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HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Mary Hazard and Corinne Sweet 2015

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Source ISBN: 9780008118372

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Dedication

To my wonderful family, and children Anthony and Christopher, and to Jennifer, whom I will never forget (MH)

To Corinne and Albert Haynes, for being there, and being you (CS)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgements

1: Arriving from Ireland

2: Joining the Regiment

3: Settling In

4: Bring Out Your Dead

5: Yes, Matron; No, Sister

6: Of Lice and Men

7: Public Enema Number One

8: Letting My Hair Down

9: Tragic Love Story

10: Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook

11: Theatre Tales

12: TB Traumas

13: Carbolic, Drugs and TLC

14: Private Rooms and Community Life

15: Kidnapped

16: Reader, I Married Him … and Carried On Working for the Next Sixty Years …

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Foreword

I first met Mary Hazard at my local GP’s surgery, the Bounds Green Group Practice, when I moved into the area in 2000. She took my blood at the surgery one day, and I was immediately struck by her vibrant personality, her amazing manner and her fantastic sense of humour. It soon became very clear that Mary was an institution. Everyone at the surgery revered her, and when she took blood it was a painless experience, accompanied by laughter and goodwill. One day she told me a story about how the women come in and say to her, ‘Will it hurt?’ and she says, ‘Yes, it’s a little prick,’ and they say, ‘OK, go ahead,’ and they’re fine. And then the men come in, ask the same question, look brave and then, ‘Boom, they’re on the floor.’ Mary is a larger than life, wonderfully warm, amazing character, always smartly dressed and up for anything (clubbing in a tiara in Leicester Square), and the surgery was not the same at all once she left in November 2013.

While writing this book I visited Mary one night at home and found a crowd of people round her front door, anxiously peering in her bay window. ‘Where is she?’ a worried neighbour said. ‘Oh, she might be unconscious on the kitchen floor,’ said another. Then some colleagues were visiting from the GP’s surgery, and were worried: ‘Where’s Mary? We hope she’s all right.’ The friends and neighbours, colleagues and passers-by were so worried about losing Mary, they forced her front door open, only to hear her loud, commanding voice booming from the pavement: ‘Sweet Jesus, what in hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t even go for a drink without being invaded?’ This was then accompanied by a raucous laugh, and we all knew that Mary had been off on her own, doing her own thing, having a quiet drink with friends down the pub, her little dog in tow. Mary is a total people magnet, who belies her age. Her neighbours call her ‘Queen Mary’ as she knows all the business in the street, is everyone’s friend, but always speaks her mind. Even at 80 she is never alone, since the doorbell goes constantly, as the phenomenon that is Mary Hazard attracts all comers.

This book only really scratches the surface of Mary’s sojourn from Ireland to England in the early 1950s. The most amazing part of the story is that she is still here to tell the tale, and is still a force to be reckoned with, after 62 years working in the NHS and 80 years of amazing, boisterous and, sometimes, tragic life.

Corinne Sweet

Acknowledgements

To Ivan Mulcahy, without whom this book would not have happened, and Sallyanne Sweeney, for your excellent assistance. To Natalie Jerome and Kate Latham, for brilliant feedback, editing and guidance. Thanks also for background research to Sgt Mark Bristow, of RAF Northolt. To my family, friends and NHS colleagues for being there for me down the years. To Rufus Potter and Clara Potter-Sweet for patience and forbearance as ever with the writing process.

1
Arriving from Ireland

It was so exciting: my first plane journey, ever. Also, my first proper time away from home, especially overseas. It was 10 September 1952, I was seventeen, and only a week away from my eighteenth birthday. I was so proud and independent to be sitting on this silver and dark-green Aer Lingus Bristol 170 Freighter, engines throbbing, propellers whirring, all the way from Dublin. I felt very grown-up, all on my own, with my little bag neatly stowed overhead and my new shiny black Clarks shoes on my feet. My heart was racing the whole time: I was finally on my way to fulfil a life-long ambition. As we descended through dank, grey clouds towards Northolt Airport, west of London, my stomach started churning and jumping in a wild fandango of fear and anticipation. What had I done? What would it really be like? What if my mother was right, and I wouldn’t last a month? I slipped my hand into my skirt pocket, and there was the folded £20 note (about £400 today) for my return fare if I couldn’t stand ‘that evil, black Protestant Godforsaken country’. My mother had screamed, then sulked at me, right up until the last minute, when she had given me a reluctant, brisk kiss on the cheek goodbye. ‘You’ll need this for your return journey, you stupid, wayward girl.’ She’d pushed a rosary, crucifix and little prayer book into my other hand, and stalked off, straightening her hat with its pheasant feather, with an irritated air. On the other hand, my father had folded me into his big arms saying, ‘Let her go, Agnes, she has to find her way,’ which made me sob into his firm, tweedy shoulder. ‘Yer bladder’s in yer bloody eyeballs,’ he teased, as always, which made me laugh through my tears, cheering me up no end.

Now, as the plane descended noisily, bumping through the dense clouds, I noticed the airport buildings rushing up towards me. I leaned towards the window and held my breath: I could just make out dark-grey silhouettes of the Nissen huts, a huge black hangar and a lit-up runway through foggy, late-afternoon light. Suddenly, a front page of the Irish Times flashed across my mind of a fatal air crash only back in January, when the same kind of plane as mine had smashed dramatically into a Welsh mountainside. It was a very rare event, but the memory of twisted wreckage, fatalities and the image of a child’s doll sinking into a bog made me shudder all the same. What on earth was I doing coming all alone to England? Maybe I was mad, like my mother said? Then I made myself get a grip: ‘Come on, Mary, pull yourself together,’ I scolded myself. ‘What are you thinking? It’s all going to be fine. You’ll see.’

Once in the busy airport, I had to find my way to Putney, wherever on earth that was. It was a long, long way from Clonmel, in the south-west of Ireland, that’s for sure. Everything looked so strange and grey, concretey and dull, after the lush green and spreading apple orchards of my beautiful home town. However, I made myself focus, as I wasn’t going to be beaten at the first hurdle (I wouldn’t give my mother that kind of satisfaction), and I soon managed to find a Greenline bus. A friendly conductor explained in broad Cockney I had to change twice to get to Putney: once in Ealing, and again in Richmond. His accent made me laugh, because it sounded so funny – the first English I’d ever really come across in person. All my life I’d dreamed of this moment, of going off to be a nurse. My mother had wanted me to study nursing in Dublin, under the beady, watchful eyes of relatives, but after a lifetime with the nuns, in convent school, I knew I could not bear another moment under their rigid, cruel control. This is where my mother and I came to bitter loggerheads, and the fight was set to continue, even though I was now in England, facing my first six months of State Registered Nurse (SRN) training. As I climbed aboard the coach, I realised it was going to be a long and memorable journey, in more ways than one.

Looking out the window, watching the unfamiliar English streets unfold, I realised I was finally escaping the confines of my home and upbringing to make this new, exciting but scary foreign start. It was 1952, and I was setting out on three years of intensive training. Ireland had been shielded, relatively, from the war, but as we drove towards London I could see bomb damage and that things were still quite austere in England. I was used to the green, lush land of Ireland, the river running past the end of our road, with its neat houses; England looked grey, suburban and a bit dreary. But it was all new to me, an adventure, and I’d finally escaped those religious, social and moral constraints that had driven me to become quite a rebellious girl.

Back home, I was the youngest of five children: four daughters, Una, Betty, Joan and me, Mary Francis, as well as a son, Peter Joseph – all of us with good Catholic names, of course. My mother, Agnes, was a seamstress and milliner, and had left school at fourteen to go into service at first. My father, George, had also left school early, but was bright, and had managed to get a good job in Customs and Excise, going around the bonded stores (which were like government-controlled warehouses), testing the specific gravity of all sorts of things, like rum and whiskey, so people didn’t get short-changed or prosecuted for doctoring goods. We lived in a big, white-painted house opposite a weir on the River Suir, on the Raheen Road, five minutes outside of rural Clonmel. It was a lovely family house, with an apple orchard down the side of the house, and a huge rambling garden with wild roses and heather, high hedges and white metal gate. On one side of the house there were my mother’s raised vegetable and fruit beds, and on the other there was a big lawn where my brother had created a little nine-hole putting course. We were quite well off, and my dad had a car (which few in the town had), a black, four-door Morris 10, which he would steer proudly up the drive, while being greeted noisily by our two liver and white Cocker Spaniels, Ivor and Vanda.

I’d wanted to be a nurse for as long as I could remember. I was always bandaging people, and pushing dolls and babies in my little black pram. I even helped a neighbour with Parkinson’s, Mrs Roach, up the road. I didn’t know what it was in those days, and there was no cure for it. This little old lady shook all the time and dribbled, and her daughter, Nora, gave up her life to look after her. I used to sit with Mrs Roach while Nora, who was a spinster in her fifties, went shopping, and I used to think, ‘I wonder why she’s like that? I wonder what can be done to help her, poor thing?’ I hadn’t a clue, but I was fascinated, and I wasn’t put off at all. I have to admit that I was a bit of a naughty child, a bit wild, I suppose. I liked climbing trees, and we nicked apples out of orchards. I loved wheeling real babies out in their high Silver Cross prams, too, and we used to wheel this baby, Frank, around, when he was about nine months old, and gradually fill up his pram with all these apples and pears we were stealing. One day, a man at the gate of an orchard stopped us, and when he pulled back the blanket, which was covering a huge lumpy heap, including a crying Frank, I was in big trouble. As my punishment, I got a walloping with a rolled-up newspaper from my father and was never allowed out with the big pram and baby Frank again.

We did go back in the orchards, though, for a different purpose. Magners and Bulmers were the local cider makers, they still are, and they had masses of huge apple orchards in Clonmel. We used to go round, in gangs of kids, with aluminium buckets and fill them up with windfalls. Then we’d get tuppence a bucket, and after a long day doing this we’d have two and six, or something like that. My father would match whatever I ‘earned’ and then I was told to put the money in my Post Office account. We did eat the apples sometimes, but they were so sour they made you wince. We rather preferred the hard cash instead – and this is the way my father taught me to save (for which I am very grateful). And it was fun – long days larking about in the sun, or rain, scrumping away, giggling and throwing rotten apples at each other.

Although there was rationing in Ireland, there was no bombing. In fact, the Irish usually sided with the Germans over the English, back then, because of our long history of strife. Because my father worked for Customs and Excise, he was well in with people, and got butter and other stuff on the black market, so we didn’t go short. We were very lucky, where others weren’t (which my mother was always reminding me of, of course). Plus, my mother was a great gardener and she would grow carrots, cauliflowers, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, rhubarb, everything. I remember one day, when I was quite young, she had shouted at me about something, and, annoyed, I went out and pulled up all the baby carrots in one of her huge, beloved raised beds. I ruined the entire crop. My mother went ballistic and shouted the usual ‘Wait till yer father gets home’ threat. I tried to put the carrots back, but they were only like little fingers, and they were all floppy, and it was hopeless. I knew I was in for it, and I did get walloped – again with the rolled-up newspaper.

I think my parents loved each other, although they had quite a temperamental relationship. My mother was the ‘boss’, a ‘matriarch’, while father was the most gentle of gentlemen (at home, at least), apart from when he walloped me, which wasn’t as often as my mother, who did it a whole lot more. Although she threatened us with father’s ‘tellings offs’, she would meanwhile pick up the sweeping brush and make use of it by shaking it at us threateningly, or even hitting us, when pushed to the limits.

We all had to muck in and make the house nice, as she was very house proud, and she did everything herself. There were no ‘mod cons’, so the washing had to be scrubbed and wrung in the mangle on a Monday, the house cleaned and swept scrupulously, and the rag rugs, which my mother made by hand, had to be beaten on the line. I hated this job as the dust went in my mouth and eyes, up my nose, absolutely everywhere it possibly could. One day, when I was about ten, I was sitting on the stairs, grumpily, having to clean the brass stair rods, which held the stair carpet in place, one by one. I was supposed to pull each rod out, rub it with Brasso, put elbow grease into them until they shone, and then put them back in, at the base of the stair, through metal loops. The stairs were long and there were so many rods, so being me I tried to cut corners, but, of course, my mother caught me. Well, I was in for it. ‘Mary Francis!’ she shouted at me, and I tried to ignore her, until she was on me, pulling me off the stairs, and I was being hauled out for a walloping. I was supposed to go to the cinema that afternoon in Clonmel for sixpence, which I loved, and I was told there was no way would I be going out that day. I had to clean all the stair rods properly, all over again, through gritted teeth, until I could see my face in them. I knew I deserved it for being cheeky, but it still felt terribly unfair, so I blubbed the whole time I rubbed.

Another day, when I was about eleven, it was my turn to go and fetch the newly baked bread from the shop across the road. We had these large pan loaves and I loved the smell of freshly baked bread. Anyway, I couldn’t resist, despite my mother warning me, ‘If you eat that bread, I’ll give you a bloody good hiding.’ But the bread was not wrapped up, it was so lovely and fresh, so tempting and warm, and I tore off the end and gnawed it greedily on my way back home and up the garden path. When I got there, I knew I would be in trouble. My mother was very strong-willed, and she would hit me with whatever came to hand. Knowing this I popped the loaf in the porch and ran down the garden, out of harm’s way. I thought, ‘God, I’m going to get it now.’ However, I then heard ‘Mary, yer tea’s ready,’ and, being me, I thought it was all right and she’d not noticed. However, when I rushed in the front door I was immediately met by a blow to the head – with the loaf of bread. I tried to get away but she was shouting ‘Mary, get in here, you evil little child,’ and was hitting me hard. She got me in the eye. ‘That’ll teach you not to do this again,’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to eat this bread.’ So I ran outside, crying bitterly, and I found Ivor, our dog, and sat on the wall outside. He came and sat with me, so I lifted up his long furry ear, and blubbed into it, ‘I hate her, I hate her,’ very dramatically: my little heart was breaking. Then I saw my dad coming up the road. My saviour! Ivor would sense him coming and would go mad, wagging his tail and barking. So I was rubbing my eye all the time, pinching the skin and being vicious, making it all the colours of the rainbow. When he got out the car I went crying to him. He used to call me ‘Moll’, and he asked, ‘What’s the matter, little Moll?’ and I replied pathetically, ‘Look what she’s done to me. She hit me with a loaf of bread, all for nothing.’ I put on a good show, and he lifted me up and walked into the house. I remember his Anthony Eden hat (a Homburg), worn at a rakish tilt, which he tipped up with his thumb as he said to my mother, ‘Agnes, can you not control your children? Do you have to maim them?’ So with that she got a dishcloth and threw it at him.

Then she wouldn’t talk to him at all, and we all seven of us sat round the big square scrubbed wooden kitchen table in total silence (sometimes one of us, in disgrace, would sit at mother’s sewing machine to eat). Today, it was me in the doghouse, obviously. She wouldn’t talk to me either, as I was the ‘evil trouble-maker’. As she dished out she’d say things like, ‘Betty, pass the salt to yer father,’ or ‘Will you ask yer father what he wants on his plate.’ And then my father would say to Betty, ‘Can you tell your mother the dinner was rotten.’ I would also be sent to Coventry by my sisters, who blamed me for all the family trouble – so I would be in agony as well. All this would go on for at least a couple of weeks, until one of my big sisters would slap her cutlery down on the table and say in front of my parents, ‘For God’s sake, stop it, the pair of you!’ And all the while I’d be sitting there, with my head down, feeling like I was all the cause of the trouble – which, of course, I was.

Then they’d make up and it would all be OK again. They had their traditions: once a year my parents would dress up and go to the policemen’s ball or county farmers’ ball together and have a grand old time. Father would also go out to the pub every night at nine o’clock sharp. McPhelan’s, it was. My mother would get grumpy, but my father went, regular as clockwork, to meet his five handsome brothers, also known as the ‘terrible five’ locally, who would have pints and whiskeys, smoke smelly Passing Cloud cigarettes, and talk and plot politics late into the night. My mother would say to him, ‘If I was dead in my bed, you’d still go to McPhelan’s,’ which was true, probably. Meanwhile, at home, she would be bottling fruit, making jam, doing sewing, knitting or crocheting, or giving us ‘question time’ round the table. She would be asking where Finland was on the map, or setting us tests. I learned more from her about geography and history than I did eventually at school. Mother was also great at playing cards and teaching us games. We all had to play a musical instrument (mine was the piano), and we’d put on little operettas, with all the costumes and everything, which my mother would run up beautifully.

My father also liked pheasant and grouse shooting, and he’d go out with his shotgun folded under his arm in his tweed jacket and big boots. He used to hang the smelly old dead birds up in the shed afterwards; I’d see all the blood running down into dark pools on the floor, and I’d hate it. My mother used to pluck them, and we used to eat them (there was loads of shot to pick out). One time he shot a cock pheasant and the feathers were absolutely beautiful. He had the bird stuffed and it would sit on top of the old piano that we all learned on, and my mother put the long tail feathers in her hats. However, my father hated having to go and ask for permission to shoot up at the big local estate, which used to be owned by the Duke of St Albans. ‘It galls me to have to go cap in hand and get permission from those bastards. I don’t see why I have to get permission from the bloody English to shoot on our own land.’ There was a lot of animosity towards the English in Clonmel, going back in history to a particularly terrible siege in 1650, with Cromwell massacring the locals willy-nilly. They found the bodies of mothers with babes in arms, and all sorts, in a mass grave, which caused a huge stir locally once the details were revealed in the 1950s. In his youth my father had been a fighter for Ireland’s freedom, and he’d tell how the youths would get the Black and Tans and push them up against doors with their pitchforks and worse. I loved to hear these stories; they were thrilling and my father was a wonderful talker.

For instance, he told me that he was in the IRA as a young man, and he had a little silver gun, a revolver, which he kept down his sock. He said he was one of Michael Collins’s men. He would tell wonderful stories, about men in Cork and the IRA, during the 1914–18 war and the twenties, which left me spellbound. He told me about escorting the Black and Tans out of prison. One day he was walking down a lane with my mother, hand in hand, when they were courting, and a ‘Peeler’ (an English policeman) jumped out of the bushes and confronted him on the road. My father said the Peeler made him strip down to his combinations (old-fashioned long-johns), and then he searched him, which was all done in front of my mother. It was hugely embarrassing for my mother, humiliating for my father, and then it all got ugly so she ran away in fear. When my father was bending down to undo his boot laces, he took out his little silver gun from his sock and shot the Peeler dead. The local men hid the body and it was an ‘unsolved crime’. He was later decorated by the President of Ireland for shooting the policeman. When he died he was buried with full military honours, with the IRA flag draped over his coffin and shots fired over it. He was a hero in many people’s eyes, including mine.

At the age of four I was sent to the Nuns of the Presentation Convent in Clonmel. They lived in a huge, gloomy grey-stone place, with a cloister in the middle in Irish Town, an outer part of Clonmel. I hated and detested it right from the very start until I finally left for England, at seventeen. All four of us sisters were sent to the Presentation Nuns, while my brother Peter Joseph, who everyone called P-J, went to the Christian Brothers. The nuns were cruel and vicious, and we were ‘murdered’ (by which I mean belted and walloped) regularly by them; and sadly P-J was equally cruelly treated at his school. Worst of all was Sister Margaret, who was tall, gaunt, with glasses, and who had a ghostly aura about her. She was particularly horrible, especially to me, or so it seemed. She was the Devil incarnate, and I used to come home crying to my mother after a bad day at school saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ and my mother would snap at me, ‘You mustn’t talk like that. You should try to be patient – why do you think she’s a nun?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I guess her family hates her.’ And my mother would ‘tut’ and then say, ‘Nobody loves her, she has no family probably,’ trying to make me feel sorry for her (which I didn’t), as she always seemed to have it in for me, unfairly. We all knew that nuns were often farmers’ daughters, who were shoved out into a convent when there were too many to marry off or feed and clothe – so they solved the problem by hastening them into the folds of the Church.

Anyway, I was always in trouble at school. I was a bit naughty, I admit; I remember there was a very goody-goody girl with a long plait, the end of which I stuck into an ink-well, and it went all black. I got into trouble for that, although I tried to play the innocent at the back of the class. Of course, I shouldn’t have done it, but I think I was always in need of exerting myself against unfair authority. Sister Margaret would take us for knitting, sewing and the like, and one day she was teaching us moss stitch. I was sweating away, struggling to keep my stitches on my needle, while Sister Margaret prowled up and down the rows between the desks. She was in her long black uniform, with big sleeves, and a huge crucifix clunking round her waist, with her big starched hat, and a white starched bib down her front. On her hand she had a huge silver Bride of Christ ring. She hovered over me menacingly as I was struggling with the knitting, thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus, I’ve lost a stitch. What am I going to do?’ ‘Having trouble, are we?’ snarled Sister Margaret, and she got her big ring and ground it hard against the side of my head. It hurt like hell. But if that didn’t make me contrite enough, she’d take out her pencil, which had a sharp point, and would push it into my ear lobe as hard as she could. My eyes would spring with tears and I’d yelp. Then she’d drag everything off my needles in fury and throw it onto the desk, in front of everyone. Then I would be told to stand on my seat, and as we had glass partitions everyone in the adjoining classrooms would see me standing there, humiliated and blubbing. It was terrible. I would run home and tell my mother what had happened, but she’d just say I should ‘pray for Sister Margaret’s body and soul’ and I would say, again, ‘But, Mammy, I want to kill her, so I do.’ I swear my ears were pierced before I was fourteen years of age.

Although my mother was quite tough, she was also very skilled and she could do anything with her hands. As she was a dressmaker, she was very nimble with her fingers, so at school I was wearing a black gym frock, with box pleats and a red sash, which had been let up and down endlessly as it had been worn by all my sisters before me. When I was about fourteen, the gymslip hem came just to my knees. Anyway, on this particular day Sister Angela, who was dumpy, with a big bust and wire glasses, was taking us for singing. She was a strict old thing, very punitive and cold, and I didn’t warm to her. ‘Stand out, Mary Francis,’ she suddenly shouted at me, ‘and look at the Virgin Mary – she’s about to weep at your immodest legs.’ I was jolted out of my musical reverie and looked at the statue on the wall and wondered what on earth I’d done now. Sister Angela came and stood over me and then made me get out in front of the class. I wanted to die. She then went and got a big sheet of brown paper and knelt down and stitched it to the hem of my frock, right down to the ankles. I felt so humiliated. My best friend, Jo Mulochny, who sat beside me, looked at me with big eyes and mouthed at me, ‘Jesus, your mother’ll go mad!’ It was well known that my mother was proud of her family and skills.

At the end of the class Sister Angela snapped at me to stay behind, but I didn’t – I ran out of the door like a bat out of hell, brown paper crackling as I went. It was pouring with rain, and I had to walk a mile home from school. So I was half walking, half running, with all this brown paper slapping round my legs, all wet and flapping. When I got in my mother was sat at the treadle sewing machine in the kitchen and I said, ‘Look what she did to me.’ My mother jumped up and said, ‘Jesus wept, who did that?’ ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, crying. ‘She humiliated me over my gym frock. She said it was “immodest”.’ Well, that was it. My mother was enraged. She couldn’t bear any of us being humiliated like that. She was a proud woman, especially about her dressmaking and mothering skills. She didn’t care if we got belted, as she thought we probably deserved it, whatever happened, but this kind of deliberate public humiliation was the last straw for her. ‘That’s it!’ she said. And it was – it was war. Her feather hat was on in a trice – she never went anywhere without her hat and her gloves – then she said ‘Come on!’ and we were out the door. My mother had a lame foot, but she was on fire, so we had to march right back to school, with it still raining, and my brown paper still slapping off my legs. She was going so fast that I was half-running, half-walking, as she was half-dragging, half-pulling me behind her. My mother was fuming, incendiary and about to explode.

When we got to the nuns’ part of the school, to their living quarters, on a big, long corridor, we could hear them all singing piously at prayer. Butter wouldn’t melt at all, so my mother rapped loudly on the door, and a little nun came limping out, the wizened housekeeper, Mother Anthony, leaning on her stick, all serene. In fact, she was the Reverend Mother, and she knew my mother well because my mother had gone to the school there, before me, also when she was little. I was tugging at my mother’s coat, whispering, ‘Mammy, let’s go, she’ll kill me tomorrow.’ But my mother was adamant, and firmly planted to the floor: ‘No, she won’t. You leave this to me.’ So when Mother Anthony said, ‘Mrs Powell, how nice to see you. What can we do for you?’ my mother exploded. ‘Look what Sister Angela has done to my daughter. How dare she humiliate me and my family!’ On and on it went, and I was so red, so embarrassed, I wanted to die.

Mother Anthony kept calm in the face of this and simply said she would deal with it, but my mother was not to be put off. ‘You get that Sister Angela out here right now,’ she insisted, eventually. Out Sister Angela came, looking sheepish and bland, and my mother let rip. ‘Did you do this to my daughter’s frock?’ Sister Angela said not a word, but looked terrified. ‘Get a pair of scissors and undo it now!’ The paper was all dripping and flapping round my legs by now, creating a puddle on the floor. So Sister Angela removed the paper, obediently, but after that, and until the day I left, she totally ignored me. She made sure I was shoved down to the bottom of the class, however. But I was happy, because she left me alone.

I always liked people, and I was always interested in learning, although I often didn’t pay attention to what my mother said, as I respected and feared her in equal measure – in fact, I usually did the opposite to what she wanted, quite cheerfully. When I was eleven we went on our usual summer caravan holiday in Tramore, which was an idyllic place by the sea, on the south-east coast of Ireland, just outside Waterford. This was probably the first time I ever learned about the evils of ‘the Protestants in the North’. I made friends with a sweet girl there called Ann Jarvis and would go down and clamber over the rocks, then fish in the rock pools, and go swimming. It was lovely and I got on really well with this girl. Anyway, I was late back one evening and I brought Ann with me. My mother asked her where she was from and she said innocently, in her strange sing-song accent, which was different from mine, ‘Belfast,’ and ‘We come down here every year.’ My mother’s face was like thunder as she pulled me into the caravan and pushed Ann out and slammed the door. ‘Don’t ever talk to her again,’ she raged right in my face. ‘She’s a black Protestant from the North. We don’t associate with those people. They are not God-fearing people – they’re all hypocrites.’ And that was it. I was forbidden to talk to her ever again. It was really confusing as I’d thought she was a lovely girl, and I couldn’t see her black soul, not at all.

Sometimes I’d get so fed up with my mother and her rules that I’d try to run away. When I was about fifteen I’d been in trouble again about something or other, and my mother had walloped me, so I decided that was it, I’d had enough, and I was off. It was dark, and we weren’t allowed out at night, only to benediction, at the church. My mother was always suspicious of me, and rightly so, as usually instead of going to benediction (as I told my mother) I would meet up with a couple of girls from my class, fetch a purple Miners lipstick we had hidden in the hedge wrapped up in newspaper, and put it on, hitch up our skirts, and then go down to the quay to meet boys and smoke Woodbines. I had already started this filthy smoking habit very early, at about thirteen years of age, and I remember how they rasped your throat. It was like smoking a disgusting bonfire, but I felt I was very cool and ‘grown-up’, and we loved meeting up with the boys and feeling naughty. I’d rush back to the Friary at seven in the evening to see which priest was doing the ‘Blessing of the Blessed Sacrament’, then run home, wiping the purple off my lips with my sleeve, and wrapping the little lipstick back up in newspaper before popping it back in the hedge. When I got in my mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re back. Who said the blessing?’ and I would rattle off the priest’s name, sweet as you like. We sucked Polos to cover the tobacco smell. I don’t think my mother guessed, although she always suspected.

Anyway, this miserable evening I was determined I was off for good. So I got some bread and wrapped it in a big handkerchief, as well as a snub of candle and two Woodbines, before taking my father’s big old bicycle, with the upright handlebar. I thought, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m never coming back. See if they miss me.’ My feet could hardly reach the pedals and it was only when I got to the other side of the town, and was near the cemetery, that I began to get the wind up, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Oh, God, where shall I go?’ I suddenly felt very alone, very spooked and scared. Then I met my father coming out onto the road (he must have been looking for me), and he said, ‘Ah, there you are. Where do you think you’re going on that bike without a light?’ I said, ‘I’m running away … but when I got to the cemetery, I got scared.’ He looked at me and said, ‘It’s not the dead you fear, Mary, it’s the living. Go home, and get that bloody bike in.’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I said, secretly pleased he’d come to find me. So that was the end of my rebellious running away.

But now, today, in September 1952, at seventeen and all alone, I was finally on my three interminable bus journeys towards Putney in south-west London. I knew I wanted to be a nurse: I was utterly determined to succeed, whatever the odds. I could hear my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, from all our endless fights, that England was ‘taboo’ and that ‘no way was I to go to that Godforsaken Protestant country’. But here I was, defying her again. My mother had a friend called Pat Wall, who lived in Wimbledon, and she wanted me to get in touch with her once I landed – ‘She’ll keep an eye on you.’ Yes, I bet she would, as everyone always was keeping an eye on me, one way or the other. I said I would, but I knew I would try to avoid her like the plague, if I could. I didn’t want any reports of my misbehaviour (if there was any, of course) to get back to my mother, as I knew she would be unbearable or, worse, drag me back, if I put a foot wrong.

Although I knew nothing about leaving home, nothing at all about travelling, or the world, for that matter, I knew I had to take this big step for myself. Eventually I found my way to Putney Hospital on that very long first day, and, as I rang the doorbell of the nurses’ quarters, round the back of the enormous red-brick hospital on the edge of a huge common, I held my breath until the large wooden door opened. A small woman appeared, in a crisp navy uniform and stiff white cap – she gave me a quick once-over while I explained who I was. After a pause she said, ‘I’m Sister Matthews, your Home Sister,’ in clipped English tones. ‘Come on in, you’ve had a long journey. I’ll show you to your quarters.’ And without a moment’s hesitation, in I jolly well went.

2
Joining the Regiment

When I arrived in 1952, Putney Hospital was a rather handsome, red-brick Edwardian sprawl on leafy Putney Common in south-west London. The three-storey nurses’ home was at the back, on the north side, and when I got there part of it had only just finished being rebuilt after being firebombed during the war in 1944 (it was the first incendiary bomb to land on London, in fact). I also found out, soon after, that there was supposed to be a ghost of a man dressed in a convict’s uniform (including broad black arrows), who had apparently drowned in a pond, and now glided across the common on dark nights, seemingly intent on committing a crime. The story was he had been in Putney Hospital and now local people spoke of his haunting the place from time to time. But even further back it seems the hospital was built on old plague burial grounds, where people who died of the ‘Pest’ in 1625 were taken out of London and buried, so the link between Putney Common, illness and death seemed to have a long, tragic and mysterious history. The place was green and spacious, but could also feel a bit eerie at night.

Anyway, by day there were nurses and sisters scurrying everywhere, being briskly busy in their starched, neat uniforms. It did strike me as ironic, momentarily, that I’d finally escaped the overly strict and pious regimes of home and convent in Ireland, only to end up with women wearing very similar outfits, albeit overseas and in a different context. However, I told myself, sternly, if I wobbled in my resolve, that I had battled to get here, and this was my own new adventure, so I was going to make it work, whatever I had to do – or wear. And no matter what anyone was like (they surely couldn’t be worse than Sister Margaret). A recent memory of fighting with my mother was still ringing in my ears, with her screaming, ‘You’re not going!’ and me shouting back, ‘Yes, I am, I am, I AM going to England. You can’t stop me!’ (accompanied by another walloping and loads of tears). We were like two cats in a bag, with my sisters and father needing to intervene before we drew blood.

My first few days in Putney went by in a blur: it was all a bit like going to boarding school (or so I imagined). First, I had to be fitted out for my uniform. On the ground floor of the nurses’ home, at the back of the main hospital, away from the road, there was a sewing room, with three middle-aged women stuck in it all day, sewing away happily at their Singer treadle machines. Lily, Gladys and Grace had to measure me up. They also worked out what each nurse needed individually, and then made it on the spot. It was a real home from home, for me, as I could imagine my mother being there, too, tape-measure round her neck, pins in her mouth, peering critically at their handiwork and ‘tutting’ at their sloppy stitches (‘Will you take a look at that – really!’). The women’s job was to actually make our uniforms, and then adjust them or re-use them, passing them on from nurse to nurse (definitely familiar ‘make-do-and-mend’ territory for me, especially reminiscent of the lean war years).

I was to be issued with three uniforms, so I would have one on, and one off in the hospital laundry, which was also on site, and one spare (as they always got dirty somehow). The dresses were pale-blue and white fine pinstriped, thick cotton, and down to our ankles nearly. We were also issued with seven white, starched aprons, one of which had to be pinned at the bib, at the front, and tied round the waist (I’m proud to say that mine was a tiny sixteen inches then). There were also starched collars and cuffs, which we had to keep absolutely spotless. Both aprons and cuffs had to be changed immediately they got mucky, which they obviously did on the ward, as we didn’t have plastic aprons or rubber gloves back then. Also, if we rolled up our sleeves to the elbows, we had to put on elasticated white cuffs to keep them up and smart.

Underneath the uniform we were to wear thick black Lyle stockings, which had to be darned immediately if you got a run or snag (we did the darning at night, ourselves). This was all finished off by black lace-up sensible shoes, which had to be buffed until they shone. There was an absolutely ‘no jewellery’ rule, except for a brooch-style Smiths watch that I pinned on my right apron breast. This was to be used for taking patients’ pulses. Also, definitely no make-up allowed, and our nails had to be inspected daily for cleanliness. Then hair had to be scrimped back tightly under our hats and any wayward hair (and mine was extremely wayward, like the rest of me) had to be pinned tightly into place. In fact, I’d cut off my beloved black plait, which reached nearly to my waist, in Ireland before I came, to my mother’s horror, so I had a newly manageable short style with a fringed bob.

Most importantly, our belts reflected our status: a virginal white belt for our first year, a royal blue one for our second and a serious black one for our third. This last belt had a special silver buckle which denoted we’d made it through, once we’d passed all our exams and had qualified – and survived. But what I really loved, most of all, were the outdoor capes. We had waist-length navy-blue woollen capes with a fabulous crimson lining, which we wore over our uniforms. It was a real Florence Nightingale touch and I felt wonderful in mine. They had red cross-over tapes to keep them in place – oh, I did feel like a proper nurse as I flounced along, my cape swishing in the wind. Very heroic, like something out of a film like Gone with the Wind.

But, horror of horrors, there were the hats. At first, making my hat correctly (which I had to most days) seemed like trying to climb a mountain like Everest (which wouldn’t be conquered until the next year, in 1953). We were given a fiercely starched square of white linen and we were taught by Sister Tutor (our lovely teacher, Angela Frobisher, who was kind, motherly and stocky), over and over, how to fold it into proper nurse’s attire. It seemed a total impossibility at first and I was all fingers and thumbs. I was half waiting for Sister Margaret’s ring to grind itself into my fumbling fingers or thump me in the temple, as I struggled to fold the blasted thing into a butterfly shape resembling a pukka Putney nurse’s hat. I had to fold it on my knee, and then pleat it, and it had to be pinned to my head, perfectly. The air would turn blue while I struggled, at first. In the third year, when we became staff nurses, we got two strings and a bow under our chins, as did the sisters, so the hats looked like little bonnets. The hats also changed in shape according to status: so staff nurses’ hats were different from Sister’s, which was different from Matron’s, whose was the most elegant and refined. We did look a sight, but I was secretly pleased and proud at finally being eligible to wear a trainee nurse’s hat at all.

The nurse’ home was at the north end of the hospital, and was three storeys high. We first years were on the middle level, with the second and third years on the top floor, and the doctors’ on call and sisters’ night duty sleeping rooms (separate, of course) on the ground floor. Our own bedrooms were small, cell-like but pleasant; clean, but very basic. I could see a large rambling lawn out of my window and, beyond it, Putney Common’s trees and bushes and local red-brick terraces. There was a single bed, with a wooden headboard, a tiny gas fire (no central heating then), an ottoman (storage chest), wardrobe, a little basin under the window and a small brown dressing table and mirror. I had two pairs of flowery winceyette pyjamas and a vest, which my mother insisted on me wearing to keep warm.

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

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

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.

I was supposed to go out to the ambulance and assess the patient, then if they were deceased they were termed Brought-in-Dead (BID) and I was supposed to decline them, so they went straight to the morgue, or even to another hospital altogether. We had been told many times that it was too much paperwork, as a BID involved the police, the mortuary, the coroner, tracking down relatives and so on. If they were found dead in the street or died in the ambulance they were never brought in. That was the rule. It was a huge job and we were not supposed to touch it with a barge pole. So there I was with a dead body on a trolley to dispose of – a poor old BID – and I hadn’t the foggiest where to start sorting out such a mess. I could feel the panic rising: Who could I turn to? Where would I start? I pulled the blanket down further and saw his grey, frozen face with icy whiskery eyebrows. Dead all right. As a doornail. Jesus, what was I to do? In those days there was no resuscitation equipment, like defibrillators or anything like. I stood there, panting quietly – what on earth should I do next? I couldn’t go and get Night Sister and say casually, ‘Oh, by the way, Sister, I have a dead body in Casualty.’ She’d absolutely kill me. So thinking quickly now, I wrapped him up again in his nice red blanket, so that he looked like a giant Christmas cracker on his trolley, and then pushed him into a corner, trying to hide him to buy some more thinking time. Suddenly I heard Night’s Sister’s clipped tones behind me: ‘Any developments, nurse?’ I jumped out of my skin. ‘Sorry? … Er, no, Sister, everything’s fine … This man … I don’t think he’s very well … actually, Sister …’ But it was no good, Sister was already peering past me curiously at the red-wrapped bundle that I was desperately trying to hide behind me all the while.

I couldn’t stop her as she advanced towards the stretcher. ‘What on earth is this doing here? That’s an ambulance blanket – why didn’t you give it back when they brought him in?’ And with that she pulled the blanket down: ‘Jesus Christ, he’s dead,’ she said. ‘He’s not,’ I said, covering wildly, ‘surely not. The ambulance men just brought him in. I was just … I didn’t realise …’ ‘Brought him in?’ She was shouting now, and I could see her eyes beginning to pop out in their characteristic way. ‘Nurse, you know that you are supposed to go out to the ambulance to assess the patient. Rigor mortis has set in – this means this man died two or three hours ago! He was brought in dead – B-I-D. You know better than this, Nurse Powell, or you really should do by now.’ At her angry words my usual waterworks started flowing. I was soon crying helplessly. It was a nightmare; I was in trouble, all over again. I’d be back in Ireland in a wink, with my mother ‘told-you-so-ing’ me to my father over my head. ‘For goodness’ sake stop snivelling, nurse.’ Night Sister was incandescent and she went on and on and on about procedures and rules. Then she went on and on about needing to uphold standards and follow correct regulations and what would happen if we didn’t (the end of the world, obviously). Suddenly she marched off and got Percy the porter and instructed him in clipped, frosty tones to take the poor dead man down to the mortuary. She didn’t even look at the body, poor thing, or try to work out who he was. What a way to end his life – I felt truly sorry for him. Then Sister was back, facing me, eyeballs popping: ‘I’ll see you in my office, Powell, ten o’clock sharp, tomorrow morning, no nonsense.’ And with that, she turned on her heel and was off. Standing there, wiping my eyes, I realised that the ambulance men, as nice as they were, had pulled a fast one on me. I was a gullible greenhorn, a real eejit, and it showed.

So I was there next morning, exhausted and trembling, and it wasn’t just Sister, but Matron, too, I had to face. I had to have a clean apron on, and stand, with my scrubbed hands behind my back, like a very naughty schoolgirl. Matron wiped the floor with me. ‘You know there are rules, nurse? And rules are meant to be followed … blah-di-blah-di-blah …’ I wanted to disappear between the floorboards. However, to be fair to her, she did stop and say, towards the end, as I was blowing my nose loudly, that she would have a word with Night Sister as I shouldn’t have been left entirely on my own while I was training. So she was actually quite fair to me in the end, and I had to learn yet another painful lesson in the importance of sticking to the damned rules … My mother would have been so proud.

There was a more tragic death one night, however, which made me very sad and again made me realise how important it was to be thorough and observant as a nurse. A young lad of about fifteen was brought in after having a fall on the Common; it wasn’t clear how, but he was probably larking about with some friends and had fallen out of a tree and broken his ankle badly. He was taken to the men’s medical ward, but mysteriously got worse, as he developed a very high temperature. His ankle was set, but still he worsened, and we discovered he was dying from tetanus (lockjaw), which was incurable at the time. However, it was only when he was examined during the post-mortem that it was found that he had a deep graze on the back of his head. This has gone horribly septic and had done for him. It was appalling to us all that this injury had been missed. More importantly, it felt terrible that such a young life was snuffed out so quickly from something that should have been dealt with at the time, and which, today, would be so easily treatable with antibiotics. This kind of tragic incident affected me deeply, as I was only a teenager myself, and made me feel that life was somehow, sometimes, hanging only by a very fine thread. It also made me realise how important it was to be thorough in the medical profession, and how the smallest thing could turn out to be important, especially if it was neglected. This made me feel much more responsible, and assiduous, when dealing with wounds after this experience.

Sister Tutor, who was a very kindly woman, could see that we were deeply affected by this kind of encounter with death – a boy who had died too soon out of both an accident and human frailty. She would tell us that we would have to get used to seeing all sorts of things in our hospital lives, and that dealing with death was a major part of it all. Sometimes we would see things that would upset us for days, other times we’d see something that would stay with us for life. Even though some of the sisters and staff nurses were quite callous and hardened, and barely paid any attention to the dead and dying, they nonetheless respected that there needed to be a dignified way of dealing with the passing of life.

Helping people to die was seen as an important aspect of the job, and so Sister Tutor taught us how to approach it with human kindness and thoughtfulness. One day, shortly after the incident of the youth dying from the hidden head injury, she sat us all down and said, ‘Don’t ever let someone die alone. We didn’t come into this world alone, and we should never leave this world alone. When someone is approaching their final hours it’s so important to sit and be with them as they go, especially if they have no family.’ Indeed, she taught us to sit and ‘mop their brows, comfort them’, she would say, ‘hold their hands and soothe them’. She taught us to care, to spend time with people, to make them comfortable, to talk to them and to ease their passage into death. She was a wonderful, sweet influence and a nice woman, to boot, and her important lessons about something that had frightened me a great deal, at first, have stayed with me all the rest of my nursing life.

5

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