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WAR ON THE WARDS

In the summer of 1944 I was working as a civilian nurse at Mount Vernon hospital.
One morning, going on duty to my assigned ward, I found that during the night a bizarre event had taken place. In the forty-bedded ward were 20 Free French patients and 20 German wounded prisoners of war! At each end of the ward was an armed British soldier. All the men were far too ill to think of fighting each other and were only too glad to be washed, their wounds dressed and be fed and made comfortable. It appeared that this mix-up had also occurred in the next ward, so for 24 hours this odd condition continued. By the following morning all was sorted out and the Free French (and one young Dutch Resistance man) were all in my ward and the Germans in another pending their removal to a proper military hospital.

Our Free French stayed for a few weeks and we were able to practise our schoolgirl French. Our Dutchman had a bullet in his lungs and it proved impossible to remove it safely, but he made good progress and was visited by Queen Juliana, the exiled Queen of the Netherlands.

As student nurses of the parent Middlesex Hospital in London we moved around between the main hospital and the three emergency hospitals, Mount Vernon, Stoke Mandeville and Aylesbury. Patients normally came from the London hospital and were transferred by convoys of buses to the outlying hospitals after a few days.

The main hospital, the Middlesex, had to keep a number of wards empty and ready for air raid casualties. I was once in the dentist’s having a tooth out, when, just at the moment of extraction, a large landmine dropped about ¼ mile away. The dentist jumped, so did I, bits of tooth appeared for years afterwards! We both ran for the hospital to report for duty, and I spent the next few hours cleaning up ‘walking wounded’ in Casualty, and spitting my own bit of blood from time to time. After we’d seen the last patient safely away and cleaned the unit a kind medical student put a plug in my jaw, so I was no longer mistaken for another casualty.

Another memory of my wartime nursing days was in June 1944. The ‘buzz-bombs’ had started arriving, but we in London did not know anything about them. However, one morning going on duty to the research building where I had been assigned, I said good morning to the medical students who had been on the roof fire-watching. The three young men were white-faced and looked very shaken — they had just seen a pilotless plane going over at roof-top height. So I went down to make them a cup of tea, the treatment for shock I had been taught. Somewhat later I was sent for by Matron, and that was a terrifying prospect. It appeared that Matron had looked out of her flat window and seen a nurse’s cap on the roof of the building opposite! I explained about the shocked state of the students and she forgave me, though not without saying I had no business to be on the roof at all. It happened to be my birthday that day, so I have never forgotten the incident.

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