The Print Petticoat

by Lucilla Andrews

  I found Nurse Haddy reading the morning paper in the Floor nurses’ sitting-room. Nurse Haddy looked at me in a way that showed she was clearly antipathetic to all voluntary hospital trainees in general and St Gregory’s in particular. I was at that time wearing my own Gregory’s uniform, since the rather musical-comedy Havenne uniform, for which I had been fitted, had not yet arrived. In fairness, I must admit Gregory’s uniform takes a lot of beating. The dresses are blue-and-white printed cotton, immensely full in the skirt, and gathered at the waist, which causes our skirts to billow ballerina-fashion under our aprons. Gregory’s skirts are famous. Gregory’s nurses are known in London hospital circles as the Print Petticoats.

  Nurse Haddy, after a sorrowful glance at my legs, sniffed. ‘We had another Gregory’s girl here, once,’ she said sadly. I asked her name, and found I knew the girl slightly.

  Nurse Haddy sniffed again. ‘She was all right,’ she said, ‘when you got used to her.’

  She stood up and closed the newspaper. She said she supposed she had better show me round the Floor.

  I must say this about The Havenne, it was a fine place to be shown round. The rooms, more like hotel rooms than private wards, were well furnished and spotlessly clean. And, like hotel rooms, Beth’s Uncle Tom had graded them in price. The Floor itself was conveniently divided into two wings. To the left side lay the suites, the luxury rooms, in fact the West End, as it was unofficially known. The East End was to the right.

  Like the rooms, the nurses also were sized up and priced. Nurse Haddy had perfectly concrete reasons for disliking nurses from the big teaching hospitals. The nurses from the Big Five were invariably given rooms in the West End, whilst other nurses gravitated to the East End with its cheaper rooms and greater number of patients. Even this was hardly slumming. Uncle Tom never thought in terms below twenty guineas weekly.

  I helped Nurse Haddy make the bed of her one patient that first morning. The patient was a polite, elderly Polish Jew who had had his tonsils out. As we left his room Nurse Haddy, still sunk in gloom, said, ‘I expect I’ll lose my job now.’

  Ten days later, in the reshuffle of the floor staff-nurses that followed upon the return of the Floor Sister from her holiday, I found myself taking over Nurse Haddy’s rooms, and was fully in sympathy with her despondency.

  We finished that one bed, and for the rest of my first day in The Havenne I had nothing to do. After the third useless attempt I stopped asking the Charge Nurse for work. The other nurses were polite but firm.

  ‘Honest to God, woman,’ said one exasperated Irishwoman, expressing the general feeling towards me, ‘you ought to be bloody glad to be having an easy time of it! Wish to God I could say as much for myself!’

  At this I foolishly asked her if she was sure there was nothing I could do to help her, and she said, ‘Not at all!’

  Most of the nurses on my floor came from Ireland, and they all said ‘Not at all!’ constantly.

  I read Boswell in the linen-cupboard until half-past nine in the morning, when it was locked by the Charge Nurse. Not because I was sitting there reading, but purely as a matter of routine. I discovered the reason for this later when the Floor Sister came back. Turned out of the linen-cupboard, I went and sat in one of the many empty bathrooms and read there, undisturbed till Sister’s return from her holiday. Becoming exhausted from being beaten down in my quest to nurse, I read all of every day, which was how I finished Boswell in four days. There were, of course, interruptions for meals and tea. We drank inordinate quantities of tea. When I asked the nurses how they managed ‒ didn’t they get indigestion from all that tea-drinking? ‒ they said ‘Not at all.’

  I was drinking my first cup of tea during my first morning when a bell rang. The indicator showed that it was one for Nurse Shanahan, the aforementioned Irishwoman. She simply ignored the bell. Not having yet learnt my place, I put down my cup, stood up, and offered to answer the bell for her.

  ‘Oh, to hell with you, Anthony! Mind your own bloody business. Let the b‒ wait.’ I sat down again. The indicator continued to glow scarlet for the next twenty minutes, whilst Nurse Shanahan drank her third cup of tea, then sailed off along the corridor.

  One afternoon towards the end of my first week I met the Matron and Beth’s uncle in the corridor. They stopped to speak to me. Uncle Tom inquired after Beth, then said politely that he hoped I was settling down and was happy in my work. I had already decided to leave The Havenne. I decided, in fact, rashly but correctly, by 11 a.m. on my first morning. I had to wait till the end of the month to give notice decently and legally.

  I said that Beth was very well and yes, thank you, to the latter question. We all three beamed on each other, and they passed on. The abnormally hot weather made the bathrooms extremely stuffy, which I found very trying.

  Allan left Elmhall a couple of days after I had done. He had finished six months as a junior obstetrical house-physician and having no desire to specialize in obstetrics ‒ being a gynaecologist at heart ‒ had wangled a transfer back to London as a gynaecological house-physician. That was how he was able to come across to The Havenne in the evenings.

  As he had stopped asking me to marry him for the moment, and he took my mind off Richard during the evenings, I was grateful to him, and, possibly, more sociable with him than I had ever been. Whatever it was, we got on with each other pretty well. We neither of us had any money, and I was fresh as a daisy from having sat around all day with a book, so we used to walk back across the Park, sometimes taking a bus for our last lap to Chelsea, more often on our own two feet. Allan was the type of Scotsman that walks thirty miles in the heather before breakfast to get up an appetite for his porridge. He generally brought a couple of tins of food for supper in the flat, which made him feel at least some of the party was on him, which it certainly was.

  During the daytime, on duty, for the first time in my working life I thought seriously of chucking nursing as a career, until I had the sense to realize that nursing-home nursing is only a small, if somewhat odd, side of the profession. I had always been lucky enough to enjoy my job, so the whole atmosphere ‒ or rather lack of any hospital atmosphere ‒ in The Havenne, together with my scarcity of patients, both bored and irritated me. Two months is not a long period when considered in retrospect; it can be all eternity when time is in your mind and not on the clock.

  In fairness to Uncle Tom, no one was forced to be a patient in The Havenne. The patients might grumble at the fees, but they came and kept on coming. On Thursday morning, when the weekly bills were presented by the secretary, the patients consoled themselves with their cleverness at side-tracking the Health Service and not finding themselves thrown into a thirty-bedded ward, the inmates of which groaned and vomited throughout the twenty-four hours. As I had only then nursed for five and a half years, I had yet to hear a patient groaning in a general ward. Privacy can be very dangerous. Nurse Shanahan, in her attitude to private nursing, was the rule, not the exception. In a hospital ward, the call ‘Nurse’ will bring half the nursing staff to the bedside, always itself under the eye of the Sister or Charge Nurse sitting at the ward-desk. You might only want a glass of water. You might equally be starting a major haemorrhage. Both are reasonably common occurrences. You can lose a good deal of blood in twenty minutes while waiting for a bell to be answered.

  The trouble is that there is no social kudos to be gained by being an inmate in St Blank’s Hospital, London. Conversely the London evening papers can hardly bear to go to press without carrying at least one photograph of some notability staggering down the steps of a fashionable West End nursing-home, inevitably surrounded by buxom and well-toothed nurses.

  There were giant hollyhocks growing in the park that summer. Allan and I loitered pleasantly, sometimes till long after dark. We would sit by the lake as night fell, watching the moon rise over the water. It was very peaceful and somehow odd to sit in the centre of London, yet to hear neither the traffic nor the sounds of the great city around us. Only th
e reflected radiation in the sky of the thousands of street-lamps showed that we were not alone. Yet straight up over our heads the night was clear to the sky. It was as if we sat in the middle of some silent, giant diamond. We had our favourite bench, one that stood between two trees at the water’s edge. The branches of the two trees joined behind us. We liked the sense of isolation this gave us. Privacy in your private life, as in illness, costs money.

  ‘Anyway, Allan,’ I said one night, ‘it may be a corny setting, but it’s perfect for romance.’

  To my surprise this upset him.

  ‘It’s all very well to laugh, Joanna,’ he said, and his voice sounded genuinely hurt. ‘I know things would be different if I had a car.’

  I was still too surprised at being taken seriously to answer. I could have said, ‘That’s why I can’t marry you, Allan.’ I did not, since if I had, he would promptly have raised the money, bought a car, and announced our engagement.

  The snag lay not in our speaking different languages, but in the fact that Allan never knew there was any other language to speak.

  We sat on in silence for a while. I tilted my head over the back of the bench and stretched as if waking up. Allan turned towards me.

  ‘Don’t sound so sad.’ His voice was very kind.

  Damn him, I thought, he is so nice. Why can’t he be a little less of a gentleman ‒ more like Richard or Marcus, then I would not have to have a constant conscience about him.

  ‘I was thinking about today. The Havenne reached a new low for me. It was that terrible little Mr Asta. The Ear, Nose, and Throat king. He did a mastoidectomy on my woman this morning. He came in four times this afternoon, or rather he put his head round the door four times and said, “Don’t forget, Nurse Anthony, tell her I’ve been in ‒ three guineas a visit is three guineas a visit”.’

  Allan sat upright. ‘Do you mean to tell me they all make twelve guineas as easily as that?’

  ‘Don’t know if they all do. He does, because he told me. He also told me to get her moved into one of my suites. “Simply doesn’t know what to do with her money, Nurse! And damn it all, the suites impress ’em. Not to mention a pretty little Nurse like you about”.’

  Indignant, I sat up as well.

  ‘That’s what gets me, Allan,’ I went on. ‘All that rubbish about the Right Type of Nurse, and all for £315 a year.’

  Allan laughed. ‘What gets you? The amount of money you earn, or the disillusion of your ideas on medical ethics?’

  I had to laugh. ‘Both, I suppose.’

  He thought it over. ‘Maybe there is quite a bit to be said for him,’ he said slowly. ‘Asta and the other chaps. A job’s a job for most people. The more you charge for your services, the more highly valued those services become. After all, most of your patients can well afford to pay what he asks, so why shouldn’t he make it? If he doesn’t operate, someone else certainly will. You know as well as I do no patient yet born believes he can get better treatment by paying less, Health Service or no Health Service.’ He leant forward, his head in his hands, arms propped on his knees, watching the slow-moving water of the lake.

  ‘Besides, Joa,’ he went on. ‘Can a patient really do better in a general ward, as you imagine? Have you ever seen one of our pundits go to a ward four times after a mastoidectomy?’

  ‘They don’t have to,’ I defended hotly. ‘They can trust their house-staff and nurses. They might perhaps if it was a private patient,’ I added thoughtfully, ‘but it’s unlikely.’

  Allan raised his head and spread his hands flat on his knees. ‘But you haven’t any housemen in The Havenne, and consider your fellow-nurses, direct descendants of Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig.’

  I smiled. ‘More or less.’

  ‘In which case,’ he concluded triumphantly, rolling every ‘r’, and clipping his words in unusual excitement, ‘in which case, since you are new to him, I think Asta was dead right to nip in ‒ if he nips in, why shouldn’t the patient pay?’

  ‘I know you are going to make me eat my words,’ I laughed. ‘I expect you are quite right about it all, but it still makes me mad. People ought not to make so much money out of other people’s diseases.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Joanna!’ Allan finally exploded, his Scots calm shattered. ‘Don’t be so stupid, woman! How do you think doctors live? The trouble with your type of nurse’ ‒ his ‘r’s were furious now ‒ ‘and all the lay public is that you expect us to carry a copy of the Hippocratic oath in our pockets and have a halo tucked firmly over our stethoscopes.’

  He swung round on the bench and shook me gently. ‘Think, girl! Think! Not one man in a hundred at Gregory’s is in medicine for any other reason than that his father is a doctor, or it’s a good way to go on playing rugger for five years after leaving school. And you know it! We are no more an inspired set than any collection of mechanics, engineers, or solicitors. It’s a job. And that’s that.’

  He rubbed his face carefully against my cheek, then let go of me and sat back in his corner.

  ‘How many men,’ he asked, ‘have you known at Gregory’s who you can truthfully say felt the same way you think we all ought to feel about suffering humanity?’

  I thought. ‘Frankie Spence,’ I said immediately, then stopped. I had known casually scores of our young men, yet in honesty I could not suggest another name.

  ‘There you are! You know quite well the average medical student is a foul-mouthed, foul-minded young man. Why expect him to be metamorphized into the Beloved Physician by passing Conjoint? Or even the M.B.?’

  I could not even pretend to be cross any longer. He was perfectly right and sensible, and, as he kept saying, I knew it.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I give up. I’ll stop being determined to be shocked and get gloomy about my future instead. I’ve got to think about what happens when I leave The Havenne.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re leading me on, Joa?’ In the darkness his voice was amused. ‘Shall I propose again? It would suit me very well if you would accept.’

  ‘No, Allan,’ I said. ‘No. But thank you. That isn’t what I want. I don’t want to get married yet. That’s the rub. I don’t know what I do want.’

  ‘I know what I want,’ he said firmly. ‘I want to spend the rest of my life sitting under a tree with you. On such a night as this! Damn that man. He said it first, and so beautifully that there is nothing for me to add. But I wish you would think about it seriously, dear Joanna. Dearest, dear Joanna’ ‒ his voice was suddenly unsteady ‒ ‘do. I would so love it, if you would.’

  I said nothing for a moment. I had never known Allan as he was tonight. Suddenly I wondered if perhaps after all it might not work. Tonight, for the first time, I had forgotten my nagging ache for Richard. It would be wonderful to be loved, genuinely. Maybe it would be successful. We certainly had our work in common. I kept quiet. I knew Allan would never hurry me for an answer. I did not want to spoil the moment there between us.

  Then Allan spoilt things without any aid from me. He put his arm round me and drew me close.

  ‘I think you would love it too, Joanna,’ he said firmly.

  We sat on there for a little while longer, then after a decent interval I said I was getting cold, so we left the Park and took a bus back to Chelsea and supper.

  Chapter Eight

  A Sultan in My Suite

  Mrs Ada Hannay the Floor Sister, came back from her holiday when I had been in The Havenne ten days. She was a trainee of one of the big provincial teaching hospitals. She had been a nursing-home Sister for sixteen years. Miss Hannay was an immensely tall, dark-haired woman, somewhere in the late forties or early fifties. She stood straight and square. Her voice and mannerisms were identical with those of Ellen Grayson’s at Elmhall, and consequently I took to her at our first meeting. Nor did I ever find that my first impression of her was wrong, like Ellen, if she did not call a spade a bloody shovel, it was certainly a damned implement. She resembled no Sister I had ever met in my training school.
Her knowledge and opinion of modern nursing technique was negligible. Such new-fangled nonsense as Chloromycetin or the sulphanilamides she refused to discuss. She allotted penicillin its place, purely on the strength of Sir Alexander Fleming’s knighthood.

  ‘After all, lass, can’t go wrong when a man’s a gentleman!’ Dakin’s solution had done nicely in the First World War and could go on for any sepsis if it was left to her. Fortunately it was not.

  Miss Hannay was probably an ardent teetotaller, yet I would never have been surprised if she had offered me a swig of gin behind the duty-room door.

  She had a weakness for the old-time voluntary hospitals. ‘Maybe a bit la-di-da, you girls, but I’ll say this ‒ they do teach you how t’work. None of that slappin’ and ticklin’ with the male nurses in the linen-cupboard you find in other places!’

  This apparently was the origin of the locking of the Floor linenry. There were no male nurses in The Havenne. There were, of course, dozens of porters. Miss Hannay was an excellent administrator, a calm manager of temperamental patients and irate doctors, and was herself an exceptionally kindly woman whose lack of nursing mattered not at all, since no nursing was required of her in her capacity as Floor Sister.

  The first morning she returned to duty, I was in her duty-room, irritably jiggling the telephone in order to get some belated attention from the switchboard operator.

  ‘Ee, don’t break up ruddy ’phone, little girl,’ she rasped, and looked me over. Her eyes fell on my petticoat. ‘Gregory’s! Ah, well. Good hospital that. Glad t’have thee, lass.’

  From that minute Sister and I were buddies. Later that morning she called me into the office and asked what weekly day off I would like. Off-duty at The Havenne was set. It never varied weekly as in a hospital. Sister offered me Saturday as my regular day off; I accepted gladly, and we became even firmer friends. Saturday was the pick of the off-duty. Miss Hannay then told me that I was to take over Nurse Haddy’s one patient and three empty rooms.