The Nit Nurse

When I was at school we had regular visits from the nit nurse. She would set up shop in the cloakroom. This consisted of a bowl of Dettol-water and a comb. Each kid would be checked to see if they had nits, and if they did a card was given to them to take home. Everyone really hoped that they wouldn’t get a card as it meant that you were unclean and to be avoided at all costs. I don’t know if this happens in the schools in the UK today. It’s possibly gone the way of free milk and disappeared.

I now live in Australia and it is quite common for kids to get nits in the summer and has nothing to do with how clean you are, but back then it was the worst thing that could happen to you. I’ve done a bit of ‘nitting’ with the grandkids. Apparently head lice have no preference for clean or dirty hair – they are happy with either, so we were all misinformed. I never had nits as a kid and have never had them since…….yet. There’s a lot of misinformation about head lice.

I always had my hair plaited for school and I hated the nit nurse looking in my hair as she only ever undid one plait and then plaited it up again very loosely, and by the end of the day it would be sticking out all over the place. Mum always plaited super tight.

Many years ago my neighbour’s kids hung over the fence and said, ‘Hey, Sue, guess what we’ve got!’ I was expecting a bike or a rabbit or something but it was, ‘We’ve got nits!’ It kept me giggling for quite some time.

To this day, whenever I smell Dettol I think of the nit nurse. My nose is my time machine. For some people it’s music – and it is for me, to a degree – but smells can whip me back through time at hyperspeed.