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

by Jane Grant

  ‘You’ll ’ave to sign the book,’ said the porter with relish.

  ‘Come now, old man, let’s be reasonable,’ said Charles. ‘It’s Christmas!’

  The porter was obviously used to this situation. ‘The book,’ he said grimly.

  ‘All right, happiness. Hand it over.’

  Charles signed with a flourish, and gave the book to me. I signed with a careless air too, and holding on to the book, Charles ordered the gates to be opened. Once we were through, Charles hurled the book at the porter and we ran like mad.

  When Gavin came in a bit later with Joyce, he found the porter very disgruntled.

  ‘Now you two must show me your signatures,’ he said. ‘Couple came in a few minutes back, signed themselves Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. What I’m going to say to Daisy I don’t know!’

  Christmas Day began in the traditional manner with all the nurses being woken at five o’clock. With home-made lanterns and our capes turned inside out, we walked through the wards singing Christmas carols, Daisy leading the procession.

  After breakfast of bacon and eggs, we went on the ward. The children were all wearing paper hats and had stocking remnants all over their beds. Each child seemed to have entered a competition to see who could shout and yell the loudest.

  Most of the routine work was left undone. Visitors arrived; a procession of Governors, led by Matron. Each child was greeted by a sickly grin from each Governor, and returned a stony stare.

  Matron said weakly, ‘How sweet of you, dear,’ when a little boy offered her his acid drop, taken out of his mouth, ‘but I’m just going to have my din-din.’

  ‘Why are you so fat, then?’ said the child, and Matron gave a forced laugh and made a mental note to tell Sister to control her children.

  One little boy called Ernest had had a box of false faces given to him. He pointed to the tallest and sternest of the Governors who had a prominent nose, and selecting a red bulbous one from his collection, he put it on and shrieked, ‘I’m that genelman there! That one! That one!’ ‒ he repeated in case there should be any mistake.

  Matron said archly, ‘They’re so high-spirited, aren’t they?’ and moved on with her retinue.

  After the children had had their dinner, the nurses moved into the recess, and with Sister and the Honorary Paediatrician serving, we ate turkey and Christmas pudding, pulled crackers and drank wine.

  In the afternoon a clown came from a leading circus, and brought a little dog with a ruff round its neck. The children shrieked with delight and held out sweets, while it danced on its hind legs, twirling solemnly, as the clown waved his stick to which a rubber balloon was attached.

  In one of the side wards there was a six weeks’ old baby called Jean. She was an illegitimate child, and had been born with a deformity in her spine, so that the fluid contents of the spinal column came out in a colossal bulge in her lower back. She had been growing gradually weaker for some time.

  At six o’clock on Christmas evening I put on a mask and gown, and went to give Jean her feed. Her face was like a little monkey’s. I picked her up and gave her her bottle. She turned her head and took the food with her eyes closed. As I looked she turned grey and suddenly vomited. I put her back in her cot and called Sister.

  Sister looked down at her. ‘Yes, Nurse. Will you stay with her please, and I will call her mother.’

  I sat beside the cot. I could hear the noises of the ward; Ernest was crying because Bill had taken his false moustache. One child was saying solemnly to a nurse, ‘My dolly’s got eyes that open and it says Mummy; I shall always love Sister.’ Another little girl called out, ‘Where are my sweeties? I feel sick.’ Gradually the noises grew less, except for an occasional, ‘I don’t want to go to sleep yet.’

  Jean’s breathing grew shorter, and at last it stopped altogether. I picked up her treatment sheet and saw that her life had lasted six weeks and three days.

  We dressed her in a tiny papery shroud, with two white flowers in her fingers. Late that night Sister, as is the custom, herself carried the small body wrapped in a sheet, through the sleeping ward, and by back ways to the mortuary.

  I washed the cot and made up a clean bed. Merry laughter came to my ears from the corridor, and I thought how strange it was that it was still Christmas Day.

  Second Year

  Chapter Eleven

  After the Christmas festivities had died down, it began to dawn on us that our first exam, on which our future hung, was close upon us. There were fevered glances at books, and then hasty reassurances: ‘Well, look at the morons who do pass!’

  Then the awful moment came when we had to enter our names and pay our fee. We had now really committed ourselves. We began borrowing each other’s lecture notes; none of our own seemed to make sense.

  The day arrived; we went to the Nursing School, entered the examination room, and sat down in our places. The Sister Tutor came in, opened a large envelope, and dealt out the papers face downwards with the air of a judge assuming the black cap.

  ‘Describe the anatomy of the kidneys.’

  ‘Give a short account of the digestive system.’

  ‘Describe the venous return of the lower limbs.’

  I looked at my paper in a daze. I thought, ‘If I fail, the worst they can do is throw me out.’ Then I thought it was a pity, just when I might have got my first year belt. I thought I would have to be a shorthand typist or something. Then I thought, I should never see Gavin again.

  Feverishly I turned to the paper. I told myself cautiously that I had swotted up the digestive system. Not to raise my hopes too highly, I gazed gloomily at the venous return question and thought I could write what I knew about that on a postage stamp. I did not dare to read any more questions. Everyone began writing at once; I went on writing, spilling all I knew and trying to disguise what I didn’t, till I heard Sister say, ‘Five more minutes.’

  The papers were collected and Sister left the room. There was instant pandemonium.

  ‘Which ones did you answer?’

  ‘Number five was a stinker.’

  ‘Bet I’ve failed.’

  ‘Bet you haven’t. Bet I have.’

  Our next paper was Nursing and First Aid. By lunch time the ordeal was over, but we still had hanging over us the worst part of the exam, our Practical. I had a morbid fear that I should forget the date of this, and stuck a large notice up in my room, ‘Fourteenth. P.’

  I was then on a Women’s Medical Ward, the Sister of which was very vague. As I came back from my written exam, she was sitting in her office doing a crossword.

  I knocked and was just going to announce myself as ‘Junior Probationer Grant’, when she said: ‘Oh yes, Nurse. Do you know the Greek for “Lady”?’

  I opened my mouth and shut it again and then said, ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘Oh.’ She returned to her crossword and I returned to the ward.

  One day when Sister was off duty a rather dumb Head Nurse was left in charge. The casualty department telephoned and said they had a patient who had a haemoptysis and we were to take her in. We started preparing the bed, leaving only one pillow in, thinking we had to lie her flat. Suddenly the trolley appeared at the end of the ward, and the Head Nurse shouted at me: ‘We’ve got to sit her up! I was thinking of haematemesis!’

  I rushed to the linen cupboard, but there were no more pillows. I ran round our various indignant patients, pulling pillows out and saying, ‘I’m sorry, it’s an emergency!’

  There was some frantic shuffling into pillow cases, while the patient sat on the trolley gasping for breath. She turned slightly less blue, however, and we were able to get her into bed and clamp an oxygen mask over her.

  The Fourteenth arrived, and we set off for the suburban hospital where we were to take our Practical, with huge cases containing our uniform and colossal paper bags for our caps, in case either should get crushed on the way.

  The hospital looked clean and efficient, and much more like a hospital tha
n St. Bernard’s. There were signposts pointing the way to ‘The Examination’, as though no other examination had ever been held.

  We were shown to a large room with a table in it, where the four of us changed into uniform and afterwards inspected each other critically. We pinned our numbers on to our uniform, and went downstairs, where we waited, looking very dejected, with cold hands and feet.

  Presently my number was called and I went in. The room contained two beds with two little boys in them, and a mass of various equipment, half of which it seemed to me I had never seen before.

  A kindly, aged Sister approached me.

  ‘Now, Nurse,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘Would you lay me a tray for an enema, please?’

  I found I had lost my voice completely. I coughed nervously, then said, ‘Yes, Sister,’ in an unrecognisable squeak.

  Next I had to bandage one of the little boys, making fatuous remarks to him in the vain hope he would put in a good word for me. Then I made a bed, and she passed me over to a very stern, tall Sister.

  ‘Now, Nurse, would you lay me a tray in preparation for the administration of oxygen?’

  I collected the various bits of rubber tubing and put them before her, like a dog bringing his master his lead. She picked out the Tudor-Edward spectacles.

  ‘Now, Nurse, how do you use these?’

  I explained how to fix catheters to the tubing, and attach that to a cylinder. She agreed, and then said, ‘Who was Tudor-Edward, Nurse?’

  I said with a vain attempt at confidence, ‘I think he was a doctor, Sister.’

  She smiled acidly, ‘Fame dies quickly, doesn’t it, Nurse?’

  I said in a very small voice that it did, and after being set one or two more tasks I was dismissed.

  Some two weeks after our Practical exam, Assistant Matron telephoned the ward and said Matron would like to speak to me the following morning.

  I told this to my friends, and discovered that they too were to have interviews with the great personage at the same time.

  We all arrived very early with clean aprons. There were about ten of us all told.

  ‘Crumbs, this is the most that ever failed at one go!’ we said to one another gloomily.

  I was the first name in the group, as we were called alphabetically, and so to my consternation had to go in first.

  Matron asked me to sit down. I thought this was to prepare for the shock.

  ‘Well, Nurse,’ she said, ‘you have been on the wards just over a year now, and I feel that with the reports I’ve had of your work, I am able to offer you your First Year Belt. Do you feel that you are able to accept further responsibility?’

  ‘Yes, Sis-Matron,’ I said.

  ‘Very well, Nurse. Congratulations.’

  She handed me four belts of the same material as our dresses. I said ‘Thank you’ in a voice very unlike my own, and reached the door, then said ‘Good morning,’ and got outside.

  A gasp went up from the tensely waiting group. The faces that had borne worried frowns were now wreathed in smiles, I was beaming and the fact that my belt was a good three inches too big did not detract from my happiness in the least.

  At this time we had rather an unhappy association with the Home Sister, who was not renowned for her good temper. Mary and I and another girl Phyllis were all sitting in Pat’s room. We had had our baths and were all dressed in pyjamas, except Pat, who had on a new and transparent nylon nightgown which she had had given her for Christmas. Mary and I were less glamorous; I had put my foot through the side seam of my pyjamas, and Mary had lost the middle button of hers. Phyllis, though her pyjamas were of a pleasant blue rayon, had a very bad and loose elastic in the top of the trousers, which caused them to keep falling round her ankles.

  We were having a violent argument about Russia. Mary said with more than her customary fervour, ‘We don’t give them a chance to be friendly.’

  Phyllis said dramatically, ‘They’re dangerous!’

  I said, ‘They probably feel the same way about us.’

  Pat said they were uncivilized, and then everybody started talking at once. Holding one hand in the air to emphasize the profundity of my statement, and speaking at the top of my voice to overcome opposition, I said, ‘We must give the Russian masses a Higher Education!’

  The door opened, and the fearsome spectacle of Home Sister in her curlers, dressed in a sack-like Paisley dressing-gown, appeared round it. There was a sudden silence.

  ‘I am sick and tired, Nurses,’ she began, ‘of you and your friends making so much noise. I’ve had several complaints about it. It is after half past ten, you should all be in your rooms, and in future you will not congregate in each other’s.’

  We stared uncomfortably at her and were struck dumb. Phyllis was the first to move. She got up, and her pyjamas fell down. The expanse of my leg was exposed on the side nearest to Sister, Mary clutched her coat around her, while Pat got well beneath the bed clothes.

  ‘If you wish,’ went on Sister coldly, ‘you may discuss communist philosophy’ ‒ she looked at us suspiciously ‒ ‘in the nurses’ sitting-room.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister,’ we all said meekly in a chorus. ‘Good night, Sister.’ We trooped to our rooms much abashed.

  Chapter Twelve

  At the end of the rugger season, the inter-Hospital Challenge Cup had its finals. For the first time for many years St. Bernard’s was one of the finalists. For several days before the match the students rushed around collecting objects that might come in useful; they went to the local market and scrounged all the bad fruit and unsaleable vegetables; one student obtained by questionable means three tins of distemper from a relation who was an interior decorator; others persuaded the local sweep into letting them have a bag of soot, by promising immediate attention next time his ulcers troubled him. Every week-end, they brought in their suitcases packets of detergent, having explained to questioning mothers that they now had to do such a lot of their own washing.

  The night before the match was a busy one. Parties of students collected supplies from various points, such as the bedrooms of sympathetic nurses, a dark corner of the boiler house, the post-mortem room, the path. lab; and the landing of the fire escape outside the residents’ room. These supplies were conveyed across the park to the students’ hostel in sacks, laundry bags, cartons and suitcases.

  It was customary for the Dean to take an evening stroll round the park, and a party of volunteers were staggering under the weight of some rotten fruit in decayed sacks, when in the half-light, they saw his figure approaching. It was too late to turn back, so, trying hard to look as if they were carrying material for the Histology Department, they tottered past him with averted eyes and a weak ‘Good evening, sir.’

  The Dean gazed ahead woodenly. No doubt he was calculating how many years it was since he had last done his share of carrying such sacks; but the students were badly shaken when one of the sacks collapsed with a tearing noise, and with repeated plops, green oranges and sickly yellow tomatoes, fell on the path behind his retreating figure. The Dean tactfully did not look back.

  That night several fire extinguishers disappeared from the wards. Bombs were prepared, made of equal parts of soot and distemper in paper bags, and the detergent stood by containers of water, ready to be mixed up and applied with a hose.

  The victory in the field next day was won by our opponents, but it was agreed by all unbiased witnesses that the battle afterwards was won hands down by Bernard’s.

  That night into Casualty there poured a collection of torn, mottled and filthy figures, suffering from broken noses, black eyes and minor cuts and abrasions. They were treated like Royal guests; nurses ministered tenderly to them, while the housemen patted their backs and sent out for free beer.

  That evening I was rung up on the ward.

  ‘Nurse,’ said a voice that had a familiar ring, though it had assumed the precise accents of the Dean, ‘I have three gentlemen down here I am treating for shock. Would you pleas
e see that they are given a nourishing beverage and some solid protein when they come up to you, in order to avoid secondary shock?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I replied solemnly. ‘Do you wish them to be warded?’

  ‘If you don’t think it would cause too much heart-fluttering on the part of your female patients, Nurse?’

  ‘Not a bit, they’d love it.’

  ‘Whack-ho!’ exclaimed the Dean, lapsing into the voice of Charles Betterton. ‘I think I’ll come along too!’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early in the year we were sent down to the small town of Lyeford in Kent. Here St. Bernard’s had a unit consisting of four wards in the local hospital, making up about a hundred beds; two wards were occupied by surgical cases and two by ear, nose and throat patients.

  We arrived about ten in the morning on the platform of the small local station, which appeared to be completely deserted. We tottered out into the station yard, carrying our heavy suitcases, and saw one very small bus that announced proudly it was going to Little Bottomley. We asked the conductor if he went anywhere near the hospital, and he said no, and there wasn’t another hospital bus for an hour.

  ‘But if you get a move on,’ he said, ‘you’ll catch the fish-van. They deliver at the hospital Thursdays.’

  He gave us directions, and we hurried down the road and found the fish-shop. The fish-man said obligingly that he did not at all mind taking us. We thought he was probably glad of a little company. Mary and Phyllis managed to squeeze into the front seat; Pat and I were not so fortunate, we had to sit in the back with the fish. The fish-man was very amiable and informative, and when we arrived he directed us to Home Sister’s office.

  We sent Pat in first, noticing as she went, to our horror, that she was covered in mackerel scales.

  We were shown to our rooms, and were told we had to see the Assistant Matron of the Unit as soon as we had changed.