大象传媒

I entered the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Preliminary Training School for nurses on September 30th 1939. We were the last peace-time set and there was some anxiety about the recent declaration of war and what might happen to our future plans. The first hurdle was the examination at the end of our two months in the school because failure would mean that we must leave. We passed and moved on to the wards. Not long after that I noticed a group of my new colleagues , all foreign nationals from various departments, being taken away for internment. This was my introduction to some of the sad things that come with war. On my first spell of night duty the siren sounded when I was alone on the ward, my senior on a meal break. Hands shaky with tension I lit the hurricane lamps and extinguished the ward lights, the house doctor and my senior nurse promptly joining me. Nothing untoward happened that night but from July 1940 the city suffered continual bombardment, a total of 1443 alerts in 4 years with much damage to the hospital. Patients from the upper wards had to endure being wheeled in their beds to the basement corridors, their beds end to end amid the whispering pipes and chirping crickets, while dispatch riders on motor cycles roared up the main road, planes droned above us and anti-aircraft guns thumped. Before long many nurses were sleeping in the shelters to avoid having to get up for the siren.

I wonder if anyone remembers Bunyan bags? Gunshot wounds were common and healing was inhibited by conventional dressings. The Bunyan bag with its valves for irrigation of the wound covered it from infection and gently inflated avoided contact. Our patients leaving with a limb in a clear balloon did look a little odd but as we so often said, there was a war on.

I remember carrying an amputated leg from theatre to the boiler house one night in the black out. Worse was the task of winding radio-active material in its lead box down the 50 foot deep radium well while planes overhead were sought by the searchlights fingering the sky. When a bomb landed the ground seemed to rise and push me away. Our patients had frequently to be transferred to the various emergency hospitals to make way for casualties but their worst experience had to be the fire blitz of June 1942 when thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped on Norwich and the hospital was ablaze. We had to bring all patients up from the basement and get all out of the building. Fortunately the bombers did not get through to follow up by dropping high explosives into the well lit target. These were the Baedeker raids aimed at our cultural and historical cities. I was on night duty on a male surgical ward with 4 patients needing close observation. Their surgeon decided to take them with me to his own home for the night. Walking beside the stretchers I was appalled at the sight of the blazing buildings on either side and anxious for my helpless patients. Returning to the hospital next morning I found a sorry mess. Furniture, mattresses, surgical instruments hastily salvaged from the wards covered our once immaculate lawns and among them I found a pan of sausages rescued from a ward kitchen ready for breakfasts. Four wards, the upper floors of the Leicester nurses home, the main theatre and linen room above it and the maids home stood burnt and black against the sky. Many nurses and maids were left with nothing but the clothing they were wearing. Patients had again been evacuated and the vacant Bethel Mental Hospital was offered for as our temporary home.. I sank thankfully to sleep in a soft green padded cell.

In 1943 two enemy planes attacked the train leaving Great Yarmouth Vauxhall as I returned from my days off. Driver and fireman, horribly exposed in their cab, carried on at 5 mph as they were required to do. When it was over we stopped and a call came for a doctor or nurse to attend a wounded passenger and I had to creep along the running board an astonishing distance above the ground to reach him His arm had been peppered with machine gun bullets and an ambulance carried him back to the hospital in Great Yarmouth. He knew my uncle and in this way I learned that he would have been in the compartment with me but seeing me alone old fashioned courtesy made him go further up the train. It did seem horribly unfair. When we reached Norwich Thorpe every passenger reached up to shake hands with our brave driver and fireman. I dashed to the hospital , threw on my uniform and just got to my out patient clinic in time only to have the doctor point out to me that some of the fireman鈥檚 soot was on my face.

How we passed our examinations in all this is a mystery. All lectures and study had to be done in our own scanty time and we had Lights Out at 10pm. After 18 months came the Preliminary State Examination which must be passed or the nurse had to move elsewhere. The frequency of the State Finals was reduced in the war years so our set had to wait 6 months longer. The hospital also set final exams. Each hospital had its own tradition and its own badge for certificated nurses and the bronze cross of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital was distinctive. I managed to gain mine and although now long retired it is still treasured.

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