Ring O' Roses

by Lucilla Andrews

Sister had arrived, so, correctly, Joss ignored me and smiled at her. ‘Morning, Sister!’

  I was not too happy about his tie, but in any circumstances in a British hospital the safest way to play it is to stick to etiquette. I did the same. When Miss Butler had finished apologizing for delaying Joss’s breakfast, I wished her a good morning as if the two men were invisible. She did not bother to answer or even look my way. ‘Do you want Mr Desmond or myself, Dr Anthony?’

  Joss looked at the floor and Peter as if he had been caught having a fix at the Dangerous Drug Cupboard. ‘Er ‒ neither, Sister, thanks. Just ‒ er ‒ collecting some notes from my office to read over breakfast.’ He vanished down the corridor.

  Naomi Butler was about twenty-seven. She was tallish and very slim, with light brown hair and a delicate-featured face that was much too pale. She looked to me not just grossly over-tired but ill. I wondered if she had an anaemia problem, and then as I knew I had never seen her before, why something about her seemed familiar. I had plenty of time to wonder, as she was still ignoring me and explaining why she had sent a message asking Joss to call in on his way to breakfast. ‘There appears to be some industrial injuries query about the man Francis Albert Ayer we admitted to Intensive Care last evening and I thought you’d prefer to sort it out quietly before we’re officially opened as you used to in St Benedict’s ‒’ she paused, frowning, as Dolly arrived. ‘Well, Staff?’

  ‘Excuse me, Sister, but a mechanic from Repairs and Works is here and would like to see you about the oxygen piping in the Shock Room.’

  Joss said, ‘I can wait, Sister.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’ Her smile was very attractive. It disappeared when she finally turned to me. ‘Staff Nurse Maitland?’

  “Yes, Sister. The Night Superintendent ‒’

  ‘I’ve seen her. I’ll deal with you, directly. Wait.’ She went off with Dolly.

  Joss and I looked at each other. And I smiled. ‘I didn’t expect this, Joss.’

  He didn’t smile. ‘Quite a turn-up for the book. Tell me something, Cathy ‒’ he took a deep breath. ‘How much accident time have you actually had on this side of the Atlantic?’

  I had not expected the lunatic, the lover, or the poet in the A.U. at this hour on a Monday, but nor had I expected this. I answered his question then added what I had said to Night Super.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted.

  ‘Have a good drive back?’

  ‘Yep. Thanks. Get to your digs all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. Just fine.’ He saw my glance at his tie, so I smiled again. ‘I didn’t realize you always wore your battle colours.’

  He glanced downwards. ‘I don’t.’

  The silence was stifling. I remembered he hadn’t had breakfast. ‘Busy night?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘From the log, yesterday seems to have been nightmarish.’

  ‘Just the usual fine summer Sunday holocaust.’ He looked at me through his lashes. ‘One doesn’t expect to play ring o’ roses on the job. Not that one’s anything against the game ‒ when one’s nothing better to do.’

  For a few seconds I was too angry to answer and half my anger was directed at myself. He wasn’t the first man to regret Saturday night on Monday morning, but he was the first I had taken seriously. ‘Can’t say it’s ever really sent me. How’s Stan Lawson this morning? I haven’t heard.’

  He said very gravely, ‘Not too well, I’m afraid. This seems a very nasty bug.’

  ‘Very nasty,’ I agreed as Sister came back.

  Chapter Three

  ‘And another police call coming your way, Staff.’ The Head Porter rustled some notes at his end of the line. ‘One male, one female. Youngish. Minor lacerations, bruises, shock. Driver and front seat passenger, in private car A. Head on, private car B ‒ not going too fast, am I?’

  ‘Just getting that, thanks, Mr Jarvis.’ I wrote swiftly on the huge memo pad on the standing desk fixed to the wall at the far end of the Receiving Room. The remainder of the wall was occupied by a line of scrubbing-up sinks.

  The three telephones on the desk were red, yellow and green. Set above and on either side of every door in the department were three similarly coloured bulbs. All incoming calls were announced by flashing lights and the only bell ever sounded was the fire alarm. The red was only used to herald admissions; yellow, for outside calls coming through the main switchboard; green, was the inter-hospital line. There was a red telephone in every room and office in the A.U., including our changing-room.

  ‘Car B, Mr Jarvis?’

  ‘Haven’t got ’em out yet. Two involved and up front. Both unconscious, seemly, and in a right mess. One male, one female. Small car, no belts visible. They’ve got the firemen out.’

  ‘Car A wearing belts, I take it?’

  ‘That’s right. Some,’ he added laconically, ‘never learn, do they? Should be here in about ten minutes.’

  Sister glanced through my notes then passed them to Joss. There was a temporary lull on and they were in Cubicle 1 with the four final year medic students working as accident dressers for that week. The only girl medic asked, ‘Why the fire brigade, Mr Desmond?’

  ‘They’ve the right type of tin-openers for this type of job.’ As the room was empty of patients, all the cubicle curtains were drawn back. Joss looked the five accident tables over. ‘4 and 5 for these two, Sister? Right. Eccles ‒’ he nodded at one student, ‘5 with Mr Palmer. (The houseman.) Huntly, 4 with Mr Charlesworth. Miss ‒ er ‒’

  ‘Dawson,’ said Sister before the girl could open her mouth.

  ‘Thanks.’ He told the girl to shadow Dr Anthony and the final student to stick by him. ‘MacDonald, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ echoed Sister and the student together.

  The A.U. trained staff always worked in pairs that were arranged by Sister at the start of each day. At present, Sister was paired with Joss, Dolly with Mr Charlesworth, Nurse Henty, the senior student nurse, with Mr Palmer, and Nurse Fisher, a third-year with more A.U. time than all the other student nurses with the exception of Henty, was with Peter. The most junior houseman, Mr Geddes, was in our plaster theatre for the day, and officially assisted by Mr Kovac, the plaster technician. Mr Kovac, a middle-aged and highly competent Pole, had run the plaster theatre since the A.U. opened. He was a good and tactful teacher.

  As necessary the pairs became a team of four, six, or eight, working simultaneously on the same patient. When possible, 1 and 2 were reserved for the most injured, being technically the senior cubicles, but they were all identically equipped and had enough floor space for a team of ten to work, uncramped. Each had its own anaesthetic machine, sucker and respirator, piped oxygen supply, trolleys set with sealed sterile dressing and instrument packs for anything from removing a splinter to the amputation of a limb. The trolleys with metal stands painted red instead of the ubiquitous white held the settings for emergency tracheotomy and cardiac arrest.

  The tables looked rather like operating tables but were far more comfortable to lie on. A battery of buttons raised or lowered transfusion and drip stands, altered any part or the whole table to any position wanted. The previous Sister Accidents said the only thing her tables could not do was walk, but give the designers time and they would get that taped. In the rare temporary lull on a Monday morning, she had always demonstrated their uses to the new medic students starting their weekly rota. I had not yet seen Miss Butler address a direct word to any of them. She gave the impression of regarding them as a necessary evil she was prepared to suffer but under no circumstances enjoy. She wasn’t unique in that, nor in the cold glances she had given Miss Dawson’s heels and hemline when she first appeared. I could think without difficulty of a dozen sisters with the same reaction. The student girl’s hemline was now hidden by her gown and from the way she was standing, the sooner she could get her feet into flatties the happier she’d be.

  My job for the morning was ‘lights and messages’. ‘You won’t be an
y use to me till you’ve had a refresher,’ Sister’s tone dismissed my Canadian job as a sinecure best forgotten. ‘A year off’s a long time.’

  The A.U. was officially open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week and when closed could open at any hour for major emergencies, minor accidents at night being dealt with in Emergencies. The large night staff there always included at least one staff nurse with accident training. When necessary she worked in the A.U. at night with other nurses from Emergencies, but as Martha’s had no shift system for residents, with the A.U. men. These had a weekly rota which gave them ‒ on paper ‒ every other night off-call, one weekly half-day, one free evening, and every other weekend off. The ‘weekend’ began at noon on Saturday and ended at midnight on Sunday. I could remember the one week when Stan Lawson, as J.A.O., had all his official time off, on time. It had happened in my first month and was still an unbeaten record when I left.

  Long before the A.U. first opened, time and motion experts worked out in detail the nurses’ shifts. The result was impressive. Every night at ten, all we had to do was hand over to the Emergencies girls and go home. The time and motion experts had done their homework, but they had never worked in an A.U., as hospitals with such units were still rare and hadn’t existed when most of them qualified, or trained. It was hard enough to hand over a ward on time when a patient has just had a coronary, or is having a major haemorrhage. It was impossible to remember the clock, much less hand over, when attending to a human being soaked in blood, grime, oil, and with the ends of broken bones visible through a business suit, or dance dress.

  Miss Evans understood this. She insisted the student nurses work only their allotted shifts, but left Sister Accidents free to arrange the hours of her staff nurses and herself, providing we somehow got the right number of hours off every week. But the only fixed free time on which we could depend were our two weekly days off. The uncertainty obviously affected our social lives and this was why Miss Evans still refused to appoint any married nurse as Sister Accidents. Stan Lawson was the only married S.A.O. we had so far had, but as his wife worked in the hospital and they had a hospital flat just across the road, in their case it was working out pretty well. Any married man with a family living out was unlikely to have more than three nights a month at home. The tiny hospital flats, originally for bachelors, were now rented to married staff without children. This was another of the many reasons why the S.A.O.’s job appealed only to that handful of individualists.

  The red light flashed again. As I reached for the red ’phone, Sister called down the room, ‘Lights, Nurse!’

  Again, Mr Jarvis: ‘Elderly gent, for you, Staff. Seventy-odd. Query fractured left femur. Shock. Stepped in front of a double-decker without looking ‒ bit hard of hearing, I shouldn’t wonder. On his way in ‒ hold it, Staff! And another! Little lad. Query greenstick fracture right forearm, minor lacerations, shock. Come off his bike ‒ day off for half-term, I reckon. Parents not yet contacted ‒ got that?’

  ‘Nearly.’ The occupants of car A were being wheeled in on low accident stretcher-trolleys. I asked if he knew more of car B?

  ‘Seems they’re having a bit of trouble still. The roof’s caved down like a sardine tin that’s been stamped on, they say.’ He rang off and I winced.

  The small boy, Mark Alan Langley, arrived before the elderly man, a Mr William Henry Pears. Mark was eight, fair, skinny, and it was his first visit to a hospital. Though without his parents and surrounded by masked and gowned strangers, he was as sensible and co-operative as the most intelligent adult. But unlike an adult on finding himself a patient for the first time, Mark was totally unimpressed by all he saw.

  Mr Palmer and Nurse Henty were attending to him. Joss had seen him and ordered his treatment on admission, as he did for every patient, then returned to Mr Pears in C2. He took another look at Mark as the technician was adjusting the angle of the portable X-ray machine. The Langley parents had been contacted, ’phoned their consent for treatment and were on their way up.

  ‘Comfortable, Mark?’ asked Joss.

  Mark said he was O.K. but unless they were all right nuts he didn’t see how the bloke could get a picture of his arm from underneath the bed thing. ‘This metal’ll cut out the rays.’

  ‘It won’t.’ Joss explained the bed and mattress were specially constructed to let the rays pass through. He used ‘constructed’, not ‘made’.

  Mark remained unimpressed. ‘Colour pictures?’

  The technician apologized. ‘No.’

  ‘Am I on closed-circuit t.v.? Don’t you even have closed-circuit t.v.?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Joss.

  ‘I say,’ said Mark, ‘this is a rather grotty old hospital, isn’t it?’

  Mr Palmer drawled apologetically, ‘We have been going six hundred years.’

  ‘Cor, that’s older than my grandad! No wonder it’s creaky.’

  Dolly was washing at the sink next to the desk when Sister paused by me. ‘Nurse Maitland, will you inform me directly the Langleys arrive, but put them in the relatives’ rest-room and offer them tea.’

  Dolly waited till Sister moved away. ‘What does she think you are? A first-year?’

  ‘Maybe Benedict’s first-years don’t answer ’phones and make the tea.’

  She pulled a face behind her mask. ‘Maybe Benedict’s haven’t sent us the rightest little megalomaniac in the business.’

  A few minutes later, Mr Palmer re-scrubbed beside me. He was a tallish, willowy young man with a very trendy hair-cut and a languid air. He was nearly as dark as Joss but had blue not brown eyes. I had seen him around at parties as a student, but this was the first time we had worked together. ‘Great place this for crushing the ego into the ground,’ he murmured behind his mask. ‘Do you suppose that revoltingly erudite little monster’s mama was once a Miss Butler?’

  I caught his eye. Joss was only a yard away. ‘I’ve no more details yet, Mr Palmer, as Mark’s parents haven’t arrived.’ He glanced round and then winked at me without saying more.

  Peter was next to use that sink. ‘How much longer are they going to be getting those poor sods out of car B?’

  I told him what Mr Jarvis had said and he winced. ‘How are the Gamlins?’ The couple in Car A.

  ‘Desmond says she can go home once she’s rested-up, and he shouldn’t be warded more than overnight.’

  I smiled voluntarily. ‘That’s something.’

  His eyes smiled over his mask. ‘I’m glad you’re with us. Every time this morning I’ve felt the gods have it in for me I’ve looked at you and changed my mind. Know what I mean?’

  I knew exactly. Being a small blonde with curves, if under-developed, in the right places, I had long come to terms with the fact that to most men I wasn’t a sex symbol, I was a teddy-bear substitute. I got cuddled, but seldom embraced. Joss on Saturday night had been a new experience for me as well as one I now wanted to forget as fast I could ‒ if I could. Angry as he had made me, seeing him all morning wasn’t making things easier.

  He had moved to the sink beside Peter’s. Soaping his hands and arms, he looked my way as casually as Stan Lawson or any other S.A.O. would have done. ‘Taking them the hell of a time getting that car open. Much longer and the poor bastards’ll come in as B.I.D.s.’ Brought In Dead.

  Peter said he was thinking that. ‘Anyone with them?’

  ‘Mr Jarvis hasn’t said, but presumably they’ve got some medic there as our Crash Team hasn’t been called out.’

  Sister caught my eye and beckoned. ‘Staff, I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to say this to a nurse of your seniority, but possibly you’ve acquired some different professional standards in the past year. In future, please remember, I do not like my staff to gossip on-duty.’

  She was Sister, so I apologized meekly, though I thought she was mistaken. I thought that again in the next temporary lull. Car B was now on everyone’s mind. The men and medic students were standing around or sitting on high stools, staring into
space. The nurses were silently dealing with the clearing, checking and re-stocking that went on constantly between cases. I thought the silence unhealthy. Formerly, here even more than in the theatres, when patientless, the staff had used casual, crazy, even heated discussions, as a safety-valve. The whole staff, as all the nurses were senior students, since only third and fourth years worked in the A.U. The present atmosphere reminded me of my first ward ex-P.T.S. and how much my set as well as myself had resented being treated by our nursing and medical seniors as moronic machines the year after we’d grown accustomed to being accepted as intelligent young adults in our sixth forms. At the end of that year Miss Evans had become our first C.N.O., instead of Matron. She was still in her thirties. Her revolutionary ideas on the treatment of student nurses had horrified many, but not all, our older sisters, but inside of two years had cut the Martha’s dropout rate amongst student nurses by twenty per cent. Looking around it struck me as time St Benedict’s had a Miss Evans, and then I noticed Joss surveying the room in much the same way as myself.

  Mr Palmer had been strolling round aimlessly. He stopped to watch some adjustments Peter was making to the anaesthetic machine in Cl and obviously absently, after fiddling with a pair of scissors lying on a shelf by his hand, put them in his pocket. Sister rounded on him as if he had been caught shop-lifting. ‘Mr Palmer, those scissors you’re secreting happen to be my private property!’

  It was a very little thing. In any department the wrong scissors got picked up by the wrong owners a dozen times a day. But as everyone was on edge, it united the home staff into an outraged band of brothers and sisters. Mr Palmer’s reactions enhanced the unity.

  ‘Sister, I’m stricken with remorse ‒ but stricken!’ Bowing affectedly, he returned her scissors at arms’ length. ‘Pray accept my most humble ‒ nay ‒ profound apologies and assurances that to take your personal property is the last thing I would ever desire to do. How can I make amends?’

  Joss said, ‘Just ask Mr Jarvis for a couple of sacks, nip down to the basement for some ashes from the boiler-house, get off those shoes and get started for Canterbury. It’s only sixty odd miles.’