by Mary Hazard
So, I pushed past Percy and Jenny, and left them arguing the point, while I looked around the kitchen and examined the contents of an old-fashioned walk-in larder. There were several fish laid out on dishes, covered with greaseproof paper, presumably for that night’s meal. What else was there? I found some butter, cheese, and then on the side I found several loaves of white bread, ready for breakfast, I supposed. There were piles of potatoes in nets, but so much time had passed while I’d been dithering and panicking, debating and crying, there was no time now to start preparing anything cooked at all. But still I thought I should try: so I got a heavy frying pan, some lard, and started frying one of the fish. It burnt on one side and started disintegrating, and then I thought, ‘Hell, what about the potatoes?’ and started crying all over again. Disgusting fishy smoke was billowing up from the pan. Jenny appeared in my face, turned off the gas, and said, irritatedly, ‘It’s no good, Mary. Stop it, for goodness’ sake. You’ve got to get the union involved.’ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’ve got to give them something. It’s too late for all that now – they’re all expecting something, aren’t they?’ I was aware of a queue forming and ravenous staff looking mighty disgruntled and confused, to say the least. ‘Will you help me now, if I say I’ll go to the union afterwards?’ Jenny looked annoyed, but after a moment she thought a bit as she was not one to give up on a fight. But then, to my relief, she said, ‘Of course, Mary. Where shall we start?’
Between us we found all the bread and cheese we could muster, and we made piles of thick cheese sandwiches. Everyone was disgusted at there being no hot food available, and there was much shouting and complaining: ‘Call this dinner?’ or ‘Blimey, is that all we get?’ We just emptied the larder of all the cold edibles, and hoped for the best. I found a box of biscuits, some slabs of Battenberg cake and some Cox’s apples, and there was a general air of disdain, but people were hungry and they fell on what they could get their hands on. Meanwhile, Percy got the urn on, and we made pots and pots of tea, which seemed to calm people down. A good old cuppa, that always seemed to be the thing to smooth things over. I’d learned that was always the English way. Anything could be solved with a nice cup of tea. By the end of the dinner break, which was about three in the morning, I had finally done the washing up and tried to make the kitchen look presentable, at least. I felt like I’d been through a huge experience, and was sure I’d be in trouble with Ivy once she found we’d eaten her week’s supply of bread and cheese, and cake and apples.
Anyway, the next day Percy and Jenny went to the union, the National Union of Public Employees, unbeknown to me. Apparently there were clear demarcations about what staff should or shouldn’t do, and kitchen work belonged to catering staff, not nurses, and there were strict regulations that covered it all. I didn’t realise that things were so regimented by law, and perhaps I was naïve. I thought of Putney Hospital as one great big community and so, in a way, I thought the Beetle had had a right to get me to do something out of the ordinary, because it was a sort of ‘everyone muck in’ kind of regime. But apparently not. Apparently the gardening staff had different rules to the catering staff, and we nurses were in a different union, or section of a union, to the porters, and so on. This was a total eye-opener to me. I was also surprised, in a way, that people took it all so seriously, although, coming from Ireland, I should have known that anything vaguely political always touched a raw nerve in people and trouble always followed. It always came down to rights, and people getting hot under the collar about wanting to exert or fight for them. I definitely should have known better, given I’d lived with my father long enough, talking about being on the barricades, to know how much it all mattered.
Anyway, inevitably, the next day I was summoned to Matron’s office. I was terrified. I knew it must be about the whole night duty dinner incident. Had I cost the hospital hundreds of pounds in using all the wrong stuff? Was I going to be sent home? I was in a real state as I found myself staring, yet again, at Matron’s grey plush carpet. That damned carpet, I’d have to bin it one day, ceremoniously, I thought, staring at its bright strips of colour. ‘Nurse Powell,’ Matron snipped in her cut-glass English voice, ‘I believe there was an altercation about the cooking last night?’ Sweet Jesus, I wanted the floor to swallow me up – how did she know all this already? I bet it was that bloody Beetle woman. I imagined the letter home to my mother saying I’d been a disgrace to the nursing profession, and that I was thrown out, just as she’d predicted, so I spluttered out: ‘Yes, Matron. I can’t cook, and I was told to cook, and it was a disaster, as everyone was shouting at me, and I couldn’t make hot food, and we had to raid the larder. It was terrible, and I used up all Ivy’s supply of food for the week, too.’ Matron sat quietly for a moment, obviously thinking. I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, I’m for it,’ but I tried not to make things worse by saying any more right now. ‘Well,’ said Matron, slowly, and fixing me with her cold blue eyes, ‘I hear Percy has got NUPE involved now. You know it’s for the likes of street cleaners, road sweepers and domestic servants, don’t you, nurse? Is that what you’ve come down to?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I stared at Matron, unbelieving, and had no idea what to say. She was so icy, such a snob, I’d never heard anything like it in my whole life. But Matron was not finished. ‘We’re professionals, nurse – and we don’t associate ourselves with the likes of NUPE.’ I could feel my blood beginning to boil, despite the precarious position I was in. ‘“We don’t associate with the likes of NUPE” – who did she think she was? The Queen?’ I tried to bite my tongue, but failed. ‘But, Matron,’ I began to explain, ‘Percy’s a porter and …’ Matron put up her hand, and stopped me, mid-flow. ‘Indeed, Nurse Powell, a porter, not a nurse, not one of us.’ ‘One of us,’ indeed. I felt my face go red. In fact, all Percy had done was try to protect me, and had actually helped me out, got into trouble for it, no doubt. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to melt into an invisible cloud. I stood there feeling miserable: I was always in trouble, always getting it wrong. I could never seem to get it right. Slowly, the tears seeped down my cheeks, no matter how hard I bit my lip. I’d always been in trouble with the bloody nuns, or my mother, or someone who thought they knew better. Now I was in trouble with Sister and with Matron – and now the union. Nothing would ever change. It seemed everyone around me always thought they knew better, and I always seemed to be the one to mess things up, and end up in the poo. I could hear Matron continuing, so I tried to concentrate and wiped away my tears. ‘You’ve let yourself down, nurse,’ she was saying haughtily, ‘and you’ve let the side down.’ She paused for effect, and I stood rooted to the spot, wanting this ordeal to end. ‘Anyway, you won’t have to worry tonight, as Ivy will be back, so you won’t have to cook.’ And with that, I was dismissed, and had to go back to my duties, feeling less than one inch tall.
That night, hunched on my bed, I described the scene with Matron to an irate Jenny, over a bottle of Merrydown and a packet of Woodbines. However, I was amazed when Jenny even rebuked me: ‘Why didn’t you tell Matron that she was treating you like a domestic servant, so going to NUPE was bloody appropriate in the circumstances?’ Oh, Lord, I was being told off by Jenny now, who was equally disappointed in me. Why couldn’t people leave me alone? To do things my way? Thing was, Jenny was always much more feisty than me, and I’d seen her stand up to Sister and stand her ground with Staff. She was used to fighting her corner, and was absolutely great at it. I felt like I always felt at home, squeezed in the middle and utterly useless. Quite often there would be ‘murders’ in the house, with my mother shouting at my older sisters, with me caught in between; or there would be my mother shouting at everyone, and my father trying to placate her, over my head. Of course, at other times she was a good, caring mother, who taught us to behave, to knit, to sew and to cook. It was often a war zone at home, and now it was a war zone at work, too. And I was still getting it wrong. I felt upset that Jenny wasn’t more sympathetic, and I sulked a bit, but we soon found t
he funny side, as we always did, and after our evening of cider and ciggies, and hot gossip about the rest of the hospital, we put the world and our friendship to rights. In the end, Jenny took me up to London, on a day off, and I joined the Royal College of Nursing as a member. I remember going into this really posh building, and signing up and paying my dues. After a lot of late-night chats with Jenny and my other colleagues, I understood, finally, how important it was to belong to something that did collective bargaining, as individuals always got picked off, somehow. I made sure I read the rule book, and then felt proud of belonging to a wonderful organisation like that, which represented nurses up and down the land. And I would continue to be a proud member of the profession, and the RCN union, which campaigns for us as a professional group as a whole, for the next sixty years and more.
Amazingly, and perhaps fortuitously, I found myself being given a six-week course of ‘housekeeping training’ soon after the night-duty dinner incident, which included learning how to cook. It was thought that nurses needed to understand a lot about diet and nutrition, and we were taught how to prepare food for the patients with special dietary requirements. In fact, at first, it came down to a lot of scrubbing of potatoes, washing of cabbages and cutting up of carrots. There were big sinks full of vegetables and we seemed to spend hours scrubbing, peeling, chopping, slicing and cutting out all the bad bits for the pig bin. I also seemed to spend hours washing up. I hated this job. The pans were enormous, and heavy, and inevitably had something burned and disgusting on the bottom, so it was scrub, scrub, scrub all over again. I guess it was good training for my later stints in the Lyons Corner Houses, where I would supplement my meagre income with hours of washing up for a few shillings extra. The rest of the housekeeping training involved learning about special diets: for diabetics (no sugar obviously), gastric ulcers (no acidic foods, like citrus fruits) and others. We would spend hours measuring out careful amounts for each particular patient, using old-fashioned Salter weighing scales with brass weights. We would weigh the porridge oats, the cornflakes, the sugar, the bread and milk. It was all carefully worked out, and thus Mr So-and-So on men’s medical would get his cornflakes, carefully measured, without sugar, to help him in the morning, as a consequence. We also spent time observing the catering staff as they chopped, sliced, prepared, boiled and cooked, which was great fun and invaluable training for my later life. The very best thing about our housekeeping training was that the day ended at four thirty, after all the washing up was done and stacked up, which seemed like sheer luxury to those of us who were usually running about at the beck and call of Sister and Staff from dawn until dusk. It was almost like going on holiday; at least it was a change, and we learned something that would be useful for ourselves later on in life.
11
Theatre Tales
As part of my training, I had to do a three-month stint in the operating theatre during my second year. I was very excited about this, as it felt like it was proper, serious medicine, and that I would finally be at the heart of the hospital’s main proceedings. After all, going down to theatre was always very dramatic, and it was often make-or-break as to whether someone would survive an operation or not. I held surgeons in high esteem, thinking they were absolutely marvellous and I was totally in awe of what they could achieve. I had watched the usually very posh and tall consultant surgeons as they wafted round the surgical wards the day before an operation, and they always looked like demi-gods. The patients would sit up, or lie prone, being very obedient and silent, while the consultant surgeon spoke over their heads to the house doctors and Sister, explaining about the case and what they would be doing the next day. I often felt sorry for the poor patients, lying there, with no idea what exactly was going to happen to them, as they were often terrified of ‘going under the knife’. (This was way before it was thought to be a good idea to explain to the patient exactly what was going to happen to them during an operation.)
However, once I’d been in a real theatre, I began to see exactly why they should be terrified. I would have been, too. I’d always imagined that the atmosphere would be a hallowed, silent place, with highly intellectual and medical discussion taking place in lofty tones. Far from it: the theatre resembled more of a butcher’s shop, with a lot of chat or loose talk, even jokes, and it was often shockingly brutal in its dealings. Indeed, I learned a lot about how resilient the body really can be from my stint in the theatre, which is where all the real drama of the hospital is played out. At first, I was very frightened of going into theatre itself, as it seemed such an alien, hallowed place. It was a very regimented atmosphere, and even more daunting than the usual routines I’d already experienced under either Sister’s or Matron’s eagle eyes on the wards. The main operating theatre was a large rectangular room with windows all along the top of the outside wall, letting in light and where we could see the tops of some trees. The room was covered with white swabbable tiles, from floor to ceiling, and the operating table was in the centre under a huge light that could be manipulated to vary its height and angles. There were the ubiquitous sterilisers bubbling away in the trolley room, which was adjacent to the theatre. There were glass cupboards full of instruments and other implements along one wall. It was drummed into me continually that hygiene, sanitation and sterilisation were all of the utmost importance, especially here. It literally meant the difference between life or death, due to the need for infection control. My job as a theatre nurse was, at first, simply to observe. I had found my experience at the morgue hard to handle, but by now, a year into my training, I had seen quite a few things, and lots of blood, pus, wounds, breaks, lacerations, aborted foetuses, smashed spines, and even my fair share of dead bodies. The purpose of any operation was to focus on one precise site on the body, and to do some very fine handiwork, and I was fascinated to watch the procedures that the surgeons seemed to carry out with such amazing deftness and confidence. I would have been terrified to take a scalpel in my trembling hand and cut someone open, but the surgeons seemed to go about it just like they were peeling an orange, and with as little hesitation, emotion or fear. I guess that’s why they were paid so much more than us, and also revered by us all – they were the mavericks of medicine.
My job, once I was given one, was to fetch the surgical instruments from the sterilisers and then to lay them out, in precise order, on a metal side trolley, ready for the surgeon to use. The instruments had to come out of the steriliser at the right time, just before the operation: not too early, so that they lost their sterility, and not too late, so they would not be too hot to hold. They had to be put in a certain order, so the assisting nurse could hand them to the surgeon as he called out for what he wanted to use next. The surgeon and his housemen assistants would scrub up in the sluice next door – another room with huge metal sinks and taps – which took quite a time before the operation started. They would scrub and scrub their hands mercilessly with soap and nail brushes. We all had to do that, and then rinse and dry on clean towels. Then they’d put on rubber gloves and the consultant would waft in, followed by his deferential entourage. I remember one surgeon was particularly small, and he had to stand on a box in order to reach his patient on the operating table. This did look fairly comic, although I wouldn’t have dared laugh, obviously. It was more than my job was worth. As our hospital was located near to Putney Bridge, we had a stream of young men come in for emergency operations, who had been involved in horrible motorcycle accidents on the Kingston bypass. Back then no one wore a helmet, or very few, and motorcycles were often in collision with lorries, buses or cars. I saw many a lad come in with a leg half-hanging off, or with terrible head injuries, or smashed spine, and these were a real surgical challenge. The poor guys usually lost their legs, if not their lives.
One job I had to do, which always stayed with me, was being what they called the ‘dirty nurse’ in theatre. I had to put on a big white apron over my theatre kit (a green mask, a hat covering all my hair, overalls and rubber gloves) and stand
in the corner of the theatre, by the sink, which was against the wall, near to the sluice. Then I had to catch the limbs and bits and pieces as they were literally chopped out or off. As the consultant amputated some poor patient’s limbs, he would wield his silver surgical instruments, which looked like hammers, scissors, even saws and knives, and then he would throw the rest of the leg, arm or other bits of the body that he’d removed towards me. My job was to catch the slippery bloody thing in my apron, and then take it over to the sink and plonk it on the draining board in the sluice. It was really quite gruesome, and I had to pinch myself afterwards quite often that I’d been holding someone’s leg or arm in my hands. The rest, like the innards, like spleens and livers, went into silver bowls. It was bizarre and I was often traumatised, I can tell you. I asked one of the less intimidating housemen what happened to the limbs and he said, quite jovially, ‘Oh, they’ll go in the incinerator.’ It was all very matter-of-fact, and there was no room for me to be squeamish at all. What always affected me was the seemingly jolly way in which the surgeons went about their business, whistling, or humming, or chatting about golf. I was very impressed by how confident the surgeons were, but they were definitely a breed apart; dare I say, almost inhuman? I would never have dared to speak to one, and I would watch, fearfully, as they snapped their instructions to the assisting nurse – ‘scalpel’, ‘swab’ or ‘clamp’ – and the sterilised implement would be picked up and slapped firmly in his gloved hand, definitely and surely. I hoped I never had to do this as I imagined I’d drop it on the floor, or miss his hand altogether, as I was so utterly terrified of getting it wrong, and then there’d be an almighty rumpus and more carpeting, no doubt.
