PORTRAIT OF AN OLD NURSE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 23

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD NURSE

“Old Nurse,” by Barbara Barclay Carter (London: Cape). This tender and admirably-written story of an old Welsh nurse develops inevitably into autobiography. So intimately are the'author’s memories of babyhood, childhood, adolescence and young womanhood associated with the ever-present and well-beloved figure of Nanna that she finds it impossible to disentangle one from the other. Nanna belonged to that extinct class of children’s nurses whose whole life and interest are bound up with those of her charges, and to this, the last of her nurslings, the figures of former “babies” become real and living, in some cases distinct enough to inspire affection or jealousy in the - rather lonely little girl whose world for many years consisted mainly of her mother and nurse. At a very early age “Ba-bee” was taken on a visit to Mary Ann’s home near the little town of Brecon, in Wales, and in a very real sense it became her own home, and the people, who took this Worst Baby to their hearts, her own .people. In the years to come her successes at school were the subject of delighted pride to Nanna’s people, and the letters announcing them were read to all and sundry who dropped into the shop kept by a sister-in-law. “Ba-bee’s sorrows became their sorrows, and when Nanna finally retired to her little pink house it became home for them both. In writing the story of Mary Ann, Miss Barclay Carter conveys to her readers a vivid picture of the little Welsh home, rich in tradition and present interest, of the people, intelligent, humorous and kindly, yet deep and difficult of understanding by a stranger, and of the impressive mountains and “the Promised Land” stretching into the distance. Here are authentic tales of “second sight” possessed so strongly by many of the Welsh, a possession which seemed at times in some way to communicate itself to the American-born child. A curious happening concerns the child’s mother and a friend who for amusement tried the old game of a moving glass within a circle of alphabetical letters. The glass moved swiftly enough, but the sequence of letters seemed to make no sense. There would be a “y”, a “w” and two “l’s” together, again 1 “w,” a "y” ... Nanna camo in to lay the tea and went as white as the tea-cloth. The apparently meaningless letters spelled a sentence in Welsh purporting to be a message to herself from her grandmother long dead. When sorrow comes the old nurse’s letters to the girl at boarding-school are touching in their tenderness and wisdom. Her sturdy good sense and selfless devotion loom large in the portrait drawn so surely and charmingly in “Old Nurse.”