We thought, again with about half-a-million others, that we would get the best view of the switch-on from the middle of Westminster Bridge as from there we could see the north and south banks and up and down the river. By more squeezing, pushing, apologizing, joking and swapping life histories, we managed to reach our chosen spot with roughly half an hour to spare. Never before, or since, had I been in a crowd of the magnitude of the one now swamping every inch of London discernible through the deepening darkness. A man just behind us had squeezed his way from the Bayswater Road. ‘No standing room this side of Hyde Park. Case of father turns, we all turn.’
In theory I would have expected to find a crowd that size terrifying. In fact I found it neither frightening nor even mildly claustrophobic. As all the crowds all evening, it was too good-natured, and above all, too relieved even for minor intolerance. If feet were squashed, glasses knocked off, elbows jammed in ribs, well, all part of the bit of fun wasn’t it and a lot better than a poke in the eye from a sharp stick. ‘Or them doodles. Can’t rightly credit there’ll be no more of them doodles.’
The chatter, the laughter, the snatches of songs from hundreds of thousands of throats, rolled to and fro over our heads like the rolling roaring waves of a great amiably growling sea. Suddenly, silence. Suddenly, unbelievably, the lights of London came on again and when they came on, for a second or more, the whole crowd around us, stayed silent. It was as if none of us dared trust our eyes or even risk breathing in case the mirage disappeared. When it did not, at first almost hesitantly, the cheering started again, and then the cheers rose and rose in crescendo after crescendo.
Maybe not every bulb in every street, embankment and bridge light was working properly and not every public building a triumphant tower of light. But that was how it looked. Tears were pouring down my face, and when I looked around, down the faces of all the women and more than a few of the men in my sight. And when my eyes were clear of tears and acclimatized to the new lighting, the whole city seemed blazing with light and most wonderful of all, still there. There, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, there Millbank, there Vauxhall Bridge, there New Scotland Yard, there, just visible, the dome of St Pauls, and there, on both sides, north and south of the Thames, the jagged roofless walls and the great stretches of empty bomb-sites, with the scars softened by the darkness enhancing the glory of that glorious moment in London’s history.
Chapter Eleven
July 1945 and the first General Election in Britain for ten years.
‘The department’s having a quiet moment, N. Andrews,’ said the new young Sister Casualty, ‘nip over to the polling booth and cast your first vote.’
I slung my cloak over my indoor uniform, slightly adjusted the Nightingale bonnet on my head, crossed the Lambeth Palace Road and, with so many of my fellow-citizens voting for the first time, used my first democratic opportunity to record my objection to having been deprived of my youth.
The Election results changed British political and social history. The Labour Party was returned with 392 seats (211 gains), the Conservatives and other Parties, 189 seats (194 losses), and Mr Clement Attlee replaced Mr Churchill as Prime Minister.
On the 6th August one small atom bomb was dropped on and extinguished the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Two days later I started training as a pupil-midwife and the following day, with the mind still numbed by the horrifying reports of Hiroshima, the news of a second atom bomb on Nagasaki. ‘For God’s sake – why another?’
‘Presumably those in high places don’t think burning one city to a crisp is enough to set the rising sun.’
On 14th August 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally. At the bottom of St Thomas’s long-exiled Midwifery Unit’s Surrey garden the midder-clerks (medical students taking their midwifery course) built a huge celebration bonfire no one had time to light. V.J. (Victory in Japan) Day had come and gone before I realized the war had ended and had time to remember my old intention to stop nursing and become a writer when that end came.
Never had I worked so hard. The day pupils’ day started at 7 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m., unless one of the twelve maternity patients, which every pupil taking the course required before the examination for Part I of the Central Midwives Board Certificate had to deliver, had gone into labour. Once in labour the pupil stayed with her patient until delivering the baby and giving the first bath. Then, as in 1940, seventy-five per cent of all British babies were born at night. It was not unusual for a day pupil to finish a delivery in the small hours and report back at 7 a.m. Pupils did no delivering during their four consecutive weeks on night-duty; night hours were 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. Once again lecture and study-time had to be fitted in the daily three hours off and weekly day off.
‘I can’t think why you pupils keep grumbling because you only get four quid a month. When I was a pupil in ’38, we had to pay to do midder.’
‘I think that was disgraceful too, Sister.’
‘Why? I wanted to be a midwife and I love midder! Don’t you like it?’
‘Yes, Sister, but liking doesn’t come into it. I think it disgraceful because I think all forms of slave-labour disgraceful – even if the slaves are happy. There’s no war on now – and there was no war on when you did midder.’
‘put the world right tomorrow, Andrews! This water’s nothing like hot enough for the babies’ baths. Pop down and see what’s amiss with Jimmy. The two night pupils on this month are hopeless with the boilers.’
The Unit had neither porters, stokers, nor pros. The midder-clerks did most of the portering, the solitary gardener dealt daily with the boilers, except on Sunday, when, as at night, they were stoked by the pupils. All the cleaning and bedpan rounds were done by the pupils; and, in the smaller of the two country houses converted into maternity hospitals by the Unit, in the gardener’s absence on Sundays the pupils burnt on bonfires the previous twenty-four hours’ accumulation of dirty dressings.
When stokers and refuse-burners, we worked in pairs. I was paired with Joan, a fellow-Nightingale and ex-VAD. Owing to our military past, in either capacity we basked in the sunshine of senior smiles. ‘How you two never fail to keep the boilers going or to get a blazing bonfire in pouring rain I can’t imagine!’
‘Natural talent, Sister,’ we simpered and covertly returned the half-empty tins of floor polish to the housemaid’s (i.e., pupils’) cupboard.
In both houses the labour wards were on the first floor, the lying-in wards on the ground, and there were no lifts. In Ashwood House, the larger of the two, the midder-clerks did all the daytime stretcher-bearing. At night this was shared between the houseman, the clerk on-call, Night Sister and night pupils. As the houseman lived in Ashwood and there were no clerks in the smaller house, there the Sister Midwives and pupils carried all the stretchers. Women, even at full term, were lighter than men. Normal labour has three stages. For any clerk or pupil who trained in St Thomas’s bombed out Midwifery Unit there were four. The fourth stage arrived when the newly delivered mother on the collapsible, poleless, canvas stretcher was carried from the labour ward, along the corridor, down the twisting stairs to her bed in a former dining-room, drawing-room, or billiard-room.
Another sideline at Ashwood was the laundry. On occasions the daily laundress did not appear, so Sister Nursery and the pupils took over the washing, boiling and mangling of the daily average of four hundred nappies. (No washing machines.)
Working in that Unit was just like being in a chummy stage crowd. Everyone played several parts, but the inter-staff atmosphere was extraordinarily amiable. Possibly, being a small, tightly enclosed community, we realized we either had to tolerate each other or go mad, or possibly we were all too busy for introspection and blood feuds. Whatever the basic cause, I noted in February 1946: ‘Here (at Ashwood) we are on the whole one Big Happy Family and with a few lapses our hearts beat as one.’
The pupils spent their six months’ course working between the two houses. The midder-clerks usually had three weeks’ residence
in Ashwood; the day one set moved out, the next set moved in. Their sets varied between four and eight and were promptly assimilated in the stage crowd. In addition to their midwifery schedule of delivering their allotted patients, watching the more complicated deliveries performed by the houseman, or obstetric consultants, watching the Caesarian operations, attending teaching rounds, taking medical case histories, learning how to bath, feed and change babies, the clerks carried stretchers, heavy laundry baskets, heaved full and empty oxygen cylinders up and down the stairs, washed clean of bloodstains the labour ward sheets used by their respective patients, mopped clean the labour ward floor after their deliveries, transferred from large kidney dishes to newspapers their patients’ discarded placentas and burnt the packets in the larger and newer of the two boilers in the cellar.
The older, smaller boiler was Jimmy; the newcomer, Jimmy’s Little Brother. Jimmy was the more likely to choke to death on clinkers in the small hours, with devastating results as the L.B. then wilted in sympathy and the whole hot-water system – and babies’ early morning baths – depended on both boilers. When Joan and I went on night-duty we were warned that Jimmy was a temperamental swine to be handled with great gentleness. We decided otherwise. Every night, immediately free of the handing-over report, we raced for the cellar, hung our caps and aprons on the outside of the cellar door, descended the few stairs and amongst the coke and the cockroaches, whatever the boilers’ condition, disembowelled both, rebuilt them only with the still glowing coke, opened every vent the gardener had carefully closed down, and raised the cellar temperature to a degree that would have shamed Dante’s imagination.
Some nights a nervous new clerk appeared at the top of the stairs gingerly holding out a packet seeping redly. ‘Terribly sorry, nurses – er – Sister Labour Ward told me – er – to shove this in something called Jimmy’s L.B.’
‘Don’t you dare damp the bastard down with your placenta, Mr …! He’s being a worse neuro than Jimmy tonight! Leave it on the top step. We’ll bung it in later.’
The Ashwood nursing staff shared bedrooms on the attic floor; the men lived over the garage occupied by the Unit’s autoclave. As the obstetric houseman was in residence for six months to one year, he had a tiny private bedroom. The clerks shared a plywood-partitioned box decorated with charts, diagrams and Medical School wit that ranged from Rabelais to prep school. The autoclave, a massive, silver, cylindrical machine in which was done all the Unit’s sterilizing, was directly under their box. I learnt how to work our autoclave but never understood how I did, or why, at intervals, it chose to whistle violently or belch jets of boiling steam. When the steam billowed up the loft stairs in clouds, and wisps came through their floorboards, unwary clerks hurtled from above gasping piteously, ‘Where’s the fire brigade? Are they coming?’
‘Relax. Just part of the system – and do get out of the light. I’ve turned up taps A, B and C and if I don’t turn down taps D, E and F we’ll probably all go through the roof.’
The majority of the clerks by 1946 were just too junior to have had personal experience of a hospital under air attacks and it was the first time they had actually worked with nurses, as opposed to standing around wards watching the nurses work. I was frequently surprised by how little even those within a few months of qualifying knew of the actual workings of a hospital and how their knowledge of illness and injuries was almost totally academic. In my general training I had already noticed how swiftly medical attitudes to nurses changed after qualification. Doctors and nurses were, and knew they were, on the same side. Medical students, no matter how individually pleasant, were basically antagonistic to the nursing staff, possibly because until medical students became doctors they needed no professional help from nurses.
Another thing that surprised me was how young they seemed, how similar to the boys I had known before the war and dissimilar to the boys I had known in the war and who, at their same age, had been men. Some of those men I had known, when they died, had been even younger than the clerks – whose ages were roughly twenty-one to twenty-three. One evening in the small sitting-room shared by the whole staff when drinking the tea served when we came off at nine, the conversation centred on 1941. All the five clerks present had then been reading medicine at Oxford or Cambridge. ‘Glorious April and May,’ said one. ‘Lilac everywhere and the college lawns green velvet. Glorious sense of peace – war didn’t seem to matter – going on in another world …’ I thought of G being shot down in that other world at that same time, left my unfinished tea and walked alone round the darkening garden until my anger cooled. I was not angry with the clerks. Their good fortune was not their responsibility. I was angry for G and for all those thousands of other young men who would never know the scent of another lilac or the sight of another green velvet lawn but had made it possible for millions of others to know both. Are people forgetting them already, I wondered, and then realized that already most of us who had known the war preferred not to talk about it. It was that that cooled my anger. And I remembered a middle-aged patient once saying to me, ‘Yesterday’s always forgotten. Youth is only interested in today; middle age in tomorrow; old age in the day before yesterday. Nobody bothers with yesterday.’
The next day was the kind of day only a maternity hospital experiences. Seven babies were born. The labour ward door swung to and fro like an hotel foyer. Every half hour the staircase echoed with the grunts and groans of the clerks in the fourth stage and the giggled encouragement of the weary patients, dazed with relief and joy. ‘You’re doing all right, ducks – doing lovely!’ I was working in the nursery crowded with the extra row of portable canvas labour-ward cots identical to those I had used in the shelter at nights for the new-born babies in Families. But in that row of cots, damp-haired, finger-sucking, shouting, blinking, new-born babies only awaiting their first baths and born into peace.
I liked working in the nursery as much as I disliked working in the labour ward. I had neither the temperament nor talent for midwifery and only managed safely to deliver twelve healthy babies through the combined help and advice of my supervising Sister Midwife, the lectures from our Midwife Tutor and consultant obstetricians, and ‘my’ twelve mothers. All seemed to me to spend more of their labour comforting and encouraging myself, than vice versa.
‘Childbirth, nurses, is, of course, a natural function for women. However, before you are tempted to equate natural with easy, just remember, so is death a natural function for men and women. But – easy?’
March, 1946: ‘You may read your papers now, nurses …’
After the written we took the then extant practical and viva voce examination for Part I, C.M.B., at another London teaching hospital. The examination patients were all volunteers from the midwifery department. One of the three male consultant obstetricians asked me to examine a patient hidden by an open screen at the other end of the room. ‘I’ll join you in a few minutes, nurse.’
Very nervously I walked round the screen and wished the youngish woman, obviously in advanced pregnancy, a good morning. Before I could touch her bed or pick up the waiting foetal stethoscope, she murmured under her breath, ‘He’s trying to catch you out on me, duck. All do it. I got two in there and one’s upside down and lying on top of his mate.’
I was too used to trusting helpful patients to doubt her, and as I knew what to look for, made the correct diagnosis. The examiner grunted ‘H’mm, well, yes.’ He had a little chat about the weather with the patient then suggested we went and sat down for a small talk. He walked away first and she winked at me behind his back. I did not dare wink back.
Once Part I was obtained, pupils who were not continuing to Part II and the six months’ course in district-midwifery and further examination necessary for the full qualification State Certified Midwife, were required by St Thomas’s to work another four months in the Unit as Maternity Staff Nurses. Civilian-trained nurses had still not been released by the Government, and I was given the post of Nursery Staff Nurse. I enjoyed
those months more than any in either of my nursing trainings. When paid my first month’s salary as a Mat. Staff Nurse, I thought there had been a mistake. ‘£8? Just for one month?’
‘That’s right, nurse. Government’s put nurses’ pay up. You’re in the money now!’
Finally, unbelievably, ‘Well, nurses, now you are all free to choose for yourselves – what are you going to do?’
In late July 1946, I had my farewell interview with the Matron of St Thomas’s in the same office off the alcove from the main corridor in St Thomas’s, London. I was astounded to be offered a post as Sister in an acute surgical ward at Botley’s Park with an initial two-year contract. Whilst the offer was being made, I knew instinctively, and regretfully, that I must refuse it. I had grown fond of St Thomas’s, but I had signed too many contracts, used up too many years. In November, half-way through my twenties; in five years’ time, thirty – middle age. As I had to earn my living, nursing was my only means of doing so until I could change to professional writing. So I decided I must only take temporary posts – I knew too well how difficult, if not impossible, it was to combine the two occupations. And as civilian nurses had no demobilization gratuities I had to find another job very quickly.
I was given some helpful advice on temporary nursing posts and wished success in my future career as a writer. ‘Thank you, N. Andrews. Goodbye.’
No duckboards across the main corridor, no chips of plaster and thick dust on Miss Nightingale’s statue and in Central Hall, no bricks left in any windows, and everywhere giant machines clearing the ground and preparing to build the new hospital on the old Lambeth site.
Chapter Twelve
For the remainder of 1946 I worked as a temporary day Staff Nurse in a series of London nursing homes. In one of these, into one of the rooms for which I was responsible, an elderly, Jewish gentleman was admitted for ophthalmic surgery. He was special-nursed by ophthalmic-trained nurses, but as he was in one of my rooms I relieved his specials for meals and off-duty enough for him to put a name to my voice. He looked a very fragile figure when propped up in bed with the pillows carefully arranged behind his high-domed, bald head, his eyes bandaged, and thin, aesthetic face tapering to the point of his little grey imperial, and was a courteous, stoic patient of such unassuming charm that I was astounded to learn, only from his visitors, that he was one of the great figures in Jewish and world history. (Consequently, here only, the full name of one of my ex-patients.) He was Dr Chaim Weizmann, the founder and future first President of the State of Israel. (Inaugurated 15th May 1948.)
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