One Night in London: a hospital in wartime (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)

by Lucilla Andrews

  He didn’t hesitate. He knew she was just playing hard to get and he didn’t hold it against her. He was twenty-three. He understood women. ‘You’re on. I’ll nip it up later. Now about our date ‒’

  She waved him to silence and tilted her head to listen. ‘Night Sister’s heels on the stairs ‒’ she fled silently into the stockroom.

  Sullivan froze with terror. Being so newly qualified he had not yet shed his awe of the ward sisters or the more experienced staff nurses, and in the latter category he placed Nurse Dean as a spine-chilling example. But in common with the entire junior resident staff he placed the Senior Night Sister in Martha’s, London, in a class of her own; the Senior Night Sister struck the Fear of God and impotence into every houseman in every branch of the hospital.

  The Senior Night Sister was a thin grey woman in her forties with the perpetual stoop, hushed voice and pallor of the permanent night worker and the perpetually severe expression of a sufferer from chronic indigestion. She favoured Sullivan with a reproving nod as she walked to the ward entrance, to look all round without stepping over the threshold. She turned back to him. ‘If you’re waiting for Nurse Dean, Mr Sullivan, you had better come back later. Mr MacDonald,’ she added in the tone others reserved for the Almighty, ‘is in the ward.’

  ‘I’ll do as you say, Sister.’ Sullivan retreated thankfully to the stairs.

  Night Sister turned her reproving gaze on Nurse Carter who, as etiquette demanded, had reappeared from the stockroom and stood at her elbow, her hands correctly held behind her back. ‘I’m not here for my round, nurse. I just want a word with Mr MacDonald. I’ll wait. Carry on with your routine.’ Nurse Dean, on her toes, had watched this exchange over the top of the screens. She didn’t mention it yet to Mr MacDonald. She settled back on her feet and returned her attention to the Major’s pulse-rate.

  Major Browne was still under the anaesthetic and the green bag fluttered rhythmically against his thin narrow chest. The shock had yellowed the tan and smoothed the lines in his high forehead, his blue-veined eyelids were peacefully closed and he looked asleep rather than unconscious. Briefly, Mr MacDonald held the mask a little above the narrow, fine-boned dreamer’s face. An anaesthetic dreamer’s face. ‘Doesn’t look fifty-four or a professional soldier,’ MacDonald observed in the quiet, flat tone used by all the staff at night since it carried far less than a whisper.

  Nurse Dean nodded noncommittally and kept her gaze on her watch. ‘142,’ she said a minute later. ‘Thin but very regular.’ She looked at the unconscious man. ‘Very thin but wiry. Kept himself in good shape. The Army’ll have helped him there ‒ it’ll help him now.’

  MacDonald said nothing. He replaced the mask and wondered how the owner of that face had endured years of Mess life or would endure the prospect of his future life when he came properly round. He stepped back to measure with his eyes the height of the wooden blocks raising the foot of the bed. The angle was so acute that they had just had to tie on a pillow to pad the headrails and with crepe bandages tied the end of the huge, electric bedcradle to the footrails. The top of the bed was made up in two parts to leave constantly exposed the massive bandages covering the right hip and the sandbags packed around it. MacDonald looked unemotionally at the bandages, then turned to time on his watch the rate of the blood dripping through the glass drip-connection fitted into the transfusion apparatus. The transfusion stand was by the footrail and the blood was flowing into an ankle vein in the left leg. ‘Give him the rest of this bottle and the next at this rate, then if he’s still holding, slow the one after to half.’ He didn’t add, if he’s not holding let me know, as that was the established procedure in such circumstances. He pulled down his face mask and for a few minutes stood in silence watching his patient. This was one of his professional habits, but it often surprised sisters and staff nurses working with him for the first time, as it was one more commonly met in physicians than surgeons.

  At thirty-four MacDonald was the oldest and professionally most experienced man on the resident staff. With the single exception of the Senior Night Sister, he was the oldest member of the entire staff on-duty in the hospital that night. Just then his exact age was impossible to guess, as even in the red glow his angular, long-jawed face was grey with fatigue and his dark eyes were bruised with black. He never looked physically strong, but this was generally ignored by those who worked with him, since he had the apparently limitless physical and mental stamina of the strong-minded in their prime. In many ways he was a remarkably shrewd man and he had that disconcerting mixture of great sensitivity and great insensitivity that often accompanies an exceptional talent for surgery. His job as Senior Surgical Officer demanded all his stamina and skill. Last night he had had two hours’ sleep and this morning the theatre had recommenced operating at six. He had lost count of the number of patients he had operated on during the day. (Twenty-three.) He would not have remembered what day it was had his wife not reminded him this afternoon that it was Thursday. ‘You know I always have a half-day on Thursday. The Head was so helpful when I said I simply must come to London to see you. I just had to talk to you after your last letter and you know you never seem to be free to come home these days. The Head was marvellous. She said she’d take my morning periods herself and so long as I was back at school second period after lunch tomorrow she could cope …’

  MacDonald brushed a hand over his eyes as if that could brush out the memory and bent over the bed to raise each limp eyelid in turn. He rested a hand on the yellow forehead. ‘He’ll do, for just now.’ He straightened and glanced over the screen behind him. ‘Night Sister’s in the flat.’

  ‘She’s been there quite a while. Sullivan was there but she got rid of him.’ Nurse Dean kept her calm gaze on her patient. She was far too conscientious ever to risk looking into MacDonald’s eyes in the ward. ‘Obviously waiting for you but can’t be urgent or she’d have come in, and she’s not here for her round as she sent Carter away. I’ll just get Smith to take over here. She seems to have settled Briggs now and Jarvis is asleep again.’

  ‘Jarvis ‒ oh, yes ‒ your coronary. Right. Better see what Night Sister wants.’ But he didn’t move. He looked at her face, and kept the pain out of his voice but not his eyes. ‘I didn’t like taking it off,’ he said.

  She didn’t look up. ‘You had to save his life.’

  He grimaced. ‘Christ ‒’ he spat under his breath, ‘would I have butchered him for any other reason?’

  Nurse Dean blushed for his bitterness. ‘I’ll get Smith,’ was all she said.

  MacDonald walked away slowly as an old man. For a fractional moment she watched the back of his long limp white coat and the truth was in her eyes. Then she drew on the armour of her training and went round to Briggs’s bedside. She was still reporting on the Major to her colleague when they heard another flying bomb, this time unheralded by sirens, streaking inland and on over the river about a mile away. Nurse Dean glanced quickly away from Nurse Smith and watched the sleeping Briggs as she continued to mouth her report. All the night nurses could lip-read. Nurse Smith folded her arms to hide the tremor of her hands and her mouth went so dry she couldn’t have produced a voice, and only just managed to move her lips for the necessary monosyllabic replies. And she could only make them when the bomb was well away.

  In the stockroom, Nurse Carter stopped rolling cotton wool balls into dressing swabs, closed her eyes and prayed. In the flat, MacDonald and the Night Sister exchanged resigned glances.

  As so often happened in the war, neither the three nurses nor Mr MacDonald heard the one bomb that night that affected all four personally and permanently.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Hammersmith, Sister. Hammersmith or Chiswick on the fourteenth second,’ mused MacDonald conversationally. ‘Reliable chap, Jerry. One knows where one is with him. If one’s face hasn’t been sliced off or guts blown out by the fifteenth second after switch-off one knows one’s intact to count down the next Vergeltungswaffe Eins.’ He propp
ed himself against the edge of the table and studied his feet. ‘Reliable label, Revenge Weapon Number One. No ambiguity there.’ The Night Sister waited for him to stop talking to himself with a sympathetic patience that owed as much to the man under the white coat as to his appointed responsibility for every surgical patient in the hospital. The severity in her grey eyes almost softened as she studied him. Much too tired ‒ but could one wonder? Such a sound surgeon and so hard-working ‒ of course, not always easy to work with ‒ but where was the physician or surgeon who was any good at his job who was? And he was a Celt. Very emotional people the Celts, she had observed, even when they came from the Scottish Lowlands and despite John Knox. He’d once told her he was a hybrid: Lowland mother, Highland father. Explained his colouring and high cheekbones and ‒ she hesitated mentally then compromised with the word ‒ niceness. Pity his home wasn’t nearer. The poor man hadn’t been able to take one of his full alternate free weekends in weeks. Nevertheless, why live in Warwickshire? She sniffed mentally. Of course, the country needed teachers and as a childless young wife had Mrs MacDonald not been in a reserved occupation she would have been called up into the Women’s Services, but frankly, had she been Mrs MacDonald she would have taken pains to obtain a teaching post much nearer London. As for suddenly deciding to come down today without warning ‒ just walked in to Casualty after lunch, Sister Casualty said this evening ‒ well, really, what a lack of consideration for her husband’s responsibilities and what an afternoon to choose. No doubt people living well out of range couldn’t be expected to know precisely what was happening in London; naturally, the newspapers and the BBC remained guarded in their reports; no one wanted to inform the Germans of the exact numbers of their bombs and rockets reaching their pre-set targets. But surely, as Sister Casualty remarked, Mr MacDonald’s letters must have given his wife some clearer notion of the true situation. How strange that such a pleasant, sensible-looking young woman should be so ‒ so downright silly! Sister Casualty was quite right. Some young women did not appear to appreciate their good fortune.

  Briggs had woken again before the two nurses left him. Nurse Dean returned alone to the Major. Briggs’s mumbles woke George Mercer and through the chink in the screen he saw Nurse Smith again dry her hands on her apron skirts, then remove the white cloth covering a kidney dish on the locker-top, take out a large, needle-less hypodermic syringe, remove the wooden plug in the fine rubber tube strapped to the greyish, skull-like temple and connect the syringe nozzle with the tube. ‘You’ll feel easier when I’ve drawn some more up, Briggs,’ she said softly.

  George Mercer turned his head away sharply and closed his eyes. He knew what was coming. He’d seen other stomach tubes in other noses. And he knew now why that little staff nurse put him in mind of anchovies.

  He had never eaten anchovies until he was in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp in 1942. Eaten enough there, he remembered, to last him a lifetime. Not much else to eat, there wasn’t ‒ aside from the bush tomatoes. Tree tomatoes Nobby said they were; looked like young plums on the trees. Weren’t too bad. Anchovies weren’t too bad once you washed off the salt and that took some doing. Nobby done the job for him while both his hands were bandaged. Nobby’d been picked up same time as hisself just before the second fall of Tobruk but they’d not met till the camp hospital. Not much of a hospital it wasn’t. Just a stone hut. Better than the first one they had him in in the desert. Just a tent that was, and no Nobby. Nobby was an RAMC Corporal and better than many an MO, all the lads in the hut reckoned. Done a lot for the lads, Nobby had, and Nobby’s hands always shaken as bad as that slip of a staff nurse’s, when he got the wind up. Nobby always got the wind up when he knew one of the lads was for the chop. Shaken cruel, Nobby’s hands had, the morning he’d come to tip him off that fat old Eytie MO as looked he only shaved Saturdays and had a month’s kip coming, would be along sharpish for a word with him private. Nobby ‒ same as hisself and all the lads ‒ had a lot of time for that fat old MO. Hands like a woman he had, gentle, and he never messed about. Spoke pretty fair English he did and you knew as he’d give it you straight … but it didn’t do to brood and the tablets that Nurse Dean give him was making him feel like he’d had five pints off the wood.

  George Mercer yawned deeply and was asleep before his good hand dropped from his mouth.

  Nurse Carter slipped silently from the stockroom over to the kitchen. MacDonald roused himself as she closed the kitchen door. ‘That girl in Rachel, Sister?’

  Night Sister nodded gravely. ‘First, Major Browne. How do you find him now?’

  ‘Not too well.’

  ‘I understand he lost quite a bit of blood in the road.’

  ‘About five pints. We’ve replaced most but the double shock hasn’t done him a lot of good. Nor,’ he added evenly, ‘will the shock he’s got coming.’

  ‘He’s not a young man, Mr MacDonald, but if that’s no ally now, in my experience, it may prove so later. You’ve been told his wife is due tonight? You want to see her if she arrives before you’ve retired?’

  ‘Please, Sister.’

  ‘Very well. Now, about Susan Evans bed 12 in Rachel Ward ‒’

  ‘The WREN I sent there from the theatre this afternoon.’ His face and eyes were expressionless. ‘She’s surfaced? She hadn’t when I last looked in before I did the Major.’

  ‘Twenty minutes ago. Only very superficially. General condition, fair. No apparent vision in the remaining eye ‒ yet.’

  For a couple of seconds they looked at each other in silence. She broke it. ‘I thought I’d step up here when I heard you’d come up. Ringing round can take so long.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks, Sister. Have we got hold of her next-of-kin yet?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. She’s a married sister with small children evacuated to Wales. I’ve had the Admiralty on the telephone about her, and I must say they are being exceedingly pleasant and helpful, unlike ‒ but I mustn’t digress. They’ve sent her a telegram and so have we as neither of us has been able to reach her by the only telephone number we have. No parents living. One might say, mercifully.’

  MacDonald inclined his head as if she had suggested it might rain tomorrow. ‘I’ll come down to Rachel after I finish here.’

  ‘Very well.’ Nurse Dean had come from the ward. ‘I’ll be back for my round later, nurse. Anything untoward to report now?’

  ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘Good. I’ll see myself out. Thank you, Mr MacDonald.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister,’ he retorted mechanically. He walked round the table, sat in one of the chairs and reached for the stack of notes awaiting his attention.

  Nurse Dean glanced at him, then at her ward, then backed to the kitchen and put her head round the door. ‘Carter, watch the ward whilst I’m out here with the SSO ‒ oh ‒ you know you mustn’t cut the patients’ breakfast bread before one a.m.,’ she protested mechanically and backed out.

  Nurse Carter ignored the protest as Nurse Dean had known she must. If she didn’t deal with the bread-and-butter in spare moments as they arrived, she couldn’t get it done at all. She soaked a clean pillowslip in cold water, wrung it out, and slung it over the half-cut long white loaf on the small kitchen table. She was using a pillowslip since, for some reason no one had explained to the night staff, the returned laundry basket that should have been filled with clean surgical dressing towels and tea-cloths had contained a massive and unrequested supply of pillowslips. The ward linen-room shelves were stacked with more pillowslips, but not one clean dressing towel or tea-cloth. This had perturbed Nurse Dean, if not her junior, though the latter had not explained she owed her equanimity to her VAD past, VADs learnt to improvise before they had ended their first month as amateur nurses; ex-VADS, when student nurses, learnt before they had ended their first week in their Preliminary Training Schools that any reference to their previous nursing experience was anathema to all professional nurses.

  Nurse Carter was back in the ward in thirty seconds. Yo-yo, tha
t’s what I am, she thought. Five minutes later whilst she washed her hands at one of the sinks down the middle, Nurse Dean beckoned her back to the flat. Bloody yo-yo.

  ‘Carter, I’ve just checked the sterilizing room. Only one emergency dressing trolley left. Set another. I’ll watch from here whilst the SSO finishes his notes. All quiet?’

  ‘No, nurse. Mr Gill in 30’s just vomited and says he still feels queasy. I’ve left a vomit bowl by him. Nurse Smith said to ask you for Soda Bic. for him.’

  ‘I’ll deal with that. Do that setting.’

  It was a strict rule that the SMO and SSO when in the wards at night must always be attended by Night Sister, one of her assistants or the ward seniors, unless the men specified otherwise. ‘All right if I leave you, to look at Mr Gill?’

  ‘I’ll see him.’ MacDonald pushed himself to his feet. ‘He shouldn’t be queasy now. Hours since his anaesthetic and he only had a whiff. I want another look at Browne and Briggs.’

  ‘Do you want me?’

  He looked into her eyes and smiled faintly. ‘Not for this.’

  She averted her head to the ward. ‘I’ll put away the notes you’ve finished.’

  She didn’t watch his back. It would worry her and she had enough on her mind. Jarvis, Briggs, the Major, all the other men ‒ and Smith. Smith, she repeated mentally, uneasily. She had to remind herself Smith had turned out to be the best Special in their mutual set and had always been rather highly-strung. Brainy people were often highly-strung and Smith had been to university and got a good degree before she started training. She’d be all right once she settled back into the night routine ‒ and if this quiet kept up Mack should get to bed in time for a decent sleep. Only he still had to do his full night round of the hospital and he was so tired; he never snapped at her unless he was dead tired.

  She backed to the sterilizing room and put her head round the door. ‘Carter, whilst the sand’s running through your timers get some tea for Mr MacDonald.’