MY FAMILY HERO
Max Higgins is the grandson of Peggy Higgins, who was a nurse in the Second World War and beyond
Max Higgins’ grandmother was a midwife in the Second World War
According to her ‘sister tutor’ at Maidstone Hospital, Peggy Cutbush was “born to be a nurse”. As to how Peggy discovered her vocation, it helps to understand that, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Peggy joined the Red Cross where, following training, her job was to treat air-raid victims.
These are details that Peggy’s grandson, Max Higgins, learned when he came across a memoir that Peggy, who died in 2015, wrote in her final years. It’s the story of a full life, encompassing a childhood in rural Kent as a farmer’s daughter, time as a nurse and midwife, and a long and happy marriage to Len Higgins, who worked as a manager at bus companies and with whom she had five children.
“Peggy would travel all over the country to various places where we lived, to help out,” Max tells Who Do You Think
You Are? Magazine, fondly. Where did this strong desire to be useful to others begin? Perhaps clues lie in Peggy’s childhood. Peggy, along with her twin sister Betty, was born in 1922, and the sisters had what was in many respects an idyllic childhood, helping “with the lambs in the spring when poorly ones were brought in to be warmed by the kitchen fire”.
But Peggy also endured the trauma of serious illness. As a child, she contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria, rare conditions today. To prevent the spread of infection, her father had to throw away all of the farm’s milk.
Worse still, Peggy spent 13 weeks in Linton Isolation Hospital. “In her memoir, she remembers her parents were only able to speak to her through a closed window,” says Max, “which she says deeply upset her father so he only came to hospital twice. But her mum came every Wednesday and Sunday to bring cakes and sweets to be shared out with the other children. She was only seven years old, so I can imagine it was deeply upsetting.”
Nevertheless Peggy recovered to attend Tonbridge Grammar School, which she left as the shadow of war fell over Europe. While serving in the Red Cross, she joined the Civil Nursing Reserve. At Ashford Hospital she was asked if she wanted to study to be a professional nurse. At first she hesitated. But when a badly injured Spitfire pilot who had rung for help saw her Red Cross uniform and said, “Fetch me a proper nurse!”, she knew what she had to do. Another story didn’t make it into the memoir, probably because it was too painful, but says much about the horrors that people saw during the period. Working in a church that had been converted into a first-aid centre, she asked a boy to fetch a doctor for a soldier “in critical need” while she tried to deal with his wounds.
“The boy, instead of coming back with a doctor, came back with a priest, which she found almost heartbreaking,” says Max. “They couldn’t heal him, but they could read him his last rites. I think these moments pointed her towards a determination to do something with her life where she would help others.”
Which Peggy did, qualifying as a stateregistered nurse (SRN) in April 1944. Six months later she began midwifery training at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire – the new home of the City of London Maternity Hospital after its site in the capital was bombed. Taxis ferried in expectant mothers, but the student midwives also had to help at antenatal clinics in London. “It was quite spooky as parts of the building’s walls were either missing or piles of rubble,” wrote Peggy.
After she qualified, Peggy worked from a house near Holloway Prison, riding a bike in a fashion familiar to anyone who’s seen Call the Midwife. Like the staff at Nonnatus House, she often met people living in difficult conditions. On her first night she attended the birth of twins. “Peggy had to deliver on a mattress on the floor, bathe the babies in a bowl on the table and use a drawer for a cot,” says Max. Teaching the mother to breastfeed the next day, she realised her patient had nits in her hair.
Peggy married Len in 1948. For all of the excitement of Peggy’s younger life, it’s her descriptions of Len, a man who died before Max was born, that show the emotional centre of her life. “Going through the early years, when they were falling in love, was lovely to read,” says her grandson. Jonathan Wright
Peggy had to deliver twins on a mattress on the floor, and use a drawer for a cot