The Secret Armour Read online

  He said cheerfully and obviously, ‘At sea.’

  I lifted one corner of the dressing gingerly, I was not sure if this was something I could do or whether I would need to call Mallinson.

  ‘I rather guessed that,’ I said, my mind on the dressing. ‘I just wondered what happened?’

  ‘Then you’d better read the books, Nurse,’ he said shortly, ‘or better still go to the movies. You’ll find out far more about the Big War at Sea that way. My own little saga is far too boring to repeat.’

  It was a dressing I could do, and on the bed-table against the wall I now noticed a covered dressing-tray. Then I remembered what he had said. I was going to make a crack about the Silent Service when I saw he was frowning. I said, ‘I see,’ and walked over to the hand-basin and began to scrub my hands. My back was to him when he spoke again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nurse. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. It’s merely,’ he hesitated, ‘merely that I’m no great believer in reliving the past.’

  I rinsed the soap off my hands. ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about, Mr Corford. It was my fault. I talk too much.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re a very nice tactful little soul, Nurse Howard, and you should do very well at your chosen career.’

  ‘That’s a cheerful thought,’ I said honestly, as I turned round. ‘I’m going to need a lot of tact if I’m going to survive the next three months in this ward.’

  ‘Three months,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘yes. That’s just about right.’ I did not understand, and said so. ‘What I meant was that you and I should both be back in circulation at the same time, Nurse Howard.’

  ‘Yes.’ I still could not follow him, but I was in the middle of his dressing, and I was wondering if I was doing it properly and whether I was being too slow.

  ‘Is that comfortable, Mr Corford?’ I straightened, and stood back from the bed.

  He looked up at me in silence for a few seconds, then he said, ‘That’s grand, thanks. Grand.’ He sounded almost surprised. That did not worry me. I was surprised myself. It was the first time I had done any dressing without supervision.

  A bell buzzed outside with the urgency that bells have at night. I drew his curtains, turned out the light. ‘I’ll have to answer that,’ I told him. ‘Good night, Mr Corford. Sleep well.’

  The indicator in the corridor glowed scarlet. The patient in bed seven in the spinal ward was ringing. I raced along the balcony. Mallinson met me at the kitchen door.

  ‘That’s Maitland wanting his codeine. I’ll see to him. You had better get on with your routine in the kitchen. And make some coffee.’

  ‘Who has coffee, Nurse?’

  ‘We do. In relays. After Night Sister’s round. It’s quite official. And don’t forget to keep an eye on the indicators. I turn off the sound at eleven, and we have to rely on the lights.’

  William Brown was in the oldest block in the hospital. It was due to be closed down at any minute to make way for a fine new block that was to match the rest of the hospital. The only points against this prospective demolition were that the beds were always filled, and there was no room anywhere else in the hospital for the orthopaedic patients. The introduction of each bed having its own bell, which had occurred during the past year, showed that William Brown was not yet ready to be reduced to dust and ashes.

  I put the coffee and milk on the stove with one eye on the unlit kitchen indicator. Nurse Mallinson came back when the coffee was ready. ‘Sister’s late,’ she remarked. ‘I expect she’s held up in Luke. They always have a crisis at night.’ She took a cup from the dresser and as she moved over to the stove she noticed my glance into the small mirror that hung over the refrigerator. ‘Your cap’s all right,’ she said. ‘At least, as all right as I imagine it ever is with hair like yours.’ Then she looked at me again. ‘You’re awfully pale. Do you feel pale?’

  ‘I feel green,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see if I looked it.’

  ‘Get any sleep to-day? I suppose not. One never does on the first day.’

  ‘I had about an hour. I went to bed at three; Home Sister made me. I just feel sick. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Night duty,’ said Mallinson calmly, ‘it always gets you that way at first. I can’t explain it, it just does. I’ll get you some soda bic.’ She went out, and was back in a couple of minutes with a medicine-glass. ‘Knock that back, Howard, and you’ll be all right.’

  Night Sister arrived when I was measuring out the breakfast oatmeal. She was very slim, very fair, and, in the electric light, very good-looking. At our own breakfast next morning she seemed twenty years older. In daylight her face was pale as a winter’s dawn over London, and her shoulders were not slim, but thin and wearily hunched Her name was Miss Selsom, and she managed to make her dark blue uniform dress seem sophisticated. She was known as the most popular Sister in Benedict’s.

  She swayed into the kitchen on neat, high heels. ‘Well, Nurse Howard, so you’ve come to join the night staff? I hope you will be happy with us.’ She turned to Mallinson. ‘How are they all, Nurse?’

  ‘All sleeping, thank you, Sister.’

  ‘Isn’t that good?’ said Sister. ‘Let’s go and have a look at them.’

  Nurse Mallinson held open the kitchen door for her. Sister hesitated. ‘Nurse Howard!’

  ‘Yes, Sister?’

  ‘You’re very white, child, and I don’t think it’s only the lighting. You had better go and get some fresh air on the balcony. Nurse and I will be in the spinal ward, and Miss Parks is up the other end. You’ll be all right if you stay there for ten minutes. The first night on duty is always the worst.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Sister.’ I followed them out gratefully.

  The night air was cold on my bare arms, but I preferred feeling cold to feeling bilious. I leant over the balcony rail and stared down into the darkness. Below, hidden by the night, lay the hospital park. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw an occasional white coat, a white cap and apron, float, apparently bodilessly, across the black grass. Across the park from William Brown lay the main medical block. Luke Ward was on a level with myself. The light from the uncurtained sluice-room windows outlined the beds of the tuberculous patients on the balcony. The heaped pillows and sleep-sagging heads of the patients threw strange shadows on the walls behind them. The night was quiet. I heard a cough, and then the clink of a glass of water being replaced on a stone floor.

  The theatre block stood far off on my right. It was built at an angle to William Brown, and only one corner of the five-storey building was visible to me now. One of the theatre corridor doors swung open, and a night porter wheeled an empty oxygen-cylinder down the balcony towards the outside lift. He left the doors wide open behind him, and I saw the white walls of an anaesthetic room lined with rows of black cylinders. The cylinders looked like nightmare teeth, grinning wickedly into the night.

  At four in the morning Mr Corford appeared in the kitchen doorway. Nurse Mallinson looked up from the report she was writing as she drank her tea, and frowned. ‘Mr Corford, what do you think you are doing, putting weight on that leg without your calliper?’

  He limped into the kitchen and hung over his crutches. ‘Now don’t take on, Nurse Mallinson! There’s a good girl! I’m not using it at all. All I want is a nice cup of tea.’

  ‘What do you suppose you’ve got a bell for?’ she asked coldly, then nodded to me. ‘Give him one, Nurse. But you must have it in bed, Mr Corford! Mr Vanders would murder me if I let you play around this way.’

  He said, ‘I don’t want to bother Nurse.’

  ‘What do you think we’re here for?’ she said wearily. ‘Take it back for him, Nurse Howard, and for goodness’ sake put his crutches out of reach. Really, Mr Corford, I can’t think what’s come over you to start fooling about this way.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Nurse. I apologize, humbly. I know I didn’t oughta’ done it!’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nurse Howard,’ he said again when we had reached
his room. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb your teatime.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I had finished tea.’ I could have added that my stomach had not allowed me to start my tea. Instead I offered to close his curtains. ‘It’ll be light soon, and you may not be able to get back to sleep.’

  He said, ‘I don’t think I want to go back to sleep. Could you leave them as they are, please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘You don’t sound very happy about it. What’s wrong? Or are you too shocked by my reckless behaviour?’

  ‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have known it was reckless unless Nurse Mallinson had told me. I was just thinking that it’s only a quarter-past four now, and you should sleep more.’

  His hair was very dark brown; he had turned his face on his pillow, and his whole head was in the shadow. I could not see his expression when he spoke again. ‘How splendid it must be to have a one-track mind.’

  It was the first time I had been up all night, and I had eaten nothing for nine hours. I clung on to Sister Preliminary Training School’s maxim, ‘The patient is always right, Nurses. To his ‒ or her ‒ face.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I hope you sleep again, Mr Corford.’

  Back in the kitchen, Mallinson was still annoyed. ‘That wretched young man! He knows quite well there would be the most ungodly row, even with Selsom, if he was discovered joining us at morning tea. Patients and nurses do not mix! Even if the patient is the S.S.O.’s brother!’ She glanced up at me seriously. ‘You do at least know that?’

  ‘Yes, Nurse.’

  She sighed. ‘Thank Heaven for small mercies! Ah, well. You had better read my report. Then you’ll see how to write them. I’ll nip along and have a look at Langley. He generally wakes about now, and loves an extra cup of tea.’ She stood up and filled a feeding-cup as she spoke.

  ‘Do you feed him, Nurse? Miss Parks had given him his cocoa last night before I discovered what happened.’

  ‘No. He hates being fed, and he’s wonderful at managing alone. You just have to see his drinks are the right temperature.’

  I said, ‘Will he be able to see again, Nurse?’

  She rubbed her eyes. ‘Am I tired!’ Then she said, ‘I dunno. No one does yet. Not even Mr Mere (the ophthalmic surgeon). Not till his bandages come off.’

  ‘Does Langley know that?’

  ‘Perhaps not in so many words, but he’s got the general idea. That’s why he’s so dead keen to do everything for himself. He told me once, “If I ’as to manage, ducks, I ’as to manage. And that’s a fact.” ’ She tested the side of the feeder. ‘Too hot.’

  ‘But, Nurse …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s awfully young.’

  ‘Twenty-three,’ she said flatly. ‘My age. And his lights may have gone out.’ She smiled briefly, without humour. ‘Don’t worry, young Howard, I always get dramatic at this time of the morning. The melancholy of many dawns. You’ll be the same one day. But to get back to Langley. In actual fact, as he would say himself, his lights won’t never go out. So-help-him.’

  ‘You mean he will see?’

  ‘My good child, who am I, when even old Mere doesn’t know? No, his inner light ‒ courage, what-have-you, common or garden, patients, for the use of.’ She tested the feeder again, and nodded to herself. ‘I’ll take this now, and you sit down and read that report.’

  I sat down at the table, and the kitchen revolved gently round me. I tried to read her words, but the letters would not stay still. After a couple of attempts I gave it up, and just sat at the table thinking of the night, of Langley and his eyes, the helpless men in the spinal ward, Mr Corford and how angry Mallinson had been. His name reminded me of the milk last night, and I shuddered in memory. I found I was turning the pages of the report-book, and my eyes focused properly on a list of admissions. I recognized only one name ‒ David St Clair Corford. Age: Twenty-eight. Religion: C. of E. Single. Next-of-kin: Mr Alistair Corford, Benedict’s. Only nine years older than myself, I thought casually. I would have thought him even older.

  At five we officially ‘started work.’ An orgy of tea-making, washings, bed-making, dressings, and temperatures began. Before I knew it had begun I was in a clean apron reporting off duty to Sister William Brown.

  Sister raised her eyebrows and turned to Mallinson. ‘Does it always fall asleep standing, do you suppose, Nurse Mallinson?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, Sister, thank you, Sister,’ I murmured mechanically.

  I cycled the half-mile that divided the orthopaedic block from the Night Nurses’ Home. It was a lovely morning, the air clean and cold. I felt wide awake and ready to work all day. I decided I liked Mallinson and that Sister Willy Brown might be worse. Then, once again, I remembered how I had felt about the spilt milk. I shut my eyes, and ran into a group of resident students who were crossing the road to the hospital and breakfast. I fell off into the gutter.

  Chapter Two

  I KNOCK DOWN FIVE STUDENTS

  Someone picked up my bicycle, someone picked up my corridor cape, someone picked up my gloves. I picked myself up. They were all kind and civil, and quite unlike my imagined idea of medical students. Although I had worked eleven months in the wards, and the two months previous to them in the Preliminary Training School, I knew no students and few housemen by name. I was socially acquainted with none at all.

  There seemed to be dozens of them around me at that moment replacing the contents of my basket, helping me on to the machine. I saw them through a haze of sleep. I said I was very sorry and hoped I had not hurt them, and they said not at all, politely. ‘But perhaps,’ one of them suggested mildly, ‘it might be a sound scheme to try riding with your eyes open, Nurse. Just once in a while. The cops are fussy about these things. Not that we mind.’ The others nodded in unison, and I was now sufficiently awake to see there were only five of them. I was too sleepy to do more than smile and say, ‘Good-bye.’

  They all stepped warily on to the pavement, assured me once more that Benedict’s men were tough and never considered their days complete if they weren’t mown down by the night staff on their way to their ‒ the students’ ‒ breakfast.

  The Night Nurses’ Home was only thirty yards away. As I wheeled my bicycle into the rack by the front door I saw one of the students was standing on the opposite pavement watching me. He waved and called something, I could not hear what. I waved back and went in.

  Alice Fell, my next-door room neighbour, one of my own set of nurses, and my best friend in the hospital, was leaning against the closed gates of the lift-shaft in the hall, her finger on the bell. ‘I suppose there are more ways than one of getting to know the boys, Maggie,’ she said, ‘but you ought to be more careful. You might have hit a tram.’

  I leant against the gates beside her. ‘There aren’t any trams, now.’

  ‘How do you know? You were too far gone just now to notice half the rugger team. I saw you. Sailing along with your eyes shut.’

  The lift arrived at that moment. ‘Not half,’ I said, opening the gates, ‘only a third.’

  The lift had reached our floor, the sixth, before Alice made any comment. ‘The odd thing about you, Maggie, is that you always take in far more than one thinks. It’s probably because you’re small and wander round with that two-year-old-lost-in-a-big-city expression that one imagines you must have a two-year-old mentality.’

  ‘A wide-open-playing-fields expression is what you mean, ducks. And that’s unavoidable if you’ve been raised in the wilds of Kent, as I have.’

  Alice said she didn’t know about that; she thought it was possibly a plain case of mental arrestment. ‘But you haven’t told me,’ she went on, ‘and I didn’t like to ask at breakfast with Mallinson sitting opposite, how did you enjoy the night?’

  I thought a second. ‘It was all right,’ I said. ‘Quite fun.’

  Alice stood still in the middle of the corridor. ‘Quite fun! With the old bulldozer herself! You can’t mean it?
’ She gaped at me in patent disbelief, then her jaw sagged. ‘I believe you do mean it.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see much of Sister Willy Brown,’ I said apologetically, ‘and Mallinson seems a honey.’

  ‘Mallinson’s all right,’ she said, ‘and orthopod patients are always nice. Even so, when I was there on days the night pros were scared out of their wits by the time daylight and the Old Girl came.’

  ‘The patients are nice,’ I agreed, and led the way into my room. She dropped heavily on to my bed. ‘In fact it was honestly fine and dandy, apart from the slight snag that I felt sick all night and Mallinson had to dose me with soda bic. That,’ I said, as I sat on the arm of my one easy-chair and took off my shoes, ‘that and my poor, poor, feet.’

  She said she was quite glad to hear it. ‘You had me worried, Maggie. No one, in their right mind, could enjoy Sister Willy B.’

  I said, ‘She wasn’t too bad.’ I rubbed my ankles.

  ‘You didn’t hit your head when you came off your cycle? You aren’t concussed or anything, Maggie?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  She unbuckled her belt and exhaled in relief. ‘You sound daft.’ She sighed. ‘It’s probably me. We had hell’s own flap in Luke all night. Two haemop’s and, for good measure, one haematem! Talk about bloody awful! I’ve been sluicing sheets all night. The sluice looked like a laundry this morning.’

  ‘What was a haemop doing among all your tubercles?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Alice, ‘I’m the ruddy junior pro. But one thing I do know, and that’s that those final-year boys will be glad of their breakfast this morning. Most of them spent the night chez Luke!’

  ‘The bunch I ran into?’ She nodded. ‘How do you know they are final years?’

  ‘I’m always chaperoning for them,’ she said. ‘Surely, Maggie, you’ve chaperoned for them? In Elizabeth?’

  ‘I’ve only chaperoned once. In my first week, when I was on loan for the evening to Agnes Small. I was too terrified at that stage to so much as look at the wretched student, far less remember what he looked like.’