No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Yes, thank you, Matron.’ I did not specify my sleeping hours as I was uncertain how long I could last on only four hours a day. However, once I grew acclimatized to that schedule, it proved an invaluable bonus to both my careers as without any harm to my health it allowed me twenty-hour instead of the more usual fourteen-hours days.

  My job on the private floor was continuously interesting owing to the variety of patients. For the first few months my work worried me more than I dared admit to any but my old friends, our elderly now retired, widowed former G.P. ‘The Doc’, his daughter Ann, and myself. In the five years since my general training ended the new chemotherapy had revolutionized so many medical, surgical and post-operative techniques. I borrowed modern medical and surgical textbooks from John, the houseman, and one of the Doc’s sons, a senior surgical registrar at a London teaching hospital. All my own were useless, having been written pre-penicillin and antibiotics.

  The most spectacular change I noticed, was in pneumonia. Early one night we admitted a middle-aged woman with double lobar pneumonia. The next night her temperature was only a little over normal and she felt well enough to be annoyed that her husband had forgotten to bring in her hair curlers. Later in the duty-room I voiced my amazement to a houseman and my second-year night junior. ‘Incredible! Remember her respirations when she came in last night?’

  My colleagues were puzzled. The houseman had been qualified a few months. ‘Why incredible?’

  I explained that I had been accustomed to some pneumonias clearing up in several days on the sulfa drugs, but that I had remembered those I had seen as a junior nursed through to the old ninth-day crisis when either the patient’s temperature soared fatally, or fell dramatically (by crisis), or dropped in the more gentle fall, rise, fall, rise, fall to normal pattern (by lysis).

  From their expressions I had worked in the Crimea with Miss Nightingale. The houseman asked, ‘Do you honestly go back pre-sulfa?’

  ‘I go back to M. and B. 693, and as it didn’t suit everyone – yes.’

  He closed his mouth with an audible snap. The junior was still lost. ‘WHAT was M. and B. 693?’

  On nights off I pushed Vee round to the Doc’s house. ‘I’m beginning to feel like a bit of nursing history.’

  The Doc’s spare hair and luxuriant walrus moustache were all white, his deafness had increased, but he still wore his glasses on the end of his nose and looked over them with direct blue eyes. ‘My Godfathers, Lucy, how do you think I feel? Fifty years since I got m’Fellowship. Started as a houseman with Lister’s carbolic spray – ending with Fleming’s penicillin. I’m not a bit of surgical history. I’m the history of modern British surgery personified and petrified. Want to borrow some more literature? How’s your own coming along? When are we going to read Vol. 1?’

  ‘Still on the first draft I started at the nursery, Doc. Coming along a bit faster now in my free hours at night.’

  ‘That’s better. What’s it about?’

  ‘Mostly a hospital in wartime London. Think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Why not? You know what you’re writing about.’

  The ruins of St Johns lay between his house and mother’s flat. The ruins had been tidied, the steeple stood alone, looked smaller than I remembered and very forlorn. I avoided looking at the steeple and tidied gap. Never for choice did I walk along our old road past our old house. On most fine days I took Vee onto the beach, but never to our ‘tent’ beach by the long-destroyed St Leonards’ pier. In my personal life, nostalgia appealed to me as little as masochism, and I only accepted the fact that to varying degrees I was enduring both when writing my novel as it seemed I had no alternative. I had not consciously chosen the theme or my characters, but directly I began writing all were released by my subconscious in such a powerful flood that often I had the impression the novel was some private arrangement between my brain and my hands over which I had no control.

  Without Vee I would never have gone back to St Leonards. But living there was less expensive than London; there I had old friends and my only roots, and both were of particular importance to any fatherless child. As soon as fatherless children can talk and have friends of the same age, they are asked, ‘Where’s your daddy?’ When the answer is already known to friends and friends of friends, on park swings, roundabouts, pebbles and while digging holes in the sand, the question was generally rephrased, ‘When’s your daddy going to stop being sick?’ (From this experience, ever after, when asked for advice by other young mothers similarly placed, I have answered, ‘Go back to your own roots, your own home town or village, and there start again. It’ll help your child and so, yourself.’)

  By November 1951 the Doc and Ann had moved to Smallhythe, near Tenterden, Kent, and my novel was still unfinished. I was no longer able to stay awake when I sat down to write in my free hours at night, or after putting Vee to bed on my nights off. Having saved £30, I resigned temporarily.

  In mid-February 1952, a few days after the death of King George VI (6th February), I finished the novel. I had run out of money and needed an additional £10 to pay for the professional typing of one top and one carbon copy. I went straight back to night-duty. When I sent the novel to be typed I had no clear idea what to do with it when it was returned. I knew nothing about publishing houses, had never heard of literary agents. In that interval, as so often in my nursing life, a patient helped me. She was an elderly lady whom I nursed for a longish period and as we became friends she heard about my novel. One of her regular visitors and great friends, I then learnt, was a distinguished biographer, who said:

  ‘When your book’s ready, let me have a look at it.’

  When the typing firm returned my copies, I had saved £12 10s. and had nights off. I drew out all but the 10s., paid the firm, used the remainder on postage, and – since Vee and I were temporarily alone – a celebration lunch to mark the start of my professional writing career. It was 17th March.

  Vee surveyed the restaurant with approval. ‘When you write lots of books, Mummy, can we have lots of feasties and can I always have lemonade with two straws and chicken and chips and chocolate ice cream?’

  In the glass of dry white wine I had bought myself, I toasted her and our future. ‘Next book, Vee, three straws.’

  On-duty, in my free hour I began another novel. A month later the biographer rang me from London one night when by sheer good chance I was again off. ‘I have shown your book to a friend who is an established writer and we both think our literary agents should see it. If you hear from them, as I think you will, for God’s sake listen to what they say and take their advice. They know the book trade.’

  In early May the literary agents wrote asking me to visit their London office. Then, ‘We’re interested in your book, Miss Andrews, but not sure we’ll be able to sell it. Worth the try. How about the next? Started? Good girl. Let us see it when it’s ready.’

  I returned to St Leonards semi-delirious with premature relief and joy. My wartime novel was rejected by six London publishers. It was in the process of collecting its second rejection slip in early June when I asked my Matron for another interview.

  ‘I can’t afford time off without working, Matron, but again I can’t keep awake in my free hour. I must have some time on days or I’ll never get this book written. Is there no part-time day work anywhere in the Group?’

  She was a tall slender woman with a long, gentle, face, and a smile that removed at least twenty years from her age. ‘I’ll ring round and see what can be done.’ Later. ‘One possibility. That former Home for Retired Professional Women, now being converted into an N.H.S. Geriatric Unit, is so desperately in need of trained staff that they are willing to take day part-timers. I’m afraid the pay isn’t good.’

  In June 1952, the official N.H.S. pay for an S.R.N., Part I C.M.B., part-time Sister and deputy Matron was 2s. 9d. (14p) an hour. The Unit cleaners were paid 2s. 6d. an hour.

  For six weeks I worked five hours a day, seven days a week. I split my h
ours between two in the early mornings and three in the late evenings after Vee was settled for the night. All those weeks the weather was glorious and every day Vee and I had picnic lunches on the beach. Whilst Vee dug holes, sand castles and tried to empty the Channel with other toddlers, against a breakwater I wrote my second novel.

  ‘Down to the beach again, Sister?’ queried my new patients. ‘That’s nice for you and the little girl.’

  Not all were elderly, but all the younger middle-aged were severely disabled by rheumatic conditions. The majority of all were single women who had lost their fiancés, or hopes of marriage, in the First World War and earned their own livings until forced into retirement by age or ill-health. ‘I’m afraid I only managed to save very little, Sister. When I was young we didn’t enter the teaching – the nursing – profession with any thought of money. But when one isn’t as young as one was, money is rather essential – not that I’m complaining! We’re most fortunate here and having so much done for us since The Change.’

  The older patients all referred to the N.H.S. as The Change. The changes were considerable. The former ‘Home’ had been renamed ‘House’; various inside walls had been knocked down, bedrooms enlarged, renamed ‘wards’; the old dark green and dark brown walls had been repainted in pastels, fitted hand-basins installed, old bathrooms converted into modern and some into sluices. The old red-plush furniture and red-plush curtains heavy with bobbles replaced with deal, plastic and chintz.

  ‘All very hygienic and scientific, dear, and, of course, we are allowed visitors three times a week and it is only understandable that we should be asked to keep our locker-tops clear of knick-knacks, but I never did like pink.’

  The pink was on the identical shell-patterned quilts now provided for all the beds.

  Efforts were made to maintain a homely and not Home atmosphere, and particularly with the arrangement of the small tables in the dining-room and chairs in the communal sitting-room. But hope was missing. The patients knew they were there until death and the knowledge cast a tangible shadow. And yet, though some of their lives seemed to me unliveable, every elderly patient there, as elsewhere in my nursing career, clung to life to the final breath. Never, anywhere, did one such patient in my hearing admit a desire for death.

  I have read and been told of the dying protesting, ‘Animals are put to sleep – why not me?’ In nine years’ bedside nursing I never once heard that. In consequence, though I do not subscribe to the belief that active attempts to prolong life are always morally or humanly justified, nor, in any circumstances, do I subscribe to legal euthanasia.

  In those six weeks I heard constantly, ‘Don’t grow old, Sister. Don’t ever wish to grow old – if it means being like us.’

  After I left the Unit, several patients wrote to me for years. Their letters were alive with items of Unit interest: the fascinating exchange Miss X had had with Miss Y over the position of an armchair, the really fierce displeasure expressed in the dining-room over the new type of marmalade, the disturbing effects of the new screen covers. ‘Modern art it may be, but, personally, I think it looks like a bilious attack in a thunderstorm – I much preferred our daffodils and roses.’ For years at Christmas they sent handmade cards ‘To Sister and little girl’. One by one the cards and letters ceased to arrive until all that remained was the sadness and the wonder at the amount the human spirit can surmount.

  At the end of July 1952 I was back on night-duty in the Buchanan and had finished the first draft of Vol. 2. At the end of August my literary agents sent me a copy of a letter written to them by the third publisher to reject Vol. 1. That letter, dated 21st August 1952, included these words: ‘I am quite sure that people could not be induced to read this book now, with its all too graphic and painful reminders of things as they were for those who saw some of the worst of them … But, as my readers sympathetically say, let her (L.A.) not make it too harrowing a story and let her, above all, leave the past to bury its dead.’

  On reading that it struck me that Dr Werner von Braun might agree. I remembered again, ‘No one bothers with yesterday.’

  On my next nights off I re-read Vol. 2, realized the same objections could apply, and that in my anxiety to portray hospital life as I saw it I had narrowed my focus on to the blood and tears, and ignored the humour, absurdities, temperamental incompatibilities, and inter-staff love affairs that were as much a part of the normal life of any large teaching hospital as the teaching rounds and bedpans. I thought of all the doctors, medical students and nurses I had known and worked with, how seldom any were over thirty or married, and how every other one was either in the throes of, or just recovering from, what he or she regarded as the love of all time. I thought of the laughter I had heard in so many wards and so many places where it would have seemed the angels must have wept. Not humans.

  I decided to re-write the whole novel without falsification, but with a much lighter touch, and the inclusion of at least one major love affair. Neither then (nor for some years until informed of this) did it occur to me that I was writing either ‘a hospital novel’ or ‘a romance’. I was merely writing of the world I knew best without any idea that others might find this world interesting. In 1952 the arrival on British television of Dr Kildare, Doctor At Large Emergency-Ward 10, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, et al., were in the future.

  One night in my free hour I was sorting the pages into chapters on the floor when a houseman put his head round the door. ‘What are you doing, Staff?’

  ‘Organizing Vol. 2.’

  He crouched and picked up a chapter. ‘You’ve given a blow-by-blow of a breech—’ he turned the page ‘and why give the baby a spina biff.?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Just happened that way.’

  ‘Is it all midder?’

  ‘First half. Later the girl gets tubercle.’

  ‘But ends up falling into the hero’s arms and stepping into the sunset?’

  ‘Ends with her still warded and not sure she loves him.’

  He sat back on his heels. ‘Who’ll want to read this stuff?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘What are you calling it?’

  ‘The Print Petticoat.’

  ‘Alliteration may help. What does your old man think of Vols. 1 and 2?’

  ‘I don’t know as we haven’t discussed them.’

  He was momentarily silent. ‘Actually, what is his prognosis?’

  ‘Nil.’

  We were both silent, then began talking about the patients. ‘Got some bad news for you,’ he said, ‘though it won’t surprise you. I’ve just left Miss Z’s latest Path. Report on your desk.’ He shook his head. ‘Plus, plus, plus.’

  ‘Oh, God, no!’

  ‘Yeah. Bloody everywhere. Bloody hell. Bloody nice woman.’

  Miss Z was a youngish woman in an Amenity bed. She had been a senior buyer in a large department store until her short, terminal illness. She was a woman of great fortitude and dignity, she did not want to die, and to her final and coherent breath she fought one of the greatest fights I ever witnessed. I was with her when she died and as the night senior performed her Last Offices on what proved to be the last time in my nursing career. It distressed me as much as on the first time when I helped my senior as a night junior in 1942.

  (Three months later when Vee and I had moved to Kent, a few days before Christmas, a parcel arrived addressed to Vee in an unknown hand. Inside was a large, exquisitely dressed girl doll with washable golden hair, a voice that said ‘Mama’ and a card in different handwriting. ‘To little Vee with love to you and Mummy for Christmas and 1953 from one of Mummy’s sick ladies, Miss Z.’

  I rang the department store and was put through to the owner’s wife. ‘Yes, I sent it as I promised when Miss Z wrote the card and chose the doll before she passed on. I asked the hospital for your new address.’)

  One night in early September 1952 I was acting-Night Sister and sitting at Matron’s desk in her office filling in the bedstate for the whole hospital from th
e night seniors’ returns when the Night Superintendent came back from her free hour. She slapped on the desk a copy of a top-selling woman’s magazine. ‘Read the short story in your hour. I’m sure even you could do better! Why don’t you write a short story for a magazine instead of the books you’re always working on?’

  I think it was the first magazine short story I had read. That took about three minutes. I re-read it, noticed it had only two major and two minor characters, a beginning, a middle, an end, and counted the words. Three thousand. I spent the rest of my hour writing on the blank backs of old used temperature charts a love story in that frame and became so engrossed that I over-ran by fifteen minutes. The Night Superintendent was amused. ‘I guessed genius was burning and as we’re having such a slack night left you to it. Finished it? Good! Mind you send it up.’

  Mainly to appease her I had it typed for 7s. 6d., sent it to my agents, and then forgot it as a major personal crisis had arisen. I learnt belatedly that the lease of Mother’s flat expired at the end of October, for legal reasons could not be renewed, and Mother was convinced we should all move to London.

  ‘The Chelsea flat only has two bedrooms and one’s tiny. There isn’t room for four adults and one very active small child.’

  ‘It’s useless trying to find another flat down here. I’ve been asking around. That’s why I haven’t told you …’

  Once more the avalanche of unsought advice, ‘Go back to Thomas’s … go into a shop … be a model … be a receptionist … how could you night nurse much longer without getting ill? … You’ll have to give up nursing. You simply can’t afford not to – look how you have to work a whole month for £24!’

  As suddenly my working life had become more demanding. A boy suffering from acute tetanus was admitted to one of our rooms and I was relieved of all other duties to be his special night nurse. For several nights he was dangerously ill, but eventually he walked out of hospital with his parents. On the morning before his discharge the wave of sheer joy that swept round the hospital was (and is) one of the reasons why doctors and nurses remain in their professions.