Hospital Circles

by Lucilla Andrews

  I answered Gwenellen with a non-committal ‘Uh-huh,’ and, as I now knew the subject was safe, asked if she knew when Bill Francis was due in Out Patients for his first follow-up clinic. ‘I’d like to know how his leg’s getting on.’

  ‘I’ve not yet seen his name on the lists. I’ll let you know when I do.’

  ‘Thanks. I wish you would.’

  She went on to talk O.P.D. ‘shop’. I did not hear much she was saying, as I was thinking of Margaret and how impossible it would be to get Gwenellen, or anyone else in Benedict’s with the obvious exception of Old Red, to believe the real truth, if I attempted to explain it. They would assume, as I had until this last holiday, that Margaret was a widow from lack of opportunity, not choice, and must surely jump at the prospect of Red as a husband. He had so much to offer her, or any woman. Benedict’s, like the world, was convinced every unattached woman wanted a man, and vice versa. I thought so, too. Yet I now had to accept, if not yet understand, that Margaret’s fundamental reason for not remarrying was the plain fact that she did not want to. She did not want another man in her life. She just needed one.

  The problem continued to bother me, and so did my lack of a letter from Bill. One afternoon, a week later, I decided the time had come to stop dithering like a Victorian maiden and to write to Bill, when I got off at ten that night, asking if no news was good news. Daisy Yates showed me the postcard she had had from him that morning. ‘As he’s sent his love to us all, take your share, Jo.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  When I got off, instead of letter-writing, I accepted a last-minute party date. I did not enjoy it much, but it was better than lying in bed feeling hurt, a failure, and gnashing my teeth in turn.

  Next morning I continued to make excuses for Bill, but as I now knew I was making them, they no longer soothed me. Some days later Gwenellen told me he had attended his first follow-up clinic two days previously. ‘Sorry I forgot to tell you. His leg’s fine. He inquired after you and Daisy.’

  ‘How nice of him!’

  The S.S.O. was crossing Casualty yard when I was going on duty that afternoon in a flaming temper. He was frequently in Cas, and generally ignored me, as he had done in Marcus. Occasionally he exchanged the time of day. Being in no mood for civilities, I was about to walk by with a brief ‘Afternoon’ when he stopped. ‘I’ve just been talking to your aunt on the phone. She asked me to apologize to you, should I see you, for not having answered your last letter. Dick’s off to Devon to fish on Monday. I’m driving him down. Any message for your aunt or cousin?’

  On any day that would have pleased me. It now had the effect of a shot in the arm. I beamed up at my future Uncle Richard, asked him to give my love to Margaret and Dickie, my regards to the General and Co., and added my hope that he would have a good holiday.

  ‘I hope so, Nurse Dungarvan. Thank you.’ He smiled and walked away. I went on into Casualty.

  A junior C.O. called Robin Armstrong and a long, lanky student with a brown beatle-cut were leaning against the wall just inside the doorway. Robin I knew well. He was one of Aline’s old flames. ‘Hi, Robin,’ I murmured as I passed.

  ‘Hi, Jo.’ He sounded faintly bemused. I guessed Sister had been beating him up again. She got on very well with most of the men, since, whatever their personal views on her, they admired and were grateful for her professional skill. But Robin Armstrong she did not like. She gave him hell at the slightest opportunity. As he was a rather slow and clumsy young man, he gave her plenty of opportunities.

  He provided one now. Leaning against a Cas wall when Sister was on the bridge was asking for an explosion. Sister suddenly spotted the pair and exploded. ‘Mr Armstrong!’ she bellowed across the crowded Hall. ‘If you have nothing better to do than prop up buildings, will you kindly go and find yourself a street corner and not clutter up my department! As for you, boy’ ‒ she bore down on the student ‒ ‘are you one of my new dressers today? Then get your mask up and get into the Accident Unit! I am sure Mr Waring requires your invaluable assistance!’ Having dispatched them, she turned on me. ‘Back aboard, eh, Nurse Dungarvan? Deal with these.’ She handed me a stack of forms. ‘Quick Developing Unit, first. Take the wet plates for Christina Maria Anson straight up to Bertha Ward. Then get to the Out Patients Laboratory with this ‒’ She paused as a police-sergeant appeared behind me. ‘Looking for your man, Sergeant? That petrol explosion? In the Burns Room of the Accident Unit, over there, third door on your right. And you’ll need one of these.’ She gave him a disposable mask from the large glass-covered jar on a shelf by the door. ‘You know what to expect?’

  ‘Aye, Sister.’ The man was grim. ‘It’ll not be the first man I’ve seen after he’s tried to fill up a car with a lighted cigarette in his mouth ‒ nor the last. I heard as he was fried to a crisp.’

  Sister saw my wince as the policeman removed himself. ‘One way of putting it.’

  ‘Sister, such a cold-blooded way!’

  ‘Cold-blooded words don’t necessarily betoken a callous nature, as you should be well aware by this stage in your training. It’s not what people say that gives ’em away, it’s what they do.’ The Burns Room door had closed behind the police-sergeant. ‘I’ve had dealings with that man before. I’ve seen him crying like a child over a dead baby he carried in. His language would have made a Chief Petty Officer blush … But this won’t get us out on the tide.’ She quickly finished all she had to tell me about my errands. ‘Cast off and don’t dawdle!’

  I did not dawdle, but as I had to pass our post pigeon-holes, from force of habit I looked in mine in case the second post had been sorted early. Mine was empty.

  Hurrying on, I thought of Sister Cas’s remarks, and then first of Violet in Hope. After her crisis she had said, ‘I’ll never forget what you done for me, dear. I’ll remember you all my life.’

  She had repeated those words when she said goodbye. She had gone to a convalescent home in Bournemouth. She had not even sent me a picture postcard. It would not be surprising if by now she had forgotten my name. After a dangerous illness few patients willingly looked back. The illness and those involved faded like a bad dream.

  Bill had written one letter to thank me. He had rung the cottage.

  Nice gestures both, I reflected bitterly, and both typical gestures of any young man in a hospital bed who temporarily imagines himself in love with one of his nurses as a form of occupational therapy.

  My bitterness was directed solely at myself. How could I have been such a fool as to take him seriously? When all the time I had actually been with him I had always realized he was the type to make a pass at the nearest girl with his last gasp, and I had just happened to be that girl. Yet since leaving Marcus I had let my imagination blow it all up into a Great Romance.

  Yet it was not all imagination. At least, not as far as I was concerned. I could accept that I had been foolish, but that acceptance was not yet a sufficient antidote for the niggling little pain in my heart. I had just enough sense to appreciate that as a pain it rated no higher than a toothache. But a toothache can be a singularly uncomfortable experience.

  Chapter Seven

  A LETTER FROM MARGARET

  It was an unusually sultry afternoon, and Casualty on my return was emptier than I had yet seen it. Sister said she had no work for me for a few minutes, so I could direct traffic for her whilst she had a few words with Dr Jones.

  Mr Wrigley, the head porter, fixed open the double-glass swing doors. ‘Quietish, eh, Nurse Dungarvan?’

  ‘Very. What’s keeping ’em away? The heat?’

  ‘Nah. Thursday. Payday round here. When a day turns quiet, like, it’s always on a Thursday.’

  I thought of the Thursday Red had given himself off. ‘Why’s that, Mr Wrigley? What’s payday got to do with it? No-one needs money to come in here.’

  ‘And that’s a fact, Nurse! But there’s many a missus as needs to be home when her old man comes in from work on a Thursday, if she’s to get her proper sh
are of his pay-packet. Mind you, I’m not saying as that’s what she’ll get for the asking, and I’m not saying there’s not many a man as’ll hand over his pay-packet unopened, but there’s enough of the other sort to give us a bit of a breather Thursdays.’ He surveyed the handful of patients waiting for attention outside the various Junior Casualty Officers’ rooms. They were all elderly. ‘Proper Darby and Joan Club we run here of a Thursday. The old ’uns know if they come in now they’ll be seen nice and easy and have time for a chat-up with their old mates.’

  He walked slowly back to the lodge. I watched the empty entrance and the yard beyond that for once was clear of ambulances. The heat was making the tar bubble up between the stone flags. The plane-trees by the main gates were limp with thirst. The iron railings were so dusty, they looked grey, not black.

  The patients on the benches fanned themselves with newspapers. A bit of heat, they allowed, was all right, but this was no joke, it wasn’t. ‘Be a storm afore long,’ announced one old man; ‘I can feel it in me knees.’

  ‘Never get a fine week like we just had,’ agreed his neighbour, ‘but we pay for it. I don’t mind a good storm meself. Clears the air lovely. But my good lady can’t abide ’em. Think old Tom’ll be in there much longer? There’s the three of you to go in before meself. Maybe I’d best push off home and look in again tomorrow.’

  The two ladies at the head of the little queue whispered together, then announced that if Mr Carter had no objection they would be happy to oblige Mr Mullings, as they did not like to think of Mrs Mullings having to face a storm unprotected.

  ‘Suits me, ladies.’ Mr Carter was the first speaker. ‘I’m not in no hurry, neither.’ His smile was patient, peeved, and very sad. ‘You got to be young for that. Like them two lads out there, see? Having a race, I reckon! Strewth! In this heat!’

  ‘And here comes another lad back of ’em!’ Mr Mullings heaved himself up by the back of the bench for a better look. ‘Student lads, you reckon?’

  The two young men racing down the pavement by our railings had reached our gates. They tore in, up the yard, and towards the entrance. One carried his dark jacket in an odd kind of bundle under one arm. His companion had his on despite the heat and their speed. On reaching Cas they ignored the porters in the lodge, the protests of the admission clerk at her desk, and Mr Wrigley’s stern, ‘Now then, you lads! What’s all this?’

  They charged at me. The one carrying his jacket produced from beneath a white paper carrier-bag. ‘Take it, Nurse!’ he gasped. ‘We found it ‒ in that phone-box, at the end of the road. Is it still alive?’

  Sister had heard them from the S.C.O.’s office and was already beside me. ‘Let me see.’ She opened the mouth of the carrier-bag. Lying inside, wrapped in a clean woollen shawl, was the smallest baby I had ever seen. Its mottled little face was a mass of wrinkles. Its eyes were closed. It had strangely long, fine black hair.

  Dr Jones had followed Sister. As he was about to put on his stethoscope, she said briskly. ‘It’s breathing, Dr Jones. I think straight up to an incubator?’ She phrased that as a question, out of respect for etiquette. She was actually giving an order. She did not wait for his nod. She whisked a blanket off the nearest trolley, wrapped it round baby and bag, and placed the bundle in my arms. ‘Up to the Maternity Unit, stat, Dungarvan. Run. Don’t drop it, but run. Now.’

  I had never been told to run on duty. I ran out of the department, and was only vaguely aware of the sudden uncanny silence and the way legs were moved aside and doors held open. In the ground-floor corridor I found Dr Jones was running with me. He grunted, ‘I’ll get the fast staff lift to the Mat Unit,’ and shot on ahead.

  The lift was roughly two hundred yards from Casualty. It seemed more like two miles. It was just after four o’clock.

  Our ward teaching rounds ended at four. The corridor was crowded with students, with white coats, with nurses going to and fro from tea, and the occasional pundit. I bulldozed my way through the lot, including one outraged Office Sister. ‘Nurse Dungarvan! What do you think you’re doing?’

  I paused on one foot. ‘Sorry, Sister. Sister Casualty’s instructions ‒’ I ran on.

  Dr Jones had the gates open. He slammed them shut and kept one finger on the top-floor button. With his free hand he reached inside the carrier-bag. ‘Still breathing, but growing cold and his muscle-tone’s bloody poor.’

  I hugged the bundle more tightly to increase the warmth. ‘Think it’s a boy, Doctor?’ I gasped breathlessly.

  ‘Don’t waste my time asking me bloody stupid questions, Nurse!’ he snapped. ‘How could I possibly tell its sex since, as you know very well, I’ve had no time to examine it? I just call all babies “he” until proved otherwise.’

  The lift stopped. A waiting gowned and masked midwife took the baby, and Dr Jones hitched up his mask and followed her into the incubator nursery. I waited in the corridor for our blanket and any message for Sister Casualty, and brooded on the baby’s chances of survival, how any mother could have made herself pack her own baby in a carrier-bag, and what kind of thoughts passed through a woman’s mind when she walked away after abandoning her baby in a telephone-box, or anywhere else. Or did she not think at all? Or had someone else done it for her?

  I wished I knew a few of the answers. I didn’t know any. I felt lost and ineffectual, and Dr Jones just now had done nothing to improve my morale. But I did not take his rebuff too personally, since, having worked with him, I was now accustomed to his habit of being unctuously civil to his seniors and much less than civil to his juniors. From Tom Lofthouse I had heard he was not popular in the Doctors’ House, yet, conversely and amazingly to anyone who had been his junior, our Dr Jones rated as a favourite pin-up in the Staff Nurses’ Home.

  In Benedict’s the staff nurses set the tone, since they saw more of our men on and off duty than any other nursing strata in the hospital. Their views trickled down through the student nurses’ years and were apt to be accepted as gospel, since that saved the students the bother of forming opinions for themselves, and also it was not often a student in her first couple of years, if not longer, had the opportunity to form any opinion on our men. In Benedict’s, as in most hospitals, only the higher nursing ranks dealt directly with the residents. To deal with a pundit one had to be either a sister, senior staff nurse, or a rare fourth-year on nights.

  The staff nurses called Dr Jones ‘dear Jackie’. He was tall, very fair, reasonably attractive, and when he made with the charm at hospital parties they lapped it up. One had to work under him to discover he never troubled with the charm unless he considered it worth his while. The staff nurses were prepared to forgive his short temper on duty, as he was ‘such fun on a party’. But Old Red’s silences they found inexcusable because he never attended our parties, or bothered to turn on the charm to anyone. Yet that he could talk, and well, I had discovered that day in the car. I had also discovered recently, again via Tom, that the men now liked him. ‘A tough but decent bastard’ was their view, even if his inability to make small-talk still riled the staff nurses. Was he just very shy? Like Margaret? Did he turn silent where she turned prim? And was that such a fault? After Bill’s chattiness I did not think so.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Nurse.’ The midwife was back with the blanket. ‘He’s breathing quite nicely and warming up now he’s in the cooker. He’s small, but he should do.’ I felt hideously ashamed, having forgotten the baby.

  ‘I’m so glad, Sister. Thank you. How old is he? And he is a boy?’

  ‘Yes.’ She had a nice smile. Dr Jones had come out with her and walked straight over to the lift. He had to wait. He behaved as if I were invisible as he did so. The midwife showed me a note that had been pinned to the baby’s jacket under the shawl. ‘We’ll keep this unless the police want it. Dr Jones has a copy.’

  The note read: ‘No money, no husband, no home. I’m sorry. Please call him Patrick and be kind to him.’

  I grimaced. ‘The poor woman.’


  Dr Jones glanced round. ‘Wouldn’t you say she left her regrets a little late, Sister?’

  The midwife merely shook her head sadly. I had never been so tempted to hit any man as I was at that moment. I went down in the lift with Dr Jones in a blazing silence. I doubted he noticed. We were not at a party, he did not go in for brunettes, and I was very much his junior. On the ground floor he walked a few feet ahead, leaving me to trundle behind like a meek Arab wife.

  Sister Casualty sighed over my report. ‘Oh, dear! The poor gals will do these things. We get so many of these dumped babies in.’

  ‘With notes, Sister?’

  ‘More often than you perhaps expect. The umbilical cord isn’t as easily severed as these unhappy mothers imagine. The maternal instinct can’t be dumped, even when you’ve got rid of your baby. The only instinct stronger is self-preservation. At this very moment that little scrap’s mother must be in hell, and part of her will stay there for the rest of her life. Society may or may not forgive her. Nature will never allow her to forgive herself. I hope she can be traced. She hopes so too, or she’d not have written that note, though she may not realize it yet. One can but hope. Now, go and get those three lads some tea. The police have finished questioning them.’

  The three young men were waiters off for the afternoon. Their names were Kevin, Frank, and Trevor. Trevor had stayed behind to ring the police and explain their actions. ‘We was late off, see,’ explained Frank. ‘Gone spare, we had, as we’d missed our bus. So we thought we’d walk to the next stop, and then we see this bag on the floor. We thought some bird must’ve forgotten her shopping. Talk about giving us a turn when we saw it move! Doing all right, is he, then? Patrick, eh? Cor!’