A Life Well Lived Hall & Prior cares for many former nurses at its 27 homes in NSW and WA, one of them is Jennifer Smyth, a nurses who now lives at St Lukes Aged Care Home and was never quite “off duty”. By Gabi Mills Jennifer and her husband John.
Digging through the archives of Jennifer Smyth, one of St Luke’s long-time residents, have sparked many happy memories for her children – David, Mary, Peter and Michael. Those who know and love Jennifer, a resident at St Luke’s Aged Care Home in Subiaco for the past eight years, use powerful words to describe her: kindness and generosity. A nurse who never quite took off her uniform, even in her 80s, Jennifer would often attempt to help other residents who had perhaps fallen or required help. Her eldest son David explains. “My mother was long past the point of being able to offer assistance and Trevor Weaver, one of the home’s Registered Nurses would say to her with a smile; “Nurse Smythe, you are not on duty tonight.” Born in 1934 in Lambeth, London, as a child Jennifer was evacuated to north London with her younger brother Michael during the war like so many other children at the time. Peter says that she recalled a beautiful summer spent playing with the children from a gypsy camp nearby to where she was billeted. “Mum said it was the happiest summer she ever knew,” Peter said. Her youngest son Michael, who now lives in Germany, recalls his mother reading ‘Carrie’s War’ to him as a child, a book about two children who were evacuated from London to Wales.
“I remember my mother recounting her experience of being evacuated – she had many pleasant memories of seeing the countryside,” Michael said. As a teenager, Jennifer belonged to the nautical arm of the Girl Guides, and won awards for the long jump at school, even visiting the Commonwealth Games facility in London on occasion. Blissful family holidays were spent on Hayling Island, off the south coast of England, and there are many photographs showing Jennifer with her brother, mother Phyllis and father Nelson having fun by the seaside. Nelson, a machine tool foreman from Wales, died suddenly in 1954 while Jennifer was training to be a nurse, and Phyllis and the children were subsequently taken under her Uncle Alec’s wing. A close-knit family, Phyllis’s father Ernest lived next door to the family on Hannington Road in Clapham, meaning Jennifer and her brother were always surrounded by love and support. Uncle Alec would go on to give Jennifer away on her wedding day, to John Smyth, on August 23, 1957. “You can see Uncle Alec and Aunt Lala (as my mother referred to her), standing next to her in the group wedding photograph,” Michael said. John and Jennifer met after she started her midwifery training while John was rostered to manage the staff clinic at London’s University College Hospital.
