Flowers on the Grass

by Monica Dickens

“A boiled beef bone usually.”

  “No!” He struggled to sit up. “How horrible—I won’t-” But Dr. Mooney had plunged the syringe into his arm and he was out like a light between one word and the next.

  Mr. Brett was low for several days after his operation, but as he picked up he began to annoy Nurse Fitt again. Coming back from lunch one day, she saw him making Nurse Potter pull the ropes of his extension about, and bustled down the ward.

  “Nurse Potter!” she cried. “You know you’re not allowed to interfere with the Balkan beams.”

  “I thought I was supposed to do what the patients want,” said Nurse Potter, who was very young, very small and very cheeky.

  “It’s a pity you don’t remember that more often. There’s old Daddy Ledward been wanting his toenails cut for days. You can go and do that now.”

  “Oh, must I? I can’t bear it. It makes me reach.”

  “Then you’ll never make a nurse.”

  “Don’t want to if it means getting like you,” retorted Nurse Potter.

  After this interchange, Nurse Fitt was out of humour when she turned to Mr. Brett. “Now what’s all the fuss about?” she asked. “Anyone would think you’d got every bone in your body broken instead of just an impacted extra-capsular fracture of the base of the femoral neck.” She liked the long names of things.

  “I don’t care what you call it, it still hurts; more so now it’s got the remains of the week-end joint in it.”

  “It wouldn’t if you didn’t fidget about so.”

  “This damn machine’s strung up too tight.”

  “Nonsense. I fixed it myself this morning.”

  She was going away, but Sonny called across the ward: “It is too tight, you know. That rope is caught up at the top, look.”

  He was right, of course. He always was. Sonny was a terrible know-all, and Nurse Fitt, who liked to have a monopoly of being right, thought he had got impossibly spoiled from being so long in the ward. She did not approve of the licence that Sister allowed him. However, he was useful for things like cutting swabs and rolling bandages. She gave him some to do now.

  As Mr. Brett’s condition improved, his manners deteriorated. Although he did not make so much fuss now, he was growing very saucy and even encouraged his visitors to give sauce to Nurse Fitt. If Sister were off duty, she was very conscious of her position on visitors’ days, sitting at the desk ostentatiously writing in ledgers, or looking through X-rays, as if she could understand them, raising her head to answer relatives’ anxious questions with grave reticence. She felt that the visitors all looked at her and thought to themselves: “That’s the staff nurse,” and envied and admired her. There was a lady, however, who came quite often to see Mr. Brett—chic, Nurse Fitt supposed you’d call her, though she herself preferred more colour and trimming. She thought perhaps that this was Mr. Brett’s girl-friend, for they seemed to have a lot to say to each other and giggled in a juvenile way, and Mr. Brett would always try and keep her there overtime after the bell had rung. It would be just like him to be carrying on with a married woman, which she proved herself to be one day when she brought her small son into the ward, strictly against rules.

  Nurse Fitt caught him wandering round the ward, eating the men’s sweets, listening in to their earphones and reading everybody’s charts.

  Nurse Fitt went to Mr. Brett’s bed, looking across it at the boy’s mother who sat quite at her ease and so perfectly groomed that it made you involuntarily put up a hand to your hair and glance down at your apron. Mr. Brett looked from one woman to the other, as if he found it amusing.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you to take that child out of the ward,” Nurse Fitt said. “They are not allowed in under twelve.”

  “But he is twelve,” said Mr. Brett’s friend. “He’s small for his age. I’m really very worried about him.” Nurse Fitt did not believe this, especially as she saw Mr. Brett’s visitor give him a wink which she did not even trouble to hide properly.

  “Even so,” said Nurse Fitt, “they are only allowed in to see their fathers.”

  “Well, how do you know-” began Mr. Brett, and his friend said: “Dan—really!” and put her hand up to stifle a giggle.

  “Short of having a blood specimen taken for a paternity test,” he said pompously, “I don’t see that you’re justified in turning the poor kid out.”

  “Well really, Mr. Brett!” Nurse Fitt was very shocked, and walked away, feeling in her spine that they were giggling about it together. She thought them disgraceful and retired to the desk, where she dealt haughtily with old Daddy Led-ward’s daughter, who wanted to know why Dad was breathing so funny, although she could not have understood if Nurse Fitt had told her.

  Nurse Fitt got her own back, however. Next week, when Mr. Brett’s friend had the colossal nerve to bring the child again, she intercepted them in the corridor outside the ward and told them that Mr. Brett was not well enough to have visitors today. “Just a slight reaction to sulphonamides,” she said, “nothing serious,” for she did not want her ringing up Sister and making trouble.

  “What’s he having M. & B. for?” the small boy asked, as if he knew something about it. Children were fiends. Nurse Fitt had always thought so. They invariably asked the one awkward question.

  “You wouldn’t understand, dear,” she said, faking a smile for him and putting a hand on his hair, from which he jerked away as if she were contagious.

  “Oh, come on, Pip,” his mother said. “Don’t make a pest of yourself. We’re obviously not wanted here. Poor old Dan.” She looked towards the ward doors and then took the child away.

  Nurse Fitt went back into the ward, stepping on the balls of her feet with triumph. Mr. Brett called out to her: “Fitt! Here a moment. Fitt!” She pretended not to hear. She would not answer to that in front of the visitors. He would have to call her Nurse if he wanted her.

  When he did, she went to him, in her own time, and he asked her if Mrs. March had rung up. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “She said she was coming at two, and she’s never late. She’s not that sort of woman.”

  Nurse Fitt implied by her manner that she was not interested in what sort of woman Mrs. March was. “I’m afraid you’re not to have any visitors today,” she said. “It’s too tiring.”

  “What on earth—who’s damfool idea is that?”

  “Sister said so. She thinks you need more rest.” She could make it right with Sister afterwards, if he complained. She would pretend to her that she had said that, and old Fergie, who was getting forgetful in her old age, and self-conscious about it, would not dare to contradict.

  Mr. Brett flopped back on his pillow and sulked. Nurse Fitt sat at the desk and kept an eye on the door to intercept any more of Mr. Brett’s visitors. A few more people came, but certainly no one for him. There was only George’s mother and Daddy Ledward’s crooked-looking brother, a few more of Sonny’s interminable family, and an enormously fat old Jewish woman in a flowered hat, who waddled down the ward weighted down on both sides with loaded bags. She was obviously bound for Joe Levi at the end, who had a locker full of stuff already.

  But when Nurse Fitt went round with the ward Christmas box, she saw to her astonishment that the fat old woman was sitting by Mr. Brett’s bed, leaning on it with a doting expression and feeding him with little sugary cakes out of a paper bag, as if he were something at the zoo.

  Daniel laughed. “Beaten you this time, Fitt,” he said. “‘I’m afraid you’re not to have any visitors today’,” he mimicked. “But this one got by you, didn’t you, Momma?”

  “So thin, I was,” said the fat woman and chuckled, overflowing the chair. “It is necessary that I come, to keep my poor Daniel alive at all.” She took bars of chocolate and cakes out of her bag and began to put them into Mr. Brett’s locker.

  “The patients are not allowed to have food brought in from outside,” said Nurse Fitt feebly, making a last attempt at mastery, but Mr. Brett said: “Now that’s a lie, Fitt, and you kn
ow it.”

  “Never mind, my dear,” said the fat woman. “Here is something for you.” She put sixpence into the slot of the Christmas box, and Nurse Fitt went away and rang the bell for the end of visiting hours five minutes too soon.

  When Jacky Saunders was going round tidying up after the visitors had gone, she asked Daniel what he was grinning at.

  “I’ve just scored off old Fitt,” he said.

  “Oh, good. Damn—I shouldn’t say that. Where is your loyalty, Nurse?” She looked over her shoulder as if she expected to have been heard. She never got away with anything. She was in trouble all the time—had been ever since she started nursing, and before that in the typing pool at the Bank of England. Other people got away with far worse things, but she was always found out. It was her fate whenever possible to run headlong into trouble like a runaway horse into barbed wire.

  When she had tidied Daniel’s locker, he reached over and untidied it again, looking for chocolate to give her. He asked her to adjust the padding under his splint, and she said: “I can’t for a sec. I’ve got masses to do. I’ll come back. Oh no, look, I’ll do it now. Come on.”

  The other nurses seemed to get through their work fairly calmly, but Jacky lived in a perpetual state of being always behind, undecided what to do next when there were so impossibly many things to do, knowing she had no hope of getting finished. Scrambling through somehow and getting off duty only half an hour late, she would remember, when she got across the road to the hostel, that she had forgotten someone’s medicine or left a glass syringe boiling in the steriliser, and rush back to the ward again before Night Sister caught her.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of us?” the men would call out. “What’s it this time?” Whenever there was a crash in the kitchen or annexe, someone would sing out: “What you bust, Nurse Saunders?” and when Sister discovered some abomination, she would stand at the top of the ward and rap out: “Nurse Saunders!” before she investigated further.

  Jacky believed that the men were fond of her. They said that she was the finest nurse in the hospital, but she knew that was not true, so it must be just their instinctive championing the underdog. Daniel said she was a rotten nurse. He and she got on very well. He annoyed the others, but he was all right with her. They talked the same language and it was fun having him in the ward.

  She had been asleep in her off-duty today, and woke to find she had only five minutes to put on her uniform and dash across the road to the hospital.

  “And you look it,” Daniel said. “It’s a pity you’re such a mess, Jacky. You could be quite pretty with those grey eyes and that long, soft mouth.”

  “Oh, shut up, Daniel,” she said.

  “Nurse Saunders!” Sister had come up behind her. People were always surprising Jacky from the rear. She lacked that instinct that makes you turn and see them just in time.

  Sister drew her aside, for she never criticised a nurse before a patient. “Nurse, you are not to call the patients by their christian names. Nor the nurses either,” she said. “I’ve heard you ever so often, calling out to each other like schoolgirls.”

  At that moment Daniel chose to shout: “Hi, Betty! Any chance of another cup?” to Nurse Barnes going round with the tea-trolley.

  “There, you see,” said Sister. “That’s what happens. You can’t expect respect from anyone else if you don’t give it to each other.”

  “But who wants respect, Sister? I mean—I’m sorry—I mean it seems so silly when we call each other by our christian names off duty.”

  “It’s a question of etiquette. If you can’t understand that, I’m afraid you’ll never make a nurse, Nurse. You must root out this slapdash streak in yourself, and you’d better start by cleaning that blood transfusion set. You forgot it before you went off this morning. Now Nurse Fitt is going off duty, and I am going to the plaster room with that Hip. Can I trust you on your own?”

  “Oh, Sister, of course”

  Sister Ferguson treated her like a child. Matron, too, was always giving her homey talks and telling her she must mature, which was so absurd, when she was one of the oldest nurses in the hospital. Most of them had started their training at eighteen or twenty, but it was not until she was thirty-three that Jacky’s desire to nurse had overcome everything else— family, job, prospects, and her half-hearted attachment to Paul.

  Perhaps it was because she had come later to hospital life that it had not chastened her. The others came to it when they were still suggestible and accepted the system, but Jacky had to sift it for herself and reject what she could not stomach, and be called a rebel about once a month, although she was really more passionately heart and soul for the hospital than anyone. But in her own way. The others had come with their characters still malleable, and by a too early contact with the unadorned issues of life and death had grown up too quickly, like flowers in a forcing-house. But Jacky could not change now. She was too old, although when she saw people like Fitt, joyless at twenty-five, she felt very young indeed.

  When the staff nurse had gone and Sister was safely in the plaster room for at least an hour, the men all got out of bed again, Winnie put the kettle on for tea and came in to play cards, and one of the walking patients went into the kitchen to fry chips for supper. The two probationers sang different tunes at the same time as they made beds and whisked through their evening duties, careful, however, to leave one job until the end, for if you finished before time Sister might find you something to do that would keep you late on the ward.

  Jacky spun hectically round, taking temperatures, giving medicines, starting one thing before she had finished another, leaving Mr. Foster to soak his septic finger while she tried to pacify a doctor about a missing X-ray, and chasing all over the hospital for it, so that poor Mr. Foster’s finger was like a washerwoman’s when she remembered him.

  Daniel and Sonny Burgess, who had long been conducting a game of chess on two boards by calling the moves across the ward, wanted her to move their beds together so that they could play properly.

  “Oh no, look, I can’t,” she said. “You know Sister hates the beds to be moved, and, anyway, I haven’t got time—oh well, come on then. If I must. Here, someone give me a hand.”

  They could not move Daniel, so they pushed Sonny across and fitted his bed in askew among the Balkan beams, sticking out into the middle of the ward.

  “Let’s pray Matron doesn’t choose to do a snap round,” Jacky said. “What I risk for you—oh, not you, Daniel. I wouldn’t do it for you. Only for Sonny.”

  Everyone in the hospital liked Sonny because he was an institution, but Jacky truly loved him for his own staunch self which had never sagged under his load of bad luck. He aroused all her campaigning instincts. She was always wanting to make causes of things—van horses, lunatics, old people who didn’t want to go to’the infirmary, the bath water in the nurses’ hostel. It was terrible about Sonny. Someone ought to do something about it. If she had been in court when they dismissed his claim she would have told them where they got off. The unspecified thems and theys of the world were all Jacky’s enemies. She could not read a newspaper without getting incensed.

  Sonny had been twenty-two when his life went wrong, a house painter, engaged to a quiet girl called Nelly, whom he was going to marry if they could ever find somewhere to live. Painting the outside of a third-story window two years ago the cradle rope broke and pitched him to the pavement, and since then he had been in and out of plasters and splints and jackets, manipulated, operated, drugged and X-rayed, but all the orthopaedic surgeons in London could not say whether he would ever walk again. His claim against his firm had failed, because they said it was his duty to check the ropes each day. When his appeal failed, his mother, who was pugnacious, wanted to go on with it, but Sonny, who had taken to books since his accident and had just finished Bleak House, said he didn’t want the case hanging found his neck for the rest of his life. When Nelly’s parents went away to Scotland she stayed behind and lived with his t
eeming family so as to be near him. Patient as a dog, she waited for him to come out of the hospital and marry her, although if he ever did they would have no home and no money for the hope of one.

  Sonny had a perfectly round head with sandy hair which had to be cut very short because it preferred to stand straight up in bristles instead of lying down. After his accident, when it had not been cut for weeks, he had looked like a porcupine. He had vivid blue eyes with stubby fair lashes that looked as if they had been singed, and with his smooth face and gap-toothed smile, his neck and arms grown thin with disuse, he seemed more like a small boy than a man of nearly twenty-five. Strange chaplains and good women visiting the hospital were apt to call him Sonny, which was how he got his nickname.

  Galloping up and down the ward, for if she obeyed the maxim that a nurse never ran she knew she would never get anywhere, Jacky was touched to see him and Daniel, propped sideways with pillows, contemplating the chess-board contentedly there. Every time she went by she asked Daniel to put out his pipe and told them that they must finish the game so that she could get the beds straight before Sister came back. They waved her away and she became involved with something in the specimen room, until the bump and sigh of the swing doors brought her flying into the ward to see Sister coming back too early with a strange and impressive doctor, and the most unholy row blew up and it was all Jacky’s fault.

  Probationers Barnes and Potter thought that Sister had got Nurse Saunders put on night duty because of spoiling the pattern of her Balkan beams. What a sell for old Fergie that she had got her back as night nurse on her own ward! She played war with her in the mornings over the report, for Sister thought that everything was always the night nurse’s fault, and doubly so when it was poor old Jacky, because everything was always her fault anyway, night or day.

  The day nurse they had got in her place was a God-bothering drip who was heading for heaven, but if Barnes and Potter had anything to do with it would go through hell on the way. They had liked Jacky. She had let you alone and was good fun and not uppish. Fitt was a sow, but they paid no attention to her. Sister was just Sister, inevitable as clouds over the sun, but Nurse Fewling was the end, a pain in the neck that would get you down if you didn’t cut her right out of your life like a carbuncle. You had to watch out that she did not corner you in the annexe and try and convert you, and Winnie was more use on the ward, for when something was really up and a man trying to beat you to the pearly gates, Fewling would be crying for his soul instead of running with hot-water bottles and trying to get the bubble out of the saline drip.