by Nina Stibbe
‘He’ll be with me—a State Registered Nurse,’ said Hilary, blowing smoke through a tube she’d made out of her tongue.
‘State Enrolled,’ said Matron.
‘State Registered,’ shouted Hilary. ‘Do you want to see my certification?’
‘Yes, actually, I do,’ said Matron.
‘Well, I’ll see yours first,’ said Hilary.
And Matron backed down like an idiot who had no certification at all.
‘I’d like to see your certification,’ I said, more to show Matron I was on her side than an actual desire to see Hilary’s papers.
‘Well, you can fuck off,’ said Hilary with a horrible sneer.
Then, on the actual leaving day, all morning Hilary kept nipping over to Mr Greenberg’s bungalow to take her bits and bobs and get it all nice before Mr Greenberg was there, bothering her. I saw her in Mr Greenberg’s Austin with a heart-shaped floor cushion squashed against the passenger-seat window (Love is… never wanting to be apart) and a load of cuddly toys, plus a long lacy dress, draped across the back seats, like a dead princess.
Matron was very upset but crashing around trying to act normal, and then she gave up trying to act normal and turned Mr Greenberg out to wait for Nurse Hilary on a bench outside in quite a breeze. She stood over him and shouted that she couldn’t stand to have him in the building. He’d already settled his account and the paperwork flapped around in his lap. He’d obviously noticed the black-stamped ‘includes breakfast on day of departure’ and he was in a bit of a tizz about his lunch.
‘Shall I be taking lunch here, Nurse?’ he asked.
‘No, you won’t be taking your lunch here, you’ll be taking it at home with that immoral woman and good luck to you,’ she said. ‘I hope she fucking poisons you.’ And with that she waddled quickly away before he could see her tears. Not that he’d have noticed.
I went out and told him that his new companion would be back soon and would arrange his lunch. And he asked which one it was going to be.
‘Which nurse?’ he asked.
‘Nurse Hilary, the one with the funny legs,’ I said.
‘Oh, not the one with the dark blue dress?’ he asked.
‘No, the one with the white dress and the funny legs,’ I said.
I went inside, got some coffee and biscuits on a tray and was about to go back out to him, but Matron called me back and asked who the tray was for.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘His live-in companion can sort out his food and drink from now on.’ She flung the tray into the sink and turned to me, furious. ‘And you owe me a pound note,’ she said.
11. Egg Fu Yung
Now, four patients had left plus a couple of convalescent patients who’d been expected to stay on had gone home early, and Miss Granger had died. So the departure of Nurse Hilary and Mr Greenberg was a huge blow. Not for the patients, who found Hilary a bit brusque, but it was heartbreaking for Matron, of course, and a setback in her retirement plan. It was sad for the staff too, losing Hilary’s nursing know-how, especially after losing Dee-Anna and Gwen. Mostly, though, it was extremely bad news for the owner, losing Mr Greenberg who—due to his superior views and incontinence—had been on the highest tariff.
It was obvious that without the Owner’s Wife running it like clockwork, and Mr Simmons doing his bit, Paradise Lodge was going downhill rapidly. The staff shortage was getting worse and the laundry wasn’t getting done. Also, because the catering grocer had stopped calling due to unpaid bills, and the cook was working only sporadically and to suit herself, we were having a lot of ‘pudding only’ days. On these days lunch would be just a hot fruit pie, such as apple and raisin, with custard, due to there being hundreds of catering tins of apple and raisin pie filler in the larder, plus endless custard powder and milk always being available. If a patient asked awkward questions about the savoury first course, they were told they’d just had shepherd’s pie and peas but must’ve forgotten all about it. And none of them seemed to mind, the pudding pies were that delicious.
Just one or two days after Mr Greenberg had left, we had an acute meal crisis. There was nothing for lunch except ginger cake and tins of marrowfat peas. This hadn’t been noticed until gone 11.30 and the patients normally had their lunch at 12. We couldn’t give them apple pie again—we’d had pudding-only days twice running already, plus we’d run out of Trex and flour.
We found some ancient tins of oxtail soup but the patients couldn’t manage soup with a spoon and couldn’t face drinking it from a cup—we’d tried before and it was just cruel to put them through it. Only Mr Simmons had ever coped with soup and he wasn’t there any more.
Miranda uncharacteristically took charge. She phoned Mike Yu at Good Luck House, in Kilmington, and spoke to him on the telephone in the hall with us crowded round, listening.
‘We’ve run out of food, hun,’ she said.
We could hear a garbled phone voice, which must have been Mike because why else would she have said ‘hun’?
‘We’ve only got some ginger cake,’ she said.
More garbled Mike phone voice.
‘Could you?’ she said, nodding vigorously and smiling at us. ‘Oh, hun, would you?’ And then she placed her hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Mike’s going to come over with some egg fu yung and Chinese chicken legs and chips.’
We all cheered and Mike must have heard and Miranda swelled with pride.
‘OK, see you in a minute,’ she said and hung up.
‘Mike’s going to come over with some egg fu yung and Chinese chicken legs and chips,’ she said again and we cheered again.
Sally-Anne set the table for lunch in the day room and the patients were all pleased to see her. ‘Is it lunchtime, Nurse?’ they asked, and Sally-Anne mumbled back, ‘Nearly.’
And then we all waited in the driveway and we cheered again when Mike Yu’s Datsun Cherry clattered over the cattle grid. Miranda swelled with pride again and we all chased the car into the courtyard. Matron said it was just like wartime when the baker took a wheat delivery or someone arrived with sugar or chocolate. And it was a lesson to us that a little bit of hardship could cause brief, intense joy. Mike Yu came across the courtyard loaded, arms to chin, with boxes of hot food. You could smell it straight away. Mike couldn’t quite see where he was going with his chin tilted up like that. He felt his way forward with his little feet and peered over the boxes. In the end I took his elbow and guided him over the cobbles and then I said, ‘Mind the steps,’ as we went inside and I continued guiding him over the flags. I can’t describe how it felt—slightly pushing Mike along by the elbow—and, knowing of his subtly sexual repertoire, I wondered if I was doing something erotic. We served the food quickly on to warmed plates, with a few marrowfats on the side, and carried them through to the day room like silver-service waiters and Mike shouted after us, ‘Tell them it’s omelette, they’ll love it.’ And they did.
After the patients had had theirs, the staff had theirs and it was really delicious. Mike Yu couldn’t stay and enjoy the wonderful atmosphere because he had a statistics exam that afternoon and he drifted away almost unnoticed as the staff chattered and ate and laughed. He kissed the top of Miranda’s head and grabbed his car keys.
As he passed me, I looked up and said, ‘The egg fu yung was delicious.’
And he said, ‘I’m really glad, Lizzie.’
I watched him go and accidentally smiled after him a bit too long. Then, glancing at Miranda, I saw that she’d seen. She looked at me as if to say, ‘I saw you looking at Mike and now I know something.’
The laundry became a huge issue. It’s funny how it always does. Laundry really messes people’s lives up—you’d think they’d have come up with a solution by now. The laundry woman had left suddenly when she saw the owner in the nude after his wife had left and she took it badly (both things). She truly believed the owner had targeted her with his nude walk-by outside the laundry room. Which was nonsense, he’d just wanted a top-up of Bath Olivers, that
was all, and he’d taken the obvious short cut from his quarters to the larder—in the nude, because it was so hot.
The rest of us had seen him in the nude numerous times and hadn’t taken it personally. He was genetically Scandinavian and nudity means nothing to them—ditto suicide, which was more of a worry.
The patients’ dirty clothes had ended up in a huge, damp wee-smelling pile in the corner of the laundry—by the time we discovered the pile, and realized it included pretty much all of the ladies’ dresses, they were too smelly to fish out and reuse.
For a couple of days the ladies had to stay in their nighties, which they hated, and Miss Brixham had cried and insisted on wearing her coat just in case the Vicar came to call, which he didn’t. Anyway, after that, I volunteered for laundry duty to tackle the backlog and had to let Sally-Anne do the teas, which I’d taken over with much success. I wasn’t happy about it because I’d come to like doing the teas, and I especially worried that Sally-Anne’s teas wouldn’t be soft enough for the patients on a soft diet. Or nice enough in general—the tea being the highlight of the day for almost all the patients. I worried even more that her teas might be better than mine and that the softs might eat even more of hers. She was a dark horse.
One of the reasons I volunteered to do the laundry was because I’d had some experience and knew the pitfalls. Twice, as a child, I’d flooded a whole house, I’d discoloured whole baskets full of clothing and I’d been barred from a launderette in Longston for over-soaping. Anyway, my early experience paid off because it wasn’t long before I’d got it under control and began to find a great sense of satisfaction. I taught myself many tricks. For instance, if you ironed before the garment was dry, that made ironing it so much easier. Soon I was ironing straight from the wash and hanging to dry after ironing. It was controversial for a while, because of all the steam, but soon I learned to open the windows.
‘Your pores are really going to open in this humidity,’ said Miranda, popping her head in one day. I didn’t know whether or not that was a good thing so I shrugged.
At home I told my mother of my laundry triumphs—her being a laundry van driver and yet temperamentally unsuited to doing laundry. I told her about the ironing-when-wet trick and about the hard-shake folding technique and about washing smalls in a stocking. To begin with she was disappointed and dismayed to hear me talking like this. She said I was getting caught up in what she called ‘washing line syndrome’—a thing where a woman’s immense pleasure from seeing her family’s sheets and shirts pegged up on the line, billowing in the breeze, blots out proper ambition or desire for equality. But hearing about adding soda crystals to prevent ‘heater build-up’ sent her rushing for her notebook, wherein she scribbled SODA CRYSTALS and underlined it twice. And later wrote a beautiful poem about limescale and women, which included the lines:
It’s not the son nor the daughter
Not the limescale in the water
But the line of dancing sheets
That will please her, then thwart her.
On a very hot day, at the tail end of the laundry crisis, a car tooted in the lane. I looked out. It tooted twice more. Then the driver came to the door and said he wasn’t prepared to bring his much-loved car into the drive—not liking the state of our cattle grid.
He told me he’d picked up a senior citizen from the Royal and needed to offload him asap. I followed him out and saw Mr Simmons fast asleep in the back seat, a hospital tag on his wrist, beside him a small canvas bag and two framed pictures sticking out of a carrier, plus a polythene sleeve containing his medical notes in his lap.
I was overjoyed. I whooped and clapped my hands.
The taxi driver looked gone out. ‘D’you know him?’ he asked.
And I said, ‘Well, he’s just a patient who left, and now he’s back,’ and felt like a fool because my eyes filled with tears.
I woke Mr Simmons gently and he immediately tried to struggle up out of the car. The driver was eating a box of TUC and wiping his salty hands on his trouser legs, and had no intention of helping. Knowing the rule about not lifting patients on my own, I asked Mr Simmons to wait a moment and rushed indoors for help.
Matron was in the day room totting up her Embassy coupons—Miss Brixham (our best concentrator) was helping. She was a quarter of the way towards a mini picnic table with foldaway legs. I congratulated her and told her a convalescent patient had arrived in a taxi outside. I didn’t say it was Mr Simmons because I didn’t want to excite Miss Brixham and the coupons.
Matron said we weren’t expecting anyone. ‘Tell the driver to dump her somewhere else, or failing that, back at the Royal,’ she said.
The taxi driver had come to the door and heard and yelled back that he couldn’t take the patient anywhere else because he was due to deliver a box of Hamlets and some After Eights to Engelbert Humperdinck’s mansion on the Oadby by-pass. Matron doubted it. She couldn’t imagine Engelbert smoking—what about voice care?
And the taxi driver said they weren’t for Engelbert himself but for some of his international superstar pals who were all over the place timezone-wise and couldn’t get down to the corner shop. And he stomped off back to the car.
I followed him. Mr Simmons was fully awake now but looked grey and ill. ‘It sounds as though there’s no room at the inn,’ he said.
‘No, there’s loads of room,’ I said, ‘it’s just that the place is still in turmoil—worse since you went—and Matron’s counting her fag coupons.’
He leant back into the headrest. I smiled and asked if there was anything I could do. He closed his eyes and said quietly, ‘Do you think I might have a glass of water?’
I dashed inside. Matron was securing little bundles with elastic bands. She frowned at me. ‘I’m just getting him a glass of water,’ I said.
‘Him?’
‘Yes, the patient—it’s Mr Simmons,’ I whispered, ‘remember him?’
‘Of course I remember him—you told me it was a woman—for God’s sake bring him in, Nurse,’ she ranted. ‘I thought it was a lady.’
The taxi driver was there again. ‘What difference does it make whether it’s a bird or a bloke?’ he asked.
‘We’ve plenty of room for Mr Simmons,’ said Matron with a sniff.
Nurse Eileen helped me get Mr Simmons into a wheelchair and we tried to wheel him in via the French windows, but the wheels were too weedy to take the ramp and, after a few attempts, Mr Simmons got out of the chair and entered on foot. Matron pretended to go through his paperwork. Mr Simmons was her first patient admittance and I could tell she was all at sea.
‘So, Mr Simmons, it says here in your notes you’re a broadcaster,’ she said. ‘Is that something to do with farming?’
‘No. Radio and television broadcasting,’ whispered Mr Simmons in his poorly voice. Tiny, perfect white flowers decorated his hair from where I’d wheeled him slightly into the shrubs flanking the drive.
‘Ooh, that’s good,’ said Matron.
‘I’ve had an inguinal hernia repair,’ said Mr Simmons.
‘Do you know Val Doonican, at all?’ asked Matron.
‘I know of him,’ stammered Mr Simmons.
‘But you don’t know him, as such?’ asked Matron.
‘Not personally,’ said Mr Simmons.
Nurse Eileen and I went upstairs to prepare Room 8 for Mr Simmons. No one had been in it since he left, so it only needed a quick freshen up. The sheets looked fine, so we turned the pillows over and got busy with the Haze and fly spray. I wiped the leaves on the weeping fig and gave it some water and soon Mr Simmons was sitting in the Morris chair by the smaller window (his choice). I took down the two pictures belonging to the room—a woodcut of Blue Boar Lane and one of Leicester Guildhall—to make room for the ones he’d brought with him. One a sketch of a Sopwith Camel, the other a dauby oil painting of a shifty-looking, cross-eyed spaniel sitting beside a small table.
‘This is nice,’ I said, holding up the spaniel. It was awful really but I
wanted to be nice after all the confusion and upset. It actually reminded me of the dog called Turk that had bitten my baby brother for no good reason. Although I didn’t recall Turk being cross-eyed.
‘It’s entitled “Olaf with Cracker”,’ said Mr Simmons. ‘It was painted by my late wife.’
‘Lovely,’ I said.
‘So what’s been happening here?’ Mr Simmons asked.
I told him the catering grocer had given up on us and we were living off apple and raisin pies, and the owner had apparently been slipping in and out of a mild coma. Mr Simmons grimaced and said as soon as he felt up to it he’d resume quartermaster duties and he’d run errands to the wholesale supermarket. Meanwhile, we could scrump some of his early plums for the pudding pies to give everyone a break from apple.
I told him about the laundry crisis and my having been taken off the teatime duty, and I mentioned the death of Elvis but he already knew about it, which I thought a good sign until he asked what room Elvis had been in.
12. Mr Freeman’s Parker Knoll Recliner
One of the golden rules I’d learned on day one was the importance of not making it obvious who your favourite patient was, nor your least favourite. Nurses must be like parents towards their offspring and never let it be known or felt—by anyone, not even the favourite. I was dubious because I could always tell whose favourite I was—or wasn’t. There’d been a teacher at my primary school who’d liked me best in the class and I could tell by her little soft-eyed giggle after everything I said, and there was a riding instructor we’d had whose favourite I definitely wasn’t. I could tell by a tiny hard-eyed sneer. Ditto our first piano teacher.
I knew instinctively and fundamentally and totally that I was my mother’s favourite, not by any facial giveaways but just by the fact that I knew her so well. She’d never admit it, of course, and was adamant that she liked us all the same. She often said that if we all fell into the river she’d be really stuck as to whose life to save first. In fact, it was a constant worry for her.