A Nurse's Life: Heart-warming and humorous tales from a 1950s student nurse (Nurse Jane Grant)

by Jane Grant

  ‘Good night,’ said Ginger abruptly.

  ‘Well, thank you very much. I did enjoy it.’

  ‘That’s all right. Good night.’

  ‘Er ‒ good night.’

  ‘Oh ‒ would you like to come over to the doctors’ sitting-room tomorrow night. I’m afraid I’m on duty so I can’t go out.’

  ‘Oh, I should love to,’ said Mary visibly brightening.

  ‘Good, then. See you tomorrow night.’

  ‘Oh ‒ what time? And I’m not quite sure of the way.’

  ‘D’you mean to say you’ve never been there?’

  ‘Well, no ‒ not really.’

  ‘I thought you might have been canned last time you went,’ he said laughing heartily. ‘Well, it’s perfectly easy to find. Ask the porter.’

  ‘I’d much rather you told me,’ said Mary. ‘It looks a bit funny.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Lots of people go there.’

  ‘I know ‒ but …’

  ‘You are a funny girl,’ said Ginger in genuine amazement. ‘Look ‒ I’ll meet you here at eight. Okay?’

  Next night the record repertoire on the doctors’ gramophone, which consisted mostly of ancient dance tunes, was played through from beginning to end. This took half an hour. There was only one contemporary record, which had been bought by a misguided friend for one of the housemen’s birthday. He had not liked it, so he had added it to the general collection.

  Ginger apologized. ‘I don’t care much for this sort of music myself.’

  ‘What sort of music do you like?’

  ‘Bach’s my favourite.’

  ‘Bach?’ said Mary, a little taken aback.

  ‘Yes. Don’t you like him?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘He’s nice and relaxing, I think,’ said Ginger.

  ‘I thought Bach was hard work, rather highbrow.’

  ‘All depends. Whether you’re a highbrow or not. If your usual music is this sort of stuff, you would think him rather highbrow I suppose.’

  ‘I do like dance music,’ said Mary boldly. ‘But I like Beethoven better.’

  ‘Oh, everyone likes Beethoven.’

  ‘Because he’s good.’

  ‘Could be. But Bach now ‒ he’s got brains. You know his Cantata and Fugue?’ He began to hum it tunelessly.

  The T.B. houseman, writing a letter, protested: ‘Have a heart, Ginger!’

  ‘Drop dead,’ said Ginger, and continued to sing.

  ‘What makes you such an objectionable swine, do you think?’ asked the houseman.

  ‘Must be practice,’ said Ginger.

  The night before our holiday started, Sheila and I were sitting at the table in the ward, while Mary was in the kitchen. Ginger came in to do his night round.

  ‘Would you like a drink, Mr. Barnes?’ I asked, trying to get away to warn Mary.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  He did his round with Sheila and then disappeared. Mary was making the porridge when he came into the kitchen.

  ‘Hullo. Tonight’s your last night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Ginger uneasily. ‘See you at Bernard’s some time, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, I hope so.’

  ‘Have a nice holiday.’ He came up to her, and she stirred the porridge even more vigorously.

  ‘Good-bye, then,’ he said.

  ‘Good-bye.’ There was a terrifying pause. Mary could hear her heart thumping. ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked in desperation.

  She did not quite know what he said, but he seemed to assent. She went to get the cocoa and he was standing in front of the cupboard. Seizing her by the arms, he kissed her, and then went out hurriedly.

  That day the week after, we were walking along a rough road with peat bogs each side, towards Dunvegan Castle on the island of Skye. We met no one on our solitary walk. We had ceased talking about our love affairs, but to each of us they were the centre of our thoughts. The scene was lonely, and we were lonely too.

  I began to think, supposing Gavin was here with me instead of Mary. I pictured his bright eyes taking in the scene, and imagined his rather cynical remarks. I thought of the little bus that had driven us to the centre of the island, and that stopped every now and then for the driver to talk to the local crofters, and I wondered if Gavin would have joined in the talk. When we got to the castle and saw a lock of Bonny Prince Charlie’s hair, I thought how he, a Lowland Scot, would have teased me over my enthusiasm. He would have said what a pretty setting the locket was, because he had a great appreciation of beautiful things. Whereas Ginger would have exclaimed ‘Blimey’, and moved on to the armour.

  Mary was happier than I, because she had hope. But though I told myself I might never see Gavin again, and that if I did see him it wouldn’t be any good, I could not stop weaving him into every hour of my day. I knew it was hopeless, but the one thing I longed for and went on longing for, was that he should fall in love with me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When we got back to St. Bernard’s, Mary and I were glad to find that we had been put on neighbouring wards called Jacob and Rebecca, to finish the rest of our night duty. These were what are called Brother and Sister wards; that is, they had the same physicians and the same type of case, but one was for male and one for female patients.

  The nurse in charge of Rebecca, Betty Rush, was a year above me. She was rather an empty-headed giggler. My first night was not only chaotic but at the beginning of it I received a terrific shock.

  We were on casualty week, and an old woman arrived in the ward unconscious from a stroke. The Head Nurse turned to me.

  ‘Call Mr. Scott,’ she said.

  Not able to believe my ears, I paused; she said again, very crossly, ‘Mr. Scott!’

  In a state of violent agitation, I ran to call Gavin on the telephone. In spite of all my resolutions on holiday, I felt nothing but a senseless joy that I should be seeing him again.

  I fetched Night Sister, and when I got back to the ward Gavin was by the bed of the sick woman. The terrific moment obviously meant nothing to him.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Get me a sphig, will you?’

  Night Sister arrived while Gavin was taking the woman’s blood pressure. He said to Sister that he thought they might as well bung in some coramine and methylamphetamine just to be on the safe side. ‘Her B.P.’s a bit low. I’d like her to have a special too.’

  I stayed by the bed while Gavin and Night Sister went off to discuss the case. The patient’s breathing was laboured, and she looked very ill.

  When Night Sister left, Gavin came back with Betty, and they began to give the patient the coramine intravenously. She started to gurgle.

  ‘I think we’d better have the sucker,’ said Gavin.

  Betty turned to me. ‘You’ll have to go to Amos. They borrowed ours last week and haven’t returned it.’

  I climbed up the two flights of stairs to Amos, and explained the situation to the Head Nurse there.

  ‘We need it,’ she said shortly. ‘We have a scalded throat and a tracheotomy here. Try Joseph.’

  I had to go up yet another flight to Joseph. The Sister there let me have their sucker; I picked it up with difficulty and started to totter downstairs with it. A sucker is an intricate and clumsy apparatus; it is also extremely heavy. It contains two large bottles as well as lengths of tubing.

  Clutching it as best I could, and concentrating on neither dropping any portion of it nor tripping on a stair and falling headlong, I staggered down the three flights as quickly as possible. When I arrived in the ward breathless, they had put blocks under the foot of the woman’s bed and were giving her oxygen. Gavin saw me come in, hurried to meet me and took the sucker. He and Betty attached it to the head, and then realized the tubing was missing.

  Betty rounded on me furiously.

  ‘Couldn’t you see? Go back, and mind you get the whole thing!’

  I ran back and up the stairs; without
breath to explain myself, I secured the tubing from Joseph, and hurried back to the ward.

  ‘Go and fetch Night Sister,’ snapped Betty, as I approached.

  Without pausing, I turned round and ran off again.

  When Night Sister arrived, the patient had considerably improved, and the crisis was over, but I was almost in tears. Dejectedly, I was walking off to get some of my own work done, when I heard Gavin’s voice, as gay and cheerful as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  ‘Hey, dogsbody! Get me a drink.’

  And at once my depression, my feeling of weariness, dropped from me. I felt, for no sensible reason at all, at peace and tremendously happy.

  A Woman’s Medical is not the most cheerful of wards. The average age of women patients is higher than that in male medical wards; many of the women are senile. Women also tend to be more depressed and more sorry for themselves than men, who in that sense are better patients. Rebecca was also an extremely busy ward, with frequent crises, and I saw very little of my friends, even of Mary. Yet in spite of all this, the weeks that followed were the happiest I had spent at St. Bernard’s.

  The beds on the ward were divided between two Honoraries, one of whom, by name Sir Charles Barton, was rather eccentric. His favourite hobby was needlework. He was also unusual in a preference for doing his rounds late at night, much to the disgust of the Registrar, housemen, students and patients. Often as late as ten o’clock at night, Sir Charles would still be on his rounds, and he nearly always chose to arrive after the Day Sister had gone. One night when he arrived at nine and Betty was preparing to accompany him, Night Sister came up and asked Betty to take her round the ward, so I had the doubtful pleasure of going round with the Honorary. I walked uneasily in the crowd, consisting of Sir Charles, a Registrar with big ears, Gavin, and one or two sleepy students.

  We reached the bed of a young girl who had rheumatism. On her bed table, as a relic of the occupational therapist’s visit that day, there lay the canvas for a small evening bag, together with the necessary embroidery silks. Ignoring the pile of charts that awaited his inspection, Sir Charles picked up the canvas and sat down amiably on the bed.

  ‘I see you’re going to do some petit point,’ he said with interest. ‘Personally, I think tapestry is the form of embroidery. You know of course it dates back to the Egyptians? Of course you do ‒ and it’s common knowledge that the Greeks took it over from there. When you come to the Bayeux tapestry ‒ that of course was not tapestry as we know it today ‒ the woof completely concealing the warp.’

  Quite lost in his subject, he went on to explain that Arras, the town, became the generic name for rich tapestry. Later, the centre seemed to hop about a bit; Brussels, Mortlake, Paris, were all celebrated. ‘The best ones today, I suppose, come from Aubusson. Pretty little thing,’ he added, picking up the canvas. ‘Made quite a few for my wife.’

  The patient was not renowned for her intelligence, and her lower lip dropped steadily throughout the recital, till she looked positively half-witted. The Registrar in the meantime was staring out of the window, while Gavin, trying to control embarrassed amusement, shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  Sir Charles, however, seemed totally oblivious of anything odd about the proceedings, and as the round progressed towards the next bed, he began to describe ‘a pretty little Jacobean design’ he had recently made for a stool.

  In the next bed lay a woman who had a prolapsed intervertebral disc. Gavin had had her fitted a fortnight before with a corset. This was to serve the dual purpose of keeping her disc in and her stockings up. Though confined to bed, the woman had insisted on wearing the garment; this had the disadvantage that the suspenders continually stuck into her, so she had cut them off and, so that she might not lose them, had pinned them to the top of the corset.

  As Sir Charles moved to the head of the bed, apparently aware of some lack of interest in his Registrar’s reaction to his favourite hobby, he was assuring this Registrar, who was famous for his drinking capacity, that he could do a lot more harmful things than embroider in his spare time. This comment was greeted with a polite ‘Yes, sir,’ from the Registrar, and some stifled sniggers from the students.

  Sir Charles picked up the patient’s notes, glanced through them, and observed: ‘Oh, you’ve had your corset fitted, have you, dear?’

  She simpered. ‘Yes, Mr. Barton.’

  Sir Charles winced at this solecism. ‘Have you got it on now?’ he inquired.

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’

  I hastily drew screens round the bed, while Sir Charles inspected the garment. Gavin had not seen the suspenders in this position before, and asked with an innocent air ‒ What were those things for?

  Sir Charles looked slightly taken aback. ‘Well ‒ I suppose they’re to keep her stockings up.’

  I felt my colour rising steadily, and stared at the floor so as not to meet anyone’s eye.

  ‘Aren’t they, Nurse?’ asked Sir Charles genially.

  I said in a very small voice, ‘Yes, sir, I suppose so.’

  The woman giggled, but Gavin relentlessly pursued the subject. ‘It seems such a funny place to have them, sir. I always thought stockings just came up the legs.’

  Sir Charles broke into a hearty guffaw. ‘Look here, Nurse ‒ you’ll have to give my houseman some lessons in women’s lingerie.’

  I tried to smile, but in my acute embarrassment I failed miserably.

  The housemen, having found out I blushed easily, delighted in causing me discomfiture. The other houseman was a young married man called Brian Austin. One night he came to me in the kitchen with a very bloodshot right eye, and asked if I had any parolin eye drops. I asked him what he had done to the eye.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, really. My brat woke me up this morning by squeezing an orange in it.’

  ‘Seems a funny way to wake you up.’

  ‘Well,’ said Brian apologetically, ‘I always was rather difficult to rouse. I suppose it was quite effective, really.’

  I put some drops in his eye, and peering myopically, he was about to go off to do his ward round, when he thought he would like some aspirin. I gave him the keys, and he took what he wanted from the drug cupboard. ‘I’d better give these keys back straight away,’ he said. ‘Last time I went off with them and they had to get me up.’

  My hands being full, I told him to pin the keys to my apron. Looking hard at my face, with his eyes screwed up, he remarked with an air of innocence: ‘Now I must be careful not to involve any other article of lingerie beneath this apron, mustn’t I?’

  He waited for the blush, and it came in its most extreme form.

  A bit later on that night, Daisy did a round. Betty saw her coming down one side of the ward, and I hastily rushed to the other side to see everyone was all right. Unfortunately one of the women took it into her head to wake up and be troublesome. She had had a barbiturate sleeping drug, and was very confused.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ she asked wildly. ‘I want to get out.’

  She started to climb out of bed.

  ‘Oh, please stay in bed,’ I pleaded desperately and ineffectually, trying at the same time to lift her back bodily.

  It was quite useless, the next moment she was walking down the ward.

  ‘I’m not staying in here,’ she announced in a very loud voice. ‘I’m getting out of this place!’

  It seemed to me that my career hung in the balance. I could not face a row with Daisy. Pursuing the patient, I caught up with her, turned her round, and gently guided her back. She protested loudly, but I managed somehow to throw her into bed. No sooner was she there than the sleeping tablet began to work, and she fell asleep before she lay down.

  Much relieved, I was leaving the bedside when Daisy beckoned me.

  ‘Now gal,’ she said crisply, ‘you must make less noise. Walkin’ up and down this ward you sounded like a regiment.’

  I agreed meekly and fled. Later that night I looked through the intermediate hall into the n
ext ward, and saw an apparition in a nightgown wandering around. I thought carelessly, ‘Queer old crowd they are next door, letting their patients get up like that.’ Just then a nurse appeared by her side, and started to guide her back ‒ into our ward. I looked at my patient’s bed and saw it was empty!

  It was forbidden to eat in the wards beyond specified meal times, but this rule was usually ignored at night. Every night I used to cut half a loaf of sandwiches to stave off the sharp pangs of hunger felt by Betty and me between our breakfast and our midnight meal, and by the housemen between their supper and breakfast.

  One night I found some great treasures in the fridge. There was a fruit salad, very prettily set out in a glass bowl, an orange and a grapefruit. These divided nicely into four, and with a drop of fruit cordial lifted from a patient’s locker, and cream from the top of the milk, was considered a very tasty morsel by one and all.

  That morning when we were giving out breakfasts, I came to a patient who asked if she could have that grapefruit that she had asked nurse to put in the fridge. I maintained stoutly that there was no grapefruit in the fridge, which was true, and also that I had not seen one, which was not. The argument became a trifle heated. I invited her to come out and have a look for herself. Fortunately, at this point, Betty came along and backed me up.

  Next I went to one of the heart patients who was on a low salt diet, and asked her what she wanted for breakfast.

  ‘I expect the Diet Kitchen have sent me an orange or an apple,’ she said.

  ‘No, they haven’t sent a thing,’ I said indignantly. ‘That Diet Kitchen is lousy!’

  She sighed. ‘I’ll have one of me own, then, Nurse,’ she said.

  When we came on that evening, Sister greeted us with a puzzled air.

  ‘You know, it’s amazing,’ she said. ‘I opened a special tin of fruit salad yesterday, to offer to Dr. Williams when he came round today. He does so enjoy it. But it’s completely disappeared. I could have sworn I put it in the fridge, too. You didn’t either of you see it, did you?’

  We shook our heads and said, No, Sister, we hadn’t seen any fruit salad.