The deceased was a thin, elderly white woman. She had been propped up on pillows, with one arm swept out and upwards towards the rail at the top of her bedstead, so that she looked curiously alive, as if she was just holding her breath. While I stood there, too scared by the unfamiliar presence of human death to stir, her arm began to move in a graceful arc. Still outstretched, it seemed to sail in the air, up and out. As it did so, the woman’s torso also moved forward and I heard a sound emanate from her throat. I was out of that room in a flash, crying out and tearing down the corridor to tell the nurses they had made a mistake; that the patient was still alive. When I turned the corner at the nurses’ station, they were all standing waiting for me, laughing.
The nurses who had arranged this awful prank thought it very funny, and told me I wasn’t a good sport when I remained sullen. I was disturbed, not only for my own sake, but for the woman who had inhabited that body and who, even in death, had been used for an indignity.
I swore I’d never become so hardened and callous as these veteran nurses, but by the time I left I could feel myself moving in that direction. When I came over from the quarters to report for duty in the morning, retiring night nurses would make comments such as, ‘I got old Mr Gardener through the night, but I don’t expect to find him in his bed when I come back on shift this evening. If he stops breathing now, Nurse, it’ll be up to you to pack him up.’
There were exceptions to the nurses’ tough veneer, particularly when the patients concerned were young. A student from a nearly boys college had to have a testicle removed, and nurses in his ward walked around on the day of his surgery crying. Often they balanced the tensions and stresses of the job by making jokes, otherwise they would go crazy. As the frequent butt of their pranks, though, I rarely appreciated their humour. Generally, when I was called to the surgical wards, it was to have pranks or embarrassing situations put on me. No matter where I’d been rostered to work, I’d be sent for to do pre-surgical pubic shaves on men or teenage boys. As I hadn’t seen a man’s private area before I started at the hospital, I found these tasks excruciating, both for myself and for the patient. On one occasion I was told to make two-hourly checks on the swollen testicles of a young man suffering from the complications of adult mumps, to the acute embarrassment of us both.
Word of my, albeit reluctant, ability to do any task assigned to me soon spread and the fact that I hadn’t keeled over in the operating theatre was also considered a plus. All nurses get a quota of dirty jobs involving bloody mess and unsavoury bodily waste, but in this small hospital there was a pecking order. As well as being on the bottom, I was young, coloured and seemingly able to tolerate whatever was thrown at me.
When patients died in the middle of the night, someone had to trundle them down the ill-lit path to the mortuary, which was located down by the back fence. For me this was a particularly scary job. I was once assigned to sit by a patient who, in the process of dying, developed a death rattle. His breathing would stop entirely for minutes and then suddenly, when it appeared that he was at last at peace, he would gasp and have a short period of rapid breathing. Over perhaps three or four minutes, this would slowly subside until he again stopped breathing. This was repeated for almost two hours, with his non-breathing periods becoming longer and longer. I sat beside him, timing his non-breathing intervals, and could only report that he’d irrevocably died when he hadn’t gasped back to life once more for over five or six minutes. I found this experience extremely distressing, and I was unable to offer him any comfort if he did, indeed, regain any consciousness during this time. The last five minutes of waiting were interminable.
At various times, I was also called to assist in the operating theatre and in the mortuary. I occasionally relieved in the maternity ward too, when the sister had her meal break. The mysteries associated with birth and death became very familiar to me and I was awed by the wide variety of responses we, as humans, have to these experiences.
My wages for this work were small, but they were all mine. Our accommodation and food were included as part of the work conditions. With my first pay I put a deposit on two pairs of slacks, to pay off on layby, and I got them out the next fortnight. It was a small triumph over my mother’s strictness.
At this time, Mum had put a payment down on a house in Norris Street, Hermit Park, and they moved there to get Leonie away from the old environment. Nellie and Laaka were overseeing the lodgers in the second of the Stanley Street cottages. Our own place was also rented out—to Koiki (Eddie) Mabo, whose name would become nationally famous in decades to come, and his wife, Bonita, and they later became my good friends. This income enabled Mum to pay off the new house. It wasn’t really new, but it was solid and much more spacious than either of the tiny Stanley Street houses. It was raised well off the ground and the area beneath was surrounded by palings for privacy, which doubled the space available.
When I had a rostered four-day weekend, and if I could afford it, I would go down to Townsville. Trains from Charters Towers to Townsville were infrequent so these trips required careful planning. I was often the only passenger on a goods train which stopped at Railway Estate at about 3 am. The area was always completely deserted at that hour, and I would have to walk from there to Hermit Park carrying my suitcase. Mum still had no phone, so there was no way I could contact her to have Arthur come and pick me up.
To give myself something to do during my days off in Charters Towers, I bought a drum kit. Generally, Matron wouldn’t let me practise as the night-shift nurses had to be able to sleep if they wanted, and playing at night was out of the question.
I also bought a horse, Nellie, from an old man who had previously rented her to me on weekends. He was going broke and had to sell her, so I purchased her for twenty pounds, then paid him to keep her at his place and look after her. The man was extremely happy with this arrangement as he loved Nellie as much as I did. On days off, I would ride around the outskirts of town. Matron didn’t like me tethering Nellie to the fence beside the quarters, so this was another area in which I fell foul of her.
Then a number of things happened which made my life at the hospital quite unbearable. The day before my birthday, I ran into Matron in the hall and she asked me to step into her office.
‘Well, tomorrow’s your big day, eh! Sixteen,’ she said. She sat down behind her desk and began to pull out some papers. ‘I want you to sign these forms and we’ll get you registered as a trainee nurse instead of a nursing aide.’
I was startled and confused. ‘But, I’m fifteen tomorrow.’
She looked up sharply and fixed me with her piercing eyes. ‘You said on your application, here,’ she pointed at the papers, and I could see my mother’s handwriting, ‘you said you were fifteen last year, and now you’ll be sixteen.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Mum wrote that letter, Matron. That’s not my writing. She must have forgotten how old I am.’
In her own way, Matron had seemed quite fond of me, if that’s the right word in these circumstances. For instance, the day after she had blown me up about the noise of my drums, she called me into her suite to have a cup of tea, a rare treat in itself, and she’d given me a gift of a rubber drum-practice pad which she had bought. She had also taken to gently ribbing me whenever a dance was being held in the Towers because she had found out I loved to dance. Then she would arrange the rosters so that older nurses worked and the few who liked to dance, including me, could attend. She would give me a smile and a nod as she posted the weekly rosters up on the notice board.
Had Mum forgotten my age? Or was she so keen to have me placed in a career that she was prepared to lie? I was never able to discover the truth.
After the revelation about my age, Matron’s attitude began to change. She seemed displeased that I was to spend another year as an aide. I was blamed for things I hadn’t done, and for not doing things when I’d not been told to do them. My duties became more onerous but I was still not registered as a trainee nurse.
I was asked out once by a young coloured boy, a ringer who’d come in from one of the surrounding stations. He had swarthy skin and piercing blue eyes. I thought all my dreams had come at once. He took me to the picture theatre, bought me a ticket and said he’d join me later. At interval he reappeared from a hotel across the street and bought me a softdrink. After the pictures he walked me back to the quarters, or I walked and he staggered, and he said he would be back in Charters Towers in two months, did I want to go out again?
On another occasion, I was asked out by a white boy who lived in the town. He, too, took me to the pictures and we had a milkshake at the milk bar on the way back to the quarters. The next day f received phone calls from three different girls who each warned me to stay away from their boyfriend. These two dates were the sum total of my interaction with the local lads in Charters Towers.
Because of the cost and difficulties involved in going down to Townsville, a friend came up one weekend and drove me down on the back of his motorbike. As we were riding on a narrow country road we passed Matron’s car speeding towards Charters Towers. We passed so quickly I didn’t recognise her car until I looked around, yet she saw me.
When I returned after the weekend, she pulled me up on the staircase in front of other nurses.
‘Nurse,’ she said, ‘my nurses do not ride pillion on motorbikes. A few years ago a nurse was killed on a motorbike. You will not get on the back of a motorbike again.’
The cost of buying a car was prohibitive and I was too young to have a licence, so I bought a small second-hand motorbike. I imagined that Matron was implying a lack of faith in the ability of men on bikes, not of me riding one myself. Mum had bought a Birina motor which she’d had fitted to the back wheel of her pushbike, turning it into a motorcycle, and I saw very little difference between her motorised transport and my own. Matron, however, thought otherwise, and she was on my case every time I turned around.
I had received several urgent notes from Mum, thick with underlining, telling me that she was in trouble with the Income Tax Department. Renting out the two little cottages in Stanley Street meant that her tax returns had become too complicated.
Mum had never used a telephone, she always wrote. So when I was called to the phone in the nurses’ quarters and heard my mother’s voice at the other end of the line, I knew immediately this must mean trouble. She begged and pleaded with me to leave Charters Towers and come back and help her to work our her taxation problem. She said they would probably put her in jail otherwise. Because of his illiteracy, Arthur was of no help at all.
I went to Townsville on my next weekend off, but when I saw the size of the task I knew it would take me a few weeks to sort it all out. As I’d griped about how meanly I was being treated by Matron, and that I had been wrongly accused of things, Mum convinced me to leave the hospital. She said that they hadn’t signed me up as a trainee and therefore my work wouldn’t be counted towards my goal. By then I had come to realise that my real goal, to study medicine and specialise in surgery, would never be achieved through emptying bedpans and bathing the elderly and frail. Or by chasing naked male patients from the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Hospital who ran out into the grounds in the middle of the night. So I didn’t need too much pressure. Mum said that she would help me to find another job in Townsville when I had taken care of her business. I handed Matron my notice, went to the stable and told the old man I was leaving and that he could either have Nellie as a gift or re-sell her, and prepared to move back home.
With the little bookkeeping I’d mastered at St Pat’s, I managed to get Mum’s affairs in order. I developed a simple way for her to keep track of her banking and showed her how to keep a receipt book so that she would stay on top of things. Then I hopped on a train and went to Rockhampton to see what was happening there, if any jobs were to be had, and to get away from the rows which had already started up again between Arthur and me.
I had been in Rockhampton for only three hours, having booked into the People’s Palace and gone for a walk, when the police stopped me and asked if I had a permit to be off the reserve. When I told them I didn’t live on a reserve, they didn’t believe me and marched me back to the People’s Palace so they could search my suitcase. They found two American one dollar bills and a few coins which Mum had given me, probably to strengthen her story about how we’d come from there, and a set of balanced feathered darts. I had bought them after learning to play in the pool room when I was waiting for Arthur to close up his barber shop and drive us home. The police said that they suspected these things were stolen and, even though it was evening, made me pack my bag and accompany them to the police station.
When I ran them the story about Mum being white and how we’d all come from America when I was a baby, I saw looks of shock and disbelief on their faces. They made me wait while they rang Townsville police and asked them to go out and interview Mum. Fortunately, I had a book on psychology in my bag, as I was intent on learning things and very much into escapism through reading, so I settled down to fill in the time while they were detaining me. But when another two officers came in and saw me reading they began to make rude comments about me to the men who had stopped me, such as ‘Where did you pick up this smart-arse?’, until glowers from the other police silenced them.
Eventually, they all gathered around me and began to ask more questions. Earlier I had been asked only questions requiring monosyllable replies and Mum’s address, and they’d taken my story as a complete fabrication, easily disproved by a phone call to Townsville. Now I had the opportunity to explain that I’d gone to St Pat’s College—without telling them I’d been expelled, of course—and had just completed a year at Charters Towers Base Hospital.
I could tell they were very impressed—if it was all true. They were waiting on word from Townsville to verify it. Otherwise, they said, it was back to the reserve for me. I wondered which reserve they’d send me to, and fervently hoped Mum would back up my story.
About midnight, a call came through, after which I was informed that the theft they’d hoped to charge me with was dropped, but that a policeman was taking me back to Townsville the next day, because at fifteen I was still under age. When they said they were making up a bed on a desk in an office, and that I had to sleep there, I remembered the last time I had been in close proximity to a detective, and became very afraid.
Despite my fears, I fell asleep immediately. As officers changed shifts, the door was opened several times and the room was flooded with light, waking me, and there would be three or four men, detectives and uniformed officers standing there looking at me. On one occasion I heard a male voice say, Pretty scrawny, isn’t she?’ before the door closed again. I slept fully dressed.
Early next morning I was woken and told to have a wash in the staff washroom. An officer stood outside the door so that no one else would enter. A strong odour of stale urine hung in the air, lightly covered by a whiff of a commercial disinfectant. My recent experience at the hospital had made me acutely aware of these sorts of things and I was anxious not to pick up any germs. Then I was given a stale sandwich and cup of tea before being taken to the railway station in a police car. As we left the police station the officer who was to travel with me said he was going to put me in handcuffs. After I’d promised not to try to run away—I wasn’t going anywhere without my suitcase—he had agreed that they might not be necessary. Another officer laughed and said I was so skinny the handcuffs would probably just have fallen off anyway.
People waiting for the train who saw me arriving in a police car and being escorted by a uniformed officer acted as th
ough I’d been arrested for murder. They stared and conspicuously called their children to stand close beside them, in case I struck out at any moment. When we boarded the train, the officer took the outside seat and made me sit near the window. As we got underway, however, he became more friendly and told me that getting a trip to Townsville was a real windfall for him. He bought food in the dining car for me, and disappeared somewhere for almost the entire journey.
When we arrived, Mum was waiting at the station. I hadn’t told her I was going to Rockhampton, so she was mighty cross, but she also realised that I had spent most of the last eighteen months living by myself and being my own boss. In another year or so, she said, I’d be able to do as I liked, but in the meantime I was to understand that the police would just bring me back if I kept wandering off by myself.
That week I found an advertisement in the Townsville Daily Bulletin for female machine operators to work in a cardboard factory, so I applied. My first Job there was to fold cartons after a more experienced worker had stitched them together with large metal staples. I soon moved on to the stapling machines myself and became their fastest hand. When the factory received major orders I was always asked to work overtime. I could make those machines zing with speed and it took two folders to keep up with my output. After I’d mastered the process I became bored, but I was still the fastest person on the floor. I began to work only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but I was often asked to come in on Saturdays on double time.
After work I’d go dancing, which I loved, until the early hours. On my free days I took up swimming training again and rode my motorbikes. I now owned a BSA and a Norton, which I’d ride over hills and trails. I still wasn’t old enough to get a licence, so I was very circumspect about riding in the street.
Snake Cradle Page 18