Читать книгу At the Coalface: The memoir of a pit nurse - Veronica Clark, Joan Hart - Страница 8

The nurses’ training college was situated inside a large Victorian house, set in its own grounds. It was a tall and imposing building, and was a good ten-minute walk from Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. All our nursing training was done inside the house, which had enough room to accommodate a dozen people, but we travelled to the hospital one afternoon a week so that we could gain real work experience. I was one of ten live-in nurses in training. We were all aged between 16 and 17 years old. It was a new course and it taught would-be nurses everything from scratch, from cooking what we called wholesome ‘invalid food’ to how to launder sheets and clean and correctly disinfect a room. The cookery courses were fun but the food wasn’t as joyful or, indeed, very appetising. We were taught how to make everything from junket – a type of blancmange using sour cream – to beef broth, and tripe and onions. On one occasion I forgot to soak my cut of salt beef overnight. The following day I prepared and cooked my ‘beef tea’ – or broth – as I’d been told, seasoning it along the way. But when I went to take a sip I almost gagged, and then I began to splutter and choke. Within seconds I’d spat it out, my face a sickly shade of green.

‘Whatever’s the matter, Joan?’ one of my fellow students asked as I dashed over to the sink to try to rinse away the awful taste.

‘Eurgh, it tastes like seawater!’ I gasped.

I couldn’t work out where I’d gone wrong until the teacher came over and sampled some using a spoon. She took a sip, pulled a disgusted face and shook her head in dismay.

‘You forgot to soak your cut; that’s why it tastes like a bag of salt. You’d kill a patient if you served this,’ she said, plopping the spoon back inside the bubbling pan.

I bowed my head. I felt such a fool because, as usual, I’d tried to run before I could walk. Of course, I failed that particular task, but afterwards I vowed to always taste the food as I went along. A few months later, when it came to my cookery exam, I decided to prepare the same beef broth followed by some junket. I took my time, sampling it until it tasted absolutely perfect before setting it out on a tray. But when I looked around at the other trays I realised something vital was missing – a vase of flowers. I had no money, so I decided to improvise. I nipped outside into the garden where I ‘borrowed’ a small handful of pretty pansies. Standing them up inside a clean fish-paste jar, I added a sprinkle of water and then I was done. It was hardly a bouquet, but it did the trick. In spite of my last-minute DIY floral arrangement, I passed with flying colours and was allowed to move to the next stage of the course – cleaning. I could hardly wait.

My youth and inexperience had left me feeling a little homesick, so I travelled back to Doncaster to visit my family. Of course, Elsie the horrid housekeeper was there and she didn’t seem too impressed when she spotted me coming through the door. When I saw the state of the place I realised why – it was filthy. If anything, Elsie’s low standards had slipped even more, so that I barely recognised my own home. I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in, cleaning what I could. Ann, Tony and Dad were delighted to see me, even if Elsie hadn’t been. By the end of the weekend, she pulled me to one side to speak with me. We were alone in the kitchen when she grabbed me roughly by the arm.

‘If you want to come home then you’re gonna have to pay your way,’ she hissed, spitting out the words in my face.

‘What do you mean? This is my home.’

‘Yes, but you’re a working woman now. You’re earning, so you need to contribute. It’s only fair on your poor father.’

I shook my head in disbelief. Surely Dad didn’t want me to pay to come home at weekends. But Elsie was adamant.

‘If you want to come home then it’ll cost you 2 pounds, 12 shillings and 6 pence,’ she demanded, holding out her grubby little hand.

‘But that’s what I earn in a month!’

She shrugged her shoulders as though it wasn’t her problem.

‘It’s not up to me,’ she insisted. ‘It’s what your dad says I should charge you.’

I was flabbergasted because Dad had never asked me to pay before. I felt a knot of anxiety clench inside my stomach. What if things were more desperate than I thought?

‘I can’t afford it,’ I argued.

Elsie ran a hand through her unruly, thick grey hair. She tucked a greasy strand behind her right ear and turned back towards the sink. ‘If you can’t afford to pay then you can’t come home, it’s as simple as that.’

My heart plummeted like a stone. I’d only just received my first proper wage but I paid what I owed and left, knowing I’d never be able to afford to return. I wanted to ask Dad why he needed to charge me but I thought better of it because I didn’t want to embarrass him. I also worried that he’d take Elsie’s side instead of mine. That must be why the house was in such a state. Dad must be broke, I reasoned on the bus journey back to Huddersfield. The rain pattered softly against the glass of the window, mirroring how I felt inside – both tearful and miserable. I stared at my reflection, trying my best not to cry. The bus slowly wound its way out of Doncaster, leaving my home far behind, and I returned to college where I threw myself into my studies. If I couldn’t afford to go home then I’d use my time wisely and try to become the best nurse I could. Thankfully, my housemates were a joy to live with, and slowly, as each month passed, we learned the basics of nursing. One day, we decided we needed to get fit so we got up extra early, donned our shorts and went for a brisk run around the park. Feeling totally invigorated, we decided to run another circuit, and then another, until we’d jogged around constantly for two hours. We returned to the house en masse, where we washed, ate breakfast and got ready for our day’s lectures. But we were so shattered by the run that we promptly fell asleep in the first lecture. The teacher was puzzled and asked why her class were so sleepy.

‘We were trying to get fit, Miss,’ a voice called from the back of the room.

The teacher looked across a dozen sets of bleary eyes as we began to yawn in unison.

‘Well, it didn’t seem to work, girls, did it?’

The following morning, I ached so much that I thought I’d broken something. My legs were too stiff at the knee to bend. I spent the rest of the day walking around like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. After that, I decided that if I wanted to get fit then I’d have to do it in moderation, not all at once.

Our year-long pre-nursing studies were essentially split into an introduction course and three blocks of learning: three months in the hospital kitchen learning how to cook and prepare ‘invalid food’; three in the laundry, washing the dirty and bloodied sheets; and the final three with Home Sister, learning how to thoroughly clean the house to her incredibly high standards. Looking back, it sounds extreme, but it served a purpose, because by the time we’d finished we all had the same impeccably high standards. But it wasn’t all work – far from it. It was also lots of fun. One day, we were kicking our heels after lectures when I decided to play a practical joke on the Sister in charge who, despite the house being huge, slept in a bedroom on the ground floor next to the main entrance. This was to ensure her young trainee nurses didn’t leave or return at ‘inappropriate hours’. There was a medical skeleton in the classroom, so I removed the skull, looped a piece of string around a bolt fastened on the top, unravelled the string and dangled it out of my bedroom window, which was situated directly above Sister’s. I carefully lowered the skull until it was in line with her window. My friends stifled a giggle as I began to swing it to and fro like a pendulum. When it had gained enough momentum I swung it forward so that it tapped lightly against her windowpane.

TAP. TAP. TAP.

By now my mates were killing themselves laughing, so much so that they had tears streaming down their faces. Moments later, the sash window scraped open as Sister popped her head out and came face to face with the dangling skull. But she didn’t scream; instead she craned her neck upwards and caught me holding onto the other end of the string.

‘Hello, Sister.’ I smiled weakly before pulling the skull up as fast as I could.

Thankfully she had a great sense of humour.

‘Nurse Smith, you will be the death of me, I swear!’ she said, laughing, as she popped her head back inside and closed her bedroom window.

From then on I became known as the joker of the house.

A few days later, Sister stopped me on the stairs.

‘Nurse Smith,’ she called. I stopped dead in my tracks and turned to face her, wondering what on earth I’d done wrong.

‘I always know when you’re on cleaning duties,’ she sighed, tapping her foot against the step.

My mind raced. Maybe my idea of cleanliness wasn’t up to her high standards?

I cleared my throat and spoke. ‘Why, Sister?’

‘Because you always make a clatter, dropping the hand brush down the stairs whenever you do it!’ A smirk spread across her face and I watched as she turned and continued down the stairs. I could still hear her giggling away to herself as she walked into her bedroom and closed the door. I laughed too because I knew it was true – I loved the idea of being a nurse but sometimes I tried so hard that it made me clumsy.

I didn’t want to go home at weekends because I didn’t want to see Elsie, and Dad didn’t rent a telephone then so I couldn’t even call him. Instead, I went back to friends’ houses. My pal Glenys lived close to the moor near Castle Hill, just outside Huddersfield. Glenys’s father was a slaughterhouse man so they were poor and working class, just like me. However, her father also had the broadest Yorkshire accent I’d ever heard in my life. By the end of the weekend, as I gathered my things to leave, he mumbled something I didn’t understand.

‘Aht bahn ame,’ he said gruffly.

I shook my head. I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, so I looked to Glenys for translation.

‘He asked when you were going home,’ she explained.

I looked at him and shook my head. ‘Oh no, I can’t afford it,’ I replied.

Glenys’s dad shook his head; now it was his turn to look confused.

Only one girl left the nursing college. She was a sweet enough lass, but she couldn’t keep up. Nursing was such a hands-on job that you had to be physically up to it, as well as mentally. But it did have its perks, namely the respect you got from members of the general public. As a trainee nurse in Huddersfield, I never had to pay a single bus fare. Instead, I was allowed to travel free, and often others would step aside in the queue to let me on the bus first. I valued both my occupation and outdoor uniform – a blue Mackintosh, cornflower-blue dress and black shoes – which I wore with immense pride.

After a year in training, and with only half a day per week working in the hospital, it was time for us to be let loose on the wards. At first the building had felt massive, but in reality it was just a regular-size town hospital. One of the first wards I worked on was the Ear, Nose and Throat, where children would come in to have their tonsils removed. As soon as they arrived we’d ply them with ice cream because it not only helped ease their sore throats, it also numbed the area. It was a pretty routine op and afterwards the hospital porter would collect the young patient from theatre, carrying them over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift to prevent them from choking on their own blood. The children would usually stay in overnight. It was my job to care for them because I worked the night shift. Many of them were still young, only seven or eight years old, and, in some cases, it’d be their first night away from home, so I tried my best to comfort them throughout the night.

A month or so later, I was transferred to the casualty department where, because of the proximity of the hospital to the Pennines and the harsh winters there, lots of youngsters suffering from chest infections were admitted. Back in those days, no one had central heating; besides, these were the toughened children of farmers and land workers, so more often than not they’d be admitted wearing a ‘liberty bodice’. The bodices were made out of a thick cotton material with a fleece liner. They would be permanently stitched around the children’s bodies to help them survive the bleak, long winter. Underneath, their skin would be smeared with goose fat to create a disgusting type of body insulation. Most of my time in casualty was spent cutting poorly children out of these liberty bodices so that we could treat them, but inevitably, when the wrappers came off, they stunk to high heaven.

‘All right?’ I asked one little boy as I sliced some sharpened scissors through his outer bodice.

He nodded, his big, wide eyes looking straight up at me. I thought I’d been well prepared, but as soon as I removed the cloth the smell was so bad that it caught at the back of my throat, choking me. I held my breath to stop myself being sick. Soap, it seemed, only reached so far and didn’t cut through goose fat.

Now we were working on the wards, my fellow student nurses and I had transferred from the college house to the nurses’ home, where we slept in between shifts. The nurses’ home was situated inside the hospital grounds, a stone’s throw from the police college. It was down the road and housed lots of nice trainee police officers. Our official curfew time was 10 p.m., but we often broke the rule, returning an hour or two later. To get around this, I made friends with nurses who had a bedroom on the ground floor. As a group, we’d plan whose turn it was to leave their window open so that we could sneak back in through it. However, on one occasion it was so dark outside that all the windows looked exactly the same. I climbed in and fell on a poor unsuspecting nurse slumbering soundly in her bed. She screamed so loud that she woke up the entire block. Thankfully I was lithe and fast on my feet, so I was able to run to my room before anyone realised I was the intruder.

The casualty department was where I first fell in love. Shy and inexperienced, I became smitten with a male nurse called Stanley. He was almost ten years older than me, in his late twenties, but to me, a girl of 17, he was the height of male sophistication. Tall and with smouldering film-star looks, Stanley was so kind to me, and when he bought me flowers one day I was so thrilled I thought I would burst with joy. Afterwards, every time I cut my finger or felt a fishbone stick slightly inside my throat, I ran straight to the casualty department to seek immediate medical attention from the lovely Stanley. There was only one fly in the ointment: Stanley was homosexual. But I was young and naïve, and I’d never heard of a man being homosexual, so I was totally stumped as to why he didn’t consider me in the same way. It was down to the lovely Sister le Fleur to set me straight and let me down gently. She quietly informed me that, sadly, Stanley’s intentions were entirely honourable, and I had mistaken his friendship for love.

‘You’re just not his type, Nurse Smith,’ she sighed, patting me kindly on the shoulder.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, hurt and a little confused.

‘It’s Stanley. He doesn’t go for girls. He’s homosexual, so I’m afraid you are wasting your time.’

The news hit me like a sharp slap across the face. I was heartbroken, but I realised that, even with all the will in the world, Stanley and I would never be more than just good friends.

Stanley and the other male nurses were very protective of us young female nurses. One evening, I’d worked a particularly long and gruelling night shift when I was overcome with exhaustion.

‘Why don’t you go and have a kip?’ another nurse, called David, suggested.

‘But where?’ I sighed. I was terrified Matron would catch me sleeping on the job.

‘There’s a side room, just down the corridor,’ he said, pointing over to it. ‘There’s a bed in it. Go on, I’ll wake you up in an hour if we get busy.’

I was so tired from standing on my feet for hours on end that I did as he said. I shut the door behind me, pulled back the covers and climbed into bed, where I fell into a deep sleep. I’d only been snoozing for a matter of minutes when David came bursting back in through the door.

‘Joan, Joan, wake up!’ His voice sounded panicked and urgent.

Bleary eyed, I sat up and stretched my arms above my head.

‘Has it been an hour already?’ I yawned.

‘No!’ David gasped as he proceeded to unceremoniously drag me out of the room with my legs trailing along the floor behind me. I looked up at him because, for a split second, I thought he’d gone completely mad! I was about to protest when he plonked me down and ran back to close the door.

‘David, what on earth’s going on?’

‘It’s the room,’ he explained, trying to catch his breath. ‘It’s being fumigated. I’ve only just found out. They’re burning some cones in there, but you must’ve been so tired that you didn’t notice. As soon as I heard, I ran in to get you. Sorry, Joan, I didn’t know, otherwise I wouldn’t have told you to go in there.’

It transpired that the fumes had been highly toxic, and if David hadn’t come to rescue me when he did I would have died in that bed. The whole episode shook me, and it made me think about my life, my family and my mum. I wondered what she looked like after all these years. Had she changed? Did she still have the same distinctive red hair? Would she even recognise me? Did she miss us or think of us as often as I thought of her? All these questions and many more burned inside me. They’d always been there, waiting, but now I was older I felt more able and prepared to meet with her to try to understand why she’d left us behind. I desperately wanted to make contact, but I was worried about Dad. I knew it’d hurt him because he’d see it as a betrayal. But then I thought of Elsie ruling the roost. In many ways I’d already lost him because I was unable to go back home. I felt rootless – as though I had no home. I wanted, no, I needed to see Mum, to know that I was still loved. I was fast approaching 18 years of age, and it’d been five long years since I’d last seen her.

A week or so later, I picked up a pen and wrote directly to my Uncle Albert to ask if he had an address. He passed my letter on to a lady, who turned out to be Mum’s boyfriend’s mother. She in turn gave my note to Mum. Weeks passed, so I presumed my request had fallen on deaf ears. I felt quite emotional because I missed my family, but I couldn’t afford to hand over a month’s wages for a weekend visit and I hated Elsie with a passion, so I was beginning to feel pretty desperate. To my complete shock and surprise, Mum not only replied, she even invited me down to London. As I boarded the train I felt a little apprehensive, but also a little excited because I knew this journey would change my life. Although it’d been years, the time melted away as soon as I spotted her walking towards me through steam billowing from the train along the platform at King’s Cross station. She was still as petite as I remembered, and her hair was auburn, just like mine. In fact, standing there on the crowded platform, we could’ve been sisters.

‘Hello, Mum,’ I said as I instinctively held my arms out to greet her.

‘You’re the last person I expected to forgive me,’ she admitted, before falling into my arms. As soon as we embraced I knew that I’d done the right thing.

We travelled back to her flat in Shepherd’s Bush, where I met her boyfriend, Bill, who was a London bus driver. I liked Bill immediately. He was a lovely bloke and totally the right man for my mother. Ironically, Mum worked at a hospital, but as a kitchen assistant, in Roehampton. She also cleaned houses for the ladies of society, and used her previous skills as a barmaid to help organise cocktail parties. Mum was beautiful, bubbly and popular with everyone. I stayed there for a week, and when she suggested that I move to London permanently, my mind was already made up. I wrote to the General Nursing Council and transferred from Huddersfield to Hammersmith Hospital in London. I was told I’d start at the beginning of the next training year, so I moved into the London nurses’ accommodation on New Year’s Eve, 1950. It was miserable spending New Year’s Eve alone but the hospital required that I sleep in the nurses’ quarters the night before my first shift. I didn’t mind because I knew it would be the beginning of a whole new life.

My snap decision to move from one end of the country to the other had left my father devastated because he felt I’d chosen Mum over him, but it wasn’t that at all. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to explain, so I went to see him before I left Yorkshire to break the news to him face to face. I thought he might take it badly, but not as bad as he actually did.

‘You’ll never see Ann or Tony again,’ he threatened. I realised he was angry and still hurting over Mum. ‘After all she’s done, after all I’ve done for you …’ he said, his voice choking with emotion.

‘What? So why are you charging me to come home for the weekend, then?’ I argued.

Dad looked at me and reeled back in horror. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Elsie? A month’s wage just to come home for the weekend? Well, I couldn’t afford it. That’s why I’ve not been back to see you, even though I’ve been really, really homesick,’ I snapped, willing my tears to go away.

It was clear that he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, so I explained all about Elsie and the monthly wage I’d handed over on my first visit home.

Dad gasped in disbelief. ‘What? And you really thought I’d charge my own daughter to come home for the weekend?’

‘Well, that’s what she told me, so I paid her in full – my first month’s salary!’

I could see Dad was trying to process what I was saying, and then the penny dropped. Elsie had lied to me and kept the money for herself. Dad vowed to deal with her later but I could tell he was hurt and disappointed in me.

‘I can’t believe you thought I’d charge you,’ he said, slumping down into a chair at the kitchen table as though the stuffing had been knocked clean from him.

‘I didn’t know what to believe. That’s why I never came home – I couldn’t afford it.’

He was still trying to digest the news but he gave me a hug and promised to sort something out. Although we’d talked it through, it took him a few months before he eventually calmed down. He wished me well and insisted I was welcome home any time. To make matters worse, before I left the house I saw my coat. It was on the back of Elsie’s daughter, who I presumed had also been hoodwinked by her wicked mother. Although I’d wanted to rip it off her, I held my head high, left the house and never said another word. I realised Dad was stuck with Elsie, because he needed to work to feed Tony and Ann. Still, after our conversation he watched her like a hawk. He slowly built a case against her, which was strengthened when she later stole and sold his best suit and gold pocket watch.

‘I threw her out,’ he later explained. ‘You were right; I think she’d been stealing from me for a long time.’

I felt for Dad, because he’d only taken her on so that he could work to keep a roof over our heads. Now he was back to square one again.