No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Not to worry. Sun’s shining. I’ll dry them outside.’

  The ward maid stopped glowering and burst into her favourite song, You Are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine. ‘… You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you …’ floated out as I arranged the bones in line on an open newspaper spread on the grass verge between the huts and a few feet from the kitchen window. As on fine days, one side of the ramp was lined with beds mostly occupied by tubercular patients. In the nearest bed was a patient newly admitted to my present ward. He was a medical student and had the sturdy build and bulky shoulders of the ardent rugger player he had been up to his illness. When in bed on the ramp he wore a black beret and dark glasses. He took off the glasses to watch me. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, nurse?’

  ‘Drying bones to make glue for a new Spit.’

  He was still laughing when Sister charged out to investigate. ‘Splendid! Sensible girl! Plenty of good glue there. From now on, N. Andrews, you are responsible for my fishbone salvage.’

  Those particular fishbones transformed me into Sister’s pin-up pro for the remainder of my time in her ward and began what has become (in 1976) one of the longest friendships of my life with that former student, Charles. In its early years our friendship was as much interrupted by the war as by Charles’s illness. A week or so after that morning he was transferred to a sanatorium in Sussex and it was over a year before we next met. And whilst we both then continued to work, technically, in the same hospital, it was never in the same branch of St Thomas’s.

  The days grew cooler, shorter; the beds out on the ramp disappeared by mid-afternoon; on our early morning drives the hedges were bright with the yellow and red hips of the dog rose, laced with the silver of Old Man’s Beard, and the hawthorn was a dense mass of flaming red berries. In the wood above the hospital the copper beeches were on fire, the oaks turning bronze and the chestnut leaves poised to fall silently with the first sharp frost.

  ‘Where’s the Senior Pro? Why hasn’t that box been returned to the surgical stores by the pro on this morning before her half-day? Take it up now, N. Andrews. You’re responsible for your pros. Sit it on a wheelchair and push it up – and don’t forget to get a receipt. Shouldn’t take a few minutes.’

  ‘Yes, nurse. Sorry, nurse.’ I replied, mentally cursing the irate Charge Nurse. Our ward had admitted eleven patients that afternoon, all the pros had heavier than usual evening worklists, and it was one of my new jobs to see we all finished on time and I could ill-afford even a few minutes out of the ward. I trundled the loaded wheelchair at the double up the ramp, and had to wait about twenty minutes for my receipt as the storekeeper was dealing with a more complicated request from another ward nurse.

  I started back at the double, then realized it was dusk, after blackout time, all the wards would be at the height of the evening washings, dressings, bed-making rush hour with their blackout screens up, curtains closed, and the downward sloping ramp ahead was empty. I perched on the back of the wheelchair, kicked off and was gaining momentum when a belated teaching round ambled on to the ramp from a ward ahead. A second later, the chair, myself, white coats, tweed jackets and one of ominous black, collided. I toppled with the chair and was picked up by an octopus with two arms in elegant black. ‘Terribly sorry – had to get back to my ward – so sorry –’ I apologized to disapproving faces. But the consultant smiled indulgently. ‘Most understandable. Our fault, nurse.’ Instantly the encircling disapproval was replaced by indulgent smiles. The consultant continued to inquire searchingly after my health. ‘No degree of shock? No fractures sustained? Good. Gooooood.’ He smoothed his greying black hair. I did not recognize him, but in that moment promoted him my pin-up pundit. I glanced covertly at his feet and breathed out. Neat, black leather. He bowed the chair and myself off, and I heard him add to his escort, ‘Let this be a lesson to you, gentlemen. St Thomas’s may have found sanctuary from the path of Hitler’s bombs, but there is no sanctuary for any Thomas’s man who rashly stands in the determined path of a Nightingale.’

  ‘You may read your papers now, nurses…’

  After our first holiday of the year, back to Hydestile, to new blue-and-white instead of purple-and-white striped dresses, to living in one of the long residential huts on the banks by the hospital’s main gates. On-duty a new standing, and new responsibilities; in the classrooms, new lectures, all our own consultants; and, as they were all men, always we were chaperoned in lectures by one of our own Sister Tutors.

  ‘Your careers have taken a new course, nurses,’ said our Senior Sister Tutor in November.

  The Second World War had changed course.

  In North Africa the Eighth Army had a new commander, General Montgomery, and General Rommel was still determined to reach Alexandria, Suez and the rich oilfields of the Middle East. On the 23rd October 1942, the British attacked the Afrika Korps at El Alamein.

  ‘Where on earth is that?’

  ‘You should know. You were born in Egypt.’

  ‘Never heard of it!’

  The battle at El Alamein went on for twelve days.

  ‘Girls! Get this! We’ve done it! The Eighth Army have beaten the living daylights out of Jerry! What price Rommel and his Afrika Korps now?’

  A few days after the overwhelming victory at El Alamein an Anglo–American force under General Eisenhower landed at the other end of North Africa. Before the stiffness had been washed out of our new uniform dresses, on the 19th November, the Russians started the counter-attack on the long-besieged Stalingrad that resulted in the surrender by Field-Marshal Paulus of the German Sixth Army on 31st January 1943. In those three months the Eighth Army advanced fourteen hundred miles across North Africa and when they ended my set were on night-duty at Hydestile as ‘night juniors’.

  A note dated Thursday 11th February 1943, and headed; ‘Eating my night meal alone in Victoria (ward) duty-room.

  ‘Daddy’ phoned me this evening just before I came on-duty to let me hear for myself he really is all right before I get his letter explaining what happened at home this afternoon. He was in the garden when a tip-and-run (enemy plane) dived in from the Channel and dropped his load of bombs on either side of our row of houses. Daddy said he found himself flying through the air like the daring young man on the flying trapeze and landed on his chest against a downstairs wall of our house. He says he hasn’t broken anything, but I said he must see our doc. and have a check and an X-ray and he promised he would. He said the house is “a bit of a mess”. The parents’ bedroom and kitchen seems to have got it worst, but Daddy kept repeating, “By a miracle, your mother, Dopey (our dog) and myself are in one piece and even if that’s more than we can say for the house, isn’t that all that matters?”’

  Chapter Eight

  Another wartime summer, another move, another great E.M.S. former mental hospital now crammed with soldiers wounded in the North African campaigns and injured and sick civilians from London. Botley’s Park, Surrey. I never discovered the origin of ‘Botley’, but the ‘Park’ was apt. The old independent villa wards and ward blocks, the new ubiquitous hut wards and hut staff’s homes were dotted around with carefully tended little beds of flowers and shrubs, joined by concrete paths that were small roads and surrounded not by barbed wire but luxuriant hedges and tall trees alive with the clapping of the wood pigeons’ wings. On the small roads, small armies of nurses on bicycles and on foot; of soldiers limping on walking-plasters, artificial limbs, walking sticks, low hand-crutches, swinging on high-armpit crutches with one empty trouser leg pinned up, propelling themselves in wheelchairs, being pushed in spinal carriages. Amongst the khaki, civilians on the same plasters, tin legs, sticks, crutches, with the same missing limbs, wheelchairs, spinal carriages. The hospital was only twenty-odd miles from London. Near enough for the ambulances from the London hospitals to whisk down in just under an hour; far enough for the London patients to sleep mostly undisturbed nights.

  The war in the desert was over. On 13th May
1943, all the Axis (German and Italian) troops in North Africa surrendered to the Allies. A few weeks later in July, the Allies invaded Sicily and in another few weeks, on 3rd September, southern Italy. After each and all the subsequent Allied invasions of Italy, as the hospital ships returned home, the convoys of wounded arrived with the regularity of the ambulances at Hydestile, but instead of in early afternoon, most seemed to arrive at around eleven o’clock at night.

  Shortly after the Allies landed in Italy, the Italian Army surrendered to the Allies and became our ‘co-belligerents’. A term that evoked hilarious laughter from the men in the beds lining the long hut ward where I then worked as senior Second Year – on the rare occasions when they remembered it. The war in Italy was far from over as the strong German force there was fighting on, fiercely. ‘Ah well,’ said the soldier-patients, as other soldiers in other wards four years earlier, ‘Jerry’s a fighting man as knows how to fight and he don’t pack it in easy.’

  Two-thirds of those patients were soldiers, chiefly guardsmen or commandos, and the remainder were London air-raid casualties.

  One row of commandos with extensive flesh wounds also had near-identical knee injuries caused, so they insisted, by their habit of leaping down from thirty-foot walls.

  ‘Must you always leap? Couldn’t you just climb down?’

  The row looked shocked. ‘Sorry, nurse, just not done,’ explained one ex-public schoolboy commando with a fair, smooth boy’s face, but not a boy’s mouth or jaw. ‘Dashed bad form. Bad as leaving a knot in your bit of string.’

  ‘What bit of string?’

  ‘The bit with which one strangles chaps. Very bad form to get it knotted. Show you mine.’ He lunged sideways into his locker and inadvertently twisted his sandbagged injured knee. Knee injuries were (and are) excruciatingly painful. ‘Damn the bastard!’ he exclaimed, wincing.

  An Irish guardsman some beds down, with both legs strung up on traction-splints, hauled himself up on his lifting straps and bellowed up the ward, ‘Mother of God, man! Have you no bloody manners at all to use such language in front of the nurse?’

  After the arrival of a new convoy I nursed my first ex-prisoners-of-war, repatriated from prison camp hospitals in one of the new exchanges of severely wounded prisoners between the opposing armies in Italy. All I nursed had been in camps run by the Italian Army. Only initially was I surprised to hear individually from all that they would have much preferred to have been imprisoned by the German Army. ‘It’s like this, nurse – if there’s any rations or medical stores going, Jerry’ll have ’em – or know how to get ’em.’

  From the thinness and physical weakness of all, no need to ask if they had been kept on short rations, but as all were too badly wounded ever to fight again – which was why they had been exchanged – I asked about the conditions in the prison ‘hospitals’.

  ‘Couldn’t rightly blame the Eyetye M.O.s, N. Andrews.’ A regular sergeant watched me put a fresh dressing on the flap of skin over the newly-trimmed stump of his amputated left leg. The original amputation had been at mid-thigh. ‘Reckon they did their best with what they had, only like the lads were saying, they didn’t have what you might call much. So when it’s me turn for the chopper, the M.O. as spoke the best English he says to me, your leg no good, sergeant, you understand? Must remove, yes? But have no medicine to make you sleep. Understand?’

  My mask suddenly stifled me. ‘You mean no anaesthetic?’ I glanced up from the dressing. His face was beginning to glisten and his neat, light-brown moustache looked black. ‘I’m sorry, sergeant, I shouldn’t have reminded you.’

  ‘Not sure it wouldn’t be best off me chest, nurse. Couldn’t tell the wife when she come, but it’s different with you being a nurse.’ He took a few long breaths. ‘The Eyetye M.O. got to use what he got, see, and what he got was ice and cotton-wool. He packs me leg with ice to freeze it good, signals his lads to stand-by to hold me down, bungs the roll of cotton-wool in me mouth and gets on with the job.’ He mopped his face with his pyjama sleeve. ‘Not just me, nurse. Same for a lot of our lads.’

  And from a lot of our lads: ‘That’s straight up, nurse. Ice and cotton-wool.’

  For the setting of bones, removal of bullets and shrapnel and other amputations.

  Despite the ward windows open all day, the reek of damp plaster, mingled with the sickly smell of pus, hung in the ward air. The time was still pre-penicillin and the antibiotics, and beneath many of the long plasters immobilizing limbs or whole bodies from necks to toes, deep-rooted old wound abscesses still suppurated. To encourage the pus to drain out, windows (small openings) were cut in the plasters over the infected areas, and the rubber drains in the wounds (either corrugated or narrow tubes of rubber) were covered with surgical dressings changed three, four, or eight hourly. Sometimes the dressings were enough to contain the seepage; at other times the flow suffused dressings and large patches of plaster. Sometimes the effluvium could be muffled by encasing the whole plaster in a kind of unstitched, felt carpet-bag. When gangrene set in, the only available way of drowning the smell was by burning strong incense cones in small enamel bowls under the bed. Almost invariably, after gangrene appeared, another amputation.

  ‘Sister or Charge Nurse around, nurse?’

  ‘No, Mr X. Sister’s still at lunch and it’s the Charge Nurse’s weekend off.’

  ‘Never mind. Just want a private word with that chap in 24. I don’t want you, nurse. Oh – Sister tell you I was coming back?’

  ‘Yes, Mr X.’

  Another second-year some months my junior drew me aside. ‘What’s our pundit doing coming back without his registrar and houseman and why’s he looking so haemadementic (bloodyminded)? He’s usually a cheerful bod.’

  ‘He’s come to tell Tom (in Bed 24) his leg’s got to come off. He always tells the patients in private before he has to amputate and amputating always makes him haemadementic. Sister says it does all good orthopod surgeons and none’ll pick up their saws until they’ve tried everything else on God’s earth to save the limb. But now Tom’s gone gangrenous it’s got to come off fast and high.’

  When Sister returned; ‘Now he’s been told, N. Andrews, do the first two skin preparations this afternoon and evening. The night nurse can do the third early tomorrow morning.’

  Always three skin preps. before orthopaedic operations whether major or minor and all body hair in the specific area shaved. ‘You’re not going to shave me with that, nurse! Wouldn’t you like to borrow my safety?’

  ‘If this really worries you, I’ll get a ward safety, but I’m much safer with a cut-throat as we’re all first taught shaving with cut-throats.’

  ‘If you’re handy with your Sweeney Todd, nurse, you use it! You’ll not mind if I close my eyes and say my prayers?’

  So often so little cause for laughter, yet always the most frequent sound in that, as so many other wards, was the sound of the patients’ laughter. When the theatre porters arrived with the theatre trolleys, the patients for operation were wheeled out to shouts of ‘Good luck, mate!’ ‘Oy, mate – swap your left boot for my right when they fetch you back and we’ll both have two good-half-pairs.’ Later, when the anaesthetic and shock had worn off, the ward followed with interested empathy the slow, progressive disappearance of the ‘phantom’ (amputated) limb.

  ‘How’s it today, Tom?’

  ‘Stump’s comfortable and much better in meself, nurse, but me phantom’s playing up Old Harry. Feels to be sticking straight up in the air through me bed-cradle and the toes are tickling shocking. Can’t get it comfortable.’

  And later, ‘Me phantom’s settled lovely to the knee, nurse. Just the knee giving me gyp.’

  Slowly, as the pain in the nerves faded, the phantoms faded to the stumps, and invariably from the extremities first.

  Occasionally at night either a solitary or several German bomber pilots mistook the hospital for a war factory. I never heard of their bombs doing any real damage to the hospital, aside from breaking a
few windows, displacing roof tiles, or the metal sheets roofing the huts, but the raids made a great deal of noise. This only annoyed me for the sake of the patients, as, after every working day, once in bed I was asleep. It took more than an air-raid siren sounding the Alert to wake me. A number of the other girls in my cubicled hut slept as soundly, to the irritation of the one very light sleeper. ‘Girls, girls! The Alert’s gone!’

  ‘So what? If Jerry does drop a few it’s just to show willing. He doesn’t really want us. Go back to sleep!’

  ‘Don’t be so dumb! Listen to those planes! Right overhead!’

  ‘Phooey! Miles away! Shut up and let us sleep—’ the voices were cut off by a barrage of explosions that rattled our hut like a tin can.

  I shared a cubicle with another ex-VAD. We reacted identically, rolled out of our beds and onto the floor beneath. In the next slight lull, we pulled down blankets and pillows and slept out the raid and night on the floor. I dropped off to the sounds of growling aircraft and the light sleeper’s triumphant ‘Didn’t I say they were overhead? I’ll bet they hit our roof!’

  We slept several nights on the floor under our beds. I slept very well mainly because I was so tired, and probably also because I was subconsciously aware I had taken the only shelter available, was off-duty, had to be back on-duty at 7.30 a.m. and tomorrow’s expected busy day could be made still busier by the bombers above. My attitude seemed pretty general in our hut. If any girl was frightened, none showed it, and our light sleeper’s running commentary always seemed more prompted by her pleasure in being hut Cassandra than from personal apprehension.

  ‘Girls, girls! Something’s hit the bathrooms’ roof!’

  ‘Shut up, get under your bed, and let us sleep! You’re worse than Jerry—’

  ‘I am under my bed!’ An ear-splitting clank of tin. ‘That was our roof – just above me!’