equipment clean and serviceable. Besides medical care, nurses provided personal care, such as helping patients with bedpans and bathing.

In a training hospital such as Alder Hey, student nurses completed many of the day-to-day care related activities, particularly the cleaning, feeding, and hygiene tasks. As a student nurse worked her way up the ladder there was always a new crop of more junior students who took on the most menial tasks. The senior students had time for more and more complex tasks. It was just the way it was. Trish and her classmates realized quickly that their next few years would be full of cleaning and many other menial tasks. Trish was unconcerned by that notion; cleaning was better than punching cards in a factory. She could see past the most junior phase of the training to the time when she would work more directly with patients, as a third-year student, then as a qualified staff nurse.

Trish settled into the routines of PTS and life in the nurses’ home quickly. The days started early, breakfast began at 7:00am. She needed to be up well before that to wrangle her bulky uniform and tame her hair adequately to set her cap in place. The moments between waking up and getting out of bed were difficult. Bed was warm, and the rest of the room was cold and uninviting. Once Trish flung the covers back and sat up, there was no longer a choice but to get up and start the day. She hurried down the hallway outside her door to take her turn in the communal lavatories. Thankfully, there were enough facilities that she rarely had to wait in a queue.

Back in her room, she donned her uniform. She learned she could roll up her uniform dress at the waist to make it the right length, just below the knees. She awkwardly secured the bulky roll of fabric with safety pins, straining to reach behind herself to pin the roll at the back of the dress as well. The hem had to be straight and the pins secure; the roll could not come loose during her daily activities. A white apron went on over the green dress, hiding most of the messy roll and safety pins.

She pulled on the required black stockings. The seams of the stockings that ran up the back of the leg had to be perfectly straight, and holes in the stockings were unacceptable. Trish lamented that most of her pocket money went toward buying new stockings, but it was unavoidable. Sisters would send student nurses back to the residence to fix a seam that had gone askew, or to change into new stockings if a ladder or hole was visible while they were in class or on duty. There was a nearby shop where Trish could buy new stockings, and she could buy a pair from Home Sister in an emergency.

The last element of the uniform was the white cap. The nurses’ cap came from the laundry as a starched, flat, white form. To wear it, Trish folded it as she had been shown, then pulled the ends together and buttoned them. She placed the cap on her head, and began the futile task of using white hair pins to secure the cap onto her head, with her hair neatly inside. Students could not have their hair showing. This was a constant problem for Trish, who had a lot of fine, curly hair. It just wouldn’t stay secure. She had already experienced a Sister sending her back to her room during the day to control her hair.

“Lewis, go fix your cap!”

Drat! From the front of the room, the Sister had noticed Trish’s cap was askew, and her hair was escaping. Trish had to leave what she was doing and return to her room to fix her cap. To prevent that happening again, each morning she added more and more hair pins to keep it secure. By the time she was done, it felt like she was wearing a helmet, rather than a nurses’ cap.

Before leaving her room to join classmates for breakfast, she inspected her reflection in the mirror. She concluded the young face looking back at her was as ready for the day as it was going to be.

Closing her door behind her, she joined the group of students who were lingering in the hallway, they usually all went to breakfast together. The dining room was on the ground floor of the hospital, so the students exited the nurses’ home and crossed the grounds to the main building. The dining room was large with many tables. Each table had room for eight people, more if they squeezed in. The main dining room was for students, staff nurses, and other hospital staff. Doctors and Sisters had their own dining rooms. Trish and the others queued to collect their breakfast as it was passed out on trays through a hatch in the wall on the near side of the dining room. They carried their meal to another area further along the wall, where they got their tea. The first girl to have collected her breakfast and tea scanned the room for free tables that had enough room for all of them. 

Once breakfast was done, Trish and her classmates made their way to the first class of the day. Often the first class in the morning was theory-based. Such classes usually started with a quiz on the content covered in the previous day’s class. There were also practical aspects of nursing that needed to be mastered by the end of PTS. Practical lessons were conducted in a training ward. The training ward was an extension of a classroom, equipped with beds and other training aids for the new students to practice skills. Specific skills Trish recalls from the early days of training were how to make a bed with speed and precision, and how to do basic bandaging. To make beds, students needed to work in pairs. Sheets must be straight, with bottom sheets tucked in tightly with nary a wrinkle. Even a small wrinkle could give a bed-bound patient a pressure sore that, besides being unnecessary and painful, could become infected and present a serious problem. The students practiced until the Sister deemed they could consistently make a bed that passed inspection.

When it was time to learn bandaging techniques, Trish was pleasantly surprised to realize that her time in the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade had prepared her well for the skill. There was little new information in the bandaging lessons for Trish, and it was comforting to be confident with her skills, in at least one area.

On the days where there were practical skills to learn, time flew by. It was surprising to find half the day had passed, and it was already time to go back to the dining room for lunch. The girls chatted over lunch about their successes and struggles from their morning class, and speculation over what the afternoon sessions might hold.

After the last class of the day, the girls went back to the nurses’ home to change out of their uniforms and into their regular clothes. There was time to look after personal chores before dinner time. Trish used the time to inspected her uniform dress and the white apron she had worn that day. She could wear the dress for a few days, if the white apron covering it was clean. When the apron was soiled, she put it in the basket to be sent to the hospital laundry room. If it was still clean, she would carefully hang it along with the uniform dress in her wardrobe to keep everything wrinkle-free for the next day. When the porter returned a trolley of clean laundry to the residence, Trish located her items by the name tags sewn into them. She attached the white collar and cuffs to the uniform dress, then hung the fresh uniform in her wardrobe. Finally, she hand-washed her personal clothing items in the sink in the lavatory and hung them to dry.

Although they were tired by the end of the day, Trish and her classmates still had much to talk about over dinner. They discussed details from class, commented on their stiff, itchy uniforms, and shared anecdotes from the day. Evenings in the nurses’ home were times of bonding as the girls studied together, sharing each other’s notes to make sure all the students had a complete picture of the information from the day. They also discussed the qualities and approaches of the various Sisters who provided their lessons day by day. It didn’t take long to settle into routines in their new life in the nurses’ home.

Later in the evening, Home Sister would pass by the rooms of the PTS students, making sure everyone was preparing for bed at a reasonable time. Trish didn’t mind being told to go to her room for the night by Home Sister. Although it was similar to the curfew imposed by her dad that she so resented, bedtime for the PTS students was applied equally to everyone. Trish wasn’t being singled out. Besides, by bedtime most days, Trish was exhausted. Her mind reeled with everything she had learned and experienced throughout the day. When she finally crawled into bed, the sheets were cold. The bed was never as warm and comfortable at night as it would be in the morning, when she would once again get up in the dark, in a cold room, and do it all over.

Although days were long and busy during those initial weeks of training, the two months of Preliminary Training School flew by. All the girls in Trish’s cohort were together on the same schedule during PTS. Some of the girls developed close friendships, many that endured throughout the three years of training, and some that would remain for many years as life took the girls in a variety of directions.

At the end of the eight weeks of PTS, students needed to pass written and practical evaluations in order to move on to the "official" first-year nurses' training. There were several students in Trish’s cohort who didn’t expect to pass those initial exams; either they could not take the rules seriously, they lacked the nerves or skill to perform the skills under the pressure of evaluation, or they just didn’t want to be there. Trish wanted to be there, and she made sure she was well prepared to pass the evaluations. She wanted to move on to be a first-year nursing student.

There was a one week break while the Sisters evaluated the examinations and confirmed the first-year class list. Like the other girls, Trish planned to go home for the break while she awaited the letter from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital that would confirm her acceptance into first-year nursing studies. She was apprehensive about returning home, there had been so much tension between her and her dad. She had not been in communication with her family during the two months of PTS. There hadn’t been time to return home, and the family did not have a phone in the house. Trish didn’t know what to expect when she returned home. The best way to find out, she thought, was to just go home and see what happens.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.

It was 1958, and Liverpool was once again a bustling city. The wartime wounds of key landmark buildings, like the museum and the Lending Library, were under repair and the city was alive with a population approaching one million. Every day, tens of thousands of workers arrived in the city by ferry, train, bicycle and car to work in the offices and factories. Little did Trish know she was about to become counted in those numbers of workers each morning, heading to work at a factory.

After Trish wrote her “O” level examinations and learned her results, her dad confirmed she had completed her final year of school. It was time she started working. Trish knew continuing classes for the final year to complete “A” levels made little sense as she had passed only four of the seven “O” level examinations, so the decision didn’t come as a surprise.

Harold arranged a job for her at the Automated Telephone & Electric Company, where he worked as a ‘Progress Planner & Chaser’. Not only was he good at his job - he had a real knack for math - but he was also proud of the company and felt deep loyalty to it. He had worked for AT&E for only a short time before being sent to war, but they had held a position for him for more than three years until his return. He was very pleased to have found a job for his daughter in the same company. Trish was less pleased, but she didn’t have any tangible options to counter with, so she resigned herself to the job - for the time being.

Career options for girls were very limited in those days, even for girls who had gone to grammar school, as she had. Trish harboured the dream of being a police officer, but at only 5’3”, she did not meet the minimum height requirement to apply to the police service. Other occupations available to girls were teaching, nursing, or secretarial roles. Each of those roles required further training, and her father was insistent that her education was over and it was time for her to work. Trish grudgingly went to work at AT&E.

On the first day of her new job, she rode her bike to work alongside her dad. It felt like they rode a long way, first down their street, then turning onto a side street, and down a major road. They pedalled down streets lined with red brick row houses, stained to near black by the soot from coal fires, before cutting through another side street to emerge onto a main road, Edge Lane Drive.

Finally, Trish followed her dad as he turned onto Milton Road, where she saw a wave of people converging on bicycles, and many more arriving on foot. As they drew closer to the extensive building complex that comprised the AT&E factory and offices, the large iron gates of the business slowly swung open. The sizeable crowd of people waiting to enter surged forward into the complex. There were a few men who were arriving in cars, but there were hundreds more on bicycles or on foot, and they all joined the swathe of workers entering the factory premises. 

It was overwhelming. The sheer number of people caused Trish to wish she was returning to the familiar grounds and halls of Childwall Valley High School for Girls, rather than this busy, crowded factory. Her dad’s voice interrupted her thoughts as he pointed out to her that the factory workers entered the buildings to one side, and the office workers to the other. She followed close behind him, and they entered the office building.

After the formalities of getting registered for employment, a supervisor took Trish to a cavernous room that looked more like a warehouse than an administrative space. There were countless single desks with chairs that formed three rows - long rows - Trish couldn’t clearly see the desks all the way at the far end of the rows. Women who seemed much older than her, her mum’s age and even older, occupied most of the desks. Along the left side of the workspace, a big metal machine clanked loudly, she was told that was the computer. Her job was punching cards that were fed into the computer. The supervisor showed Trish to a desk. She wondered how she would find this desk again if she ever left it. It was just like all the others. She noticed there was another young girl sitting at the desk next to hers, that was a slight relief. They exchanged shy glances as Trish sat stiffly in her chair, awaiting instruction.

There was a large machine on the desk, it slightly resembled a typewriter, but was larger, and had only a numerical keypad. There was a thick stack of paper sheets with rows and rows numbers on them, and another pile of stiffer cards that were blank. She received a brief orientation to her responsibilities. The supervisor showed her how to feed the stiff, blank cards into the machine, then watched as Trish mimicked the action. Using the keypad, she typed the numbers from the sheet of paper on the top of the stack, into the machine. The machine punched corresponding holes into the cards. Once she punched a card, Trish added it to a stack on the corner of her desk to be collected. Another worker walked along the rows of desks collecting the completed cards, before feeding them into the massive computer that was churning away on the far wall. The work seemed simple enough, but Trish could immediately see it would be ever so monotonous. There were rows and rows of numbers to transfer to the punch cards. When she neared the end of the one stack of papers, more were brought. It never ended.

Before the day was out, she learned that the numbers on the sheets represented inventory counts from the factory side of the business. Workers in the factory counted all the parts in stock and typed the tallies on paper sheets. Those paper sheets were then brought to the offices, and distributed on the desks in Trish’s area. Once Trish and her colleagues transferred the data form the sheets to the punch cards for the large computer, the computer added all the numbers and produced inventory reports. She also learned that when she made an error on a card, it appeared back on her desk to be re-done. By afternoon, Trish had quite a few cards in the pile to re-do. It was just so boring she lost track of the numbers, a trend that improved little with time.

The Automated Telephone & Electronics Company was a large, international manufacturing company. The AT&E factory in Liverpool manufactured components for telephone switching boards, and increasingly, components that enabled overseas phone calls. The components were small and varied, and keeping an accurate inventory of stock was a massive task. The inventory process was constant, laborious, and critical to operations. That knowledge did little to relieve the crushing boredom of the work.

In time, Trish spoke more with Ann, the girl who worked at the desk beside her own. Trish learned that Ann was only 15 years old. Once they had the work in common and were the only younger girls working in their area, the age difference didn’t seem to matter much. They became friends. Most of the other workers in the department were older women, probably the wives of men who worked in other areas of the factory, and the younger girls didn’t have much in common with them. Ann and Trish did watch the older women with amusement on Fridays though, when many of the women came to work with curlers in their hair. On Trish’s first Friday at AT&E, she was surprised to see not one or two, but many of the women who worked in her area arrive with their hair in curlers and covered by headscarfs. From the chatter around her, she quickly understood they were preparing to get fancied up to go out to the dancehalls for a Friday night out. Trish’s parents didn’t go out to dancehalls, or really “out” at all, and neither did Trish. From the number of heads full of curlers at work on a Friday, it was apparent a night out at the dance halls was a well anticipated break from the monotony of the week for many.

One day in late spring, after Trish had been working at AT&E for several months, Ann told her she had heard the local hospital was interviewing for nurses’ aides, and she asked Trish to come interview with her. Trish didn’t think long about it before agreeing to go along. Even washing bedpans seemed preferable to the mind-numbing, repetitive work she was doing punching cards. The problem was, how would she get out of work and go to the interview, as it was occurring during a regular workday? She had not missed a day of work yet in her brief working life, and she knew her father would forbid her to take a day off, particularly to interview for a different job. If she did it without his permission, he would be furious. She supposed he would take it as a direct insult to the company who had not only held a position for him for all the years of the war, but now also hired his daughter. Trish wryly thought that in the sea of desks in the administrative area of the factory, no one would even notice if her desk sat empty for a day, and it was even less likely anyone had any idea of her name, let alone that she was the daughter of another worker. She mulled it over until she devised a plan to get to the interview that she thought just might work, at least in the short-term.

Overcast skies and light rain did little to dampen Trish’s nervous energy on the morning of the interview. She set out on her bicycle alongside her dad for the usual ride to work, and hoped he didn’t notice her nerves. Shortly before arriving at the factory, she told her dad there was a problem with her bike chain - she would stop and fix it - he should go on ahead. He did carry on, and she fiddled with her bike’s chain while she watched her dad pedal out of sight. As she turned her bike around to go meet Ann, she felt a flush of excitement. She had never so abruptly defied her father before, and the anticipation of a more stimulating job was very strong. 

The girls arrived at the main entrance of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and were directed to an area where a few other girls were waiting. Trish and Ann were interviewing for training for an entry level nurses’ aide position, and they had a vague idea of what such a job would entail. A nurses’ aide performed the most menial tasks involved with managing a hospital ward - the girls suspected there would be a lot of cleaning, helping with bedpans, and other basic tasks. They gave their names to the woman who was organizing the hopeful applicants. Waiting with the other girls reminded Trish of waiting outside the principal’s office in school, an experience that had occurred often enough to no longer rattle her. The woman told the girls they would be interviewed by the Matron, who oversaw all the nurses at that hospital. That news surprised Trish and she felt a flush of nerves, she knew that a matron was a very senior nurse. She didn’t have much time to worry about it though, there had been only a few girls ahead of her, so she was called into her interview quite quickly.

As Trish entered the Matron’s office, awareness dawned that she had never participated in an interview before. The tiny, older woman waiting for her had a very “starched” and stiff appearance. She wore a crisp blue uniform, with a very frilly cap. She spoke briskly as she introduced herself, confirming to Trish that she was, in fact The Matron. As the Matron welcomed Trish and began to ask her questions, Trish was relieved to see that she seemed like a normal person, asking normal questions. She began to relax.

The Matron asked Trish about her home life, and how many family members she had. She explained there were a lot of rules in nursing, and some of them might seem strange, but they were tradition, and they were important to respect and follow.

When asked, Trish summarized her schooling history. The Matron wished to know what subjects she had written exams for and passed. This surprised Trish. As far as she knew, you didn’t need your O-levels to be a nurses’ aide, but she listed the exams she had passed. When she named the biology exam, the Matron told her that qualified her to enter the training to become a RSCN (Registered Sick Children’s Nurse), and asked if she would accept a spot in the upcoming cohort.

Trish had never really considered a career in nursing beyond this impulsive bid at a nurses’ aide position. She listened intently as the Matron explained the phases of nurses’ training, and that nursing students were required to live in the nurses’ residence that was attached to the hospital for the three years of training. The wages that student nurses earned during their training covered the room and board. That detail was enticing. Trish knew her father would be furious about her skipping work to go to the interview, never mind how angry he would be if she left AT&E and went into nurses’ training. She thought having some distance between her and her dad for the next three years was a splendid idea.

Trish accepted the training position on the spot.

Previous chapter / Next chapter / Start at the beginning

If you are enjoying reading Trish’s story, please consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

Buy Me a Coffee

Coffee makes the world go round, and the words flow, as they say!

Author’s note:

We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"

To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom.

Trish Lewis was 18 years old and desperate to escape a mind-numbing administrative job at a factory in Liverpool in the 1950’s. She made the impulsive decision to join a friend to interview for nurse’s aide training at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. That decision changed the trajectory of her life and launched her into an interesting and rewarding career as a nurse.

Trish is my mom, and this is her story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024. The story is pieced together from Mom’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person. The Journey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you are enjoying this story, you may also enjoy reading my memoir, “Resilience in the Rubble: A True Tale of Aid and Survival in Kashmir”. The book shares my experience as a first-time medical aid worker in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, after an earthquake devastated the region in 2005. It also tells the story of Nadeem Malik, a local teenager who lived through the earthquake, and his struggle to provide for his family in the aftermath.