'Certainly, sir! How about you, Mr. Gordon? If I might advise you, sir, from my experience…'
'I'll have a bottle of gin,' I said. 'Can you put it on the slate until the New Year?'
'Of course, Mr. Gordon. You get your allowance quarterly, don't you? Anything you like, sir.'
Arm in arm, all four, we went singing to the Nurses' Home.
The gaunt dining-hall was dripping with paper chains, and a five-piece band was stuck up on a tinsel-ringed dais in one corner. There was a Christmas tree, a running buffet on trestles, streamers, paper hats, Chinese lanterns, and all the standardized trappings of respectable jollity. On a stage at one end, opposite the band, there sat throughout the evening the Matron, in full uniform. Next to her, also uniformed, were the three sister tutors. Behind them were five or six of the senior sisters in a row, and the lot were separated by sandwiches and sausage rolls on small tables. They were a jury that was constantly forming unspoken verdicts. Very little escaped them. If a girl danced with too many men or too few it was remembered until the end of her training, and if she turned up in an off-the-shoulder gown she might as well have had 'Hussy' tattooed across her clavicles.
There was an interval between dances when we arrived. We pushed our way up to the buffet.
'Look at that!' Benskin said in disgust, pointing to a row of glass jugs. 'Lemonade!'
He reached across the table and picked up a half-full pitcher.
'I think we might stiffen this a little,' he continued, with a shifty glance over his shoulder towards the stage. 'Hold the jug, old boy, while I get my flask out.'
He tipped his flask of whisky into the drink and I added half my bottle of gin.
'That should be more like it,' Benskin said with satisfaction, stirring the mixture with a jelly spoon. 'Guaranteed to bring the roses to the cheeks. One sip, and never a dull moment afterwards.'
He was still stirring when Mike Kelly appeared at the table with one of the operating theatre nurses.
'Mind if we join the party, Tony?' he asked. 'I've got some rum in my pocket.'
'Put it in, old boy!' Benskin invited him. 'Nothing like a lemonade cocktail to get the party going. That's right, pour the lot in. You didn't have much left, anyway.'
'The best part of half a bottle!' Kelly said indignantly. 'It's all I've got, too.'
'Fear nothing,' Benskin said, stirring rapidly. 'I know of secret caches. Now! Let us taste the devil's brew.'
He poured a little in six glasses and we sipped it with some foreboding.
'It's strong,' Benskin admitted, gulping. 'Odd sort of taste. I suppose that rum was all right, Mike? You hadn't been palmed off with a bottle of hooch, had you?'
'Of course it was all right. I got it off the Padre.'
'Oh well, it must be the lemonade. Cheers, everyone.' We had almost finished the jug when Harris pushed his way into the group.
'You dirty dogs!' he exclaimed angrily. 'You've pinched my blasted jug of lemonade! I had half a bottle of sherry and some crиme de menthe in that, too!'
I did not remember much about the dance. Isolated incidents came back to me in flashes the next day, like fragments of a dream. I recalled two gentlemen doing the old-fashioned waltz with their partners, catching the tails of their coats together, and covering the floor with broken glass and the best part of two bottles of gin; other gentlemen overcome with the heat and having to be assisted to the fresh air; nurse Footte laughing so loudly in my arms I noticed her uvula waggling in the back of her throat, and my thinking how horrible it was. All the students were drunk, and the Matron, being unaware of such things, beamed and thought she was giving these high-spirited young men a great evening. The next morning, however, she democratically joined in cleaning the hall herself and was horrified to find a hundred and thirty empty spirit bottles tucked away in the potted palms, behind the curtains, in the seats of the sofas, and on top of the framed portraits of her predecessors in office.
The nurses' dance marked the end of the Christmas holiday at St. Swithin's. Everyone knew that the next morning the operating theatres would start work again, new patients would be admitted, lectures would begin, and the students would troop round the bare and gloomy wards with their Chiefs. But that night it was still Christmas, and the hospital was alive with marauding students who leaped on the night nurses while they made cocoa in the ward kitchens. And they, dear girls, screamed softly (so as not to wake the patients) before surrendering themselves to their students' arms. After all, there had to be some compensations for being a nurse.
12
In the New Year I began work in the out-patient department. It was my first contact with the hard routine of the general practitioner's surgery. In the wards the patients are scrubbed, combed, and undressed, and presented to the doctors in crisp sheets; but in out-patients' they came straight off the streets and examination is complicated by clothes, embarrassment, and sometimes the advisability of the medical attendant keeping his distance.
The department was the busiest part of the hospital. It was centred round a wide, high green-painted hall decorated only by coloured Ministry of Health posters warning the' populace against the danger of spitting, refusing to have their babies inoculated, cooking greens in too much water, and indiscriminate love-making. There led off from the hall, on all sides, the assortment of clinics that it had been found necessary to establish to treat the wide variety of illnesses carried in through the doors every day. There were the big medical and surgical rooms, the gynaecological department and the ante-natal clinic, the ear, nose, and throat clinic, the fracture clinic, and a dozen others. The V.D. department was approached through discreet and unmarked entrances from the street; in one corner the infertility clinic and the birth control clinic stood next to one another; and at the other end of the hall were the shady confessionals of the psychiatrists.
On one side was a long counter, behind which four or five girls in white smocks sorted the case notes from their filing cabinets and passed them across to the patients with the carefully cultivated air of distaste mixed with suspicion employed by Customs men handing back passports. There were telephones in the middle of the hall for emergency calls, and, outside every clinic door, rows of wooden benches that looked as inviting to sit on as a line of tank-traps.
The department was run chiefly by the hospital porters. These were an invaluable body of men, without whom the work of the hospital would immediately have come to a standstill. They were experts at such common tasks beyond the ability of the doctors as directing patients to the correct department, holding down drunks, putting on strait jackets, dealing tactfully with the police, getting rid of unwanted relatives, and finding cups of tea at impossible hours. They stood, in their red and blue livery, inspecting with experienced Cockney shrewdness the humanity that daily passed in large numbers under their noses.
As soon as a patient entered the building he came up against a porter-a fat one sitting on a stool behind a high desk, like a sergeant in the charge-room of a police station.
'What's up, chum?' the porter demanded.
The patient would begin to mumble out his leading symptoms, but he would be cut short with 'Surgical, you,' or 'Throat department,' or the name of the appropriate clinic. The porters were the best diagnosticians in the hospital. They unerringly divided the cases into medical and surgical so that the patients arrived in front of the correct specialist. If a porter had made a mistake and consigned, for instance, a case of bronchitis to the surgical side, the complications that would have arisen and the disaster that might have overtaken the patient were beyond speculation.
After passing the porter the patient visited the counter to collect his case notes. St. Swithin's kept faithful records of its visitors, and several residents of the district had been neatly represented by a green folder containing the obstetrical notes of his birth, an account of the removal of his tonsils, the surgical description of the repair of his hernias, a record of his mounting blood pressure, and details of the postmortem following the final complaint that carried him off. Clutching his folder in one hand, he took his place at the end of the queue seated outside the door of his clinic. The queue shifted up the wooden seat as each patient was called inside by the stern-faced nurse at the door: the movement was slow and spasmodic, like the stirrings of a sleepy snake.
For the first half-hour the patient amused himself by reading carefully through his folder of confidential notes, comparing in his mind what the doctors had written about him with what they told him to his face. After a while this
