She pleased me very much by allowing that must make a difference. ‘Benedict’s may alter outwardly, but not Benedict’s traditions. The only person in the hospital to whom the S.S.O. can natter with as an equal is the S.M.O., and as Dr Curtis is married and goes home whenever he can get off, Richard, when he has time to notice it, must be pretty lonely. Of course, he could talk to the sisters ‒’
‘Do me a favour, Margaret! Have you seen most of our sisters?’
‘Careful! Don’t you realize that’s what I am whilst I’m here?’
‘You rank as one of our sisters? Blimey! What make?’
‘Senior.’ She laughed at my reaction. ‘Don’t forget I trained in the Dark Ages in the same set as Matron. I’m having supper with her tonight in her flat.’
‘Honest to God! Wait till I tell the girls!’
She said, ‘If you don’t mind, Jo, I’d rather you didn’t. I’ve been away a long time. I’m only here as a private nurse, even though, being an old Benedictine, I’m temporarily given this exalted status and lent a sister’s uniform. But I feel I’ve no real right to it, or to throw my weight about because I happen to know Matron, the S.S.O., and a handful of pundits by their Christian names.’ She hesitated and studied her hands. ‘Frankly, darling, old Auntie is feeling aged and dithery. You call your boyfriends young. My child, the lot of you look like children to me. When I stepped out of my taxi this afternoon I felt like a ghost from my own past stepping back into that past ‒ until I saw my face in the mirror and realized it was the wrong face for this setting. I’ve now to grow accustomed to this face in this setting, to strange faces in well-remembered places, and to the well-remembered faces that only half-a-dozen people, apart from myself, in this present Benedict’s will remember at all, and that are no longer present. I’m not only talking about Simon.’ She looked up now with eyes that looked backward. ‘I was very happy here. Happiness remembered can be as painful as an old pain. I’d like to be able to ease my way back in gently, without too much of “Do you really remember so-and-so?” and “Was it really like that?” Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and thanked God I had at least had the sense to realize most of this in advance and put a stop to Aline’s inspired guess. Luckily for Margaret and myself, if not Aline, the latter was still in Majorca. She had had acute food poisoning in her last week of holiday, and had remained out there with her parents on sick-leave. There were now a few more of my set on days. Occasionally they teased me mildly about Old Red, but without Aline to lead, as she invariably did on every subject in our set, and with Gwenellen to keep them in her plump hands, on the whole my friends had been remarkably reticent.
At supper that night I told Gwenellen Margaret had arrived to nurse General Francis, since she would have thought it very odd had I not done so. She was momentarily interested, but more from the General’s angle than any other. ‘There’s such a nice man, Jo! Too bad so good a father should have so spoilt his son. A proper little “I want” he was! But I expect his mother ruined him whilst his father was away fighting wars or doing whatever it is soldiers do in peace-time. But, listen, love ‒ have you heard the latest? Tom vows it’s true …’ She went on to enchant me with the hottest grape-vine story in weeks about one of the married theatre sisters who was separated from her husband and a married renal specialist who was not, yet, separated from his wife.
It was several days before I saw Margaret again. The Private Wing occupied a building set apart from the rest of the hospital and on the far side of Casualty yard. The Wing was staffed only by trained nurses who lived and ate with the sisters. The Sisters’ Home was out of bounds to student nurses unless going there on some official ward or departmental errand. Officially, we were not even allowed to ring up the sisters, though that could be got round by giving a false name. Of course, Margaret could ring me, but I was working an extra late, late shift her first week. She came off at nine-thirty each evening. She could not ring up for a chat after midnight when I got back, and though I was free every morning, she was off only from four to eight each evening. The Wing was not merely a building apart. The Wing nurses worked strange off-duty hours and often nursed a patient right through without a day off, taking all the time then due to them at the end of one case before starting the next.
One morning when I was back on the day shift we ran into each other in the ground-floor corridor. Margaret was out of uniform. The General’s operation had been temporarily postponed for further tests, and she was having an extra two hours that morning to make up for time she had missed yesterday. She said she had nothing to do but sit and talk to her patient. ‘I feel such a fraud.’
‘I expect he’s glad to have you there. This waiting must be hell. How’s he taking it?’
‘Very, very well.’
‘So he’s a good patient?’
‘To date, model. He had a card from Bill this morning. It was posted in Malaga.’
‘How the lad gets around! Daisy Yates had another a couple of days ago. Hers was from Gibraltar.’ We had reached the Out Patients Laboratory, my destination. ‘Must go in here. See you.’
The pathologist on counter-duty pushed up his glasses to read my request form. ‘I presume Dr Jones wants to use this in the next half-hour?’
‘He didn’t say, Doctor, but I expect so.’
He took a small test-tube half filled with a colourless turgid liquid from one of his battery of incubators. He held it enclosed in the palm of his hand. ‘We are making more, but the next batch won’t be ready until two this afternoon. This’ll begin to deteriorate directly its temperature drops below blood-heat, so hang on to it until it’s wanted. And, please,’ he added, smiling, ‘don’t drop it, or we will all be very sad here.’
I smiled back. ‘I’ll be careful, Doctor. Thank you very much.’
He nipped round his counter to open the door for me. That was an unusual gesture for any stray doctor to any stray nurse in Benedict’s, but not for a pathologist. For some peculiar and delightful reason which none of us had ever been able to fathom, our pathological department was staffed exclusively by polite and obliging individuals, whether doctors or technicians. Consequently, we all welcomed any chance to visit any of our Path Labs, as the experience gave our morales such a boost.
Mine badly needed a boost that morning. Sister was being as tough as ever; Dr Jones had already snapped my head off three times; Staff Nurse Robins was now fast moving in on Sister’s act with me, and even Old Red when I wished him ‘good morning’ had looked as pained as Dr Jones at his worst.
I had grown too accustomed to Sister and Dr Jones to bother overmuch over them. Robins’s attitude I could follow. As Sister’s stand-in she had to back up every line Sister took, and this morning I had heard her confide to one of the other staff nurses that one of her migraines was starting. She was hoping to keep it off until lunch-time, as it was her half-day and she intended going straight to bed, but from the look of her just now when she sent me to the O.P. Lab. she was feeling wretched. No-one could blame a girl with a migraine for being peevish, particularly as Casualty Hall was having a busy morning.
Perhaps Old Red’s got a migraine, I thought casually, and then, as I realized belatedly that for the past few days he had been much less forthcoming than previously, I wondered what I had done to upset him. Had he noticed other people noticing us? Had some word somehow reached his high-powered private sitting-room in the Doctors’ House? Or was Margaret making his life tricky, and was he working off on me the irritation he would not want to work off on her? Just as before his feelings, whatever they were, for her had overlapped enough for him to include me in their aura? That seemed possible, but so was the fact, since I now knew how dangerously my imagination could mislead me, that being in a gloomy mood I was taking unintentional off-handedness for an intentional slight. Watch it, Joanna, I warned myself, or you’ll find yourself with the best little persecution complex in the business.
I had left Robins with Dr Jones in his office. On my r
eturn Old Red had joined them, and all three were standing in the doorway. Matron had arrived for one of her regular but unexpected rounds, and was up the far end with Sister and talking to a waiting patient. A twitch of Sister’s left eyebrow informed me Robins was now in charge of the Hall. I crossed to the S.C.O.’s office, and waited at Robins’s elbow.
Old Red broke off his conversation. ‘Nurse, if you want Dr Jones, Nurse Robins, or myself, will you please come back in a few minutes? As must be apparent,’ he added impatiently, ‘we’re occupied.’
Had Robins not been struggling with her headache, watching the Hall with one eye, and paying attention to Old Red with the other, she would probably have explained why I was there, since she knew very well. So did Dr Jones, but he never explained away any actions of his juniors.
I apologized with the meekness expected of any student nurse by a senior resident who had suddenly decided to turn into a Big Doctor. Then I moved a few yards away to wait out of earshot.
The Hall was full. The warm, dry weather was still lasting and the heat-wave making headlines in all the newspapers the patients on the packed benches were either reading or using as fans. Every window and door in the department that could be opened was wide. There was not a breath of moving air about, and outside the noon sun had caused the ambulance men to shed their jackets, roll up their shirt-sleeves, push their caps back on their damp heads, and loosen their ties.
The heat made me feel for Robins. She looked a dirty grey now, and by the way she was blinking up at Old Red, who was still talking about some patient, she was having difficulty getting him into focus. Dr Jones, being so blond, was scarlet in the face. Old Red, despite his flaming hair, was paler than normal, which accentuated the colour of his blue eyes. He was lucky, I thought, not to have the florid complexion that so often went with red hair and blue eyes. And then I thought, and so’s Margaret, even if she doesn’t realize it.
He glanced my way then, and briefly our eyes met. Instantly, and it was not my imagination, his expression hardened. Honest to God! I thought, looking away fast, Et tu, Brute! Foolishly, I nearly wept. I knew exactly how Julius Caesar felt.
The genuine Cas Hall junior was doing the noon restocking and testing. She had checked and replaced where necessary the drums of dressings used in all the dressing-rooms, the disposable mask jars, and the various stock lotions and emulsions in regular use. The solutions of double-strength sterile saline and hydrogen peroxide were literally used by the gallon daily. Three times each day and once during the night the Cas junior refilled those particular bottles.
Throughout Benedict’s every routine job had to be done in the approved way and order. When cleaning, we worked from clean to dirty, always clockwise, and if cleaning instruments, first the ‘blunts’ ‒ i.e. forceps ‒ then the ‘sharps’ ‒ scalpels and scissors. In stocking and testing there was an official order in which one topped up bottles. First the ‘safe’ lotions, emulsions, and solutions, then the ‘unsafe’ spirits. The two of these in constant use in Cas were ether methylated and methylated spirits. The ‘safes’ were refilled in the dressing-rooms, but to avoid any danger of an explosion from the heat of the sterilizers the ‘unsafes’ were refilled on a metal trolley parked outside each room in turn.
The junior jangled her metal trolley past me. ‘It’s bad enough doing this with Sister watching, but with Matron as well I’m a nervous wreck,’ she muttered.
‘Relax.’ I looked behind her. ‘They’ve gone into the A.R.R.U.’
‘They won’t be there long. There’s only one man in I.C. (Intensive Care) with a fractured skull, and he’s only there until someone can find a bed for him. The S.C.O. wanted to shift him on, but the S.S.O. says we must keep him. That’s what they’re thrashing out now.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Heard Sister telling Matron. What are you doing?’
‘Keeping this tube cooking until the S.C.O.’s ready.’
‘I’ve got to say it: they also serve who only stand and wait.’ She pushed on.
By her next stop two small children waiting with their mother had grown bored with looking at their comics on the bench and were sitting on the floor by their mother’s feet, building a brick house. The boy looked about five and his sister a little younger. They were being very good, and far more patient than the youth sitting on their mother’s other side. He kept shifting his legs, standing up, sitting again, and complaining to his neighbours. ‘When are we going to get some service, eh? What they need along of this joint is a spot of organization. Look at them all standing around yak-yak-yakking like a pack of bleeding old bags.’
The children giggled together, then the boy tugged his mother’s skirt. ‘Mum, the lady’s trolley goes yak-yak-yak too, don’t it, Mum, don’t it?’
‘Now, Barry, you be a good boy and stay nice and quiet like you been doing.’
‘Mum, no, Mum, you listen!’ He shook the trolley gently by one leg, clinking the large spirits bottles on the top shelf, as the junior reappeared. His sister crawled under the bench and crooned to herself, ‘Yak-yak-yak, yak-yak-yak.’
‘Don’t touch my trolley, duckie,’ said the junior. ‘This stuff’s got such a nasty smell. You’ll be able to sniff it from over there in a minute, but if it spills it’ll smell and smell. Oh, dearie me!’ She put down the half-empty smaller bottles she had brought out. ‘Aren’t I silly? I must have left my funnel in the last room. I’ll have to go and find it.’ She rolled her eyes as she went by me. ‘Wouldn’t I do this, this morning?’
‘Gawd! Makes you wonder, don’t it?’ the youth demanded of his fellows. ‘You see that bit in the paper about the bloke what had the scissors left inside him when he come out the operating theatre? Packed it in, he did.’
‘That happened here? In St Benedict’s?’ The speaker was a middle-aged man in a dark suit, with the thin, anxious face of a man with a chronic gastric ulcer.
‘Not here. But these places is all the same, I reckon.’ The youth produced a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. There was a huge ‘No Smoking, Please’ notice on the wall directly in front of him and a yard from the room doorway. As if to ram home the message, directly beneath the notice was a row of fire-extinguishers and fire-buckets. ‘Anyone fancy a fag?’
I glanced round at Robins. Since she was running the Hall, for a junior to protest in her presence was bad manners. She was not paying attention. I guessed she had not heard.
I moved nearer that particular bench. ‘I’m very sorry, gentlemen, but I’m afraid you mustn’t smoke in the Hall.’
I smiled to include the notice. ‘That does mean what it says.’
The youth looked me up and down. ‘And what if I can’t read, darlin’?’
‘Then I’ll read it for you, with pleasure.’
‘Reckon you could, at that.’ He smiled lewdly. ‘Reckon you could do a lot for me, darlin’, and it’d be my pleasure. So if I put away me fags, what’ll you do for me, eh?’
The middle-aged man looked pleasant as well as gastric. He was shocked and cleared his throat uncomfortably. I would have liked to have told him he need not worry. After nearly three years I had met my quota of sheep who liked to imagine they were wolves. I had met them on benches, in ward beds, wheel-chairs. They came in all shapes and ages, and from assorted backgrounds. They were as foolish, and as harmless, as sheep.
‘I’ll say thank you very much for not risking blowing yourself and the rest of us up. See that trolley? The stuff in one of those bottles is ether. That takes light like petrol.’
The youth, inevitably, looked sheepish. The middle-aged man turned on him. ‘You do like the young lady says and put that lighter away, son! Silly young fool! All the same these teenagers! Think they know it all! Go on, you put it away.’ He flicked the lighter that was still on the seat towards the youth. It spun and fell on the floor. The children scrambled for it as a new toy.
Everything happened so quickly. Later no-one was able to say which child had bumped the trolley and which h
ad flicked on the lighter. I was so close, but I did not see the ether bottle toppling, or hear the sound of broken glass. Fortunately it did break, which prevented its exploding. The ether vapour ignited with a roar, and simultaneously the trolley was enveloped in a rising, spitting sheet of blue-and-white flame.
The screaming started as I grabbed the nearest fire-extinguisher. I did not remember throwing out my pen and jamming the test-tube in the pen-pocket of my dress bib until I found it there later. It had not broken, and my body heat had kept the contents at the right temperature. I was very hot, and not only because of the heat of the flames. Though Sister had taught us all how to work those fire-extinguishers, it was the first time I had handled one in action, and it was much heavier than I expected. The foam jet was more powerful and effective than I would have believed possible. My one extinguisher was really enough to deal with that blaze, even though I was joined in a matter of seconds by the three more that Old Red, Dr Jones, and Robins had dived for. Luis, two porters, and three junior C.O.s appeared with others, but they were not needed.
Another staff nurse and the Cas junior had rushed to attend the two children. Two more nurses and a dresser helped Sister quietly shepherd the patients away from the benches in the danger area. The patients themselves filed out of the Hall as calmly as if going to take their places in a bus queue. Only the two little children had screamed! Their screams continued for a little while, but they were screaming with shock, not pain. Later we heard it had taken two and a half minutes to empty the crowded Hall. When we practised our fire drill Sister Cas was satisfied if we were all out in three.
By tea-time my set knew more about it than I did. A girl in the children’s ward told me the little brother and sister admitted for shock had recovered so well that they were unlikely to be warded more than one night. Their mother had gone home to get her husband’s tea an hour ago. A few other patients had been treated for minor shock. None had needed admission.
Hospital Circles Page 13