by Jane Grant
‘Don’t upset yourself, my dear.’ Staff took a step into the room and glanced at her watch. ‘They’ll be sure not to put it on too tight this time. It’s much better to be safe than sorry.’
‘But, Staff ‒’
‘Sorry, dear, I must run. If I miss this bus I’ll have to wait till nine or walk all the way. And I’ve left all my washing hanging out.’
Mrs McKie was silenced. A picture of the girl’s life formed in her mind. Housework and washing at home; a day’s nursing; a husband tired from commuting to London; a meal to get and a hundred small acts to plan and execute.
And anyway, what was the use of rebellion, she thought despairingly. They had it over you every way. They had only to say, ‘We know best’ ‒ ‘we think it best’ and you had to submit.
Angus came that afternoon; he seemed depressed; worrying because the planting was getting behind and one of the tractors needed an overhaul and he couldn’t spare it. Also Maude’s children had measles and she couldn’t come to help.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said.
‘Don’t you worry over the plaster. They’re bound to be more careful this time.’
‘We’ll neither of us worry.’
They both kept up a front of not worrying, but found it hard to find unworried subjects of discourse.
In the evening, as she sat staring out of the window feeling generally cast down, with nothing apparently going right with her fracture and her family, two young men in raincoats suddenly appeared under the trees. They produced guns and started firing up into the rooks’ nests.
There were cries of protest from the main ward and from Gloria and Miss Caulfield, as bodies fell to the ground, and the rest of the rooks took off, wheeling away into the upper air.
‘Oh, the beasts!’
‘Look at that one they winged, poor thing!’
‘They’re aiming at the nests.’
‘That’s it. They kill the young ones and smash the eggs.’
‘Why do they always have to be killing?’
It was late that night before the remnant of the rooks returned to the trees. So much, thought Mrs McKie, for my sentimental picture of the hospital as a place of healing, rich with animals and birds, a sanctuary for wildlife.
But why cry? she asked herself. Don’t you know life is cruel, animals kill each other, only last week Angus brought the little pigs you had hand-reared to market to be killed and eaten. For heaven’s sake, woman, she told herself, get some detachment. It would be more fitting at your age.
But the tears still fell for the rooks; for the anxious parent rooks teaching the young ones to fly; for the old gentlemanly rooks walking down the rose beds like solicitors going to the office; for the rook that had tried to have a bath in the dew, and the one that was blown sideways by the gale when he fluttered his wings and nearly lost his balance and his dignity; for the colony in the tree that had been so happy, breeding and cawing.
The wind changed that night, and through the window came the smoke from the furnace chimney, smelling of old dressings, to mingle with the smell in the ward of Miss Caulfield’s old banana skins.
Next day Mr Camden came to put on the plaster with his own hands. Nurse Mooney laid a green rubber sheet across the bed and put up a screen between Mrs McKie’s bed and Mrs Oaksey’s. Gloria was at the gym, and Miss Caulfield sitting in the corridor, so there was a welcome privacy and quietness in the ward. As the Registrar worked with his coat off, slapping on and smoothing the plaster over the cotton net stocking, he became quite friendly and communicative. So she knew Theo Banyard? He ‒ well he was not an intimate friend of hers, but he had met her once or twice.
‘I haven’t seen her for some years. We were girls together.’
‘I met her once at the East London when I went to take a course there. She’s rather one of the old type of women doctors, isn’t she?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, in the old days they had to fight for their rights. Nowadays ‒’ he gave a little snort of laughter ‒ ‘now they do it all by charm. Mind you,’ he added, slapping on another layer, ‘I’m not sure that I don’t prefer the old type. You know where you are with them.’
‘I suppose with the charmers you don’t know where you are?’
He gave a brief smile. ‘Well, let’s say you find yourself somewhere you didn’t really want to be. Now is that comfortable?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘You must tell Sister at once if you get any discomfort.’ He prepared to depart, but she detained him with an uncertain inquiry.
‘Mr Camden ‒ please ‒ do you know at all how it’s going on? I mean how long will it be?’
‘How long before you go home? Or how long altogether?’
She was so anxious to put the first inquiry that she ignored the second. ‘I mean how long before I go home?’ It was impossible to see beyond that blessed release.
‘If you go on all right ‒ another month or six weeks.’
‘And do you think I’m going on all right? I mean these pains ‒ it doesn’t mean anything going wrong, does it?’
‘I’m afraid bones are a bit painful sometimes,’ he said smiling. ‘You just lie and relax and read books and look at the sky. You’ll never have a chance like this again ‒ a busy woman like you.’
Angus came that night, and she got great comfort from telling him her troubles.
‘You think the rooks have got worries,’ he said. ‘Wait till you hear mine. The Ferguson’s packed up altogether, and Maude’s passed on the measles to her old man. Now I haven’t got a tractor driver to drive the tractor I haven’t got!’
When he left he put a little parcel into her hands.
‘Open it when I’m gone,’ he said as he kissed her goodbye.
It proved to be a new nylon nightdress, with the inscription attached: ‘Something nice to wear with something nasty.’
Chapter Ten
It seemed to my rather over-wrought imagination that my mother’s next question would be, ‘What are your intentions, Don?’
Don had come over to Sunday lunch, and was taking me back to hospital that evening from my weekend. He had arranged that we should call on his mother during that evening’s visiting hours, so I had suggested that we might as well make a day of it and he could meet my parents.
Our rather delicate relationship was still in the balance. Don had never mentioned marriage, and I was very undecided as to whether I wanted to give up my independence just yet. My mother’s curiosity was obvious; she wanted to find out everything about him and had certainly pumped him well over the meal. I could see my father and my brother were enjoying the situation immensely, because my mother’s interest in people was a family joke. They did not seem to realize that this was different, and that I was at first embarrassed and later annoyed by the inquisition.
‘Oh, so you work with your father, do you?’ she was saying. The next minute I felt she would be asking, ‘Who owns the farm and what are your prospects in it?’ but she managed to restrain herself and I breathed again.
‘It must be a lovely life, farming. I’ve always felt an attraction for it. Very hard work though,’ she amended.
‘Yes, very hard,’ said Don shortly.
I know what he’s thinking too, I thought. These people who talk glibly about hard work on farms ‒ they know nothing about hard work or farms.
There was a short silence while my mother poured out the tea, then she went on: ‘What a nuisance about your mother! It must be very inconvenient for you, quite apart from the unpleasantness for her, poor thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Don.
‘Wasn’t it funny that she should go to Jane’s hospital?’
‘Not really, Ma. Considering she lives in its area,’ I said snappily.
‘But rather nice in a way. It will give them a chance of getting to know each other.’
‘Yes, it will.’ Don’s large hands fumbled with his cup and saucer. My skin crawled with embarr
assment. I saw my father smiling at Colin before retiring behind the Sunday Times.
‘I really think we ought to be off, Ma,’ I said quickly. ‘It will be visiting time before we get back.’
‘Oh? I thought you said you were going to visit her at six o’clock.’ She stopped, and then added, ‘But of course you’d like a little time to yourselves.’
This was the final straw; I felt like bursting into tears then and there. Really, how could anyone as sweet-natured and sensitive as my mother be so crass and tactless!
I fled, and put my coat on. Don hurriedly got up, and seemed to my over-heated feelings to be in an indecent haste to say his goodbyes, thank yous, and get away.
He said little in the car on the way up to the hospital, seeming more thoughtful than cross. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking. Until the interference of our parents we had both jogged along happily, going forward slightly in our relationship, but never getting to a point where either of us wanted to get engaged or give up the whole thing. Now it seemed to me a decision was being forced on us, whether we wanted it or not. It rather frightened me, because I didn’t know what the answer was.
Don drove slowly, whether by accident or design, and we arrived at the hospital just before six.
We sat in the car and had a cigarette; I told him a few bits of hospital gossip and he mentioned casually a few of the events on the farm. We were both, I knew, ill at ease.
A bus drove up full of visitors, and the cars began to fill the parking ground.
‘Time,’ said Don.
‘Look,’ I said desperately, ‘I’d better just go to my room and get tidy.’
‘No,’ said Don. ‘You’ll be all night, and I don’t like being late to see her.’
We entered the hospital. Being in theatre, I had no contact with the wards; all I ever saw of them was a fleeting glimpse as I pushed back a patient from theatre; then I never had time to take in the surroundings. Now I could see the wards through the eyes of a casual visitor; they looked bright and filled with flowers; not in their everyday garb of stripped utility, as they appear to the patients and nurses who spend their time there.
Don guided my elbow firmly forward down the corridor, but let go quickly as we reached the entrance to the small end ward, and we were strictly non-touching as we made our entrance.
Mrs McKie looked up anxiously. She was a small dark woman with her son’s blue eyes and an open-air, red and brown complexion. Don kissed her briefly and murmured ‘This is Jane, Mother.’
He gestured vaguely, in my direction and then seized one of the magazines on his mother’s bed-table and sitting down, promptly became engrossed in it.
‘Oh, so you’re Jane!’ The accent on the ‘you’re’ left no doubt that I was one amongst many, any of whom might have been called Jane. ‘I’m so pleased to see you.’
I smiled and replied that I was pleased too.
She went on rapidly: ‘Awful, Don’s got so secretive that we never know any more of his important secrets till well after everyone else. One day he arrived with a brand new pig-feeder and we didn’t know he was even thinking of getting one!’
Her eyes seemed to be eagerly searching my face, looking for any outstanding giveaway features.
I smiled weakly at what was obviously meant to be smiled at, but actually I rather resented being compared to a pig-feeder.
I looked pointedly at my hand, which Mrs McKie was still firmly holding.
‘Ah,’ she exclaimed approvingly ‒ her trace of Scottish intonation making the ‘ah’ almost an ‘och’. ‘Yours are working hands, I can see ‒ like Don’s.’
I saw her glance quickly at my left hand, and seeing no incriminating evidence she obviously decided that pig-feeders her son might surprise her with, but fiancées, no.
She released my good working hands, and I then didn’t know what to do with them.
There was a dreadful pause. ‘Well, now, Jane,’ she began again, ‘tell me, how do you like nursing?’
This is one of the questions one is always being asked, and to which if one is honest there is no flat answer. Should one say ‘Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t,’ or ‘I don’t know about liking it, it is my job and I wouldn’t do any other.’
I replied as I generally do, ‘Yes, fairly well.’
Mrs McKie was going to get down to basics very quickly.
‘Since I’ve been in hospital I’ve realized what wonderful girls you are. It must be a fearful strain, there’s one staff nurse here who comes every day, she’s married and has to run her home as well, I do think nurses should give up when they are married, it’s such a demanding job, I mean nursing of course. And marriage.’
Really, this was worse than my mother’s blundering questions and tactless comments. I was getting no support from Don whatsoever. He was showing surprising interest in a copy of Beautiful Homes, and giving no sign of hearing any of this one-sided conversation.
‘Er-how are you getting on?’ I asked limply.
‘Very well really. Thanks to you.’
‘To me?’
‘Yes. Don told me how you were in charge of the theatre when I had my op. If you hadn’t done your job well the surgeons couldn’t have, could they?’
I could only hope these sentiments were not repeated to anyone else. I could just see Camden’s face on being informed that he was incapable of doing an operation without my help.
‘Well, I hope everything will go on all right,’ I said lamely.
‘But fancy you getting to be a Sister! It’s very grand, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, it’s just a matter of hanging on,’ I said.
‘And Don ‒ you know I was reading that only the very best are selected for London hospitals. Three out of five applicants are rejected. What’s that in percentages?’
‘Sixty per cent,’ said Don without looking up.
‘Sixty per cent! Of course out of those accepted, forty per cent, very few can become Sisters.’
I glanced at the clock. I didn’t know how much longer I could put up with this one-sided adulation. I racked my brain to think of another subject of conversation, and was about to mention the well-loved Sister Sadd, when I was astounded to see Mrs McKie sit upright, to watch her face suddenly wreathed in smiles, and to hear her exclaim, ‘Darling!’
A large woman sailed past me into the enveloping arms of Don’s mother.
‘Lovely to see you!’
‘Well, Betty, I must say you’re looking remarkably well. The rest is doing you good.’ The large woman spoke firmly, making this remark a statement of fact. She looked quickly at me, dismissed me as a nobody, and her gaze moved on to Don, who had got up to offer her his chair.
‘Surely this can’t be Don!’ she exclaimed. ‘Almost the last time I saw him he had that dreadful nappy rash. Do you remember, Betty?’
Don’s mother came to his assistance. ‘Theo, what nonsense! You’ve seen him several times since then.’
‘I remember it distinctly. It was very stubborn, and I thought at one point it might be worms.’
Don’s expression of polite discomfort was hardening into disgust. Mrs McKie gave a slight laugh, responding to the high-pitched one of her friend, who evidently thought the joke excellent.
Then she turned to me.
‘This is Don’s girlfriend, Jane.’ She obviously knew that set expression on Don’s face, and was doing her best to distract Theo from her shaming reminiscences.
‘Oh, Don’s got a girlfriend now, has he? But I suppose he must be in his twenties now?’
‘Theo, don’t be ridiculous! He’s two years older than Teddy, and Teddy must be twenty-five at least.’
‘Yes, of course, so he is.’ Theo’s face suddenly looked pinched. ‘It’s amazing how time slips away.’
Mrs McKie turned to me again. ‘Jane, you must forgive me, my dear. I’ve known Theo all my life. I’m afraid I assume that everyone else does. She is Mrs Banyard, and her son is house surgeon here, I expect you’v
e met him in the Theatre. Jane is the Sister in Theatres here, you know,’ she explained to Theo.
‘Oh, all in the profession together,’ said Theo. ‘I’m a surgeon, you know. Don’t practise now, my time’s filled up with other sorts of hospital work. I always wanted Teddy to be a surgeon, so much more opportunity for men of course.’
I said, ‘As he’s H.S. to the Senior Registrar, I often see him in theatres.’
‘I understand he’s shaping up very well,’ said Theo. ‘Of course he’s had it easy. I had to fight every inch of the way. Much easier to be a nurse, my dear.’
‘Jane’s a Sister,’ said Mrs McKie firmly. ‘I was just saying how difficult it must be to get to that stage ‒ I mean only forty per cent of girls are accepted for training by the real hospitals.’
‘Oh come off it, Betty, you know nothing about it,’ said Theo firmly. ‘Nurses can get just as much training in the Little Wallop Royal Infirmary. As for the odds against rising in one’s profession ‒’ she dismissed my claim to fame with a snap of her broad capable fingers ‒ ‘you should try being a woman doctor. When I first decided to become a doctor ‒’
It was delivered like the lecture it was. She stood at the bottom of the bed, occasionally emphasizing a point with her spatulated fingers, oblivious to my fascinated stare, Don’s look of amazement, and the glazed, weary expression of Mrs McKie’s eyes.
She stopped at last, rather suddenly. Perhaps she was out of breath. Perhaps it had suddenly come over her that this was a social occasion, not a talk to sixth-formers on ‘What career shall I choose?’
I saw Mrs McKie was tired out, and I was about to suggest that Don and I should leave her, hoping Mrs Banyard would take the hint, but just at that moment there was an interruption. Bustling little Staff Nurse Copley came in from the corridor with a bunch of raffle tickets for Matron’s Ball.
‘Oh ‒ the Friends of Fawley Ball?’ said Theo. ‘That’s in June, isn’t it? Oh, Betty, I’ve got a grand idea!’
I was buying raffle tickets, and did not hear the grand idea, which was delivered in rather a low tone of voice. Copley had begun to rally Don. ‘Come on, you must have a book, a big man like you. Marvellous prizes!’
