The Free Spirit

Childhood and Teen Years, 1946 - 1954

"The future's not ours to see, que sera, sera..."

I suppose I should update my readers on what my dear husband was doing while I was in a concentration camp. His parents were trying to make it as musicians and were succeeding, not wanting their two sons to have to work in the coal mines like their father did. They had a radio show, of which my husband, as the elder son, would appear on as 'Little Donnie' and eventually got his own segment. He would sing and talk and the recordings I've heard I find quite adorable. He and his brother both were hits in the area and were quickly becoming local celebrities, but of course we never heard of those boys from Shenandoah, Iowa in the East End of London.

Mum gave birth to my younger brother, Jeremy, on the fifteenth of July, 1946 by midwife. Dad ran down the stairs to call them from the public telephone while I stood by to assist Mum to her bed so she could give birth comfortably. "Katryna," she said to me, speaking in fluent Romanian (I say Romanian because we spoke a Romani dialect, however, we really didn't have a name for it other than Romanian), "put on Maria Tănase on the phonograph." Maria Tănase was a Romanian singer that Mum had recently discovered in a music shop that we had visited. She loved the traditional Romani sound that Ms. Tănase's music had and claimed the music reminded her of home and her family, which she missed so much, but I had little to no memory of. Sometimes, I had wished I could remember Romania before the war, but I was just too young. I visited Romania through her stories and the music of Ms. Tănase, and eventually did get to visit in the nineties, with my husband when the Berlin Wall finally fell.

The midwife came, a charming nun from Poplar by the name of Sister Julienne, to deliver Jeremy and as soon as she arrived, she put on the kettle and made tea to calm my father's nerves and settle my mother's mind. "Would you like to help me with your mother?" she asked me in her soft, sweet, mellow voice. I could barely understand her, as I had only been learning English for a year, but I did understand the words 'help' and 'mother' very clearly, to which I nodded. I assisted Sister Julienne with delivering Jeremy, and that experience inspired me to want to become a midwife myself. Sister Julienne later was appointed to head of Nonnatus House, where she worked with other nuns and, eventually, nurses, and would later become my employer nine years later. Sister Julienne delivered each of my brothers - Arthur in April of 1948, Richard in August of 1949 and Harry in January of 1951. I was present at all of their births and assisted Sister Julienne on each of them, and she encouraged me to pursue midwifery each time.

My Aunt Anne, my father's older sister who was nineteen years his senior and considered a spinster - or rather, a middle-aged or older unmarried woman - came to live with us for a few years while Mum and I adjusted and helped me adapt to English culture and speak English. Anne Cromwell was born in North Uist, but as soon as she was twenty and sick of her mother trying to marry her off, she moved to the East End of London in Bethnal Green and became a nurse. She became a field nurse in 1917, when the First World War was nearly over, and spent time in France on the Western Front, then came back to England and moved to Whitechapel to work in hospital. When World War II came, she was in her forties and continued to pursue field nursing during the war, then returned to her Whitechapel home and then to our little home. She worked at the London Hospital, shortened to the London, for years, having many suitors over the years but always denying every single one, loving the freedom she had of being single and on her own. She was over fifty when Mum and I came into the picture and she seemed happy to settle down for a little while, but she did grow restless. Up until her dying day, Auntie Anne never settled down. She was ninety-three when she died in 1988, and they say it was from all of the smoking she did. But I was sure she gave Death a real good fight.

While learning English and studying medicine and nursing on my own, I found an interest in the piano and became rather skilled quickly. Mum said I did pick up new skills very quickly, and in 1948, she insisted I try dance. I liked to sing, I liked to play the piano, so she thought that I might like to dance. I tried many different styles of dance for four months, finally setting on tap dancing as my favourite style of dance. I would go on to become a National Tap Dance Champion in 1952 at the age of fourteen, appearing on live national television everywhere across the country and dancing a routine to Glenn Miller's 'American Patrol'. Before meeting my husband, that was my claim to fame. By that point, I was well versed in English and had many friends, both from dancing and from school. There was, however, always a prejudice that people carried against me. I was not white, or at least, not white enough. I was born in a Romani caravan and the Romani people came from India and the Middle East into Europe. Generations of intimacy with white European men have bred much of the darker Indian skin tones out of me, however, I was still darker skinned than the white English kids. I was from far enough into Europe to be considered Caucasian, yet far enough east to be considered not white. The racial bias, as well as the association of Gypsies with thievery and whoring, called for many unnecessary slurs and insults being thrown at me over the years.

I was fifteen when I enrolled in a nursing course at King's College in London, and my father insisted that he would pay for it. "I want to see ye workin' for the Nonna'ans some day, hen," he would say to me. Truth to be told, I wanted to see myself working for the Nonnatans, too, but that was likely a long time away. Come shortly before my sixteenth birthday at the end of 1953, I took the exams and passed, becoming a fully licensed and qualified midwife. In the year I spent overloading myself with classes, I was always doing homework, always volunteering for the most difficult births - for everything, really, but the easy births were, well, easy - and so much more. The hard work paid off, and I applied for a job at the London in very early 1954. My dreams of nursing were finally going to come true.