Sheila Morris - Oh Baby!
At 24, Sheila Morris was an accomplished young Christchurch nursing sister on her way to Auckland to join famous cardiothoracic surgeon Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes.
However, her passion for skiing put paid to all that when she met 28-year-old local accountant Bruce Morris one weekend in Queenstown. Set up by Sheila’s ice skating friend Diane Buckley, it was obviously a match made in heaven. “Bruce proposed after five weeks and we were married five months later, which had tongues wagging back in Christchurch,” smiles Sheila. A nervous Sheila then had to front up to the Christchurch Hospital matron and announce the cardiac position was off as she was getting married.
Born in the UK, Sheila’s family immigrated to New Zealand when she was five in search of sunshine and no post-war food ration queues. The long sea journey, recorded in a diary by her mother, was “pretty horrific”. Growing up in Christchurch most of her schooling was at Rangi Ruru Girls’ School where she gained distinction in life saving. Sheila’s mother was the first woman to gain a First Class Honours Degree in Science at London University so most weekends she took Sheila and her two brothers as far away as Peel Forest, near Geraldine, to learn the botanic names of plants.
“As soon as I was 15 I got my driver’s licence and Dad let me take the car to Lake Ida (80kms) ice skating.” By 17, self-taught, she was hooked on skiing. “You just learned somehow.”
“When Porter Heights opened we’d ski the morning and start nursing shifts in the afternoons. It took 45 minutes from Christchurch in the Morris Minor.” After many weekends handling rope tows, Coronet Peak’s shiny chairlift lured and Sheila and her nursing friends headed south, borrowing her brother’s Land Rover.
Sheila had spent a year seeing the UK with her parents before starting her nursing training in 1965. Living at the Nurse’s Home was compulsory until the third year. “The matron came round every night shining a torch in our faces. You learned to use a wig and stuff your bed, climbing back in through the windows, or fire escape.”
Queenstown was a far cry from where Sheila had been headed. After five years nursing in the city she ended up as the first nurse to Queenstown’s only two doctors in 1969. “I was receptionist, nurse, cleaner, tidier, administrator and ordered supplies, but they were entertaining, social times.” Patients weren’t used to ringing and not speaking to the doctor direct. “Sometimes when it was quiet during winter I’d have to say the doctors were busy then pop over to Eichardt’s, where they were playing snooker, to get them.”
After six months she decided midwifery was for her, heading back to Christchurch to train for six months. As Queenstown’s legendary midwifery team of Sister Buddle and Lovey Aikman gradually retired Sheila stepped in part-time. She took her own first baby to work at Queenstown’s old maternity home in Sydney Street. “We had a cook, midwife and nurse aid and if I got caught up with a mother in labour the nurse aid looked after Ruthie.” The day her second daughter was born the doctor called her in to the delivery room to help as her Invercargill replacement wasn’t performing. “He said, ‘For goodness sake, Sheila, would you come and help?’ A good friend had had her baby too and had milk galore so breastfed mine,” recalls Sheila. “I then asked the doctor if I could go home and he tried to say no, but when I pointed out that I’d just worked non-stop for six hours he had to let me,” she grins. “Mothers stayed for five days back then and that’s so important to establish feeding and routine.”
Sheila took 12 years off to enjoy raising her family. She and Bruce even managed an 8-week overseas ski holiday while her mother had the two girls, before their two sons were born.
“The kids and I loved horses and Bruce had never said I couldn’t have anything, but I wanted a triple float and he said, ‘No, I can’t afford it. You’ll have to find a part-time job.” Lakes District Hospital boss Isabelle (‘Brem’) Bremner snapped her up. “That was 1988. It was so much fun. Mice were running the edges of the hallway while the builders erected the new hospital around us, until we got our hospital cat.”
At one stage 120 babies were born a year and Sheila rode out many an ambulance transfer by road, some air emergencies, to Invercargill or Dunedin. “I remember my first transfer and I was a bit nervous, but the doctor said, ‘It’s stuck and it’s not going to come unstuck in two hours. If it does you know what to do.” There were some pretty hairy rides. “One premature baby was born mid-flight and I just tucked it down my front to keep it warm and it was fine.”
Her 17 years as a midwife, and more than 20 nursing all up, made Sheila cautious when midwives became lead maternity carers in New Zealand. “Resident hospital doctors can now respond, but we were too isolated here back then and too much could go wrong.” So in 1999, aged 56, she began three years of three months on and three months off contract work at a busy Melbourne Hospital with Bruce joining her periodically. Here she trained as a neo-natal intensive care nurse.
Retirement at 60 wasn’t really. A short stint working on her son’s St Bathan’s vineyard has grown to 18 years, which she loves, but there’s still time for gardening, tramping adventures and family.
