No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Where did you train, Sister?’

  ‘St Thomas’s. The Nightingale Training-School.’

  ‘Hasn’t St Thomas’s been blitzed, Sister?’

  ‘On and off.’ She filled the bowls on my tray with care. ‘Off you go and I’ll get on with the next batch.’

  On my return, ‘Is St Thomas’s still working, Sister?’

  She looked amused. ‘My child, as St Thomas’s has been working since 1153 the habit is a little old to break.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was that old! Oldest in London?’

  ‘Bart’s is fifty years older.’ She glanced at my stripe. ‘Thinking of training?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘Take those round and I’ll investigate this fish pie.’ When I got back with my empty tray, ‘Why are you still only thinking about training? I know it’ll take a long time, but I’m afraid we’re in for a long war.’

  I hesitated before answering. Then I thought, as so often, what does anything really matter now G’s dead? I explained and waited tensely for her to laugh.

  She gave me a long, thoughtful look. ‘Yes, I see your problem. How much writing have you done in the Army?’

  ‘Lots of notes. Not much else. No time.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be. Nor can I pretend you’ll have any more if you do train in St Thomas’s – in fact, you’ll have less as you’ll have lectures to write up in your free time. But you will learn how to nurse and I think you should. And in the process, if you really want to learn about people – and if you are going to be a writer you certainly should – you’ll learn a tremendous amount. Won’t that help you when you stop nursing and become a writer? Can any writer know too much about human nature? Then why not get yourself the double training simultaneously at St Thomas’s?’

  Momentarily, I just stared in astounded relief. ‘How do I apply, Sister? Just write to the Matron of St Thomas’s?’

  ‘That’s right. London, SE1.’

  She had left our ward, and I think the hospital, before I wrote my application on my next half-day. I was sorry I could not tell her I had taken her advice and for once broke my defensive rule of avoiding full names in my always unlocked notes, to record, ‘her name is Theodora Turner’. (In retrospect I suspect Miss T. Turner, O.B.E., A.R.R.C., would have been as surprised as myself when I made that entry, if then told I was recording the name of a future Matron of St Thomas’s.)

  ‘Thomas’s, Lucy? You haven’t a hope in hell of being accepted. It’s the most difficult hospital in the country to get into – you need the Matric. and you’ve only got School Cert …’’

  ‘Thomas’s, Andrews? Why not go into a convent and have done?’

  ‘Thomas’s, eh? Oh well, as they say—

  Guy’s to flirt,

  Bart’s to work,

  Thomas’s if you’re a lady.

  Enjoy yourself amongst all the toffee-noses!’

  ‘Naturally, St Thomas’s has to be careful only to admit the right type, Lucilla. As Matron explained when she accepted me, the Nightingale Training-School was founded by Miss Nightingale herself and was the first nurses’ training-school in the world. That’s why St Thomas’s nurses are called Nightingales – frankly, one’s rather looking forward to being a Nightingale …’

  ‘So you want to enter my training-school, nurse? Far be it from me to put you off, but I think it only fair to tell you nothing would persuade this Old Nightingale to endure her training again! Four years of sheer slavery.’

  Mother said, ‘You won’t last three months in St Thomas’s.’

  And Father, ‘If that is what you really want, you’ll get in. Let me know what I have to sign and underwrite.’

  It was traditional at St Thomas’s that on Tuesday mornings the Matron, who was also Lady Superintendent of The Nightingale Training-School, – should interview in her private office in St Thomas’s, London, applicants to her School. One Tuesday in May 1941, with two other VADs who had applied in the same week as myself, I was summoned for interview by the incumbent Matron. (The late Miss G. V. Hillyers.)

  We travelled to London by train, in outdoor uniform, with buttons and cap badges unnaturally gleaming, and the starch in my clean shirt collar slicing my neck. Our train deposited us at Waterloo on time, more to the surprise of our fellow-passengers than ourselves, as in our pre-interview nervousness we had overlooked the fact that in the last couple of days London had had another major air raid. ‘Third big ’un this spring,’ said a passenger. ‘Ah well, summer soon. Maybe Jerry’ll go on his summer holidays.’

  We walked from Waterloo to the hospital. It was only a short walk down the Waterloo Road, over the crossing at the southern end of Westminster Bridge then into the Lambeth Palace Road with the hospital sprawling for as far as I could see on the river side. It was the first time I had seen St Thomas’s. At first sight that morning it did not look like a hospital. It looked like parts of the City after the fire.

  I did not then know St Thomas’s had started the war with eight individual blocks and the mortuary a ninth and smaller building at the Lambeth Palace end of the line that ranged from Westminster Bridge, so I did not recognize the extent of the damage since last September. I saw a jumble of three blocks standing close together and one of these looked less than intact. All three had bricks instead of glass in the upper windows and their ground floors were hidden by anti-blast walls and stacks of sandbags. On either side of the standing blocks were the now omnipresent in London blackened, roofless buildings, jagged walls, gaping, glassless windows, piles of rubble and grime, and one semi-ruined block (4) was still smouldering. A crowd of begrimed men were busy clearing the chaos, and there was a line of ambulances outside a heavily sandbagged entrance marked ‘Casualty Department’.

  A porter directed us. ‘You don’t want Cas., nurses, you want Central Hall. Old main entrance. Just along there then up those stone steps. You go on in through the Hall, turn right past Miss Nightingale – you can’t miss her – then a mite down the main corridor to your right and you’ll see the alcove to the Matron’s Office on your left. Can’t miss it and when you get there an Office Sister will be waiting to look after you.’

  The stone steps led up to tall, heavily battened doors guarded on either side by little stone figures of nineteenth-century cripples. There was no electric light on in the empty Hall. It was so darkened by the bricked-in windows and the battens that it was a few seconds before I saw the cracked plaster on walls and ceilings, the plaster and dust on the floor, and the duckboards laid across a gap in the corridor floor a few feet from the larger-than-life stone statue of Florence Nightingale holding her lamp.

  One of the other girls said, ‘Did you notice that porter called her “Miss Nightingale?’”

  I vaguely recalled someone, probably one of the VADs already accepted by St Thomas’s, telling me to say ‘Miss’ and not ‘Florence’ if the name came up in my interview. ‘Simply not done to call her “Florence” in St Thomas’s.’ And with that thought in mind, for the first time on a duckboard I crossed the long ground floor main corridor that had once connected all the blocks.

  And crossed into an alcove of orderly calm presided over by a trim figure in a navy blue-and-white-spotted Sister’s dress, impeccable white apron and befrilled cap with a lace bow under her chin. ‘Good morning! Matron will see you in alphabetical order. Now, which is Miss Andrews? Come with me. Will you two others just sit here.’

  It was an extraordinary sensation to walk through devastation, step off duckboards and be ushered through one large neat office to a slightly smaller but slightly more luxurious office smelling of polish and normality. ‘How do you do, Miss Andrews. Please sit down. Now. Tell me a little about yourself …’

  I was offered a place in the set of new probationers due to enter the Preliminary Training School on the 21st September. ‘In a large country house we have taken in the village of Shamley Green in Surrey. Very lovely country. I’m sure you will enjoy it.’

  Back over the duc
kboards and whilst I waited for the others, back for a closer look at the stone figure with the lamp, and at the rough wooden wall that ran for a considerable length and narrowed the main corridor. I wondered why it was there, but lacked the courage to ask until an elderly porter stopped to ask if I had lost my way. ‘No, thanks. Just waiting. Excuse me, but why is this wall here?’

  ‘Had to put it up, miss. Didn’t want to have us all falling down the hole that’s the other side, did they? Seventy foot wide it is. Not surprising, mind, seeing the dispensary was down there. Jerry got one slap on it, he did.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Back at the start – Sunday night, last September. And a proper night it was. Lost two of the doctors that night we did and it’s a wonder we didn’t lose more seeing as he got Medical Out-Patients and most of College House – that’ll be the doctors’ house, miss. Proper night it was! Come the morning – oh dear me – what a morning! No water, no gas, no light. And patients coming in all the time – every time you looked round there was a new lot waiting. So we had to start shifting ’em out down the country. Quite nice down there they says.’

  He was a small man with grey hair, glasses and a worried expression. ‘You don’t like the country?’

  ‘All right for some. Too quiet, I reckon. Give me London every time, I say. Mind you, I’m not saying I’d not fancy a bit more quiet here. Noisy week we’ve had. Still, we got our water this time. Not like last month when Jerry dropped one slap atween the two blocks, busted the water-pipes and gives all the patients in the basement wards a good wash down. Proper shower-bath they had. But we shifted ’em out into the corridors and dried ’em off. No harm done, seemly. Got good basements we have.’

  Despite the visible evidence, I thought he had spun me an older soldiers’ tale. I later learnt he had understated, and all he had said was true. One of the facts he left out was that the raid on that Sunday night in September 1940 caused three members of the hospital staff to be awarded George Medals. (Dr H. R. B. Norman, resident assistant physician, Mr P. B. Maling, medical student, Mr H. E. Frewer, assistant Clerk of the Works.)

  To quote from part of the official intimation: ‘After St Thomas’s Hospital had been hit by a H.E. bomb it was found that two of the staff were trapped. Mr Frewer formed a rescue party and was joined by Dr Norman and Mr Maling. The debris had crashed through the ground floor into the basement. The dispensary stores had been destroyed and the alcohol and acids caught fire. Gas was escaping and masonry continually falling. Mr Frewer led the rescue party. Dr Norman, assisted by Mr Maling, burrowed into the debris and gave morphia injections. They succeeded in extricating the casualties.’

  I only learnt this when training and only by asking innumerable questions. This was no reflection on brave men, but simply because old air raids became old hospital history within days of the event. During the periods when air raids were part of the normal hospital routine, as in the many, very long intervals without raids, everyone was too busy continuing with the normal routine of caring for the sick, of teaching or being taught, to recall yesterday.

  ‘Once you get in the wards, nurses,’ said Sister P.T.S., ‘before you have had time to draw breath your training will be over. And please remember you will work IN and not ON the wards.’

  The old P.T.S. in London had been destroyed. In that Surrey country house the spirit lived on, as did the lifesize dolls on which decades of young Nightingale nurses had learnt to blanket bath. Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and George, a baby boy of convenient physique to allow him to double as a baby girl. In the absence of an adult male doll, the technique for blanket-bathing men was explained with ambiguous exactitude. At a precise point after the second change of washing water, the freshly soaped ‘back’ flannel and ‘back’ towel were to be handed the patient with the words, ‘I am sure you would like to finish yourself off now, Mr Blank, whilst I fetch your mouthwash.’

  Straight back to school; to sitting up straight at our desks, no talking in class; morning and evening prayers; lights out at ten-thirty; Grace before meals; cocoa at mid-morning break.

  The conversations at break were different.

  ‘Think Jerry will get to Moscow?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I still haven’t got over the shock of his attacking the Russians last summer (22nd June 1941). I thought they were terrific buddies.’

  ‘I wish to God they’d stayed buddies. My boyfriend’s freezing to death ferrying the Russians goodies to Murmansk. This paper says Jerry’s taking same route as Napoleon.’

  ‘I thought the Russians were holding him up at Leningrad – or do I mean Stalingrad?’

  ‘Both, Leningrad’s north, Moscow in the middle, Stalingrad south.’

  Many of my set were ex-VADs also training because of the war, others had first done other full-time jobs, a few more were straight from school. The minimum entry age was nineteen.

  ‘Do me a favour, Lu. Cut the nails on my right hand.’

  ‘Sure. Hurt your left?’

  ‘No. I just can’t manage. Mummy’s always cut my right-hand nails.’

  ‘What happened at school?’

  ‘I didn’t go away. Mummy thinks boarding-schools make girls too independent.’

  ‘How does she feel about your coming here?’

  ‘Well, she says since I’ve got to do war-work at least nursing is a ladylike occupation.’

  One night near the end of the two months’ term:

  ‘Will someone please tell me WHAT that lecture was all about?’

  ‘My God, Lu, are you another who didn’t catch on? Bloody funny! Don’t know what a lesbian or a homosexual is? Gather round, chickies, and aunty will elucidate …’

  ‘You may read your papers now, nurses … last five minutes, nurses … stop writing now, please, nurses.’

  P.T.S. finals, the first of the many written, viva voce and practical examinations ahead.

  At the end of the first year, Hospital Nursing; in the second, Hospital Anatomy and Physiology, the Preliminary State Examination, Hospital Gynaecology; in the third, Hospital Surgery, Hospital Medicine, and at the year’s end, State Finals followed shortly by the most vital and difficult of all, Hospital Finals. Beyond – S.R.N.s with Nightingale Certificates and Nightingale Badges.

  When we were training, 1941–45, all our lectures, with the very rare isolated exception, had to be attended in our daily three hours off, or on our days off; all academic studying done in our free time, and generally after working a full day or night. For the benefit of the night nurses who had to be in bed by noon, after the first year ( no first years did night-duty) our lectures all began at 9.30 a.m. The night nurses were easily identifiable as the sleepers in the back rows.

  First year day hours were similar to those I had worked in military hospitals, but only for six days a week. St Thomas’s had recently introduced the previously undreamed of luxury to ex-VADs, of a weekly day off for all student nurses. From the second year onwards our day hours were extended to finish at 9 p.m. On night-duty we worked from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. and, as in the Army, ate our night meals in our ward kitchens or duty-rooms as time and work permitted. Each spell of night-duty lasted for three months; after each shift of twenty-one consecutive working nights we had three nights off.

  In my first year we were paid £7 per quarter. The second, again £28 per annum, but as this was paid monthly and super-annuation removed, the total was about £25. Third year, £36 per annum. Fourth, once an S.R.N., £60 per annum.

  To the best of my knowledge, these rates of pay and working hours applied generally to student nurses in the UK, as did the custom of providing nurses with full board, lodging, indoor uniforms – not stockings and shoes – and indoor uniform laundry allowances. Being civilian nurses, when we travelled from our parent hospitals to work in the various Sectors – blanket terms for the many Emergency Medical Services hospitals opened by the Government – we travelled at our own expense. The E.M.S. hospitals catered for service and civilian patients, and were staffed by civ
ilian doctors and nurses borrowed from civilian medical teaching and nurses’ training hospitals. Without these large, loaned, and, in the main, regularly changing contingents of staff, the E.M.S. hospitals could not have functioned. The last free travel warrant I received as a nurse in the Second World War was in late August 1941, to go home to St Leonards after being released from the VADs.

  After the P.T.S. and a week’s holiday, back to Hampshire and another great red-brick, former mental now general hospital on an isolated hilltop and resembling not army barracks but a prison camp. The high water-tower looming over the ugly cluster of red-brick gave the immediate impression of sheltering guards with machine-guns. An impression enhanced by the barbed wire surrounding extensive grounds largely devoted to regimental ranks of unattractive cabbages, the many old notices, PATIENTS WILL NOT ADVANCE BEYOND THIS POINT, the miles of green-tiled corridors smelling of carbolic and excreta, the omnipresent sash windows that could only be opened a few inches at top or bottom and were so often additionally barred, and the huge brass locks and heavy keys on all the doors.

  The hospital had about two thousand beds and, as usually obtained in E.M.S. hospitals, each of the several hospitals contributing staff was allotted its own wards and departments and tended to keep itself to itself. Arguably, none more zealously than St Thomas’s. My set as Nightingale pros (only St Thomas’s first-year student nurses were ‘pros’), worked under Nightingale Sisters, were taught by a Nightingale Sister Tutor, and lived together in a former patients’ dormitory converted with curtains into two- and three-bedded cubicles in the care of a Nightingale Home Sister. We shared the vast nursing staff’s dining-room with all the other hospitals, but by the time of our arrival unwritten law had been written and every hospital had its own block of tables. The only personal contact I ever had with non-Nightingale nurses was in the long queues at the serving-counters in the dining-room when we groaned in unison, ‘Not tinned pilchards and Yellow Peril again!’ Yellow Peril was bright yellow, unsweetened blancmange.