Teresa Vines
Teresa talks about working as a Health Care Assistant at Brookwood

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I left Ireland when I was nineteen because a friend was working at Brookwood Hospital as a nursing assistant as they were known at that time and her aunt was a Sister, a Ward Sister. I came and joined her and it turned out that her and I were the first health care assistants, through the Union, that got rooms in what was known as the Nurses’ Home. We did have to go through our local Union to do that because it was only for qualified nurses, domestics and porters and there was no rooms for health care assistants. We put up a fight and we managed to get rooms because we were paying for a private rented place and in actual fact that was quite expensive and I was living illegally with my friend and used to hide in the wardrobe when the landlord came but anyway we managed to get the rooms.

We used to wear the black shoes - black lace up - and they were brilliant when they came in because they were like Dr. Marten type shoes but they were very, very comfortable and you’d think, ‘Oh God, yeah I’ll put them on.’ They had thick soles and you know, I remember thinking, ‘They’re my work shoes’ - everybody else was wearing them for fashion, you were wearing them for work.

What were the patients like?

They were lovely, there were very - I think they were institutionalised, when I look back. You know, you had your routine of what you done at work and they had their routine of what happened, so very institutionalised. I think the majority were very happy, you know, you didn’t get any retaliation or argument or anything like that because they knew what the routine was, you knew what you were providing, whereas if it had been more I suppose individualised it might have been a completely different story.
 
Some of the people that you worked with, the clients, they would talk about their lives when they were in the workhouse when that was over at Farnham Road Hospital and you did query to yourself - as a young person I did - thinking, ‘Oh what is this woman doing here?’ you know, just because her mother died when she was young and her dad put her into a workhouse and she has no contact with her kids and stuff like that and that was quite sad.

Normally it was the girls that ended up coming into somewhere like Brookwood Hospital. They’d been there for years before I’d got there but you used to question why are these people here. They had a happy life and they used to have a role within that area I suppose because there wasn’t anything like psychosis or mania or mega depression so they had a more fixed role within the community that they were in at that moment, so things like being in charge of the food cupboard and being in charge of carrying the keys of whatever, doors or whatever, because they were able to carry out that responsibility, so they did have a role. I mean they would tell us off, the younger staff, for not doing it properly you know - ‘Did you make that bed like that?’ - things like that you know, ‘Oh all right then.’ I have to say I always respected it because this is the way I was reared, you respect your elders, it doesn’t matter where they come from.