The New Sister Theatre

by Lucilla Andrews

  Matron said pacifically, ‘And very excellent nurses you made, Sister. But while the shift system may not be wholly suitable to all departments, I feel it has certain advantages we should not overlook. I believe you would like to enlarge on that, Senior Sister Tutor?’

  The Senior Sister Tutor looked ready to throw off her cuffs and up her sleeves. ‘Thank you, Matron. We must remember that if our student nurses’ ‒ she stressed the ‘student’ ‒ ‘are to attend the many extra lectures now necessary to cover their syllabus and have sufficient time for private studying, they must have longer periods away from their ward work.’

  ‘Nurses without patients! Huh!’ Sister Private Wing snorted. ‘And what is a nurse without a patient? A half-baked medical student? Is that the type of nurse we are now sending into the world as a St Barnabas-trained nurse?’

  Sister Henry Carter caught my eye as several other senior sisters joined the fight. If I had not been so concerned by my own thoughts I would have been amused, interested, and touched to see how passionately my seniors cared for the future of the profession to which they had given their working lives and were mostly shortly due to leave. But they loved nursing and Barny’s and were opposed to change, not, I suspected, because it was change, but because they were afraid it might bring a lowering of standards in the profession which they, and everyone else there, including myself, thought the finest profession any woman could choose.

  Were we smug, I wondered, looking at the faces. I hoped not. But there was something in every face I looked at that was not always present in the faces of a group of single women of assorted ages. Content. I suspected that was because we knew that what we did was much needed, and women need to be needed.

  It was a comforting thought on a night when I badly needed comfort.

  After the meeting Sister Private Wing suddenly bore down on me. ‘Well, Sister General Theatre?’ She looked me over, and I turned into a first-year. ‘Well done, child! I always thought you had an aptitude for surgery. I believe I said as much when you worked in my wing some years ago.’

  I was surprised the old girl had remembered me. I did not remember her saying anything to me beyond, ‘Get on, child! Don’t dawdle! You are in a hospital, not the Preliminary Training School, now!’

  I did not mention that now. I thanked her for her kind words, asked after her department, and was much shaken to discover she obviously proposed to tell me all while I escorted her to the dining-room.

  We were in the main hospital corridor when I found the courage to say I remembered one of her patients from my brief stay in her wing. ‘A Dr Harper, I think, Sister. As I remember, a spinal case.’

  ‘Harper? Harper?’ She frowned. ‘I disremember the name, Sister. I seldom disremember names.’

  ‘It might have been ‒ Potter, Sister.’

  ‘Dr Potter! Yes, indeed. He was a spinal. Poor man! Tch, tch, tch.’ She clicked her teeth with her tongue. ‘You must not allow yourself these dips of memory now you are a theatre sister, Sister!’

  I apologized meekly, then asked the diagnosis of that former patient. ‘Sarcoma of the spine, Sister?’

  ‘No, no. Although that was mentioned as a differential diagnosis by Sir Robert when he asked Mr Buckwell of St Martha’s to come over and see Dr Potter. He was one of our own men. Mr Buckwell, as you will know, is the acknowledged expert in spinal surgery.’ And she went on to explain just why such an expert had been necessary in that case. ‘Unfortunately, on investigation the poor man’s condition proved inoperable. Very sad.’

  ‘Yes, Sister. Very.’ I held open the dining-room door. My hand was suddenly very cold. ‘Thank you.’

  Sister Henry Carter had kept a place for me at the junior end of our table. During dinner I asked what she knew about Buckwell of Martha’s.

  ‘He comes over occasionally to see various men I’ve had in with spines. Sir Robert says there’s no surgeon to touch him in that line. He’s a very nice man.’ She smiled. ‘Too bad he belongs to Martha’s and not us.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’

  ‘You keen on spinal surgery?’

  ‘It’s one line ‒ or rather one of many ‒ I don’t know much about. As you know, any spines here are done by the orthopods. Something Sister P.W. said has made me’ ‒ I hesitated ‒ ‘made me feel I’d like to know more.’

  She said she could see I was in the right job and began talking about the meeting. After that, for the rest of the meal, the talk was general.

  I did not sleep well that night. All next day my thoughts kept going back to what Sister Private Wing had told me, to Mr Buckwell at Martha’s, and to Joe. I tried to talk sense into myself, to remember Barny’s was a hospital too, and the power of the hospital grapevine. If by any ghastly chance there really was something wrong with Joe’s back, someone would have told me. Someone always did.

  By evening I had had enough. I went into one of the outside telephone booths in the main corridor before going in to dinner and rang the admission desk at Martha’s.

  ‘A Mr J. L. de Winter? Come in last evening, you think?’ The clerk sounded doubtful, but not as if the name was wholly unfamiliar. ‘That name’s not on yesterday’s or to-day’s lists, or on to-morrow’s bookings. Now, then ‒ de Winter? Would he be from St Barnabas’s? Hold on, miss. What’s that? Might not be a patient and just stepped in for the evening? Hang on ‒ I’ll find out for you.’ From the sound, the receiver was put down on a desk. Then I heard the clerk’s voice very faintly. ‘Bert. That chap from Barny’s as is always coming in here with Dr Durant. Isn’t his name de Winter? Thought as I knew it! You did? When?’ Bert’s answers were inaudible to me.

  The receiver clicked loudly as the clerk came back on my line. ‘Still there, miss? Well, I reckon as you are mistaken about the gentleman being a patient, but he is over here now. Seems he’s calling on one of our doctors. If you’ll just hang on another jiffy I’ll have this call put through to our Medical Officers’ Wing for you. I expect you’ll be able to get him there.’

  I had to pretend we had been cut off. I jiggled the receiver rest, ignored the clerk’s ‘I can still hear you, miss. Can’t you hear me?’ muttered something about having to get some more change before trying again, and rang off.

  In the little mirror on the box wall my face was as white as my cap. I was in no mood to sympathize with my face. ‘You’ve asked for this, Maggie, my dear,’ I said aloud, ‘and, my God, you’ve got it. Joe’s cut his losses with a vengeance, and that’s what you’ve got to do. The snag is ‒ how?’

  I never found the answer. I just tried to give the impression I had, particularly on duty. I also tried ringing Martha’s again next morning when I judged another clerk should be on duty, then again the next afternoon. Both assured me no Mr J. L. de Winter had been admitted as an in-patient to St Martha’s in the last forty-eight hours, or was down on their lists of bookings for the rest of that week. The trouble they took to try to trace the name for me made me feel very guilty about bothering them over what was, on the face of it, the wildest of disturbing hunches. Yet, even after those calls, I remained disturbed. I now remembered, or thought I remembered, that Dr Potter clearly. I recalled his reddish-grey hair, heavy jaw, the line of red hairs on the backs of his invalid-white hands that had slightly nauseated me, the way he used his hands to haul himself out of the armchair when he sat out to have his bed made. His movements had been a caricature of Joe’s that day in the sitting-room, and later in my office in the theatre, but the general picture was the same. Of that, I was convinced. Or rather, I was convinced when I was tired, or when I woke in the night. In the mornings, or during the course of normal busy days, I saw the many weaknesses in my hunch, and again reminded myself I lived and worked in a London teaching hospital. All personal feelings aside, that condition was rare enough for any teaching hospital to be glad of the opportunity to study and teach on it, as well as treat it. And Barny’s, being a good hospital, was very good about caring for its own. No man or woman on our staff ne
ed go elsewhere. If, as with that man in the Private Wing, it was thought that better advice could be found in some other hospital, Barny’s was prepared to swallow its pride and ask for it.

  All that reassured me ‒ to a certain extent. To be more sure, I asked first discreet and then blunt questions of all Joe’s friends in my Unit. That got me nowhere. ‘Joe? Didn’t he say something about the States? Everyone seems to be off there these days. Where? Oh, California ‒ or was it Texas ‒ or Maryland? Sorry, Maggie. Try the Dean’s Office. They’ll have a forwarding address.’

  They had. A London bank.

  Ellen, though reluctant to give credit to men, allowed the boys were just being tactful. ‘And anyway, men always stick together.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt them to tell me where he’s gone.’

  ‘Perhaps he asked them not to. He might be afraid you are going to chase after him. Men are so hideously conceited! I don’t see why you have to keep on raking up the ashes. And you aren’t left high and dry. You’ve still got Mark Delaney.’

  I tried again, again without success, to talk her out of her fixation that Mark was in love with me. She had her little ways, but she was a nice girl and longing for me to fall into Mark’s supposedly eager arms. She had been shocked by Joe’s behaviour to me, but, having accepted it herself, was now very clearly growing impatient with me for not doing the same. Before she left me that evening she launched into one of those ‘I-think-I-ought-to-tell-you’ lectures in which ‘pride’ figured constantly. ‘You’re just refusing to face facts, Maggie.’

  ‘No. Though I’ll admit it may look like it. I’m just puzzled because the facts I’ve been given to face don’t match the facts I have long known about Joe’s character. A man may change his fiancée, even wife, but not his attitude to living, job, hobbies.’

  She looked at his radiogram severely. ‘He shouldn’t have given you that. You oughtn’t to keep it.’

  ‘I know.’

  She turned on me. ‘How can you bear to have anything of his after the way he’s treated you?’

  ‘Ellen, he fell out of love with me and had the guts to say so. One can’t stay in love to order.’

  ‘You aren’t furious with him?’

  ‘No.’ She was looking shocked. ‘Sorry!’

  She said, ‘I don’t understand you, Maggie. If any man jilted me I’d never forgive him.’

  I said nothing. There was a short, uncomfortable silence, then we both started talking theatre shop. She left fairly soon after. We had been friends for a long time. We would probably go on being friends on the surface, but after that there would never again be any real basis to our relationship. I was sorry. I liked Ellen, and knew she had been disappointed in me. I wondered if I ought to be disappointed in myself for being sad instead of angry. Perhaps that would come later, when I stopped loving him. If I stopped loving him.

  Time went by. I stopped asking questions. No one ever mentioned his name to me. Unless I brought it up, from the day Joe walked out of Barny’s, as far as the Unit was concerned, the only S.S.O. anyone remembered was Bill Swan. Anyone, that was, except myself. Weeks turned into months; list followed list; I grew accustomed to seeing Bill’s name signing the many notices on my office board; yet when he said ‘S.S.O. here’ on the telephone, or took the S.S.O.’s sink in the theatre, I turned hollow with longing for Joe.

  Mark dated me on the occasional evening when we were both free; always asked me to the parties the registrars gave in their sitting-room most Saturday nights.

  There was one party some two months after Joe left that was extra hilarious even for a hospital party. Mark was on top of his form; the quiet Bill Swan looked in unexpectedly and insisted on doing the Bossa Nova with me; and George Ellis, who was off and had decided not to go away, announced he was going to rule out all possibility of being made to work as he was around by getting very, very drunk.

  Later, I remarked to Mark on the high spirits of the Unit boys. ‘I’ve never known George hit the bottle before.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t he? When he’s free until to-morrow night after a hard, hard week? Arise, my love’ ‒ he pulled me from my chair ‒ ‘and if you will not fly with me, at least dance with me. And while we dance, tell me what you mean by doing this line with our Bill!’

  ‘Don’t ask me! I was going to ask you. He’s not usually a dancing man.’ I had a good look round. ‘You all had some good news, or something?’

  ‘Indeed we have! It’s Saturday night, the customers are all curing themselves nicely, those poor devils Steve Porter and Tom Ross are holding the G.S. fort, and we are free to dance and make love. What say you, Sister Theatre?’

  ‘We will twist, Dr Delaney. Then you can go and find me some apples.’

  ‘Apples? …’

  ‘ “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love”.’

  ‘Solomon? Song of? There now, apples is it to be?’ He grimaced. ‘You’re a hard woman, Maggie Lindsay. But I love you the way you are.’

  One morning the following week Wendy Scutt walked over to breakfast with me and offered me two free tickets for a concert that evening. ‘The solo pianist is a G.-ex-P. [grateful ex-patient] of mine. He always sends me six tickets whenever he has a concert in London. Those two are in one row. I’ve four more two rows ahead that I want to use. These any use?’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’m off this evening and not on call.’

  I met Mark on my way to the theatre after breakfast and asked if he would like to come with me to that concert. ‘It is your free evening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Er ‒ yes. I’m off the call hook, too. Thanks, Maggie. This is sweet of you.’ He went a dull red. ‘What time may I call for you?’

  He looked and sounded so embarrassed and unlike himself that for the first time I wondered if Ellen might not be right about him. I found the thought more disturbing than pleasing. I was not yet ready to love again.

  ‘Sister Theatre ‒’ Bill Swan’s voice made me turn round.

  ‘Sister, a word in your ear! Crisis on.’

  The crisis was in the Obstetric Theatre. A main steam-pipe had burst in the night and the theatre would be out of action all day for repairs. ‘Any objections to the obstetric department borrowing your theatre and self for a caesar at one-thirty, Sister? Sir Robert’ll start an hour later than usual. Thanks. I’ll fix it with the accoucheurs.’

  Sister Obstetric Theatre rang me shortly after I reached the theatre. ‘Sorry about this, Sister. Will it be convenient if I send down a complete floor staff?’

  My theatre nurses were enchanted about the caesar, and as Sandra was off that afternoon, there was no one to take umbrage over the invasion from the Obstetric Theatre staff. I went to early lunch. When I returned my theatre was full of strange forms and strange eyes. The gallery was equally strange, being packed with pupil-midwives and midder-clerks in addition to my own girls and the usual drift of students.

  The woman to have the caesar was thirty-nine. She had been married twelve years, and had a poor obstetrical record. ‘Four miscarriages, Sister,’ said the staff midwife who was ‘dirtying’ for me. ‘The last went to twenty-eight weeks and was abnormal. No arms.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ I winced. ‘Does this baby sound right?’

  ‘Aye. The foetal heart’s good. But the mother’s measurements are far too wee. And she’s awful scared.’

  ‘The poor dear. I don’t blame her. What about her husband?’

  ‘Och, in a terrible state. Mr Bellings (the Senior Obstetrical Registrar) has given him a tranquillizer. Ah ‒ this’ll be the trolley now, Sister.’

  It was not long before the child was born, but apprehension made it seem long. The S.O.S.R. lifted the limp little figure gently. ‘All there ‒ and a girl. Thank God!’ He handed the baby to the sterile-gowned and -gloved staff midwife from the Maternity Unit nursery who was waiting to receive her, then returned his attention to the mother. ‘Something odd going on in here, Charles,’ he remarked to his assistan
t as the placenta was removed. ‘What have we … Thought so! Feel this fibroid! God knows how she went to term with this one.’

  ‘Going to take out the works?’ asked the J.O.H.P.

  ‘Let’s have a bit more of a look round.’

  A few minutes later he said he would have to do a hysterectomy. ‘She was expecting this.’

  It was my job to ask, ‘Has her husband signed his consent?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in writing from both.’

  I had set a second instrument trolley in case a hysterectomy (removal of the womb) might be necessary. The ‘dirty’ moved it forward for me, propelling it carefully by the lower legs.

  Mr Bellings glanced round. ‘All set? Thanks, Sister.’

  It was the first time I had ever met Mr Bellings. The obstetric department lived in a world apart from the general side. Joe had been S.O.H.P. during my first year, and neither of us had remembered seeing each other around the hospital until he moved back as Senior Surgical Registrar to the G.S. Unit in my second year.

  Mr Bellings was a competent, good-humoured, and very talkative surgeon. He chatted on about the mother’s previous obstetric history and fears. ‘Poor woman had us all on edge with her hunch. So much for feminine intuition!’ His hand came my way for a second arterial clamp. ‘How’s that nipper breathing now, Nurse Dunne?’

  The staff midwife from the nursery said the baby was breathing quite nicely. ‘Colour’s not at all bad.’ She adjusted the flow of oxygen into the tented, incubator-type cot sent down from the Mat Unit. ‘You got her into this world before much of that anaesthetic got to her. She should do you proud for your half-century.’

  I asked, ‘Your fiftieth caesar, Mr Bellings? Congratulations.’

  He took up the scalpel again, holding it like a table knife, with his forefinger along the handle. As he took it, his forefinger tapped the handle a couple of times absently. Joe had sometimes done that, and Bill Swan. It was one of Sir Robert’s mannerisms that had brushed off on his young men. It should have reminded me of Sir Robert. Instead, I remembered Joe.