The deprivation of a post-war Birmingham suburb has been captured in a new book. Diane Parkes spoke to author Dot May Dunn.

When Dot May Dunn came to re-live her experiences as a health visitor in Aston in the 1950s she found the door hard to push open.

Her memories were vivid – but at times they were too painful to remember.

Still damaged by a war which had hit Birmingham hard, many families in the inner city were living in harsh conditions. Some faced the daily challenges of hunger, unemployment and disease, sometimes exacerbated by too much reliance on the bottle. Others had lost loved ones, and sometimes their sole providers, in the conflicts. And the results could be hard to take for a young idealist just out of medical school.

“It was a very tough and aggressive place to live,” Dot, who is now in her seventies, recalls. “That part of Aston had been left behind. It was only just after the war and people didn’t have anything. A lot of food was still rationed and there were people starving.

“Birmingham had been badly bombed and there wasn’t a lot of housing stock left so you would have people having to share houses. They would be living in one room in a big house. And there were the back-to-backs which backed onto factories.

“But the way people got through it was comradeship. They were proud people. There would be a lot of giving and taking and looking out for each other.”

A newly qualified health visitor, Dot was part of a team based at the Lancaster Street Child Health Clinic responsible for more than 1,000 families packed into a small area of streets in Aston.

Arriving in 1958, she worked with families around the Victoria Road, Park Lane, Clifton Road and Upper Thomas Street area – and admits there were challenges.

“I was always called Miss or The Welfare. We never used surnames, we kept our distance. You had to keep a distance. When you had 1,000 people in conditions that stressful you couldn’t afford to get that close to them, you would have disintegrated.

“There were times when you lost families. They moved or simply disappeared and you never found out what happened to them.”

Dot has used her time in Aston as the basis of a book Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram. Told in the first person, she has changed all of the names – including her own. In the book she appears as Dot Compton while she was actually Dot Walker when she lived in the city.

“Publishers are always a bit worried about people seeing themselves in books so I set the book in a place called Burlington,” she says. “I also changed all of the names.

“In many cases I did also have a degree of poetic licence. They say that people who are writing autobiography have to do that as how can you remember every conversation?

“I didn’t keep a diary at the time, you didn’t have any time when you were writing too many notes. But a lot of it is still very vivid to me. It is a long time ago but there are some things in life that stay with you.”

Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram is Dot’s second book. Her first, Twelve Babies on a Bike, recounted her time as a pupil midwife and became a best-seller. Originally from Derbyshire, Dot came to Birmingham as a raw recruit. She lived in Moseley with her boyfriend Bill Dunn, a welder for Austin Motor Company, who later became her husband and father to their child, also called Bill, who is now a 47-year-old London firefighter.

Dot worked in other parts of Birmingham including Deritend, Balsall Heath, Stirchley and Small Heath before the family moved to London. Her husband died in 1984 and Dot now shares her life with partner of 20 years Brian Turner. These days she divides her time between Leamington Spa and a family home she shares in France.

It may be more than half a lifetime ago but Dot still has a love for Birmingham and has dedicated her book to “the indomitable spirit of Birmingham people”.

They were people who she could not help but admire – because they found their own ways of surviving through hard times.

“In the book I tell various stories of how we were taken for a ride by people,” she says. “People were wheeler dealers and they knew what they wanted. But they were also prepared to respond to us.

“In those days people respected professionalism. If you met them on their ground then they would respond to you and they did generally respect what you said. It was a case of knowing how far you could go with each family. Sometimes they would just peer round the door at you and you would tell them when the next clinic was. That was as close as you could get on that occasion.

“And it was a case of understanding what people were like. Very often if you went to the back-to-backs there would be one woman who knew everyone and everything and you just had to get her on your side. She knew how the cookie crumbled.

“And our responsibility was towards the whole family. If grandma didn’t have any false teeth and needed some to eat with then you needed to sort that out. If dad wasn’t working you would do what you could to encourage him to find a job.”

Dot was working within a much larger system.

“You turned up at each house with a card, it was actually three sides and you would put all your notes on there and then every Friday you would write that up. It was all very organised.

“You had an allowance to buy a navy blue suit but you never over-dressed. We were told very early “don’t go dressed in Chanel to see families who won’t have much more than an apron”.

“I remember going out and buying my first navy blue suit and coat and I always wore a hat. Then you had to take the ticket into work to claim the money back. You had to wear what you had bought so they could see it. This was my uniform really. I bought a couple of good quality navy coats – in fact they were such good quality they lasted pretty much for the rest of my life.”

Walking into people’s lives did have its risks. In the book Dot tells about two incidents when the men of the house attacked her.

“You had to learn when violence may come and do all you could not to evoke it and to step back out of the way,” she says. “And the violence didn’t always just come from men. Women could get very angry too. But when it did happen you just took it on the chin. You didn’t do anything about it.”

Many families were keen to ensure the best for their children.

“The vaccination clinics were really popular, we would have families queuing down the street,” Dot recalls. “At this time people were afraid of things like polio, diphtheria, small pox. People knew about vaccinations from the war.”

Dot talks about how people living in a series of back-to-backs were all taken ill with a stomach bug.

“That would have been gastroenteritis but nobody ever went back to the families and told them that,” she said. “If they were lucky they would get a standpipe or the sewerage department would come and change the lavatory pans.

“But what you can’t imagine is that, if I am describing that happening in one courtyard, then it would have been happening in hundreds of courtyards across Birmingham.”

And Dot admits experiencing so much hardship did take its toll – if not immediately.

“There is a lot of emotion when I think of those times,” she says. “When I was there I was in my early 20s and at that age you don’t necessarily realise that. At that age you think there is nothing you cannot do. You think you can change the world.

“I don’t think I actually realised quite how hard and aggressive it was then. I was too busy just getting on with it.

“It was really only when I came to write this book that I realised quite how hard it had been for the families and for those working with them.

“There are a lot more incidents which happened which I haven’t mentioned in the book. Sometimes things are too hard to write about.”

* Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram by Dot May Dunn is published by Orion for £12.99.