by Sheila Burns
A Nurse’s Duty
Sheila Burns
Copyright © The Estate of Sheila Burns 2019
This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2019
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
www.wyndhambooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 1938 as Lady! This is Love!
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork: images © Katarina Liss/Mike Charles (Shutterstock) and izuske (istockphoto)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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To
Phyllis Mannin
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Preview: Doctors and Nurses 3-in-1 box set by Sheila Burns
Preview: Heartbreak Surgeon by Sheila Burns
Preview: The Flying Nurse by Sheila Burns
Preview: The Village Nurse by Sheila Burns
Chapter One
I suppose that we all think our own story is the most interesting in all the world, and really I dare say it is of very little interest to those people outside your own circle. And yet I wonder? For all this I have a burning desire to write about what happened to me, because I feel that it has been different. It has been absorbing, and I believe that it will hold you because it is true.
I am a nurse.
I trained in a big London hospital, under the vigilance of one of the strictest Sisters to be found. I worked early and late, until I thought that my feet would drop right off me as I stood. I very soon gave up the idea that a nurse’s life consisted of patting pillows and saying ‘There now!’ in a tenderly sympathetic voice, and I resigned myself to scrubbing and to scouring and to wishing that I had never attempted the job. But I went on. I went on because I knew my people would laugh if I cut it all and went home. I knew that they would say I was spineless, and I wasn’t going to stand for that.
There were days when I got dog-tired. Night duty when I spent the live-long night on my feet. Breakfast at eight, then attending lectures when your head is nodding and your eyes closing for the want of sleep. But let the powers-that-be catch you nodding, and it means dismissal!
I knew that.
Well, we have all been through it.
Three solid years, three hard, and almost defeating, years, with a stiff exam at the end which sets you quaking. Then suddenly a day when I was called up before the Matron (a most frightening old lady) with a certificate in my hand which read ‘Fully Qualified’.
I had done my time.
I was a fully-fledged nurse.
After all this, maybe you wonder what I am like? Well, I’m ordinary, I have brown eyes and brown hair, which I long to go blonde, but which never will; I have a pale complexion and too red a mouth. The very alarming Sister swore that I used lip-stick, but that is not true. That would have meant dismissal all right, because as a nurse there are very few things that you may do in that way. I’m not too tall. I’m the sort of nurse who flits up and down a ward, and who goes on and on slaving all her life. I didn’t suppose that I would marry. In my job you don’t get an awful lot of chances, and it wasn’t as if I had people of my own who could give me a good time off duty.
Mother died when I was a child and Father is very old, and rather a remote sort of a person. He lives with my married sister, and my married sister is one of those people who, had I failed in my training, would have said, ‘There, I knew you couldn’t stick it!’
I’ve had to put up with a lot from Alice, but then lots of us have sisters like that and don’t make a song about it.
I am called Katy Day, and I work from seven-thirty in the morning until seven-thirty at night; then I am generally so tired that I flop on to the bed. I have not much time to enjoy myself. I haven’t time to meet people. No time for anything that really matters in one’s personal and intimate life.
I love my work.
Please don’t think that I am complaining. I always wanted to be a nurse from the time when I bound and bandaged my dolls in the old garden at home. What is more, I would be a nurse if I had my time again, but it is a hard life.
I suppose in every girl’s existence there must be the longing for marriage and motherhood. There is the yearning for romance. It is a latent instinct that you cannot choke down in you, leastways I couldn’t; I’ve tried, but it won’t go.
Love was something which I always thought would never come to me just because I would never get the chance to meet the man of my dreams. Yet for all this the chance came. That is why I am writing this now.
It seemed that suddenly a fairy stepped into my life, and drew back the curtain of possibility and said, ‘Lady, this is love!’
That is why I am taking up my pen now, to tell you the story which is my own; the story that nobody else knows but me.
When I had finished training, for a short time I wandered restlessly through most of the different phases of private nursing. Then suddenly I happened to get offered a post in Miss Vaughan’s nursing home.
I was tremendously lucky in this, because hers is in a very enviable position. The home stands in one of the great, quiet streets of London which lie round Harley Street. I liked Miss Vaughan. She was a woman of infinite understanding, with calm grey eyes that looked you through and through, and grey hair which had never been cut short.
She was one of the few nurses who had not become an automaton through over-training; she was still a woman. She had kept her own soul.
Because I liked her so much I took the job when it was offered to me, and came here to live in her home. What is more, I knew that I was enormously lucky. The staff was largely composed of older nurses, who had been with her for many years and who all worked together like the cog-wheels of some giant machine. The rooms were luxurious. Stepping inside the building, you would never have thought that you were going into a nursing home, but into some lovely private house. Quiet carpets, exquisite flowers, and suddenly through a half-open door the glimpse of a room decorated beautifully (she had a special colour scheme for every room), and further flowers. She believed in minds mending bodies, and for that reason she said it was important that sick people should lie in lovely surroundings, and I am quite sure that she was right.
They put me on to the theatre work.
The newest and junior nurses always get all the rotten jobs that are going; that is one of the laws of hospital work, so that I rather expected I should get something of this kind. Naturally I like to have a patient of my own, and all the responsibility of caring for that patient. I like to get someone ready for the theatre and, receiving them back from the surgeon’s hands, nurse them into health again.
But directly I got to Miss Vaughan’s she called me into her little private room and said, ‘Nurse Day, your first duty will be in the theatre’; then I knew that I should probably be there for some time.
It was, of course, experience, for all the most eminent surgeons in London went to operate at Miss Vaughan’s, and people who were just names before were working in the deathly stillness of that theatre, a stillness only broken by the ripple of anaesthetic passing through tubes, by the word of command, or the rustle of a starched skirt as Sister obeyed that command.
I can see Sister Bridges now. She was old and white-haired, with blue eyes bent on the surgeon, but her heart was in her work. They just lived for their work in that home; they had given the best of their lives to it, and existed for nothing else. You couldn’t expect it of them.
I made friends with the only other young nurse in the building, Nurse Tennyson, called Tenny for short. Tenny was a bit wild, I must say, and she made great fun (sometimes not too kind fun) of the ‘old fossils’ as she called the other nurses. She had been born in Scotland, and she had come to the home because she thought that it would afford chances to meet people, only somehow she had been kept so busy that none of the anticipated chances had come her way.
‘I always hope that I’ll meet some rich patient who wants a permanent nurse, and offers marriage to me,’ she would say with a twinkle in her eye.
Poor Tenny! I liked her, though I always did feel that one day there would be a dreadful rumpus with her, but all the same she had been in the home four years, so she could not have been as cheery as she sounded.
She mentioned Dr. Harper to me. All along I had an idea that his name was a pass-word to the home. They doted on him.
‘He is marvellous,’ she told me; ‘he just won’t let his patients die. You should see that man in the theatre; he is worth watching. He is a miracle.’
I wished she would not talk about him that way, but what she said intrigued me. Most doctors are casual in a theatre, almost rude. There is no time for courtesy, and the idea that romances occur there is a very mistaken one. But the impression she made on me about Dr. Harper stayed, so that when I did see him I was already interested. I was already intrigued. I was busy with the sterilizer when he came in. He was younger than most of our surgeons; tall and dark, with eyes that were quickly alert, and a mouth that was tender and affectionate. You could not look at that mouth without realizing that it might mean everything in the world to you. It sounds silly. It sounds as though I was a love-sick young girl, ready to fall in love; in point of fact I was nothing of the kind.
I watched him coming into the theatre fastening the mask over his face, and after that I could only see his eyes; all the time I knew that they were the eyes of a fighting man. He did not mean to lose to death, whatever happened. He had an extraordinary personality; I felt that; what is more, I am sure that I should have felt it if Tenny hadn’t told me of it beforehand. I had the strange, rather uncanny feeling that he was going to mean something to me, yet all the time I knew that he couldn’t mean anything to me; it was just stupid of me. I pulled myself together with a jerk.
The patient was under when she was wheeled in. It was a tricky case. I personally should have said that she did not stand one chance in a hundred, but I knew that Dr. Harper was not feeling the same way about it. I had nothing to do but stand back and watch, and, as I stood there, I realized the extraordinary will-power of this man. He was the most determined personality that I have ever met as he bent over her.
From the head of the table the anaesthetist whispered a warning. ‘The heart is bad. She won’t stick much more.’
I saw Sister Bridges’ eyes above her mask, and they were distressed. She was one of those people who panic, yet who only show it in their eyes. But the doctor did not turn a hair. He worked on like an automaton, those clever fingers touching this and that, deftly and without hesitation. He went on operating without wasting a second.
‘She has got to stick it,’ he said between his teeth; ‘what’s more, she has got to live.’
I felt then that he was one of those men who could make you do anything that he wanted. I felt that he would never relinquish his hold on a patient’s life if he could possibly help it. He went on, and in the next few minutes I saw him perform what was nothing less than a miracle; it was something that I am quite sure no other man could have done.
Afterwards, when they rushed her back to her room, I stood by the basin offering him a towel as he washed. Suddenly he seemed to relax. He whipped off mask and cap, and I saw that his brow was wet with perspiration, and that the dark hair clung to it. Those eyes which had been so determined and so full of that fighting spirit looked at me in a surprised way, as though he noticed me for the first time.
‘You’re new here?’
‘Yes, sir, I am new.’ And I felt like a little girl at school ‒ a little girl meeting a fresh teacher for the first time. It may sound absurd, but I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look him between the eyes.
He said, ‘They need some new blood; there are far too many of the old school, and it doesn’t help temperamental patients. It is a good thing to have someone fresh. Where were you trained?’
I told him, and it seemed to me that he looked me through; all the while I felt gauche and nervous before him. I felt as though something trembled inside me, and that he could read my thoughts, which made it all the worse, for I knew that I wanted to make a good impression on him, yet here I was blushing like a schoolgirl.
He finished wiping his hands and flung the towel aside. I should have been angry with most doctors who did that, but you couldn’t be angry with him. He was dog-tired from the operation, and I don’t wonder. He had exhausted much of his own vitality in working for the life of the woman. And he had saved her life. He had operated marvellously.
He said, ‘I hope you’ll be on on the next op. Are you theatre nurse?’
And I said ‘Yes, sir’, but I don’t think he stopped to listen to my answer, for he seemed to be thinking about something else.
Then he rushed off.
I told Tenny about it when she came into the sterilizing room, where I was finishing up.
‘I felt such a fool,’ I explained.
‘Oh, he makes you feel like that,’ said she; ‘he is so awfully good-looking and so fascinating. He ought not to be a doctor. He ought to have been a Rudolf Valentino ‒ I always think he looks awfully like Valentino, don’t you? The odd thing is that he hasn’t any time for women and he makes that pretty plain before you know him very long. He doesn’t like them.’
‘He seemed kind enough,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, just kind enough, but nothing more. You’ll never get any further with Ray Harper, my girl, so don’t you fancy it.’
‘I’m not fancying it.’
A bell began to ring.
‘That’s little Mrs. Twenty-Four. Sometimes I feel that she rings that bell to spite me. The moment I have got a cup of tea, bang goes that bell. Half a moment,’ and off she went.
I sat there in the sterilizing room, still thinking about what she had said. I suppose it is because I am plain and rather simple that I never had expected to be attracted to any man, yet somehow this had suddenly happened to me. Ray Harper was somebody you went on thinking about. The way he looked at you, and those calm, almost dreadfully calm hands of his. I knew that I should never forget his fight for that woman’s life this afternoon, and undoubtedly he had saved her. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen big men operate before; I had, but I have never see
n anything so clever as the operation he had performed this afternoon.
But it was all stupid of me.
Quite early on in my training, when hordes of medical students were going round the wards, I had been warned by the Sister who lectured to us.
‘Never set your cap at a doctor, nurses; it doesn’t come off. Never think of a doctor as being anything but a machine, and think of yourselves as being part of the machine which helps him accomplish his task.’
Somehow I could not think of Ray Harper as being only a machine.
‘You’ll get over it,’ said Tenny, coming back cheerfully; ‘you’ll find that when he snubs you you feel awful, but you’ll pull yourself together.’
‘It isn’t anything like that.’
‘Isn’t it? With most new nurses it is. But they all learn in time,’ and she laughed about it.
Just at first at the home I had so much work to do that I couldn’t think of him very often; at that time there seemed to be a large amount of emergency ops rushed in, and we were working from all hours. When I did think of Ray Harper, I was a little ashamed, because it was schoolgirlish and silly, and I had no right to be schoolgirlish and silly with my training.
Then suddenly I found him in the theatre again. That grim personality which actually compelled a patient to live. That haste and precision, the way he instantly stayed bleeding (he was the cleanest surgeon who came to us) and the way he relaxed directly the operation was over.
He always had a smile for me.
He always said, ‘Oh, hello, it’s you,’ when he sank back afterwards, with that tired look in his eyes, and those hands which had been so strong, and which suddenly seemed to have no life left in them.
‘You take too much out of yourself,’ I said one day; it was only about the third time I had seen him. ‘You give too much of yourself.’
And he answered, ‘My patients have a right to demand it of me, and I have no right to deny it to them. My job is to see them well again.’
Somehow then I saw that grimness, that bleak coldness which Tenny said he could put up between himself and any nurse who worried him. I did not talk of his personality again.