大象传媒

The blitzes were over by the time I became a student in Liverpool in 1943, we were ravenous, trying to grow up on wartime rations. Everything was scarce but we were alive. Working very hard in College had nothing to do with the war, so a group of five of us looked around for some way to help on Sundays, our only free time...
Seeing a Stars & Stripes outside a hotel we went in, but, "Thank you we bring our own girls over from the States..."

Walking down to the Pier Head, the only building standing on a large bomb-site, another S & S flag. In we went and were welcomed by a lovely lady, Mrs Haynes in uniform. U.S. ships full of G.I.s were pouring into the Mersey... It was early May, 1944. We went there for several Sundays but never saw the same soldiers twice. They had moved south. They talked about their 'homes.' I remember one telling me about Florida in California. I took him over to see the large U.S. map on the wall.

One Sunday a G.I. walked in, saw all the brown faces and fled. On June 6th the news told us why the yanks had been pouring in to Liverpool...

Some years later, seeing the immense U.S. war cemeteries in Normandy, I could only think of those smiling American negroes, but it was quite recently that I learned of the U.S. government policy of offering freedom to men in prison, on condition they joined the Army!

My home was near Sheffield, the city with the enormous black pancake of smoke and grime above, which still had children suffering vitamin D deficiency. Someone who knew I was studying Physical Education with Physiotherapy sent a message from the Head of the Physiotherapy Dept. at Sheffield Royal Infirmary inviting me to spend time in my long vacation getting in some practice. Oh yes please, (my father wouldn't get a bill, like he did the following year for my assessed practice in a Physio. Training School).

The Infirmary, like all the neighbouring buildings, was blackened by smoke and soot from the adjoining steelworks, and how it had survived the blitz was a miracle, but it was surrounded by bombed buildings. The steelworks were working full blast twenty-four hours a day. But the inside of the hospital was so clean, smelling of disinfectant, and the nurses scrubbed and tidy. And no clutter, which spreads infection. Written on the faces of the men crippled by horrendous industrial accidents, was worry of how they would support their families. But the humour of the patient who said "I dropped a 14 ton furnace door on my foot," reducing his toes to mincemeat, made the surgeon smile.

I was invited to join the surgeon's round, where, in the men's ward was a 7 year old boy ?. He replied to the surgeon, "Today I had 10c.c.s, yesterday I had eight, the day before I had six..." We could see on the x-rays that the shadow of pus around the hip joint was reducing. The surgeon turned to us and said, "I will not see a child suffer when I have the wherewithall to prevent it." The physio. whispered to me, " We have an allocation of the new wonder drug - for military patients only."

In the afternoons I worked on the military wards. It was years later that I learned that only three civilian hospitals took military patients, presumably because of the facilities for treating gross injuries... I had wondered why the younger physiso. had greeted me with, "Good, you can do the ward exercises." Turning down all the beds, making sure they had pants on, then standing on a table to demonstrate, invited ribaldry. As I was massaging scars, I thought about their futures. Many were not much older than I was. What would the slate quarry worker from Ffestiniog whose knee cap had been shot away manage to do for a living. Or the older man of 44, who said to me, "All I need is a new eye, a new complexion, a new set of teeth, and new arm and a new leg, then I am going to ask TOJO (ward sister) for a date." Sadly he told me that when his wife came to see him she didn't look at him, so he asked why she didn't. Her reply, "They told me you are blind."

One patient lay solemnly in bed attached to strings and pulleys, speaking to no-one, except the staff. One patient explained quietly that, "We are all 'other ranks,' he is a naval officer so above us." The smell in the civilian wards was unpleasant. Apart from the disinfectant, plasters heavily stained with pus, blood, urine and faeces is still with me. But in the military wards, the wonder drug was working miracles... Penicillin of course.

One patient's hand was protected by a cage to keep off the flies and his fingers looked like a bunch of aubergines. It was gangrene. I believe he'd had a gunshot wound in the shoulder and was awaiting amputation.

Every day there were changes in the military wards as the hospital trains ran at night, as did the ships crossing the Channel, bringing the injured from Normandy.

Still in my 'teens I joined the banter as I re-educated movement, mobilised joints, etc. but in private I cried myself to sleep at night.

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