The First Year

by Lucilla Andrews

  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-fashioned 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 betwe
en 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 residents’ 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.’

  ‘Murphy in 15 doesn’t,’ she retorted serenely.

  ‘He’ll be an Ulsterman ‒’

  ‘He’s not. Merchant seaman from Cork. Jerry got him in the docks last night. He’s sweet. He’s promised to send me tea parcels next time he hits port outside the UK.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Sullivan played his ace. ‘It so happens I’ve half-a-pound in my room in the basement right now.’

  She flapped her eyelashes ecstatically. ‘Mr Sullivan, you’re a dreamboat. Will you give me some?’

  He flushed and fingered his tie. ‘When are your next nights off?’

  ‘Not till Thursday, Friday, Saturday next week.’

  ‘If I can swing it with my boss to get off Saturday, date? You can have the tea then.’

  She hesitated, still gazing at his face but seeing another man’s. Hell, she thought, he won’t like this and nor will I. And then she thought, My God, the things I do for England. ‘Okay, but only if I can have the lot tonight.’

  He didn’t hesitate. He knew she was just playing hard to get and he didn’t hold it against her. He was twenty-three. He understood women. ‘You’re on. I’ll nip it up later. Now about our date ‒’

  She waved him to silence and tilted her head to listen. ‘Night Sister’s heels on the stairs ‒’ she fled silently into the stockroom.

  Sullivan froze with terror. Being so newly qualified he had not yet shed his awe of the ward sisters or the more experienced staff nurses, and in the latter category he placed Nurse Dean as a spine-chilling example. But in common with the entire junior resident staff he placed the Senior Night Sister in Martha’s, London, in a class of her own; the Senior Night Sister struck the Fear of God and impotence into every houseman in every branch of the hospital.

  The Senior Night Sister was a thin grey woman in her forties with the perpetual stoop, hushed voice and pallor of the permanent night worker and the perpetually severe expression of a sufferer from chronic indigestion. She favoured Sullivan with a reproving nod as she walked to the ward entrance, to look all round without stepping over the threshold. She turned back to him. ‘If you’re waiting for Nurse Dean, Mr Sullivan, you had better come back later. Mr MacDonald,’ she added in the tone others reserved for the Almighty, ‘is in the ward.’

  ‘I’ll do as you say, Sister.’ Sullivan retreated thankfully to the stairs.

  Night Sister turned her reproving gaze on Nurse Carter who, as etiquette demanded, had re-appeared from the stock-room and stood at her elbow, her hands correctly held behind her back. ‘I’m not here for my round, nurse. I just want a word with Mr MacDonald. I’ll wait. Carry on with your routine.’ Nurse Dean, on her toes, had watched this exchange over the top of the screens. She didn’t mention it yet to Mr MacDonald. She settled back on her feet and returned her attention to the Major’s pulse-rate.

  Major Browne was still under the anaesthetic and the green bag fluttered rhythmically against his thin narrow chest. The shock had yellowed the tan and smoothed the lines in his high forehead, his blue-veined eyelids were peacefully closed and he looked asleep rather than unconscious. Briefly, Mr MacDonald held the mask a little above the narrow, fine-boned dreamer’s face. An anaesthetic dreamer’s face. ‘Doesn’t look fifty-four or a professional soldier,’ MacDonald observed in the quiet, flat tone used by all the staff at night since it carried far less than a whisper.

  Nurse Dean nodded non-committally and kept her gaze on her watch. ‘142,’ she said a minute later. ‘Thin but very regular.’ She looked at the unconscious man. ‘Very thin but wiry. Kept himself in good shape. The Army’ll have helped him there ‒ it’ll help him now.’

  MacDonald said nothing. He replaced the mask and wondered how the owner of that face had endured years of Mess life or would endure the prospect of his future life when he came properly round. He stepped back to measure with his eyes the height of the wooden blocks raising the foot of the bed. The angle was so acute that they had just had to tie on a pillow to pad the headrails and with crepe bandages tied the end of the huge, electric bedcradle to the footrails. The top of the bed was made up in two parts to leave constantly exposed the massive bandages covering the right hip and the sandbags packed around it. MacDonald looked unemotionally at the bandages, then turned to time on his watch the rate of the blood dripping through the glass drip-connection fitted into the transfusion apparatus. The transfusion stand was by the footrail and the blood was flowing into an ankle vein in the left leg. ‘Give him the rest of this bottle and the next at this rate, then if he’s still holding, slow the one after to half.’ He didn’t add, if he’s not holding let me know, as that was the established procedure in such circumstances. He pulled down his face mask and for a few minutes stood in silence watching his patient. This was one of his professional habits, but it often surprised sisters and staff nurses working with him for the first time, as it was one more commonly met in physicians than surgeons.

  At thirty-four MacDonald was the oldest and professionally most experienced man on the resident staff. With the single exception of the Senior Night Sister, he was the oldest member of the entire staff on-duty in the hospital that night. Just then his exact age was impossible to guess, as even in the red glow his angular, long-jawed face was grey with fatigue and his dark eyes were bruised with black. He never looked physically strong, but this was generally ignored by those who worked with him, since he had the apparently limitless physical and mental stamina of the strong-minded in their prime. In many ways he was a remarkably shrewd man and he had that disconcerting mixture of great sensitivity and great insensitivity that often accompanies an exceptional talent for surgery. His job as Senior Surgical Officer demanded all his stamina and skill. Last night he had had two hours’ sleep and this morning the theatre had recommenced operating at six. He had lost count of the number of patients he had operated on during the day. (Twenty-three.) He would not have remembered what day it was had his wife not reminded him this afternoon that it was Thursday. ‘You know I always have a half-day on Thursday. The Head was so helpful when I said I simply must come to Londo
n to see you. I just had to talk to you after your last letter and you know you never seem to be free to come home these days. The Head was marvellous. She said she’d take my morning periods herself and so long as I was back at school second period after lunch tomorrow she could cope …’

  MacDonald brushed a hand over his eyes as if that could brush out the memory and bent over the bed to raise each limp eyelid in turn. He rested a hand on the yellow forehead. ‘He’ll do, for just now.’ He straightened and glanced over the screen behind him. ‘Night Sister’s in the flat.’

  ‘She’s been there quite a while. Sullivan was there but she got rid of him.’ Nurse Dean kept her calm gaze on her patient. She was far too conscientious ever to risk looking into MacDonald’s eyes in the ward. ‘Obviously waiting for you but can’t be urgent or she’d have come in, and she’s not here for her round as she sent Carter away. I’ll just get Smith to take over here. She seems to have settled Briggs now and Jarvis is asleep again.’

  ‘Jarvis ‒ oh, yes ‒ your coronary. Right. Better see what Night Sister wants.’ But he didn’t move. He looked at her face, and kept the pain out of his voice but not his eyes. ‘I didn’t like taking it off,’ he said.

  She didn’t look up. ‘You had to save his life.’

  He grimaced. ‘Christ ‒’ he spat under his breath, ‘would I have butchered him for any other reason?’

  Nurse Dean blushed for his bitterness. ‘I’ll get Smith,’ was all she said.

  MacDonald walked away slowly as an old man. For a fractional moment she watched the back of his long limp white coat and the truth was in her eyes. Then she drew on the armour of her training and went round to Briggs’s bedside. She was still reporting on the Major to her colleague when they heard another flying bomb, this time unheralded by sirens, streaking inland and on over the river about a mile away. Nurse Dean glanced quickly away from Nurse Smith and watched the sleeping Briggs as she continued to mouth her report. All the night nurses could lip-read. Nurse Smith folded her arms to hide the tremor of her hands and her mouth went so dry she couldn’t have produced a voice, and only just managed to move her lips for the necessary monosyllabic replies. And she could only make them when the bomb was well away.