Lesley Winifred Barnard’s Life After Leaving School Until her Marriage

After leaving her expensive boarding school when she was about 17 my mother, Lesley, trained at Norland a famous English school for nannies. This prepared her for a career looking after small children in wealthy people’s homes. Being the second eldest of 7 children she had helped care for her younger siblings and it was something she loved to do. She was at the school for about 2 years and then continued at Middlesex Hospital - to finalize her training. At Norland she had to care for numerous babies, mostly the illegitimate children of the wealthy and famous. There was a large nursery filled with babies. Family were only able to visit once a week for short periods of time on the weekends. There were just a few young women caring for numerous babies and my mother found the work exhausting and the rules dreadfully stringent. One was that however cold it was, the baby blankets could not be doubled at the neck, but had to be kept single with only two blankets per child. There were no disposable diapers or plastic covers for cloth diapers, so if the babies were both wet and cold 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.)

https://www.norland.ac.uk/the-history-of-norland-in-13-objects-a-portrait-of-emily-ward-aged-seven/

World War I 1914-1918. My mother was in England at boarding school shortly after this war ended - age 11, in 1919.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Ward

Her first job was with a family with twin boys. The mother was nursing one of the boys but the other was bottle fed and failing to thrive, being unable to keep the formula down. Fortunately my mother was able to cure him by holding him and preparing his bottles of milk herself.   The woman who cooked for the family was furious that my mother was hired, since she wanted the job for her daughter. She became quite abusive, even going to far as to slash my mother’s clothes while they were hanging out to dry, so she did not stay very long.

Some time later through family connections, she got a job with a family with a small daughter nicknamed Smalls. The mother, 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, when 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. Horse drawn sleigh rides in the snow and a beautiful house to live in. She was able to join the country club where 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 she learned to drive she was taking Betty to an appointment and Betty was late and kept telling my mother to drive faster, As an inexperienced driver my mother crashed and Betty sustained a broken arm. However she later apologized to my mother and said it was her fault.

There was an incident at the country club one day. My mother was leaving and passed a young man in the lobby. Later she was told by 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 so romantic. She was very pretty with black hair and dark blue eyes and quite curvaceous, which she liked to show off with her tops cut low or partially unbuttoned . Even into her last years of life !! Unfortunately Betty was unhappy in her marriage and fell in love with a local doctor. She got a divorce, married the doctor and my mother was out of a job.

She returned without warning to England and arrived at her Aunt Hilda’s home in Ramsgate. Hilda’s reaction on seeing her was: “Why on earth did you quit your job?”

I am not sure why my mother moved to London but it was there she was living when she dated 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, and she may have met my father through Hugh. John was born in 1915 so seven years younger. She was 30 and he was only 23 which is 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 wish he was my father. I have forgotten his name but she had hoped to marry him, however his family were against the match and they stopped seeing one another.

They married in August of 1938 and my brother was born on February 24, 1939, just before the start of World War II 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, ex wife of Denis Barnard. Eileen spent the honeymoon flirting with John. There is a photo of this behavior and Eileen later told Lesley that it served her right as 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, Tony, with Denis, before her infection.

During my childhood my mother often mentioned that she had been quite wild as a young girl and some years later 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 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

I find it hard to describe my mother’s character. During my childhood I adored her, but later – as is often the case with adult children – I came to see her faults. She was a great mother to us when we were small. We were very poor but there were lots of bike rides, taking along picnic lunches, walks in the country. We were the envy of the other children we knew. However, we never discussed feelings or got much guidance from her. Every time we moved, which was quite often, she would quietly dispose of my brother Richard’s and my personal items without telling us. At the time neither of us talked about this, but later I mentioned it in an email and learned that he had also found it upsetting.

I asked my oldest daughter and she came up with this description : Strong, the matriarch of the family, She loved fashion and makeup, shopping for gifts, eating out, getting her nails done. Adored animals, had numerous cats and dogs. She was smart and even in her later years, youthful in her outlook and demeanor until she was became very old. A woman to be admired, not soft but feminine. She loved poetry and doing crosswords. All her relationships with the opposite sex were with very strange men. She was very feminine, but not in a soft way. Not kind, but she greatly loved her family. She was not particularly sociable with people other than family, Not good with money. Didn’t worry about things including money ! She had a familial tremor that she inherited from the Hendy - her mother’s - side of the family, which caused her to avoid doing things that made her shake, like writing. She did not work if at all possible. She played tennis, liked long walks and swimming, sunbathing however hot it was.

She was married a second time in her 50’s to Harry Wallace Dragoo and both marriages were to very odd and abusive men. Harry, whom we all called Hank, was brilliantly clever. Her ‘true love’ Warren Beth was charming but married someone else and later was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed suicide. More on that part of her life later !