The Print Petticoat

by Lucilla Andrews

  Her name was Agnes Trant. She said she had been a Sister in the Army during the War, and since then had drifted into private nursing. I told her I had given notice that morning.

  ‘What are you going to do now, Nurse?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Anything. Except work in another nursing home.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back to Gregory’s?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure Matron would fix you up.’

  ‘She might,’ I said slowly. ‘I thought I had finished with Gregory’s, but it seems they still haven’t got a Baby Sister.’

  I had been waiting for Beth to come off duty one evening the previous week. I was standing in Casualty Hall when Matron came by. She stopped to speak to me. ‘How are you enjoying being a private nurse, Nurse Anthony?’

  I told her not at all.

  ‘Come and have a chat with me before you decide to investigate any other aspects of our profession,’ she said.

  Beth told me later that the Nursery job at Elmhall was still going.

  ‘I’m sure you could get it, Joa ‒ for the asking.’

  ‘How about Richard?’ I was gloomy.

  ‘To hell with Richard!’ said Beth. Then sympathy rushed in. ‘Honey ‒ I am sorry. I know how miserable it all is. Perhaps you had better not.’

  ‘I’d better be strong-minded,’ I said. ‘If I’m only five miles or whatever-it-is away from the man it’ll be hopeless. And I’ll have to go through it all over again.’

  Miss Trant was all for me going back to Gregory’s.

  ‘I’m not surprised Matron wants you back,’ she said wearily, ‘you are very much the type they like. Go back, my dear. Stay back. Be safe!’

  I had no intentions of going into the details of my private life, or explaining that my hair-style was misleading her as well as the Matron at Gregory’s, so I asked her about herself. When she replied I wished I had not.

  ‘I’m in a mess, my dear,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s why I advise you to go back to Gregory’s. Go back and stay back. It’s safe,’ she repeated again.

  She said she had felt restless at the end of her training period. She wanted to travel.

  ‘So I got a job in Crete ‒ Anglo-American Hospital ‒ did that for three years. Then I wandered down to South Africa. There was a hospital in Durban ‒ I enjoyed that ‒ the climate never bothered me. After that ‒ I think it was after Africa ‒ yes, I went to Paris. The Anglo-American there. Then I did a few years’ private cases ‒ always good families, very wealthy! I enjoyed that very much ‒ as much as Durban, which was oddly my favourite.’

  The last War had found her on the Reserve of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. I gathered she had, in a purely financial way, enjoyed the War. ‘It’s so nice to know one’s rent is being paid. And a regular income. Without wondering what is going to happen when one’s present case finishes! And also ‒ if one is going to get paid at all. That’s always a problem in private houses.’

  ‘Do you get many bad debts?’ I asked. This was a new idea to me, not very palatable. The thought of free-lancing for a while when I left The Havenne had occurred to me several times.

  ‘Not all that many, Nurse,’ she said. ‘But enough to make the acquisition of one’s pay cheque a profound relief.’

  She smiled to show she was light-hearted, but there was very little humour in her eyes.

  ‘And now,’ she went on, ‘I’m too old!’

  She said the great change in medical and nursing technique since the War terrified her.

  ‘You girls live with a hypodermic syringe in one hand and a sphygmomanometer in the other. It’s all very difficult, and frankly I’m lost.’

  ‘It’s all this chemotherapy and C6 that’s to blame,’ I said. ‘Not us girls. We are as keen on cool hands on fevered brows as ever you were. Only there isn’t much time.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said pathetically. ‘What is C6?’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ ‒ I was, too ‒ ‘I didn’t mean to talk nonsense. It’s just that the stuff’s second nature.’

  ‘I know it is. What is it?’

  ‘Hexamethonium bromide.’

  ‘That’s it! I read about it in some daily paper. The ‒ the safe anaesthetic they called it. Is it?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Sister,’ I said. ‘I’m only a poor wretched nurse. All I do know is that over my dead body anyone gives that stuff to me or mine.’

  ‘Really?’ She seemed quite interested, and I was glad to keep on discussing the stuff to get away from the subject of herself. It was not much of an idea. We went back.

  ‘I’m too old,’ she said again.

  She was over-age for the Army and the Colonial Nursing Service. No hospital would now employ her in any but a non-nursing capacity. She was out of date.

  She could not get the words out of her mind. A good many people must have used them to her a good many times. There seemed little danger that she would ever forget.

  ‘So here I am, my dear, Assistant Home Sister. Serving out eight meals a day ‒ and fortunate to be able to do it! You take my advice, Miss Anthony! Go back. It’s your only hope if you are a sick-nurse. Stick to your own training school.

  ‘They talk about a shortage of nurses; so there is ‒ of young nurses. Have you ever wondered why nurses never seem to be old? If you have not ‒ I’ll tell you the reason. No one employs old nurses. That’s why you never see them; like old soldiers, we simply fade away.’ And she laughed again without amusement.

  She reminded me suddenly of an old Home Sister I had known during my training. I was ill with pneumonia at the time. One evening she came into the Nurses’ Sick Bay to wash me.

  ‘Nice to have a young body,’ she had said. ‘Wish I had my youth back again. Not,’ she added quickly, ‘not that I would have done anything different. I’m a nurse and I love it. The hospital, too. Don’t think I don’t! But sometimes I get tired these days, and I can’t afford to get tired. I haven’t a penny put by. How could I? Out of what we used to get paid? It’s better now ‒ but too late for my generation. So I’ll go on till I drop, and between ourselves I’m not far from dropping now.’

  She sighed as she wrung out my face-flannel. ‘Yes, I’d like to be young again. I’d make sure this time that when I was old I had something to drop into ‒ someone to think about me when I dropped.

  ‘St Gregory’s has been my family ‒ my ‒ home ‒ my life. And the day I discard my cap and petticoat none of you will give me another thought. Except perhaps to wonder what became of old Howarth whenever you see a cart-horse.’ She patted my feet gently as she tucked in the blanket. ‘I know my nickname, Nurse! You needn’t look so innocent. Now’ ‒ she straightened her old corseted back ‒ ‘comfortable?’

  I had felt too ill that night to be surprised at Miss Howarth’s talking in that way to a third-year-nurse, forty years her junior. Later, on thinking it over, I realized there was nothing surprising about it. Miss Howarth had done everything for me during that illness. When you really nurse someone, nurse and patient become very close, and confession is easy.

  As I have said, Miss Trant reminded me of Miss Howarth. I thought ruefully that until that moment I had forgotten all about the poor old cart-horse. I did not even know if she was still alive. If she was, she could only be existing. She had left half her life and Gregory’s behind her before I first went to Elmhall.

  I wondered why Miss Trant ruled out marriage as firmly for me as it had apparently been out for her. She had lived through two World Wars, which probably accounted for the fact that she was single. She was an attractive woman still, and nurses on the whole are a set of women much given to marrying and being married. Or had she, like myself, wanted to marry a man who did not love her? In which case was she really any happier on her own than she would have been as the wife of one of the Allans of this world?

  Marcus was round at the flat when I got back that evening. He had driven Beth back from the hospital. Beth was in the bath. She
called out ‘Hallo’ as I came in.

  ‘I won’t be long, Joa ‒ but my feet are killing me! Marcus is in the kitchen cooking supper.’

  Marcus appeared at the kitchen door in his shirt-sleeves, an old apron of Beth’s tied round his waist.

  ‘Hallo, Joanna. How do you like your eggs fried? Hard or soft?’

  ‘Like leather, please. The yoke solid.’

  ‘Not really? Beth said you did, but I couldn’t believe her.’

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled as I shed my coat and shoes; Beth was not the only nurse with feet that evening.

  ‘I have execrable taste,’ I added.

  ‘So I’ve noticed,’ he smiled back. ‘Never mind, dear. We love you the way you are.’

  I redid my hair, put on some lipstick, and thought about Marcus. Beth suggested we made a book as to which of us he was doing a line with.

  ‘Maybe his heart is set on being a brother to us both,’ I had suggested. ‘And it gives him somewhere to go in the long summer evenings.’

  I was quite glad to see him that night. Allan was working and I had come away from The Havenne on my own. I was full of gloomy forebodings about the nursing profession as a whole and my own future in particular. As I knew how Beth felt about Allan, I could hardly discuss with her, even academically, the subject of marrying him in cold blood. Not that I intended marrying him for any reason at all ‒ it was merely that for the first time in my life I was worried about my future. I knew I was drifting, but did not know to where, or, worst of all, what I wanted to do about it. It’s a fairly common worry which hits most single young women in their late twenties. I was only twenty-five, admittedly, but having no family I had generally got around to facing things a lot earlier than was usual or necessary.

  Beth was still in the bath when I went in to wash. She said she had had the hell of a day.

  ‘Hundreds of admissions all the time; clinics that should have finished by twelve were going on after lunch. Sister Casualty hidden in Room 34 with a woman having a baby! Then the porters left a B.I.D. in Room 21 and forgot to tell me about it. It was discovered by a new dresser who had never seen death and didn’t recognize it when he sent it away from the Anatomy Room Table. The wretched boy tried to take the man’s temperature, then let out a blood-curling scream and fainted! A jolly day in all.’

  B.I.D. means Brought In Dead.

  She asked me to turn on the hot tap for her again. ‘I’m only just coming to life. In another half-hour I’ll be almost human.’

  ‘What kind of baby did Sister get?’

  ‘A boy. Big one. The thing was that the woman did not even know she was pregnant. The husband rushed in with her at lunch-time as we were changing over. He caught Sister’s arm and said that he would be ever so obliged if she would have a look at his wife, he would, as the old lady was real queer downstairs.’

  Apparently Allan had been passing through Casualty at that moment. Sister Casualty called after him. ‘Did you hear that, Mr Kinnoch? Would you have a look at this gentleman’s wife?’ Allan, who had been in a hurry, said, ‘Right, Sister!’ and rushed along to the Ante-Natal Clinic in the new wing before stopping to check up where the patient was.

  ‘So,’ said Beth, ‘Sister delivered the woman herself then and there. She was “real queer” too. There was an arm presenting.’

  ‘Didn’t she really know she was pregnant?’ I asked, although I knew this was quite possible. It is amazing how common ignorance of the facts of life is in a big city.

  Beth said no. The woman thought she had put on a bit of weight lately, Sister ‒ but she never thought it could be anything like that!

  I laughed. ‘What happened to Allan?’

  ‘Oh, he came back shortly and joined the party, purple with confusion. Sister made things worse by asking him in front of everyone how he could call himself a gynaecologist when he did not know what the average Londoner meant when he referred to “downstairs”.’

  Marcus was alone in the living-room. He stood up as I went in.

  ‘I take it you’ve been hearing the saga of Allan?’ I sat down and took the cigarette he offered me. I noticed he had laid the table for supper.

  ‘Thanks. Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Poor Allan ‒ will he ever live it down?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Marcus. ‘Anyway, he’ll be round later, so he’ll probably unburden his soul to you himself.’ I looked again at the table. There were only three places set.

  ‘Not for supper?’ I lifted my feet over the arm of my chair as I spoke. ‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘it’s very good of you to be such a mother’s help.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ He grinned. ‘The perfect, domesticated, not so young, student man ‒ that’s me.’

  ‘How old are you?’ I wondered.

  ‘Twenty-nine. The Grand Old Man of the Medical School. The Dean and I meet on equal terms as men of the world.’

  ‘Do you mind being with the boys all the time?’

  ‘Well, I’m not really. About 75 per cent of my lot are ex-Service. We are all much of the same age. The kindergartens enjoy the chance to be little Peter Pans and boys at heart for a few more years. How old are you, Joanna?’

  He swung round in his chair as he spoke, and his eyes were on my legs.

  ‘They are good, aren’t they?’ I agreed. ‘And black nylon improves them!’

  He laughed. ‘God’s gift to the medical staff! And, of course, world-weary Sultans! How’s The Havenne? And you still haven’t answered my question. Aren’t you going to?’

  ‘Twenty-five. Don’t remind me. It’s not that I mind growing old. It just strikes chill into my very bones, that’s all.’

  ‘I hate to think,’ he said, ‘what would happen if you really minded about something. Seriously, Joanna’ ‒ his face was surprisingly kind as he spoke ‒ ‘Seriously,’ he said again, ‘what’s wrong? The Havenne? Allan? Or Richard Everley?’

  ‘Look’ ‒ I was suddenly weary ‒ ‘can’t we leave Richard out of things?’

  ‘We can,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but isn’t he still rather in things as far as you are concerned?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly, ‘I suppose he is.’

  ‘But he’s not worrying you tonight?’

  ‘No more so than usual.’ And I told him about Miss Trant and Miss Howarth.

  ‘I know,’ he said when I had finished. ‘I have sometimes wondered myself. There’s hardly a woman over forty in Gregory’s, and precious few over thirty. They must go somewhere. Where?’

  ‘A lot marry.’ I spoke without thinking.

  ‘So you’ve decided to marry Allan to avoid a glorious future as Assistant Home Sister in The Havenne? Well ‒ it’s a way out,’ he said dryly. ‘Do I wish him joy tonight?’

  ‘Don’t fool, Marcus, please, I don’t feel strong enough.’ I laughed because I had to do something.

  ‘I’m not fooling,’ he said quickly. ‘I think it would be a perfectly bloody thing even to consider. And I certainly would be damned before I congratulated Allan for marrying a cold-blooded cheat.’

  ‘Me?’ My voice rose, outraged. He stood up suddenly, leant over me and kissed my mouth firmly.

  ‘Yes, my darling ‒ you! I would marry you for myself to stop that. I thought Beth and you were what you please to call buddies.’

  I pushed his face away. It did not need much strength. He went back of his own accord. We were still looking at each other in astonished silence when Beth came in wearing a blue cotton house-coat, her fair hair damped to silver by the steam from her bath.

  Allan arrived after supper. He was full of the story of the baby he had tried to deliver in the basement, and told it all over again before we had a chance to say I had heard it. Marcus discovered a half-bottle of whisky he had forgotten was in his mackintosh pocket. He fetched wine-glasses from the kitchen. It looked like being a pleasant evening, only something was wrong. I decided the atmosphere that had grown up between Marcus and me after our little chat was still around! The whisky helped, but not much. I watched him with
Beth. He was always nice to Beth. But then so was every man and woman who knew her. Beth was one of those rare people who really does bring out the best in you. Maybe he was really serious about her. In which case he was too old a hand at the game to show what he felt. Then I realized that was sheer rubbish. If Marcus was really, properly, in love, he would be completely at sea. So far Marcus ran his love-life with highly successful sham methods. He would not know where to start if he genuinely loved some girl. Meaning what he said alone would be beyond him. All the same, as I watched him with Beth I wondered. It would certainly complicate life for us all.

  ‘Come on, Joa ‒ wake up.’ Beth waved across the room at. me. ‘We really ought to drink a toast. This is real Scotch.’

  ‘Would I drink it if it were not?’ grinned Allan smugly. ‘How about my baby?’

  ‘Coupled with the Senior Gynaecological House Physician?’ said Marcus.

  ‘You can laugh, my boy,’ said Allan, lying back in his chair, smiling at me. ‘You can laugh, but just you wait a few more months till you are a harassed C.O.’

  ‘Sister Slane drives the poor C.O.s,’ said Beth cheerfully. ‘God help you, Marcus.’

  ‘I’ve seen ’em,’ said Marcus. ‘I’ve seen the Casualty Officers, lined up outside Casualty Hall whilst Sister gets busy with the stock-whip. It’s the best reason I know for not qualifying. My heart quails at the thought.’

  Allan was at the reminiscing stage early.

  ‘My God, do I not remember last year? From the moment I woke up in the morning I would hear that wretched hall-porter on the inter-com. “All Casualty Officers wanted in Casualty!” The times I chucked my stethoscope at my bedroom microphone. And risked a D.U. galloping along to Casualty after breakfast. I never got there on time. Sister was invariably standing by my desk with a dirty look, holding back the crowd round the door. I was never one of her bright boys. You’re much more her type, Marcus. She likes wolves.’