Bittersweet (6 page)

T
he first six months of anything new and strange are always the worst to endure: a mantra that ruled the lives of the Latimer sisters until the very end of 1926, when, to their amazement, they discovered they had survived, even Grace the Unwilling.

The pity of it, thought Tufts, is that we haven’t really expanded our human horizons. From nurses’ dining room to accommodation, everything is stratified; we’re not allowed to mix with doctors or menials, and the sisters make sure that the West Enders know we are a cut above them, harbingers of a new nursing order. I can’t befriend Harry or Ernie the porters, I can’t sit amid the West End nurses in the dining room, and if a doctor appears on the ward, I am immediately sent to sort the dirty laundry or scrub bed pans in the sluice room. I sit on a level above or below which I dare not go. How can there be
esprit de corps
or camaraderie among the various kinds of people staffing a hospital if they are not allowed to communicate with each other as friends? Yet our bitterest opponents, if not outright enemies, are exactly the people who would benefit the most. I yearn to offer to
teach Lena Corrigan, Nancy Wilson and Maureen O’Brien the rudiments of chemistry and physics, make them see that water has three states of being, and that iodine is an element. But they don’t want to know because confessing to their ignorance they would see as admitting defeat in this senseless battle they wage. How do I get it through their heads that knowledge is the only road leads out of penury and subservience?

“The West Enders are convinced that if we have no company save our own, we’ll fall apart at the seams,” said Edda. “When do you think they’ll wake up?”

Christmas was coming and they were dressing for church, the first Sunday since they had started nursing that all four were off duty together. After service they were going to the Rectory for a celebratory lunch; Tufts and Kitty had turned nineteen in August, and Edda and Grace twenty-one in November, but without birthday dinners. Today was very special.

Having checked that the seams of her sheer silk stockings were straight, Grace looked up. “The West Enders don’t know we’re sisters,” she said, “and they do a lot of wondering about how bad our rows and quarrels are.”

Beautiful! she was thinking as she gazed at Edda — why can’t I look like that? It’s the way she moves, sinuous and slinky, the way she holds her head, that tiny, enigmatic smile. Red was definitely her colour, no matter what its exact shade; today she wore Chinese red, a dress of heavy crepe that hung loose yet suggested how superb her body was. On her head she wore a ruched-up pancake of red crepe tilted over her left eye, and black kid shoes, bag and gloves.

“You look wonderful, Grace,” Edda said unexpectedly — or do twins read minds? “I wish I had the patience to work embroidery like that! It turns your cream crepe into a butterfly’s wing with a black skeleton. Aubrey Beardsley to a tee.”

Pulling on long black kid gloves, Grace glowed. “My hat? Is it all right, Eds?”

“Perfect. Like folded black-edged wings.”

A group of West End nurses saw the four girls walk down the ramp to Victoria Street; Lena Corrigan frowned. It beggared understanding that after eight months of inflexible isolation from all avenues of hospital friendship, these four females were still on speaking terms with each other. Looking like a million dollars, they passed along the ramp laughing and joking with each other, so obviously, inexplicably happy.

“Can posh accents and education do that?” Lena asked.

“Do what?”

“I dunno, Nance, but they’ve got
something
.” Lena sighed. “Trouble is, the longer I know them, the better I like them. Most specially Latimer. A queen to look at, but not stuck-up.”

“No, they ain’t none of them stuck-up,” Maureen said. “Even Treadby the bottle-blonde is nice.”

Nurse Corrigan turned away. “Know what, girls? I’m fed up with war. They’re hardly twenty yet, but before we know it they’ll have state registration. I think it’s time we thought about fighting the old man for some of his beer money to see our daughters matriculate. And yeah, you’re right — that’s not my idea. It was something Scobie said.”

Life on the wards was a challenge for Edda, Tufts and Kitty, but for Grace it was an ordeal. Every last one of Corunda’s sisters was an import and an official public servant. Unofficial West End nurses were at liberty to be married because they were described as “casual workers” without benefits, like the porters, wardsmaids, kitchen staff, typists and the rest. Female public servants could not be married, so there were no married nursing sisters. Widows were employable; so, technically, were divorcees, save that a divorcee would never get as far as a face-to-face interview. What divorcees there were pretended to be widows, and took fine care never to be seen in the regular company of men. A lot of sisters “lived out” in rented premises, usually shared with a fellow sister, but Corunda Base, like some other hospitals, did offer on-site accommodation for a number of sisters. Frank Campbell preferred to see a little rent coming in from the Great War housing than keep it empty, and sisters were ideal tenants, being spinsters — no children, no beer-swilling husbands.

What no one save the sisters themselves thought about were the intangibles of holding down a professional career: the unborn babies, the empty other side of the bed, the lack of stimulus in eternally female company, the worry of indigent old age. So they buried themselves in their work, tried to find congenial housemates, had occasional affairs with men, or made do with each other. None of which made them easy bosses. It was, however, a rigidly level playing field; if there had been such
a person as a female judge, she too would be a spinster if she took a government salary.

The day was divided into three shifts — six in the morning until two in the afternoon, two in the afternoon until ten at night, and ten at night until six in the morning. Each ward required a minimum of one sister on duty at all times; the double wards, Men’s and Women’s, demanded two, as did Children’s. With the result that there were a total of fifty nursing sisters, including those at the mental asylum and convalescent/aged home.

Some, like Sister Una Robertson of Men’s and Sister Meg Moulton of Children’s, were known within a day of starting to work anywhere in the hospital, while others, like Deputy Matron Anne Harding, remained anonymous for months. It was a question of personality. Sister Moulton was an absolute dear, whereas Sister Robertson was the dragon to end all dragons. Both were middle-aged women just beginning to sprout whiskers on their chins, thickened midriffs and leathery skins, but there the similarities ended. All Sister Robertson’s love was given to her men patients, who were as terrified of her as were the doctors. To Grace, the Devil was a far easier adversary.

“Faulding, you are running,” Sister Robertson snarled at a frantic Grace. “Kindly desist this minute! There are only two reasons a nurse runs — fire or haemorrhage.”

But how, asked Grace of herself, is the work to get finished if I’m not allowed to run? And why does every man have to be shaved every day?
Fifty shaves a day, even if they’re dying!
A sentiment many of the men shared with Grace.

“You could do with a shave yerself, Sister,” said one angry man in Grace’s hearing. “Gimme yer veil and take me place under the bloody razor — yer worse than Kaiser Bill!”

“Poor chap!” said Grace to Kitty later on, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “He got a
rabid
suppository rammed up his arse by Sister in person not five minutes later, and spent a terrible morning on the toilet. Luckily he could walk.”

There were many funny moments, but there were also moments so wrenchingly sad that it took all that year of 1926 for the Latimers to learn to cope with the sorrow. Some people, they discovered, were so brave! Others flinched and started squealing before they were touched. No one stayed in hospital any longer than possible, not entirely because it was hospital policy. The notorious stinginess of the Superintendent, Frank Campbell, affected the patients as much as the staff. Lumpy old mattresses, sheets worn so thin they were darned, towels devoid of their nap, home-made and hideously caustic soap, cut-up newspapers for wiping bottoms, and the worst food shearers’ cooks could provide.

What baffled the Latimers was how their father could be a member of the Hospital Board and stroll through the wards every day without seeing what Frank Campbell had done and was doing. No, Daddy drifted on his saintly way, smiling, comforting the patients spiritually while ignoring their acute physical misery as if it did not exist. For hospital wasn’t
free
. Even the poorest patient received a bill, which made the Almoner’s job the hardest in all of Corunda Base; she had to find a reason not
to charge for services, and that was very often impossible. The consulting specialist doctors were a decent bunch, but Frank Campbell charged for every square of cut-up newspaper.

Kitty bloomed, especially after she was sent to Children’s, where many of the little patients had bone problems: broken limbs in the main, an occasional congenital displacement of the hips, infected fractures, diseases of bone density, and too much rickets among the poor. Whatever was wrong, they tended to be cheerful children inured to pain and bed, or a perilous nuisance once they were allowed out of bed. To Kitty it didn’t matter; she loved every child, every obstacle, every moment.

Boys and girls were nursed together until they turned six, after which the ward was split into Boys and Girls. At fourteen they were admitted to the adult wards. Winter saw more broken bones, summer more enteric or gastric diseases, but all year round the fifty beds were filled, as child patients tended to need longer hospitalisation. Here alone had the Reverend Thomas Latimer made an effort to ease the suffering; there were plenty of toys and books, and the steam radiators were kept functioning, which wasn’t always the case elsewhere. Frank Campbell’s budget provided for just one plumber, whose perpetually unfulfilled dream was to have a plumber’s mate.

The moment when Kitty realised that her depression had gone for good was so buried under the demands of her work that she was never able to pinpoint it. Perhaps it had been too stealthy, too gradual, but certainly after she went to Children’s
it never reared its head. Children’s nursing wrapped a blanket of wellbeing around her that comforted, nourished, calmed and satisfied her every desire. The world, she understood, was stuffed with people whose needs and insults made her own seem laughable, ridiculous. From nineteen years of being the centre of the world, Kitty saw herself relegated to its outermost margins — a nobody, a nothing. And she loved it so much that she forgot she was beautiful, even forgot Maude and life in the Rectory. Not the naughtiest or nastiest child had the power to dent her newfound confidence, the tranquil peace she concluded with herself. Finally, Kitty flew free.

What she didn’t understand was that her awakening had only served to increase her beauty. In desperation to remove her from the gaze of as many men as possible, Matron had sent her to Children’s as a last resort.

“The trouble is that Treadby is such a good nurse I can’t afford to lose her,” Matron said to Liam Finucan, “and I can’t say she’s stuck-up or conscious of her looks, because she’s not. But she makes men as silly as wheels, and women patients hate her as much for the sweetness of her nature as they do for her face.”

“Luckily,” said Liam with a grin, “Corunda Base has no Paris to tempt our Helen of Troy.”

“Why are you impervious to her, Liam?”

He shoved at his hair, which had a tendency to fall over his brow and part-blind him. “I have no idea. Perhaps I dislike bottle blondes?”

“That hair is not out of a bottle! I wish it were — a black root might disillusion some of our junior doctors.”

“Children’s will suffice for Treadby,” he soothed.

“Yes, but she can’t stay on Children’s forever.”

“True. Just keep her adult nursing down to the minimum.”

“Meg Moulton adores the girl — that’s a relief! I’m told that Treadby is a perfect children’s nurse. The ward’s a happier place on her shifts, and she works like a navvy.”

“No human being is perfect, Gertie.”

Bouncing through the ward with smiles, dances and skips that had the children in giggles, Kitty continued on her voyage of discovery, wondering at her own blindness. Until she started nursing, but especially children’s nursing, everyone except her sisters and her father had discounted her as a productive member of society. Now, she had a purpose.

Not that Children’s permitted time for internal reflections. If Jimmy Collins hadn’t picked the top off an unready scab or Ginny Giacometti fallen out of bed trying to play a joke, then Alf Smithers had eaten a whole packet of pastel chalks because the meals never filled his bottomless belly.

“The effect of his multihued smile might have been quite charming,” Kitty said to Sister Moulton, “except that he ate the black pair last — revolting!”

Came a wail from Barry Simpson that made them spin around.

“Nursie, nursie! I done poohs in me bed!”

“And bang goes Frank Campbell’s bottom sheet,” Kitty said. “Barry’s poohs are formidable.”

Though even on Children’s there were men to bother Kitty. The most persistent nuisance was the resident, Dr. Neil
Cranshaw; he had the weight of medical authority to bolster his pursuit. Kitty loathed him, but his rank insisted that he be treated with fawning respect.

“Dinner at the Parthenon?” he asked, supervising Nurse Treadby as she dealt with Jimmy’s scab.

“Sorry, sir, I’m busy.”

“You can’t possibly be busy every night, Nurse.”

“I am until June of 1929.”

“What happens then?” he asked, wondering which of several expressions would work best on her — what a little beauty she was! He assumed a look of admiration quite spoiled by the lust seething inside his brain.

“I graduate as a registered nurse,” she said demurely, “and will be free to accept dinner invitations. Until then, I’m forced to study in all my free time.”