Chapter 4 - The Interview
Chapter 4 of "Open to Possibilities: The Life of a Young English Nurse"
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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.
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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.