A Nurse's Life: Heart-warming and humorous tales from a 1950s student nurse (Nurse Jane Grant)

by Jane Grant

  The days passed very quickly in classes, demonstrations and sometimes the great privilege of one of St. Bernard’s specialists coming to lecture. Once a week we were taken up to the hospital, where we were assigned to various wards, and becoming the lowest of the low, juniors to the youngest junior, were given simple and usually disagreeable jobs.

  One day I was sent to the Casualty Department, where I was put in the charge of a nurse who had the great experience of having been at the hospital for two months. With obvious delight she set me to clean a dirty trolley, and I meekly set to work, for this being one of our inevitable jobs, I felt I did at any rate know how to do it.

  I was working hard when I heard a fierce feminine voice shouting, ‘Nurse!’ Glowering from one of the cubicles, I saw the masked face of a woman student. She was evidently addressing me.

  Terrified, I murmured something unintelligible. She merely shouted, ‘Get me a scalpel blade at once, Nurse!’ and disappeared into the cubicle.

  I hurried off to find my mentor, who was engaged in listening to a patient’s tale of woe. I broke into this without compunction.

  ‘A doctor in there wants ‒’ I began. Then for the life of me, I could not remember what it was she did want.

  ‘Oh,’ said the nurse calmly, ‘it’s only one of those ruddy students. They think they’re Honoraries. I’ll go and fix her.’

  Astounded by her boldness, and also much relieved, I was about to return to my trolley cleaning, when my superior was summoned by Sister and told to go and stop that child screaming its head off. She went off humbly, having lost a considerable amount of face in my eyes.

  I had no idea what to do next. I knew that as soon as I went back to my place the woman would start yelling at me again. I looked desperately around for aid. All the nurses seemed to be busy, and besides, I did not dare to address them.

  Then I saw, walking down the corridor towards me, a sharp-faced young man, with very bright eyes and black hair. He smiled at me, and this gave me the courage to approach him and ask feebly: ‘I wonder if you could tell me what to do. I mean with that woman.’

  He asked reasonably, ‘Which particular one?’

  I pointed in the direction of the cubicle. ‘She wants something,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember what she said, and if I could remember, I shouldn’t know what it is.’

  The mantle of St. Bernard was beginning to slip; never had I felt so low, so useless and so contemptible.

  He merely inquired cheerfully, ‘What did she look like?’

  I said, ‘I could only see her eyes, and they were covered with glasses. The rest of her was covered in mask.’

  ‘It could be anybody. What did she sound like.’

  ‘Angry.’

  ‘Oh, that explains everything,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I’ll go and see to her.’

  Tremendously relieved, I was shrinking off when he seized hold of my arm. ‘Come along. You must come and face the music too.’

  I crept into the cubicle behind him. A man lay on the couch with his hand extended, showing a swollen septic thumb. The fierce woman was almost dancing round the trolley in her wrath.

  ‘How do they expect me,’ she raved, ‘to open these fingers if they don’t provide the scalpel to do it?’

  The bright-eyed young man had obviously had to deal with this sort of situation before. He poked around the sterile dressings with forceps, and produced a scalpel which lay underneath them.

  ‘What’s wrong with this one?’

  The woman had been glaring at me balefully, but she immediately turned to him and said with great sweetness, ‘Nothing.’

  Signing to me to retreat, he followed me out.

  ‘One good turn deserves another,’ he said. ‘Now come and chaperone for me.’

  I looked at him blankly, and he remarked calmly, ‘M’m. You are a bit green, aren’t you? It’ll wear off. Now come and hold this woman’s hand.’

  This was my first meeting with Gavin Scott, and I did not realize its significance.

  Chapter Two

  Anyone knowing the hospital who had come amongst us on the afternoon we arrived at St. Bernard’s from the Training School, would immediately have singled us out as new. Not only were our shoes polished, but our caps were kept on with elastic instead of with hair grips, and we wore thick lisle stockings instead of nylon.

  We had an interview with the Assistant Matron, who gave us another lecture about how the future of St. Bernard’s depended on us, and how we should be setting an example to new juniors very shortly. The idea had never entered our minds that there would ever be anyone junior to us.

  We were then told with awful finality the wards we were to grace with our presence for our first month in the hospital. Anxious that we should not waste any time in gossip, she then dispatched us with a guide ‒ for we still did not know our way about the hospital ‒ to our first wards, where we were introduced to the Sisters.

  Sister Walter, the Sister of my ward, which was a Men’s Medical called Daniel, was an institution in St. Bernard’s. She had trained there twenty years before, and lived entirely for her ward. In manner she was brusque and hearty. Her first words to me were: ‘Hope you settle down. We haven’t had a junior for some time, so go in the sluice and clean it.’

  I went, only too glad to be kept for a little longer from public scrutiny.

  The ward was hectically busy, taking in acute medical cases every other week. I practically lived in the sluice, cleaning treatment trolleys and bottles. There was an extension to the ward of a balcony which contained T.B. patients. These, being long-term patients, were not particularly ill, and were always friendly and full of life.

  When I had been on the ward a week I was sent into the balcony to help make beds, and was ill-advised enough to call Alan, a little boy of eleven, ‘Honey Bunch’. This name stuck with me till I left the ward. The next morning Alan, being in unusually high spirits, seized me round the neck while I was making his bed, and buried my head in his bedclothes, completely crushing my cap. While I was still struggling to escape, and the other patients were shouting, ‘Why don’t you hit him, Honey Bunch?’ Sister Walter came in.

  She asked in icy tones, ‘What are you doing, Nurse?’

  I really had no answer. Alan bravely said: ‘She was looking at the luminous dial on my new watch, Sister.’

  Sister said nothing, but called me to her office when I came out.

  ‘Enthusiasm is all very well, Nurse,’ she said, ‘but you must not be too keen on your duties. You could perhaps look at the dial of Alan’s watch one evening when it is dark.’

  I said, ‘Yes, Sister,’ with as much dignity as I could muster, and then retreated in disorderly fashion, my hair over my eyes and my cap anywhere but perched in the regulation fashion on the back of my head.

  Alan was so repentant that he gave me a box of chocolates.

  One of the T.B. patients, called Bill, had been in the ward for eighteen months, and would probably be there for at least the same length of time in the future. He was keenly interested in the outside world, and whenever I came back from my off-duty, he would question me about my activities. Then he would start inviting me out to imaginary amusements.

  ‘Where shall we go tonight, Honey Bunch?’

  Entering into the game, I suggested a cinema or a theatre.

  ‘Right,’ said Bill. ‘I think I’ll meet you inside, so as you can pay for your own seat. Then afterwards we’ll just have time for a drink before they close. I’ll have a bitter. What’ll you have?’

  I usually had an orangeade because he always said he jolly well wasn’t going to buy me anything fancy if I was crazy enough not to like beer.

  One evening I was feeling low and tired. Everything had gone wrong on the ward, and Sister had blown me up for being too slow with my work. When Bill started the game, I did not feel like playing.

  ‘Where shall we go tonight, Honey Bunch.’

  ‘We’ll go to bed,’ I said firmly.

  ‘O
h, good show!’ said Bill.

  I retired in confusion.

  Patients were allocated to the nurses by bed numbers, and each nurse had a certain number of beds. One week we were very busy indeed, and to one of my beds there came a man of forty, who had cirrhosis of the liver. I regarded him with awe and pity, for from what I had overheard I knew his case was hopeless. How, I wondered, could he have got in such a state?

  ‘He was in the R.A.F. during the War,’ said the other junior, who was two sets above me and so much more knowledgeable. ‘I suppose they drink a lot, and he couldn’t stop afterwards.’

  The patient was given only ice to suck, and he lay, gross, flabby and pale, caring about nothing.

  One night, about to go off duty, I was saying good night to the patients. I came to his bed, and he signalled me to come close. I bent over him and he said in a low, hoarse voice: ‘Nurse ‒ look ‒ you needn’t tell anyone about this ‒ but could you just nip down to the Crown and get me half a bottle of gin?’

  He felt for my hand, and pressed a pound note into it.

  I was very frightened and upset. It seemed terrible to have to say no, refusing a dying man his only desire.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘You can’t have one just yet. Perhaps when you’re a bit better.’

  He squeezed my hand confidentially, and over his face there flitted the ghost of what must once have been a charming smile.

  ‘Oh, go on nurse!’ he said. ‘Be a sport. I won’t tell a soul.’

  Hot with misery and shame, I tried to escape by assuming the authoritative manner I had heard from other nurses.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s quite out of my power. Could you speak to Sister about it? I’ll fetch her if you like.’

  He lay back exhausted. ‘Don’t put yourself out,’ he said angrily.

  I put the money down quickly on his locker and said good night. He did not answer, but lay with glazed eyes staring ahead, as if he had not heard. Next day he died after a heavy haemorrhage. This was my first contact with death.

  When bored while we were off duty, it was considered the height of humour to go and jeer at the wretched Mary, who had to take the children from her ward out for a walk in the grounds. We were not present, however, on the day that they got completely out of control. It started with Michael, a precocious child of about eight, rushing up to an immaculate Rolls-Royce, shouting, ‘Cor ‒ what a smashing car!’ and after breathing on the mudguard, writing his name on it with a smeary finger.

  Mary, recognizing the car of one of the chief Honoraries, hurriedly tried to pull Michael away; while she was wrestling with him, Peter, a child who had come in under one of the psychologists as being unmanageable, rushed up shouting, and managed to poke a stick between Mary’s feet, so that she tripped and fell prostrate, hitting her nose smartly on the running-board.

  As she lay on the ground Mary heard about six violent thwacks. Getting hastily to her feet, she saw a burly young man with ginger hair laying about him. To Mary he looked like a combination of Sir Galahad and St. George, but actually he had a remarkably plain but honest face.

  ‘Flipping kids!’ he remarked, as he pushed and buffeted them back into orderly file.

  Mary thanked him rather stiffly, and he took no notice of her whatever, simply remarking to the children that if he heard another squeak he’d come after them. They were extraordinarily good for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘He was such bliss,’ said Mary to us that evening, as we were all sitting on her bed.

  ‘You don’t mean old Ginger Barnes?’ said Sarah, and broke into song: ‘All the girls are fond of Gin, Gin-gin-gin-gin-ginger!’

  ‘Who’s Ginger Barnes?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s on Sexy Fred’s firm.’ This was the gynaecological specialist.

  ‘How sordid can you get?’ said Mary.

  ‘He’s the clot who left a placenta with forceps attached on the trolley when Daisy was doing her rounds.’

  A spasm of horror passed over Mary’s face. Pat broke in. ‘Oh, the most awful thing happened to me this morning! When I got on the ward Mr. Duval and Mr. Robinson grabbed hold of me and put me in the dirty linen basket and wheeled me round the ward. They said it was so I could say good morning to everyone in comfort. And guess who they dropped me out at the feet of?’

  We groaned.

  ‘Sister! Honestly, I felt frightful!’

  Not to be outdone, I told them how Mr. Bowes had asked me to pick up a book that had fallen under his bed. And of course it was right at the top, so when I was well and truly under, I looked up and saw a pair of shoes, and heard Fanny Flap say in her usual wet way, ‘Good morning, Mr. Bowes, and how are you this morning? How is the leg?’

  I had crouched underneath feeling a complete twerp, with all the men giggling, till the Assistant Matron had pushed off.

  ‘You should have got up boldly and said, ‘How are your legs, dear?’ said Sarah. ‘I never saw such matchsticks as Fanny’s legs. When she bends over I always think they’re going to snap.’ I felt this wasn’t just a comic suggestion on Sarah’s part; she had cheek enough for anything.

  After our first four weeks, we still had another trial two months on another ward to do, before signing our contracts. In spite of lots of warnings of ‘You’ll be sorry’, we eventually found ourselves in front of Matron. We heard the usual patter about the tradition of St. Bernard’s, and signed on the dotted line.

  Chapter Three

  Night duty was a totally different life from day duty. We had to learn the hard way, not to talk in a normal voice, to walk softly on creaking boards, and to do things the way Daisy liked them. Daisy had been Night Superintendent at St. Bernard’s for over twenty-five years. Night duty revolved round her entirely. If she did not like you, life just was not worth living.

  She was very short-sighted, and poked her head forward as she walked; and she talked in the way people did before the First World War, thus laying herself open to happy mimicry. In particular, she always dropped her final g’s. Her nickname originated from her favourite expression, ‘Gal ‒ I’m in a daze.’ She addressed the entire nursing profession as ‘Gal’. The patients, high or low, young or old, were ‘Dear’.

  On Amos, a Men’s Surgical Ward, I had one head nurse above me, and the two of us attended a ward of some twenty-five patients. In this ward there was a patient called Mike. He was a little man of about forty; his face was thin, his eyes bright; his expression was anxious but gentle and kind. He was a stevedore by trade, and had come in some three months before complaining he was unable to lift his arm. They had operated on him to try to remove the pressure from the nerve, and found he had cancer with multiple secondary growths. He came back to Amos ward to die; but he had such a will to live, that though his growths had by now attacked every vital organ in his body, that body would not accept the fact that it had to die.

  Every night we would have to treat his back, which had three very large bedsores. He was so thin that his skin touched the bone. He had to be settled carefully afterwards on his right side, with a pillow supporting his head in such a way that there was no pressure on the growths and all his dearest possessions arranged on his locker, within reach of his hand.

  Daisy, after one of her journeys of inspection through the ward, called me over.

  ‘That patient number eight ‒ what’s all that litter on his locker? You must keep the lockers tidier, gal.’

  I gave a worried glance towards the disorderly locker ‒ the photographs of his wife and children; his wallet with more photographs of his wife and children; a letter from his mates; his watch and his rosary. I said, after a struggle, ‘He ‒ he likes it that way, Sister.’

  There was a pause. I expected Daisy to blow me up. But to my surprise she did not say another word of censure; a tightening came over her features, and she turned and left the ward.

  Mike did not sleep very much, as he had had so much morphia that it was losing its effect. When he felt lonely and frighten
ed he would call out to us, and one of us would go and stand by his bed and keep him company. His one idea was to get well and go home to his wife and four children.

  ‘August Bank Holiday,’ he said, ‘I’ll take ’em all to the seaside for the day.’

  It was now July, and we knew he would die by the end of the month.

  One evening one of the registrars came in to the ward to see a patient, and as he passed Mike’s bed, Mike called out to him.

  ‘When are you going to operate on me, sir? I want to get it over and done with.’

  The Registrar sighed. He had had a busy day with operations, and was tired and jaded.

  ‘Look, Mike,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘if we could operate, old man, we would. But there’s nothing further we can do for you.’

  At first Mike did not understand what he meant, but after a few moments the full impact of the words hit him. The Registrar, passing again, and seeing his gleaming frightened eyes in a shrunken face, realized what he had done.

  ‘He’d better have some morphia now,’ he said to Stevens, the head nurse. ‘I’ll check it.’

  Stevens gave the morphia, and Mike went to sleep.

  At two o’clock in the morning I passed his bed and he called softly to me.

  ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘Come here and talk to me, girl.’ I went and stood by his bed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I want to talk to you for a long time.’ I sat down and took his hand. He felt my arm. ‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Go and put your woolly on, dear.’

  When I came back I thought he was asleep; but as I sat down beside him he started talking in a halting way, his eyes still closed.

  ‘Jane ‒ what’ve I done? Why is God going to kill me?’ His voice trembled and he added, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  I said, ‘We’ve all got to die, Mike.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But I’m not old. Why did this have to happen to me? Some chaps don’t care for their families and their families don’t care for them. But my Molly and the kids, they think a lot of me. What’ll happen to them when I’m gone?’