大象传媒

After my mother died in March 2001 I found this poem amongst her personal effects. It was "composed by a grateful patient" in Clatterbridge General Hospital 60 years earlier on 29 March 1941. My mother, was a nurse during WW2. Her name was Ethel Lydia Jones and at the time the poem was written she would have been 22.

LITTLE NURSE JONES
1. There's a hospital ward, ten Iron beds,
With spotless sheets and white cotton
spreads,
Temperature charts hang over each bed
With radio phones for each patient's
head.
The patients are sleeping, all peaceful
and calm,
Did I say all? well all but old Sam,
Sam doesn't sleep, just sits there and
moans,
He looks for a nurse, it's little nurse
Jones.

2. It's 6.30 a.m., days routine starts,
Lights are switched on, outside it's
still dark,
Night nurses hustling, the temperatures
take,
Day nurses rushing, all beds to make.
Bowls of hot water, for patients to wash,
Then before breakfast everyone's posh!
But who will wash me with my broken
bones,
Someone is coming, it's little nurse
Jones.

3. Who's screaming now at the end of the
room?
It's Jessop, we call him the mad
carraige groom,
For crazy he must be, or strange in his
head,
When he sees the nurses, he screams in
his bed.
Take them away, send them all breaking
stones,
But wait! not them all, All but little
nurse Jones.

4. Then Dirk the Dutch sailor in No. 2 bed,
Perpetually hungry, shouts gimme more
bread,
I never get better, I starve till I'm
dead,
I tell ja me stummick am heavy as lead.
Nurses am no good, they not feed the
mans,
She only give him the bottles and pans.
I go to the huts, and get tea and hot
scones,
But I buy only one nurse! Little Nurse
Jones.

5. Now the wards almost empty, few patients
in bed,
Most have got better, but old Sam is
dead.
Jessop the crazy one, taken away,
And others expecting discharge any day.
Dirk the dutch sailor, returned to his
ship,
And gone is the man with the sore on his
hip.
Soon we will all be back in our homes,
But we'll always remember, Dear Little
Nurse Jones.

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