Everyone was enthralled by the shiny new steel equipment, the sterilizers and Little Sister steamers. They watched with interest as the enamel equivalents, which had served St Angelus well since 1915, made their way to the scrap merchant’s via the porter’s rubbish collection.
As Matron and Emily now passed across the porter’s yard, Jake shouted a greeting and raised his cap. ‘Morning, Matron. Everything is all good and ready, is it? We’ve been at it since six. There are so many oxygen bottles in the new theatres today, a national disaster couldn’t drain them dry. And we’ve another delivery arriving before the weekend.’
‘Thank you, Jake,’ Matron shouted back without breaking her stride. ‘Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, shall we. That’s the last thing we need. Good to know we will be firing on all cylinders, though, and ready for whatever Liverpool’s dockland community throws at us.’
Emily had to take two steps to each one of Matron’s and still she was finding it difficult to keep up. It had been the talk of the hospital for days that Matron had invited the MP to visit. It was assumed that Matron was simply showing off, but, as Emily now knew, it was in fact because she wanted him to be on the side of St Angelus, fighting their corner from behind the scenes, over and above the hospital board.
‘The second it was known that the MP was visiting, all the great and good from the hospital board past and present, even those from the old trust board, wanted to be here. Imagine if some of the equipment during the first operation list fails to work tomorrow – with all this attention, it will be our own little disaster after it being in the papers. We could do without the board breathing down our necks today. And Dr Gaskell demanded to be here too, even though he doesn’t know what I’m up to. I couldn’t fend him off yesterday. Make sure you don’t breathe a word.’ Matron placed a finger on her lips and her face was alive with intrigue and anticipation.
‘Don’t worry, Matron.’ Emily almost placed a reassuring hand on Matron’s arm but pulled back quickly. Matron’s frosty manner had softened of late, but not quite that much. ‘Dr Gaskell will never catch on and the MP cannot fail to be impressed. Sister Pokey had the nurses come in early to clean the theatres yet again. And I saw Madge on the main steps, she tells me that Cook had a bevvy of domestics running to and fro with glasses and cups and saucers earlier, to feed everyone up and keep them happy, just like you asked. The MP will leave thinking this is the best hospital on Merseyside and he will do his best, I am sure, to get every penny he can for us. I don’t think many wards will be cleaned today, everyone is so excited.’
Matron grinned. ‘I had to stop Elsie getting out the VE Day party bunting. Honestly, that woman. She wanted to string it along the front of the block. She thinks he’s royalty. He may act like it, but I didn’t like to disabuse her. Not one single operation performed yet and the floors have been cleaned half a dozen times as if there had already been a major incident. I had to tell her, it’s the MP, Elsie, not the Queen. We want him to get us more money, not a medal and an OBE.’
‘Heaven help us if the new Queen ever did come to visit, Matron. I think Elsie would put a mop and bucket in your hand, she’s such a fan.’
‘Well, it isn’t something I shall be doing today, but I have been known to wield a bucket and mop, you know, Sister Haycock. I was a probationer nurse once. As was Sister Pokey. We can mop very well, along with the rest of them.’ Matron looked up and almost broke her stride. ‘Goodness me. A guard of honour at the bottom of the theatre steps. Would you look at the porter’s lads. They are so smart, their late fathers would have been so proud of them all.’
Emily lifted her head and saw two rows of Dessie’s lads standing to attention. Dessie had told her that morning that he had managed to acquire new work coats for the lads, although Matron had initially complained about the expense. But Emily could see that Matron, having complained or not, was as proud as Dessie would be at the show the lads had put on. The new, long, tan-coloured coats were buttoned up to hide the shabby-looking clothes beneath.
‘There’s been a lot of Brylcreem used this morning,’ Matron half whispered to Emily. ‘And I have never seen the yard looking so clean. Not a scrap of coal dust or a used oxygen bottle hanging around anywhere. They must have mopped the cobbles. Oh, Sister Haycock, I do hope the MP is taken with us. I do hope he gets a sense of how dedicated to St Angelus everyone who works here is. You can’t show that in a morning’s visit. I can’t explain it in words, it is something we need to impress without words, something he can feel.’
‘Morning, Matron,’ the boys sang out in unison as she approached.
Emily saw a look of appreciation flash across her eyes.
‘Morning, Sister Haycock,’ they sang out again.
Most of the porter’s lads had begun work the day of their fourteenth birthday and some looked young for their age, not more than children. The older ones stood head and shoulders above them, clearly having benefited from the disciplined routine, the regular wage and the food from the greasy spoon.
‘Goodness me, we really know how to put on a show at St Angelus, don’t we. Morning, boys,’ said Emily. ‘Has the new chair of the board arrived yet, Bryan?’
‘Yes, Sister Haycock. Half an hour since. Dr Gaskell has taken him up to the theatre. He had another man with him, too, from the LDHB.’
‘Another man? That’s very odd.’ Matron’s antenna was immediately alerted. ‘Half an hour ago? They weren’t due to arrive for another half hour yet. That means they are over an hour early.’ She tutted. ‘The Liverpool District Hospitals Board seems to be replacing its women members with men one by one. Would you believe it? They were all over us women like a rash when the war was on and there were no men around, and now they can’t replace us fast enough. Righty oh, thank you, Bryan.’
Bryan almost saluted. He was desperate to be invited up into the actual theatre where the tour was about to take place. He kept asking Jake, ‘Shall I take another bottle of the gas up? Shall I make another run to the autoclave? Do you need more dressings?’
From across at the lodge an hour earlier, he had seen Nurse Harper bustling in through the entrance. His heart had begun its familiar pounding at the sight of her and his mouth had dried. He just couldn’t get enough of the intense pleasure and excitement he felt from simply watching her from afar. It was as if the very sight of her gave him an electric shock.
God, look at me, turn around, look. No, don’t, don’t look. His thoughts had raced and contradicted each other. Then, when she reached the foot of the theatre steps, she suddenly turned around as though she had sensed his presence and raised her hand in greeting. And he just stood there gawping at her, stupefied. He felt the blood rush to his face and then leave again as he almost passed out and by the time he had raised his hand in return, she had turned to continue into the theatre block.
He dropped the shovel on the floor and he knew, he could sense it, he could tell, she had laughed at him. Oh, not openly, Nurse Harper was far too nice for that, but inside she must have been thinking, what a peasant that boy is, when he can’t even return a wave. And she would be right, because wasn’t it a fact, he had never been able to speak to a girl. Never tried to kiss one when he was at school, like all the other boys had. Had never had a gang of girls chasing him and chanting, ‘Will you go out with our Sheila?’ like he had seen the girls asking their Finn in the entry only yesterday.
The only girl who was interested in him was Lorraine Tanner and how could he take her seriously? He had known her almost his entire life. He didn’t want a girl like their Mary, who didn’t know one end of a washing line from the other, and Lorraine was Mary’s best friend, so she had to be just like her. He would go half mad if he found himself stuck with a girl like their Mary. He had watched Nurse Harper from a distance, she was a worker. A good egg. Sister Haycock and Matron must like her if they trusted her to prepare the new theatre and greet the guests with Staff Nurse and all the rest.
His mood sank into his boots as he retrie
ved his shovel from the ground. His heart had now slowed to a steady beat and he resumed the hard, physical slog of shovelling coke into the cart.
*
Beth had made a special effort to arrive at theatre before anyone else. She had wanted once again to be the one to clean the huge central lamp in at least one of the two new operating theatres and there was always competition for that chore.
‘Morning, Sister Pokey,’ she called out as she removed her cloak in the staff room. ‘Shall I start on the lamps?’
Sister Pokey looked up from her desk and gave no acknowledgement or flicker of appreciation that Beth had arrived early. ‘Yes, please, Nurse Harper. We can work outwards and finish in the dirty sluice.’
Beth’s heart sank. It sounded like Sister Pokey had just allocated her all the cleaning. The old theatres hadn’t closed yet. Not one operation had taken place in the new ones and yet Sister Pokey was acting as though a dirty op had already taken place.
Beth had been studying theatre procedure every night for the last week and had tried, unsuccessfully, to impress Sister Pokey. ‘I take it, Sister, that once we are up and running, all the clean operations, the ones without infection present, or surgery associated with the bowel, will take place in the mornings, and operations such as the draining of abscesses will happen at the end of the list?’ Even to her own ears that had sounded as though she was stating the obvious for no reason other than to impress. And Sister Pokey was not easily impressed. She had lifted her head from the notes she was writing, regarded Beth over the top of her glasses and said one cutting word in disdainful response. ‘Obviously.’
On this early morning, Beth was surprised to see Biddy enter the dirty sluice straight after she did. Biddy never normally worked outside of her own domain, which was the school of nursing. But today was special.
‘All hands on deck today, Nurse Harper. And close your mouth, you look like a fish. You have me to put up with today. Sister Haycock sent me over from the school. Matron is apparently in a flap regarding her very important visitor. The MP is coming and there can’t be anyone with good hearing who doesn’t know that between here and the Wirral.’ Biddy dropped her voice to a whisper so that Sister Pokey couldn’t hear her. ‘They know the only one to make a decent cuppa around here is me, so you are stuck with me for the morning. But first Sister Pokey wants me to clean the step at the bottom of the stairs. What the point of that is, I don’t know, with everyone running up and down. But apparently your man, he’s arriving that way.’
Beth smiled, relieved to have Biddy there too.
Biddy leant against the long sink, one hand on her hip, the other on the handle of a bucket as she waited for it to fill with hot water. On the side of the sink stood a bottle of Lysol. The smell of it filled the room. Beth inhaled. She loved it. The smell that pervaded every hospital up and down the country and could turn grown men into a trembling lump of jelly. As she stood at the window listening to Biddy, she saw Bryan looking down in dismay at his porter’s coat, which was covered in black coke dust. ‘Oh, look at that poor Bryan,’ she said. ‘He’s got coke dust all down his coat. He won’t be happy.’
‘Ah, well now, I reckon there’s one thing that could make him happy all right.’ Biddy grinned and Beth was intrigued.
‘Oh, really, what’s that?’
‘Well, have you not noticed how he can barely take his eyes off a certain young nurse who works at St Angelus?’
Beth smiled. ‘Oh, that’s not so unusual,’ she said. ‘It happens all the time. Everywhere we go.’
‘Well now, that’s a surprise,’ said Biddy. She had always had Beth down as one of the quiet ones. Mind you, she thought, aren’t they just always the worst. How wrong can you be?
‘I think it’s the colour of her hair, it being so red and beautiful, and now she’s grown it longer, it’s even more eye-catching. How could anyone not notice her? And with Bryan being Liverpool Irish and her being from Ireland, I suppose there’s bound to be an attraction. There’s a lot of common ground there, isn’t there?’
Biddy’s face was almost contorted with disbelief.
‘But I’m afraid he has no chance whatsoever. Dana only has eyes for her Teddy. And they will both be back very soon, we hope.’
Biddy took a long, hard look at Beth. She obviously didn’t have a clue that she was the nurse Bryan was mooning after. ‘Well, I don’t think it’s Nurse Brogan Bryan is after now,’ she said. Using both hands, she clasped the handle of the bucket and with a grimace lifted it clear of the sink. ‘’Tis another nurse, not a million miles from here, he has his eye on and I reckon I could be looking right at her. And before you say anything, you could do a lot worse than Bryan Delaney. From one of the best families on Vince Street, he is.’
But Nurse Harper had already left the room and Biddy was talking to the back of the swing door.
Beth had already forgiven Sister Pokey for putting her back on cleaning again, although she was longing for the day when she could be a real scrub nurse. Inside the theatre, she pulled the shiny new lamp down by its chrome arm and then pushed it back up again. It could be tilted to the right or the left.
‘Nearly as big as you, that thing,’ said Biddy as she walked through, pushing her bucket along on a trolley.
No one had ever seen anything like it. Beth had spotted Mr Mabbutt the previous day doing just the same thing. She had wanted to shout, ‘Oi, I’ve just cleaned that,’ but Mr Mabbutt was a surgeon and she couldn’t speak to him until he had spoken to her first. It was the way. Theatre protocol. ‘It’s a habit you have to get into,’ Sister Pokey had told her. ‘Surgeons need silence to think. Can’t have mindless chatter around them when they are operating. Takes every ounce of their concentration. There are no patients to speak to and nurses shouldn’t be chattering when there is work to do.’
Beth never chattered and she didn’t reply. Pammy was working on theatre and everyone knew what a chatterbox she was. It was a relief to all that she would be floating between casualty and theatre.
Pammy arrived exactly on time at eight thirty.
‘I wish I could just qualify now and never work anywhere else again, ever,’ Beth said as they wiped down the new oxygen bottles Jake had wheeled up together with a pink chlorhexidine solution. ‘I just cannot believe that we are going to be the first ever dirty nurses to work in the brand-new theatre suite.’
‘How can you be so excited about being the dirty nurse?’ Pammy said. ‘Buckets of blood and bone, dirty wellies, and blood-soaked dressings to rinse and send to autoclave, that’ll be our lot.’ She dropped to her knees with her cloth. ‘Were you all right last night on your own? I wouldn’t normally have gone, it’s just that it was Anthony’s night off and with Dana being away, well, it was a bit difficult.’
Pammy had been out with Anthony Mackintosh the evening before and Beth had felt lonely in the Lovely Lane nurses’ home with all her best friends away or out having fun. Victoria had gone up to Bolton to spend her off-duty time with Roland, Dana and Teddy, and Pammy had glammed up like only Pammy could and was out too. Beth had felt her single status come crashing down on her. She had confided this to the housekeeper, Mrs Duffy.
‘Your day will come,’ Mrs Duffy had told her, but Beth knew she was only being kind. There had been no sign, ever, that Beth’s day would come. She was feeling very much left on the shelf, not least because the only man who interested her was entirely out of bounds.
‘Oh, I was fine,’ she told Pammy. ‘I helped Mrs Duffy with the night drinks. The new probationers are going to give her the runaround, I can tell you. They have a lot more lip than we did when we started.’
‘Well, I think they should get one or two of them on here in theatre. Honestly, Beth, we’re going to get nothing but the rotten jobs. All the cleaning and sending away of the dirty equipment to be sterilized. I want to be stood at the surgeon’s side, wiping the sweat from his brow, handing him the instruments.’ Pammy sighed as she lost herself in the fantasy of being a theatre
nurse, which they both knew was a million miles from the reality, at least until they had qualified.
‘Biddy told me earlier that the staff nurses aren’t even starting until the theatres are up and running.’
‘Oh, marvellous,’ said Pammy. ‘Once they arrive, we’ll be getting bossed around by everyone, not just Sister Pokey. All we’ll be doing for our training month on theatre is the cleaning. What else have we done so far? I can’t wait for when that’s over and we can move on to the next stage, but it won’t be any day soon.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ said Beth, who was determined to love theatre. ‘Sister Pokey said that once the theatres are fully functioning, we can escort patients back to the ward with the porters. Won’t that be wonderful, handing over post-op patients from our care, back to the wards.’ She looked dreamy eyed.
Pammy shook her head. ‘Thank God Sister Haycock has let me run between casualty and theatre. I’d go mad if I had to spend all my time up here. I have to admit, the first time I washed down these lovely green tiles and matching floor, I did think it was wonderful. But we’ve done them that many times now, I will scream if I have to do them again tomorrow. It’s all very well for Pokeynose to keep saying, “Practice makes perfect, nurses,” but I don’t need to practise tile washing. I’ve been helping me mam wash our house since I could walk.’
‘Has the MP arrived yet?’ asked Beth. ‘I can hear lots of muttering in the anaesthetic area all of a sudden. I hope he isn’t late. The last trolley from the old theatre has come over now and we have to go and swab down the walls in there next and then that’s it. The old theatre won’t ever be used as a theatre again. The doors are officially shut as of this morning. Right now St Angelus has no operating theatre, you know.’
‘Oh, blimey,’ said Pammy with a hint of alarm in her voice. ‘Let’s hope all is quiet, then, on the Mersey front.’ She stood up from where she’d been crouching as she’d wiped the bottom of a large black oxygen bottle and walked over towards the window. ‘Tell you what, I’m looking forward to Victoria getting back. I can’t get Dana and Teddy out of my mind. I’m dying to hear what’s up with Dana.’
The Mother's Of Lovely Lane Page 14
