I arrived a day too early for my hospital interview and was dispatched to a boarding house, instructed to go straight there, with no messing about. ‘There are no sights worth seeing here,’ I was warned. ‘Get yourself a room, something to eat, stay inside, and come back tomorrow.’ I spent that night listening to freakish, animalistic howls coming from the street outside. I stared at the ceiling that sagged above my head, convinced it would collapse if I shut my eyes. In the morning, the landlady told me, in a voice like a pipe-smoking mariner, that I could not have porridge that morning because a mouse had drowned in it.
The next day at the hospital, when I saw the nurses gliding about like starched icebergs, it was impossible to imagine I could ever be one of them. Matron’s portrait hung on the wall outside her office and may as well have been Queen Victoria herself. Nursing positions were hard to come by. There were applications and interviews, and a girl’s background had also to be examined. For Matron Luckes’ nurses were a new breed, an attempt to professionalise the care of the sick, to employ educated women, and to submit them to a regime of intense and militaristic training. They were to work alongside doctors, and as such would have to demonstrate they could conduct themselves appropriately, behave with discipline and follow instruction to the letter. This was not an easily won opportunity; the support of doctors and governors had to be extracted over years. The wrong recruit could contaminate this brave new experiment, and there were already too many who felt threatened by the concept of a troop of professional women, an oxymoron in their view, and wanted it to fail. Despite the obstacles, I was accepted as a sister probationer.
The London Hospital offered care to the working classes of the East End. It was funded by donations, but that was never enough. Surgeons didn’t get paid at the hospital; they worked there for the experience and the reputation it earned them, and they made their money by private practice. We took all emergencies and accidents, being so close to the docks and located among the abattoirs, the bell foundry and the factories that crushed bones. A person could get drunk enough to forget their own name on fourpence worth of gin, but could not earn enough to eat, so most patients were malnourished. In Whitechapel, the music halls, the travelling navvies, the sweeps and the sailors were all thrown together. Desperation and lunacy were provoked by starvation, laudanum and alcohol; it was inevitable this would erupt on occasion, and that gave surgeons their opportunity. It was why they all came to the London; it was why Thomas came. Like vultures, to pick over the broken bodies and chase glory.
I soon learned it was best not to think about the scale of human despair or the sheer pointlessness of healing. The destitute were sent to the workhouse, the wealthy rooted out and sent away, but they all came and tried. There were syphilitic women with noses half sloughed off and swollen bellies that carried the same disease. There was the tide of infants brought in already dead, poisoned with opium or gin by their halfwit mothers. These women would cry and beg for help, wail about how they hated their children and couldn’t afford to feed or clothe them, but if ever I dared suggest they avoid having more, the abuse would come like a flood. Ceaseless childbearing was an inevitable curse to these women and they accepted their fate without question. When finding food and keeping warm was an all-consuming occupation, it left little appetite to improve one’s circumstances. I learned to keep my mouth shut, for no one wanted a priggish nurse lecturing them about abstinence. I’m sure I was most annoying when I was still trying in earnest.
Soft-cheeked boys would be carried in by old dockers with faces like weasels. The canny older men gave the youngest the most dangerous jobs. I shall never forget the two Polish brothers, one fourteen, the other nine or ten. The older one came in carrying the younger. They had a job of putting in rivets, and the older one had dropped a piece of scalding metal in the eye of his brother, who would now lose it. The next day the older brother was back, having tried to burn his own eye out with a scalding iron. When asked why, he said their mother had told him to do it; to make it fair before God.
*
By the time Emma Smith was brought into the receiving room in April 1888, I’d seen three years of the futility of Whitechapel at the London. I’d had my fill. Aisling had gone and I was barely eating or speaking. I was thoroughly miserable. Matron gave me the talk: how the resilience of her nurses was of utmost importance and that professionalism must be maintained at all costs. We were not individuals but a single mass working towards the same purpose. There was no time to indulge in personal issues. Her nurses were pioneers, no ordinary women, and all emotions must be suffered in stoic silence. Scared of losing my job, and now alone, I convinced her I could work.
Sister Park had been moved into my room. She was pleasant enough, but no Aisling, and I resented her for that. Having this stranger in what had been our space, singing and forcing her gaiety on me, was torture. I had to fight the
