‘We heard how you did your stuff, Jo!’ exclaimed Gwenellen. ‘I’ll bet you’re Sinbad’s pet, now! What did she say to you?’
‘She said, “Dungarvan, I’ll have no gals with lacerated, infected bosoms caused by their own carelessness in my ship’s company. So if I ever catch you putting a test-tube in your bib-pocket again I’ll have ye guts for garters!” ’
Chapter Ten
THE ACCIDENT RECOVERY ROOM UNIT
A week later I was in the Accident Team. Six days before I was moved Staff Nurse Humber arrived in Casualty.
‘The Hall staff nurses are spitting blood,’ I confided to Margaret when she rang me after my first day in my new job. ‘Sister didn’t tell anyone she was coming to us from Marcus, or that Mrs Fields isn’t coming back as she’s having a baby. Humber’s been shoved in over all their heads. Robins was so livid it cured her migraine! Usually when she has one it lasts for days. Ruthless type, our Sinbad, but, baby, does she get results!’
‘Very necessary, in a complicated department like Cas. Isn’t this Humber one of your old mates?’
‘God bless her, she is! She even had Sister smiling on me before I left the Hall. What’s your news?’
‘The General’s op is fixed for next Thursday.’
‘Poor man!’ It was a Monday. ‘Such a wait! Tell him good luck from me.’
‘I will. He’ll appreciate it. He considers you a most fetching young woman.’ From her voice she was smiling. ‘And the Corp thinks you a real nice young lady with ever such a lovely smile.’
‘The cute pair!’ I was more grateful than I cared to tell her for the kind words. Although Humber had transformed life with Sister Cas for me, her advent had had no effect on my one-time source of strength and comfort. Richard Leland now seemed ready to spit at the sight of me, and I honestly did not know why. I did not like it either. I had grown so accustomed to thinking of him as my one mate in Cas, and owing to Margaret’s habit of using his Christian name, I now found it impossible to think of him by any other name. But when we met he seemed to go out of his way to remind me he was neither the amiably silent Old Red I used to know nor my mildly friendly future Uncle Richard. He was very much our Mr Leland, the S.S.O.
I asked Margaret how she was making out with the Corp.
‘Very well, I think. I had a head start as Dickie’s Mum. He calls me “ma’am”, inquires daily after the young master, and when he’s not doing odd little jobs for the General he spends all day and half the night sitting practically to attention on a hard chair outside the General’s room. When I suggest he goes to a movie or across to the pub for a beer he says “Much obliged, ma’am, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stay.” So he stays, and when the General is snoozing takes me through the Second World War. We reached Alamein last night.’
‘Was the General in it?’
‘Yes. As a major in a tank regiment. The Corp was one of his tank crew. I now know exactly how General Francis won his M.C., and pretty nearly how to drive a tank. Incidentally, I asked the Corp what Alamein was really like. He thought for a good five minutes. “Noisy, ma’am. Bit noisy”.’
I laughed with her. ‘You sound as if you’re enjoying your come-back!’
She said warmly, ‘I should. Everyone has been so incredibly kind to me.’
For ‘everyone’ I read Richard Leland. I should have been delighted. I was, for her. For myself, I was too shaken up by the day I had just worked to feel delight. Recently I had very much wanted to get into the A.R.R.U. to prove myself to Sister, and to myself. One day had been enough to show me my original instincts had been right. I had got what I wanted, but it was not a job I was ever going to like, much less enjoy. That day haunted me all evening, and that night I had the kind of nightmares I had not had since I worked in the theatre. But at least the messiest theatre job was clean, aseptic, impersonal. The most fastidious human being looks the reverse after being mangled in a road accident, and, being in ordinary street clothes and on some ordinary occasion when the accident happens, our patients arrived in the Unit looking like people, not patients. It was that that hit me, and not only me, in the pit of the stomach.
Daisy’s friend Mary de Wint was the staff nurse in charge of the nurses in the Accident Team. There were four of us under her. Daisy was the most senior, and I was the junior. We were all third- or fourth-years. In Benedict’s no first- or second-year student nurses worked in the Unit, and only the final-year students, which was why Sister Cas had been so furious about Charlie Peters.
Nurse de Wint was a small, dark-haired, and very quiet girl. During my time in the Hall I had liked the very little I had seen of her, as she was a fixture in the Unit. To call the A.R.R.U. the Unit was something else I had learnt in one day. Benedict’s had rows of ‘Units’, but once anyone had worked in the Accident Team, for ever after for that person there was only one Unit in the hospital.
Daisy was off for my first day. Cleaning the already clean Cleansing Theatre together early next morning, she remarked on the extraordinary but accepted hospital fact that throughout one’s training one constantly worked with the same people. ‘Some sets one never meets from the day they start in the P.T.S. to the day they collect their badges; others follow one round and round in the same small circles.’
I drew a circle in polish on the spotless metal trolley-top I was working on. (In the C.T., as in the other theatres, we started each day by cleaning the clean, polishing the polished; we cleaned between patients; we cleaned again at the end of the day.) ‘Even in one’s own set one keeps on the same circuit with just a few. I’ve worked I don’t know how often with Gwenellen. Never with Aline.’
‘Aline Ash? I worked with her in Arthur, and recently in Marcus. She still off sick?’
‘Yes. Out in Majorca.’ I removed my polish circle. ‘Daisy, in Marcus did she and Humber ever settle down?’
‘Hardly. The atmosphere was so thick when the night girls came on a blow-lamp wouldn’t have got through.’
‘I’ve never understood that. They’re both so nice.’
‘Humber’s all right.’ She gave no opinion on Aline. ‘Mind you, Humber used to be very taken with Robin Armstrong.’
‘I never knew that!’ Her inference was too obvious for pretence. ‘You’re not suggesting Aline bust it up?’
‘I’m not suggesting. I’m stating a simple fact. She did. Right here in Cas last year. God knows why, as dear old Robin’s not her type at all. He’s far too slow.’
That was true, and, as I did know from Aline, the reason why she had dropped Robin. ‘Certainly she much prefers the fast-talking fast workers, being one herself.’ As I spoke I realized I could be describing Bill. ‘Daisy, she can’t have known about Humber and Robin. She wouldn't snitch.’
‘Jo, I know she’s your friend, but that doesn’t have to strike you blind. Maybe she can’t help being one of those girls who are only attracted by other girls’ men ‒ or maybe she just likes playing with fire. Some do. Not me, but it takes all sorts.’ She had finished and covered her setting. She pulled down her mask, and her face was red from the sterilizer’s steam. ‘Have you really not seen that streak in Ash?’
‘No. That is, not until now. Now, hell, yes.’ I was remembering a couple of tentative romances that had for some reason never got off the ground, and then later how Aline, for a while, had run around with the man in question. Then I remembered a long-forgotten incident that could have split our set wide open but for Gwenellen. It had been in our first year, when Gwenellen first met Tom Lofthouse. Aline had made a very obvious play for him, but Tom, being seriously in love with Gwenellen from the start, had refused to play. Aline had made a huge joke of it all, but to this day had never a good word for Tom. Gwenellen had apparently ignored the whole thing, and had never mentioned it to me, or, as far as I knew, anyone else since. Nor had she let it affect her friendship with Aline. Gwenellen was four months younger than myself and our set’s baby. It struck me now that if Aline was our cleverest member
Gwenellen was by far the most mature.
My lack of insight infuriated me. ‘Why do I have to be such a nut? Why do I see people without really seeing them at all?’
‘Because you see them as you imagine they are, and not as they are. One hell of a difference! As for your being a nut, that’s just something else you’ve dreamed up to the point where you’ve kidded other people, into believing it so successfully that you’re now beginning to believe in the act yourself. Humber rumbled you in Marcus. She’s been working on Sinbad.’
‘That, even I’ve rumbled.’
‘If the eyes are opening there’s hope yet. Oh, damn the customers! Not this early!’
It was ten minutes to eight. The red light over the door was flashing on and off, a sign that the emergency line from the lodge was ringing the telephone in Mr Waring’s tiny office along the corridor. Nurse de Wint was with Sister, getting the daily staff nurses’ briefing. Mr Waring, his two surgical registrars, two house-surgeons, and the Resident Accident Anaesthetist, plus our four accident dressers, were at breakfast.
Daisy vanished to answer the telephone. ‘I’ve had to call for the lot,’ she said on return. ‘We’ve a right packet on the way in.’
June Bateman, another fourth-year and next in seniority to Daisy in the Unit, had joined us from the Intensive Care Room. ‘What’s the packet?’
‘Two couples. One middle-aged, one young, and a baby. The baby’s only shaken. He was in a carry-cot, between what I guess were his mother and grandmother in the back.’ She set four emergency transfusion trolleys with the speed and precision of a machine. ‘The two men have really copped it. The women are pretty bad.’ She repeated herself as Nurse de Wint came in.
‘How?’ asked de Wint.
‘On the clearway. An empty lorry overtaking got into a skid and spun. Its back hit the car. A closed saloon. Paddy says the cops say the top has been sliced off so cleanly it now looks like an open tourer. It was that drop of rain half an hour ago after the weeks of dryness.’
Nurse de Wint surveyed the empty tables. ‘I thought we’d fill up when I saw that rain. The old dried oil will have made the roads as slippery as when rain falls on snow and freezes. Well, Dungarvan, Table 4 for you. Yates, 2, Bateman, 3. I’ll take Table 1 with Mr Waring.’ She looked round as the dressers rushed in. ‘Morning, gentlemen. An early start.’ She was still briefing them when Mr Waring and the other men arrived.
Daisy said, ‘I was sorry to herd you from your bacon and eggs, Mr Waring.’
Mr Waring, though Senior Accident Officer and of equal status with Dr Jones, had a very different approach to his juniors. ‘Nurse Yates, I’ll bawl you out for one hell of a lot,’ he replied amiably, ‘but not for causing the rain to fall.’ The red light began to flash. ‘Here we go again. This’ll be ’em.’
About a minute later the first special major-accident trolley was wheeled in, quickly followed by three others. These trolleys stood as high as the tables, were fitted with special mattresses through which X-rays could pass, and were so constructed as to allow any part of the trolley to be tilted upwards, downwards, or sideways, without dislodging the occupant. Inside of ten minutes, despite the air-extractor, the scents of oil, sweat, fresh blood, blood-soaked clothes, and road grime mingled sickeningly with the scents of ether and anaesthetic.
The young woman I was attending was mercifully unconscious. There was an obvious fracture at the base of her skull, the jagged ends of her right radius were sticking through her blue linen suit-sleeve as well as her skin, and the back of her neck and her shoulders were ripped by flying glass. Of the four adults in that car, she was the least injured. At first I took her for a brunette. She was blonde, and when I washed the caked blood from her face she was pretty and very young.
Mr Waring arrived at the elbow of the Registrar with whom I was working, together with a dresser. ‘Any internal bleeding, John?’
‘None that I can find. Will you see?’
Very gently, Mr Waring made an examination. ‘None. Good. The usual,’ he murmured almost casually before walking away.
He was not being casual. The ‘usual’ specific immediate treatment might vary with every patient that came into the Unit, but to the Unit each was a matter of old and much practised routine. The routine was new to me, but as de Wint had briefed me very clearly and everyone else knew his job so well, I found it far easier than I expected to fall in with the routine.
It took me rather longer to grow accustomed to the strange sensation of timelessness. In the wards, even in the Hall, one was constantly summoned from job to job. The telephone had always to be answered. The clock had always to be watched. Not in the Unit. As we were all permanent fixtures, no-one had any responsibilities outside. Even Mr Waring’s emergency telephone was taken over, when any major accident, as now, came in, by one of the Hall staff nurses sent to sit in his office and tell him personally anything he had to be told. I had always thought him a nice little man. By the end of that second morning I never thought of him as a ‘little man’ again.
Two hours after they were wheeled in, the two women and the younger of the two men were admitted to wards. The older man died on the trolley twenty minutes after leaving the ambulance. Table 1 was never used. The Cleansing Theatre was empty again before I was aware of this.
Mr Waring looked back at Table 1 as he washed his hands and arms. ‘From the papers the cops found on them and lying around they were taking themselves and the car to France on holiday. They must have made an early start to get away before the traffic piled up. And then the rain came down. On the just and the unjust.’
Mr Cook, one of the Registrars, asked, ‘Anyone know what happened to the lorry-driver?’
‘Upset, but otherwise not even mildly shocked.’ Richard Leland had come in. ‘The cops brought him up for a check up. I’ve let him go. The baby’s all right. We’ll keep him in until the other set of grandparents arrive. They’ve got to come down from Manchester, so they’ll be here some time this afternoon.’ He leant against the door. ‘I’ve just been speaking to the grandmother.’
Mr Waring nodded to himself as he mopped his forehead with the towel on which he had just dried his arms. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t save that older chap, sir.’
Richard said unemotionally, ‘No man can save a man whose face has been pushed through the back of his head. Typical front-passenger-seat injury. But I’ve had another look at his wife. I think she and the young couple should do. That’s three out of four, Michael. You could have done a lot worse. And the baby’s all right,’ he said again. ‘His mother was lying on top of him.’ He glanced up as the light above his head started flashing. ‘This’ll be the boy on a scooter I came in to tell you about. Fractured skull.’
‘My God! Don’t tell me it’s another no skid-lid?’
‘He had one on, but as he hadn’t done up the strap, when he came off, it came off.’ Richard moved from the door and went out with Mr Waring.
A dresser asked, ‘Who’ll tell that poor old girl about her husband?’
‘The S.S.O.’ Mr Cook and Nurse de Wint spoke together. Mr Cook added, ‘His job.’
‘Christ,’ muttered the dresser, ‘who’d have it?’
No-one answered him.
The boy who had come off the scooter looked about Charlie’s age. He was unconscious and already growing spastic from brain damage when he was wheeled in. He was articled to a firm of chartered accountants. He lived in Putney and had had his scooter only a month. He was still in the Intensive Care Room when his parents and seventeen-year-old sister arrived. Shortly after they were joined by the head of his firm. They waited in Mr Waring’s office, and as the most junior nurse in the Unit I was sent to take them a tray of tea. The mother said, ‘Do you mind pouring, Nurse? My hands are a little unsteady.’
Her husband was a plumber. He had been called home from work and was still in his working clothes. He owned a good car, and his wife and daughter wore good clothes. They were a very ordinary little family. They
looked as if they cared for each other and for the semi-detached home they were buying with a Council mortgage; as if they always had a joint and two veg on Sundays, and the only time there was alcohol in the house was at Christmas; as if they did the pools and occasionally risked a few bob of the house-keeping at a betting shop, but never ran into debt, got drunk, had any dealings with the police for anything more serious than a forgotten dog-licence, and regarded violence and sudden death as not really the concern of respectable people.
Later I saw dozens of such little families sitting very close together in Mr Waring’s office. I never grew accustomed to them, and often never learnt their names. The expression they all wore lingered like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, but it was no grin. It was an expression of dazed horror, and the horror was tinged with outrage. ‘This can’t really be happening ‒ not to us. Why us?’
Their name was Parker. While Mr Parker stared at his untouched tea and Jenny, their daughter, crumbled, but did not eat, a biscuit, Mrs Parker talked to me about her son. ‘He’s always been a good boy, Nurse. I’m not saying he’s not had his moods, but all the youngsters have ’em, and he’s never given his father and me a moment’s what I call real worry. Did ever so well in grammar school. He got his two ‘A’ Levels. Pure and Applied Maths, he took ‒ though what that means don’t ask me, as I’m sure I couldn’t say. But you see what I mean, dear? He’s been such a good boy, and he’s done so well.’
I saw exactly what she meant and knew exactly to whom she was really talking. The head accountant sitting on the other side of the desk in his neat dark-blue suit looked downwards and lowered his head as if he realized he was listening to a prayer.
Jenny had not taken her eyes off my face. She had long, straight light-brown hair carefully arranged to fall forward. Now she constantly pushed it back, impatiently. ‘Nurse, how is David? They told us he was bad. How bad?’
Her mother said quickly, ‘Jenny, I told you it’s not fair to ask nurses, as they can’t tell you. They’re not allowed to. The doctor has to tell you. He’ll be in soon.’ She turned to me. ‘Jenny’s not used to hospitals, dear. This is the first one she’s been in since she was born. David, too. But I mind what the nurses used to say when I was in St Martha’s for the two of ’em. That’s how I know.’ She looked at her husband and daughter. ‘We’ve been ever so lucky. We’ve all had good health. We never thought’ ‒ her voice shook ‒ ‘as anything like this could ever happen to one of us.’ She suddenly stiffened as Mr Waring came in with de Wint. ‘How is he, Doctor? How is he? He is going to be all right?’
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