No Time For Romance Read online

  ‘No sense to worry about a rocket,’ said the air raid warden. ‘If Jerry gets you with a direct hit, you’ve had it and you’re knocking up St Peter before your mates below’ve heard the one with your name on it. Don’t know how Jerry thinks up these things. Got a clever mind whoever thought this one up.’

  (The inventor of the V1s and V2s in Nazi Germany was Dr Werner von Braun who now (1976) and for many years has worked in the United States, mainly, I understand, in connection with the Space Programme.)

  A priest connected with the Old People’s Home told me, ‘Many of my old folk nearly passed on when they heard the second roar. They thought a second rocket had landed on them.’

  ‘I’d have thought the same, Padre. Considering their ages, they’ve been incredibly lucky.’

  He was very tall, gaunt, and looked straight into my face with dark, sunken eyes. ‘Not lucky, nurse. Your prayers were answered.’

  Later I repeated this to Sister and added, ‘I felt horribly guilty as I keep forgetting to pray off rockets and hadn’t the nerve to tell him.’

  Sister placidly suggested I send up a blanket prayer to keep off rockets for the duration. ‘Don’t you think that’ll cover the situation?’

  I was very angry that night. They were nice old ladies and, from what they had said, they had enjoyed their Home. ‘Sister, I don’t dare think on this sort of day.’

  ‘Wise girl,’ she said.

  And Wilfred Owen in another war and another time: ‘Happy are these who lose imagination …’

  There had been other times when thought had to be suspended and imagination stifled, but never had I found either mental discipline so difficult, or downright impossible, as in that time and ward. Too often to number the sight of so much grief, pain, misery and courage rekindled a terrible, silent, anger – and taught me to hate screens. The ordinary screens we used to provide privacy round the beds as none then had bed curtains. Ordinary portable screens on solid feet, not wheels, that had to be lifted into position and carried to and fro on the hip in the approved method long taught by Sister Preliminary Training School. For normal purposes – bedpans, blanket baths, dressings – two screens. For the dangerously ill, the dying, the dead – three screens. Before the removal of a dead patient, screens outstretched on either side of the ward to shut out all the beds whilst the mortuary trolley was wheeled away feet first. All live patients on stretchers, head first. And at certain times screens fixed half-open at strange angles all round the ward to save those patients with undamaged eyesight from seeing certain faces. Faces nursed unbandaged to promote better healing, and heavily dusted with the yellow penicillin powder we were using for the first time and which the artificial light made more garish: the faces of women and girls, all that I nursed, Londoners, and mostly from Lambeth – or to be accurate, what remained of their faces.

  Women, generally, were good patients. Nowhere have I nursed better than in that ward at that time. Very few of those patients had had more than the minimum state education, some had begun earning at thirteen, some at eleven. Some lived and some died, but all did both with patience, courage and dignity. Some even managed – and God alone knew how in their circumstances – to meet horror with humour. When London was suffering the Great (bubonic) Plague, her citizens sang Ring o’ Roses.

  Ring-a-ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies,

  At-tishoo – at-tishoo – we all fall down!

  Amongst the symptoms of bubonic plague are a red ring round the mouth, violent sneezing, and collapse.

  So that time:

  ‘Come to put some more pretty yeller powder on one of the ruins what ’Itler knocked abaht a bit, duck?’

  ‘Just call me Nelson, nurse! Done alright with ’is one an only didn’t ’e? An’ when they ’as me up along of ’im dahn Trafalgar Square them ruddy pigeons’ll ’ave to watch it!’

  And:

  ‘Nurse, before she comes round from the anaesthetic be sure to check there’s no mirror in that handbag her family have just brought up … Nurse, take that powder compact and put it in the desk drawer … Nurse, I think we need a screen moved – down beyond the end bed to shut off the sterilizers.’

  The highly polished silvered sides of the large bowl and smaller instrument sterilizers fixed to a panel at one side of the wall by the ward doorway made distorting mirrors, but still mirrors.

  At times the ward entrance seemed haunted by huddled little groups of anxious, exhausted relatives. Civilians in the last war were provided with identity cards but not identity discs. Women of all ages most frequently carried their personal papers in their handbags. The rescuer’s first object was to save lives, not property. Often, for hours and longer, our admissions were nameless.

  ‘Sister, please – we’re looking for me mum – elderly party – white hair – oh – er – maybe seventy odd – that’s right isn’t it, Bill – mum’s passed seventy – have you got her, Sister – have you got her?’

  ‘I can’t find me wife, nurse – can’t find her nowhere – oh – well – let me think – oh – red hair and blue eyes – yeah, blue eyes – slim like – thirty-two but she don’t like to say – is she in here?’

  ‘For Gawd’s sake, nurse, have you got a little girl? Eleven – little girl eleven – me Nora – dark hair – short like – but big for her age she is – for Gawd’s sake – have you got her – please—?’

  In one of the bathrooms outside the ward was a special, small table holding the ward stock brandy bottle and medicine glasses on a round tray. The distraught relatives were taken first to that bathroom. ‘Would this be your mother’s shawl? Cardigan … ? Your wife’s coat? Dress … ? Your little girl’s skirt? Jumper?’

  Often the clothes were stiff with dried blood; always they were impregnated with dust, soot and plaster. When there was time they were arranged in tidy bundles; when there was not they lay heaped in the empty baths.

  ‘That’s hers! Oh, thank Gawd! Can I see her, please – now? How is she?’

  And after, the brandy was needed.

  Or, ‘Nah. Nah. She never wore them …’

  ‘Have you tried Brooke Street (Hospital)? St James’s, Balham? Well, why not try your nearest Warden’s Post again? They may have more names by now … Yes, we do hope so … Yes, we are very sorry – wish we could’ve helped …’

  We gave them tea and when the brandy ran out and was down at the dispensary being refilled, Amon. Aromat. (sal volatile). We tried to give them comfort but there is no comfort for those still unsure if the people they love are alive or dead.

  The shawl belonged to Mrs B, a First World War widow who had supported a family and herself by dressmaking. ‘Fifteen hours a day I worked until me youngest left school, nurse, and then it was only the nine or ten, dear. I’ve always been handy with my needle. Ever so lucky, that.’ Mrs B, blinded by a flying bomb, and badly injured. A few weeks after her death her eldest, married daughter came back to the ward with her mother’s life savings. Ten pounds. ‘Mum asked me special to see it went to her nurses here.’ After it had been tactfully explained that in no circumstances could any St Thomas’s nurse accept a gift of money from a patient: ‘Oh no, we couldn’t keep it for the family! I promised Mum special! Will it be alright then if I give it to help build again like it says on the boxes outside? Mum’ll give it to old Thomas’s that way and she’d want that.’

  From the Blitz in ’40 the collecting boxes had been fixed to the wall outside the main entrance to Casualty and labelled: ST THOMAS’S IS DOWN – BUT NOT OUT. PLEASE HELP US REBUILD.

  Josie had no time to save. Josie was my age, twenty-three, had the same near-black hair and previously, from her family’s description, the same very pale complexion. Her maternal grandfather had been an Italian immigrant who had settled in Lambeth and married a local girl. Even by current ward standards, Josie’s injuries were gross. She had come home on leave from one of the Women’s Services and a posting well out of the bombs’ range and stopped to watch ‘the funny little thing stre
aking fire turn off its engine’. That was her last sight on earth.

  For several days I was her special day nurse and, as almost invariably happens when a nurse spends so many uninterrupted hours with a ‘special’ patient, we became great friends. She could just talk and loved talking. She talked about her friend in the Navy on the Atlantic run, her service mates, her family, but never of herself or the future. One evening as I sat by her, feeding beaten egg and milk into her gastric tube, she suddenly turned her head away. ‘Ta, duck. That’s me lot.’

  ‘You’ve only had half, duckie. Try a little more. It’ll do you good.’

  She turned her head my way and slowly groped for my arm. ‘Want to ask you something, N. Andrews.’

  ‘Sure, Josie, what?’

  ‘If you were me, duck – would you want to be done good?’

  We were friends and she trusted me not to lie. I couldn’t answer.

  She gave my arm a tap. ‘Ta, duck. You been ever so kind. You all been ever so kind. Ta. Ever so.’

  In the early hours of the following morning Josie died in her sleep.

  That afternoon one of her many female cousins came up to collect her few possessions. She was a youngish married woman and her pretty, sensible, face was creased with compassion. ‘Poor kid. Lovely looker she was. Dottie Lamour the boys used to call her. Just as well she never knew proper what they done to her.’

  I let that go. No one had told Josie, but she had known.

  The cousin continued: ‘I feel badly not coming up to see her more than the once, but they said just her mum and dad when she was took that poorly – and – tell you honest, nurse – not sure I could have bring meself to come back. Don’t know how you nurses and the Sister stick it in here – honest, I don’t. Wouldn’t have your job for a fortune, and couldn’t do it, neither, if they give me a fortune. But there – like as they says – you got to be born to it to be a nurse.’

  I didn’t tell her, but I was not a born nurse and nor, before 1939, had the idea of nursing ever occurred to me. I was made a trained nurse by the Second World War, the Nightingale Training-School, St Thomas’s Hospital, and my antecedents.

  Chapter Two

  My father, William Henry Andrews, was born in London in 1876 and, though he never again lived there after 1896, all his life he thought of himself as a Londoner and had a deep, nostalgic affection for the city. In later life he often told us of the London of his youth, of music halls, Marie Lloyd, Little Titch, ‘swells’, ‘mashers’ and straw boaters worn at outrageous angles. But he said little of his childhood and of the lasting scar left by the death of his mother, Elizabeth, when he was eight. He then had two elder brothers and a younger sister and brother. Their father, a Master in the Mercantile Marine (later Merchant Navy), was mostly away at sea, the children were split between relatives; the three youngest went to one family, the two elder boys to another. Father was still a child when the family was temporarily united by their father’s second marriage in which another son and daughter were born.

  From the one extant photograph of my paternal grandfather, in middle age in his sea captain’s uniform, he looked rather like King Edward VII at the same age, but had much harder eyes. Not long after it was taken he died after being injured on his bridge in a bad storm at sea. Of his five sons, only the eldest, Matthew, followed him to sea and became a ship’s Master for many years that included the First World War. According to Father, Matthew throughout the war never lost a ship because he invariably nailed the Red Ensign to his mast and confused the U-boat commanders into thinking any ship sailing so openly under the British flag could not be the unarmed merchantman she appeared and must be some form of Q-ship.

  Matthew and Father lived to retire and die in their beds. Harry, the second son, and John, the fourth, were killed fighting in the First World War. John was Father’s great friend amongst his brothers and his death haunted Father for years, though by 1914 all four brothers had gone their separate ways.

  In, I think, 1894, Father went into the old Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable and Wireless). In 1896 the ETC first sent him abroad to the Seychelles, and until he retired in 1932 he spent his working life in the Company’s African and Mediterranean stations. From the few yellowing, carefully posed Victorian photographs, as a young man Father was thin as paper, had the face of an innocent aesthete and an enchanting smile. Age altered him little and in his sixties he weighed no more than in his twenties.

  The ETC had transferred Father to Gibraltar when, in 1912, at a ball at Government House he was introduced to Lucilla Quero-Béjar, the elder of the two daughters of a Spanish doctor. Mother was a very slim, attractive girl of twenty, with beautiful dark eyes and hair; then, as ever, she spoke fluent English with a strong Andalusian accent. After the ball she told her sister, ‘I’m going to marry that Englishman.’ Her mother was appalled. ‘Who is this Englishman? What do we know of him? Nothing! He could be a nobody! No daughter of mine is marrying such a man – say no more!’

  My maternal grandmother – whom we always called Grandmama with a capital G – was a strong-minded lady, but her eldest daughter and future son-in-law had equally strong minds. Father had already decided he wanted to marry that fetching little Señorita Whatsit-Whatsit and had better call on her father to ask if he could pay his respects. When he did so he found an unexpected ally.

  I have always wished my maternal grandfather, who died in 1914, had lived long enough for me to know him. Luis Quero-Béjar was a man of humour, intelligence and remarkably advanced opinions and ideas for his time and social background. Born the youngest son of a duke’s daughter he endured the rigid conventions of the nineteenth century Spanish aristocracy until his thirties when he shocked family and friends by entering the University of Madrid to read medicine and, after qualifying, worked as a General Practitioner for the rest of his life. He spoke little English and Father as little Spanish, but the two men seem to have liked and understood each other. He told his wife, ‘That Englishman is a good man who will make Lucilla a good husband.’ As he was a Victorian father and Spanish husband, once his permission was given, the matter was settled. My parents were married in Gibraltar on 6th October 1913. Despite the differences in age, nationality, outlook and background, for the thirty-one years of their marriage they remained devoted lovers and each other’s greatest friend.

  A couple of months after the marriage Father was transferred to Alexandria and from there to Mozambique. Mother never saw her father again and possibly the shock of his sudden death from a stroke, her youth and living in the tropics for the first time combined to delay her conceiving her first child for a few years. Then my elder sister, Elizabeth (Betty), was born on a Portuguese ship off the coast of Zanzibar. Betty was nine months old when Father was transferred to Suez where Luis, who died in infancy, then myself (Lucilla Matthew) and then John, were born. John on the same day, 21st April 1926, as the then Princess Elizabeth.

  By then Betty and I were installed in the small private boarding-school in Sussex where Betty had been sent when she was seven; I joined her at three-and-a-half. The school stood in its own fairly extensive grounds on wooded down-land a few miles inland from the coast and had about sixty boarders and no day-girls, or only very rarely. As far as I know, the school had no reputation for academic merit, but amongst expatriate parents it was highly regarded as a safe and healthy sanctuary for their daughters. Whilst I was there, most pupils were the children of parents stationed in the various outposts of the still massive British Empire. The maps of the world on the classroom walls were ringed with the pink patches that marked British possessions and every new girl was thrust at a map: ‘Where’s your Mummy and Daddy? Ours are – here!’ Then, ‘What does your Daddy do? Ours is a manager in the ETC … the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank … the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company …’ The children of Empire exiles learnt to appreciate protocol before shedding their milk teeth.

  The Empire provided our fathers with jobs, reasonably good or very good incomes, large hou
ses or bungalows, hosts of servants, active if strictly limited social lives and, for those who loved music, books and the theatre, usually years of deprivation. It provided our mothers with constant leisure that some translated into boredom, and others accepted as a natural right. It provided for both parents the ultimate prospect of retiring on restricted pensions to Britain to live out their lives amongst strangers, often the more strange for speaking a common tongue but not the same language. Many never lived to retire. Malaria, yellow fever, blackwater fever, dysentery, typhoid, rabies, tetanus, heat stroke and cirrhotic livers were just a few of the occupational hazards of Empire exiles before the discovery of penicillin and the antibiotic shield, when vaccinations and immunizations were in their medical infancy. Only the fittest survived. The thousands of children’s graves in the British cemeteries that ringed the world with the pink patches were part of the price of the British Empire to the British. Very rare was the exiled parent spared the agony of watching a beloved small child die. I never saw my father in tears or ever losing his Victorian self-control. It was not until after his death that mother told me he had wept all night after Luis died.

  Generally when a child was about seven the parents had to decide how the family was to be split. There were two main choices: send the child ‘home’ to boarding-school in Britain; send mother and child ‘home’ and maintain a separate long-term home there. There was no air travel. Sea voyages were long, expensive additions to the boarding-school fees, and were seldom subsidized by the father’s employers. Leaves were mostly either three months every three years, or six months every five. Our parents chose the former; my husband’s parents in India at the same time, the latter. Neither solution has seemed to me satisfactory, but probably there was no satisfactory solution. Either way, children and at least one parent became strangers and the younger the child at the split, the wider the subsequent gap – in comparison with which the overrated modern Generation Gap is a hairline crack. Parents and children who habitually, or only in the school holidays, share the same roof, do recognize each other across a street. When parents and growing children are reunited after an interval of years, they can find each other physically unrecognizable.