That's Another Story: The Autobiography (15 page)

The work in the lower sixth was a lot more challenging than ever before and so, it seemed, was getting up in the morning. Generally, having overslept and missed the school bus, I would amble in, in the late morning or at dinnertime, until I got so far behind that I couldn’t make head nor tail of Geography A level, and Molière’s
L’Avare
might just as well have been written in Mandarin. Eventually at the end of the lower-sixth year, Mr Taylor, our deputy head, took me to one side and gave me a letter addressed to my parents. Mr Taylor - who unfortunately didn’t take us for A level and with whom a great number of girls, myself included, had been romantically infatuated - was a brilliantly inspired Geography teacher who got thirty hormonally challenged and totally uninterested girls through Geography GCE by the sheer force of his unique personality. You couldn’t help but remember his lessons; he was witty, funny and eccentric and often attracted the attention of a chattering girl by hitting her on the back of the head with a piece of chalk, thrown from some distance and with deadly accuracy. Today, of course, he would probably be up for assault.

‘Julia . . .’ Teachers always called me Julia. ‘We don’t want you to come back next year. You will never get your A levels now; it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time, as you are too far behind. You simply haven’t put in the work. And we don’t like your subversive influence.’

I looked up into the intense blue eyes behind the horn-rimmed specs whilst scrabbling for the meaning of ‘subversive’. Did it refer to my truancy, which had got so bad that I was hardly ever there? Or could it have referred to the time when I had gone into an empty classroom, egged on by my friend, and thrown a metal tubular chair at a thin wooden partition, on the other side of which was our tightbunned and straight-faced form teacher who, in her terrible Edward Heath French accent, was in the process of teaching the upper sixth French group? It was reported that the resulting clatter had almost caused her to collapse with fright.

I went home that afternoon, posted the letter to my parents, unread, into a dustbin outside a shop and told my mother that I had reached a momentous decision: I would take up nursing. There was no need for me to stay on at school; I would prefer to get a job for a year and save some money (the word ‘save’ was always a good one with my mother). Surprisingly, without any discussion, she agreed. I went straight upstairs and looked up ‘subversive’.

My first full-time job was in an insurance office in Birmingham. Prior to this, aged about fifteen, I had been employed on a Saturday and during the school holidays at C&A Modes in the centre of Birmingham, where, along with my friend Chris, I worked backstage, as it were, unpacking the crates and parcels of blouses, dresses and skirts and other assorted items of clothing, then counting each one, after mentally tearing holes in its sartorial tattiness, logging it and hanging it up.

We then found much more interesting employment at a sweet shop in Smethwick. It offered two advantages: there was no boss present, and every Wednesday night and all day Sunday we were left to our own devices. The shop sold every kind of sweet and, owing to the fact that there was no till roll and no real record of what was delivered and subsequently sold, we gorged ourselves freely on crisps, ice lollies, raspberry ripples, Bassett’s sherbet fountain (a personal favourite), fruit gums and Caramac chocolate ad nauseam, literally. We gave away packets of cigarettes to boys we fancied and spent hours on the telephone, playing daft tricks on members of the public, claiming that we were from a market research company and asking them lewd questions about their sex lives and body parts, or telling them we were from the telephone exchange and then asking them to make a high-pitched squeal down the phone, as a means of ‘testing the line, madam’. Needless to say, it was not a job that lasted long, once the rather absentee proprietor cottoned on to what was happening.

The insurance office, on the other hand, was a proper job. The office was divided into sections, each one consisting of a couple of rows of desks, with four desks to each row. Being the most junior, I was on the end of the second row and was in charge of finding the files that corresponded to the post that came in each morning. I soon tired of the tedious nature of the work and would spend as much time as possible staring wistfully out of the window at the traffic on its way in and out of town, longing to be in one of the cars speeding along and, more importantly, away from what I began to see as a kind of prison. Post began to pile up when I couldn’t find particular files and eventually I resorted to putting it down the toilets. This practice was brought to a close when I came in one morning to find that the Ladies’ toilets were closed due to some sort of flooding; there was water coming out from under the door and a plumber was going in and out with pliers and buckets. Luckily the blockage was cleared, the offending substance being too wet and mushy to be identified, but I wasn’t the only junior with a red face that morning.

I sat next to a girl, a slightly more senior junior, called Linda and immediately created the same role that I played in school. We were always gossiping and I would spend most of the day trying to make her laugh. The names of various clients, as we went through the files, sent us both into purple-faced, hissing hysteria, often causing Linda to get under her desk so as not to be seen by Miss Kelly, our spinsterly section leader, whose head was continually whipping round in our direction to shush us. Sometimes I would scour the filing cabinets, not for files in connection with the morning post, but purely for names to make my new friend laugh. Cornelius Clark was an explosive favourite; John Smellie and Katarina Balls were others that can still get me going today. Every so often this behaviour would be punctuated by a serious bollocking from Miss Kelly after which we would knuckle down to work for a couple of days, only to slowly but surely return to our old ways. Linda was fifteen and had already been at the place for about six months.

‘How old am ya?’ she asked on my first day there.

‘Seventeen,’ I replied.

‘Am yer engaged?’

‘No.’

‘Jesus! Yer ent engaged?’ Her voice rose into a falsetto.

‘No, I haven’t got a boyfriend.’

‘Blimey! If I ent engaged by the time I’m seventeen, I’ll kill me bloomin’ self.’

About ten years later, on a visit home, I saw a woman I’m pretty sure was her, pushing a baby in a stroller along Smethwick High Street with two other children in tow. She had a badly bruised eye and a swollen and cut lip.

At the age of eighteen, in May 1968, I enrolled in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital School of Nursing in Edgbaston, Birmingham. My mother was never prouder, before or since. It is what she would have wanted for herself, had she had the opportunity. Frustratingly for her, her parents sent her younger sister, Agnes, to England to train as a nurse, but she never took it up, becoming a secretary instead.

My first ward, after six weeks in the preliminary nursing school, was an ophthalmic ward in the bowels of the hospital, dealing mainly with cataract operations. The ward Sister, a Sister Hartwell, was a relatively elderly and rather eccentric Irishwoman, who had lived in the nursing home across the road from the hospital since she was seventeen. This was a detail that I found both depressing and claustrophobic as at this point she was apparently sixty-seven. She never called me by my name; it was always ‘Come here, Little Nurse’ or ‘Where’s the little nurse?’ booming embarrassingly from one end of the corridor to the other. Her huge blue eyes peered piercingly at you through thick dark lashes, over half-moon glasses perched midway down a largish, Roman nose. It was a slightly alarming stare for she could do it at any moment, and often for no fathomable reason. You might be engaged in some nursing activity or other and suddenly she would be at your side, a little closer than was comfortable, staring directly at the side of your face. She was equally eccentric when dealing with the patients; in fact the drug round, which occurred four times a day, was something to be endured by nurse and patient alike.

In order to administer drugs, in the form of drops, to the eye, it was first of all necessary to dilate the tear duct, which was done with a fairly small, pointed, sharp-looking implement. For the purposes of carrying this out, Sister whose eyesight wasn’t all that it should be, would get up on to the bed, shouting down at the patient to relax and keep still. Then on her knees, wobbling about on the mattress and hovering over the victim, millimetres from their face with the said implement, she would, whilst peering myopically through her half-glasses, attempt to dilate the tear duct. If she didn’t succeed the first time, she would loudly berate the terrified patient, blaming their inability to keep still for her inaccuracy, at which point they usually didn’t have a chance in hell of keeping their eyes open out of sheer terror.

When I was on duty I generally accompanied her on the drug rounds and dreaded this procedure, because it often resulted in her shouting in exasperation, ‘Little Nurse! Get up here now, you, and finish this off! You should be doing this, not me! You have the eyes for it. Come on!’ On one occasion, red-faced with embarrassment, I started to move towards the patient with this dilating tool and just as I was about to pull the patient’s lower lid down to insert it, she slapped me on the arse with such force I nearly blinded the poor woman I was trying to treat and I even let out a little screech of fright, for which I had to apologise to the patient.

‘What are you playing at? Get up there on the bed. Let the dog see the rabbit. You can’t do this standing by the bed, you’re too small, Little Nurse.’

When I lost my fear of her, I became very fond of this Sister. Apart from being scarily hilarious on a day-to-day basis, she was immensely kind to the staff and I know she was fond of me. Although I worked on several different wards during my nursing life, my experience on this one was unlike any other.

I never really settled into nursing, feeling that I couldn’t possibly be up to the task as well as ultimately knowing that I was there to please my mother and to fulfil her ambition rather than my own. I was terrified of being given any responsibility, constantly doubting my own judgement and ability. Mind you, this wasn’t without cause. Within the first few weeks on the wards, I whipped out what I thought were my Spencer Wells forceps, which were kept in my top pocket and were used to clamp off tubing. In this instance the tubing concerned linked a bag of blood that was being used in a blood transfusion to the patient. Snapping them on to the tube, I found that it was not the forceps at all but my surgical scissors. I was sent back to the nurses’ home to change, looking as if I had just performed major abdominal surgery with a blunt kitchen knife and no skill whatsoever.

Another unfortunate incident occurred, involving a faulty bedpan washer. Bedpans were placed in these contraptions, the heavy, round, nautical-looking door would be closed and then for several minutes the thing would spray the pans with hot water with the force of a fire hose. However, on this occasion, no sooner had I placed the bedpan inside and closed the door than it somehow fell open again almost immediately, but sadly not before the water had started to spray. Luckily, because the machine was faulty, the water was breathtakingly cold and it hit me full in the face and chest, sending me reeling backwards against the sluice room wall, where I remained in shock until the cycle had finished, my beautiful, pristine nurse’s cap, which was made of paper, wilted and flattened into a sodden mush. Whilst I stood there, rigid and winded, being battered by the spray, the staff nurse, having seen the incident through the porthole window in the door, came in and stood looking at me with an amused smirk on her face. When the water finally stopped, she said hand on hip, ‘What is this?
Carry on Nursing
?’ And then wearily, ‘Go and get changed.’ And so ensued another embarrassing walk back to the nurses’ home in disarray, having to endure titters and ‘witty’ comments. Halfway back I suddenly remembered my cap and tried to take it off, only to find it ripping away in soggy handfuls.

I never got into any serious trouble, but came close to it once when I was working on a men’s surgical ward. I was on the night shift and on this particular ward the consultant in charge insisted on every patient giving a mid-stream specimen of urine. This process involved first cleaning the area with cotton-wool balls dipped into a mild disinfectant, which was poured into a small foil galley pot. Then the patient would begin to urinate, catching some pee mid-stream in another little pot.

One night after most of the men had gone to sleep an old man appeared like an apparition at the end of the ward. It seemed that he should have been admitted earlier on in the day and, for some reason that neither I nor the senior nurse could glean, he had turned up at eleven o’clock. I showed him to his bed and, drawing the curtains around it, went to make a cup of tea for him, leaving him to get into his pyjamas. When I returned he was in bed and it was only then that I remembered the required specimen, the requisites for which were on his bedside locker.