The Quiet Wards

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Well, what about you? Mightn’t that same danger be there for you?’

  He said, ‘Are we discussing Frances Mack?’ I nodded. ‘I was afraid of this. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I thought you were in love with her.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Now do you see why I left you alone? I asked that young woman to one dance. One. Once I met her by chance and we had tea together. One of the patients had sent me a brace of tickets, and I passed them on to her. They were for that afternoon. If I’d met you first you’d have had ’em. She took her mother, and they asked me to tea at their flat, presumably to return the compliment. And that was all.’ He raised one hand and dropped it by his side again. ‘But I know the hospital had married us off before we had had the first dance of the evening, and she’s a Sister, and technically Sisters are above gossip. Can you imagine what would have been said if I had been rushing round after a nurse ‒ sixteen years younger than myself? A nurse who clearly wasn’t interested? Can you conceive how you’d feel to be the object of all that talk? My God, there’d have been talk,’ he added bitterly, ‘because if one thing is certain at Joe’s, it is that there’ll be talk!’

  I said, ‘I never thought of that.’ I felt very happy and then I remembered that night in O.P.s. My expression must have altered because he said gently, ‘Now what’s wrong?’

  I told him. He stared at me, then roared with laughter.

  ‘My darling child, I spend my entire life writing letters for Sisters! I have to write a letter about every single patient that passes through my hands. Surely you knew that?’

  ‘I do,’ I agreed. ‘It’s just something else I never thought of. But why were you always around O.P.s lately?’

  He said simply, ‘Because you were there.’ Then he smiled. ‘Anything else you want cleared up?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not a thing. Not one thing.’

  He said, ‘My turn now. I want to know something. When,’ his voice shook, ‘did I stop being something you had to take round and offer coffee to?’

  I thought it over. ‘I’m not sure.’ He looked amused. ‘Truly. Everything’s been such a muddle lately, and then, when the muddle began to clear, you were there.’

  The laughter left his eyes. ‘Dearest ‒ perhaps I’m not being fair. I’m so much older than you, and you’re used to doing what I say ‒ perhaps because I love you so much I’m forcing you to say more than you feel?’

  His face was lined and worried, and the sight of his anxiety brought back all the courage I ever had and a great deal more. I raised myself on to my heels and twisted round so that I was facing him. I put my hands on his shoulders and shook him slightly.

  ‘You are a very clever man,’ I said firmly, ‘and a good surgeon. You are also the kindest man I ever met and, quite apart from loving you, I respect you more than any man I’ve ever known. But you are talking a packet of rubbish, Mr Dexter, sir, and I wish to goodness you’d stop.’ His eyes were alight with laughter and more than laughter. I knew I was scarlet in the face, I did not care if I was purple. ‘I’ve been quite daft,’ I went on quickly, ‘about a lot of things. But the daftest thing I ever did was not seeing you as you really are until these last few weeks.’

  He took my face in his hands. ‘Shake me again, Gill. I like being shaken by you.’ He kissed me. ‘You’ll have to marry me after that ‒ won’t you, please?’

  ‘Will you report me to Matron if I don’t?’

  ‘Of course.’ He kissed me again. ‘Rank insubordination. So you will?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  Suddenly he laughed, and his shoulders shook.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  He controlled himself. ‘Now we are engaged,’ he murmured, ‘don’t you think you could break down and call me John?’

  I laughed too. ‘I never realised I hadn’t. I always do.’

  He said, ‘I grasped that. I mean to my face.’

  Some time later we saw the winter afternoon was dying, and the sky was heavy with rain clouds. He said, ‘I’ll have to get back. I’ve got three hours’ driving ahead. I must do my night round ‒ and I’ve had to leave Henderson standing in, when officially he’s off.’

  We had four miles to walk, and we walked slowly. It was dark when we reached the Blacks’ house. He would not come in.

  ‘I’ve got to push off in a few minutes and I don’t want to waste those minutes sharing you with other people. I’ve shared you long enough.’

  I remembered we had had no tea.

  ‘Tea?’ he said vaguely. ‘Is it tea-time?’

  I asked if he had had any lunch?

  ‘I wanted to get away,’ he said apologetically, ‘so I skipped it. I’m a little out of touch with the finer points of life. I haven’t lived in a house for ‒ let’s see ‒ not since I was a preclinical, nineteen years ago. I lived in digs, and since I qualified, either in or out of the army I’ve lived in hospitals. It will be so nice,’ he said softly as he stroked my hair, ‘to have a home, with you.’

  His job as S.S.O. was due to finish in the coming April. After that he had been promised a Consultant’s job at Joe’s and could live where he liked. He said, ‘One thing ‒ do you mind my being so much older than you?’

  I said, ‘Do you mind my being so much younger?’ And there was no more talk.

  When he got into the car he said, ‘The other night in Christian when we were discussing my hypothetical wife, I was thinking how wonderful it would be, if that was you.’

  I told him I had thought the same. He smiled, a wonderful smile.

  ‘I knew Henderson had been in. I wasn’t doing a general round as I was off. But I had to come to Christian. I was very cut up about that poor girl. I felt useless and weary, and I needed the comfort of your presence. So I came to you.’

  I thought, no woman could ask for any more.

  I did not go into the house immediately he left. It must have rained for some time while we were in the net-house, because the bare branches of the trees were dripping with water. I walked under the empty apple trees and over the sodden ground, and wished I could tell my parents how wonderful he was and how still more wonderful it was that he should love me. I stayed out for a long time, thinking about him and about tomorrow, when I would see him again. And before I went in I saw the night sky had cleared. The marsh wind had blown the rain clouds out to sea, and the stars were all over the sky.

  One Night in London by Lucilla Andrews

  If you enjoyed The Quiet Wards, you will also want to read One Night in London by Lucilla Andrews. This moving and gripping novel recounts one night in a busy London teaching hospital during the Second World War, as bombs and rockets rain down on the city.

  Chapter One

  The Thames was the colour of blood that night. Venous blood, Nurse Carter registered absently, and emptied her bucket of wet sheets into the damp-laundry bin on the ward balcony. On the opposite embankment the uneven frieze of jagged black shadows and the great gaps that even in the blackout stood out like missing teeth, were splashed with pink, and the face Big Ben turned to the river had a rosy glow. The colour came from the arclights of the rescue squads digging for the people buried by a V2 rocket sometime that afternoon. The diggers had to work slowly. No one knew for sure exactly where all the bodies were or how many of the bodies were still alive.

  Nurse Carter glanced at the lights across the river, then turned her head and didn’t look back. She was now twenty-two and before she had been out of her teens she had learnt that she needed both physical and mental effort when she wanted to suspend thought and imagination. Earlier in the war she had only managed to practise this technique consciously, but as the war dragged on and particularly after the last two months, it had become one of her conditioned reflexes. It was two months to the night since she had been transferred from the sprawling conglomeration of Nissen huts sixty miles from London that was the evacuated home of her parent hospital, to work in what remained of St Martha’s Hospital, Londo
n. During that time, though fewer V1 flying bombs were reaching London, the V2 rocket attacks had started. Very occasionally she wondered what the V3s would be like, but never for more than a few seconds as that involved thinking of the future. By that night in October 1944 she had long learnt never to think of the future. Today was enough, unless one happened to be a night nurse, and if so, tonight.

  She had to go back into the ward, but paused before opening the heavily-battened balcony doors and gulped in the clean cold night air, like a swimmer about to dive under water. Once inside, with the doors quickly closed behind her, she wondered once again how Wally’s patients endured, slept, and more often than not survived in the ward air.

  Walter Walters Ward, named after a dead and otherwise forgotten Martha’s physician, had for the past century been ‘Wally’s’ to patients and staff, with two present exceptions. One was the Senior Night Sister, who objected to all abbreviations on principle; the other was Wally’s present night senior, Nurse Dean. Nurse Dean was a staff nurse who had won the gold medal for her year when her training ended and had nothing against abbreviations in general, providing they were nice.

  Wally’s had initially been a men’s medical ward, but during the blitzes and again since the flying bombs started, in common with every other ward in Martha’s, London, Wally’s admitted surgical and medical patients. Technically, medicals were on the left, surgicals on the right, unless, as now happened regularly, the surgical overflow swamped both sides and emergency beds were put up down the middle. In normal circumstances Wally’s had forty beds, eighteen in line up each side, two set facing down the ward on both sides of the balcony doors. There was room for ten emergency beds in single file down the middle, but none were up that night and only one of the twenty-nine occupied beds held a medical patient. The long wide ward had once had a window between every bed, but shortly after the first blitz in September 1940, every window in the still usable parts of the hospital had been bricked-in. And every night Wally’s smelt as if it hadn’t been aired since 1940. The hot, stuffy atmosphere reeked of sweat, warm bed mackintoshes, pus, ether, iodiform, carbolic, tobacco, anaesthetics, and, when Nurse Carter came in from the balcony, especially of the sickly-sweet aroma of fresh-spilled blood. Half-an-hour ago one of the senior medical students up from the country hospital that day to start his week in residence as a Casualty dresser ‒ a job that currently trebled with that of unskilled porter and general messenger boy ‒ had heard his first rocket. It had fallen a good way off on either Fulham or Acton, and the vacolitre of whole blood in his hands had fallen onto the ward floor.

  ‘Jolly lucky it’s Group O,’ said Nurse Dean in a brisk murmur. ‘Cut yourself, Mr ‒ sorry, don’t know your name. No? Jolly good. Press on regardless back to the In-Patients’ Path. Lab. for a replacement ‒ where’s Carter? Oh, there you are. Carter, get weaving on this mess. Any minute now the theatre’ll ring to say the Major’s ready to come up.’

  Only a few of the heavily sedated patients had been woken. The bedsprings creaked as neighbour leant towards neighbour. ‘If you ask me, mate, that young student don’t want us to feel out in the cold, seeing Jerry’s giving our side the miss tonight.’

  ‘Fair’s fair. We’d our turn last night.’

  ‘Too true. Oh well. Best get me head down again.’

  A row of small red night lights cast crimson patches on the ward ceiling and the lights from the shaded bedhead lamps filtered through the open red screens round beds 11, 29 and 31, and dappled in soft crimson the beds on either side. Bert Harper, propped into a sitting position in 27, saw the raised head of his neighbour in 28 outlined against the dividing screen. Bert Harper clutched his large, bandaged abdomen with both hands before leaning to his left. ‘Give you a bit of a start, mate? You don’t need to worry. Just one of the students, clumsy-like.’

  George Mercer in 28 was a tall, red-faced man in his late thirties, with the bone structure, colouring, and, until he was wounded in North Africa, the physique of his distant Viking ancestors. Yesterday, the farmer for whom he had worked since he left school at thirteen, up to his call-up in the Territorials in 1939, and who had given him back his old job earlier this year, had given him the day off to come to London to meet one of the mates he had made in the prison camp. It had been a good day even if it hadn’t ended rightly. All he could now remember of last night was waiting on the platform for the last train back to Kent. It had been midday when he discovered he was back in a hospital bed with his chest, shoulders and extended left arm and hand covered with bandages, and a bedcradle over his body from the waist down. The black-haired doctor with the Scotch voice had said he’d been in luck. ‘Flattened your artificial foot, laddie, but your stump and good leg are fine.’

  George Mercer turned his head towards the big, grey-haired man on his right. ‘Reckon he was having hisself a smashing time,’ he announced in his slow Weald voice.

  Bert Harper nodded approvingly. Bert was a Londoner and 28’s silence had worried him all day. ‘Feeling more like it tonight? That’s nice. Mind you, nasty do, last night. Watched them fetch your lot in, I did. Coming in all night you was. Nasty do. Where’d he get you then?’

  ‘Station ‒ can’t rightly remember the name ‒’

  ‘Don’t you worry, mate, it’ll come. It’s the shock that’s what. Not from London then?’

  ‘Down Kent. Appleden. Tenterden way.’

  ‘Doodle-Bug Alley, eh? Home from home. Still, here you are ‒ er ‒ not with your missus like, was you?’

  ‘On me own.’

  ‘Ah. Best. Nasty,’ mused Bert Harper in a stage whisper, ‘when you got the missus and kids along.’

  George Mercer braced himself, ‘Where’d he get you?’

  Bert’s solid, squashed, ex-heavyweight’s face creased in a delighted grin. ‘He never! Strangulated hernia, I am. Harper’s the name. Bert Harper. Newsagent, three streets down ‒ nice little business though I says it meself ‒ had it the fifteen years since I packed in me gloves ‒ well, I mean, past it wasn’t I ‒ and then this pain in me guts has me out for the count. Well, I says, never, I says. When that Mr MacDonald tells me ‒ he’s the Scotch bloke ‒ surgeon like ‒ never, I says. If you’ve not got enough custom, what with Jerry bunging over them doodles and them rockets, without me twisting me guts. Not to worry, he says, we’re still open for business for guts. War’s never stopped no one twisting a wee bit of gut nor never will, he says. Bit of a card, times, that Mr MacDonald, but he knows his job, he does.’ He took a new grip on his stomach and his springs squeaked painfully. ‘You got a real poorly neighbour in 29.’

  George Mercer glanced at the dividing screen. ‘Seemly.’

  ‘DIL,’ intoned Bert. ‘Dangerously Ill List. Tom Briggs. Poorly. Always spot the DILs by the red screens, see. Over there in 11 ‒’ he nodded his bullet-shaped head directly across the ward, ‘poor old Sam Jarvis. Ticker. Shocking ticker has poor old Sam. Mind you, as well he was in here last night seeing as his home’s in that row Jerry fetched down opposite. Come down like a pack of cards, the paper boy says this morning. Upset poor old Sam shocking, but lucky his missus and his old mum gone down the Piccadilly Line for the night and didn’t know nothing till them come up this morning. Whole row flat as cards. The blast. Cruel blast them doodles got. Mind you ‒’

  ‘Gentlemen, please.’ Nurse Dean swept up on soundless feet crackling starch. ‘Terribly sorry, but do you mind not chatting now as you should try and get back to sleep. I’ll just do your pillows and give you drinks …’ After she had gone George Mercer glanced back at the dividing screen and through a narrow slit between curtain and frame glimpsed a face hidden by a green rubber oxygen mask and a small, thin girl in a staff nurse’s uniform. He hadn’t seen her before. He watched her pick up, then quickly put down again, the white china spouted feeding cup on the locker-top and dry her hands on the back of her apron skirts. He lay back, looking up at the ceiling and found he was thinking of anchovies.

  There were strange shadows on t
he ceiling above Briggs’s screened bed. The slumped, emaciated figure was lost in the mound of pillows and the grotesque hump of the large bedcradle supporting the top sheet and blankets. The bottle of glucose hanging from the infusion stand drawn up to the bedhead was transformed into a spindle; the rubber tubing of the drip-apparatus into a long, thin strand of wool; and the new staff nurse into an elongated, curveless, pantomime fairy floating over mound and hump with wings growing out of her head instead of her shoulders. The wings were the tails of the starched bow on the back of the clean, small, starched, lace cap the staff nurse had made-up in her bunk during her sleepless afternoon in the night seniors’ basement shelter-dormitory.

  ‘I did not mince matters to Matron this morning, nurses,’ said Sister Wally in her handing-over report to her night staff at nine p.m. ‘If we’re to have more nights like last night, Matron, I said, my night senior must have a senior relief. And who can say we won’t? All that talk about the invasion ending the war ‒ huh! Allies’ve been in France since June and haven’t reached the Rhine yet. Last night, as I reminded Matron, was quite as bad as those nights in June and July when as Mr Churchill himself had to admit, over one hundred flying bombs were being aimed at London every day. And if not all got through, as we all know, enough arrived to fill every ward in this and I daresay every other London general hospital. And then ‒ as I reminded Matron ‒ no rockets. Nor then were the Senior Medical and Surgical Officers sending me DIL admissions who should have special nursing. Take Briggs, Matron, I said ‒ carcinomatosis ‒ a total gastrectomy ‒ secondaries everywhere ‒ of course, he needs a special. As does Jarvis. Jarvis.’ Sister Wally’s cap frills rustled with indignation. ‘Naturally I appreciate the SMO’s predicament, nurses, and when Jarvis was admitted four days ago in a state of collapse after his first coronary thrombosis, as there wasn’t a spare medical bed in a basement or ground floor ward and he was unfit to be moved more than across the road from his home, I agreed we must take him. But, as I reminded Matron, he is an acute cardiac patient and acute cardiacs need absolute quiet, and absolute rest, which means special nursing day and night. I asked her how anyone could expect my two night nurses to special any single patient in a ward filled with bed-patients and with casualties coming in all night. I found forty-eight patients in my ward when I arrived on-duty this morning, Matron, I said, and to the great credit of my two night nurses, Briggs and Jarvis were amongst them. But I refuse to risk a repetition, for my patients’ and my night nurses’ sakes. Unless you can send me a senior Special to help out tonight, Matron, I am afraid I shall refuse to go off-duty. Not,’ Sister Wally added unemotionally, ‘that I expect poor Briggs to last another night, but you’ll shortly have this Major Browne. You’ll have to divide yourself in three, Nurse Smith ‒ and very glad I am to see you.’ Sister paused to study the newcomer’s pinched, taut, intelligent face. Nurse Smith was twenty-six but at that moment looked ten years older. ‘I know you’ve done a great deal of specialing. I’m sure you’ll manage nicely. You’re very pale. Not much sleep today?’