by Kate Eastham
She picked up her wool skirt and, with a flash of fine stocking, skilfully flitted her way through a sea of needy faces and a murmur of ‘Nurse, nurse, please, nurse.’
As she reached the area of the ward where the beds were, she automatically scanned under each one; sure enough, dark huddled shapes and the glint of an eye indicated that the rats were back in. At the sight of them her stomach turned and she moved faster. She would let the other staff know so they could have a go at them with brooms and clubs. Some of the fitter patients kept bayonets within reach for that purpose but most were too sick to even notice the scurrying of these vile beasts under and over beds and mattresses.
At last she reached the door and ran full pelt into Mary Roberts.
‘Ah, Nurse Blackwood,’ said Sister with a great deal of amusement twinkling in her brown eyes. ‘We have a new nurse, just arrived off a ship from Scutari, in a bit of a state and not really rousable. I think it’s sun stroke but with all the fevers going round we can never be too sure. Would you go along and have a look at her? I need to get on and sort out the supplies. We seem to be short again – they never send on what they should from Scutari.’
Rose had stood quietly listening, concern for the new recruit growing. ‘Yes, Sister, of course. Do we know anything about the new nurse?’
‘Ah yes,’ said Sister Roberts, pulling Miss Nightingale’s letter out of her pocket. ‘I spoke to her only briefly but there is a letter of recommendation here. Her name is Ada Houston. She has no training; they have nothing for her at Scutari. The thing is we weren’t expecting anyone – there has been no correspondence. Miss Smith may know something about her but I doubt it. Anyway, nurse, you get along there and see what you can do for the poor girl. At this rate we might lose her anyway.’
Nurse Blackwood nodded and walked to what would be, hopefully, her final duty of a very long day.
On reaching the sick bay Rose took stock of the situation. A hospital nurse who yesterday had developed a high fever and had been projectile vomiting now lay quiet, a bit too quiet for her liking, in the far bed. One thing that Rose had learnt very quickly about these fever cases was that beyond sponging them down there was little that one could do. Either the fever would break and the patient would recover or the infection would be unstoppable and lead quickly to death.
Nurse Blackwood’s heels clipped on the wooden floor as she went across the room to make her assessment of the new patient. She seemed to be sleeping and, as Sister Roberts had reported, she was hardly rousable and clearly had a bad case of sunburn on her face from standing out without a bonnet. Rose noted a pretty face with delicate cheekbones, a small but full red mouth and the longest black eyelashes that she had ever seen. The girl’s hair was struggling to escape from its restraint and although spattered with what looked like dried vomit, it fell luxuriant on the pillow as Rose removed the combs that held it in place. Someone, probably Sister Roberts, had already removed a worn but carefully darned red shawl that now lay neatly folded at the end of the bed.
First Rose felt the girl’s face and neck to check for heat, observed the depth and strength of her breathing and looked for the beat of a rapid pulse beneath the delicate skin of the young woman’s neck. She was sunburnt but there was no sign of a major fever. Beneath the thin blanket the girl was fully clothed in dress that was suited to the cold streets of some English town, not the summer heat of the Crimea, and so Rose removed the girl’s outer garments for comfort. She was surprised to find that the girl had a rather lovely mother-of-pearl brooch pinned to her blouse. Best secure that to her shift, she thought, so it doesn’t get lost.
Finding a bowl of water and a cotton cloth by the bed, she gently sponged the girl’s face, neck and hands. As she turned the hands over she noted finely shaped fingers and delicate palms covered in very rough skin. It looked like this girl was more than used to hard work. Then finally, as she had been taught, using the last dregs of water for the most soiled area, she soaked and then sponged the dried vomit from that glorious mane of dark brown hair.
Rose always liked to perform these simple offices for people. It made her feel as well as know the reason she had come out to this godforsaken place. The tenderness with which she wiped the girl’s skin, taking extra care around her eyes and laying the cloth for a few moments across the forehead, had become, for Rose, almost like a meditation. It was a ritual that she had performed many times within the walls of this hospital, but each time it was done with as much care and respect as she could muster. She felt that the more battered, weather-beaten or maimed the face, the more deserving of this small comfort. She had known hardened soldiers’ eyes fill with tears on receipt of this tender care.
She knew by the girl’s responses that it would be a waste of time sourcing a bowl of beef tea or a piece of bread for her – she wouldn’t be taking solid food just yet. So she simply offered a sponge soaked in drinking water first to the lips and then to the girl’s mouth. The girl drank readily, so Rose offered some sips of water from a spouted cup, carefully propping her up with her free arm. The girl muttered thank you and then opened her eyes just for a moment. She gave Rose a beautiful smile that felt like a glimpse of the sun. Rose smiled back at her and then squeezed her hand before saying goodnight.
The ward was rapidly darkening; Rose found a lamp and lit it with the tinder. This was the time she should be finding her way back to the nurses’ quarters and taking her rest, but she was reluctant to leave this girl with the lovely smile. She remembered what a state she herself had been in when she first arrived and how grateful she had been for one of the nurses at Scutari sitting with her. She would probably get into trouble with Sister Roberts for this but she knew what her instincts were urging her to do.
The welcome glow cast by the lamp flickered around the room and in the corner she saw a chair. She would sit here tonight by the girl, then she could give her drinks overnight and make sure she was safe.
She laughed to herself as she carried the Turkish lamp across to a small table between the beds. She felt like Florence Nightingale with her lamp, but knew that back in Scutari Miss Nightingale was also known as the ‘lady with the hammer’ after an incident where she had been denied access to a storeroom of medicines that were needed for her wounded men. And she had taken a hammer and smashed the lock off the door. Rose smiled when she remembered the story and felt so proud of the woman who had inspired her to come out to the Crimea.
Beginning to feel sleepy, Rose found herself drifting off and began to doze in the chair by the girl’s bed. And as the night passed, her waking and sleeping became muddled and she entered a strange state of awareness.
She found herself back home watching again the spectacle of the troops as they embarked, their bright red jackets, shining buttons and military hats dazzling and delighting the huge crowd that had gathered to see them off. No one, except her father, really seemed to know where the Crimea was but everyone was certain that the men would be back soon and they would be victorious. In her sleep she also visited again that cold drawing room in her father’s house where, under the tick of the mantel clock, she had requested permission to apply to join the contingent of army nurses gathering for transfer out to Balaklava. She saw again her mother’s look of pain as she glanced up from her embroidery then put down her needle.
Rose would like to think that this was due to concern for her daughter’s safety but she knew, in truth, it related to the probable loss of a love match that her mother had been working on between Rose and a local landowner’s son.
But Rose’s imagination had been caught by the prospect of doing something good for others – not taking flowers round to an ailing relative or visiting the poor house, but doing something that would make a real difference.
Conditions for the soldiers in the Crimea had been reported for all to see in The Times, and with the journalists now having access to that new telegraph, the people of England could get the news very readily, almost before the blood had dried on the battlefie
ld. This had made Rose feel close to the events of the war and to the plight of the men and she had begun to have vivid dreams of being dressed as a nurse and carrying a lamp like Miss Nightingale. And the more afternoon teas she had to sit through, or invitations to balls that she received, or, worst of all, the stitch after stitch that she was required to make with her embroidery needle, the more she wanted – no, needed – to do something real.
9
‘The very first requirement in a hospital [is] that it should do the sick no harm.’
Florence Nightingale
In the doctors’ quarters at the other side of the hospital building, John Lampeter paced up and down the restrictive length of a barely furnished room. He ground his teeth in frustration and talked out loud, going through the surgical procedures he had been required to perform during another busy day of receiving casualties from Sevastopol. One of the above-knee amputations had gone smoothly but that last procedure was a complete mess. The man shouldn’t have bled like that. It would be easy to blame his incompetent assistant but he reluctantly and angrily acknowledged that his sheer exhaustion and repeated exposure to a series of demanding tasks had compromised his performance.
Damn and blast it, he could feel again the artery slipping from his grip as the useless ligature tightened on nothing. He had been left frantically clawing around in a haemorrhage of blood for the blasted vessel as the poor blighter exsanguinated before his eyes. He hadn’t even realized that the new nurse had fainted until after he’d finished. I mean, where did they get these women from anyway? Any nurse with the right experience should be able to stay on her feet during a routine operation. Not that it would have made any real difference; these procedures were difficult even in the best of circumstances, and when an injured man had been left so long before he was seen by a doctor, when infection had set in, it was even worse.
Lampeter was always hard on himself and he hated it when things didn’t work out for the best. He had been a doctor long enough to know that was often the way, but even so he still despised himself for what he regarded as a botched job. With a sigh he sat down on the edge of the bed and poured himself a large brandy from the bottle that lived on the packing case which served as a bedside locker. He took a good slug and tried to relax as the fiery liquid burned down his gullet then settled with a glow in his empty stomach. What he’d give for some tobacco in his pipe right now. Hopefully Dr Mason would be in soon, a generous good-natured fellow who would almost certainly share a smoke.
Suddenly restless again, he got up from the bed and went over to the narrow window ledge to inspect the collection of bullets he had dug out of the flesh of British and Russian soldiers alike. He knew from his careful study of ammunition and observation of the effects on the human body that the damage from these weapons was becoming more severe. At the beginning of the war when he was in Scutari you could dig a ball of shot out of a man’s thigh and sew him up with little damage – the bullet would literally bounce off the femur. Now the bone would be shattered from top to bottom on impact and the leg would almost certainly need to be amputated.
He was interrupted by a knock at the door and Jones entered carrying a black tin pan containing something to eat – he didn’t know what, but thought it might be boiled beef. He instructed Jones to place the meal on the table and then be gone to his other duties. Jones had suffered greatly during their posting to Balaklava. Remarkably, while all and sundry were falling over with typhus fever or cholera back in Scutari, Jones had remained hale and hearty, but as soon as they arrived in the Crimea, down he went with a damned inconvenient fever that left Lampeter without a servant. He knew that the man couldn’t help all of that, but with his uniform hanging loose about him Jones now looked for all the world like a pauper from one of those sketches by that chap Dickens.
Lampeter tried to feel something for his poor, downcast servant but increasingly his feelings towards those who were not injured or dying were blunted as they became buried deeper and deeper inside the shell of a man who was required to deal with death and horror on a daily basis.
He was saved from sinking from an angry to a black mood by the appearance of Dr Mason in the doorway. With his cheerful manner and ready wit, his companionship in the evening made a world of difference to John. The meat they were about to eat might be the toughest in the whole world but shared with Mason it would be much easier to stomach.
After supper they both settled with some brandy and a share of Mason’s tobacco to talk through the events of the day. When both started to fall asleep through sheer exhaustion the conversation petered out and it was time for bed.
John knew he should check through his clothes and bedding for lice or at least try and remove some of the dried blood on his boots, but sheer exhaustion hit him and after quickly finishing the rest of his glass he fell on to his bed and entered a dark, heavy sleep.
The booming of artillery up the coast continued overnight but nothing could disturb John. Even as a medical student he had had a reputation for being able to sleep through anything and rarely became ill.
His days here at the hospital were intense and so busy it seemed that he could have been here weeks or months or even years. In fact he had arrived on board a steamer from Scutari only a few months ago. That foggy day, as they breached the narrow entrance to the harbour and he saw the dock bristling with masts and the shape of the rocky shore, had felt like the beginning of something he had been craving since his arrival in Turkey last year.
His work at the hospitals in Scutari had gone well enough, but as a young surgeon he was frustrated by the lack of surgical cases and the huge number of chronic medical cases on the wards. Fevers were rampant and often deadly. In fact he had lost two of his colleagues and close friends within the space of a few days, and he too, in the end, had succumbed to an aggressive choleric fever.
He couldn’t remember much about that time but was thankful for the ministration of the medical officer’s wife at Scutari who had nursed him through the worst. Once able to sit up in bed and take a few steps, he’d known he would at least live, but this episode had for the first time in his life made him feel vulnerable and maybe mortal. The possibility that he might die out here, so far from home, had become real and he now bore the resulting anxiety alongside whatever arrogance he still managed to cling on to.
This anxiety led him to check over himself each morning as a routine. After removing his shirt he would inspect his skin for blemishes; then, trying not to look too closely at his now scrawny frame in the waist-length mirror, he would stick out his tongue to check its colour. Taking up a fine comb he would go through his thick black whiskers and beard to remove any lice and check for scurf. Then, of course, he would check his pulse and the colour of his urine. Sometimes he was concerned by a little irregularity of the pulse and darkness of his water but would put this down to excessive work and lack of fresh air and exercise.
He had devised a short programme of simple exercises in an attempt to build his strength back up following the fever and was quite pleased that this was coming along nicely. However, the quality of food was often very poor and he needed to make strenuous and repeated requests for milk, eggs and boiled beef. A man couldn’t live off bread, butter and tea alone.
As he slept, his heart pumped, his muscles relaxed and his guts rumbled on that hard lump of meat and the brandy. Even asleep, his lively mind continued to whir and make plans. After scrounging what he could for breakfast, he would probably make a trip out to Mrs Seacole’s canteen for some provisions and his regular glass of cherry brandy before returning to the hospital for the ward round. Once he started with the patients his day would not be his own and this routine allowed the nurses and orderlies to create some semblance of order on the ward and remove any dead before he started asking questions and making demands.
The place was packed out at the moment, mainly with Crimean fever cases, but there were also some interesting war wounds to monitor. One in particular took a great deal of his ti
me. A poor young lad had been hit by a shell full in the face, blasting a hole in his cheek and removing most of his tongue and his teeth. How he didn’t die out there in the mud of the trenches they would never know but they were now packing the wound daily and once clear of suppuration he would be attempting to stitch up the hole in the lad’s cheek. If he lived to return home his mother wouldn’t recognize him but at least he would be a survivor.
Dr Lampeter had been trained not to think or feel too much for his cases but he couldn’t help feeling sorry for this boy, who suffered miserable pain, was unable to speak and needed to be fed with slops. Although he still harboured a great deal of resistance to women being out here in the field of war, he had to admit that some of those nurses were doing a damn fine job of looking after his patients.
Mason was always banging on about that pale, thin nurse – Rose something-or-other her name was. Even though her wan face reminded him too much of his mother’s drawing room, he had to admit that she was a fairly remarkable young woman. Very beautiful too in an unusual kind of way, with pale freckly skin and strawberry blond hair often wispy around her face after a morning’s work. Mason certainly seemed to have a soft spot for her.
Lampeter wasn’t sure how that new nurse was going to work out though, fainting away like that during what was, in effect, a routine procedure out here. Even so, he was half hoping that he would see her on the ward again soon.
When he woke, Lampeter felt the new day upon him after what seemed to be nothing more than a short nap, although he had, in fact, slept soundly for eight hours. He was irritated with himself, feeling that he was behind already and not properly prepared for the day. Getting out of bed, he walked over to the bucket and emptied his bladder, taking strange satisfaction in the sound of his urine drumming strongly into the iron pail.