‘Our American adventure was like a movie’
Two old nursing friends, reunited, recall the road trip of a lifetime. Luke Mintz reports
For many of Britain’s eight million over-70s, the last two months of loosening lockdown have been a time of reunion. Old friends, back together again, taking their first tentative steps to normality after months of unfulfilling conversations over Zoom, straining to hear each other over a poor internet connection.
Many of these rekindled friendships stretch back decades, with remarkable stories to tell – none more so, perhaps, than Gwenda Gofton, 86, and Pat Small, 89, who finally met up again last month, for lunch in Fenwick, Northumberland.
Best friends for almost 70 years, coronavirus marked their longest period apart. And what a friendship it has been. In their twenties, the pair became minor celebrities in the United States after embarking on a remarkable year-long road trip, following the westward trail of the 19th-century cowboys in their search for adventure.
They first met as student nurses at Newcastle General Hospital in 1952, where they answered to a “battleaxe” sister tutor who wouldn’t let students chat or use each other’s first names, Gwenda remembers. In solidarity, the pair bonded.
Once qualified, Pat spotted an advert in the Nursing Times for jobs in Cleveland, in the American Midwest, for the equivalent of £90 per month. They arrived in March 1957, just as the snow was beginning to melt, to work at Mount Sinai, a large inner-city Jewish hospital.
“It was the rough part of Cleveland,” recalls Gwenda over Zoom from her home in Northumberland. “Somebody was murdered on my second night. I thought: ‘If my mother knew...’”
Pat adds: “With all these dollars coming in, things were so cheap. At home, it was out of my range to have a portable wireless or typewriter.
There, you could just go and buy one. It was a life of plenty.”
Used to the staid, formal style of English nursing best known from Call the Midwife, the pair were quickly shocked by the attitude of some of their American colleagues.
“The nurse flattened her chewing gum behind her front teeth with her tongue,” Gwenda wrote of one early conversation in Bedpans and Bobby Socks: Five British Nurses on the American Road Trip of a Lifetime, a book about the pair’s adventures ghosted by Gwenda’s daughter, Barbara Fox. “I was so transfixed by this that I had barely registered what she said. A nurse chewing gum on duty! What would the staff nurse say?”
But they settled in well, joining an international club and hosting friends at their shared apartment. Perhaps that is what gave them the confidence to buy a 1949 Ford and take weekend road trips across the North East. Gwenda remembers the excitement of seeing Manhattan’s twinkling lights as they drove over the George Washington Bridge; and the horror of witnessing the extreme poverty that still existed. The apple blossom in Washington DC was particularly “magnificent”. Pat says: “I was of the generation that spent lots of time at the cinema, and they were all American films. So it was just lovely to see all these places in real life.”
In April 1958, their year of nursing service came to an end and the young women loaded their Ford with a few belongings and headed west for a great American road trip. Joined by three friends (Molly from Glasgow, Maureen from London and Celia from Co Tipperary), they drove for thousands of miles, through the flat plains of Wisconsin and the Dakotas and into the
West – the region known so well to the young women from cowboy movies.
“The miles and miles of cornfields gradually gave way to cattle country and the landscape of the Westerns,” says Gwenda. “Low hills rose in the distance and creatures dotted the vast plains, some of them no more than pinpricks on the horizon. We even passed a cowboy on his horse. We saw few cars and people, but when we did, heads would turn and gaze after us.”
They found casual work, waiting tables at the Hotel Colorado, nestled in the Rockies, all their money going into a shared biscuit tin. Where they couldn’t afford a motel, they simply pitched a tent or slept in their car.
In South Dakota’s Black Hills, they ate fire-toasted marshmallows and trekked to Mount Rushmore. They found six months of nursing work in Hollywood, where they persuaded a landlord to let all five of them share a one-bedroom apartment (they worked different shifts, they insisted).
The City of Angels was exactly how they expected, to an almost comic degree. “There were studios on almost every corner … Just off Sunset Boulevard, we came across a camera crew and pulled over. A couple of men in suits and trilbies were standing together, talking and smoking. Two huge lights cast a strange, otherworldly glow on the street.”
They encountered kindness everywhere, and they certainly didn’t expect to cause such a stir: journalists found them wherever they went, their faces appearing in local newspapers. One headline described the pack as “Wandering Girls” – a title that stuck, inspiring a podcast of the same name by Gwenda’s grandson, Joseph.
It was unusual in the Fifties for five foreign girls to take to the road, Gwenda explains, and locals showed a kind-hearted fascination with how they found the guts to do it.
The whole trip felt remarkably safe, they say, except for one regrettable night when they arrived at a ski lodge near Denver to find it was shut. A man called Dennis invited them to stay at his ranch, offering them rum. Upon arrival, he rather unnervingly showed his shooting prowess, lining their new cowboy hats on the ground and putting a bullet through each. In the early hours, Gwenda woke as an alcohol-reeked Dennis stumbled in. He offered them tea; when they politely refused, he took his gun from his belt, throwing it into the air and catching it like a deranged cowboy, and pointing it at Gwenda’s head.
“You drink your tea now,” he told them. “I made it special. You’re all English, right? You all drink tea.”
Gwenda later wrote: “It didn’t seem like the right moment to point out that one of us was Scottish and another was Irish. My heart was hammering so hard, I thought everyone would be able to hear it. I glanced across at the gun. If this were a film, I thought, I would be grabbing it now and forcing him to leave the room. But that idea was too preposterous, and it could all go horribly wrong.” Instead, Gwenda drank her tea and the five women left, calling it a lucky escape.
They returned to Britain in September 1959 and all remained in touch. Gwenda married in 1961 and had four children; Pat married three years later and had two. Her husband, Ian, died in 1998. Maureen went to live in America and died in 1999. Celia returned to Ireland and died earlier this year. Pat and Gwenda, who are still good friends with Molly in Glasgow, also remained great friends even after Pat moved to Edinburgh. The pair, who are both grandmothers, still take regular trips around Europe, plus walking holidays.
As friendships go, theirs is clearly a resilient one. How have they managed to keep close all these years? “I think it’s just having the same outlook, the same ideals and wishes,” says Pat. “You know that you just get on. You know what the other one is thinking.”
And not even coronavirus is going to keep them apart.
‘I glanced across at the gun. If this were a film, I thought, I would be grabbing it’