Paradise Lodge

by Nina Stibbe

  Matron said we spoke as if he was the real Gordon Banks.

  ‘He is,’ said one nurse.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said Matron.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said another nurse.

  ‘Is he?’ asked Matron.

  And the tableful of nurses laughed.

  The staff all had their quirks—I can’t list them all here (the staff or their quirks), it’d be a whole chapter—but I was struck that day by Nurse Hilary, who drank her coffee through a straw, and Nurse Sally-Anne, who was assertively shy and communicated via little grunts that the others seemed to understand. I found out later that Hilary had unusually pitted teeth that stained easily and, even worse, that Sally-Anne had just had twins who she’d named after the showjumping Schockemöhle brothers and who’d been adopted by a couple in Scotland. I wished I’d known that then and I might have been nicer to her. Also, there was Nurse Gwen, who had a diploma in advanced geriatric nursing and worked to the principle of keeping the patients comfortable and happy but not necessarily alive. Nurse Gwen spoke almost exclusively in swear words and I realized for the first time how aggressive swearing could sound.

  There was Nurse Eileen who was very pretty and had graceful movements. She cocked her head to the side when she lit up and made a hell of a lot of smoke with endless small puffs and hardly inhaling. Also, she hated feathers.

  Finally, there was Nurse Dee-Anna, who seemed completely normal in every way. She had a nice voice and honey-coloured hair and sang ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ while she went about her business. Her name was Diana but she pronounced it Dee-Anna. If I write it Diana, you’ll not say it right in your mind. It being Dee-Anna is important. Somehow. She was so normal I suspected she was hiding something like a crime in her past, or a love affair with someone in the room.

  As time went by I met assorted other staff, but for the first day it was just the above.

  After coffee break Matron, Miranda and I followed the Owner’s Wife and went off for a tour of the house. I’d already heard from Miranda that it had been quite grand until the owner’s family had been forced to turn it into a business due to complicated money difficulties. The owner had hoped to start up a boarding kennels for dogs but his wife had insisted on a nursing home for elderly gentlefolk. According to Matron, they’d arm-wrestled for it in the Piglet Inn and she’d won 2–1 in a best-of-three contest and thought up the name ‘Paradise Lodge’ on the spot—being a huge fan of the poet John Milton—and they raised their glasses, ‘To Paradise Lodge!’ and laughed like posh people do in times of great uncertainty, and the landlord had rubbed his palms together at the thought of all the future nurses coming in for vodka and orange and KP nuts. Which they did.

  None of this was mentioned on our tour of the house but the Owner’s Wife did tell us that Paradise Lodge had previously been called The Old Grey Hall and they’d had to apply to change it to something more upbeat to attract old people. They soon found out that changing a house name is quite a complicated business but they changed it anyway, having had all the advertising and headed paper done.

  True to its ex-name, Paradise Lodge was a big, old, L-shaped, grey, stuccoed house. The front door was at the side and you could tell it always had been because a thick old wall ran right across the front, with no gap for a gate, and all sorts of ancient trees and climbing vines. The rooftop was the most attractive feature—dramatic, big and steep, and a mass of little windows in the gables where the nurses’ quarters were.

  The house was grand, but not beautiful. You wouldn’t walk past and say to yourself, ‘Ooh, I’d like to live in that house,’ like you would about the tall red farmhouse opposite, or the modern box with slitty windows the other side where the German film director lived with his mother (and whose father was a patient). But once you were inside, Paradise Lodge was lovely and in some ways beguiling. There were backstairs and front stairs and secret stairs and doors hidden in the panelling that the owner had had put in so that he could go about his business without ever having to bump into a sick old person who might need help. There were outhouses, including a stables and a summer house. Next to the brand-new laundry was the tack room which was supposed to become the salon for hair and chiropody but never had, and beside that was the boot room which was now the morgue and had a bench, a candle, a cross and a Bible and, for some reason, a little brass bell. I imagined ringing it like mad if ever I was in there and a dead body came back to life. Next to that was the larder.

  The Owner’s Wife pointed things out along the way and always Matron would chip in, trying to be helpful but sounding like an idiot. The Owner’s Wife showed us the main bathroom. I commented on the pretty Victorian bath with little dog’s feet.

  ‘Yes, it’s very pretty,’ said the Owner’s Wife, ‘but not ideal for bathing the infirm.’

  I watched Matron and Miranda dawdle ahead and noted they made a ridiculous pair: Matron as previously described, and Miranda teetering on a pair of high wedges and constantly picking her pants out of her bottom. After a short but serious talk about the laundry, particularly the importance of adding a lidful of Dettol to the wash and even more so the adding of soda crystals to help combat the effects of hard water on the element, we went away in pairs.

  The Owner’s Wife led me out into the hall and we stood for a while and she ran through the daily routine.

  ‘So, the day begins at about six thirty when the night nurse takes the breakfasts round…’ she began.

  I had to gaze about to avoid looking at her (me still not comfortable with one-to-one chats). It would have seemed rude in any ordinary hall but luckily this one was genuinely fascinating with ornate cornicing and decorative dados and two different colours on the walls. There was a curving banister rail in gleaming mahogany and, on the floor, patterned tiles in approx ten different colours. And the furniture—delicate matching consoles with inlaid wood and shapely legs—was topped with all sorts of urns and bowls and antique china dogs etc.

  ‘… and that’s the day-to-day routine,’ the Owner’s Wife was saying, ‘now, let us go and meet the patients.’

  I’d been dreading this bit. I had imagined them all bedridden in dimly lit wards with the Vicar sitting, reading from the Bible, and a nurse feeding them drips of watered-down honey—like you do with baby birds that you know aren’t going to make it. But as we approached the day room I could see they were mostly sitting bolt upright in chairs. Before we entered, the Owner’s Wife gave me a few pointers re meeting them. One was on the subject of communication—tone of voice and vocabulary.

  ‘Not that I’m suggesting you should come over as condescending,’ she said, ‘just don’t speak too quickly, try to be clear and try to avoid slang words.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. And I did. She was really talking about Miranda, who used endless slang, such as ‘right on’ and ‘nope’ and ‘bog’ and other words that the elderly wouldn’t be at home with. God knew how they coped with that sweary nurse with the diploma, though.

  The day room was really two large, adjoining reception rooms with the big divider doors pushed as open as they could go. We went to the smaller room and the Owner’s Wife introduced me to the male patients, one by one. There were five of them. One of them, Mr Greenberg, said, ‘Well, bless my soul! A new chap.’ And then muttered something about cheese upsetting his stomach.

  They were extremely old—around a hundred years, I guessed—and it was like being at the aquarium and thinking the amphibians looked like old men (only the other way round). But they were very alive, one of them was reading the Daily Mail and another was fiddling with a transistor radio.

  The Owner’s Wife flung an arm towards the adjoining room. ‘And all our lovely ladies tend to sit in there,’ she said.

  The ladies—about thirty of them—sat in assorted chairs in a ring around the edge of the room. A few looked unbelievably old and frail, but somehow healthy. Some were just oldish but quavery. Others were extremely sprightly indeed. One wore bright red lipstick, a couple h
ad blue-rinsed hair, and one was wearing a silky turban. Overall they looked more human than the men.

  ‘Ladies, we have two new carers starting today,’ the Owner’s Wife called out, ‘this is Lizzie, you’ll meet Miranda in due course.’

  A few of them smiled or nodded. One old lady close to us repeated, ‘In due course,’ and then another said, ‘What did she say, dear?’

  And I said, ‘In due course.’

  It was like the beginning of a horror film.

  ‘Should I go and introduce myself?’ I asked.

  ‘No need, you’ll meet them by and by,’ said the Owner’s Wife, ‘when we do the comfort round.’

  We strolled back out to the hall.

  ‘I thought they’d all be in bed,’ I said.

  ‘We do have two bedridden ladies,’ said the Owner’s Wife brightly, as if not wanting to disappoint me. And she took me into a long room containing eight beds. Two, side by side, were occupied, a skull-like head on the pillow and a basic human shape draped in softly pleated white linen. It reminded me strongly of the stone tomb effigy of T. E. Lawrence in a Dorset church. His head, in Arabian headdress, resting on the saddle of his favourite camel—which, our mother told us, was called Faisal. I’ve always remembered it. The smooth coldness of the stone, and the idea of the camel and everything.

  Strange, unsettling noises filled the ward—loud snoring and some awful gurgling, as well as a gentle motorized hum which, I found out later, came from the electric ripple mattresses used to prevent bedsores.

  Back in the hall, the Owner’s Wife stood for a moment to let an old man pass. He was tall and a bit wobbly and because his sandal buckles were undone he jangled slightly as he walked.

  ‘Morning!’ he said as he drew close and he stood, looking at the Owner’s Wife, and she did a small cough and said, ‘This is my husband,’ and then, gesturing to me, ‘Lizzie is one of the new auxiliary nurses, Thor, I’m showing her the ropes.’

  ‘Oh, jolly good,’ said the owner (I realized he was the owner). ‘How are you getting along?’

  I said I was getting along fine and commented on the hallway. ‘It’s like a stately home,’ I said, thinking it a complimentary thing to say.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘the floor tiles are knockout, aren’t they? You won’t see better in the Alhambra—Euclidean geometry and whatnot.’

  I said, ‘Brillo pads!’ which was a normal thing to say in those days, meaning ‘brilliant’ (I’d picked it up from Miranda), but the owner misunderstood and became anxious. Some of the tiles were loose, he explained, because previous staff had used Flash, which had eroded the grouting (he tapped at the floor with his sandal to demonstrate).

  The Owner’s Wife groaned. ‘Off you go now, darling,’ she said, and he shuffled off, but called back, ‘Take her up to meet Lady B.’

  ‘Yes, yes, all in good time,’ said the Owner’s Wife.

  I felt sorry for the Owner’s Wife. It was always embarrassing seeing people’s husbands; especially the idiotic sort, and you seldom saw any other. Also, I was at that age where you can’t stop yourself imagining the couple having sexual intercourse. And it was really awful.

  ‘The tiles are lovely,’ I said to the Owner’s Wife after he’d gone, to make her feel a bit better about him.

  If it had been up to her, she said, they’d have been covered with a practical, non-slip linoleum years ago, and she went on to list the many ways the building was unsuitable for its elderly residents. The flooring in particular, which she said was unstable, and the driveway and paths, which were ever changing, like a dry riverbed. And there was no passenger lift, even though there was nothing to prevent the installation of a small one—only the owner’s unwillingness to compromise his living quarters. Talking about it seemed to upset her but she pulled herself together and gave me a recap on the golden rules of working with the elderly, which we’d been through at the interview.

  The most important thing seemed to be (a) that I appreciate the huge privilege of being among them and remember they had a lot to teach a young woman like me. And (b) that I must take them to the toilet frequently and regularly, but do my utmost to avoid calling it ‘the toilet’, suggesting ‘comfort area’ and ‘spend a penny’ if I absolutely had to say anything.

  The comfort round had to be done after breakfast, coffee, lunch and tea, and carers had to be ready to help at all times in that respect above all others.

  It was a bit like looking after a toddler, I said, and started to talk about my tiny brother, Danny, who’d just gone into pants, but that was obviously a very wrong thing to say and the Owner’s Wife told me never, ever to say it again.

  We were silent for a moment and I was about to apologize and explain when a car clanked over the cattle grid and sounded its horn. The Owner’s Wife rushed away to investigate and reappeared a moment later in a controlled fluster.

  ‘A convalescent patient has arrived, we weren’t expecting him until tomorrow, we’re not quite ready,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to do the comfort round.’

  So, I was thrown in at the deep end—as it were—and though I hadn’t had the proper training (only the theory), when it came to it, the comfort round was only a matter of escorting or wheeling the patients to the sluice across the hall, waiting outside and helping with corset hooks and stockings and trying to avoid saying the word ‘toilet’ or ‘wee’. I noticed the shy nurse plucking her eyebrows in the mirror above the vast butler’s sink while she waited for her gentleman and even when he called out, she carried on.

  It was nice to get to know the ladies without the Owner’s Wife watching my every move and word, especially since running into her husband in the hall had put her in a ‘blue funk’ (her words). And though it was a simple endeavour, it still took me over an hour to get the thirty-five-odd patients all to the conveniences and back into their chairs. Some of them said they didn’t want to go and had to be forced, literally, to get up and walk across the hall. Sometimes my euphemisms must have been too vague so I was resorting to nods, hand gestures (raindrops) and pointing. Some walked incredibly slowly and others had walking frames which, in my opinion, slowed them down. Some took ages in the cubicles (one fell asleep) and others insisted on washing their hands afterwards. Some had to go twice, one did it on the way and I had to drag a cloth round with my foot and hope to God the Owner’s Wife didn’t appear and notice the area of brightened tiles.

  After I’d finished the comfort round I joined the Owner’s Wife and the patient who’d arrived unexpectedly. He was called Mr Simmons and lived locally. He had reddish, greyish hair and not a single eyelash. The Owner’s Wife was asking him very specific questions about his health and his breakfast preferences but kept interrupting herself to say how delightful it was that he’d been discharged early from hospital, and she wasn’t being sarcastic—even though anyone could see the chaos it had caused. Mr Simmons was in good health except for a gammy foot and whatever operation he’d just had, which wasn’t discussed—presumably it was made clear on his medical notes or was too personal for an auxiliary to know about.

  He had been scheduled to have something done to his gammy foot but the surgeons had found this other more pressing (undisclosed) thing and had switched to that instead. The Owner’s Wife said that was a common occurrence and probably quite right under the circumstances. But it was obvious Mr Simmons was fed up—so fed up he made a little fist of crossness. That was the thing with private hospitals, I supposed (privately), it being in their interests to find extra things to do. Ditto vets, hairdressers and car mechanics.

  Apart from guessing what his breakfast preference was going to be—porridge with cream (I’d guessed Grape-Nuts)—I could hardly stop myself from groaning out loud with boredom.

  Mr Simmons waited in the Owner’s Wife’s office while she and I prepared his room. Room 8 was a bright, sunny room with its own little bathroom and, instead of parquet and rugs, had a bristly carpet on the floor. The fireplace with overmantel gave it a comfy, sitting-room
feel and from the leatherette Morris recliner you could see the reservoir and, in theory, you’d be able to chuck a sugared almond at Prince Charles as he trotted past to tackle Mr Oliphant’s cross-country course (which he was rumoured to do occasionally).

  Signs of the previous incumbent were still very much in evidence (that’s what the Owner’s Wife was so flapped about)—a square, silver-backed hairbrush and a tortoiseshell comb sat on a shelf in the bathroom and a pair of grey trousers was still sandwiched in the press. These had all belonged to Mr Cresswell who’d passed away the Thursday before, the Owner’s Wife explained. I gazed at the talcy outline of two enormous feet on the cork bathmat and felt a wave of anxiety.

  ‘Now, Lizzie, Mr Simmons’ stepdaughter is a tricky one,’ said the Owner’s Wife, ‘tread carefully if you have dealings with her.’

  ‘In what way?’ I asked.

  ‘She’d rather Mr Simmons wasn’t here—she thinks it unnecessary,’ said the Owner’s Wife.

  ‘And is it unnecessary?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we don’t think so, but I suppose it’s her inheritance being spent.’

  The Owner’s Wife gave the room a final blast of Haze and sent me downstairs for a tray of coffee and biscuits while she went to fetch Mr Simmons and his tricky stepdaughter, who had just arrived.

  At the bottom of the stairs we separated and I went to the kitchen for the refreshments. I almost caught up with them, a few minutes later, approaching Room 8. Mr Simmons shuffled along slowly and the Owner’s Wife walked behind with his relative. I followed behind at a distance and, as she turned to take the bend on the stairs, I saw to my dismay that Mr Simmons’ relative was a teacher from my school. Not any old teacher but Miss Pitt—the Deputy Head.

  I turned on my heel and strode—tray and all—back to the kitchen. It was troubling in the extreme to see Miss Pitt in this context. I hadn’t been doing anything wrong, I wasn’t smoking or skiving, but having been respected all day I really didn’t want to be humiliated in front of my new mentor/boss and a convalescent patient.