Sixty Years a Nurse

I had to learn a whole new routine. A maid knocked on the door at six thirty every morning, and I had to get straight up, spit spot, no messing. In the winter, it was tough to get up to no heating and in the dark. I had a quick wash at the basin, then it was on with all the uniform, and a clean apron (which crossed over at the back) every day. There were no tights then, so the Lyle stockings were held up with suspenders which hung from a suspender belt, which we wore over our knickers. When we lost our suspenders, we used buttons or pennies which we twisted in the tops to keep our stockings up. We were allowed silk as we got more senior, and tights (American Tan, of course) didn’t come in until the early 1960s – so thick, mendable stockings were the rule. In my pockets I always had to have a pen and a pair of scissors – and my only allowed adornment was my little pinned-on watch. When our clothes were dirty we put them outside the door, in a marked laundry box, and they were taken away and laundered and brought back crisply starched and ironed in a week. It all had to be absolutely perfect.

Then I had to make my bed, using ‘hospital corners’ at the ends with the sheets and blanket, folded over tightly like an envelope shape, to keep everything in. Then I had to tidy my room for daily ‘inspection’. There was no privacy at all, as Home Sister would suddenly burst in, unannounced, and if your room was not tidy, or the bed corners not made properly, she would rip off all the bedding and throw it on the floor and shout, ‘Do it again, nurse, not good enough!’ Or she would throw open my dressing-table drawers and, if things were not tickety-boo, tip the contents out onto the floor, and snap, ‘No, no, no, this will never do – now tidy it up, nurse. Jump to it.’ I was actually quite tidy by nature – my mother had trained me well – so I was pleased when Home Sister pronounced after a couple of weeks, ‘Tidiest drawers in the whole place, Powell. Well done.’ It was like one of those Carry On films, very Hattie Jacques. It was hilarious. After so many years with the nuns I felt there was nothing I couldn’t handle, although Home Sister was very scary at first.

On Sunday mornings we went to church. So it was up at seven, and then we would be trooping down the road together to mass. We had to put money in the collection, but because we were broke most of the time we’d put in our stocking buttons or anything else that came to hand, much to the Father’s disdain. Then we had to be in bed by ten o’clock at night and there was official ‘lights out’. It was a complete institution and there was no messing about it. It was certainly like my home all over again. In fact, the nurses’ home was like I imagined a strict boarding school would be like in the kind of Angela Brazil book that I had loved reading back home. I’d run away from the overly pious and unforgiving strictness of Ireland only to land in another fierce regime.

We earned ten pounds a month while we were training. Right from the beginning we needed to buy Woodbines from Bert the porter. I had learned to smoke surreptitiously at thirteen, and, sad to say, smoking had already become an essential part of my life, ironically for someone concerned about health. Of course, we didn’t make the connection between smoking and health back then, as doctors often recommended cigarettes to patients to relax them. It was seen as a sophisticated pastime and almost everybody did it, without thinking. Plus, I was always hungry and tired, so smoking was a way of quelling my appetite and exhaustion. Buying the Woodbines, which were fiercely strong, was a total secret, of course, but we knew when we got our wages the first person we paid was Bert – and at four old pennies for a packet of eight, it soon mounted up. Bert would keep a tab when we didn’t have any money, and we’d have to cough up (literally) once our wages came in. He would also get us the Merrydown cider that we liked to drink illicitly after lights out, to relax and have a giggle, so we could easily spend a third of our wages without even going out of the nurses’ home. Our daily food was served in the hospital dining room. It was cooked on site, and was very basic. It was always quite plentiful and hearty, but stodgy: pies, puddings, potatoes, lots of starch. I remember we were always starving, and always demolished what was on our plates.

In 1952, Putney took in about twenty new trainee nurses – mostly from Ireland, like me, but also from Holland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and England. There were strong unresolved post-war feelings and I’m sorry to say that racism abounded, unchecked. Matron, a small, intense woman called Miriam Sturgeon, said quite baldly to us that ‘I’ll take the Irish, because I need you, but I don’t have to take the coloureds.’ However, the Dutch would not sit down with the Germans, even if they were Jewish, and there was a hell of a lot of strife between them then, which I found quite bewildering at first. One of my first new trainee friends was a lovely Dutch girl called Hanse. She was nineteen and from Amsterdam, and she told me the most terrible story which explained her attitude towards the Germans. She said her family had been starving during the German occupation, and had had to beg, borrow or steal anything to eat. She had a twenty-year-old brother who would go out and forage for food, scavenging round the fields around Amsterdam or even dustbins. To disguise himself, he would put on one of Hanse’s dresses and a headscarf, and get on her sit-up-and-beg bike, and go and scrounge turnips from the fields for the family to eat.

Then one day he was actually stopped by a German soldier. The Nazi asked what ‘she’ was doing, then tried to rape Hanse’s brother, but when he discovered very quickly that ‘she’ was a boy, he shot him and left him in the gutter to die. As a consequence, Hanse would not sit down with the German nurses in the canteen, and hated being anywhere near them. She would stand up and eat, her back to the wall, and Sister would command, ‘Sit down, nurse,’ and Hanse would retort, saying, ‘No, Sister, I’m fine where I am.’ I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, she’s in for it,’ and I’d entreat her to sit down next to me. ‘I’m not sitting next to a verdammte Deutsche,’ she’d spit. I didn’t really understand the depth of her feelings or the reasons for them then at all. I was so naïve back then. But Hanse would say, ‘You know, Mary, the Germans killed us in Holland, just because we were hungry, so I’m not sitting down.’ Another Dutch girl, Christe Lemm, would say, ‘I’m also not sitting down next to those Germans. You can’t make me,’ and would stand staunchly next to Hanse. Infuriated by this insubordination, Sister would stride off and get Matron, telling her there was a war still going on with the prelim nurses; Matron would then march back in, alongside Sister, and snap at the Dutch protesters, ‘Have you no dignity, girls? Sit down.’ Unperturbed, Hanse would say, ‘Gott verdammt the lot of us.’ Matron would bark, ‘Well, you’ll all have to learn to rub along together. The war is over now.’ Indeed, on the wards she would not settle for anything else, despite Hanse’s and Christe’s painful feelings. We were told over and over we all had a job to do, and we had to get on and do it, regardless of any personal grudges or feelings. But the Dutch and the Germans were red rags to a bull, while the Irish were stuck in the middle with the English, for a change. For me, this was a real turn-up for the books.

My training as an SRN would take three years, with each year including three months of day duty, three months of night duty, and experience on specialist wards, such as tuberculosis (TB), which was rife at the time. I was also to do a three-month stint in theatre and I would have to do dreaded annual exams. For the first three months I was at school daily being trained, and then I ‘observed’ on the wards for a day a week. We were only unleashed on the wards, to do some basic or minor tasks with real patients, under the eagle-eyed gazes of staff nurses and sisters, after the first three months were completed satisfactorily.

Even then, once on the wards, a lot of my time was spent cleaning: swabbing, washing, scrubbing, wiping everything down scrupulously. There was an unrelenting fixation on cleanliness and disease prevention, so we disinfected and scrubbed everything in sight. It was second nature. One of my first jobs was cleaning a toilet, without a brush or rubber gloves, which was disgusting. I was crying all the time, and Sister snapped at me to ‘Stop blubbering and get on with it.’ I said, ‘My mother wouldn’t make me do this,’ and she said, ‘Well, tough, nurse. You’re not with your mother now, are you?’ My hands became raw from washing and scrubbing all the time, immersed in carbolic and disinfectant, but there was a zero tolerance to infection as little could be done, otherwise, to stop it spreading. We didn’t suffer from MRSA or C. Diff, which are the modern killers, but I’m convinced it’s because we were on our knees wiping down the beds, even the chair feet and bed wheels, cleaning taps, washing down walls, even light switches, door knobs and bed springs, night and day.

Men and women were segregated into separate wards back then, and there were two main categories: medical (which was general and covered lots of things) and surgical. Each long, rectangular ward had up to thirty patients each, in beds down the sides, with the nurse’s table at the double door end. There was usually a table for mobile patients to eat at down the middle of the room. The floors were wooden, and scrubbed constantly. There was a little side kitchen, where the nurses could make tea and toast, or squash, or fill vases and jugs with water. Also, there were balconies with iron railings outside the windows, and ‘isolation’ patients would be pushed out there in their beds to get fresh air (in which there was a great curative belief) during the day. There were a few side rooms for extremely ill or even private paying patients. Then, off the ward, there was the huge sluice, a big tiled room with huge sinks, for the metal bedpans and men’s glass wee bottles to be washed and disinfected in. We also did diabetic urine testing there.

The women’s medical ward, Corry, had patients in together with all sorts of different conditions from broken femurs with patients strung up on huge metal traction frames, to appendectomies, tonsillectomies (which were popular then), stomach ulcers and even women being treated for failed abortions. I was really amazed to see these poor women, of all ages, both married and single (which was shocking then), in with everyone else. Sister would ‘tut tut’ all the time, showing she did not approve of them, and they could be ostracised. Some of them came in in a terrible state, it was so cruel to see, with metal back-street abortion implements still stuck in them. But they got no kind words from Sister, no arm round the shoulder: she disapproved and she didn’t mind showing it. They’d be given Ergometrine, a drug to put them in labour, and they suffered dreadfully, poor things.

Then we would be told to swab the women down with Dettol, and we’d have to shave them ‘down there’. I’d never seen anything like this at all. The poor, bleak women would be rolled away to have a ‘scrape’ in theatre and then shoved back out by a very snooty Sister, as soon as she could discharge them. Then their ‘incomplete abortions’ would be lined up in metal bowls in the sluice for doctor to inspect. I was horrified. I’d see something baby-shaped, lying amid large liver-like clots of blood. She made the poor women feel very guilty about wasting her time and effort, and the Health Service money. It was a very bad business, a real eye-opener, and it made me feel very wary about getting pregnant, I can tell you.

The men’s surgical ward, Lancaster, could be equally as grim. Among the broken legs and car smashes were the hernias, appendectomies and the constipated men (‘who couldn’t go’). The men’s Lancaster Medical Ward was next door, and they had those ‘incurable patients’ with ‘growths’ (what we would now call cancer). It seemed so undignified and unnecessary to me for simple cases to be next to fatal ones. Then, if a man had to be shaved ‘down there’, I learned to beg Percy the porter to come and do it with a wet razor. Imagine my horror at being asked to exfoliate (yes, standard practice in disease prevention or pre-operative) a man’s privates, when, as an innocent seventeen-year-old, I’d never seen a boy naked at all. But there were times, during those first months, when I had to do it all alone, and I was a quivering wreck, hoping and praying to God that my hand wouldn’t slip at the wrong moment, and in the wrong place (I could hear Sister Margaret shouting at me that I was a ‘clumsy oaf and a silly girl’, which made it all so much worse).

So for the first three months in training school, being taught by Sister Tutor, I sat and took copious notes and absorbed as much knowledge as I could. It was all anatomy, physiology, hygiene and everything else thrown in. We had a large school room with a pink rubber woman dummy called Araminta that we had to practise all sorts of unspeakable things on. The walls were lined with shelves with things like a twenty-foot tapeworm suspended in formaldehyde, or miscarried babies in bottles. It could be a bit gruesome. But I soon got used to it, as I soon got used to everything else about hospital life. I can honestly say these months were spent swimming in blood, poo, vomit, wee and absolutely everything else that comes out of the body: it was a real baptism of bodily fluids.

3

Settling In (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

There was so much to learn in those first weeks and months that I was in a constant whirl of activity, confusion and, often, amusement and bemusement with my fellow trainees. We worked six-day weeks and there was a huge amount to learn, a great deal to absorb, mentally, and also to master, physically. For some reason, I was often clumsy, and I was also very naïve, although always very enthusiastic. So, I would find myself being barked at by the Day Sister Burton (‘No, Powell, you don’t do it that way, silly girl!’) or Staff Nurse (‘For goodness’ sake, Powell, you’re not wrapping a Christmas present – retie your bandage properly, now!’) It was like being with my mother or Sister Margaret all over again – I could never get things right, or so it seemed.

We had to observe the doctors’ rounds on the wards each week and I was absolutely fascinated by everything. We trailed behind the doctors and consultants in their crisp white coats and pin-striped suits, stethoscopes slung round their necks, as they pronounced on the patients and snapped their orders with military precision. We were like well-behaved little goslings following behind giant ganders. Staff and Sister would always be turned out perfectly, in smart navy uniforms, and would be beside the doctors, silently obedient, and at the ready, with notes and charts at hand, ready to answer their queries or to jump to it, as they talked loftily over the patients’ heads. It was all very formal, intimidating – and bewildering. We nurses had to make sure everything was tickety-boo before the doctors did their rounds: everything had to be spotless, tidy and gleaming; sheets neatly tucked in, patients washed and hair combed. Their lockers had to be clean, with fresh water in their jugs and their flower vases refreshed. Sometimes I thought we made the beds so tightly that I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had cut off the circulation in the legs and arms of the poor people strapped neatly into bed, like strangulated sausages in hot-dog buns.

Back in our training school on the ground floor of the hospital (safely away from the real patients) we had our large rubber dolly, Araminta, to practise clinical procedures on. She lay, smiling her unchanging red-lipped smile, on a bed, and she could be zipped open from chin to pubic bone, so we could take all of her plastic internal organs out: liver, spleen, stomach, intestines, gall bladder, kidneys, bladder, and so on. We spent quite some time taking Araminta apart and putting her back together again: it was quite a game. We also had to pretend to ‘bed bath’ Araminta, and change her rubber undersheet, which involved rolling her onto her side, sliding the ‘drawsheets’ out from under, and rolling her back again. She sometimes rolled onto the floor, which, obviously, we knew we’d have to avoid with real patients (if at all possible). However, Araminta didn’t object to her mistreatment and sometimes we felt quite sorry for the punishment we gave her as we also had to practise giving her injections, which I hated doing. Back then syringes were made of glass and metal, and had to be re-used, so they were boiled in big metal sterilisers, which were bubbling away in the corner of the medical rooms all the time. Everything had to be boiled and sterilised endlessly, and was rejected as sub-standard if it wasn’t perfectly clean.

Then one day, towards the end of my first three months, Sister Burton told me I was going onto the men’s surgical ward and I was going to give my first injection. I nearly fainted. A real injection into a real person. Not Araminta?No, surely not. I wasn’t ready, was I? Sister being Sister was blunt, business-like and to the point: ‘Nurse Powell, you will give the patient his injection – now stop fussing and get on with it. You know what to do.’ So I approached Mr Brown’s bed gingerly. I stood, holding the metal kidney-shaped dish with the syringe rattling in it, while he read his newspaper, totally unaware of my inexperience. He was a good-looking, fair-haired man of about thirty with a deep, badly infected cut on his leg from a work accident. He was sitting there, all innocence, in his striped pyjamas with no idea what was about to be unleashed on him – all-fingers-and-thumbs-me.

Mr Brown looked up and saw me looking at him fixedly, just as I felt a presence begin hovering behind me. I looked round and there was Sister, glaring. Oh my God, I had to get on with it. I pulled the screens round the bed on their squeaky wheels while I was frantically trying to remember what I’d done to poor old Araminta. Sister had told me the injection, which was a thick antibiotic mixture, had to go in the outer quadrant of Mr Brown’s right buttock. Buttock! Sweet Jesus, I’d never seen a man naked before and now I was going to be looking at this poor man’s bum, and inject him, to boot. Despite my nervousness, I tried to brazen it out: ‘All right, Mr Brown, I have to give you this little injection, so could you roll over and pull down your pyjama bottoms?’

I couldn’t believe I was saying this to a real, live man, and was even more amazed when he rolled over obediently, and did just that. Luckily, he couldn’t see my hand shaking as I got the large syringe out of the dish and prepared it for him. Little it was not. I swabbed his right buttock with antiseptic and cotton wool, trying not to take in the smooth brown and hairy skin of his muscular body. I was looking at a naked man’s posterior, my first, but was seriously trying to concentrate on the job in hand (as it were). I filled the syringe with the thick Streptomycin with trembling fingers, and pushed out the air bubble, just as I’d been taught. Surely nothing could really go wrong?

Thing was, I was terrified of hurting him and I stood rooted to the spot for a minute trying to remember all that Sister Tutor had told me when I was torturing Araminta. Mr Brown was perturbed by my hesitation. ‘Anything wrong, nurse?’ he asked, innocently, trying to peer round over his shoulder. ‘No, no, nothing, Mr Brown,’ I stuttered. ‘No, not at all – just turn round, lie there and relax.’ And with that I lobbed the heavy glass syringe at poor Mr Brown’s right buttock, rather like a dart at a dart board, and it went in a bit, and then hung out of his bum at a ghastly angle. I knew it wasn’t in right, especially as he yelped, then hollered, loudly, and to cover my embarrassment I just syringed the viscous fluid in as fast as I could. It should have gone deep in his muscle; instead I injected it all under his skin. Poor Mr Brown was groaning as I could see a ball forming under his epidermis, like a ping-pong ball. Oh sweet Jesus! I tried to make it better by rubbing his buttock a great deal, and sort of massaging it; then I asked him to turn over and hoped for the best. The poor man looked pained, as he pulled his pyjamas up, but I tried to cheer him up as I tucked him in tightly before getting away as fast as I could.

Next day, I was really for it. Poor Mr Brown had now developed a deeply infected buttock. I was taken back to him, by Sister, and made to look: his buttock had gone black, and the place I’d injected had formed an ulcer. There was now a large hole which had to be packed. Mr Brown got really ill after this. My terrible injection technique was causing him almost more trouble than the leg injury that he had come in for in the first 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, with lovely shops, and I liked nothing better than to stroll up and down it, lusting after goods. I remember longing for a pair of red stilettos in Saxone’s that cost £3.00 and wondering how long it would take me to save for them. I knew I would have to save for weeks, even months, as, in those days, if you didn’t have the money, you simply didn’t have something you wanted. You had to ‘save up’ and that could take ages and ages. I thought ‘I’m going to have those’ and, eventually, after weeks of saving hard, I did.

I liked fashion a great deal. Back home I had been used to my mother being able to run up anything. She made my fabulous pale strapless green evening dress, which I wore at sixteen to my first grown-up dance in Clonmel, which doubled as my leaving ‘do’. In those days you had one good frock, and one good pair of strappy evening shoes, and they lasted you for years, too. I brought the green dress with me to Putney, in the hope I’d have occasion to wear it one day, and I was always amending it: putting some ribbon on it here, or a corsage or bow, or a little flourish, there. It’s what we did in those ‘make-do-and-mend’ post-war years.

I also bought my first proper two-piece suit in Richard Shops: it was pale grey with a pleated skirt. It was all the rage to have big skirts with net under-petticoats, and to wear gypsy-style blouses on top. Everything was waisted and girly, and I knew I looked good as I had a tiny waist back then. It would all be topped by having a ‘shampoo and set’ at a new, modern hair salon on the High Street, which had those dome hairdryers we sat under in rollers (although this would only happen on very special occasions). I would have to save for a cut and set, and would have one maybe every two or three months or so. Meanwhile, I would snip my fringe myself and, being me, it was usually lop-sided once I’d finished hacking at it in the bathroom mirror.

During these first few months of settling in, I would write dutiful letters home, making my London life sound busy and meaningful, and would make my job sound important (which it was to me). I certainly didn’t tell of the men I saw naked, or the cigarettes and booze, or even what I had encountered on the wards. My mother would write back, telling of local and family news, but would ask almost nothing of my life in England or as a trainee nurse. She simply didn’t want to know. This hurt me, but I knew how proud and stubborn my mother was. So I had to rely on my sisters for the real news from back home. I felt very nostalgic thinking of the lovely rural countryside, the orchards, and my dear sisters, brother and father, and the dogs, but I didn’t miss either my mother, really, or the nuns. And of course, I never asked for money. I certainly knew I would never get any for wasting my time in that ‘Godforsaken Protestant country’, so I didn’t bother asking. I knew that I had to make it on my own, and I was utterly determined to do so, no matter what it cost.

4

Bring Out Your Dead (#udea7a680-12d9-50f2-9f52-8c7d838d14ca)

Hospital life is all about disease, birth and death, so I knew, sooner or later, I would have to be dealing with all these things first hand. I was quite trepidacious, but also curious. Plus, after my disgrace of fainting away in the morgue, I had begun to get used to seeing all sorts of things on the wards, although we were usually given very menial tasks to do, which were still mainly about scrubbing everything in sight with carbolic and Dettol, or rolling up bandages, emptying bedpans, folding linen and mopping the floors. However, after a few months we were being given more challenging, albeit still fairly basic, tasks to do. Fairly soon after I started, I was on a stint of night duties, which was also all very new to me. In charge was a horrible woman, whom we nurses called ‘the Beetle’. She was small, dark, with a tight bun, and she scuttled around, keeping us in check. We were terrified of her, and Sister Morten became ‘the Beetle’ thereafter: someone we always had to keep our eyes open for, but who would often surprise us by appearing and scaring the life out of us.

It’s often the way that people die in the early hours of the morning, something to do with our bodily rhythms, whereby people reach a low ebb in the middle of the night. Thus it was I was confronted with handling my very first dead body one dark mid-winter night. It was three in the morning, and I was already feeling exhausted, when Sister came and told me that Mr Johnson had died. He was a retired ex-policeman, a nice old man with a big handlebar moustache, rather like Jimmy Edwards, the popular entertainer. That night I was on the ward with twenty patients, all of whom needed things like bedpans, fresh water jugs or more medication. The nurses would sit at the end of the ward at a little table with a light on, doing paperwork and keeping watch. It was quite a quiet night, until Sister came up to me and whispered, ‘Nurse Powell, go and lay out Mr Johnson.’

The flowery curtains were already pulled round Mr Johnson’s bed when I arrived on the scene, jittery as a kitten. I felt quite spooked by what I might see, and hesitated for a moment, feeling anxious. Luckily, the twenty other patients on the ward were snoring away, but I was alone, as the other nurse had gone on her ‘lunch break’ (which was a meal in the middle of the night). I was very nervous as I drew the curtains and saw him lying there, in the half light. I sort of half expected he might sit up and start talking, like in a horror film, so I watched him to see if he was really gone for a minute or two. There was no breathing, so that was it. Next, I had to wash him down, so I got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge, then starting at the top of his head worked my way down all the way to his toes. This turned out to be a very long way as Mr Johnson was about six foot five, with his huge bony feet hanging over the end of the hospital bed.

I felt so sorry for him having died that I started crying. I was uncontrollable. Poor old Mr Johnson, I was thinking to myself, dead and gone. His life was well and truly snuffed out. What would his family be feeling? Would they miss him? As usual the tears were flowing, and mixing with the soapy water as I washed and wiped away at his poor old body. I actually felt quite horrified by what I was doing. I’d never touched a dead body before, although I’d seen the headless monster in the morgue. I was curious at the icy marble texture of his skin and how his face had begun to sink in as his jaw slackened. I saw his eyes had sunk into his head and I shook involuntarily, feeling quite spooked out by it all. He now looked very different from the Mr Johnson who had sat up in bed while I took his temperature and pulse, only yesterday. There was an eerie silence in the ward around me as I washed my way down the poor old man’s body. I noticed, slightly squeamishly, that he had started oozing from his orifices and I had to plug them with cotton wool as I worked. It felt so weird to do this to what had been a warm human being only a few hours earlier: he had been a sentient being, with a history and feelings. Now he was like a waxwork, although he’d never be an Araminta, I thought wryly.

Anyway, the worst part was to come, when I got to his middle, or rather, to his ‘private parts’. I had no idea what to do at all. The poor man had a catheter sticking out of his penis and I had absolutely no idea how to get it out. There was no one around to ask, and I couldn’t bear the idea of going to ask Sister, in her hidey-hole office, who would bite my head off as soon as look at me, so I got the rubber tube and started yanking, then pulling, then wrenching, trying to get the damned thing out. Poor Mr Johnson’s body was going this way and that, and his head was bobbing up and down, in a very undignified way, as his willy was yanked hither and thither by me. I was desperate to get that tube out. I could feel my heart racing, while my mouth was dry, as panic was rising. I bent over the poor man’s penis, and was examining the tube close up, yanking and pulling all the while, when I suddenly heard a fierce whisper hissing behind me, ‘Nurse Powell, what on earth do you think you are doing?’

I stood up, red-faced, tube in hand, and Mr Johnson’s body did a ghastly jump, led by his willy (which was still firmly attached to his catheter). I must have looked a total sight, tears still pouring down my panicked face, with my hands going all over his private parts. Sister stepped forward and got out her scissors on their little chain and neatly snipped the rubber tube and the catheter slid out, nice as pie. I stood open-mouthed, feeling such a fool. ‘Next time, use your common sense, will you, Powell,’ was all Sister snapped as she turned and left me alone again with the battered body. So undignified. I said sorry to Mr Johnson right there and then for all I had put him through, and cried some more tears of sympathy. I said a little prayer for his soul … and, of course, the other parts that had got a rude walloping from me.

Then I had to lay him out, which is what all of us nurses were taught to do, as preparation for being taken to the morgue. When he was finally finished, I called Staff Nurse to check him over. It had taken me an absolute age, since I had had to keep stopping to blow my nose throughout as I had found the whole thing traumatising. Staff came along briskly and emptied his locker of his worldly goods. There were a couple of packets of Woodbines in there, packs of twenty, which, amazingly, patients were allowed to smoke on the ward. Back then it was thought that smoking calmed their nerves … there was no thought of cigarettes being a health hazard; in fact, quite the opposite. To my horror Staff said, ‘Let’s take these Woodbines. His relatives won’t notice,’ and with that she pocketed them. I was amazed at her attitude, but I didn’t object. I’d been in enough trouble for one night. However, I thought it was a very bad thing to do, and I didn’t feel comfortable being ‘party’ to our crime. Yet, once we were on our break, and Staff got the fags out, I smoked a couple. I really needed a smoke after all that – I was gasping.

I think during that first year I was often naïve about the rules, or I failed to follow the strict regulations, as I was used to always trying to skirt round them back home. It was force of habit for me to be a bit rebellious, I suppose. Also, a means of survival. I tried to be good, and tried to be the best trainee that I could possibly be, but I had a mischievous streak and often acted on impulse or said things without thinking them through. However, I was still really desperate to prove my mother’s prediction about me being hopeless and a quitter was wrong. I was not going to be sent home, tail between my legs. I was going to succeed: I had to, as it was a matter of life and death. Thankfully, some of the more experienced nurses took pity on me. Sometimes we spent hours hunched over the sinks on night duty scraping poo and vomit off sheets with our scrubbing brushes and bare hands, which got sore and rough. We were scrubbing and cleaning endlessly; one of my more experienced nurse friends, Beryl, used to joke that pushing the enormous floor mop would increase her breasts, so we all sang a comical ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust’ with every strenuous bush stroke across the floor.

We would also spend hours folding linen in the linen cupboards, and if I was on nights it would get very warm and soporific in there. I had a pal, a third-year nurse, Sandy, who surprised me one night by clearing a space on the enormous second shelf (which was about ten foot long and two foot deep) and telling me to get up on the shelf, and lie down to take forty winks. ‘No,’ I protested. ‘If the Beetle finds out, she’ll have my guts for garters.’ ‘Go on with you,’ Sandy encouraged. ‘You’re all in. Have an hour. I’ll wake you up.’ I could see she meant it, so I did. It became a regular occurrence after that when I was on nights. I’d clamber up, and be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail (as we used to say). Sandy would be shaking me and I’d be down a dark tunnel, back in Clonmel, trying to avoid the whack of my mother’s large wooden spoon over my head. ‘Get up, Mary, you lazy girl,’ Sandy would be whispering. ‘Time to get up – you’ve had an hour’s kip.’ For a moment I’d think it was one of my lovely sisters, Una, and then I’d focus on starched sheets and pillows in neat white piles, and it would all come flooding back to me. Sweet Jesus, I was in that linen cupboard. However, those snatched naps were a real life-saver.

Putney Hospital, being on the edge of Barnes Common, which was a huge geographical area, meant we got all sorts drifting in, night and day. Tramps, children, couples, basically anyone who had come to grief in the open air or on the road, some way or another, were brought in. The ambulance men (and they were mainly men then) were aware that I was a ‘new girl’ and sometimes took advantage of it, especially when I was left on duty in casualty all alone. Another bitter cold night in the middle of winter during my first year it turned out that I was the only nurse in casualty left on duty. It was sometimes like that, as we were often not that busy at night. Putney Hospital had been set up originally to serve the local community, so it was not a really hectic place serving central London, like Barts (St Bartholomew’s) could be. It was part of Westminster Hospital, so we did send patients there when necessary, such as when a case was more serious or needed more complex equipment or nursing.

However, this evening Night Sister was at dinner and the house doctor had gone to sleep in the downstairs ‘on call’ bedrooms allocated to night staff. He could be called and woken up in an emergency, and Sister floated round the hospital at night, but I was supposed to cope the best I could with most situations, on my own, otherwise. When an ambulance turned up at the entrance the rule was that I had to go out to it and see who was being brought in. Usually the ambulance men would say, ‘Got a heart attack here, nurse,’ or ‘It’s a car crash,’ or whatever. I think this night they saw me coming. It was freezing and I’d thrown on my cape, but was shivering terribly in the wind. The rule was I wasn’t supposed to accept any patient without seeing them first in the ambulance. The ambulance men, George and Charlie, whom I’d seen before on nights, indicated that because it was so bitter cold they hadn’t got the time or inclination to let me clamber aboard and check out their patient. I was also rapidly turning into a human icicle, so I went back into casualty as the two men carried in this fella on their stretcher all wrapped in a red blanket. ‘Found him on Hammersmith Bridge,’ explained George. ‘Think it’s a heart attack, probably.’ And with that they were gone.

So I was stood there, next to this man, wrapped in a red ambulance blanket. He looked frozen, poor old chap. He had grey whiskers and bushy grey eyebrows, and was in a brown raincoat and suit. I folded back the sides of the blanket and thought, ‘Sweet Jesus, he looks really terrible,’ so then I felt for his pulse. Nothing. I felt again, and then put my head on his chest, listening for his breathing. Not a sausage. Oh my God! He was dead! Oh Lord, what should I do? Sweet Jesus, I was really for it now! I looked around the casualty department and absolutely no one was around; it was like a ghost town, as it was now four in the morning. Thing was, the rule was I was not authorised to take in a dead body; it was absolutely against regulations. This had been drummed into us as trainees over and over and over again. Had I been listening? Well, obviously not.