The Print Petticoat

by Lucilla Andrews

  The pros were very worried when they arrived on the balcony after lunch to push me back into the Ward. ‘Don’t say the Professor is going to have a teaching round today as well.’

  ‘I gather so,’ I said, and their faces fell. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you girls like him? We always thought he was a honey.’

  ‘He may be,’ said the Senior Probationer glumly, ‘but we can’t serve teas when he’s in the Ward, and that means we have to spend the rest of the evening making up for lost time. It’s a blood-curdling rush to get finished by eight.’

  ‘Is that a new rule?’ I asked. ‘We always served teas during rounds in my day.’

  The two pros exchanged glances as they wondered how far they could go with me, since Sister and I were friends.

  ‘Sister’s got a thing about teas,’ explained the Senior Pro eventually. ‘So we always know how important a doctor is or isn’t by the fact that we can or we can’t feed the patients. For instance,’ she went on, ‘the Professor. No teas at all till he’s gone. With Dr Homer ‒ we can take them round on trays if we do it quietly. But when it’s Dr Jobber-Rese,’ she finished triumphantly, ‘we’re allowed to push in the trolley, urn, cups, jangling teaspoons, and all!’

  I laughed. ‘Sister Catherine never did like Dr Jobber-Rese,’ I said.

  ‘Miss Anthony,’ she said, ‘how could she? Such an oily little man! And he wears brothel-creepers.’

  ‘Good God,’ I said, looking at her round pink face and her baby brown eyes. ‘What are those, Nurse?’

  ‘Crepe-soled suede shoes,’ said the junior pro in a soft voice. She was even younger than the first girl.

  The two teaching rounds went on simultaneously in Catherine that afternoon. The Professor’s and Dr Homer’s. I was always on the balcony for Dr Homer’s rounds. He noticed me as he walked into the Ward followed by a bevy of young men. He came over to my bed. The students began to follow him. He waved them away behind his head, as if he was brushing off a fly. Nurse Gray was chaperoning for him. She stood at the foot of my bed and raised her eyebrows as Dr Homer and I shook hands.

  ‘T-t-too b-b-bad, Miss Anthony! This is no place for a Windmill lady,’ he grinned pleasantly. ‘Hurry up and g-g-get well, and we’ll have another p-p-party.’ He smiled and went back to his students. I could see from the expression on Nurse Gray’s face that my social position had risen several degrees in the past few minutes. To have mild affairs with housemen is part of a general training. Reminiscing with a senior member of the hospital staff is a different story.

  The Professor loomed in the doorway, his young men thick upon him. Sister Catherine sailed down the Ward from her desk, met him formally by the first bed where he stood politely waiting for her to chaperon for him. The Professor and Dr Homer nodded at each other, and the rounds moved off on different sides of the Ward.

  There were fifty-one students in Catherine Ward that afternoon. Twenty-nine with the Professor, twenty-two following Dr Homer. Each doctor had his own Medical Registrar and House Physician. The Professor, as the Senior, had John Fernie, the Resident Physician, with him as well. There were in all fifty-eight men, Sister Catherine, eight nurses, and forty patients in the Ward, yet in the quiet all that could be heard were the low voices of the Professor and Dr Homer.

  The Professor showed his boys my notes and pictures. He told them my case history. They all looked at me with casual politeness. One or two asked obvious questions.

  ‘Have you had a cough?’

  ‘Did you lose any weight beforehand?’

  ‘Any pain?’

  Marcus grinned, his head high over them all. Then sobered instantly as the Professor started talking again.

  Dr Homer’s round went on long after the Professor’s had gone. My neighbour on one side was a lady called Mrs Adams, who had cardiac failure. She was a chatty woman and on the whole fairly cheerful, but for some reason she was not improving under treatment as she should have done. Dr Homer questioned her carefully. ‘Is anything bothering you, Mrs Adams?’

  ‘Oh, Doctor’ She hesitated, then burst out. ‘It’s my babies, Doctor. I do so worry about them.’

  ‘Babies?’ There was surprise in his voice. He turned back the pages on her bed-ticket. ‘I didn’t know you had had any children, Mrs Adams.’

  ‘Not real children,’ she said with contempt. ‘My babies. My Scotties!’

  ‘D-d-dogs?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘How many have you got?’

  ‘Sixteen Scotties, Doctor,’ she said proudly, ‘and one pussy cat!’

  ‘G-g-good G-G-God. Who’s looking after them? The R.S.P.C.A.?’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ she wailed, ‘the man came for them and he said they would be well treated, but I know they won’t feed them as I do! Nothing but bunny ‒ the best bunny ‒ and brown bread, have they ever had. I know they won’t like the food in the kennels.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Homer seriously. ‘Is there anything else on your mind, Mrs Adams?’

  ‘Oh, Doctor!’ She clutched his arm. ‘Yes, there is.’

  He sat down patiently on her locker-seat. One or two of his students began to fidget. Tom Cadell turned round and frowned them to silence.

  ‘T-tell me, Mrs Adams,’ said the cardiologist kindly.

  ‘It’s my tenants ‒ they have the flat upstairs ‒’ her voice came in gushes on the short breaths of the advanced cardiac failure.

  ‘D-don’t they p-pay rent?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s not that ‒ they are a young couple ‒ such a coincidence’ ‒ she gasped, then gave a little giggle ‒ ‘he’s a doctor, too. They aren’t married, of course.’ She smiled deprecatingly as if to assure Dr Homer that she realized the Medical Profession was too busy to regularize its personal unions. Dr Homer’s mouth tightened.

  ‘I don’t mind that,’ went on Mrs Adams. ‘I mean I’m broad-minded and I know ‒ what young people are ‒ but it’s that piano! She will play it ‒ all day! And really, Doctor,’ she finished pathetically, ‘she’s not at all musical!’

  Dr Homer promised that Dr Cadell would see the in-patient Lady Almoner. He eventually persuaded Mrs Adams to let him listen to her heart. A few minutes later he eased his stethoscope away from his ears, straightened, took out his pocket-watch, and reached for her wrist.

  ‘Whose is this patient?’ He glanced round at the students. A small man on the opposite side of the bed coughed.

  ‘Mine, sir.’

  ‘What’s her pulse like as a rule?’

  The student squinted across the bed at the upside-down chart in Tom Cadell’s hands.

  ‘I asked you, boy,’ said Dr Homer drily. ‘What do you think of it? I can read the nurse’s record any time I like.’

  The young man had a nice fresh-coloured face. By now he was scarlet.

  ‘It ‒ it fibrillates quite a bit, sir, I think,’ he added cautiously.

  ‘How much digitalis is she having?’ Dr Homer spoke to the ceiling. The student squinted again.

  ‘Er ‒ I’m not sure, sir.’

  Dr Homer turned irritably to Nurse Gray beside him.

  ‘What is her pulse like, Nurse?’

  ‘It does fibrillate occasionally,’ she said, ‘and the discrepancy is usually about ten.’

  ‘What’s the volume, Nurse?’

  ‘Good. Sometimes very good.’

  ‘Thank you, Nurse.’

  He moved round to the foot of the bed and faced the students.

  ‘Now, gentlemen! You’ve just had a demonstration. Don’t you forget it. When you want to find out about a patient’s pulse in hospital, seize hold of the nearest nurse and ask her. The nurses are taking pulses all day. There is nothing they don’t know about the finer shades of the beat. And don’t think you have to take my word only for this. Sir Hamish Forbes himself taught me that when I was his house physician. “Ask a nurse, Homer my boy, not a cardiologist ‒ just the nearest probationer ‒ if you really want the truth about a pulse!” ’

 
I noticed that when he was doing a lot of talking Dr Homer forgot his stutter.

  The late Sir Hamish Forbes was the greatest cardiologist St Gregory’s had ever produced. During his lifetime he was considered the outstanding heart man in England. He had always been extremely popular, and was now much missed by Gregory’s nurses. It would seem that Dr Homer was going the right way to follow in Sir Hamish Forbes’s footsteps as successfully as he had filled his place as Senior Cardiologist on the staff of the hospital.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Frozen Spring

  Spring was late that year. So late that it would be fair to say it never arrived. I was sent down to the hospital at Stevenswood in the middle of January and found the countryside colder than London.

  The nurses’ hands and arms cracked and reddened as they wheeled me, morning and evening, out of the ward and on to the covered ramp.

  The hospital, growing as it had from Army huts, still had no two-storey buildings and no balcony; the ramp was used for any patients who had to spend their days in the open air.

  The Dettol-water in my clinical thermometer jar froze solid on my bed-table every night. The pine-woods around the hospital groaned stiffly under the weight of the ice they carried, and the sky for weeks was grey and heavy with a threat of more snow. Spring had come and nearly gone on the calendar before the snow began to clear from the earth around us. It was the end of May before the staff-nurse in Margaret Ward, the ward in which I was now a patient, brought me the first bunch of daffodils that any of us had seen that year.

  There was very little to do down at Stevenswood. There was no street, no traffic to watch. It was too far out in the country for there ever to be a chance of casual visitors dropping in. In London I had become an institution among my friends and acquaintances. They were all more than kind, and every day I had at least one visitor. It is extraordinary quite how important being visited is to hospital patients. I discovered this after my first few weeks in the country. That, among other things about illness.

  The business of pain. Its effect as a refiner of character and on the immortal soul. Pain ‒ the real enemy of the sick ‒ not death, often a welcome friend. Pain and its parasite insomnia.

  In my experience the effect on character was disastrous! They made me irritable, apprehensive, and increasingly full of self-pity. As my illness improved, so did my temper and toleration. I must have been an exceedingly trying patient during my worst days in London.

  I used to look round Margaret Ward on the rare occasions I was inside and see similar cases all around me, all behaving as I had behaved.

  I had suspected this when I was a nurse. Now I saw it proved. If you want to make a human being selfish, self-centred and completely introspective, strike him down with some disease which will hurt him in spasms and cause him to sleep poorly.

  The ghastly-sounding carcinomas, the dreaded painful diseases beloved of novelists, described with fearsome detail, are treated mercifully. The Almighty sowed the white poppy. It was only left to man to find its uses. If you are going to recover, or be ill for a very long time, opium or its scientific counterparts are not for you. A little phenobarbitone, perhaps, but that’s all.

  It’s a wise, if uncomfortable policy. Uncomfortable, that is, to the sick.

  All this self-analysis was not surprisingly having an odd effect on my love-life. I was now so far removed from my normal self that I was infinitely more concerned to describe in detail to the Medical Registrar, Frankie Spence, exactly how I had lain awake for forty-five minutes between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. than to talk to Richard as he dashed across the ramp from one of the surgical wards to the theatre, a thing he did at least sixteen times a day.

  The theatre was built of brick and stood on the opposite side of the ramp to all the wards. There were ten adult wards down there, five men, five women, each holding thirty-two beds. The children’s ward was smaller. It had twenty cots. A concrete path swept straight across the main ramp directly connecting the main men’s surgical ward, Stanley Curtis, with the theatre. The original huts had been built on the hillside, and it was a downhill run into the theatre. The stretcher-trolleys carrying the patients whistled backward and forward up the covered way, the patients hidden from sight, their heads under the monstrous covered green bird-cages that were there to keep the cold air from their lungs; the fluffy scarlet of the theatre blankets contrasted with the green, and as they whisked by it was as if bunches of holly were being carried over the snow.

  The nurses’ billowing print petticoats swirled behind them as they ran beside the theatre porters in their effort to keep up with the men. Theatre porters always run. They live in a breathless world of their own. They are invariably highly-strung, given to duodenal ulcers, and have to be treated gently. As they are an incredibly useful body of men, who are perfectly capable of removing anything from anyone ‒ surgically speaking ‒ and have an instinct where anaesthetic cylinders or sterilizers boiling dry are concerned, they are always endured and generally much admired for their idiosyncrasies.

  The students would sometimes come out between cases for a smoke. Their gowns, caps, and masks were leaf-green, and, if they managed to avoid Sister Theatre, they kept on their soft white leather over-boots. They looked, in that white world, like subterranean creatures who had lost their way. The ice of their breath, mixed with their tobacco-smoke, added to their unreality.

  My bed lay a few yards from the theatre. Richard came over one morning just before lunch.

  ‘What was the party about?’ I asked. All morning I had watched an apparently endless stream of men going into the theatre.

  ‘Illesly Martin giving a demonstration.’ Illesly Martin was Richard’s boss.

  ‘To the boys?’

  ‘No. Some visiting surgeons. It was a lovely show. Gastrectomy. Thyroidectomy ‒ and an ordinary appendicectomy.’

  Richard chuckled. ‘That was to show the hand of The Master. It was wonderful, Joa ‒ wish you’d seen it. Old Martin was being sharp as a knife, he made a neat cut, then looked over his shoulder and said the gentlemen would note he had used Warre’s incision. An old boy at the back stood up and bellowed, “Sir ‒ you have made an incision ‒ but not Warre’s.” “Oh,” said the Old Man coldly, “I think you are mistaken there, sir!” “Mistaken be damned, sir!” said the old boy, “I am Warre”.’

  ‘Richard,’ I said when I stopped laughing. ‘Richard, Martin will never get over it. He’s such a bumptious little man. Why are most great surgeons small?’

  Richard bent his knees. ‘Think I’ll be all right if I go down a couple of inches?’

  I was thinking about Illesly Martin. ‘Poor old man. He’ll probably have a stroke.’

  ‘If he does,’ said Richard, thinking aloud, ‘Mike Armstrong will probably go on the staff.’ He stopped.

  ‘Then you will almost certainly be R.S.O.’

  ‘If ‒ I ‒ get my Mastership?’

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘July.’

  ‘Oh ‒ you’ll get it all right, Richard. You were born to be a Master of Surgery.’

  He looked pleased. ‘Think so, honey?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But what will you do when you have no exams left to take?’

  I was speaking superficially. I meant no more than I said. I saw Richard dig under my words.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll think of something.’ He went away to his lunch.

  Every Monday and Thursday the new patients arrived from London in the ambulance buses. The hour on Mondays and Thursdays between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. was the nightmare hour of the junior probationers.

  All Gregory’s patients on admission have to have a bath or be blanket-bathed; their heads tooth-combed for livestock; their clothes packed; suit-cases labelled; and, if men, their razors removed and signed for. All this, excluding the blanket-bathing, is done in each ward by one nurse during that hour. There may easily be twelve or fourteen admissions per ward.

  From my bed outside Ma
rgaret I could see into Stanley Curtis as well as my own ward. I used to watch the harassed little pros shepherding patients in and out of bathrooms; tying mackintosh-capes round their necks before the head-combing, which took place in the privacy of the mackintosh room. This was the room in which all the used mackintoshes were scrubbed daily ‒ needless to say by the junior probationer.

  One Thursday afternoon the commotion in Stanley Curtis was worse than usual. The ward was open for a teaching round: at 2.30 p.m. Sir Jefferson Book was coming down from London for a special round. Twenty-seven students hung round the entrance to Stanley Curtis, shivering in the February air, waiting for Sir Jefferson. Sister Stanley Curtis, a tall, slim, frigid gold-medallist, who possessed a soft voice and an impeccable nursing technique, joined Michael Armstrong, the Resident Surgeon, and Peter McGill, Sir Jefferson Book’s Surgical Registrar, who stood waiting with the students. Their quiet voices travelled easily through the cold, still air.

  ‘I don’t know where he’s got to, Sister,’ said the R.S.O., ‘his car’s been here a good half-hour. He generally comes straight to the ward.’

  Mr Armstrong turned to the young men. ‘Any of you seen Sir Jefferson?’

  Nobody had. Then at last one student said he wasn’t all that sure, but he had thought he had seen the back of Sir Jefferson vanishing into Stanley Curtis.

  ‘When?’ said the R.S.O.

  ‘About twenty minutes ago, sir.’

  Sister Stanley Curtis’s pale gold brows shot up.

  ‘Sir Jefferson Book has not been in my ward this afternoon,’ she said coldly.

  As she was speaking there was a stir in the ranks pushing into the ward and Sir Jefferson came out of the swing glass doors of Stanley Curtis.

  I had by now lost all shame and was watching Sister Stanley Curtis, entranced. It was worth having T.B. to see a gold-medallist put out of countenance.

  The R.S. grinned. ‘We thought we had lost you, sir.’

  Sir Jefferson looked amused. ‘No,’ he said pleasantly, ‘I was merely having my head tooth-combed. A most enjoyable sensation.’ He turned to Sister. ‘Sister, I beg you will say nothing to Nurse. She was most charming and efficient. It was my fault for becoming involved with her admissions. Her speed was admirable. Before I could open my mouth I had a mackintosh-cape round my neck, she sat me in a comfortable chair, assured me most kindly that she realized it was an unnecessary precaution in my case, but’ ‒ he shrugged gaily ‒ ‘one of the rules of the hospital she was forced to obey. It was only when she suggested that she lend me a dressing-gown and I go and have a bath that I felt bound to say perhaps I had better take my students round!’