Now the War Is Over

by Annie Murray

  She knew really that Mr Alexander had not been interested in her like that. He was a nice man and he had seemed to like having a chat to her and having her look after him. She barely understood her own tender attachment to him – not like being in love exactly, but involved so that her emotions fixed so strongly on him. But none of this really made sense of why, now, she was in such an overwrought state. Every night her mind was like a flickering light, sending fast, broken-up images until she thought she might go mad. Eyes open or closed she could not stop it. Her chest was tight and she had to keep reminding herself to breathe deeply.

  Lying here, now, she turned on her back once more and stared up into the darkness. He was there. Then he was gone.

  She had seen other patients die, or known of them dying. This one was different. The sudden, abrupt wrongness of it.

  He was a beautiful man . . . The thought wrung her, but still she could not cry. If she could only shed some tears she might begin to get past it, but they would not come. She felt like a dry stone.

  There was nothing she could say to anyone. They all had their shocks and things to face on their own wards. Margaret had said to her, ‘Such a shame about that nice man, Mr Alexander. And you were there? Terrible thing. Must’ve been a shock.’ She clicked her tongue, shook her head. That was all. It was a straight line for Margaret, it seemed, out the other end. For Melly it was a circle in which she was trapped, which just kept swirling her round and round.

  ‘Nurse.’

  Melly was walking along the ward. A hazy feeling filled her head, as if she was not really there. Everything felt like a dream.

  ‘Nurse!’

  ‘Melly – Mr Hopkins is calling you.’

  Luckily it was Cath who saw her. She gave Melly an odd look but was not in a position to tell her off.

  Melly went over to Mr Hopkins, a bluff, bald, pink-faced man with a heart problem. His legs were swollen with oedema and sometimes seeped astonishing amounts of liquid.

  ‘You with us, bab?’ he said wheezily. He was a kindly person, embarrassed by his condition. ‘Only, er . . .’ He whispered. ‘I need to, er, I need to go, Nurse.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Hopkins,’ she said wretchedly. God, she thought. I must pull myself together.

  ‘I’ll help you. You’d prefer to go along to the bathroom, rather than a bedpan?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I would,’ he said fervently. ‘I’d rather be private, Nurse, if I can.’

  She supported him slowly along the ward. He made a gallant joke about them walking arm in arm. Like getting married, he said, and she managed a laugh. She delivered him to the lavatories.

  ‘I’ll be outside,’ she said.

  She stood just by the door, almost in the spot where Mr Alexander had collapsed. Melly closed her eyes for a moment. Right there, by her feet, was where he had lain. For the first time, tears welled behind her eyelids. Oh, God, not now. I can’t cry now. She swallowed them away and quickly wiped her eyes. Mr Hopkins took a while. She began to be afraid. Supposing his heart gave out while he was sitting on the lavatory and she didn’t notice in time? Or what if he was in there haemorrhaging to death and was too faint to call out?

  ‘You all right, Mr Hopkins?’ she called to him.

  ‘Yes, ta, bab. Not doing too badly,’ she heard.

  Eventually she was able to take him back to bed.

  Nothing went wrong, she thought, with relief. She realized she did not trust herself. Even making beds, one of the easiest jobs on the ward, seemed fraught with danger. Taking patients’ TPRs, sometimes she had to start again several times because she drifted off.

  ‘Sure you can count?’ one man said to her sarcastically, when she had taken his pulse for a ridiculously long time.

  Odd things kept happening, or seemed to her to be happening. She saw calamity everywhere: gushes of blood, horrific torrents of diarrhoea, unstoppable vomiting, all plagued her mind. Every time a patient had anything wrong in that way, she froze with panic, terrified that something extreme was about to happen. She saw chaos breaking out everywhere.

  Over and over again she tidied up; the beds, the ward. It was such a busy place that things got out of order very quickly. If only she could keep everything tidy, nothing would happen. Everything would be kept at bay.

  ‘Nurse . . .’ Sister Anderson came to her one afternoon in the laundry cupboard, where she was folding and refolding pillowcases, pyjamas. Sister frowned. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just tidying, Sister.’ She felt hunted. Was she doing something wrong? She just wanted to be busy, to keep things under control.

  Sister Anderson looked around the little room with its neatly stacked shelves. Then she looked at Melly.

  ‘Are you all right, Nurse Booker?’

  ‘Yes, Sister. Thank you.’

  ‘The laundry room is quite tidy enough. We have a new admission coming this evening – Mr Davis is going to be discharged today. I shall need your help with that. In the meantime, go and make the patients’ drinks, please.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  She felt Sister Anderson’s eyes on her as she walked towards the kitchen. She had a moment’s relief. Making drinks was a soothing, easy job. Nothing terrible could happen.

  Working wards was becoming more and more difficult but despite all the worry and uncertainty it caused her, it was the nights she dreaded most now, going to bed and lying there in a scattered agony of mind, unable to fall asleep. Sounds echoed loud in her head. Images flashed and dashed across her mind.

  She felt as if everything was sliding from her grip, but she did not know how to say so, or who to say it to. Nurses were not supposed to have emotions, or not for long. They were meant to get over them. She was ashamed of the state she was in. It was unprofessional and weak.

  ‘You’ve been restless at night,’ Berni – who slept like a log – observed one evening, a week after Mr Alexander’s death.

  ‘Sorry,’ Melly said, amazed that Berni had only just noticed this. ‘I’m not sleeping very well.’

  It didn’t get any better. A few days later, Berni tackled her about it again. Sitting on the side of her bed, she studied Melly’s face.

  ‘Are you still not getting your rest? I heard you moving about last night. You really don’t look any too good, you know. You’re all black under the eyes. And you’re getting thin.’

  Melly knew it. In the mirror a white, gaunt face looked back at her. Her uniform belt felt looser and she could easily circle her wrist with the finger and thumb of the other hand.

  ‘What’s ailing you?’ Berni asked, head on one side. ‘You look worse than some of the patients!’ She gave her laugh and Melly forced a smile.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Time of the month.’ She pretended to busy herself. ‘Better get my shoes polished.’

  They were lovely March days, sunshine brightening the chill and spring flowers like a bright carpet across Bournville Green. But Melly was too exhausted to notice.

  That morning, when she crawled out of bed, she felt so sick she could barely force any breakfast down. Normally the hearty slabs of bread and margarine were just what was needed to fuel a morning’s work, but she was finding it difficult to eat anything. She only managed to nibble at the edge of a piece of bread, which settled her stomach a bit with a cup of tea.

  Her placement on A3 was almost over and they would be back in the Training School for a few weeks after that. It felt like a relief. She was fast beginning to feel that she could no longer cope on the ward. All the time she was full of doubt. She was the worst nurse there had ever been – and to think she had wanted to be the best! Maybe she had aimed too high and it was not for her. She had failed.

  When Melly walked on to the ward that morning she was feeling especially low. She thought every patient was looking at her and thinking, she shouldn’t be here, she can’t do the job. She’s an impostor!

  Even the simplest tasks such as emptying bedpans and serving out cups of tea filled her with nervousness, as if she was bou
nd to do something terribly wrong – scald a patient with a cup of tea, drop the contents of the bedpans all over the place. As for writing down results of urinary and other tests, she kept checking over and over again. It made her very slow.

  She was asked to go back to the kitchen when the tea trolley was going round. Melly walked along to the kitchen. She stood in the middle of the floor looking around, at a loss. Why was she here? Someone had sent her for something but she could not for the life of her remember what. She just stood there, helpless.

  Nurse Jenkins came striding along looking very irritated.

  ‘The sugar! I sent you ages ago. Oh, for goodness’ sake – I might as well get it myself.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Melly said. Sugar – of course. What felt like several hours ago, someone had asked her to bring sugar.

  It was later that morning, as she battled on, that Sister Anderson asked her to assist her while she removed the IV drip from the arm of a patient called Mr Brzezinski.

  Mr Brzezinski had arrived from Poland after the war. He was in his forties, had a pale, chiselled face and spoke heavily accented English in which he had, with apparent zest, mastered the words for gratitude.

  ‘Thank you, thank you!’ he addressed them before they had even started.

  ‘I’m going to remove this –’ Sister pointed, speaking slowly. ‘Take it out of your arm.’

  ‘Ah, very good – thank you!’ Mr Brzezinski beamed at her.

  Melly stood beside Sister Anderson. Her head felt as though it was swimming. She would have liked to sit down but that was not a possibility.

  Sister Anderson pressed gently on the cannula and slid it from the man’s muscular arm. He made a small sound, an intake of breath between his lips.

  ‘All right?’ Sister looked at him.

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you – very good!’

  It was then, in those seconds when Sister Anderson went to press a small dressing on the wound, that Melly saw the bead of blood. It was welling slowly bigger. Panic exploded in her. She heard herself gasp and the next thing she knew she was tearing along the ward in utter panic, desperate to get away before the surge and flood of blood submerged them all.

  Forty-Two

  Nervous breakdown, they said at the hospital.

  That day, after Mr Brzezinski, after the bead of blood which had turned into a spouting deluge in her mind, Sister Anderson had come back into the sluice, after the first ticking off, and found Melly crouched in the same spot in the corner, curled in on herself, her limbs quivering.

  ‘Nurse?’ Her tone was outraged at first. ‘Nurse?’ She came closer. Now there was caution, concern growing in her voice. Melly watched her shoes come closer, the sturdy ankles, the hem of her navy uniform.

  ‘Nurse Booker.’ Her voice had become chilly and professional, as if Melly was another patient. ‘What are you doing?’

  Melly began to tremble even more. She shook her head, kept shaking it, too many times to be normal; she knew but she could not stop doing it.

  Sister Anderson bent down and Melly caught a whiff of her, a tang of sweat, lavender water, carbolic, so strong it made her stomach heave.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ She spoke very quietly now. They must not let the patients have any idea of this. They were professionals.

  ‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Melly managed to say.

  ‘Nurse – would you please stand up and continue your duties?’ Sister Anderson clearly decided to adopt the firm, no-nonsense approach.

  Melly climbed shakily to her feet. A moment later she had thrown herself, retching, over one of the sluice sinks.

  Sister Anderson waited, hands on hips now.

  ‘Right, Student Nurse Booker, you had better call in sick.’

  She turned and walked out. Melly heard the squeak of her shoes on the floor.

  The next morning she could not get out of bed.

  The bus crawled along the outer circle route away from Selly Oak.

  Melly had climbed to the top deck and walked right to the front seat as far away from everybody as she could. The bus was not full but it was still fuggy with cigarette smoke and the stale smell of crammed-in bodies from the busier time of the morning. The window was steamed up and smeary.

  She put her bag down on the floor beside her and sat holding her hands clasped together to try and stop them shaking.

  It took barely twenty minutes to get to Harborne. She wished it was much longer, that she had got on the number eleven going round the other way so that she could spend half the morning just sitting here.

  Twenty minutes for her to transfer herself back from one life – the only life she had really wanted – to another, which held nothing for her.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’

  Her mother’s face, after the initial shock, looked stern and guarded. She stood blocking the doorway.

  ‘Let me in, Mom,’ Melly said.

  In silence they went into the back. Alan was playing on the kitchen floor. Rachel folded her arms across her pink blouse, her apron.

  ‘You look like a widow. What’s going on?’

  Even then, Melly could not reach the tears which she knew must come. She felt queasy all the time, and wired tight inside, so tight that she still could not sleep. But she could not cry either.

  She shrugged. ‘They sent me home.’

  ‘Why?’ Her mother looked even more grim. ‘What’ve you done?’

  ‘Done? Nothing. It’s not . . .’ She looked down at the floor, the familiar well-worn quarry tiles. She had thought she was so encased in misery that nothing could affect her. But the way Mom was looking at her, her question, made Melly feel overwhelmed with shame and guilt.

  ‘They said I’m not very well. That I needed to go home.’

  Rachel softened a fraction. ‘You don’t look well, babby.’

  Tears swam into her eyes then and she could not look up. ‘Oh, Mom,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

  ‘You’ll have to sleep in with Sandra,’ Rachel said. Melly could hear a sigh in her voice. Even though Mom had not been keen on her going into nursing, she didn’t seem any more enthusiastic about her coming home again. She’d got used to things the way they were. Having thought she’d got one child off her hands, here she was back again and not apparently fit for anything.

  ‘You look as if you just need a good night’s sleep,’ she observed. Her worry made her sharp-tempered. ‘Nervous breakdown indeed. I don’t know what your father’ll say about all this. Are they still paying you?’

  ‘No – I don’t suppose so.’ Melly felt herself shrinking inside. She wasn’t sure about the nervous-breakdown bit either, but Mom was acting as if she was putting it all on and just being a nuisance.

  ‘But you’ll be going back, will you – they’ll take you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Melly sat hunched at the table. She was finding this interrogation, as well as Alan’s whirring about the room, very difficult to bear. She was close to screaming, and clutched her arms tight round herself to keep the scream inside.

  Matron hadn’t said that she couldn’t go back. She said it depended on her recovery and then they would see.

  It went quiet and after a moment Melly looked up, to find her mother staring at her with a worried expression.

  ‘You look all in. Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you a bed ready.’

  In the face of this kindness, as she took her bag and followed her mother upstairs, for the first time, Melly burst into tears.

  VII

  1961

  Forty-Three

  May 1961

  ‘Back later!’ Rachel called up the stairs. ‘Don’t forget to fetch Alan, will you?’

  She heard a faint reply from upstairs.

  ‘Well, I s’pose she heard me,’ Rachel muttered, heading out of the front door. There was no time to go up and make sure. She was running late. ‘At least one of us is out earning our living, any road,’ she added huffily.

  Soon after Melly
arrived back home, Rachel had decided she might just as well go out to work. It was no good both of them mooning about at home. Ricky and Sandra’s school, where Alan would soon be going as well, had been asking for more dinner ladies. It was only a couple of hours a day, supervising the dinners and outside playtime, and Rachel jumped at it. She had let her volunteering at Carlson House go when she had Sandra and then Alan and was yearning to have her own little job to go to again.

  She was worried about the state Melly was in, but at least this gave her the chance to get out and earn a bit of money for a change. The work suited her and she signed up for three days to begin with. Once Alan started at Michaelmas, she thought, maybe she’d work there every day. She was already making friends with some of the other women, especially a lively, dark-haired mother called Gina who also had two children in the school.

  She had said to Melly, ‘Well, if you’re around the house, you can mind Alan while I go out, can’t you? Take your mind off things.’

  After all, it was no good her just moping about. Rachel wasn’t sure what all this nervous-breakdown talk was supposed to mean exactly, but she could see there was something up with Melly. She’d been most peculiar.

  ‘It’s as if the wench has been turned to stone,’ Gladys remarked, when she came round and saw her. ‘She can hardly seem to put one foot in front of the other.’

  ‘She’s just worn out, that’s all,’ Rachel had said. ‘She says she hasn’t been sleeping.’

  Finally, Melly did sleep; she barely seemed to do anything else for a fortnight. When she was awake she was permanently in tears. The other kids didn’t know what to make of it. Tommy tried to talk to her. Rachel was grateful to the lad because she had no idea what to say herself. Kev and Ricky mostly ignored it all, but five-year-old Sandra would go up and put her head in Melly’s lap, her little arms round her sister’s waist.

  ‘Don’t you go blarting, Melly,’ she’d say. ‘There, there – s’all right.’