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Nursing in Wartime

Recollections of Doreen M Bishop — then Doreen Malby.

I was born in 1923; my younger sister was born in 1932, and my dear Mother died of cancer in 1936. My Father remarried in 1938, so at outbreak of war the following year I was only 16, my younger sister was 7, and my Father had a new wife and a baby expected. I remember going with my Father and Vera his wife, to an auction to buy a school and paddock as a house for his expanding family. He went a bit higher in the bidding than he meant to, but he got it. This school, now a house, was near Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. They constructed a dug-out in the garden as an air-raid shelter; we called it ‘Adolf’s Hole’. The paddock was ploughed up to grow food by my Father with some help; there was also an orchard.

By 1940 I wanted to train to be a nurse, but at only 17, I was too young, so I went to work at a cottage hospital in Uxbridge. There were just two wards, male and female. The men’s ward had red blankets, and windows looking out over countryside. The women’s ward was at right angles to the men’s. On one occasion we heard a bomb come screaming down; it demolished the house next door. A mobile gun used to run up and down the road outside at night.

In the meantime my Father had evacuated his young family to Worcestershire, where my sister Rosemary was boarding at a school just west of the Malvern Hills. Dad took V (Vera) and baby Jane to a little house, Laburnum Cottage, Hawthorn Lane. When I enrolled with this address, Matron said what a flowery address it was.

At last I started my training in September 1941, at the PTS (Preliminary Training School) at the West Middlesex Hospital, near Syon House in London. I recently found my S.R.N. badge, with ‘West Middlesex’ and my name inscribed on the reverse. I deliberately chose to go to a county hospital for my training, rather than a more prestigious hospital. When I started I stayed in a lodge of Warkworth House within the grounds of the hospital. Once I discovered a man in this all-female nurses’ accommodation. I challenged him and he fled! I have a vivid memory of a group of we trainee nurses sitting on the parapet of the terrace there, eating cherries. At this time there was a group of four of us who enjoyed each other’s company and we became close friends. All the nurses were known by their surnames, so we were Malby, Whittick, Roake and Nyilassy. We kept in touch after the war, I am still in touch with most of them and we still refer to each other by these names. Roake was known as Rokio, and I recall her coming into class once and bursting into tears; she had just heard her brother had been killed in combat. As it happens, her 80th birthday is due on January 30th 06.

Later we were in a Nurses’ Home, which was a three storey, curved red-brick building. One day we could hear the drone of an approaching doodle-bug (a flying bomb) and there were faces at every window. The sound cut off (which meant it would soon fall and explode) and I ducked, but my friend Rokio saw all the faces suddenly disappear, before she too dived for cover! If they came over during mealtimes we would dive under the tables for cover. On our tables we would have our own ration of the scarce food supplies.

During my training we had accommodation at various wards; while on night duty we were in Syon House itself which was nearby. We slept 8 to a bedroom of this stately home or 4 to a dressing-room. One of the nurses used to put her mattress on the floor under the bedstead; she could not get to sleep otherwise. To go to the toilet we had to go 100 yards down a red plush corridor, round a corner, and into the toilet room. It was on a raised platform, just like a throne, and was shaped like one. During that period, while I stayed there it was a very cold winter. After a prolonged period of frost the little stream in the grounds froze over and I cycled across it.

Our transport to and from hospital was in a truck; we nurses used to be flung from side to side in the back of the truck, screaming with laughter as it drove along the narrow twisting lane to or from Syon House. We would be wrapped in our lovely long navy woollen cloaks, with a hood and a red lining, and we all wore black Lyle stockings and black shoes. Our uniforms were white overalls with a belt, and a cap. The caps bore stripes for our year of training, one stripe for the first year, two for second year etc. My training lasted for four and a half years, as I had sick leave to make up; I had vesicular eczema on my hands so was not able to work, (due to attention to patients’ bottoms, entailing rubbing with methylated spirits.)

While I was training I went often to plays, opera, concerts and the ballet, always ‘in the gods’, that is right on the very highest tier, which was all I could afford. Our weekly salary was £4 3s 4d. Once when I was on night duty I fell asleep up there during some fine music concert! I saw all the major ballets, and often saw Fonteyn and Nureyev dancing, also with Robert Helpmann. On my days off I would cycle out into the country I loved so much; and I discovered youth hostelling, which I continued until very recently, into my late seventies.

When I was in my 3rd year of training, I was on night duty. Sister was off, and the staff nurse was off, so I was in charge of the male surgical ward on my own for the first time. So during the course of the previous day the senior doctor did the ward rounds with me, discharging many patients; perhaps this was a premonition? That same night the very first rocket bomb (V2) was dropped on Gillette’s factory, just a quarter of a mile away. I was trying to keep a sense of calm in the ward, and sat at my table in the centre ruling lines in my record book. I also went round and spoke quietly to the occupant of every bed, checking records of injury, for no-one was asleep. There were so many people injured that night, they were stitching people up as they sat on the stairs, so we later learned. In the morning Matron came in, expecting the ward to be in a shambles, but she was ‘pleasantly surprised’ at how I had coped. When I worked on the children’s ward, I used to pull the beds away from the walls, in case the walls collapsed in the bombing.

I became 21 in July 1944, and that night I was on night duty. I went out onto the roof, and was enchanted by the stars. It was a marvellous dark starry night, which could be seen in London then with the blackout.

The spring after the war ended I qualified as a State Registered Nurse, and spent the first two years at a Sanatorium in Bromsgrove, where the four-bedded rooms were open to the fresh air. Later I became a theatre sister at Bromsgrove Cottage Hospital. At the end of the war I went abroad; the cheapest place to go to was Ireland where I again stayed in youth hostels and then went further afield. But that would begin another story.

This was written in November and December 2005, with the help of my daughter Kathryn.

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