When discharged back to camp our AIF patients gave us their hat and shoulder badges, uniform buttons, picture postcards of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Brisbane, or spare snaps of little towns with British or Aboriginal names. They said anytime we stopped over we must be sure to look them up and meet the folks. They did not give us bits of shrapnel or empty cartridge cases as they had yet to collect either from enemy guns or talk of the war as anything but a bonzer spree. I liked meeting them and the very little nursing I did for them, but always in their presence was conscious of a new anxiety niggling at the back of my mind. It was an anxiety later to haunt me whenever nursing servicemen, but with the AIF I experienced it for the first time. I kept wondering if this was how their fathers had talked and laughed before the Dardanelles and if as many of the sons, as the fathers, would die before reaching home again. I had not yet seen death, but I had heard from Betty and other VADs working in the acute blocks, of the wounded men who had died since the retreat. I knew, as we all knew, of the many more men who had been killed in that retreat. Slowly I had come to realize war was a killing business and that those most likely to be killed in war were the young men in uniform. Looking around at the amiable and so often long-jawed AIF faces that even on the slightly older men looked, to my considerably younger eyes, touchingly youthful, it was only too easy for my imagination to cloak them with the fatigue, grime and oil of just a week or so back. But the great majority of the men I had washed clean had been our own men, fighting, as they and I knew now, if not before, for the life of our own country. The AIF were so far from home and, as I had just discovered, in a strange country. I found their generosity in coming so far to help that strange country as disturbing as the thought of the possible, and still apparently totally unexpected, cost to themselves.
The banshee rising and falling wails of the air-raid Alert sirens had become daily events, mainly, said rumour, because the G.O.C. took a sadistic joy in precipitating us all into another P.A.D. drill. The only enemy aircraft yet to appear in our sky had been either reconnaissance planes, or some off-course bomber flying too high for our ack-ack guns. ‘Jerry’, said the patients, ‘wasn’t nobody’s fool and wouldn’t stick his neck out bashing a military target what’d hand it back to him, when he could have it nice and easy blitzing civvies.’ Sometimes our otherwise uneventful Alerts were enlivened by short, violent bursts of ack-ack fire. ‘Ah well,’ said the patients, ‘Gunners got to earn their pay.’
A gunner Cpl and former schoolmaster suffering from Vincent’s Angina, and with cotton wool surrounding the kaolin poultice round his neck framing his long pale English face with an Elizabethan ruff, languidly raised himself on his pillows. ‘The Gentlemen of the Artillery,’ he croaked, ‘never fail to earn the pittance awarded them by an ungrateful nation.’
‘You know why Lofty’s got that poorly throat, don’t you, nurse?’ said the other patients. ‘Swallowed a dictionary, he has.’
One morning early in August my half-day in bed was disturbed at noon by the banshee wails. A few other girls were off with me, still in their beds, and as we knew our Commandant was out, when the Home VAD rushed into the ballroom blowing a whistle, we chorused ‘Sure we’ll shutter the French windows on the double!’ and as she rushed out settled back in our beds leaving the windows open and our tin hats and respirators under our beds. The sound of distant aircraft and bursts of ack-ack fire followed the expected pattern. After a longish silence there was a sudden explosion from the ack-acks, then another silence. One very pretty Irish girl, a newly joined VAD cook, sauntered in her nightie to one of the French windows, and gazed upwards. ‘Will you tell me something girls? What does a plane with a big black cross on it mean, as there’s one without an engine trying to land in the garden.’
I never knew whose rugger tackle floored her. The heap of girls in nighties and pyjamas leapt up and watched in mesmerized horror the crippled German bomber hit and explode in an empty field across the road. Momentarily blinded by the sheet of white flame, when I next looked the flame was red, the smoke black. Someone muttered, ‘Hope to God the poor bods were dead before they roasted.’ I managed to hold my vomit until in the nearest lavatory and was still retching when the single-noted All Clear siren sounded. When I got back to the ballroom the Irish girl was drifting around demanding in a daze, ‘Will someone just tell me how our ack-ack missed that Jerry? Will someone just tell me, please?’
A few days later, in early afternoon, again as most days, the banshee wailed. I was stacking tea-mugs on a large wooden trolley and groaned with the patients, ‘Why does the G.O.C. always pick on mealtimes?’
In the hospital from Alert to All Clear, all patients and staff had to wear tin hats and their respirators at the alert – i.e., strapped to the chest. In every block, Sisters, VADs and RAMC medical orderlies – where these existed – had their appointed P.A.D. jobs practised, it had seemed, ad nauseam in the many earlier drills and recent false alarms. That afternoon, our block was ready in about three minutes. Tin hats and respirators were on, blackout screens were up in all the windows as a protection against flying glass, all the outer doors were shut, electric lights on, all the beds pulled away from the walls and arranged in two rows down the ward centres, and dumped at the foot of the bed-patients’ beds were the turned back spare mattresses waiting to be heaved over the patients’ bodies should the hospital be the target of, or directly involved in, a direct air attack. If this happened, the up-patients had to lie on the floor under their beds, since bed-springs and mattresses provided useful extra protection.
During Alerts in our block Sister allotted two wards to the senior VAD and herself, respectively, and gave the rest of us responsibility for individual wards. We still had no orderlies on the permanent block staff. In that and every hospital in which I worked during the war, throughout air-raids the nursing staff on duty remained with their appointed patients. And in any hospital that possessed air raid shelters, it was always the most junior nurses who were sent to the shelters with those patients who could be moved and the seniors who remained in the wards, almost invariably, by the bedsides of their illest patients.
My only bed-patients then were four with Vincent’s Angina and one P.U.O. with a dramatically swinging temperature that made his chart the pride of the ward and despair of our latest, newly recruited M.O. The P.U.O.’s face ran sweat under the tin hat tilted over his nose. ‘Why don’t they fetch the G.O.C. his char and wad so we can have ours?’
Before anyone could answer, the air was split with the whine of diving aircraft. The supine bed-patients, galvanized into life, heaved the spare mattresses over themselves before I could reach one and, as I crouched between the beds of the gunner Cpl and P.U.O., my two illest men, the up-patients flattened themselves under their beds like falling playing cards. In those and the following seconds it sounded as if every gun in the great camp had opened up, simultaneously. The sustained cacophony did more than deafen, it hurt the teeth, the ears, the facial sinuses, it made the bones ache, the bedsteads vibrate under my gripping hands and drinking glasses and tin ashtrays fall soundlessly off lockers, droplets in an ocean of noise. Yet because they were our own guns, and perhaps because heard for the first time at full roar, I found their thunderous voices extraordinarily exhilarating.
When the uproar subsided to staccato barks and hearing returned to normal, we could hear growling aircraft, and explosions, some little way off. Then the guns fell silent. A second or so later the silence was splintered by the higher-pitch whines of wheeling fighter planes. One up-patient crawled to peer through a chink in a blackout screen. ‘One Jerrys got two Spits on his tail! Get at him, mates!’ He shouted with triumph. ‘They got him!’
The bed-patients shoved off their spare mattresses, the up-patients bobbed up, all grinning euphorically. By the All Clear, our entire block was jubilant. ‘Jerry got a taste of his own medicine, didn’t he, nurse? Knows what to expect, don’t he, when he starts his invasion. And he’s welcome to try it on. Any time!’
The euphoria lasted roughly fifteen minutes. Then the ambulances began to arrive and the telephone to ring. ‘A’ block (acute surgical-cum-theatre) needed all available junior Sisters and VADs. Our Sister being in sole charge could not leave her block, and sent another VAD and myself. ‘Take your cloaks and spare clean aprons as I don’t know how long you’ll be needed in "A".’ The other VAD returned to N.D.K. some days later. I never worked there again.
‘A’ being acute was on the upper floor and had at one end the operating theatre, anaesthetic room and proper Sister’s duty-room, and at the other, five wards equipped as hospital wards and not, as N.D.K., barely converted barrack rooms. The block was the busiest and heaviest in the hospital and for both reasons the most popular amongst the VADs since the patients needed what was known to nurses, amateur and professional, as ‘real nursing’.
In normal circumstances, all the patients were ‘acute surgicals’ and in those medical times only rarely was a patient allowed out of bed after an abdominal operation until the stitches or clips were out. Usually the acute appendices staggered to their unsteady feet on the tenth day after operation; haemorrhoids around the fourteenth; and hernias more often had twenty-one days in bed. The innumerable Dispatch and other motor-bike riders injured in crashes, if sufficiently injured to rate admission to the block, could be warded as bed-patients for weeks. Generally once an acute surgical patient was fit to be up for a few hours daily, he was transferred to the semi-convalescent surgical hut recently added to the ground floor. Postoperative physiotherapy, as the sulfa drugs, were very recent innovations.
Having never been in ‘A’ before I could not judge how it looked normally. That afternoon the block so closely resembled a scene of a front-line casualty clearing station in an old war movie, that my immediate reaction was disbelief. Reality began to penetrate owing to the scene not being in black and white but in colour, with the two predominating colours varying shades of red and grey.
Scarlet on the pinned-back shoulder capes of the QA Regulars, scarlet edging the grey capes of the QA Reservists; all the Sisters with grey dresses beneath white aprons, white masks on their faces and their sleeves up. It was the first time I had seen the elbows of so many army Sisters exposed, or the Sisters themselves moving at the astonishing speed that takes years of training to acquire and once acquired is never wholly forgotten. Scarlet and crimson splashing the long white overalls of the medical orderlies and the pale khaki shirts of the jacketless M.O.s, also all masked and with sleeves rolled up and working as physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, and stretcher-bearers. Scarlet and crimson seeping through the grey blankets covering the huddled bundles on the incoming stretchers being unloaded from the one lift with the monotony of some nightmare factory-belt. Scarlet blankets over the bed-patients being carried out to provide ward beds for the incomers, by pairs of amateur stretcher-bearers. Each pair, a regimental chaplain and a VAD as the orderlies were all needed by the newly wounded. I had never seen so many padres and had no chance or time to ask how they came to be there. I later heard that when news of the number of air-raid casualties had flashed round the camp, chaplains of every denomination had rushed to the hospital to offer help.
I found myself paired with a stout, youngish padre, whose name and denomination I never learnt. He was in shirt-sleeves and insisted on taking the heavier head of each stretcher and repeating his terrible little jokes. ‘This’ll shift my spare tyre, eh, lad? … How’s the weather up your end, nurse? … If you feel sea-sick, lad, remember the wind’s blowing my way! … And who’s the next lucky lad for the joy-ride?’
The patients obligingly grinned, winked, jerked-up thumbs. ‘Bring on the dancing girls, eh, nurse?’
Having neither breath for speech nor free hands, I winked back. It was my first and only experience as a stretcher-bearer for men. The weight and unwieldiness of those stretchers left me with a lifelong respect for all ambulance teams in peace and war. I never knew how the padre and I safely delivered six bed-patients from one of the upstairs wards to the convalescent hut. We had to use the balcony and outer iron staircase to leave the lift for the incomers. Every time we tilted a stretcher down the iron stairs I expected the sweating, little padre to collapse under the extra weight, and stretcher, patient and myself to collapse on top of him.
On one of our breathless return gallops up with the empty stretcher, I asked if he knew where the casualties were from and how many involved. Briefly, the jocular mask fell off. ‘I heard the lads at the RASC Driving School got it just as they were bringing their training lorries back for tea. Not sure how many. Too many. Bad show. Very bad show … So here we are! And who’s the next lucky lad for the joy ride?’
‘Can you find another partner, padre? I need this girl.’ A Sister drew me aside. ‘Find the linen cupboard. Bring to me in this ward any remaining blankets, any colour, fast.’
My hands were so shaking from the weight of the stretchers that in the linen cupboard I dropped all my arm-load of blankets on the floor. After I delivered them: ‘I must have hot water bottles. Bring me all you can find. Fill them in pairs.’
After the first dozen I stopped counting hot water bottles, and lost count of the still incoming casualties. There was no time for properly re-making the emptied beds. Once the old bedclothes were stripped off, the long red mackintosh sheet was replaced on the mattress, covered with a grey, tucked in, blanket, onto which was lifted the crumpled figure under the sodden grey stretcher blankets. When there were no more beds, the stretchers were laid on the floor, one beside each bed, so that stretcher and bed-patient could share one of the tall, white metal and mobile, transfusion-cum-infusion stands. (The stand attached to, or incorporated in, the bedhead was still in the future.) To my untrained eyes the speed at which the injured were connected to the crimson vacolitres of whole blood and yellow bottles of plasma hanging from the stands was incredible rather than impressive. It took training to appreciate the difficulty of getting a transfusion needle into a shock-collapsed vein and then keeping, particularly the blood, flowing into the vein at the correct – and vitally important – uninterrupted rate.
Another Sister stopped me. ‘Where are you taking those hotties?’
‘That Sister over there told me to put them under the feet of the first two men on the left in the next ward, Sister.’
‘Do it, then come back to me. And be careful not to put the bottles close enough to touch feet or legs. The shocked are easily burnt.’
In the next ward, again the stretchers and beds were paired. I crouched first by the stretcher-patient. He had dried blood on his face, but no visible injuries and his eyes were open. He stared at me, but not as if he saw me and fearfully I wondered if he had been blinded, as I was too inexperienced to recognize acute clinical shock.
A padre kneeling by the bed-patient glanced up and slightly shook his head as I put the second bottle in place. Again I failed to recognize a patient’s condition. ‘Take it to a man it can still help, nurse,’ said the padre quietly as he covered the patient’s face with the top blanket. Then he sat back on his heels and wrote something in a little notebook. Someone, I never knew who, switched the hot bottle from my hands and said, ‘Padre, the soldier three down right is asking for you.’
Up to that moment I had not grasped I was in the presence of death and the dying. I stood and stared in horror at the figure covered by the blanket. Then the Sister who had told me to return to her reappeared. ‘I want you next door.’ She swept me to the ward entrance. ‘You see that man with a bandaged head in the far corner bed up right? I want you to find a chair, quickly, put it by him, then sit down and hold his hand. If anyone tells you to do anything else, say I have told you to stay with him.’ She gave me her name. She was a very senior QA Regular. ‘He’s not in pain now, and whilst he can still talk, if he wants to, let him. All you’ve got to do is sit by him, hold his hand, and stay there until I tell you to go. Understand?’
She was slightly taller than myself and had a c
entre parting and neat grey wings of hair just visible beneath the turn-up of her huge, triangular army cap and very dark lined eyes above her white mask. ‘Yes, Sister,’ I lied automatically, and a memory of a forgotten Red Cross lecture on acute surgical nursing pushed its way up. ‘Sister, should I put on a mask?’
She looked at my face and shook her head. And she said something I remembered to the end of my nursing career. ‘When patients aren’t used to hospitals and are a little frightened, a mask can frighten them still more. Go to him now.’
The soldier’s head and the right half of his face were not, as I had thought, bandaged, but covered with thick white sterile towels held in place with broad strips of gauze bandage tied in three large bows. The bows seemed to me indecently frivolous as I did not understand that the bigger the bow, the easier and the less disturbing for the patient it was to untie. The one visible eye was badly bloodshot and the exposed surrounding skin purple with the contused blood beneath the surface. From the smoothness of the jaw the soldier was not a man but a boy about my own age.
He blinked dreamily with his one eye. ‘Hallo, nurse.’
‘Hallo, soldier.’ I tried to force a smile and hoped it did not look the grimace it felt. I was hollow with fear that re-doubled when I touched his icy and oddly stiff hand. Only because I knew that senior Sister was watching, was I able to hold it. I felt I should explain my presence and, not knowing how, told him the truth. ‘Sister says I can sit and natter with you.’
No Time For Romance Page 10
