by Diana Cooper
Love
DIANA
It might have been signed by Daisy Ashford. As the plan didn’t mature I began scheming to get to the war as a nurse. Women were taking Red Cross hospitals and dressing-stations to France, and they were taking their daughters and their daughters’ friends. I wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland and Lady Dudley and the Duchess of Westminster and others. Maxine Elliott had a plan for a barge on the canals of Flanders, packed with clothes for refugees. I got nothing but discouragement and tears from my mother and a pi-jaw from Lady Dudley, whom my mother summoned to reason with me. She explained in words suitable to my innocent ears that wounded soldiers, so long starved of women, inflamed with wine and battle, ravish and leave half-dead the young nurses who wish only to tend them. I thought her ridiculous and my mother ridiculous too, and could not believe Rosemary Leveson-Gower, my cousin Angie Manners and other girls I knew, already in France, to be victims of rape.
Regretfully I abandoned the Front in favour of nursing at Guy’s Hospital (Aunt Kitty’s refuge many years before). This took a stiff fight, but as an alternative to rape at the Front the civil hospital was relieving to my poor, poor mother, who knew, as I did, that my emancipation was at hand. Still she did write to the Matron, while putting up every obstacle. She begged and warned and apprehended, and ordered the hideous print for my uniform, while I went to the kitchen and saw a hare’s insides taken out to prepare me for operations. I think few nurses were killed in the war—Nurse Cavell of course, but not by chance. Sights were terrible, suffering ghastly, but I would rather my daughter had been nursing the wounded in France than in the wards of a London hospital. It must have been Guy’s that was responsible for my silly hypochondria, now outgrown: threatened leprosy, lockjaw, T.B., cancer, foetid bronchitis and dementia were for many years a great handicap in my life.
Two reactions—one from England:
Are you really contemplating Guy’s Hospital? I can’t help thinking it is not a thing like the Slade School to be lightly undertaken as a mere essay in parent-dodging. The contract is lengthy, the drudgery unbearable, and the uniform disfiguring. I don’t believe even your genius could make the headwear tolerable, and I doubt if you would be more accessible in the Borough than at Belvoir. A hospital has all the material discomforts of a nunnery without the spiritual glamour of chastity. Quite the contrary indeed. But anyhow I feel pretty sure that their Graces won’t let you go and that the Matron won’t let you stay. How glad I am that you did not whip off to the Front with Lady Dudley. R.
And from France:
I’m thrilled to hear of your resolution; it will be simply bloody but I think it’s well worth while and I’m sure you are right. Also I’m sure you will be able to do it without an excessive amount of nausea. I approve it all the more heartily as I am now out of the country and have nothing to lose by your seclusion—“internment” is the word, I believe. Now you will be well out of the reach of those Yeomanry boys with their generous leave and their wild ways. Be chilly to the medical students, won’t you? P.
So the die was cast. I had won, but with the winning came anticlimax and cooled enthusiasm. My mother drove me down sorrowing and silent to Guy’s Hospital. I had not been there before, but she had.
It was a grey cold day. I felt ashamed of having triumphed, but not in the least apprehensive. I do not think my mother was at all proud of me; she just hated the sordid, unvirginal aspect of it all and the loss of authority and protection. Guy’s looked very Dickensian that afternoon beneath its dark drizzle. A few shivering nurses in cotton dresses were being blown about the wide courtyard and open arcaded passages. We rang the bell at a side entrance. The door was opened by an old housekeeper in black with a hospital cap. She was as dry and grey as cinders. She led us to an upper bedroom giving on to the courtyard. Here I unpacked my modest little trunk—some underclothes, some books, concealed cosmetics, clock, pencils and paper, and a pampering hot-water-bottle. Every movement was watched by the old house-Gestapo. Then they dressed me. My mother writhed. I felt myself more a nun leaving the world than a V.A.D. probationer. There was no long glass, but I later saw what was making my mother so appalled, for indeed I did look horrible. The dress was just off the floor and gathered at the back only. The print was of a minute and colourless mauve-and-white pin-stripe. The apron was cut to deform the figure. The stiff collar, cuffs and belt gleaming with starch gave cleanth and trimness. The absurd cap attached to the tip-top of the head by an unreliable pin protected one’s hair neither from lice nor from contagious germs. There were the universal black stockings and flat black shoes. I was led away from my mother who left disconsolate. I could not feel myself naughty, only perhaps heartless.
They took me to a women’s surgical ward called Charity. There I was passed on to Sister Charity, a very comely, shy young Sister in well-fitted becoming blue, with a cap held on by fresh white strings and a pleated bow. No smiles. A training hospital in 1914 was as inhuman as the army. No speaking to superiors before being spoken to. All these rules had to be learnt by trial and error, as I found out when next day I said “Good morning” to Matron. One could be schoolgirlish with the probationers though not with the Head Nurse (still unqualified), whose cap was tied on and was therefore unofficially referred to as “Strings.”
That evening I hung around not knowing what to do with myself—shy of the patients, no one naturally paying any attention to me. I had had no preparatory first-aid training, nor was this asked for. I had never been into a hospital ward before and knew no more about nursing than Nanny’s plasters and doses. I was given a very unattractive little boy of two or three as my own patient. He was recovering from an appendicitis. I clung to him and tried to ingratiate myself. There was a pretty girl of twelve who had had her tubercular leg amputated (I saw her eighteen years later still in bed at her home, lined and dry, smiling and patient). Jessie she was called. I felt I could love her. Then there was Mrs 12, who was mental. I had never talked to anyone mental. It was hard to believe that one could not personally find the clue or break through the mazes diagnosed as impenetrable.
It was a fine old L-shaped ward with deep embrasured windows on both sides. It held between twenty and thirty beds with a few children’s cots scattered around. It had an atmosphere of brightness and even happiness—a big fire in the grate, the convalescents sitting round it, the pretty Sister and a pleasant bustle. I left it after Sister had said prayers at eight o’clock, had some supper and went to my austere little room. There was a bath and hot water for the bottle. I had my orders for the next day and altogether felt satisfied with the beginnings, and ready for hardships. The first came at 10.15 p.m., when without appeal the only (centre ceiling) light went out. No reading, but tiredness took its place and I was awoken sharply at six a.m. by the same light blazing into my sleepy eyes.
How hard it is to get up when there is an hour to do it in! “Another few minutes—I can do it in ten.” “I can do it in five—in two.” And then the hideous scurry—new difficulties with collar-studs and caps, no washing, of course, the room left in chaos, the inadequate black-flannel cape thrown over shivering shoulders, the scramble with a dozen others down the Georgian wooden stairs and out into the court. A biting wind blew us into the beautiful old chapel, where for a quarter of an hour we prayed to be given strength and patience with the patients and for the safety of an ever-lengthening list of Guy’s nurses abroad with the Forces.
From chapel we filed over to a modern building where our very nasty breakfast was waiting for us—tea limitless, off-white “standard” bread, marge (in those days uneatable), tinned eggs (then a novelty and considered poisonous), good sausages or stalish fish. My trouble was wanting not to eat as I was both vain and rather fat, yet knowing that a high-graded Sister on a little rostrum was eagle-eyeing each nurse who was late, who was ill-dressed or who appeared fastidious. Often in later days I would be called with several other miscreants after the meal and reproved severely. Did I not know that nurses were differen
t from other people? Their lives were dedicated to the sick, maybe dying, and they must keep up their strength by sensible diet in order not to be found wanting.
By seven-fifty breakfast was over. The roll was called—no cheating possible (often tried and always exposed). Before the zero-hour of the ward there were ten precious minutes in which one doubled back to one’s room, brushed one’s teeth, made the bed (no dusting or sweeping), collected mail, did up the buttons one had left undone and tore back to the cheerful ward. My first job was to clean the glass trolley. The fear and dislike of asking where things are impede one’s speed the first day. “Clean it with meth, nurse.” Where’s the meth kept? one wondered. Meanwhile beds were screened off and the miserable unresisting patients blanket-bathed in turn. Convalescents dragged themselves off to a washroom. I was told to give the horrid little boy a bath and dress him cleanly. This meant a spate of agonising questions. What bath? Where are the clean clothes? What soap? I had no idea how to wash a child (half-invalid) of two. I seemed to have done nothing practical in all my twenty years. The child yelled as though I’d put it on the rack. The clean clothes were a frightful problem as there appeared to be none. Later I learnt to wait for the clean linen when it was delivered from the laundry, and if I had a child patient to grab the best of a few poor articles and hide them for future use. We all did this, so there was naturally nothing in the common cupboard.
At ten o’clock a cup of tea was snatched by half the nurses in the little kitchen attached to the ward. There the ward-maid operated. She was never off her knees except to put the kettle on—she was called Polly—and to heat up the excellent food the patients were given—good meat, chicken, creamy rice-pudding, fresh fruit compôtes. Soon after this break the doctors would arrive, followed by a knot of students. Matron had already passed through the ward, met and escorted by Sister, silent and inscrutable. She spoke neither to the patients nor to the nurses. She was formidable. To be sent for by Matron (if a probationer) meant tears before, during and after the interview.
I was called behind the screens by Sister to watch a dressing on a woman who had had a kidney removed. She had a biggish hole in her side, and as Sister squeezed and pressed her stomach and flanks a stream of green pus oozed slowly into a kidney-dish. I felt sick and weak. Dreading operations, I had never expected some dressings to be worse, but they are to me much more terrible—the patient’s own consciousness and shame and pain, the smell and the realism and all the horrors the theatre overcomes by its unearthliness.
Very soon it was 11.15, at which unexpected hour one shift of nurses went to dinner. The second shift went at twelve and returned at one, and took over the ward with an interval for tea till eight p.m., while the first shift was out from two till six and remained on duty till nine. Dinner was very nasty, but one could wolf it and regain one’s room, put one’s aching feet up on the bed and read the papers and one’s letters. Feet hurt more when one got up. Back in the ward by twelve to serve dinners. This was done ceremoniously by Sister, extra-aproned like a chef, sharpening her carvers on a stone and dispensing to her understrappers plates of different robustness and lightness—“Mrs 10 and little B’s (cot),” “That’s not enough for 22, add some more sprouts.”
At one o’clock bed-making, general tidying up, preparing for operations and visitors. And at two, my first day out and away, in a bonnet not unlike the Salvation Army but less becoming, and a long tubular narrow cape to the ankles—no arm-movement possible. We looked like caterpillars. Later I would dress in plain clothes for outings, but on my first day there was no question of not showing myself to be a nurse par excellence. I got back to Arlington Street by bus before they had finished their 1.45 luncheon. Eagerly awaiting me (I was by then the Pride of the Family) they bombarded me with questions and I gave, probably, an exaggeratedly dramatic account of hospital life with no details omitted or extenuated. I rested and was petted and tucked into a fine tea. The hospital provided tea, but I think no nurse whose off-afternoon it was took advantage of the Indian stew and rock-bottom cakes.
In the ward at six, more washing, four-hourly fomentations, tonics and bed-pans, temperatures, pulses, respiration-charts, convalescents, prayers and hand-over to the “night people.” There was a traditional dislike and distrust of the “night people.” The most popular nurse, when her turn came for night duty, became one of these heartless, negligent, half-asleep murderesses who let No. 15 “go,” i.e. die. Deaths are rarer in hospitals than laymen imagine, especially in a surgical ward. Accident and medical wards have more. But death in Charity came in a blue moon. I do not know if it is true that the small hours take the biggest toll of mortals, but the dying certainly did tend to flicker out at dawn, and it was always the fault of the night people, particularly in the eyes of that poor creature’s day nurse. For we each had our own patients. I don’t think that is so today, so all the pride in one another is lost.
We handed our pampered victims over to the nurses who would take our places on off-afternoons with a mass of instructions and injunctions not to forget their idiosyncrasies—“Boil the eggs her mother brought her for three and a half minutes,” “She’ll drop off about three—don’t wake her.” So of course we thought had we been there at night she would never have died.
The third day held good and bad. In the morning the blood-curdling message “You’re wanted in Matron’s office” froze my bones. I had already graduated to doing simple dressings and fomentations. I had two or three patients of my own besides the horrid little boy. Jessie I had, and the mental Mrs. 12, and I was feeling safer and successful. Here was a whack to send me spinning off the ladder’s first rung. Unroll the sleeves—what did I do with the cuffs? “Nurse, your apron’s not very clean. You’d better change it before going to Matron,” from Sister, her face inscrutable. “What have I done? Will she dismiss me? Give me something for courage?”—all these remarks were not voiced. The nurses saw me off, sympathetic and comforting. “It isn’t as bad as all that.” “Isn’t it though?” So with a whiter apron and a whiter face I knocked on the lion’s bars. She was an old lady, I think (I could hardly look), all in black with white-frilled cap. She ignored me for some minutes while she finished writing a report—an old trick. And then it came out.
I had been home the day before. I had told my story. I had given all the details possible to my relations and friends. Did I not realise what a sacred thing a hospital was? How vowed we should all be to discretion and respect? In our hands were the sick and dying. The responsibility of their death was often with us. Outside its walls it should not be talked about and certainly not ridiculed. By this time I was in tears, unable to deny or defend myself.
“That will be all, nurse.”
I left having said no word. I have thought since that perhaps, as I came from a society house, she felt safe in assuming my crime. She may even have felt her way. “You went home yesterday, did you not, nurse?” “They asked about your work?” My nods, for I could not speak, confirmed her suspicions, but I did not think of this, so thought “Who can have spied? The footman? A friend? An eavesdropper belonging to the hospital?”
So I got back to the chorus of “How was it?” and to make up for all the suffering Sister said: “I’ve arranged for Nurse Manners to take Nurse Shepherd’s patient to the theatre this afternoon.”
Another moment I had feared was upon me. “You’ll have to see operations!” my obstructors used to say, and old Dr Hood, in my family’s pay, would pull out stories of the Guy’s of fifty years earlier—his Guy’s, when the doctors kept their old coats for operations. These coats lived in the theatre and were so stiff with old blood that they stood up like armour. The students were always fainting, he told me. Neither student nor nurse ever saw their first op. without passing out.
There was not very long in which to worry. The poor victim had a cancer of the chin. Of all dreadful operations it is the worst to watch. A face must always be more affecting. Stomachs and limbs are less concentratedly human. On the table
an abdomen is so shrouded and strange, and, except for the little square amid the sheets, iodined to a brilliant orange where the scalpel is to cut so whitely, then so redly, you can see nothing. The doctors and nurses in their caps and masks are a secret society incognito, and the intestines themselves are as familiar as what we know in pork-butchers’ shops. But a woman’s face—who can imagine worse than to see most of a chin cut off?
So she was put on a trolley. Two orderlies whisked her away and I trotted importantly alongside, carrying a tray of I forget what—something that always went to the theatre with the patient. She was wheeled into the little anaesthetic room and I held her hand. In those days anaesthetics were very unpleasant and alarming, not to say suffocating. They got her “off” protesting, and unconscious she was wheeled into the hot glaring theatre. The doctors were being dressed by theatre nurses and sisters—masks adjusted, sterilising-drums opened, rubber gloves soaped and drawn on, sluicings of water and antiseptics, unsterile taps and wastes turned on and off by unsterile feet, a lot of talking about outside things—racing, theatre plans, hospital appointments. This I had been warned of as something callous and disillusioning, but it seemed to me most natural and necessary. The conversation turns to the patient when the operation is in full swing. If there are students watching it develops into a mask-mumbled lecture delivered as talk is delivered when one is very tense and absorbed in any concentrated handicraft. I did not look very close or very long. I thought small doses would teach me not to faint, and I never came near to it—not with unconscious patients.
