‘I’m glad to see you’re still here with us,’ Vera smiled.
‘I do hope I haven’t been an awful nuisance,’ Madge replied, wincing at the pain as she attempted to lift herself up to talk to her friend. She gave up and rested her head back on the pillow.
‘Hardly!’ Vera said. ‘You were good as gold on the night shift. But you won’t believe what Matron said.’
Apparently, as soon as the surgeon came out of the operating theatre, Matron had rounded on him and asked if the appendix had really been in a bad enough condition to warrant an emergency operation and take her nurse off duty.
‘You’ll never guess what he said!’ Vera went on. ‘He told her, “Madam, it was in such a dreadful condition that it is still aching in the jar,” and he said it completely straight-faced!’
Madge laughed so much that she almost pulled her stitches.
She recovered well from her operation but not quickly enough to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, which she spent cooped up as a patient. There had been fleeting visits from Vera and Phyl and birthday wishes from many of the boys on the wards, but as the sunny July afternoon wore on it had all the makings of the gloomiest birthday she could remember. The anaesthetic had taken a lot out of her and Madge was taking forty winks when Mum and the girls burst into the ward singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’, having caught the bus over from High Wycombe once school was finished for the day.
As there were ten wards in the services section of the hospital, when the new rosters went up there was always a scramble among the girls to see where they would be next. As luck would have it, after Madge’s return from sick leave she was allotted to the tightly knit team run by Professor Tommy Kilner, one of an elite group of brilliant surgeons who were practising what the hospital called ‘plastic surgery’. Along with Sir Harold Gilles he was one of just two plastic surgeons in the country in the early 1920s, and by 1940 he was still one of only four such surgeons.
Pipe-smoking Professor Kilner operated frequently at Stoke Mandeville on Allied air crew, many of whom had fought the Luftwaffe over ‘Hellfire Corner’ in the Battle of Britain.
‘Watch out, Graves,’ Clarissa, one of the EMS nurses, warned when the roster went up. ‘He runs his operating theatre like a military exercise.’
Madge soon found out, however, that he also loved a bit of fun.
Halfway through an operation in which he was reshaping the distorted features of a once fresh-faced young pilot he said to Madge, without looking up, ‘Please remove the patient’s glass eye now and put it in this wooden box. Don’t drop it under any circumstances,’ he added. ‘It will then need to be sterilised.’
Because the patient on the operating table was unconscious after the anaesthetic there was simply no way of knowing which eye was the glass one, and when Madge realised she didn’t know what to do, she felt very silly. She looked round in desperation for help and spotted one or two of the surgical team doing their level best not to laugh. Madge then looked over at the surgeon and realised he was almost smiling as well.
‘Very funny,’ she moaned when the penny finally dropped!
Professor Kilner made it clear to Madge and his hand-picked team that successful recuperation was a key element in patient recovery. The sight of young men walking around the hospital with new noses growing on their arms or stomachs became quite normal after undergoing operations that Professor Kilner called pedicle grafts.
Patients also had to wear an ‘aeroplane splint’ to keep an arm at ninety degrees while the skin that had been grafted grew straight and strong before being transplanted and shaped into a new nose. Madge found that she was in constant demand by men worried about the life-changing injuries and burns they had suffered. They weren’t always the most serious, but they were unquestionably the most disfiguring and, as a result, often the ones that caused the soldiers the most trauma.
The fact that Madge had seen these boys walking round the hospital grounds meant it wasn’t a complete shock when she first joined Professor Kilner’s team, and she found that her endless patience was a huge asset when she stayed behind, often long after her shift was over, to write deeply personal letters to girlfriends and parents for the incapacitated war heroes. She would encourage the boys to open their hearts and help them to add a signature and two big XXs.
Archie McIndoe, a New Zealander, was another plastic surgeon who worked at Stoke Mandeville as well as at the Burns Unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. He was always very charming and courteous to staff and patients alike. He and Tommy Kilner were chalk and cheese when it came to the way they dressed for surgery. McIndoe dressed in white, from head to toe, whereas Kilner looked as if he were wearing dark green pyjamas, and his surgical cap was the same colour. The only white items he wore were his boots. Both, however, were unified in telling their patients to look upon their wounds as badges of honour, and believed that the key thing in overcoming their psychological problems was to concentrate on leading normal lives, as much as was possible.
As Madge’s experience grew, she was given the responsibility of looking after several wards and became ever more certain that nursing was the route for her. The pace at the hospital increased dramatically with the influx of casualties brought home to England as brutal fighting continued in the weeks after the D-Day landings. It meant Madge was so madly busy she was almost able to forget the bitter disappointment of being rejected after responding to Lord Mountbatten’s plea for nurses to serve in the Burma Campaign. When the instructions from the Military Department of
