Sixty Years a Nurse. Mary Hazard

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СКАЧАТЬ place. I felt absolutely awful, and was in floods of tears. Sweet Jesus, I was hopeless, I would never make it – my mother was right, I was utterly useless. I apologised profusely to Mr Brown, and to my utter amazement he was quite accepting about it. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It could have been worse.’ He could see I was genuinely distraught. Worse? I didn’t think it could be, and I seriously considered if I was really up to the job for the first time since arriving.

      I was carpeted by Sister, who was a real dragon. ‘What on earth do you think you were doing, Nurse Powell?’ She went on and on, saying, ‘We obviously can’t let you anywhere near injections yet,’ as I blubbered in front of her, wanting the floor to open up. I explained that I hadn’t wanted to hurt poor Mr Brown, and instead I’d ended up giving him a whole load of pain. She barked at me to practise again on Araminta and stop whining. It was so humiliating as everyone on the ward knew it was me who had buggered it up and I imagined all the patients refusing to let me touch them from now on. Her? Oh, no, I don’t want her, Sister. Bring me a proper nurse. She’s the Devil incarnate. I could just hear it. Wisely, Sister moved me onto another ward the next day, telling me to ‘Toughen up, Powell.’ I certainly never gave another botched injection like that again; I learned I had to be firm and decisive from the start. Mr Brown recovered completely, I’m glad to say, and bore me no grudge. Luckily, patients didn’t sue in those days or I’d certainly have been up for the chop.

      There was another time I showed myself up badly, too. We had to go to the morgue, which was also on the ground floor at the back of the hospital, and observe a post-mortem as part of our training. I was very nervous about this as I had not seen a dead body as yet, although Araminta had been taken apart and put back together like a giant female plastic Meccano set several times over. I was very intimate with her by now – but a real dead body? This brought back horrors of Clonmel cemetery and the terror I always felt there after dark with my wild imagination seeing grisly ghouls and hellfire and damnation everywhere. I was never very good with horror films, ghosts or anything spooky like that. Even the thought of the Putney Common convict ghost made me shiver, and I tried to put it out of my mind as much as I could.

      So one cool winter afternoon eight of us trotted along to the morgue, feeling we were going to the gallows. We were all extremely nervous at what might be about to happen, and getting each other nervous, plus my overactive imagination was working away, as usual. I didn’t really know what I was in for until the mortician, a Mr Tayler, a lofty, serious-faced consultant, pulled back the shroud and there was a stark naked middle-aged man, the colour of putty: stone cold dead. I could feel my knees going immediately, so I crossed my arms and wrapped my fingers tight round my elbows to try to keep myself from falling over. There were lots of shiny, ordinary-looking surgical implements laid out, like a chisel, a carving knife, and then I espied something like a garden saw. Surely he wasn’t going to use those? I closed my eyes and swallowed.

      When I opened them again, the mortician picked the saw up cheerfully and without further ado deftly hacked through the top of the man’s head. I stood there open-mouthed, and was amazed to see his brain fluid, like a grey, wrinkled, deflated football, which he scooped neatly in a silver bowl, explaining all the while about the nature of brain matter. Four of the assembled nurses went down immediately, like skittles, and one ran out, holding her hand over her mouth. Completely unperturbed, Mr Tayler continued his butchery, talking coolly all the while. I couldn’t really concentrate and could feel my gorge rising, but I was determined to see it through, so dug my fingers into my arms even harder. Then Mr Tayler got his scalpel and cut the poor man’s body from the neck to his pubes and suddenly all his guts were tumbling out, like miles and miles of grey sausages into a great silver tray alongside the slab … that was it, I was done for: I felt my knees buckle as the room spun round and I was sick as a dog on the floor.

      When I came round I was outside on a chair, along with five other white-faced nurses, most of whom were bent double, holding their heads in their hands, and groaning. We were all told, in no uncertain terms, by a tough staff nurse, that we had to pull ourselves together straight away and get back in there. We were wasting valuable time, and this was part of our training – we were here to learn and we’d better get used to it. So after a few more woozy minutes and a sip of water we all had to troop back in and carry on watching as Mr Tayler cheerfully continued his controlled carnage, whether we liked it or not.

      After a tough experience like my first injection, or the nauseating post-mortems, we took refuge in each other’s rooms at night to put the world to rights and, literally, let our hair down. I had begun to make some firm friends in those first few months: Rosie, Hanse, Magdelena, Christe and Susan, who would keep me sane over the next three years one way or another. We would all club together and nip out to the local pub and get us a couple of bottles of Merrydown cider, our favourite tipple, and a couple of packs of Woodbines (often from Bert the porter). This was standard fare for a good nattery debrief. We’d pile into my room (nearly always mine for some reason), and we’d be on my bed, cackling, gassing, recounting the horrors of the day until lights out, and beyond.

      One night I drank a bit too much (as was my wont), and I was desperate for a pee. We had the windows open to waft the smoke out (smoking was totally forbidden, of course), and I realised I was too far gone to get up and find the lavatories at the end of the corridor. Being clumsy, I would probably alert Home Sister Matthews by staggering about, and then we’d all be for it. So, we closed the windows, giggling, and I decided I would pee in the sink to save time. This increased the suppressed laughter ten-fold, especially as I tried to hitch up my skirt and bum onto the tiny hand-basin and position myself to pee properly without flooding the floor. ‘Oh, Mary, be careful,’ Susan was just saying when there was an almighty ‘craa-aack’ and the sink came away from the wall, tipping me onto the floor, with my pants round my knees in a pool of water. The four witnesses fell off the bed in complete hysterics, and we all lay helplessly on the wooden floor for about five minutes until we heard Home Sister’s footsteps begin to clip down the corridor. ‘Sssshhhh,’ I said, and everyone mimicked, ‘Sssshhhh!’ and we all lay there, panting and trying to suppress our mounting hysteria, waiting for Sister to barge in with a torch. Luckily, we heard her feet pause, then begin to retreat, thankfully, once we managed to shut up.

      However, next day I had to explain precisely why my sink was hanging off my wall at such a crazy angle. Home Sister fixed me with her beady eye. ‘So, nurse, you were saying about opening the windows?’ ‘Ah, yes, Sister,’ I went on, innocently. ‘Well, it was like this: I put my foot on the sink to get up to open the window as it was stuffy and, well, the sink just gave way …’ Sister peered at me critically for a moment. ‘It’s a considerable amount of weight to put on such a small sink,’ she said, pointedly. ‘Yes, Sister,’ I said, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’m for it, now.’ After another long pause she said, without looking up, ‘Well, kindly stop using your room as a climbing frame from now on, nurse.’ And that was it. She had bought my story, I think, particularly as I had a reputation for being a bit of a clumsy twit. This scene with Sister was recounted to my friends, over yet more Woodbines and Merrydown, and to the accompaniment of yet more giggles, gasps and ‘Oh, Mary’s’ later that night.

      1952, the year I hit Putney, was also the year that the first espresso coffee machine came to London. It became ‘cool’ to frequent coffee bars, which were thought to be almost illicit dens of iniquity and heinous vice. In Putney there was a wonderful coffee house called Zeta’s, which was a large shop on the corner, where we would all go on our day off. There was also Mario’s, a lovely old Italian place, that did huge knickerbocker glories, which I thought were marvellous. We would sit there, nursing a coffee in a Pyrex glass cup and saucer, and someone would put music on the Wurlitzer, and it all seemed very sophisticated and grown up to be out alone, spending my own meagre earnings on coffee, Woodbines, cake, ice cream and music. We were always hungry, always thirsty, but we had to live within our means, which were very tight, so there was no other way.

      Of course, I loved shopping. Window shopping, mainly, as I had little money and none to spend on clothes. Putney High Street was a broad, posh, leafy road, СКАЧАТЬ