Sixty Years a Nurse

by Mary Hazard

  I found out that there was quite a dark side to the private wing. It was often the place that the abortions were done in, as they were paid for privately – and these affected women of all ages, and all classes and backgrounds (like the poor African woman I had attended in theatre, and whose termination had apparently been paid for by the high-ups in the army). However, it was only those who could get enough money together who were able to pay for going private, obviously. It was all hushed up and no one spoke about it, really. The other poor women, with usually failed abortions, ended up in women’s surgical and had to mix in with everyone else, and the nurses and sisters could be very punitive and disapproving indeed. The benefit of going private for someone in this unfortunate circumstance was that they were able to get seen to quickly, and relatively anonymously. Plus, being alone in a room gave them privacy and a place to grieve, with some respect. I certainly noticed that the consultant surgeons who were performing these operations, and even the anaesthetists, drove to Putney Hospital in swanky cars, such as Rolls-Royces and Mercedes. These cars were not easily paid for on an NHS salary, I was sure, so it showed that performing private abortions could be quite a profitable business, especially before reliable contraception, like the Pill, was available generally for women. I only knew a little bit about this all going on, but I was sure that my mother would have been outraged – it was exactly the kind of thing that would make her spit teeth and call England a ‘Godforsaken black Protestant country’. However, I also learned that there was an even darker side to the private wing that I had not anticipated at all. Although abortions were not really spoken about, we all knew they happened: it was a sad old business, but a tough part of life. However, there was also a practice that, again, my mother and the nuns would have fulminated against if they had known it was happening, and especially if they had known I was in any way party to it at all.

  I was doing a week’s stint on the private ward during my third year, and it was summer. We had the windows open, and it was warm and sunny during the day, and still quite warm and pleasant at night. When I arrived there was a very elegant woman, a Miss Pringle, who was a buyer for Harrods, in a single room. She was forty-five, with a curly perm and a handsome face, and had pancreatic cancer, which was a terrible disease to get. She was in the terminal stages, and was in an awful lot of pain. I found her incredibly polite and genteel, and it was so sad to see her looking sallow and yellow, fading away, all on her own, so I would chat to her. She was a nice, educated woman, who would tell me about her job – she was unmarried and didn’t have children, obviously – and how much she loved buying furniture for the store. She was worldly and knowledgeable, but extremely lonely as she declined. She didn’t have many visitors and I felt so sad that she was facing a painful death without having someone to hold her hand. I would arrange her flowers, and take her temperature, and she would want to talk a little bit, and I would listen, and then she’d have her morphine injection and fall asleep. However, the morphine would wear off, as it always did, and she would be in terrible, agonising pain for a couple of hours between the injections. It was awful to see her suffer so.

  The difference in attitude of the higher-up staff on the private wards compared with the ordinary wards was fascinating to see. I noticed the sisters were much more attentive and polite, and the doctors came round more frequently and stayed longer at the bedside. I also saw that Sister or Staff would call the doctors if there was a query about something, even quite trivial, and get them to pop in on the ward, much more than they would have done on the public wards. I guess I learned the lesson that money really did buy you better health care, and that you simply got more attention if you could pay for it. And yet, the patients were still just human beings, like everyone else. The only difference between them and the people on the other wards was the fact that they had a bit of lolly tucked away or were wealthy by family or had earned well. Anyway, one evening, a couple of weeks after the buyer had been brought in, I was on night duty again on the private ward. There were nine beds in this ward and only about six were filled that night. Miss Pringle was still there, and was still slowly deteriorating and in pain. I popped in to see her, said ‘hallo’ and tidied her bed. She looked dreadfully shrivelled and vulnerable in her bed, and her face looked quite yellow and sallow. Sister came up to me at 11 o’clock and told me to go to dinner, and to take my time coming back. ‘Have a nice leisurely dinner, nurse,’ she said to me, pointedly. I looked at her questioningly. I can honestly say that Sister had never, ever said anything like that before. Usually it was ‘Get back as soon as you can – don’t hang about, nurse,’ or ‘Eat your dinner, but don’t take for ever about it, you haven’t got all day.’ But this night Sister was looking at me a bit strangely, and saying things like: ‘Take your time, nurse.’ I had a weird feeling that something was up, but had absolutely no idea what it was at all.

  All the way through dinner I felt spooked and uneasy. I usually wolfed my food down, and it often didn’t touch the sides. But tonight I ate slowly, chewed my food and took the full hour, which seemed incredibly long for some reason. I read a magazine, and then went back to the ward, wondering what was really up. When I got there I had a shock. Miss Pringle was dead. She hadn’t been near death when I left, although she had been in pain. I knew the signs of oncoming death by now, as I had seen it many times, and although she was perhaps a few more days, even a week, away, it wasn’t imminent as far as I could see, and certainly they hadn’t been there when I went for dinner. When I went into the sluice I found two doctors silently washing their hands. That was strange, as usually there was just one doctor on the rounds. They looked round at me, over their shoulders, warily, and there was something in their glance that let me know I had to leave the room and say nothing. Similarly, Sister was acting strangely. She told me quietly to lay out Miss Pringle, but she didn’t look me in the eye. The silence hung between us, and as I went to get the bowl of water and equipment to prepare her I felt a deep sense of unease. I knew that something had happened, but I wasn’t at all sure what. Had she had a heart attack? Or a stroke? If, so, why wasn’t Sister talking about it as she usually would? As I washed her down I felt terrible, and the tears pricked my eyes as always. My Catholic upbringing made me feel like I had colluded in something terrible, and I prayed for Miss Pringle’s soul, and also the souls of the doctors and Sister, as I washed the still warm body in the eerie silence of the middle of the night.

  Next day, back at the nurses’ home, I had a late-night conversation with Jenny, my fount of all knowledge, about what might have gone on. We were half hanging out the windows in my room, as it was a hot summer night, and passing the Merrydown bottle between us. Jenny listened to my story attentively and then explained what she thought had happened. ‘Look, Mary, you wouldn’t know this, but it’s actually quite common practice for two doctors to give a lethal injection simultaneously, with a syringe in one arm each, if a patient wants to end their life.’ What? I’d never heard of such a thing. ‘You mean it’s a kind of suicide?’ ‘In a way, yes, but she’s got the doctors to do it for her, instead of doing it herself. It’s called euthanasia, or mercy killing,’ explained Jenny. ‘It’s a way of ending your life, but because it’s an illegal practice they get two doctors to do it at the same time, so no one doctor can actually be prosecuted.’ Jenny told me she had seen something like it herself before on the private ward when she had been on nights. ‘But it’s a criminal offence!’ I was outraged. I believed in the doctors, and I also believed in the Hippocratic Oath, and I suppose I had drunk in all my life that it was a cardinal sin to take life. Only God had the right to take life away. Surely it was murder, by any other name?

  Jenny explained further that patients who had the money could simply pay for this kind of treatment. It was done on the quiet, and it wasn’t supposed to happen, but it was something that had gone on for years, apparently. I was really and truly shocked. And yet, when I thought about it, I remembered Miss Pringle being in such terrib
le pain, and not being able to deal with the lack of morphine relief. What would I do in the same circumstances if I had the means to pay for it? It had been drummed into me to suffer naturally, and to accept death, but what would I do if I had the means to end things another way? She clearly wasn’t worrying about the state of her soul, and maybe you wouldn’t care about that if you were in such terrible agony. How would I know what I would do in similar circumstances? I suppose I remembered all the lessons about the saints and how they suffered and how it purified their souls. But I had seen many patients die slow and painful deaths, for what reason? Surely, it didn’t purify their souls to suffer so badly; surely it just crucified their spirits? I began to notice that many of my colleagues also whispered about cases of euthanasia, and the fact they went on, somewhere in the hospital. It hadn’t registered with me before, but now I had actually witnessed it happening (or rather, witnessed the before and after of it) I felt it must actually be true. However, I always felt like it was a terrible dark secret, as if I had committed the crime myself, by not stopping it, and not reporting it afterwards. I used to live in fear of it being found out, and over the years the demise of Miss Pringle ate away at me. It was difficult for me to let go of something like that, as it brought up terrible conflict about what was right and wrong in the situation. I always struggled to do the right thing, so when I colluded with the wrong thing I didn’t like myself for it. I wished I’d had the courage of my convictions to go and tell someone about the practice. But who? I presumed now that the high-ups knew all about this practice, and condoned it. But then I also wished that pain relief was better, so patients didn’t have to suffer. After all, you wouldn’t let an animal suffer like this in similar circumstances. It did take the gloss off the doctors for me, though, when I saw their Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, and thought, ‘Ah well, money can buy you death, an abortion, anything apparently illegal, and those who commit the crime can come out well, too.’ The scales of innocence had definitely fallen finally from my eyes.

  On a much lighter note, our private wing was sometimes graced by the presence of Hollywood actors or famous people. It was often like royalty was coming. Again, junior nurses would be sent in, ahead of time, to scrub and brush, skivvy and rub, until everything sparkled and gleamed. And then one winter’s day I was on duty, and came onto the private ward to find the actor Jack Hawkins, who lived in nearby Richmond-on-Thames and who had fallen in the snow and had broken his shoulder. All the nurses adored Jack Hawkins, who had recently been the star of a hit film called The Cruel Sea; he was the bee’s knees at the time, the George Clooney of his day. He was a real star, very manly, with a deep gravelly voice, and hunky good looks and a tan. We all fought over plumping up his pillows or changing his sheets, and there was a fight over getting his bedpan, even. He had some famous visitors, such as the actor Richard Attenborough and his wife, who lived in Richmond, too, and we were all literally hiding in the wings, wanting to get a glimpse of them. They were like gods to us. We didn’t get their autographs, but we did ogle them from afar.

  Apart from stars, we also got some very high-up business people. I remember we had a director from the posh shop Liberty’s in central London (which I’d never even been into), who had stayed for a couple of weeks for an operation. He was a delightful man, and we liked him a lot so we did as much as we could to keep him happy. It was always insisted upon that we treat the private patients well, so their drinking water was changed regularly, and their pillows plumped up and sheets straightened, and we made sure we responded promptly when they rang their buzzers. We went and got them newspapers and fruit, even alcohol and cigarettes, when they wanted it. When the director left he gave each of us a £20 voucher for the shop, which was a huge amount of money, probably equivalent to hundreds now. I remember Sister telling us that we were not allowed to keep this money or any gifts at all. We all said ‘Yes, Sister,’ and looked meek, but then we were naughty nurses and kept the vouchers anyway. We needed the money, and I was not going to pass up £20 worth of goods; indeed, none of us could afford to do that. What did Sister think we would really do? It was another thing for my conscience to wrestle with, but when I finally went to Liberty’s and bought myself some wonderful material that I got made up into a suit, I was really very glad that, on this occasion, I had defied authority and broken the rules. I didn’t think it was the worst thing in the world, and to be frank I was absolutely delighted with the result; I had the suit for years and wore it until it dropped off me, finally, in shreds.

  At that time there were pockets of poverty all over the south-west of London, and Putney had some pretty rough areas tucked in behind the more salubrious parts. There were old-fashioned Victorian tenement buildings that had no heating, lots of damp and outside lavatories. There were also overcrowded flats and a lot of deprivation, despite the more leafy and red-brick suburban areas around the hospital itself, which I was used to by then. As part of my training I was sent out on my rounds with a bag of basic bandages and medicines, to attend to people in their homes, like a District Nurse. I loved meeting people and talking to them, and I found it fascinating to visit them, and see how they lived their lives. It certainly changed my view that all English people were rich and posh, as I learned that poverty and deprivation could happen anywhere. In particular, I liked working with the elderly. I always had time for them, and I think they reminded me of the kinds of people I had sat with as a child, like the old lady back home, with her Parkinson’s. When we visited the elderly locally, we would make sandwiches and take them flasks of hot soup or cocoa that had been made up in the hospital kitchens. A lot of the work was basic, giving them a wash, cleaning them up, bandaging their wounds or sores. Quite a few of the local elderly were living in quite squalid, cold and damp conditions, and I could see they had little to eat. They would sit in a chair all day, and if they were lucky they would sit hunched over a few bits of glowing coal or a single-bar electric fire. But this could be too expensive, so they were often bundled under blankets and eiderdowns, trying to keep body and soul together.

  One awful, smelly flat I went into had a granny sitting in her high-backed wing chair. The place was filthy, unheated and really stank of wee, and I felt it was very unsanitary indeed. There were four young children in the flat, with a baby crawling around on a fairly dirty lino floor. The granny was trying to keep an eye on the baby, but it was the smaller children who looked after the babies. The children’s mum was out somewhere, and there was a huge Alsatian in the garden, chained to the fence. I noticed the granny’s hands were very swollen and red; it looked like chilblains or something like that. I asked the eldest child, who was probably about eight or nine, what her name was and she said ‘Monday’. She told me the other kids were also named after the days of the week. When I asked her why her granny’s hands were so red, she said, ‘That’s where Mum keeps hitting her when she tries to get out of her chair.’ I was horrified. Each time Granny tried to move, Mum would hit her, and she’d pee herself in fear. Then I saw there were black marks on her neck and breasts, and she was being hit all the time. ‘Mum pushes her in her chair with her walking stick,’ volunteered the child. ‘Every time she gets up, she gets pushed back down.’ I was outraged and had to tell the authorities what was going on when I got back to the hospital. It was terrible. I found out that the old lady got moved to a local nursing home eventually and had a lovely four years after that of relative peace and happiness. I visited her once she was in there, and she grabbed my hand and said, ‘Thank you, dear. I’m in heaven here.’ It really moved me to tears and it made me wonder just why people did such things to their own flesh and blood. She turned out to be quite a lively old lady, and she loved mixing with people. So instead of sitting in her chair all day, being bullied, she was experiencing some level of relaxation, freedom and well-being in her final years. Her daughter was had up for assault and battery, plus neglect, I am pleased to say. However, her poor children were taken into care and were eventually fostered, and I felt b
ad about that for a long time afterwards. Every time I had to make this kind of intervention, I always found it heart-rending, but what else could I do? It wasn’t right, and something had to be done about it, so I had to do something. Else I couldn’t live with my good old conscience, Catholic or not.

  Another time, I was walking down the street in Putney and I passed a local rough pub. There were a load of men drinking in there, it must have been early evening and I was on my way back to the hospital. I heard, ‘That’s the fuckin’ bitch that got my kid taken away,’ from a man’s voice behind me, and then I felt a thump on my back. Instinctively, I turned round and landed him one back on his shoulder. I didn’t recognise him, but I guess he was related in some way to the woman whose mum had ended up in the nursing home. I didn’t mean to, but it was a natural thing to do, to hit him back; it was self-defence, I suppose, and I felt provoked. I thought, ‘Sweet Jesus, bloody cheek.’ It didn’t hurt him and he was drunk as, by the time I came to my senses, I saw that his friend was dragging him back into the pub, saying, ‘Just forget her, mate.’ He was definitely the worse for wear, and I just carried on, hoping that I wouldn’t get reported at all. I didn’t want another carpeting in front of Matron, with her saying, ‘And what exactly did you mean by thumping a member of the public, Nurse Powell? You know we have our reputation as nurses to keep up. What were you thinking?’ Or worse, would I get arrested, myself? How would I explain an incident like that to Matron, or even my mother? Thing was, I often didn’t think, I was often very instinctual, and I would react to people and situations before I thought things through. This meant I was often compassionate and caring, but it also meant I often got into trouble, or overstepped the mark, because I felt passionately about something and couldn’t leave it alone. I certainly enjoyed my times of going out into the community, but it was a totally shocking eye-opener, and taught me where my real nursing interests lay – I did love working with the elderly, and it was something I would come back to, later in life. It would also give me great experience for dealing with all manner of people, in all sorts of situations, for the rest of my working days as a nurse and medical practitioner.