The Secret Armour

by Lucilla Andrews

  The small ward door was open as it had been in Judson last night. The same red screen stood between the bed and the door. Mallinson pushed the screen aside, and we went in. He opened his eyes slowly, and she smiled down at him. ‘Hallo, Mr Corford. It’s us. The night staff. How are you feeling?’

  His voice sounded strange. ‘Better, thanks. I only feel as if I’ve been under a bulldozer.’

  She felt his pulse, checked the transfusion apparatus, counted the drops of saline as they fell rhythmically through the drip connexion. ‘It’s quite extraordinary,’ she said, ‘the way we night girls can’t go off duty, without you patients getting up to no good.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Nurse Mallinson. I know I didn’t ought ’a done it.’

  ‘Well, don’t let it worry you,’ she said gently; ‘we have hearts of gold. Haven’t we, Nurse Howard?’

  I had been standing back from the bed. I moved forward. ‘Yes, indeed, Nurse. Good evening, Mr Corford.’

  ‘Hallo, Nurse.’ He held out his hand. ‘I am so glad you’re back.’

  ‘I was only borrowed for one night.’

  He had caught hold of my apron as he had done before. ‘That’s good. I need you here.’

  Mallinson said dryly, ‘Now isn’t that nice, Mr Corford?’

  He looked round at her as if he had forgotten she was there. His expression altered, and he smiled faintly. ‘Very, Nurse Mallinson.’

  She said, ‘We’re going to settle you for the night, now, Mr Corford. After this either Nurse Howard or I will be looking in on you every few minutes. Don’t take any notice of us, but we’ll need to keep an eye on you, and’ ‒ she nodded at the transfusion ‒ ‘all that paraphernalia.’

  We turned his pillow, gave him a drink, checked the transfusion again, looked at his new plaster, saw that the dressing over the wound ‒ a window had been cut in the plaster ‒ was dry and comfortable, shaded the light.

  ‘Remember, Mr Corford,’ said Mallinson, as she pinned the bell-cord on to his top sheet, ‘remember, if you feel odd at any time, in any way, don’t wait for our visits ‒ just put your finger on that bell and keep it there. All right?’

  On the balcony Mallinson said, ‘We had better start off with my spinals, and you’ll have to nip to and fro every few minutes for the first couple of hours, until we’ve settled the family and Sister and the men have been round. After that I’ll take over alternate visits. I’m afraid it’s going to be hard on your feet, but there’s no option. I don’t think he’s bad enough now to qualify for a special, although, of course, we’ll see what Night Sister says. If he had been as low as I expected after hearing the Day Report I would have left you with him and demanded a relief from Sister. It’s just as well he’s better’ ‒ she pushed open the office door, and we went in quickly ‒ ‘because I don’t think Sister could have produced a relief. She ain’t got one! And it’s just as well ‒’ Here she stopped suddenly in the middle of the office. I was not expecting this and I cannoned into her. ‘Hey! You want to look where you are going, my infant!’ She smiled. ‘As I was saying, it’s just as well you and I had that little talk on the facts of hospital life. High time. You want to look where you are going in that direction too. I was right about that soft spot. Could be something more serious, don’t you think?’

  I said, ‘I expect it’s just that he’s used to having me around.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She did not sound very sure. ‘I hope to goodness it is. And the same in your case. You’re in for a packet of trouble if not.’

  ‘Yes, Nurse.’

  Her hand was on the spinal ward door-knob. ‘As I expected to find him moribund, I was so relieved to see the old green light in his eyes when he looked at you, just now, that personally I wouldn’t have cared if he had proposed to you there and then. I wouldn’t have cared,’ she added quietly, ‘but Matron would. She would care the hell of a lot. I’m sorry if you think I’m over-doing the Mother-to-you aspect, Howard, but you’re pretty young, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nineteen, Nurse.’

  ‘Well’ ‒ her expression was very kind ‒ ‘you don’t have to hurry, do you? Now, to work, to work!’

  At half-past eleven she told me to change David’s saline-bottle. ‘You know how to do it, Howard?’

  ‘Yes, Nurse. You showed me with Easterly’s.’

  David was awake. I explained what I was going to do and did it.

  ‘Do you know what you look like doing that?’

  I was fiddling with the long rubber tube. ‘No, Mr Corford.’

  ‘A goose-girl. Or a snow-maiden. It’s the effect of that white cap on your dark hair. You remind me of one of those old-fashioned fairy-tale illustrations. Look up on the ceiling, and you’ll see what I mean.’

  The saline was running properly, so I looked up. The shadow on the ceiling changed the glass vacolitre of saline and the thin, winding tube, into a spinning-wheel. The lace frills of my cap fluttered, enormously enlarged, over my head.

  ‘Aren’t I right?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I was so glad to see you back again, Nurse Howard,’ he said. He turned his face away from me; it was hidden by the shadow that covered half his pillow, but his voice was much stronger. ‘Do you know what bothered me most this afternoon? During that merry half-hour when I thought I had had it?’

  ‘Your job?’

  He turned back, opened his eyes again, and lifted his head slightly. The light fell on his pale face and showed the tightness of the skin over his cheek-bones.

  ‘Not that. Oddly enough. God knows, I’ve fought long enough against leaving the Navy. No,’ he sounded surprised, ‘it was the thought that I would never see you again. Funny. I knew I liked you, Nurse Howard. I knew I liked you very much. You must have known it too. What I did not know was how much.’ His voice was very deep. ‘Do you mind?’

  I had never seen any man look at me as he was doing now, I had never heard any man talk to me in that tone, I had never even thought this could happen to me. I said, ‘I don’t mind, Mr Corford.’ Then I remembered Mallinson’s strictures and went on formally. ‘Are you quite comfortable?’

  He smiled. ‘This isn’t the time or the place? Maybe you’re right. I just wanted you to know. I’m glad you don’t mind. And, yes, thank you, Nurse, I am quite comfortable.’

  I went back to the kitchen where Mallinson was filling a feeding-cup with hot milk. ‘All set? Good. I’ve been thinking. We won’t have time to go down to the dining-room to-night, Howard. We’ll eat in turns in here.’

  ‘This is getting to be a habit,’ I said. ‘I ate in Judson, last night.’

  ‘Things always happen that way in hospital,’ she said. ‘All the wards are slack together, and then they all produce crises at the same time. Incidentally, will you make some more coffee when you do the porridge? Mr Mellows rang up ten minutes ago. He’s coming up at midnight to see Corford, and I’ve promised him a cup.’

  I whisked round the two fracture wards, rushed down to the spinals, all the men were quiet, and got back again to the kitchen as twelve struck. I heard Night Sister and two men go along the balcony as I took out the oatmeal. Then I remembered about the coffee. I made it first, as usual with one eye on the indicator above the kitchen door.

  The coffee boiled over as George Hartigan came into the room. ‘Got any of that to spare, Nurse?’ He recognized who I was. ‘Hallo! You again! You do get around, Nurse Howard. Or is it me?’

  ‘It’s you. I belong here. I was only on loan last night. But what are you, a medical clerk, doing in an orthopaedic ward?’

  ‘I’m not really a clerk at all,’ he said apologetically; ‘I’m merely hurtling round every block in the hospital, trying to assimilate some last-minute knowledge before my big moment.’

  ‘What have we got up here that makes an examination case?’

  ‘Treatment of reactionary haemorrhage all laid on,’ he said. ‘I was in on the party this afternoon. How is he?’

  ‘He’s fine. Just fine.’

  He grinned, and t
he corners of his mouth turned down.

  The result was attractive, although it should not have been. ‘Good as that, eh? Splendid.’

  I knew I was grinning like the Cheshire Cat; I hoped he would not notice it, but, by the way he was looking at me, I saw he had. I said, ‘The coffee’s ready. Would you like to help yourself to a cup now, or will you wait for Mr Mellows and Nurse Mallinson?’

  ‘Nurse, I am only a lowly student man. I don’t drink with my betters. I’d like some now, please.’ He walked over to the dresser and took down two cups. ‘Sugar and milk for you, Nurse?’

  ‘I won’t have any at the moment, thanks. I’ve got to go round again.’

  He held the coffee saucepan poised. ‘Come, come, Nurse. Devotion to duty is all very well, but a girl has to keep her strength up.’

  ‘I dare say a girl has,’ I said, ‘but not to-night. There just isn’t time. I haven’t started my routine, yet.’

  ‘Laundry-folding, trolley-laying, book-ruling, bread and butter cutting?’

  ‘How on earth do you know it all? Have you trained?’

  ‘Practically,’ he said. ‘Remember I’ve been hanging round the old firm for six years.’

  I glanced at the clock over his head. ‘Will you keep an eye on the porridge for me while I go round the spinals?’

  ‘I’ll do that. How many patients have you got?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’ I stopped in the doorway. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll do the bread and butter,’ he said placidly, reaching for the bread-board.

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Half a tick, Nurse Howard …’

  ‘Yes?’ I turned back again.

  ‘You’re bound to get held up, somewhere, and as I’ve seen two dawns in succession I draw a line at a third. How about that do?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘yes, thank you. I should have remembered to tell you. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get off for it.’

  He said, ‘You haven’t really had much time in which to remember. You can only have got my note this evening.’ He opened the bread-bin, and I thought, was it only this evening? I felt as if a couple of years had gone by since I arrived on duty.

  ‘A pity you can’t make it, Nurse,’ he said. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t be free.’

  The day pros trooped up the iron staircase at twenty-five minutes past seven next morning and flocked into the sluice-room where I was rinsing the washing-bowls.

  ‘How is he, Howard?’

  ‘Better,’ I beamed at them, ‘much, much better. Mallinson says he’ll be O.K. now he’s pumped full of saline and good red blood.’

  They beamed back, ‘Good show, Howard!’

  The other men had been equally pleased. Langley’s mouth wore a broad smile when I washed him. ‘That Mr Corford doing all right, eh, Nurse ’Oward? Wonderful what they does for you in these places an’ that’s a fact!’

  Even the normally gloomy back patients cheered up and said it just went to show that it never did to get downhearted. How they, the spinals, knew about David in their far-off ward no one ever discovered, as no one ever does discover how the grape-vine works in hospital wards. The only certain thing is that it does work, most efficiently.

  I thought it over as I cycled off duty. The whole ward had been happy that morning. You could feel the atmosphere radiating from the wards to the corridors, the kitchen, even the sluices, were gay. The return of Sister Willy B. from her week-end off, normally a cause for despondency, was treated by the whole staff as a mere bagatelle.

  It was the first time I had seen this happen ‒ this peculiar shared pleasure among strangers that another stranger was recovering. I was glad to have been there. And then I nearly fell off my bicycle again as I thought over this understatement. ‘Glad’ came nowhere near describing how I felt. If I had not been in Willy Brown I should never have met David.

  We had no lecture that morning, and, as I felt wide awake, after breakfast I decided to tidy my room. Elsie was eternally fussing over the state of my bookcase and the quantity of bottles on my dressing-table. Generally her nagging annoyed me, but to-day she was Good Old Elsie with a heart of gold, and anything I could do to lighten the floor-maid’s lot was a pleasure.

  I shed my cloak, shoes, and belt, and pushed open my window. I found that I loved the view of the bottle-factory, which my room overlooked. I leant out and admired the grey roof-tops of the East End. I thought how beautiful they all were, then I discovered it had begun to rain and the starch was wilting in my cap.

  Alice came in later to find me singing to the wireless, my bed covered in books. ‘Maggie, what on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Organizing my bookcase.’ I grinned idiotically. ‘It’s sheer chaos.’

  She pushed aside a dozen or so books and sat on one corner of the bed. ‘But it always is! Why this sudden rush of blood to the head?’

  ‘I just feel in the mood. It must be the spring.’

  Alice said grimly that if I called the young February hurricane that was blowing outside spring, I ought to have my head examined. ‘And it’s been pouring with rain for the past half-hour! Come to think of it, Maggie, maybe you should go into Judson for a spell. You haven’t really been the same girl since you came off your bike.’

  I said, ‘I expect you’re right,’ which is what I always say when I disagree with a person and have not the courage to admit it. I asked if she had had a good night.

  ‘No, perfectly dreadful. I hear you had a flap in Willy B.’

  ‘We did, but it did not last long. How did you know?’

  She said she had been talking to Mallinson. ‘I’ve got a bit of gossip that concerns you, duckie. The big girls are changing over. Mallinson’s coming off to-morrow night, and Spikes is taking her place in Willy B.’

  ‘Spikes? Who’s she?’ Then I remembered. ‘Oh, no, Alice! They can’t do that to me! Not Spikes and Sister Willy B. together?’

  Alice said they could and had. ‘Just as well you’re in this daft frame of mind, Maggie. You’ll need some antidote to the future horror of night-life in Willy B.’ She stood up and scattered a pile of books on to the floor. ‘You will exist, my child,’ she said, as she picked them up, ‘in a state one degree lower than slave-labour.’

  The patients in William Brown were as little pleased with Nurse Mallinson’s successor as I had been when I heard that I was to work with her. Her name was Miss Spikes. She was much older than the general run of nurses in training, and her hair was iron-grey. Her manner was steel-grey. She treated the whole block as schoolboys. She was a governess born. One of the Bröntes’ militant ladies, rather than Miss Austen’s more gentle variety. Any protest against lights out, going to sleep, washing, shaving, spitting here, or drinking this, she dealt with firmly. ‘Nonsense, boy! You’ll feel much better if you do what you are told!’

  The men nicknamed her ‘The Thistle,’ and the day pros suffered from her in the early morning as I suffered from Sister Willy B. at night. She invariably greeted their arrival in the ward at seven-thirty with a list of complaints. ‘Thirty-one had no fresh drinking-water when I went round last evening, Nurses. The fracture sluice was a disgrace ‒ the measure-jug was missing, and there were Three Unwashed Cups in the kitchen! I’m afraid I shall have to speak to Sister!’

  The day pros said that the only thing that made life worth living for them at all, these days, was listening to Nurse Spikes fighting it out with Sister Willy B. at the daily morning reports.

  ‘At least, Howard, you haven’t got Sister all night, and you can hide in the kitchen or the depths of the fracture wards.’

  Miss Parks, the orderly, who had been on holiday for the past ten nights, now returned and hissed mutinously in the fracture sluice-room. ‘Really, Nurse, if I’ve said it once to the boys I’m sure I’ve said it a hundred times, that if it wasn’t that I had little Nurse Howard to have a laugh with at night, I’d ask for my cards.’ She polished the basin she was cleaning violently. ‘And I was only telling that Mr Cor
ford this evening ‒ ever such a nice gentleman he is, but there, I always did like naval gentlemen ‒ well, I was telling him that Mr Langley was saying that if Matron took off that Nurse Howard as well, Mr Langley would tell them what they could do with his morale, and that was a fact. And Mr Corford said ‒’

  ‘Nurse Howard!’ Nurse Spikes stood in the doorway. ‘What do you think you are doing, gossiping in here?’

  I said truthfully, ‘Cleaning the specimen-glasses, Nurse.’ Nurse Spikes grunted, then said I had better get on with them, and vanished.

  Miss Parks shrugged her shoulders. ‘Never once did that sweet Nurse Mallinson complain! But there, as I tell the boys, you can’t have everything. Only don’t you grow up like that Nurse Spikes, Nurse,’ she added warningly. ‘You copy Nurse Mallinson. Ever so gentle. Ever so firm. A real nurse, I call her.’ She looked me over. ‘The boys say as how you are ever so gentle, Nurse’ ‒ she shook her head ‒ ‘but, of course, you’re a bit on the small side. I expect you’ll grow,’ she ended kindly.

  ‘I expect you’re right.’ One of my specimen-glasses was cloudy. I breathed on it and rubbed harder. ‘Sister said to-night that the bandage was to come off Langley’s eyes to-morrow. Did he tell you?’

  Miss Parks straightened her back. She looked very tired, despite her holiday.

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘Is it going to be all right, Nurse?’

  I shook my head. ‘I dunno. Sister said it was doubtful. Might work. I do hope so. We’re not sure about one eye, but at least he can see a bit with the other.’

  ‘I expect he’ll be all right.’ She was determined to be cheerful. ‘We done a good job on that boy, dear. He must be all right.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ I said again.

  Miss Parks was thin and angular; she was that rarity in the East End of London, an unmarried woman in her late forties. She was fiercely maternal towards the patients, ‘her boys,’ and untiringly kind. The men teased her, bullied her into endless illicit tea-making, and loved her.