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

by Jane Grant

  The truth was he so intrigued and puzzled me, I felt I had to know him better, so as not to have to think about him so much.

  He took me to a small restaurant in Soho, and ordered a small delicious meal, and a bottle of wine. After a while he began to talk. He talked as if a hose had been turned on, as if once he had started he could not stop. In that evening I learnt much of his past life, and in particular, I heard the story of his marriage.

  At twenty-one, while still at Cambridge, he had married a girl three years older than himself. He said he did not know why he had married her, except that at the time he would have married anyone.

  ‘I was hopelessly immature,’ he said. ‘As far as emotions go, I might have been graded mentally deficient.’

  He had known almost before he married that the thing was a mistake. Within a few months he not only knew he did not love her, he was conscious that she repelled him. Yet none of this was her fault. She loved him as far as she was capable of loving anyone; she was proud of his brains and appearance; she kept the furnished rooms in which they lived spruce, bought and cooked the food he liked, and never looked at another man. It was not her fault, he said. It was all his. But this did not make the situation any easier, in fact it made it worse from his point of view.

  ‘Why don’t you leave her?’ I asked him. ‘If you go on living with her you’re only living a lie.’

  ‘Don’t I know?’ he said. ‘But if I leave her, her world collapses. God knows why, because I’m miserable to her, and I behave abominably most of the time, and snap the poor girl’s head off. But if ever I try to talk of leaving her she goes on her knees and begs and pleads. She says she doesn’t mind what I do if only I’ll stay in the same house with her. She even says I can go with other women. If only, she says, I won’t leave her without anything at all.’

  ‘I don’t understand how she can want to hold someone who’s tired of her.’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t. But Jane, if I leave her ‒ and God knows sometimes I think if I don’t I shall kill her ‒ if I go off and then she jumps in front of a train or turns on the gas! Suppose she does ‒ and then I know all the rest of my life that I was the devil that drove her to it!’

  As he spoke, sweat came out on his forehead, and I knew that he was seeing in imagination the whole scene ‒ the crushed body, the inquest, the funeral. I was so sorry for him that I put my hand on his; he turned the palm and gripped mine till it hurt.

  ‘There must be a solution,’ I said.

  ‘D’you think so?’ he answered. ‘Jane, I’m older than you. I’ve got past thinking there has to be a solution to everything. Some things are just insoluble. You’re in the frying pan and you can get out and into the fire, and that’s all you can do. But what I don’t understand is why a thing which didn’t seem so bad as some of the things one has done, should land one up in such hell.’

  After a moment’s silence he added: ‘If only she were a bitch! But she’s really a terribly nice person.’

  ‘If she’s so nice, surely she could understand.’

  ‘I didn’t say she could understand,’ he said. ‘One can be nice without being sensitive, or even particularly bright.’

  There was another pause and then he said: ‘Divorce is supposed to be degrading. But do you think anything could be more degrading than living with someone you don’t love, who ‒ fawns on you?’

  When I came off night duty, I started going out with Michael regularly. We would meet by the river, and walk along the embankment to Charing Cross. Then we would go up Charing Cross Road, turning over books on the bookstalls, and into Soho to our little restaurant.

  Michael never made love to me, and after that first night we never talked about his wife. We discussed books and music, and his work. He had the idea that some day he would cut the Gordian knot by going out to Africa, where he wanted to work amongst the more primitive tribes who are badly in need of help.

  It was fine early autumn weather, and it seemed to me my emotions were as tranquil as the calm still days, with the leaves still on the embankment trees, and the river flowing slowly and peacefully under the bridges. This, I thought, is what it is to have a man friend.

  But one night as we walked back, the wind rose in the first of the autumn gales. We battled against it, and through the streets to the hospital, and in the park we said good night as usual, with Michael pressing my hand. It all seemed the same as it had always been, till that night I woke up and knew suddenly that the situation had slipped away from my grasp.

  I still did not think I was in love with him. But I felt such pity and understanding and longing to help, that I did not know what would happen if I saw him again. I was glad to be going on my holiday next day, so that I should have time to think things over.

  But I hadn’t reckoned with Michael’s conscience. When I came back from my holiday the first thing I heard was that he had left the hospital. On the board was an envelope addressed to me in his handwriting. I tore it open. Inside was a small piece of paper torn from a notebook.

  ‘Good-bye Jane, and thanks for everything.’

  I could have found out his address and written to him ‒ I knew he had sailed for Nigeria. But after a sleepless night and many tears, I realized with a heavy heart that it was better the way it was. And as he had said ‘Good-bye Jane,’ I said in my heart to him, ‘Good-bye, Michael.’

  Phyllis, meanwhile, was in the throes of a different sort of love affair. Among all the Tonys, Peters, Johns and Davids of her acquaintance was a certain fifth-year student called Tony Bastin, commonly known as Basket or even Bastard.

  Tony was a South African, and like many of his race, was used to having plenty of money and his own way in everything. He was noted for his prowess with women, and from the first time of meeting Phyllis, he chased her hotly. Like the hunters of the snark, he pursued her with forks and hope, the forks being laid in the best restaurants and the hopes tactfully unexpressed. He also, it may be said, charmed her with smiles and soap ‒ for Tony had great charm and an inexhaustible supply of soap of the softest kind. Enormous boxes of chocolates appeared regularly in the Nurses’ Home. Phyllis’s friends, in fact, were quite annoyed if ever she returned from an outing with Tony and failed to bring back something substantial in the Sucker line. There were also theatre tickets, nylons, fountain pens, fruit ‒ all of the best quality from the most expensive shops.

  A trail of heat-wounded nurses lay behind Tony Bastin, dotted through the years of his medical training; nurses wooed with gifts and flattery and promises, won, and then dropped like bricks. But in Phyllis he feared he had met his match. The thought shook him, till to his surprise she one night consented to his proposal to visit his room in the Students’ Hostel, entering secretly by the fire escape to the top landing.

  Once inside the room, Tony promptly fastened the door and put the key in his trouser pocket.

  ‘Give me that key!’ cried Phyllis.

  ‘Not much,’ said Tony. ‘A pity, isn’t it, that they didn’t teach you in training school how to deal with hard-bitten students who’ve got you where they want you!’

  He approached to embrace Phyllis, and she (being rather small in stature) ran at him and butted him in the stomach. Before he could recover his wind, she smacked his face. Tony was rather taken aback by these tactics, though at the same time he found them attractive.

  He approached again, got his arm round her, and she bit his hand.

  ‘Ow!’ he exclaimed. He added, ‘Enough’s enough. Now give me a kiss.’

  But before he could kiss her Phyllis had burst into tears.

  ‘Look,’ said the exasperated Tony, ‘you’re not dumb. What did you come here for? Why on earth do you think any man brings a beautiful girl to his room?’

  Phyllis batted her eyes at him. ‘I know that’s what Any Man would do,’ she said. ‘But I thought you were different.’

  Tony knew when he was beaten. He gave up, and unlocked the door.

  Chapter Thirty

&n
bsp; After my night duty I went on to a Women’s Medical Ward. One of the side wards contained skin patients; it had eight beds and I was put in charge of it, with one Junior to help me.

  Sister Thomas, in charge of the ward, was a woman of great charm, who, without ever asserting herself, always managed to get her own way. The skin ward was due to be re-decorated, and Sister had made up her mind that the walls should be painted.

  The head of the Works Department, who came up to inspect the job before submitting it to the Superintendent, was a dark, gloomy Scotsman who was always imagining he suffered from ulcers. Whenever any course of action was proposed to him he shook his head and said: ‘Canna do that. They’ll no pass it.’ If pressed for his reasons, he would add: ‘It’ll cost a deal too much money.’

  This to his mind was so conclusive an argument that he never expected any further discussion.

  Nor did he get discussion from Sister. Her methods were different.

  ‘What do you think we should do with those walls, Mr. Breck? I mean, it’s obviously no use distempering them.’

  ‘For why not?’

  ‘I mean, as you said, the plaster is so bad, isn’t it? In Amos they’ve painted the walls on the balcony, you know.’

  ‘Superintendent’ll no pass that, Sister.’

  ‘Oh well, I leave it to you, of course.’

  She smiled sweetly and led him into her room, where she was to arrange with him about the new curtains which had been promised her. Style and material were decided without much difficulty. But Sister had made up her mind to an innovation. She was going to have a proper pelmet. With a puzzled look she stood back from the window and observed: ‘How right you are, Mr. Breck. There is something wrong still. At the top, you know. Even with those new curtains you suggest, it will still look ‒ not ‒ quite right. What can it be?’

  Breck, flattered out of his negativity, cast a critical eye at the window.

  ‘At the top, I think,’ murmured Sister. ‘Now it doesn’t look quite right, does it?’

  ‘What can you expec’?’ said Breck censoriously. ‘What you want for that window, Sister, is a pelmet.’

  Sister clasped her hands in admiration.

  ‘Of course, Mr. Breck!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s it! A pelmet. Thank you so much!’

  No sooner had Breck’s face, wearing an unusually pleased expression, disappeared through the door, than Sister sat down and rang up the Superintendent.

  ‘I’ve just had the head of the Works Department up here,’ I heard her say eagerly. ‘He tells me we should really have those walls in the skin ward painted … Oh, well, you see, the plaster is so bad he says, and if they are painted it will be so much easier to wash them down … Yes, I quite agree. In cases where there is a chance of infection it is so much better to have the walls washable! Yes, yes … Thank you so much!’

  The cases in the skin ward were all bad ones; many of the patients had to be covered from head to toe in bandages and lint, and the dressings took a long time. The patients were unhappy and inclined to be difficult because of their discomfort, and most of them both looked and smelt hideous.

  In one corner was an old lady of seventy-three who had malignant disease of the skin and was covered with colossal scabs; where the scabs had come off were huge ulcers. She was the wife of a farmer, and had always been very healthy; she could not understand her affliction. Every visiting day her farmer husband, some years older than herself, tottered into the ward with a big basket of fruit for her, and the old couple would talk with great interest about how many eggs the hens were producing, and what the butterfat on the milk had been. Every morning I had to give the old lady a potassium permanganate bath; she found this very soothing and would sink into it sighing with relief and saying, ‘Oh, that’s lovely!’ I would then put clean dressings on her. The whole job took over an hour.

  To give her relief we started to give her another bath at night, and another lot of clean dressings. She never took this bath for granted or considered it as her due, but always thanked me and sinking into the bath, exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s lovely!’

  Gradually, before my eyes, she began to weaken, and each day it was more of an effort for her to get down to the bathroom. She got thin and pale; all the scabs from her skin began to drop off. Her hair came out; noticing this, she took to wearing a pink chiffon scarf; this, tied round her afflicted face with its hooked nose and chin and glasses, looked so pathetically incongruous as to be almost comic.

  She still thanked me for all I did for her, still said ‘That’s lovely!’ after the bath and dressings. But she took to sleeping a great deal, in spite of the pain and discomfort the toxins of her disease mercifully made her very dopey.

  Her temperature began to rise; she suffered from a tight feeling in her chest, and one day she was too ill to have her bath. I changed the dressings; she said weakly, ‘That’s lovely!’

  The old husband still came in with his basket of fruit which she could no longer eat. He sat beside her for the regulation hour, but she no longer talked or listened, but slept throughout his visit.

  One day when I was trying to give her some milk she began to cry. That night she went into a coma and died early in the morning.

  It was visiting day, and the old farmer, though he had been notified of his wife’s death, appeared in the ward as usual with his fruit. He walked, old and bent, up the ward to where I stood, and handed me the basket.

  ‘For the nurses,’ he mumbled, and turning round before I could thank him, he painfully made his way out.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Psychiatric Ward, to which I was moved late in my third year, was a very new building, used almost entirely for experimental work. It was completely separate from the general hospital, standing alone at the back, with its own entrance.

  Contrary to popular belief, most mentally ill patients are neither dangerous nor raving. The vast majority are simply rather weak characters who feel the need for protection and security. None of the patients in this block were certified, though many were extremely ill.

  The wards were arranged with separate rooms and cubicles, and there was special sound-proofing in certain rooms, for the more noisy patients. No one was locked in; but since patients had agreed to give five days’ notice before leaving, there was a device by which the door to the stairs on each corridor was kept bolted on the inside. If a patient left his room unobserved with the idea of escaping from the block, he would be overheard drawing back the bolts before he could reach the stairs.

  It is, of course, part of the malady of some patients to wish to escape, and it was only on my second day that I heard the bolt click, and went into the corridor in time to see one of the male patients disappearing through the door in his pyjamas.

  I called after: ‘Mr. Barrett!’

  He stopped, turned, and shuffled back.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ I asked, coming up to him.

  He grinned at me uneasily. ‘Oh ‒ I was just going to look at the view.’

  ‘There’s a window in your room,’ I said. ‘Why not look at it through there?’

  He paused a moment. ‘Well, actually,’ he said, ‘I wanted to telephone.’

  ‘Why don’t you phone from the ward?’

  He shifted from foot to foot. ‘I was really wondering if I could see Sheila,’ he said.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t it be better to arrange it first?’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose it would be really,’ he said. ‘But I just thought I’d try!’

  This particular patient was a brilliant man of thirty-five, whose career in science had been international, and who now held an important Government post. His marriage had been a failure, his wife having taken numerous lovers, and his brilliant and highly complicated brain had collapsed under the strain.

  He was in the habit of writing down his sensations on scraps of paper. These he would scatter round his room. They usually started perfectly lucidly about scenes which had pleasant associations for him,
but as he wrote it would seem to him that these memories too had turned against him, and the account would end by the pleasant objects becoming sinister.

  One of these descriptive writings started as a pastoral. Green meadows were described; the trees, the birds, little lambs gambolling. But the last sentence ended the idyllic scene abruptly: ‘The sheep ate all the grass up so that only brown earth was left, and when they turned to me I saw they had all grown old with black faces.’

  Another patient, an elderly man, had a guilt complex which showed itself in obsessional tendencies, so that he had to pick up all cigarette ends that he saw. Before he came to the ward, this had reached the point when he had always to walk along the street with his eyes looking upwards, because he was afraid that if he saw a cigarette end he would have to bend down and pick it up no matter where it was. When he sat with the other patients in the main ward, he would frequently seize cigarettes they had left for a moment in an ashtray unguarded, dash them out, and put them in in his pocket.

  Most of the psychiatrists interviewed their patients privately, but on one occasion Dr. Deane, the head psychiatrist of the hospital, interviewed a patient in my presence.

  This girl was a young married woman called Mrs. Neville, who one day tried to kill herself by putting her head in a gas oven. She could give no reason for doing this. When questioned by the doctor who brought her round as to why she had done it, she could only answer that she did not know. She made other attempts at suicide, and her husband became afraid of leaving her alone. The night before she was admitted to the ward she had cut her wrists inefficiently and then tried to hang herself.

  I was appointed her special nurse, for patients of this type were never allowed to be left for a moment. I sat by her bed in the sound-proof room, and we talked of her family, and of the part of the country she came from. She appeared to be quite at ease and unworried. In the middle of a conversation about holidays, she seized the towel that hung on the back of her bed, and pulled it tight across her neck. I tried to free her hand but for some time could not do so, until at last I managed to get my hand under the towel, and using all my strength, prised it away.