大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Angela Cutting of Leicester City Libraries on behalf of Edna Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

CHAPTER 1

I volunteered to nurse with the British Red Cross soon after the outbreak of war because, whatever justification there might have been for the outbreak of hostilities, the idea of being conscripted to the armed services was abhorrent to me.

So it was that I received a letter ordering me to report at a large military hospital in London. It was 7.00 a.m. the following morning and I was standing in what appeared to be a fantasy world, surrounded by beds. I thought, in my confusion, that I must have been to a fancy dress party and had forgotten to change. I was alone and alarmed. Then I heard a man's voice calling "Nurse, Nurse!". I thought "Someone needs a nurse I wonder where I can find one". Then another voice, much closer said "Nurse, someone wants you" and I was jerked into the realisation that I was now a nurse, and that no other nurse was in sight. It was January 1941.

I had had no experience of nursing at all, so I was totally ill-prepared for the life that was to follow. 1 was to learn the hard way. The hutted wards of the hospital, of which there were 21, with two operating theatres, stretched down a single corridor for three-quarters of a mile, separated from each other by large open spaces, in the hope that bomb damage would be confined to only one or two wards at a time, and this proved marginally successful. Every ward contained 28 beds and had two side wards for 3 critically ill patients. It was largely a surgical hospital, with two medical wards. Our patients were servicemen and women, all of whom had been seriously injured, minor injuries were taken elsewhere. They came directly from field dressing stations on the Continent and from other war zones. We also admitted air raid casualties from the local area. We ranked as a front line hospital.

Staffing was worse than inadequate. The ward sisters, a motley bunch, were in charge of the wards and were all qualified, though some had been out of nursing for years, and others were young S.R.N. nurses, insufficiently experienced for their new status. The remainder of the staff were V.A.D.s like myself, or nurses who had failed their finals or left the profession unqualified. Again, we were a heterogeneous collection, and social classes ranged from the aristocracy to people from the East End of London. The aristocracy did not know how to make a cup of tea or boil an egg (in those days they had had no experience of such things) but worked hard under the instruction of the more practical nurses, who compensated for their lack of verbal skills with a colourful vocabulary of swear words to suit all occasions. We all got on well together, though actually we seldom met up except at mealtimes; normally there were only two, or perhaps three, nurses on duty in a ward at any one time, and frequently only one in the evenings.

Finally, there were the male orderlies, usually one on each ward. They were all retired regular servicemen who, after years of experience, had learnt how to cope with all the disciplines of army life and with all the personnel. Nothing and nobody worried them - they had nothing to lose or gain from their new experience, and they went about their work competently, but with complete disregard of instructions and requirements which they thought unnecessary. They were always calm and cheerful, and supportive of us nurses, and probably helped to restore balance and sanity to the hospital, despite the fact that they were often at loggerheads with the establishment.

CHAPTER 2

For the first few weeks I seldom came near to our patients, because my time was spent on domestic work - there were no ward orderlies or cleaners. Occasionally I helped to make beds or wash locker tops. Otherwise, I checked and stacked linen, and spent much time polishing floors. This was a strenuous job for which we were provided with a block of wood, about 12 inches by 5 inches by 5 inches, to the top of which was hinged a very long pole, probably about 6 feet. The system was to push the beds to one side of the ward, and spatter polish all over the exposed floor. Then a piece of felt was placed under the buffer, which we then swung from side to side, holding on to the pole. It was all terribly cumbersome, and as our arms began to ache the pole would slip and the buffer would collide with the beds on which the soldiers were lying, often in pain or discomfort. The air "turned blue" with their protests.

The whole procedure left the floor shining and slippery, and extremely hazardous for the patients, many of whom had suffered leg injuries and amputations and were on crutches.
The reason. for this somewhat ridiculous procedure was the Royal Medical Corps Colonel's inspection. This took place on alternate Tuesday mornings, no matter how busy we were. The Colonel arrived wearing white gloves, and made his way round the ward, wiping his finger along ledges and the rungs of beds, and then examining his glove for any sign of dust. The patients lay on the beds with the bedclothes tucked in so tightly that it was impossible to move. We were all - men and staff - under military discipline and if anything was amiss the Sister bore the brunt of the Colonel's anger, and we bore the brunt of the Sister's anger afterwards, so it was a great relief when we could relax and return to work.

There were also daily inspections by the matron or assistant matron, who came officially to inspect the patients. With a thousand men and three-quarters of a mile of corridor, this was probably a very laborious process. The conversation was intended to go as follows:
"Good morning, how are you?"
"Alright, thank you matron"
"Good".
Since everyone was seriously ill, this was a farce and occasionally the reply would be: "Not so well today, matron" or even "I feel terrible, matron" but this went unheeded and "Good" was treated with the scornful laughter it deserved. All this added to light entertainment on the ward.

Another task that fell to the junior staff was a seemingly endless one. There were no sterile packaged dressings, and surgical supplies were limited. Cylindrical metal drums had to be packed, sealed and sterilised, and all spare moments, frequently during off-duty periods, were spent cutting pieces of gauze from a large roll and folding them into different sizes. A roll of lint was treated similarly, and then we made hundreds of cotton wool balls for swabs. The official instruction was to roll these on our knees, but the unofficial theory was that if we rolled them under our breasts, we should develop shapely bosoms, so this was the method we adopted, spurred on by the hope of attracting the airmen billeted nearby when we went out in our uniform suits, which were actually very smart.

Then there were cupboard shelves to be cleaned and this was probably the most unpopular task we had. The shelves were all wooden and we scrubbed these with 'monkey soaps'. These were large blocks which looked deceptively like ordinary soap but which contained crushed pumice. They were moistened and then rubbed on to the shelves with our bare hands - an exceedingly painful activity which left us red and sore - and handcream was scarce like everything else.

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