Lesley
Winifred Barnard’s Life After Leaving School Until her Marriage
When she was 17, my mother Lesley Winifred Barnard left her expensive boarding school in Beaconsfield in the County of Buckinghamshire, to train at the Norland University of Early Childhood for nannies, located in Pembridge Square, Notting Hill, London, England. Founded in 1892, the school was considered the world’s first training college for upper and upper-middle class women. Famous for requiring matching, starched and seasonally changing uniforms, the curriculum was rigorous. Studies focused on child-centered principles such as those of Friedrich Fröbel, who started the kindergarten system. The school promoted meticulous tracking of health markers, play, and babies being outside in the pram. This one to two-year program prepared her for a career looking after small children in wealthy people’s homes.
(Many years later, but likely not much changed https://www.boardingschoolmemories.com/
Taking
care of children was not new for my mother. Being the second eldest
of seven children she
regularly helped care for her younger siblings and it was something that she loved to do. She was at
Norland for about 2 years and then continued on at Middlesex Hospital where she was able to finalize her
training as a nurse. At Norland she’d cared for numerous babies born to unwed mothers whose families
were wealthy, famous, or both. The babies were housed in what was called the “baby hotel,” a large
nursery filled with babies. Mothers or family members were separated from the baby and only able to visit
once a week for a short period of time on the weekends.
While
the school prided itself on excellent care of the children, the
demand meant that a few young
women would care for numerous babies. A reformed wild child who had raised hell at boarding school,
my mother found the work exhausting and the rules dreadfully stringent. One rule was that however
cold.
it was, the baby blankets could not be doubled at the neck, but kept single with only two blankets per
child. My mother worried they weren’t warm enough. Moreover, disposable diapers and plastic covers for
cloth diapers were not yet made, so when babies were wet it was terrible for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norland_University_of_Early_Childhood
(Middlesex Hospital - Oddly years later Lesley married the son of John Dudgeon Oliver, a top ear nose and throat specialist at Middlesex, who also had offices on Harley Street. Her younger sister, Joan, also trained there.)
After leaving Middlesex hospital, my mother’s first job was to work for a family with twin boys. The mother was nursing one of the boys but the other was bottle fed and failing to thrive since he was unable to keep the formula down. Fortunately, my mother was able to cure him with gentle care. As she held him and prepared his bottles of milk herself, he began to feed and grow. Less fortunately, the woman who cooked for the family was furious that my mother was hired, since she wanted the job for her daughter. She soon grew quite abusive, even going so far as to slash my mother’s clothes while they were in the laundry. Due to this my mother did not stay in the position for very long.
Some time later through family connections, she was hired by a family with a small daughter nicknamed Smalls. The mother of the household, Betty Hoffman, and my mother became good friends and my mother stayed with the family for some years, through the birth of two more children. They were American and she later accompanied them to their home in Massachusetts. The father, Richard Hoffman, was a millionaire and a published author. He and Betty were friends with the Lindberg family and my mother had a story about Charles Lindberg. Apparently, after his baby was kidnapped, one of the detectives was sitting on the front deck of the house reading a newspaper. Charles Lindberg crept up and lit the newspaper on fire! Perhaps he was annoyed at the man’s relaxed pose.
My mother loved Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There were horse drawn sleigh rides in the snow and the beautiful house her employers lived in. She was able to join the country club, and there she met Skip, a man she liked, whom she often told me about––although she said they never planned to marry. She got two Ford cars, one with no proper seats, so she drove sitting on a wooden box!! Shortly after learning to drive, she was taking Betty to an appointment and Betty was late. “Faster,” she pressured my mother but as an inexperienced driver, my mother soon crashed. Unfortunately, Betty sustained a broken arm, but later apologized to my mother and said it was her fault.
One day, there was an incident at the country club. My mother was leaving and passed a young man in the lobby. She found out later, from a friend, that the man rushed into the club, raving that he had just seen the most beautiful girl. All the men jumped up to see but my mother had already gone! I loved this story as a child, as I thought it was so romantic. She was very pretty with black hair, dark blue eyes, and quite curvaceous. Sse liked to show off her curves with tops cut low or partially unbuttoned. That habit she kept even into her last years of life!! Unfortunately, Betty grew unhappy in her marriage and eventually fell in love with a local doctor. She got a divorce, married the doctor and my mother was out of a job.
My mother had no choice but to return to England. She arrived at her Aunt Hilda’s home in Ramsgate and Hilda’s reaction on seeing her, was to say “Why on earth did you quit your job?”
I am not sure why my mother moved to London but she was living there when she began dating my father, John Charles Oliver. Funnily enough, she rarely spoke about that part of her life. Her brother, Hugh was also living in London, She and Hugh were always very close, so she may have met my father through Hugh. John was born in 1915, making him seven years younger. She was 30 and he was 23, a huge age difference at that time of life.. When she became pregnant, he was very keen to marry her, though later he denied that was so! My mother had dated a young military officer prior to meeting my father. She had a photo of him that I loved to look at, and in doing so I would often wish that he was my father. I have forgotten his name, but she’d actually hoped to marry him. However, his family were against the match and they stopped seeing one another.
My mother and father married in August of 1938 and my brother was born in February 1939, just before World War II began on September 3, 1939. Their honeymoon was spent at a beach resort in Cornwall. They were accompanied by Lesley’s cousin in law, Eileen Barnard, the ex-wife of Denis Barnard. Eileen spent the honeymoon flirting with John, which did not make for a pleasant trip. There is a photo of this behavior and Eileen later told Lesley that it served her right, since Lesley had been very flirtatious with Denis a few years before. Eileen had left Denis since he gave her gonorrhea and made her sterile. She had one son with Denis, Tony, before her infection.
During my childhood, my mother often mentioned her wilder days as a young girl and later added that it was fortunate there were no drugs available to her, as she would have tried them. She also mentioned that, as a teenager, she would wear her bathing suit in the town, something which was absolutely NOT DONE in those days. Other members of the family considered her a bad influence on her younger sister Joan, who started doing the same thing! However, perhaps England temporarily tamed her, as I never saw any sign of wildness while we lived in England.
All the children in the family had a rather odd upbringing with uninvolved parenting and a certain amount of abuse from various sources.
