No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  There were no inter-staff canteens, nor communal rest-rooms, but in the library I discovered D. H. Lawrence, Hardy, Sinclair Lewis, Tolstoy, Emily Brontë, and that Charlotte Brontë had written more than Jane Eyre. On-duty I discovered sailors made even better patients than soldiers.

  I was sent with two others from my set to be junior pros (the lowest form of hospital life) in a men’s medical ward filled with sailors suffering from peptic ulcers, diabetes and a type of jaundice that, according to the sailors, was decimating the Royal Navy. ‘Whole ship’s company come out yellow, nurse. Reckoned I’d berthed with a load of Chinks!’

  The ward had forty beds divided between three largish former epileptic patients’ dormitories. The bedsprings were roughly eighteen inches from the floor. This worried the sailors. ‘Enough to break your backs after making beds all round this low, nurse.’

  Neither my aching back nor the perpetual fire in my feet worried me nearly so much as the junior pros’ personal domain, the sluice. ‘Why didn’t whoever converted this from the housemaid’s pantry, or whatever it was, realize medical patients are mostly bed-patients, bed-patients need bedpans and to empty bedpans properly without machines, you need some power behind these water-jets. Can’t even clean a bottle (urinal) properly with this swine.’

  Having to ask the pros for bedpans worried the sailors. They were great worriers on our behalf, amazingly undemanding, appreciative patients, and clean. Once any sailor was fit to stagger out of bed, he staggered to the nearest bathroom hand-basin and began washing his smalls and festooning radiators with cap, collar linings, lanyards, vests, and the innumerable other bits of white incorporated in Leading, Able, and Ordinary Seamen’s uniforms. Like the soldiers, the sailors had mates, but called them ‘oppos’.

  On my birthday, 20th November, I worked the duty we called ‘long trot’. 7.30–10 a.m., 3 hours off, 1–8 p.m. Just after seven that evening I re-cleaned the sluice in a very bad temper having been told it was a disgrace. ‘Have you looked down your bedpan handles, N. Andrews? Have you examined the insides of your bottles?’

  I slammed shut the sluice door, tied a long rubber apron round my waist and demanded aloud of the stacks of bedpans and bottles if I looked the kind of girl who went round peering into handles and bottles. ‘Either I have to empty you with my eyes shut and holding my breath or I can’t empty you at all.’

  Another senior head came round the door, ‘N. Andrews, what do you think you’re doing?’ The question was clearly rhetorical as she vanished swiftly. To cheer myself, I answered to the bedpans and bottles with an adaption of one of Jack Warner’s enormously popular monologues on the BBC wireless programme Garrison Theatre:

  ‘I’m a girl what washes bottles in a sluice room,

  But a bottle washer-upper’s what I yearns,

  Still as long as there are bottles there’ll be washers-up of bottles,

  So it looks as though I got the job for years.’

  One of my set came in, leant against the door and gazed at the sink as if seeing the Holy Grail. ‘Do you realize if Jerry hadn’t bombed STH, London, we’d be junior pros in wards with mechanical bedpan and bottle washers?’

  I slung more enamel bottles into a solution of carbolic. ‘I can forgive Jerry a lot – not this!’

  ‘Think there’ll be anything of STH, London, left by the time we’re senior enough to get there?’

  ‘Maybe the war’ll be over by then. Much quieter now Jerry’s so busy in Russia.’

  On 7th December 1941, the Japanese attacked the US Navy in Pearl Harbor. I was in the ward when the news came over the wireless. The sailors lowered newspapers, magazines, books, and listened with bemused incredulity or derisive grins. ‘Stone me! Whole ship’s company taken the liberty-boat?’

  The jaundiced congratulated each other and themselves. ‘Couldn’t be more yellow if we was Japs could we, nurse? Interned for the duration – that’s us!’

  No grins, no jokes, nor for a while any talking at all when we heard the Japanese had sunk the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser Repulse. (Off the coast of S.E. Asia on 10th December 1941). The stunned reaction of those sick sailors was unlike any ward reaction to national disaster I had yet encountered. It seemed not national but personal. Until then I had assumed the Navy to be as divided into units and loyalties as the army. In that ward were men from the RN, RNR, RNVR, but suddenly it was as if all were members of the same ship’s company and the men who had gone down with those great ships were literally their shipmates.

  Normally, the high spot of the patients’ day was Vera Lynn’s fifteen-minute evening broadcast. I heard a senior nurse quietly ask a Chief Petty Office, ‘Rather not, this evening?’

  He looked round the silent ward. ‘I think we’ll have Vera, please, nurse.’

  Normally, whilst Vera Lynn sang, the patients smiled to themselves, or hummed with her. That evening they listened without expression, in silence. At that period ‘We’ll meet again’ still made me want to cry for G. That evening I had to duck into my sluice sanctuary to weep for two unknown ships’ companies, the tears my sick sailors were trying not to shed.

  The short, winter days and the war news darkened together. New maps headed the war reports. Maps of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, that temporarily drove our new, mighty US Allies from the headlines.

  ‘Say that again!’

  ‘Hong Kong’s surrendered to the Japs. On the news just now.’

  ‘Oh, no! I say – Mary’s fiancé’s there. Does she know?’

  ‘Yes. She heard the news with me. She’s gone out on her bike. She doesn’t want to talk.’

  ‘That figures. I say – er – your brother?’

  ‘Far as I know in Singapore, thank God. Hope he stays there.’

  ‘Good morning, nurses. In today’s lecture we will discuss barrier-nursing. Barrier-nursing is required when a patient with a communicable infection is nursed in a general ward. To take a very common example; pulmonary tuberculosis. You will meet a great many tuberculosis patients in the course of your training so it is essential for you to learn and observe the stringent precautions that must be taken to prevent the infection being transmitted to the other patients and yourselves. Only too frequently do young doctors, nurses and medical students succumb to the tubercle bacilli…’

  The hospital was too far for me to go home for my days off. When lecture-free I usually slept till first lunch at noon and in the afternoons or evenings typed with two fingers on the elderly Remington portable Father had loaned me since my last holiday at home. My set endured the irritation with amused tolerance. Home Sister was intrigued and her white-haired, white-befrilled head regularly appeared between my cubicle curtains, ‘Still hard at it, nurse? Ah well, there’s no doubt you look to be enjoying yourself, but don’t forget to take some fresh air on your day off. A good nurse must take care of her own health for her patients’ sake as much as herself.’

  One day off in mid-February 1942; ‘Wake up, Lu! Wake up!’

  I squinted at my watch. ‘Why the hell? It’s only just after eleven.’

  ‘I know, but I’m on-duty, I’ve only got permission to nip back for a clean apron and if you haven’t heard you’ll probably drop bricks at lunch. The Japs have taken Singapore.’

  ‘They can’t have! Everyone says Singapore’s our greatest base in the Far East and absolutely impregnable!’

  ‘The Japs have got it. BBC news.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ I whispered.

  So many times when all I could say or write was – ‘I am so sorry’. All I could do – put on kettles and hand out tea, but in old jam jars not cups as my set’s private store of crockery had run out, the hospital had none to spare on loan to the nurses’ dormitories, and in the nearest shops in the small town four miles away the crockery shelves were empty.

  One afternoon in March: ‘Still hard at it, N. Andrews? I fear your wee book’s to be interrupted. Hydestile are short of probationers. You’ll be away with the first alphabet
ical six tomorrow. The rest of your set will follow next month.’

  After the bombing in September 1940 and the evacuation of patients from St Thomas’s, London, to various hospitals in Surrey, the main body of the hospital had finally found sanctuary in a row of long wooden huts left behind by the Australian Imperial Force in a clearing on the side of a wooded hill in the hamlet of Hydestile, near Godalming. On 17th April 1941, St Thomas’s-in-the-country (Hydestile) opened with seventy-two patients in two hut wards. When the six of us reached Hydestile just under a year later, the long wooden, Nissen and brick huts held two hundred and seventy beds and had been transformed into a modern general teaching and training hospital. Within days of our arrival the hut wards lost their identifying numbers. Once the old names were added to the already traditional St Thomas’s ward interiors, the bombed wards lived again. Christian, Victoria, Beatrice, George Makins, Arthur Stanley, George, in a row on the higher side of the long, sloping, covered, connecting ramp that at the far end beyond George Ward ran into the woods. In small Nissen huts at the wood end, the surgical stores, the mortuary, the chapel. At the lower side of the ramp, Nightingale, Lilian (the children’s ward shortly re-named America to mark the hospital’s gratitude for the great generosity shown by US citizens), the Theatre, Casualty in a Nissen hut, and directly opposite Christian, Adelaide. In the rash of other single-storey new buildings; pathological laboratories, staff dining-rooms, canteens, classrooms, administration, College House, and at the main gates a small, glass-fronted porter’s lodge. And already the wallflowers and first small rose bushes had been planted against the hut walls.

  About six miles away in a large country house on a hill near Hascombe, the bombed Nightingale Home was re-born to house, as of old, the first year pros. A special coach ferried us to and fro, leaving the Home every morning at 7 a.m., the hospital every evening at 8.15 p.m. As Hydestile pros we had one day and a half free each week, and on all other weekdays were only off-duty from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Late leave, only permitted on half-days or days off, ended at 10.30 p.m. and only in very exceptional circumstances extended to midnight. On full working days we were not allowed to miss supper after duty, or go out at night. We shared varying-sized bedrooms; I always shared with six other girls. When off-duty in the Home, unless in mufti, we had to wear our uniform dresses correctly buttoned and belted, and our caps.

  Every day we progressed another day up the first-year ladder and since the year was 1942, so progressed the war disasters. When we drove through country lanes with banks alight with primroses, cowslips, bluebells, pale mauve milk-maidens, the may was out in all the hedges, and every cottage garden golden with daffodils and forsythia, the British retreat from Rangoon to Mandalay was over. All Malaya, all Burma, all the Philippines, all the Dutch East Indies had fallen to the Japanese. No dawn coming up like thunder out of China across the bay for the British Raj. Only the flag showing the rising sun.

  When reading the newspaper war reports, I wished I had never nursed soldiers and could think impersonally of armies as fighting machines labelled with numbers, or initials. When I read of ‘remnants of the Fourteenth Army fighting gallantly in retreat’, of ‘a magnificent rearguard action defended to the last by a force of Australians and New Zealanders’, I saw the faces of the soldiers I had nursed, met, seen marching; faces that belonged not to ‘soldiers’ but to men in soldiers’ uniforms. I remembered how men looked when wounded, the feel and smell of fresh-spilled blood on skin and khaki, the sounds men made when in pain, the cold, stiffening silence when men died. I remembered the dry heat of Suez. No difficulty to imagine how much more unbearable the dripping, festering heat of East Asian jungles.

  I had only met a few sailors professionally and whilst still too junior properly to have nursed any. But those sailors in men’s medical transformed into reality the dreadful, monthly increasing losses of British ships in the Atlantic. One look at the figures and in my mind the faces of Dusty, Shorty, Lofty, Hooky, the C.P.O. and the boy the whole ward called Half-Pint.

  In the North African war reports, two names dominating – General Rommel and the Afrika Korps.

  ‘Too bad we haven’t a Rommel. If his Afrika Korps don’t slow down the poor old Eighth Army’ll be paddling in your Suez Canal.’

  ‘Where’s Rommel now? No, thanks, don’t want the paper. I’m browned off with reading gloom. Just tell me.’

  ‘Now he’s shoved us out of Tobruk they think next stop Alexandria. Go there as a kid?’

  ‘No. Parents were there before I was born.’

  ‘How’s your father after his pneumonia?’

  ‘Fine. M. and B. knocked it on the head. He’s now raising the best spuds in Sussex on our back lawn. Did I tell you Betty was home on my day off last week? She’s posted to Gatwick, driving RAF staff cars and having a wow of a time.’

  ‘So’s my sister in Oban. Maybe we should have joined the WAAF and WRNS when we left the VADs. Only snag – I just don’t see me square-bashing.’

  ‘Nor me, nor my poor feet.’ I was lying on my bed with both legs propped horizontally against my bedside wall. ‘Poor feet. You thought you had it tough in the Army. Little did you know how civvy pros footslog.’

  My life as a pro was a running battle with the clock. A battle punctuated by extra-breathless skirmishes throughout the day at the appointed hours when the screen across the entrance to the ward itself had either to be put up, or taken down. An open screen across the entrance signified the ward as ‘closed’ and thereby if a women’s ward, out-of-bounds to all men, including consultants. In the men’s wards the open screen kept out the teaching rounds but not the steady trickle of itinerant long and short white coats and the tweed jackets with leather patches at elbows and cuffs favoured by the medical students.

  ‘N. Andrews! Is one of my patients suffering a major haemorrhage?’

  ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘I presume the sluice is on fire?’

  ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘Then why have I just seen you run from the sluice into this ward? Please remember a nurse may only run for haemorrhage or fire. In future, walk, nurse. With dignity.’

  I learnt to compromise between walking and running by jog-trotting, but never with dignity.

  Nearly all the patients were civilians and Lambetheans who were driven down from London in the large ambulance convoys that usually arrived between 1 and 2 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays. The emergency convoys arrived at irregular hours in the intervals with much the same regularity.

  In the men’s wards I was surprised by the number of London policemen.

  ‘Didn’t you know you’re the hospital for the Metropolitan Police? New are you? Then you’ll not mind my giving you a tip. When you tidy down your side of the ward of an evening, nurse, make sure you get all the used newspapers, all the ash out the ashtrays, and the feet of your bedcastors nice and straight and facing inwards. Sister gets a bit fussed if she sees a paper forgotten and she doesn’t like the castors crooked.’

  My ward’s Senior Pro (a member of the senior set in the first-year) gave me another tip. ‘You can tell the cops on the beat from the C.I.D. as the cops wear the red and blue hospital dressing-gowns and the C.I.D. bring in their own spotted silks.’

  The consultants’ teaching rounds were near-daily events. Often two rounds went on simultaneously at different parts of the ward. One morning I counted and noted on my apron hem the standing posses on either side. On the left, the senior consultant, chaperoned by Sister, escorted by, the Resident Assistant Physician (the senior resident), a medical registrar, a house-physician and twenty-two students. On the right, another consultant, the Charge Nurse, another registrar, houseman, and eighteen students. For the two hours both rounds lasted, the only sounds in the ward were the consultants, flattened voices droning on like overworked bees.

  Once, in another ward, a large single teaching round lingered on to the patients’ tea-time. I sought the Senior Pro. ‘Sister told me to do teas and they’re all ready. Do I just whe
el in the trolley quietly?’

  ‘No, no, Andrews! Not when the Professor’s teaching!’

  I had still only mentally sorted the Medical Faculty by their coats, jackets, and my personal impression of their importance. If well tailored, and in black or other sober hue – pundits (Consultants). Very important. Long white coats if covering the R.A.P., or his opposite number the R.A.S.; – pretty important. Short white coats, housemen; – of no importance. Scruffy tweed jackets, medical students; – dead bores and wasters of my precious time in chaperoning when I was late with my work routine. ‘I didn’t know that pundit was the Professor.’

  ‘If you’re going to stay in this ward, you’ll learn who’s who fast. Sister’s got a thing about teas, so we can always tell who’s big stuff and who’s not by the way we can or can’t feed the patients’ tea. For the Prof., no teas until he’s finished. For Mr ABC, we can take the teas round on trays so long as we’re very quiet. But when Mr XYZ is teaching, we’re allowed to push in the big wooden trolley, urn, cups, jangling teaspoons and all!’

  ‘What does Mr XYZ look like?’

  ‘Look at his feet. He’s the one with brothel-creepers.’

  From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. only the pro due for the half-day before the day off remained on-duty. On one of my solitary mid-mornings, a large, unboned fish was the main luncheon dish for the patients. Sister surveyed it with antagonism. ‘Is this an infant whale? Am I to nourish my patients on that most endearing mammal? No, no – wrong vertebral structure!’ She dissected neatly, thrust at me the carving dish laden with bones. ‘Country needs aircraft. Aircraft need glue. Do something constructive with those, nurse. Off! Off!’

  I retreated to the ward kitchen and washed the bones under running water with the ward maid glowering at my elbow, hands on hips. ‘You’re not drying them bones nor boiling ’em into glue on me stove, nurse! Can’t abide the pong. You try it on and I’m asking for me cards.’