‘No!’ She had been a headgirl at school and she used her headgirl’s voice. ‘Leave that ’phone alone, Mr Jason. If he gets a message saying we want him urgently he’ll be sure the Major’s having a haemorrhage. You know how that amputation’s upset him ‒’
‘She was his wife,’ he reminded her flatly. ‘Not a patient. His wife. He’s got a right to know stat.’
‘We can’t get hold of him stat., Mr Jason.’ She could now be talking to a backward child. ‘It could take the switchboard twenty minutes to find him. This must wait. It can. The penicillin can’t ‒’
His anger suddenly returned at flash-point. ‘Don’t be such a cold-blooded machine ‒’
‘Don’t flap, Mr Jason,’ she retorted firmly. ‘Flapping never does anyone any good.’ She glanced round. Nurse Smith was racing down towards them, her face masked, dripping hands held high.
‘Just coming, Smith.’
Jason had made up his mind. He’d go in search of MacDonald, take him into a quiet corner away from any ward and tell him. He had just moved from the table, but Nurse Smith’s words forced him to stay.
‘Briggs is in a bad way. God knows what that last one’s done to him internally, and the pain’s getting worse. He’s got to have his next shot now. I’m clean ‒ get it and witness, Dean. We’re in the clear. We’ve got it in writing from Mack.’
‘I’ll look at him,’ Jason said and vanished.
Nurse Smith frowned after him. ‘Looking won’t help. The only thing that will is morph. Get it from the DD cupboard, Dean,’ she urged. ‘I tell you he can’t wait.’
Nurse Dean was studying the Dangerous Drug Book. She laid it open on Briggs’s prescription sheet. ‘Bit close for another. Remember how dodgy his pulse was for quite a while after his last. A repeat now could be too much for his heart.’
‘For God’s sake go and feel what the pain’s doing to his pulse right now! Go and watch him sweating, staring, not daring to breathe. I’ve left Carter with him ‒’ Jason was back, grim-faced. ‘Well?’
‘Yes. Give it stat. Any query, bloody say I said so.’ He looked Nurse Dean full in the face. ‘Stat. please, Nurse Dean.’ (Stat. abbreviation of Latin statim; English, at once.)
She looked straight back at him. ‘I still think it’s a bit soon, but if you say so, Mr Jason, we’ll give it stat.’
‘Right.’ Jason strode back to Briggs. Nurse Smith was about to race after him. Nurse Dean detained her.
‘Half a mo, Smith. Listen. Sorry, but do try not to let the men see you’re flapping. It’s bound to upset them. Even last night’s admissions have been in long enough to worry about Briggs.’ She unpinned the Dangerous Drug Cupboard keys from her bib pocket. ‘Get Carter to take the lids off the hypodermic tray for you. I’ll be back in a jiff with the morph., DD book and his bed-ticket.’ She glided away to the strong, locked, DD cupboard in the day duty-room. For a second Nurse Smith watched her with something close to envy, then she turned and walked more slowly up the ward.
The staff nurse and Jason were with Briggs, and Nurse Carter was with Nigel Gill, when Mr Sullivan ambled into the flat, the packet of tea bulging in one of his white coat pockets. He looked through the open kitchen door, then stopped in the entrance to survey the ward. Jarvis had gone back to sleep and was snoring gently. Sullivan didn’t want to disturb him, and though he wouldn’t have admitted it, he knew he was still too inexperienced to take a pulse without waking the patient. Jarvis’s fifteen-minute pulse-chart would tell Sullivan a great deal, but Martha’s senior consultant cardiologist insisted the chart wasn’t enough. ‘If you really want to know what a patient’s pulse is doing, gentlemen, ask the ward nurses ‒ even the juniors. Nurses spend their working lives taking pulses. I shall expect you to remember this and add the nurses’ reports in your notes on my patients.’
The main lights were still on, the patients still drinking tea. None were talking. The heads turned towards Sullivan, but no muted chorus warned Nurse Dean he was in the doorway. As she had just observed, the patients had now been welded into Wally’s. On certain occasions, Wally’s, as every ward in Martha’s, thought alike and spoke with one voice.
In normal circumstances the patient-to-patient bond seldom took more than a few hours to form and was always stronger at night, as was the patient-nurse bond. The night lowered the resistance of all; in the darkness it was much easier for the patients to make and nurses to hear the kind of confidences that turn strangers into friends. Both bonds were further strengthened on nights when patients were bedridden in a ward in a hospital in a target area of enemy air attacks. Wally’s knew the night nurses would live or die with them. Wally’s gratitude was unspoken and tangible as the stuffy air.
Wally’s knew now that poor old Tom Briggs had taken a turn for the worse and that young student in 30 spewing into a bowl held by Nurse Carter, wasn’t playing up. Wally’s was keeping its aches, soreness, pains, personal anxieties and fears to itself and wasn’t making a sound to disturb the nurses or that tall young Mr Jason with the glasses and quiet way with him. That Mr Sullivan only had Sam Jarvis and old Sam Jarvis was asleep. If Mr Sullivan wanted to take a look all he’d got to do was walk up to 11. Wally’s turned back to watching 29 and 30.
Mr Sullivan sighed impatiently. Mother of God, night nurses were bad as cops. Never one around when a man wanted one.
Chapter Five
Nurse Carter rested both elbows on the table, took another bite of cheese sandwich and gazed at the upturned cards on the papier mache tray on Mrs Browne’s lap. Mrs Browne had asked Nurse Dean if she could borrow a small tray sometime after Nurse Carter had brought her back from Nightingale, and carried it with her when Nurse Dean ushered her from the ward a few minutes ago. Nurse Dean had cast an apologetic glance at her junior. Another of her virtues as a senior in all her juniors’ eyes, was her insistence that their thirty-minute meal-breaks were their right and not their privilege. Not all their nursing seniors shared this view. ‘I expect Mrs Browne would like a cup of tea before you take her back to Nightingale, Carter.’
Mrs Browne’s empty cup was now on the floor beside the armchair that she filled like an old, much-stoved bolster, Nurse Carter observed. Any minute the stuffing would ooze. ‘You’re going to get that one out.’
‘High time.’ Mrs Browne seemed engrossed in her game. ‘Haven’t had one out all night.’
‘Do you always carry patience cards?’
‘Always.’ She upturned one very slowly. ‘Fills the gaps. Always so many gaps.’
‘Like other women knit.’
Mrs Browne nodded graciously. It was just after two-thirty in the morning and her attitude to the nurses was undergoing a slow and minor upheaval. Still other ranks, of course, but in Wally’s definitely OCTU-bound, though she remained uneasy about Nurse Smith. A well-bred gel who knew her job, but a look of being too clever by half to be a good leader of men. In Mrs Browne’s experience, the too clever chaps never were. Young Carter had just told her the gel was a BA Hons. Explained it. Too much education never did anything for a gel but put a lot of ideas into her head and made it exceedingly difficult for her to find herself a husband. She glanced briefly at Nurse Carter. No difficulty there for that child. Rather nice child. Not quite the airy-fairy flibberty-gibbet she looked; quite a bit of nous. She had often noticed nous was very much more useful than brains for a woman ‒ or a man. She straightened her back, dug in her chins. ‘Never cared for knitting. Have you had enough grub? Couple of sandwiches and an apple doesn’t seem much to last you the night.’
‘We’ve got two courses in our tins. The main kitchen cooks ’em and we bring ’em on when we come up at night.’ Nurse Carter glanced automatically, unnecessarily, at the ward. The entrance was blocked by the open red screen she had put up before she sat down to eat. ‘Dean and I much prefer sandwiches, particularly when eating this late. Luckily Smith says she does, as I put her main course in the oven to warm-up hours ago and it’s dry as leather. Roast meat and two veg tonight. I�
��ll bet it’s horse.’
Mrs Browne was outraged. ‘One knows there’s a war on but surely not in an English hospital?’
‘Long and stringy. Looks like horse.’
‘Friend Jerry has a lot to answer for.’
Nurse Carter smiled amiably. ‘At least he’s kept out of our hair since midnight.’
Mrs Browne had forgotten and ignored the air-war. ‘What’s the duff?’
‘Yellow Peril.’
‘Type of sog?’
‘Mush. Cold, sloppy, unsweetened mush. We’re always getting it. Always pitch ours straight into the pig-bucket. Somewhere there must be hordes of pigs growing fat on Yellow Peril. More tea?’
‘No thanks, m’dear.’ Mrs Browne could glance at the ward now it was hidden. ‘Always eat out here?’
‘If we haven’t had time before Night Sister’s two a.m. round. By now, she’s come and gone and all the proper night rounds are over. The surgeons’ll be back as they haven’t seen Mr Gill since I brought him back from the theatre. You probably didn’t notice but I went down for him after I brought you up. I had to hang around as though he was just an ordinary appendix, it took Mr MacDonald a bit longer than usual as they had a bit of a problem trying to find it. Tucked itself down under yards of gut. Appendices,’ she added cheerfully, ‘do that, sometimes.’
Mrs Browne preferred not to dwell on appendices. The subject reminded her too vividly of the period immediately before she had heard the theatre trolley rumbling back to the next bed. ‘Shouldn’t you be using this armchair?’
‘We’re allowed to just for our meals but I never do. Sit in that chair and I’m out like a light.’
‘On a charge if you drop off?’
‘And how. Night Sister goes right round the bend ‒ and puts it in her night report for Matron. She doesn’t much like us eating in the flat. She doesn’t create if the ward’s screened as it’s much handier for the ’phone than the kitchen, especially when there’re just two of us. Patients aren’t supposed to see nurses eating. Bad etiquette. Reminds them nurses are human.’ Mrs Browne made no comment. Nurse Carter smiled reminiscently. ‘My father went round the bend when I told him that. He said he thought it essential nurses should be human. He’s a country parson ‒ always having fearful rows with the PCC as he’s High and they’re Low. So’s Night Sister. She comes from quite near us. Stamford, I think. If she’d been born a bit earlier I bet she’d have shipped out on the Mayflower.’ Her eyes sparkled joyfully at the thought. ‘She says it depends what you mean by human. She’s still nuts on Professor Joad.’
Mrs Browne had stopped listening. She had withdrawn to a carefully prepared position. She upturned another card.
Nurse Carter eyed the bent grey head sympathetically. Poor old Mother B. looked twenty years older than when she arrived. Thank God she’d been in Nightingale when her old man started shouting his head off and tried to pull off his oxygen mask and tug out the transfusion needle in his ankle vein. His outbursts of manic delirium had only lasted a few minutes and two seniors had managed to prevent him doing himself any real damage, but those minutes had seemed to Nurse Carter nearly as unbearable as those she had spent with Briggs before his last shot. She picked up her apple, absently, thought of Briggs’s agonized eyes as he gripped her hands, and put down the apple uneaten.
It had been the arrival of the theatre trolley for Nigel Gill that had initially disturbed Major Browne. Earlier, Nurse Dean had detailed Nurse Carter to do Mr Gill’s skin preparation, dress him for the theatre, deal with the trolley when it arrived, escort him down and stay with him throughout his operation. She had slightly puzzled Nurse Carter by her remark, ‘Mr MacDonald insists on doing him, himself.’
‘But doesn’t the SSO always do routine night emergency ops., nurse? Specially when it’s one of the firm.’
Nurse Dean merely nodded briefly. ‘Get weaving on that shave, Carter.’
The Major’s shouts had subsided to mumbles when the trolley rumbled out of Wally’s. Nigel Gill’s pre-medicating injection had left him too dry and drowsy to notice what was happening next door. Nurse Carter was sure he was the only patient aside from the Major himself and the drugged Briggs, who wasn’t wide awake. The rest of the ward was so unnaturally still the bedsprings had stopped creaking. Directly they wheeled the theatre-trolley into the small, green-curtained alcove that was the anaesthetic room, a green turbaned, gowned and masked theatre nurse slid between the curtains. ‘Wally’s junior? Your senior’s just rung down. I’ll take over Mr Gill pro tem. Go straight to Nightingale and take one Mrs Browne back to Wally’s stat. Her husband’s asking for her. Your senior’s rung Nightingale.’
Mrs Browne had removed only her overcoat, skirt and shoes and dropped into an exhausted sleep immediately she lay between the blankets laid over an under-sheet on the high, screened bed. The Nightingale senior had to shake her awake and help her into her discarded clothes and shoes as if dressing a sleepy child. Mrs Browne, dazed with sleep and fear, was vaguely aware some nurse whisked a comb through her hair and another took her arm and led her away. The impression that she must still be asleep and in a nightmare was enhanced by the main basement corridor.
The long, narrow, winding, sparsely lit corridor was much more like a tunnel than any hospital corridor. In place of spotless tiled walls and polished floors, uneven walls lined with pipes great and small, an uneven stone floor worn with centuries of feet, an uneven low ceiling encrusted with centuries of whitewash and grime. At varying intervals the corridor was crossed by smaller passages left unlit at night to save electricity. The passages led to cavern-like alcoves long unused in peacetime, that from late 1940 had been fitted with locked doors and used to store surgical equipment, medical stores, spare beds, mattresses, pillows, blankets, hospital records and the innumerable other essentials for running a large general hospital temporarily transformed into a massive casualty clearing station. The unlit passage entrances made fathomless black gaps in the corridor walls; gaps shaped like low, narrow horseshoes framed by the converged, convoluted pipes. The black gaps disturbed Mrs Browne less than the wider, lighted horseshoes of the alcoves just outside the basement wards. Beyond the splashes of light she glimpsed a darkness with a glowing red centre, lines of shadowy white beds, and shadowy white figures, some flitting, some stationary. And somewhere in every basement ward they passed, she glimpsed the omnipresent red screens and the omnipresent red bottles hanging like lush tropical fruit from tall white stands made frailer by the shadows.
At last she knew she was awake and why she had been woken. She was too apprehensive to ask her guide for details and equally apprehensive that the nurse would give them unasked. But the nurse stayed silent and very slowly Mrs Browne recognized her silence was compassionate, companionable, and that her guide was that child Carter.
The area of the basement through which they passed lay in the oldest part of the hospital’s foundations. It was a cherished, if apocryphal, Martha’s legend that the area was haunted by the ghosts of the nursing order of monks carrying out the bodies of the patients who had died in the Great Plague. Nurse Carter remembered the ghosts with affection. But during her first week in Wally’s, whenever she had to walk along there alone, she had been very frightened. It had only taken one week for her to learn that the living were far more terrifying than any number of ghostly monks bearing ghostly burdens. It was the living who made and aimed the machines that killed by day and night. The ghosts ‒ if they existed ‒ killed no one. All they were was dead. She realized she had seen death too often to fear the dead. Too often, she realized, to be afraid of death itself. What she really feared came not from the unquiet graves of the past, but from the skies of the present. She began to regard the ghostly monks as her friends, since it was only in the haunted basement that she ever felt safe at night.
From September 1940, St Martha’s Hospital, London, had sustained on some part of the hospital a direct hit from every type of bomb the Germans had used in the air-war, aside from a V2 ro
cket. The great rabbit-warren of the basement that stretched the length of the original eight five-storey ward blocks above, had survived the hits more, rather than less, intact. And this despite the land-mine that had blown up the main dispensary stores, the occasional slicing of mains water and gas pipes, the shock of the initial collapse and weight of the subsequent mounds of rubble that were all that remained of three of the five blocks now destroyed by enemy action. That not even that strong basement could survive a direct hit from a rocket was something Nurse Carter refused to think upon. She knew, as London knew, that once any rocket was launched at the city, nothing but its mechanical failure could stop it reaching its pre-set target. The RAF fighters, the anti-aircraft guns ranged round London and the entire length of the Channel coast, were proving a more and more formidable defence against flying bombs. The Allies had no weapons for shooting down rockets. The defenceless had to defend themselves, if only mentally. The majority of those Nurse Carter met in and out of Wally’s chose the same method as herself. Here again, Wally’s spoke for all. ‘No sense worrying about a rocket, mate. If one’s got your number on it you’ve had it and you’re up there knocking up St Peter before your mates below’ve heard the one that got you. Don’t do to think, so best not to think. Well, I mean ‒ stands to reason, don’t it?’
‘There.’ Mrs Browne played her last card. ‘Out.’
‘Good show.’ Nurse Carter drained her cup. ‘Like to go back to Nightingale, now, or would you like another look at the Major first?’
Mrs Browne concentrated on replacing her cards in the handbag she had only discovered in her lap after she had been sitting on her husband’s locker-seat for over twenty minutes. ‘Don’t care to risk waking him again or the other chaps. Perhaps you could ‒’
‘Sure. I’ve got to go in anyway and let Dean know I’m leaving the ward. I’ll just get rid of this first.’ She took her tray into the kitchen and absently put her apple in her dress pocket. Her mind was on Mrs Browne. Still scared as hell of hospital even though she’d probably take on a Panzer Division single-handed without a second thought.
One Night in London: a hospital in wartime (The Jason Trilogy Book 1) Page 8
