The Angels of Lovely Lane

by Nadine Dorries

  Pammy frowned. ‘Bit of a know-it-all you are, eh, Beth?’

  ‘Not really.’ No hint of irritation in Pammy’s voice was going to throw Beth off her stride. ‘They have the same equipment in the military hospital in Germany. I saw the nurses packing them up once. They were just the same.’

  ‘When did you see that?’ Pammy was never afraid to speak, or ask a question, and frequently said what the others were thinking. All three girls felt in awe of Beth and the knowledge she already appeared to have acquired. But before she could answer Sister Ryan’s voice rang out down the corridor.

  ‘Into the classroom, everyone, and after the first lesson you are to form a queue outside my office to collect your Evelyn Pearce anatomy and physiology books and sign your deduction slips.’ Each nurse had to pay for her own textbooks and the cost would be taken from the first month’s pay. Sister Ryan had spoken and they all hurried along, passing a long room with internal windows that appeared to be laid out like a ward.

  ‘Look at those poor patients,’ said Pammy, as they walked past the window. ‘They must be cold. They have nothing on their arms.’

  The girls began to giggle, but in a moment of clarity Dana became aware that Pammy wasn’t joking.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, they aren’t real,’ Beth said impatiently. ‘They’re just dummies. You really are ridiculous.’

  ‘Oi, you. Don’t call me ridiculous. How was I to know? I’ve never even set foot inside a hospital before today. I’m only here because of our Lorraine and me mam. Are you sure they are only dummies?’ They all pressed their faces against the glass to take a closer look and Pammy shrieked with fright at the sight of the skeleton hanging in the corner of the room. Beth sighed.

  As they walked in through the classroom door, Pammy pulled an exaggerated face at Beth behind her back and was spotted by Celia Forsyth.

  ‘You won’t be pulling that face, Nurse Tanner, when you fail your PTS exam.’

  ‘Who says I’m going to fail?’ Pammy hissed.

  This was not a possibility that had ever crossed Pammy’s mind and she looked both shocked and frightened at the prospect. Beth did seem to be terribly clever, and come to that, so did Celia Forsyth. Pammy glared at them both as she took her place along the bench. Beth sat next to Celia and they both smiled at Pammy. They could see self-doubt all over her face and Celia took pleasure from the fact that she had been the cause of it.

  After a few minutes Sister Ryan walked into the room accompanied by Sister Haycock, who was wearing a white coat. The girls stood up like children in a classroom. Pammy recognized Sister Haycock from the interview and smiled at her, remembering that the nursing director had told her she was originally from George Street. It must have been a long time ago, at least before the war, Pammy thought; today, George Street was a makeshift football pitch and a playground for all the children who lived off the dock road. She was saddened by the fact that Sister Haycock didn’t seem to recognize her, or smile back. But why would she recognize me, Pammy reasoned with herself. She must have interviewed dozens of girls. Maisie and Stan had been secretive, but it was clear that they knew who she was, just by the name on the letter. Pammy felt a sudden sharp sense of disappointment and knew it for what it was. She was sure she had felt a bond with Sister Haycock on the day of her interview. She had obviously been wrong.

  ‘Sit yourselves down, ladies,’ said Sister Ryan. ‘This is Sister Haycock, the director of nursing. Some of you may have met her at your interview. She is in charge around here and will be taking you for all your anatomy and physiology lessons, and will prepare you for your final examinations in three years’ time. Your ward-based tasks will be assessed by the ward sisters, who will mark and sign your work cards, which will be distributed shortly. Various assessments are undertaken by Sister Haycock and myself, and we will visit you on the wards ourselves in order to carry these out. Your initial twelve weeks will be in the classroom, at the end of which you will take your first exam, and then we let you out on to the wards before we bring you back in here for another week of lessons. If you pass,’ she paused for effect, ‘and let me tell you, I do mean if, because not all do. You will then begin your first full ward placements. Do you have any questions, nurses?’

  Without hesitation, Pammy raised her hand. ‘Sister Ryan, who does that skeleton belong to that’s hanging up in the corner of the ward room? It gave me the creeps, that did. I mean, is it real? Was that a real person once?’

  ‘I told you she was going to be difficult,’ said Sister Ryan to Emily as she walked past her and out of the room.

  *

  As soon as they finished writing up the notes from the blackboard, Sister Haycock asked for a volunteer to hand out the papers in the classroom. Beth and Celia had their hands up first. Dana felt herself bristle as Celia dropped the notes on to her desk. She hadn’t forgotten her sneering on the stairs earlier that morning.

  She looked around the classroom at the other probationers. She felt a chill and wondered how they would cope, wearing what was in effect a summer dress in the dead of winter. She hated to have her arms bare at the best of times. Years of milking and reaping, cutting the turf and working outdoors had given her the hardest, freckliest arms, more like those of a farmhand than a nurse. Dana looked at the delicate, pale pink limbs of the girls around her and then down at her own, and wished she had anyone else’s. Rubbing her forearms with her hands, both to warm herself and in a subconscious attempt to conceal them, she whispered to Beth, who was sitting next to her, ‘I’m sure the dummies are fine, but why aren’t we allowed to wear cardigans? Will we not be allowed to wear them on the wards?’

  ‘Standards, dear girl,’ Beth replied. ‘That’s what my pa would say, anyway. Mrs Duffy told me last night you can wear a navy woolly on nights, after lights out. When no patients or visitors can see you.’

  Every time Beth spoke, she made Dana feel stupid. She made a mental note to write home and ask her mother to knit a second navy blue woolly as soon as possible. ‘Do you have one, Beth?’ she whispered, about to offer her mother’s services. She knew her mammy wouldn’t mind; in fact, she would be thrilled, and Dana was desperate to impress Beth in some way. But Beth just looked at her over the rim of her glasses.

  ‘Of course I have a woolly. I have two of everything.’

  Dana felt stung by her response. She had the strong impression that Beth would rather she didn’t speak to her.

  Pammy looked down at the notes on her desk and could barely understand a single word on the sheet in front of her. The diagram on the board, which they had to copy into their notebooks, had been difficult and made her wrist ache. The passage headed Squamous Epithelium on the sheet in front of her was incomprehensible. Her head ached as much as her wrist, if not more. She had highlighted the different layers of skin, follicles, muscles and cells in various shades from the tin of coloured pencils which had been on the list of essential items to bring to the classroom.

  ‘God, you need to be a Philadelphia lawyer to understand all of this,’ she said out loud, quoting a well-used Liverpool expression with no clue of what a Philadelphia lawyer was.

  Sister Haycock, sitting at her desk, bent her head and placed her hands over her eyes. She couldn’t help herself: Pammy made her smile and that was not something she did very often. Recovering herself quickly, she stood to address the class.

  ‘Care of a patient’s skin will be one of your most pressing daily concerns,’ she said. ‘Many of your patients will be bedbound for varying periods of time. Even a dilatation and curettage on the gynae ward requires ten days’ post-operative bed rest.’

  Pammy turned to Victoria and whispered, ‘A dittyation and what?’

  Sister Haycock continued, ‘If a patient is in poor health to begin with, or is suffering from the trauma of surgery, a deprivation of fresh oxygenated blood to the areas of greatest pressure will result in the skin quickly breaking down. Your job is to prevent this happening. There is only one reason for the existenc
e of a pressure sore and that is poor nursing care.’ She wrote the words PRESSURE SORES in big letters on the blackboard.

  ‘If any of you ever make it to the giddy heights of being a ward sister, you will be judged by your management of pressure sores, sometimes called bedsores, although that is, in my book, lazy terminology and puts the blame on the bed, not on the nurse. If pressure sores occur as a matter of course on your ward, your reputation will suffer, badly. It will be a mark of shame. Do you all understand that?’

  A classroom of speechless young women, unused to their starched and precariously balanced caps, nodded carefully in unison.

  ‘Sister Ryan will teach you the practicalities of looking after your patients well, but please never forget that the prevention of pressure sores will always dominate your nursing career wherever you may go. I am here to teach you the anatomy and physiology of the skin. By the time I have finished, you will understand how the skin works. But now you all look as though you are in complete shock. I reckon it’s time for the break, and if my sense of smell is on form, Mrs Kennedy and the maids have lunch ready in the refectory on the ground floor.’

  Dana could have leapt for joy. Her stomach had been rumbling for the past hour and she was sure others in the classroom could hear it.

  ‘Leave quietly please, nurses,’ Sister Haycock said, as the thumping and clattering of desk lids filled the room. ‘Silence is a virtue and one you will all become familiar with when you are working on the wards.’

  Dana looked around at the others and felt a sense of relief. Yes, they all looked as bemused and browbeaten as she must. Pammy exclaimed, far too loudly, ‘God, me head is banging now. I don’t know about them dummies, it’s me what needs a lie down.’

  Dana shot an anxious look towards Sister Haycock. She expected Pammy to be reprimanded for being noisy. Instead she was sure that she saw a faint smile twitch at Sister Haycock’s lips, but it disappeared just as quickly and she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Darling, me too,’ whispered Victoria. ‘What about you, Beth?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll all get there, I’m sure. It won’t take long. Preparation and study is the key,’ said Beth, and the others groaned.

  *

  When Dana wrote her first letter home that week, she wrote more about the food than she did about the hospital, but she knew her mammy would be interested in two things above anything else. Where she was attending mass, and what she was eating.

  There is a room we all eat in on the ground floor of the school, but today we were shown the hospital canteen. That is where we will eat when we are out of the school and on the wards. We will have three breaks each day, called refs, which means refreshments, in case you don’t know. One mid-morning and another mid-afternoon with lunch in between. The canteen was bursting at the seams with groups of nurses and staff walking in and out to take their morning refs.

  At the bottom of the canteen, opposite the doors where you enter, are three big tables and on each table is a huge big urn of milky coffee, with a burner underneath to keep it warm. Mammy, I have never in me life tasted anything so delicious as the coffee. Why do we not have coffee at home? I never even knew what it was and Victoria must have thought I was a right eejit. In the afternoon, the urns are full of tea. The kitchen staff walk around the tables with a big wooden trolley piled high with slices of toast dripping in butter and they hand it out on plates and we don’t have to pay for any of it.

  Sister Tutor said nurses are very bad at eating in the mornings and too many faint too often because of it, so they make sure everyone has something on their stomach. We pay for the lunch, which we take it in turns to eat when the patients have finished theirs. There is a lady in the kitchen here in the school, her name is Biddy Kennedy and she is Irish. She was from Cork and she knows the Brogans in Belmullet. She says she has a sister whose mother-in-law knew Granny Brogan’s cousin. I think I am her favourite, because she keeps slipping biscuits into my apron pocket and today she said when ye write home to yer mammy, tell her Biddy is looking after ye. She is very nice, Mammy.

  I had sausages today with onion gravy and mashed potatoes and then a jam roly-poly with custard afterwards. Sister Tutor says we are all too skinny and need fattening up before she lets us loose on the wards. She’s talking to the others when she says that, not me. I am twice the width of most of them and I’ve said they need to come back home and be fed by you.

  She says that some of the patients we will have to lift will snap our backs in two if we don’t put some muscle on. Mammy, I almost laughed out loud. Will there be a patient as heavy as the dead heifer the kids and I carried down from the field last year? I don’t want to be put on the wards. I am scared stiff so I am. I am even scared in the practical room in the school. I’ve never had to touch another human body before. I’m happier with the pigs, but I will just have to get on with it, I suppose. Tomorrow is mortuary day. Jesus, I am out of my mind about that one. We have to go and see where the patients are taken to when they die and we have to see how they are labelled and placed in the fridges. Imagine that? If I don’t faint, it will be a miracle.

  Dana wrote about the new friends she had made, and that she had attended mass. She failed to mention that it was only the once. She knew her mammy would write back and want to know where and when. Who was the priest and where was he from? She knew her well enough to know that if she told her the priest was Irish, which he was, she would have tracked his family down and spoken to someone who knew him within the week. The priest had made an attempt to speak to Dana as she left but she had rushed out, skirting around the ladies hogging his attention. She would escape his questioning for as long as possible.

  Dana didn’t tell her mother everything. She failed to mention the stranger who had churned up her mind or the impact the new medical students had on the girls.

  ‘Oh my God, they are gorgeous,’ Pammy had said as they stood upstairs in the school of nursing’s main corridor on the first day, looking out of the window on to the car park below at a group of white-coated medical students parading across to the wards from the medical school. ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, would ye look at him,’ she went on, not specifying which particular doctor she was referring to.

  ‘They are men,’ said Beth, to a chorus of squeals and giggles. ‘If you had ever lived on an army camp, it is a sight you would be used to. Men in uniform do nothing for me, I’m afraid, not even when they are wearing white coats and carrying stethoscopes.’

  ‘Well, they do it for me,’ said Pammy, who was beginning to sense that she might enjoy her freedom from Arthur Street more than she had anticipated.

  Just as Pammy finished speaking, one of the medical students looked up at the window. Dana felt her heart beat faster. It was Teddy. He raised an arm into the air and laughed, walking backwards. She noticed that Victoria raised her arm in return and felt confused. Dark horse, she thought. The other medical students now looked up at the window and broke out into a rapture of wolf whistles.

  ‘Oh my God, let me down those stairs now. Hiya, lads!’ shouted Pammy, cupping her mouth with her hands to the glass, apparently having completely forgotten where she was. ‘Look at the one in the front. Isn’t he gorgeous? Do you think he’s waving at me?’ Pammy was now jumping up and down on the spot and waving back out of the window.

  Dana was sure Teddy was waving to her. ‘Well, would you look at you,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even had the first lesson and you’re after a doctor.’

  ‘Yeah, but no doctor will look at me twice, I don’t suppose, coming from Arthur Street. I would be ashamed to take a fella like one of them back to ours. I bet they all live in nice houses and went to a proper school. Mine closed down when I was there, twice. I have that effect on teachers. Me mam says it was probably my fault that the headmistress had a nervous breakdown, but it wasn’t. It was nothing to do with me, I swear to God.’ Pammy roared with laughter just as Biddy walked past.

  ‘You need to keep that down, Nurse Tanner,’ said Biddy, without
slowing. ‘You’ll come a cropper if you don’t lower the volume.’

  Pammy pulled a face.

  ‘Ah, don’t,’ said Dana, nudging her. ‘She’s nice.’

  Dana had kept the story of her encounter with Teddy to herself, being reluctant to share it with anyone. He was her secret. She had thought about him often. She felt as though she had already known him for an age. She remembered the way he had tried to hand her the lit cigarette. The knowing, self-confident look in his eyes. He had made her stomach turn to jelly and every time she thought of him the same thing happened. It made her breathless and giddy and all from just a single five-minute conversation and that one smile from a stranger.

  Mortuary Friday arrived far too quickly. The girls were unusually quiet as they made their way up to the school of nursing from Lovely Lane. Exhausted from the sheer amount of information their brains had been forced to absorb, they looked like four very different girls from the ones who had walked up to the hospital on Monday. The bounce in the step, the wobble of the cap, the bright smiles and cheery hellos to everyone they passed had been replaced with a slower march and bent shoulders as they held the fronts of their capes together against the stiff January chill.

  ‘Lizzie says to eat a mint before you go in,’ said Pammy. ‘She knocked on me door as she passed this mornin’ and left us these.’ She thrust her hand into her apron pocket and produced a crumpled white paper bag. Inside were four damp and sticky mint humbugs. ‘She says the sugar in the mint, as well as the smell, will help.’

  ‘What a sweetie she is. She really looks out for us,’ said Victoria. ‘I think because your room is almost on the staircase you will have a lot of people knocking on your door, Pammy.’