The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘And your sight and hearing are perfect?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I’ve never thought about them.’

  ‘You notice that I wear reading-glasses myself. I need them now, but as a probationer I did not need them. Have you any physical defects?’

  ‘What kind of defects?’ Daisy asked, a little troubled.

  ‘Any that I can’t see at a cursory glance. You may be subject to very heavy periods. You may be marked and scarred. Your spine may be crooked.... Have you any tendency to pulmonary complaints?’ She looked up sharply. ‘Do you understand what I mean by “pulmonary”?’

  ‘Yes, it means to do with the lungs.’

  ‘Pertaining to the lungs. A sickly nurse is of no use to the profession. One might call her an enemy of the profession. Above all, though, we don’t want a weakly habit of constant complaint. As a rough guide, remember that while the average man is ill for four days a year, a grown woman must expect to spend one fourth of her life in actual pain.’

  Daisy felt a rush of admiration. So far she herself had done nothing like her fair share.

  ‘The next thing I am going to ask you is: have you read, and do you clearly understand, the Regulations of this hospital? I find that reading and understanding are not the same thing. Copies are handed out in the waiting-room, but although the applicants have plenty of time before their interview to go through them, they often turn out, in fact, not to have grasped them at all.’

  Nobody had given Daisy a copy of the Regulations, perhaps they had run out, but to say this would get the receptionist into trouble. She made a guess.

  ‘I’m not afraid of getting up early.’

  ‘Or of doing the rough work in the wards? Or of taking only one week’s holiday during your first year’s probation?’

  ‘No, I ain’t.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘No, I’m not, Matron.’

  ‘You can obtain another copy of the Regulations on your way out. Meanwhile, I shall require copies of your references and in particular one from your last employer.’ Daisy hesitated. ‘If you haven’t brought them with you in writing, you may re-present yourself with them next Friday.’

  And the tiny matron nodded dismissal to the tall, strong, juicy, courageous, not quite confident young woman, who clearly had something wrong with her references. Daisy stopped in the hospital’s wide porch and changed her good boots for her old ones, then began to walk, keeping her hopes low, through the bright cold afternoon streets. Presently the dark-skinned woman who had been in the waiting-room caught up with her. She must have been hanging about, waiting to say, as she now did, ‘Miss, you remember me. I didn’t answer your question, but I will answer it now. You asked me if I had applied at the hospital before. I have applied, but each time they would not accept me. I can’t fill in the form where it says “single or widow”. What can I write? You see, I am single, but I have a child.’

  ‘Let down, were you?’ asked Daisy. ‘I should fill that in, if I were you.’

  The woman looked at her mournfully, and said that to be young was to be without care. ‘I live just near here. Perhaps you would like to step in and take a cup of tea.’

  ‘No thank you, I better hadn’t.’

  ‘Why not, it won’t take a moment.’

  ‘No, I’d better be on my way.’

  ‘You would come in if I was married.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told me about it if you thought I’d object,’ said Daisy, smiling. ‘There was no call.’

  They stopped in front of a small finishing laundry, where the shirts were brought in rough-ironed from a bigger place, to have the collars done. ‘I am known here as Mrs Martinez.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Daisy.

  Mrs Martinez walked across the laundry with only a nod to the woman in charge. Out of a wicker washing-basket on the counter she lifted a child of about two years old who had been sitting in it playing with a handful of dolly-pegs. You’d never get an English child to sit quiet like that.

  ‘My word, is that yours?’ said Daisy. ‘What a love. I’d have thought it would have been a bit older.’

  ‘I am more than thirty-five years of age,’ said Mrs Martinez, ‘but unfortunately it seems that I am still fertile.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Daisy. ‘You ought to know better by this time.’ She held out her arms and took the baby, preventing it with a gentle movement from pulling out her hatpins. ‘You don’t want to let things upset you.’

  ‘We fertiles are the unlucky ones,’ said Mrs Martinez. ‘However, there will be a time when thirty-five won’t seem old to you.’

  ‘I shan’t let that upset me either. I shan’t be upset, let’s say, in 1939.’ They both laughed, the date sounded absurd. They were on the way upstairs, stopping on the half-landing, where there was a fish-tail gas jet and a sink. Through the back window Daisy could see a very small yard, with a tap, and a pump for when the tap failed.

  Above the yard walls there was a segment of dazzling sky, drifting down with bright silvery clouds. ‘I should think you’d like looking out at this,’ she said, ‘when there’s no fog.’ But it seemed that Mrs Martinez came from a part of Spain where coal was mined, and the sky was hazy all the year round. Only the fogs made her feel at home in London. Daisy handed back the little boy, bundled up in his petticoats. ‘I won’t stay any longer, Mrs Martinez.’ She could see that every drop of water would have to be fetched up by some means or other, from the yard. Every cup of tea would be a burden.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to go. I should like to talk more. We might have talked about the sorrows of women.’

  Daisy paused, two steps down.

  ‘But if you’re going,’ said Mrs Martinez, ‘I wonder if you could oblige me.’

  ‘Did you mean—’

  ‘Tide me over a little, that is.’

  ‘How much are you short, Mrs Martinez?’

  ‘Oh, one shilling and sixpence, two shillings and sixpence.’

  ‘Don’t you know which?’ asked Daisy.

  ‘No, I don’t know which,’ said Mrs Martinez, who appeared to be laughing.

  ‘Is there anyone pressing you for payment, anything like that?’

  Daisy usually kept her purse in her inner breast pocket, but not today, when she was wearing her good costume and had to think of the line. It was in the skirt pocket, with her key. She dragged it out and extracted two shilling pieces. Mrs Martinez took them with indifference, and gave one of them to the baby to hold.

  The hospital regulations, when Daisy read them at last, suggested that one of the references should be from the applicant’s place of worship. ‘Another recommendation, how old are you now?’ asked Father Haggett. They were in the study of the cheerless clergy house. ‘Seventeen, well, I’m going to write you down as bright, hard-working, honest and charitable. Shake your head if you don’t like what I’m putting.’—‘I don’t know about “honest”,’ said Daisy. ‘Right and wrong are all depending, I think, so is honest.’—‘You make up your own rules about that, then,’ said Father Haggett.—‘No, they’re depending,’ said Daisy. ‘They don’t change, it’s what they refer to that changes.’—‘You think I’m going to argue with you, but I’m not,’ said Father Haggett. ‘To oblige you, I won’t say you’re honest. Completely dependable.’ The door was thrown open and the housekeeper, standing on the threshold, said that the oxtail was ready. ‘You can have it hot now or cold later. Father Smith obliged by having his earlier.’

  ‘I am summoned,’ said Father Haggett, writing a few more lines.—‘You didn’t ought to be put upon like that by your housekeeper,’ said Daisy.—‘You should get rid of this idea of life as a battlefield,’ said Father Haggett. ‘In a battle you can only succeed through fraud and violence. I shall pray for you in your new profession. Pray for me, Daisy Saunders.’ Daisy thanked him while he looked through his desk drawers for an envelope.

  The other necessary reference was, as she had feared, her most recent employer. She sent young Mr
Sedley a letter. He did not answer, so she went to the box-factory in person, knowing that he left about half-past six, when his regular hired motor-car called for him. Sedley recognised her and asked her if she’d changed her mind. She said she hadn’t, but wanted a reference. Sedley told her he didn’t feel like giving her one, and she could stick that up her Khyber. He jumped into the motor, slammed the door shut, and she watched the springs bounce and shiver as he threw himself heavily into his seat. Not having wasted much time at Sedley’s, she went on to Lambert’s Glazing. The reception clerk at the door was a friend of hers. She was allowed straight up. With wheedling, stocking-top-fancying old Mr Lambert things went more easily. He was afraid that she had come to complain. ‘Let me see, Miss Sanderson, when did you leave us exactly?’—‘I want you to make it quite clear that Miss Daisy Saunders worked satisfactorily, and that she left your employ a fortnight ago.’ She felt her resolution was beginning to dissolve in pity, but persevered. ‘Just do that, Mr Lambert, and you’ve no more worries, you’ll never set eyes on me again, I give you my solemn word.’ Old Mr Lambert, groping and fumbling with the slippery shapes of his ideas, struggled to keep hold. His face hung down in folds, his eyes moistened.—‘What kind of post is it that you’re looking for now?’—‘I want to be a hospital nurse.’ Old Lambert seemed relieved.—‘A nurse! Ah, we’ll all of us be needing one of them sooner or later. You want to care for others, that’s it, isn’t it?’ Daisy said, ‘I should like to know how the human body works, and what has to be done to it when it doesn’t work.’—‘You’re quite wrong there, quite wrong, that’s for doctors. Nurses, surely, shouldn’t know how anything works. You will want to soothe, Miss Sandison, soothe and tend, and to keep the spirits up.’—‘I do want to do that,’ said Daisy.—‘The mind is as important as the body,’ said old Lambert, who had, perhaps, learnt this at last.

  The Blackfriars accepted the references, and Daisy became Saunders. For seven weeks, until she passed her first exam, she wouldn’t even be a probationer. She was advised to get herself a second-hand Kirke’s, shoes a size larger than she usually wore, a good stock of underwear, and, if she could afford any extras, some scented soap, a bottle of eau-de-cologne, and a packet of cocoa or cocoatina. Kirke’s was a nursing handbook. Daisy sat down with Kirke’s on her last night in the room she had shared with her mother, and looked at the specimen questions.

  What would you do to calm a restless patient?

  What would you do in a case of syncope?

  Should a heart case have a bath? If not, why not, and what substitute would you give?

  What are your duties at the physician’s visit?

  How you would apply leeches? And how would you ensure their biting at the exact spot? What is the best way of telling one end of a leech from the other, and how can you induce it to vomit when the application is over, in order that it may be used again as expeditiously as possible?

  On the day of her arrival the Home Nurse, absurdly overworked, showed her into a small double cubicle. On the other bed was a pile of knitted stockings, a tin of biscuits and a tin trunk. The name on the trunk was K. Smith.

  ‘She’ll have to get rid of all this rubbish,’ said the Home Nurse. ‘You can make a start. Put on your dress, cap and apron. No, not like that.’ Probationers were to stand when a Sister spoke to them, keep their hands out of their pockets, never lean against a wall or a table, never laugh, run or talk in the corridors, and remember to call the doctors and medical students ‘sir’. Only the lady pupils might call him ‘doctor’.

  Even these first regulations were more than Kate Smith, who turned up at last, having been lost in the corridors, could remember. At once Daisy found in her a friend who needed protection. The very first time they worked together they had to go down one of the female wards, Daisy to the right, Kate to the left, putting the patients’ hair in tight pigtails; they were being got ready for their operations. Daisy finished first and looked back.

  ‘Lord, Kate, whatever have you done to them?’

  ‘Put them right for me, Daisy!’

  And Daisy rapidly put them right for the first of many times, not knowing how dangerous generosity is to the giver.

  10

  The Men’s Ward

  When the whole of the men’s ward had been persuaded to face the morning, the patients washed, wounds dressed, the windows facing the world open an inch and a half, those away from the wind open six inches, all of them two inches less than during the night, when the gas jets were burning, the abdominal cases on their backs, the apopleptics on their face, the fractured skulls on their sides, the broken limbs raised on blocks (or at the end of the ward, where the blocks had run out, on tin bowls), the coughs hushed, the morbid curiosity about the screen cases quelled, the steak-and-kidney pudding smuggled in by No. 23 (to keep up his strength before his operation) quietly removed, and the bed-covers all smooth, all white, all blameless, all blank, all clean, there was a moment of balance and harmony, scarcely real, when nurses and probationers knew themselves as artists. Then a dark group, a black patch, began to move up the white rows that gave the hard-won illusion of peace, and at one bed or another, indicated by Matron, the consulting surgeon, with his train of students, paused. The white bed then became a place of anxiety and pain, or the memory of pain, or the expectation of it. When surgeon, Matron and students moved on, the probationers, at a respectful distance, straightened the sheets, the pillows and the coverlet and settled the patient, who had not only been frightened but was now suffering from the loss of his only few minutes of importance in the men’s ward of the Blackfriars, and, perhaps, on this earth.

  Daisy reproved herself, imagining that no-one else could feel as she did. It came out that all of them did, all the probationers, all became unreasonable at the sight of the white beds, the black procession. ‘We’re all going daft together,’ she told Kate, who said they couldn’t be as crazy as Dr Sage.

  Dr Sage, the Senior Registrar, was, of course, not crazy, but he was indulged. He liked to make an effect, and the habit of allowing him to do this had grown in the protected world of the hospital. Daisy had heard his voice before she had ever seen him, at the far end of the fever ward.

  ‘All the bloodshed, Sister, caused by the warlike ambition of Napoleon is as nothing compared with the myriads of persons who have sunk into their graves from a misplaced confidence in the food value of beef-tea. As a food, it is but as the mirage of water seen by the thirsty travellers in the desert. There is no real water. So with beef-tea; it is not a food.’

  Daisy had come in with the pile of clean bandages for the patients to roll. They had nothing to read or to do, and had to be kept occupied. Dr Sage, who had been addressing the Ward Sister, turned now with his stethoscope still round his neck, his grey moustache triumphant. He pointed at Daisy; it was one of his set pieces. ‘You, young woman, are a probationer in your first year?’

  Daisy replied that she was.

  ‘And your name?’

  ‘Saunders, sir.’

  ‘You heard what I was saying to Sister Morris?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Tell me: as a child, did you drink beef-tea?’

  ‘We used to drink the gravy, sir, from the cow-heel.’

  The whole ward was watching, as at a play. Those who could, sat upright. Dr Sage shouted furiously.

  ‘Don’t make the mistake, Saunders, of thinking you kept alive on that!’

  Yes, he had put her right, and the ward was satisfied. Although they loved Daisy, in whose energetic hands they felt safe, she ought, of course, not to have spoken, at least for another year, to a doctor at all. Ward Sister was prepared to overlook it on this occasion. But Dr Sage carried away the impression—a firm impression, he had no time for any others—that this probationer had failed in the first duty, repeated at the beginning of every lecture on elementary physiology, anatomy, materia medica and hygiene—the duty of absolute obedience. Saunders had not contradicted him, but she had not given him the answer h
e expected. Nevertheless, he believed she would make a good nurse. The patients, meanwhile, trusted Dr Sage, not because he was trustworthy, but because he had set his face against new methods, and every one of them who was allowed to take anything at all by the mouth was prescribed generous draughts of medicine from their own bottle. Down in the dispensary, the engine room of the hospital, ranged in alphabetical order, were preparations of aceta (or vinegars), aquae (or waters), balsams, confections, conserves, decoctions, enemata, essences, glycerines, infusions, hypodermic liquors, oils, pepsins, resins, spirits, succi or juices, syrups, thyroid extracts, trochisii or lozenges, unguents, vapores, vina (or wines). In the wards the kidney sufferers, waiting to sweat into their thick flared night-shirts, were dosed with nitre, squill and broom. Fever cases had a drop of aconite in a teaspoonful of water every fifteen minutes, then antimony every quarter of an hour. Babies with enteritis had tar-water and brandy. Gallstones and strangulated hernia were treated with opium, paralysis with strychnine, tapeworm with oil or male fern. Over-prescriptions brought drama to the patients’ tedious day. Too much antimony made them faint, too much quinine caused buzzing in the ears, too much salicylic acid brought on delirium, too much strychnine made them unable to swallow (and they twitched violently), too much mercury made them dribble, too much iodine made them sneeze uncontrollably, with too much antifebrin their skins turned dusky blue. When they were disinfected internally with carbolic acid their urine became olive green. No matter, all or most of these excesses could be corrected. Fiat Mistura! Dr Sage’s bold prescriptions, many of them with rhubarb, ginger and honey added in a wild gesture of palatability, came up from the depths, where his executives pounded and mixed in bottles green, and red, which were poured out by the nurses, always keeping the labels uppermost, as they had been trained to do, and always into clean medicine-glasses inscribed with mysterious lines and numbers. The patients swallowed gladly. Their names were on the bottles. The doctor had given them something.