The Secret Armour

by Lucilla Andrews

  Nurse Dean thought so. Nurse Smith pressed her pale lips more tightly together and tried, unsuccessfully, not to think on the subject. Nurse Carter studied her hands and dwelt on the thought that it was being so cheerful that kept Sister Wally going.

  ‘Thank you, nurses.’ Sister Wally flicked down the neatly upturned corners of her apron skirts and rose to signify the report was over. ‘I hope you have a good night. Nurse Carter, a word in your ear before you disappear to make the drinks! Don’t forget what I said this morning. Next time I come on and find you’ve used up my patients’ breakfast tea, I shall send you straight to Matron.’

  ‘I won’t forget, Sister,’ said Nurse Carter, politely. She waited until she was alone in the small ward kitchen and had shut the door, to explode aloud. ‘My God, what does the bloody woman expect me to use when my night’s tea’s run out? Boil up the leaves the wardmaid’s used on the floor?’ She re-filled and slammed back on the gas cooker the hot water urn. ‘Is it my fault I’ve to hand out tea all round Wally’s every time Jerry lobs us a near miss? Did I ‒’ she demanded of the large double milk saucepan ‘ask him to try and flatten us last night? Am I supposed to grow my own bloody tea?’

  ‘Carter, stop this ghastly row!’ Nurse Dean had come in quietly. Nurse Dean was a pleasant-faced brunette with calm, candid brown eyes and a figure that at first sight reminded every Martha’s man and every Martha’s male patient under forty, of Betty Grable. It was a rare man who remembered Betty Grable after the first few moments in Nurse Dean’s presence. She was only a few months older than Nurse Carter, though two years senior in hospital time, and her brisk, slightly maternal and often over-poweringly efficient manner had her openly tipped in the Sisters’ Home as a future Matron. Only her friends in her own set and a very few of her juniors were aware of the schoolgirl that still lay beneath her manner and uniform. Nurse Carter knew the schoolgirl was there but didn’t think this would in any way affect her senior’s chances of being Matron of Martha’s. Only two things could stop her, she thought: her legs.

  ‘Sorry, nurse. Sister’s narking about my tea got under my skin.’

  ‘She always gets browned off about tea. You know she does, so why bother to flap? Just shove on the milk then give me a hand with Jarvis. He must be higher and Nurse Smith’s already tied-up with Briggs.’ She watched Carter turn down the gas under urn and saucepan. ‘I’m glad we’ve got her. She’s a marvellous special.’

  Nurse Carter had worked in other wards with Nurse Smith and liked her. She assumed her best dumb blonde expression. It was a good best. ‘Yes, nurse.’

  Nurse Dean noticed but was untroubled by her junior’s expression. Carter seemed a bit dumb sometimes, but she couldn’t help that, she thought charitably, as everyone knew chocolate-box blondes always were dumb. But in her confidential report to Sister Walter Walters she had made it clear that Carter was shaping nicely as a night junior and wasn’t actually that type of blonde. ‘Just not interested, Sister. I think she was engaged to some RAF type ‒ shot down in flames over Bremen or somewhere ‒ and that’s why she decided to train. She was a VAD first.’

  ‘If you ask me, Nurse Dean,’ Sister had retorted with some asperity, ‘that’s why most of the girls we’re now getting are here. Of course, we do need them and some of them make quite good nurses, but I’m not sure this influx of wartime-onlys will do our profession much good. These new nurses seem to me to question things too much ‒ there it is. But I’m relieved young Carter isn’t proving the handful I expected when she first came to us on nights. Between ourselves, nurse ‒ one look at that naughty little thing’s eyes ‒ and doesn’t she know how to use them! ‒ and I was expecting every houseman and resident student to haunt my ward at night and to have even my DILs sitting up demanding Brylcreem. I was almost grateful to Jerry for keeping the main body of our medical school down in the country.’

  Jarvis was a printer who had served three years in France in the last war, been wounded four times, and in the last few years of peace twice admitted to Martha’s with bronchial pneumonia. Directly the nurses slid their arms into the lifting position, with the automatic response of an old hospital hand he dug in his heels and let his body and arms sag limply. ‘My trouble, nurses ‒’ he gasped on the short breath of the acute cardiac, ‘always loved my ‒’ gasp ‘food. Thanks ‒’ gasp ‘nurses. Lovely.’

  The nurses straightened their backs and breathed deeply. Jarvis weighed fifteen stone; Nurse Dean, the taller and heavier girl, just over eight. They were fond of him and watched him with more anxiety than they showed. He was a good and normally very cheerful patient, but the loss of his home had left him too subdued even to make his usual joke about being made of feathers. His small, deep set eyes were tired and angry, his heavy blue jowls sagged beneath the bulbous green mask, his stomach sprawled wearily onto his fat thighs, and he had closed his eyes before Nurse Dean dismissed Nurse Carter with a flick of her eyebrows.

  Nurse Dean stayed with him, one hand on his wrist, the other adjusting the rate of the oxygen. The tall black oxygen cylinder stood just behind his locker and she stooped for a closer look at the speed of the bubbles in the flow-meter through which the oxygen passed before reaching the mask. Attached to the last was a green rubber bag that rose and fell with each respiration. She watched the bag until it ceased to flutter and settled into a regular rhythm. Too rapid and too shallow, she thought, but at least steady. She studied his total appearance clinically, uneasily, and remembered the anger in his eyes. The emotion wouldn’t help his heart but it would help his will. She knew from first-hand experience that any patient still capable of anger was a patient still determined to fight for life. From his pulse, his heart was fighting now, but it was a very tired heart. It all depended on how long his will could power his heart and how quiet they could keep him. She was not an imaginative girl but, as her reflexes had been conditioned, at that last thought she glanced instinctively up at the invisible sky.

  That one distant rocket remained the only thing to have dropped on London since the night staff took over, when Nurse Carter came in from the balcony just before eleven. Earlier, as the night nurses were streaming sleepily into the dining-room for supper, the air-raid sirens had moaned the Alert that after five years had become as easily ignored as an habitual alarm clock in the morning. No one within a flying bomb’s range needed a warning siren; the noise of the engines and the sight of the fire spitting from the tails provided enough warning; experience taught that the bombs were relatively safe until the engines cut off, the fire went out and the dive started. And then the bombs were deathly dangerous. No sirens wailed to warn the approach of a rocket, as the V2s came too high, too fast, and too silently. The first anyone knew of a rocket attack was when one landed.

  A few minutes after the Alert at supper, two flying bombs had fallen on the other side of the river within minutes of each other. The three Wally’s night nurses had heard the bombs explode, but only Nurse Smith still remembered them and even she had forgotten when, or even if, she heard the All-Clear that followed. The deep-throated chug-chug-chug of the engines echoed in her head as she held Briggs’s hand in both hers and listened to his anxious mutters about his wife, ‘… she will come … comes up every day from Guildford, nurse … not right for her … she will come … every day, nurse … worries me, nurse … she will come …’

  The sluice and ward bathrooms were up at the balcony end. Nurse Carter took her bucket into the sluice and blinked at the harshness of the white-shaded light accentuated by the white tiles on the walls and green tiles on the floor. Her night was only two hours old, but as it was her fourteenth of the twenty-one consecutive nights worked by all the night nurses, between intervals of three free nights, during their three-month periods on night-duty, her back had already started aching and the usual tentacles of fire were ringing her ankles and shooting down into the balls of her feet. She checked the doorway was empty, then sat on the weighing machine drawn up against one wall. It was of the old-fashione
d wheelchair-cum-wheelbarrow variety that someone had produced from some forgotten store after the direct hit on the main surgical stores.

  ‘Carter! What do you think you’re doing?’ Nurse Dean was in the open doorway.

  Nurse Carter bounced up and stifled the urge to retort: Just checking on my TB, nurse. ‘Sorry. Want me?’

  ‘Why didn’t you answer that ’phone?’

  ‘Sorry, nurse. On the balcony.’

  ‘Never mind that now ‒ but you know you’re not allowed to sit down at night unless you’re writing, specialing or having your meal. Do try and be more professional. Just because Jerry’s slack is no excuse for slack nursing. Leave your routine this end and deal with all you’ve got to do down the flat end. Stay there and cope with the ’phone whilst I’m tied up in the ward. Luckily, I just heard it. It was the theatre for the Major’s bed. I’ve managed to scrounge two Cas. dressers to take it down and you needn’t go with it as they’re sending him up with a theatre nurse as the SSO’s coming with him.’

  ‘Okay, nurse,’ said Nurse Carter equably, but her senior had vanished.

  ‘The flat’ was the small windowless corridor that connected the ward entrance with the lift and stairwells. It was lined on one side by the kitchen, sterilizing and urine-testing rooms; on the other by the linen and stock rooms, a small bathroom and Sister’s day duty-room. From last June, in Wally’s and the only three other above ground and also first-floor wards open, every night the flats were converted into night duty-rooms. Setting the flat was part of Nurse Carter’s routine work. She screened off the stairs but not the lift, hauled the sturdy deal table from the stockroom, and furnished it with the two hard kitchen chairs and all the paraphernalia that occupied Sister’s ward table during the day.

  The table, with the chairs side by side facing the ward, was set close enough to the entrance to give a clear view of the entire ward without blocking the paths of in-going and out-going stretcher, dressing and tea-trolleys. The wide, double, battened ward doors were kept fixed open all night. The one ward telephone was moved onto the table from its shelf on the wall between the kitchen and sterilizing-room doors. Owing to some freak in the acoustics ‒ caused, according to cherished if unproven wartime legend, by the bricked-in windows ‒ though it was possible from the flat to hear a patient muttering in sleep in a bed at the balcony end, from the ward even the ringing telephone on the table was barely audible. The telephone was the ward’s lifeline with the rest of the hospital and the outside world. During the day, as the day staff was so much larger, there was always some nurse around the flat to answer the telephone; at night this was the junior’s responsibility unless her senior was occupied in the flat by medical rounds, Night Sister, or patients’ relatives.

  Major Browne had arrived in his bed, the portering students and the theatre nurse had gone and the SSO’s spruce black head was still visible above the screens round 31, when Nurse Carter sat at the flat table twenty minutes later. She had started drawing up the new ward diagnosis list that would come into use for the next twenty-four hours from midnight, when the Alert sounded. She had reached Bed 15, Patrick Francis Murphy, aged 21, Merchant Navy, Multiple lacerations to back … before she put down her pen to listen. She could hear it now. Still a long way off but coming closer and very fast. If it keeps up this speed, she thought, it’ll go over the river. She looked anxiously into the ward and especially at Jarvis. Dean was with the Major and Smith with Briggs ‒ then she saw her senior glide silently from the sheltering screens to Jarvis’s bedside and the SSO’s head suddenly disappear. Momentarily, Nurse Dean’s head turned towards her and nodded to remind her to stay in the flat. This was partially not to alarm the patients further with the sight of a nurse suddenly rushing into the ward, and partially as Nurse Dean was convinced the bomb was going on over the river.

  The roaring bomb was nearly overhead. The noise filtered through the patients’ drugged sleep and, without waking properly, all those who were able to turn themselves instinctively rolled onto their faces. Nurse Carter closed her eyes, folded her hands in prayer and muttered to herself, ‘Please God ‒ right over and let it drop on Benedict’s not us.’ And the sturdy young house physician who had just come swiftly up the stairs, stopped by the table and grinned. He couldn’t hear her words but he could guess them. The sudden silence of the bomb’s engine swept the grin from his face. He dived under the table with the agility of a good scrum-half, buried his face between his knees and clasped his hands over the nape of his neck. Simultaneously, Nurse Carter flattened her face on the table top and folded both arms over the back of her head. The houseman was back on his feet and smoothing his dark bushy hair before the sound of the explosion faded. It was much further away than four of the staff then in Wally’s had anticipated; but not Nurse Dean: ‘I didn’t think it was for us, Jarvis dear,’ she said placidly. ‘Comfortable? Good.’

  Still without waking properly, the patients on their faces turned themselves into more comfortable positions and slept on. Nurse Dean moved to the middle of the ward, took a long slow look all round, nodded again towards her junior, then disappeared behind the Major’s screens. Nurse Carter straightened her cap and breathed out. No main lights on; no tea all round for that one. ‘Benedict’s, Mr Sullivan,’ she said.

  Mr Sullivan, the house-physician, had very regular features, excellent teeth, and was well aware of both attributes. ‘That’s for sure,’ he agreed happily. ‘I’d no conception you’d this influence in high places, Nurse Carter. Were you on the job at supper?’ She nodded. ‘They tell me those poor sods over at Benedict’s haven’t the one emergency bed left after those two. God alone knows where they’ll put the pieces from this one. But what happened last night? You were dead off-target.’

  ‘Obviously the Benedicts’ girls beat me to the draw.’ She picked up her pen. ‘Come for your round?’

  ‘Round of one, seeing Jarvis is all I’ve got in Wally’s.’ From his tone, he carried the entire medical side of Martha’s single-handed. ‘Will your boss be free soon?’

  She shrugged. ‘Search me. SSO’s here.’

  He peered into the ward. ‘Is that him flapping behind 31? What’s going on?’

  ‘Our Major Browne who bought it under a tram.’

  ‘I heard about him.’ He turned his back on the ward to improvise: ‘ “Oh look Mama, is that Papa that looks like strawberry jam? No, no, my dear, ’tis the Major’s leg, left underneath a tram.” ’

  Nurse Carter sighed. ‘He didn’t leave it under the tram. It’s in the basement theatre. Mack took it off.’

  He slapped his forehead. ‘I should’ve known. Not Kilroy but Mack was here. Trust the Ripper. And how’s my good friend Nigel Gill?’

  ‘Snoring his head off in 30 between two DILs.’

  ‘That’ll teach him to hold his beer better.’

  Nurse Carter wrote ‘Albert William Harper’ before looking up. New housemen, she reflected, were as dumb as medical students; neither ever knew anything about the patients. ‘Mr Gill’s in with busted ribs, not alcohol poisoning.’

  ‘And didn’t he bust them falling out of Sep’s at closing time this afternoon?’

  The nearest pub to the hospital had another name but none of the staff ever remembered what it was. For the past ninety years, to Martha’s the pub had been Sep’s, in memory of one Dr Septimus Holtsmoor, a general physician who had endeared himself to generations of Martha’s men by his reputation for never having made an incorrect diagnosis when drunk or a correct one when sober.

  Nurse Carter studied the good-looking face thoughtfully. Wood between the ears ‒ but Irish. She glanced into the ward to be sure none of her seniors were watching then smiled up at Sullivan and flapped her long and genuinely dark eyelashes. ‘There’s something I’ve been longing to ask you, Mr Sullivan. May I?’

  Sullivan was pleased but unsurprised. There was no denying he did something to blondes and if this was the first time she’d given him the green light it just went to show the junior r
esidents’ rest-room was right to label her the darkest horse in Martha’s. ‘Go right ahead, Nurse Carter.’

  ‘Do you get food parcels from home?’

  He was only slightly taken aback. He could recognize an opening gambit in any form. ‘Now and then.’

  ‘Tea?’ she suggested, packing the sexuality into her quiet voice. ‘Or couldn’t you write home for some? Southern Ireland must have tea. You’re neutral.’

  Momentarily, common-sense broke through. ‘Mother of God, girl, if I wrote home saying England’s short on tea, if it got by the censors and didn’t get me up against a wall, it’d have them dancing in the streets of Dublin. We hate you bloody English.’