大象传媒

About the third day of my first week Nurse MacGarry went for her lunch break and I was alone on the ward. There were 75 patients on the ward; most were up and about and sitting in the Day room. At one end of the ward we had 10 sick old ladies who needed nursing care after having had operations. Staff Nurse MacGarry told me to stay with these patients and not bother about the others, as they were all able to look after themselves. She had been gone about a quarter of an hour when I noticed one lady appeared to be restless. She had had a Mastectomy (breast removed). I went to look at her and found she had pulled all her drainage tubes out of her wounds. As MacGarry had not told me what to do in an emergency, I went to the telephone and rang matron. I told her what had happened and asked her what I should do. She was so nice, and came along to the ward, rolled up her sleeves and told me to wash all the tubes and put them in the sterilizer and boil them and gave me more instruments to boil. She then rang the Doctor. When Staff Nurse MacGarry came back from lunch, there was I, a very junior nurse in her first week of training, helping matron and the doctor in replacing all the tubes. Matron congratulated me on my quickness in calling for help, and that I had not panicked. I had just got on with the job as if I had been nursing for years.

I always got on very well with Staff Nurse MacGarry and if ever she was doing special dressings, she would always ask me if I would like to come and watch or help her. This is how I learned basic nursing skills. The worst part about this type of nursing was the counting. There were always a great many patients at one time, and we had to count the patients into the toilet block, then lock the doors, then they had to be counted back into the ward again. Every ward, toilet, and bathroom was locked. Round your waist you wore a rope belt with a bunch of keys attached.

Another day I was alone during a lunch break and a patient had an epileptic fit. I had never seen one before, and did not know what to do, but one of the other patients said "It's alright nurse, I'll see to her", and put a gag in her mouth and told me to see that she did not bang herself against anything. I was amazed how all the patients helped each other. They also did all the work on the wards, and some patients who could be trusted were allowed to work in the kitchens, laundry and sewing rooms. The constant counting caused a great deal of stress. Counting knives, forks, spoons at every mealtime etc, etc. After six months my friend Winnie Matthews went home on a weekend pass and did not come back. I rang her mother and she told me she was having a nervous breakdown and could not return. I missed her very much as we had spent our off duty time together playing tennis and hockey for the hospital.

The work we had to do with so many patients was terrible. One weekend I went home and my mother was on holiday, and my grandmother was staying in our house to look after my brothers. She brought me a cup of tea one morning and found me counting the wallpaper patterns. She immediately sent for our family doctor named Doctor Wilson, who was also a very close friend of my mother. He advised me to transfer at once away from the Mental Hospital and continue my training at a local hospital. This hospital was called "The Brook" which was a fever hospital. Half was for general patients, and the other half took the overflow from the Military Hospital next door called "The Herbert Hospital". As the war was on and beds and nurses were needed after the retreat of Dunkirk, I had no trouble in arranging the transfer. Doctor Wilson got in touch with matron, who asked me to return to work one month's notice while she arranged the transfer. So after 11 months at Bexley, I reported to The Brook Hospital. This episode probably prevented me from having a nervous breakdown like my friend Winnie. She was ill for a long time and gave up nursing altogether and married a Naval Officer.

At the Brook Hospital, I lived in, and had a room in the Nurses Home. Now at last this was real nursing. We had lots of wounded soldiers from Dunkirk. They were brought direct from the beaches in France to Dover by boat, then from the boats into Green Line coaches which were converted into ambulances straight to us at the Brook. We worked ten to twelve hours a day. In my set I met Ursula Watts, a girl from Hastings. We became friends, and as she could not get home often she used to come home with me. We used to stand on a bridge between the two Nurses Homes and watch the R.A.F. Battle of Britain spitfires coming back from a raid doing the victory rolls in the sky. Being a fever and general hospital we had to take the casualties from the bombing, along with the local children with infections. We did get a few lectures, and a few practical lessons from Sister Tutors, but we really learned most from the sisters and staff nurses on the wards that we worked on. We never knew from one day to the next what we would be doing. Although we were allocated a ward we were moved according to the urgent need at the time. One day would be a general ward, another would be de-lousing children who had been sleeping in shelters, or we were looking after babies that had been abandoned. There was a ward full of healthy babies who had been left in Churches, on doorsteps or on Woolwich Common.

We all had our own room in the nurse's home with a home sister named Sister Hays to look after us. One day she confiscated my portable gramophone. I had bought a record of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas. Unfortunately my room was right next door to her office and she got so sick of hearing it being played over and over she marched in one day and took it away, and I never did get it back.

Altogether it was a very happy life. All our food was provided in our respective dining rooms. Sisters had their own dining room, nurses in training had a separate section in a large dining room, the other section was for staff nurses. Matron had her private room and the doctors had another place to eat.

All our laundry was done for us. We only got 拢3 per month, but I remember buying a lovely dress for only five shillings. We had our own sitting room for trained and untrained staff. We used to have little dances in our sitting room. No men were allowed in the nurse's home, but you could make an appointment with the home sister to receive visitors in the visitor's room and were allowed a tray of tea from the servery provided it was booked in advance.

It was great having my home within walking distance because I took all my friends home. My mum always made us welcome, and gave us whatever was going, such as home made cakes, scones and jam tarts with a pot of tea.

It was the year of 1939 and things were pretty quiet. We nursed soldiers who were ill with flue etc. Children with their childhood complaints such as measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever and diphtheria, the latter being the worst. We had a strong wooden table in the ward where the doctors used to do tracheotomy. I remember a lady doctor named Dr. Coutts. She was a wonderful doctor and excelled at this particular operation. A child would come in with diphtheria, the type in which the neck swelled and the child would go blue and be unable to breathe. On the table they would go, and in seconds a tiny vertical cut would be made and a small tube passed into the trachea and the child was able to breath again. Dr. Coutts was by far the fastest and neatest at this operation. In the early days I saw many of these operations each week, but with the discovery of immunisation and antibiotics, diphtheria faded out. I thought about Dr. Coutts many years later, when I saw some of the ugly scars some doctors left and their pathetic attempts at doing tracheotomy.

Before continuing further on my nursing memories, I must tell you about the rest of the family. I was the eldest, 15 months later brother Bill came along, then brother Jim and the youngest was Dorothy. My grandmother on my mother's side was called Emily Jeffs, who was married to Joseph Inseal. She had ten children, six girls and four boys. We were very close to my grandmother. She lived next door to us in Maryon Road. Two of the houses, Nos. 6 and 8, had been left by my grandfather's aunt, to my mother and her sister Doll. It was at No.6 that my grandmother lived along with her daughters that were left. World war 1 took three SODS. The fourth son joined the Army. One daughter had been adopted by my grandfather's brother. My mother took over No.8 when I was 5 years old.

When World War II came, my brother Bill went into the R.A.F. Brother Jim went into the Guards. When Dorothy was 14 years old she went to work in an office at "Siemens". I had, by then, started nursing.

An Anderson shelter was built in the garden and a surface shelter was built for the public opposite the house, by the wall of the pub which was called The Woodman. During the Christmas of 1939 the nurses were invited to a dance at the RA. Gun site 161 Heavy AA Battery on Woolwich Common. Six of us went from the Brook Hospital to this dance, and during the evening I met Bill Ewins (later to become my husband). Our first dance together was a "Boomps A daisy", not very romantic, but this was the first dance of hundreds we were to have together. After a two-year courtship we were married on the 18dI December 1941 by special licence at Greenwich Town Hall. I continued to work at the Brook Hospital, but just before we were married, I found a job with more money at Charlton Lane First Aid Post. We were having lots of raids by now. My friend Ursula married Robin Cork, who she also met at one of the dances. She did, however, know him previously, as he came from Hastings where she also lived. One night while on night duty there was a very bad raid. Bombs fell on the Brook Hotel and some large three-storey house next to the Hospital. When Ursula looked at the house next morning after coming off duty, the whole of the front of the house was down and she could see her bed on the third floor from the street. She came and stayed in my mother's house for a few weeks until she could find a flat. .

The First Aid Post where I worked was run by the medical staff of Charlton Football Club. Our boss was Jimmy Trotter who was England's football trainer. This was a different life from the hospital. I was in charge of the theatre and had to always make sure everything was ready for any emergency.

Now that I have retired, looking back on my 42 years of nursing, enormous changes have taken place, and the conditions when I started in 1938 were very different by the time I retired in 1980. Before 1940, if nurses married, they had to resign. We were not allowed to use Christian names to each other, and when we were very junior nurses we used to do all the cleaning of sluices, lavatories, light shades, walls, ceilings and metal beds etc. We only had carbolic and lysol as cleaning material, and had to soak our duster in this and dust everything in sight. Every morning when we were on early shift we had to pull every bed forward a few feet, the domestic would sweep and bumper the floor, then we would dust the back of the beds with our damp dusters and push the bed back. The beds had been made by the night staff. If you were not dusting or carbolizing (as we used to call it) we were making up the green soft soap for the enemas. The soft soap was dissolved in boiling water in a big white enamel jug. It was made every day ready to lay up the trolley, along with the jugs, rubber pipes and funnels. There was a special way to lay up every trolley for each different procedure.

We had to clean and polish the bedpans and urinals; they were enamel and stainless steel. We had all the horrid jobs and a few that I remember were washing the bandages made of flannelette which were used on splints and for various other things. Some of these bandages were very soiled and had to be soaked m Lysol then washed with hard white soap, hung up to dry, then rolled ready for use again.

Lots of the children brought into hospital had fleas and lice and we had a foul smelling oil to put on their hair, then we had to put a bandage made into a cap on their head, these bandages also had to be used again and again. Also, horror of horrors, cleaning the metal spittoons (I heave now at the thought of it.)

Another job was dragging screens about. They were heavy metal and had pretty cotton curtains on them. One screen did not cover half the bed, so it usually took three of these screens to completely hide it, leaving enough room for you and your trolley to do your work.

When sister arrived at the door at 8am - one hour after us - every bed would have been made, comers neatly pleated, castors of the beds turned in and the openings of the pillowcases away from the door. Sister had a table in the middle of the ward, and we used to gather round her with sleeves rolled down and cuffs on, ready for her to give us our instructions. We were not allowed to take notes then, everything she told us we had to remember.

Night duty was worse because you had to accompany the night sister when she did her round; this was about an hour after being on duty. You had to tell her the name and diagnosis of every patient) without notes of any kind. The first night on the ward was the worst, as you had to get to know every patient yourself. During the night we also had to fill drums with gauze. This had to be cut and folded in different sizes, roll cotton wool into balls and larger rolls of cotton wool. Before packing rubber gloves we had to wash and powder them. All this had to be done when I first started nursing, but as the years went on things became much easier with the invention of disposables (C.S.S.D.). These changes were due to the N.H.S. which started in 1948, the Salmon Report of 1966, and re-organisation in 1972. Each time I returned to work in hospitals over the years the changes were very much for the better and life was made much easier for the nurses. Earlier the prejudices and injustices that went on were terrible. One example was when I was going to become engaged to Bill Ewins. His mother had arranged a party for us and I had booked the weekend off well in advance, bearing in mind we were only allowed one weekend off per month. On the Friday morning, the day before my weekend off, I was told I could not have it as the "off duty" roster had to be re-organised owing to a senior nurse being off sick. I went home in tears to my mother and told her I could not go to my own engagement party. She said "You will go and you will take it. Don't worry, I will ring the hospital". So I took the weekend off. My mother had telephoned but on Monday morning I was sent for by Matron, and given a right ticking off. I told her the truth, and said I had requested and been granted the weekend off weeks before. She told me I was ridiculous to get engaged when there was a war on.

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