‘The strange thing was,’ she said, ‘that the other nurses who were rostered before me also ran out of needles. It seems that however carefully the syringes are counted, there never seem to be enough.’
‘Perhaps I can help,’ said Basil. ‘The least I can do is check the number of patients and try to shed some light on this problem once and for all.’
He could see that Madge was concerned, so that night he held the hurricane light as she carried out the injections. Everything was carefully checked and counted, but while greater love hath no man than one who holds a hurricane lamp as his beloved injects the bottoms of VD-infected soldiers, the number mix-up continued.
‘The only thing I can think,’ said Basil to Madge, ‘is that some of the earlier patients went back into the queue for another jab!’
At the end of her stint on nights Madge was carpeted once again by Matron Ferguson and asked to explain the needle shortage.
‘I simply don’t know,’ said Madge, ‘unless some of the men were injected twice. But that doesn’t make sense either.’
‘It’s not as silly as you think,’ said Matron. ‘We got one of the nursing sepoys to pretend he was preparing medicine in the ward when the injections were actually taking place and he spotted what they were doing. It turned out there was a group of soldiers who made sure they were always at the head of the queue and once they had been injected they would run to the back and line up again. They thought that by having double the dose of penicillin they would recover in half the normal time!’
Not for the first time Matron Olive Ferguson was smiling as she pointed to the door to dismiss a laughing Nurse Graves, who held up her hands, pleaded guilty and asked for these mitigating circumstances to be taken into account. ‘I’m afraid I find it impossible to identify bums in the dark.’
17
Christmas in Chittagong
Matron Ferguson had made it clear from the start that all her VAD and QA (Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps) sisters would be working on Christmas Day. The boys in the wards had to come first in all circumstances. Madge didn’t mind; the girls had been planning a good old-fashioned British Christmas since November. In a strange way Matron’s edict was comforting for Madge and Vera, who had looked at each other in amusement when they had heard that Christmas for nurses had again been cancelled. It reminded them of their time as trainees at Stoke Mandeville when Sister Crowley terrified even the doctors into making an appearance on the big day.
We’re in a different hospital in a different country and on a different continent but it is still the same for us nurses, Madge thought, when she had a closer look at the rotas pinned up in the mess hall. But she was so surprised that she had to look again. Her night duty had been due to begin the day before 25 December, but she had been put on the early shift from the morning of Christmas Day.
‘You know what that means?’ she said to Vera. ‘I can see Basil in the evening after all, and the way the days fall, we’ll also be able to go out for dinner on New Year’s Day for his twenty-second birthday.’
‘Forget his birthday, you still haven’t told us how you got on at the dance he invited you to at the Movements mess,’ said Vera, who was shushed as the Christmas planning meeting started. A little present for each and every patient was suggested, but ruled out because the number of troops arriving and those leaving varied enormously from week to week. A Christmas card each was vetoed for the same reason and Vera’s idea of having ‘a hamper or two sent over from Fortnum and Mason’ got the response it deserved. Eventually they agreed that Phyl’s suggestion of an English roast for Christmas lunch would be a treat above all else. They decided that the menu would be discussed with the kitchen staff to guarantee a meal that would remind one and all of home.
Roast beef was vetoed because of the upset that would be caused if a sacred cow suddenly disappeared, and nobody had even seen a turkey since they arrived in Chittagong. Madge pointed out that there seemed to be large numbers of scraggy-looking chickens scratching around the grounds. ‘What about roast chicken with bread sauce, roast potatoes and plenty of veg and gravy?’ she suggested.
56 IGH treated all nationalities and religions together but there were concerns that Hindus and Muslims might be upset by the celebration of a Christian religious festival in the wards. However, Sister Blossom pointed out that there had not been a problem over Christmas when she had worked in similar hospitals. ‘The main thing is to make sure all the patients have a good time,’ she said.
With the next nurses’ shift approaching rapidly the mini-meeting broke up. On their way down to the basha wards, two of the hens that had been earmarked for Christmas dinner wandered across the path in front of Madge and Vera, which made them both chuckle.
‘They can cluck, cluck, cluck all they like,’ said Vera, ‘but they will still be ending up in the pot. Now come on, Madge, how did that dance go?’
That was as far as the conversation went, however, because as they approached the main entrance there, larger than life, was Matron Ferguson talking to one of the doctors, so the two young nurses just smiled and went their separate ways.
‘Sorry for the delay over telling you about the dance, Miss Nosy Parker,’ smiled Madge when she sat down with Vera for a quick lunch later in the day,
