A Weekend in The Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2) Page 20

  I was wondering about this fish and automatically patting Christine’s back when I heard the door behind me open. I turned and saw Allan coming quickly into the nursery. He pulled a clean white cotton face-mask out of the glass container standing on a table by the door; he tied the mask over his face as he came towards the window. The strings of white tape made a coquettish and out-of-character bow on the top of his dark head.

  ‘Morning, Joanna. Is Sister in?’

  I shook my head reluctantly. Not that I minded that Sister was off duty or that Allan had come to do a round of the babies. I was merely sorry for the moment I had just lost.

  ‘Hallo, Allan,’ I said. ‘No, Sister has got the week-end off. Aren’t you rather early for your round?’

  ‘My good girl,’ said Allan firmly, ‘do you realize it’s only half-past eight? Can you see me doing a round on an empty stomach? No. I wanted to see the new chap. And you?’

  I smiled at him, although he could not see I was smiling because of my mask. The bow on his head was having an effect on Allan Kinnoch. Whatever he might be, he was never coy. I put Christine down in her empty cot, and we moved across the nursery to the new baby.

  ‘He’s a bit knocked about,’ I said as he stood over the cot. I flicked a shawl away. ‘He’s blue, too. He looks as if the going was tough. Was it?’

  Allan nodded. ‘It was,’ he said glumly. ‘It was tough on his poor mum too. I had to get up and greet the dawn with a neat bit of stitchery. That’s why I’m so early. It wasn’t worth going back to bed.’

  ‘Did you put on forks?’

  ‘No.’ Allan hesitated. ‘I wonder if I should have. He certainly had a tough struggle,’ he added again.

  He looked worried and in need of a soothing bromide. After all, the child was born and alive.

  ‘I expect you did the right thing,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t got much of a head for the forks to have gripped, anyway.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Allan, but he still sounded worried.

  ‘How’s the mum?’ I asked.

  I straightened up from the baby and turned round to look properly at him. Allan really was behaving most unusual this morning. He was normally a phlegmatic, imperturbable Scot; good, solid, clever, conscientious ‒ and highly aware of these facts. I had never seen him even faintly agitated before, yet here he was dithering like a new pupil-midwife over her first delivery. I had to ask him twice about the baby’s mother before I could get an answer.

  ‘Oh ‒ she’s fine. I looked in just now, on my way up. She’s eating a vast meal. More than I’ve done.’ He rubbed his forehead, and his eyes danced above his yashmak.

  ‘Women ‒ amazing creatures!’ he added.

  ‘We’re a bright sex,’ I said smugly.

  He laughed. ‘It could be that the sex is sub-human.’

  I hated to get back to it but I was Nursery staff-nurse. Sister was away for the week-end, and asking awkward questions about the babies was another of my jobs.

  ‘His cry is a bit high-pitched,’ I said.

  ‘Think he’s cerebral?’ Allan asked quickly. ‘Think we really did some damage?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘It’s too early for me to tell. Sister might ‒ I haven’t her experience. But it is too high for my liking. Shall we do the usual? Phenobarb, and cot nursing for a few days and see how he goes?’

  ‘Do that, would you, Joanna? Thanks.’

  We moved slowly across the nursery to the window. Allan yawned widely, stretching his mask. ‘God, what a day.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get any breakfast?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No. I had some tea with the night staff at half-past five, that’s all. I saw Sandy a while ago. She said I could gate-crash the nurse’s breakfast at nine if I wanted, or wait till the proper time for the doctors’ breakfast at half-past.’

  I laughed. ‘I know Sandy believes in keeping the medical staff in their proper places, but it’s a trifle hard after a rough night.’

  Mrs Angelina Sandford was our housekeeper and head cook. She had formerly been head cook at our parent hospital up till the end of the Second World War. She then retired, but after six months’ leisure she had had enough and returned to what she considered a sinecure, running the kitchen and household of St Gregory’s Hospital Maternity Unit.

  She was also, at the belligerent period, a suffragette. She now cried Rights for Nurses in place of Votes for Women. As Sandy’s cooking was unbelievably wonderful, the men accepted her food thankfully, and her little ways without much grumbling. Sometimes, as now with Allan, it seemed a trifle hard.

  ‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said. ‘I wanted to have a look at that chap. I’ll get Martin Herrith to come up and see him later.’ Martin Herrith was the senior resident obstetrical house-physician to the Unit. Allan was the junior R.O.H.P.

  ‘Also,’ continued Allan almost gloomily. I wanted to see you.’

  I was putting the milk bottles in the sterilizer. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Allan turned over the pages of the Weights Book before answering. ‘Young Keyte’s lost a lot! He would ‒ ten pounds is too big.’ He looked up at me. ‘I just wondered if you were off one evening this week-end.’

  ‘I can’t be ‒ Sister’s off.’ He knew as well as I did that one of us always had to be on duty to hand over properly to the night staff. It was a Gregory’s rule.

  ‘How about next week? There’s that dance on at Gregory’s ‒ would you care to come up with me? Or we might see a show?’

  ‘I’m off,’ I said, ‘but I’m booked, I’m afraid.’

  His eyes smiled suddenly. ‘The whole week-end?’

  ‘The whole week-end.’

  He shut the Weights Book with a snap. ‘I thought you might be,’ he said, and went out to breakfast.

  St Gregory’s Hospital in London was the large teaching hospital and nurses’ training school where, as I have said, Allan Kinnoch and myself received our respective trainings. The Maternity Unit in which we now worked was the official midwifery training school for our own men and some of our own nurses. It was what is called a Part I school for nurses. I had been a pupil-midwife there myself, returning to London for Part II of our nurses’ course, which is done as a district pupil-midwife. Gregory’s had no district practice in that county. We occasionally had a few girls from other hospitals training there, but on the whole 98 per cent of the staff were old Gregorians.

  The Unit had moved down to the country after one particularly wild night during the War. The morning after that night the Maternity Block in London had ceased to exist. The hospital had taken over a large country house, and after a surprisingly short period the Maternity Unit opened up again at Elmhall. Elmhall was the name of the house.

  When the War ended and I was a junior probationer beginning my general training at Gregory’s, the hospital decided to keep on sending midder-cases down to Elmhall. Our patients, who were all Londoners, had become used to the idea of having their babies out of London. The new generation of mothers ‒ mostly children themselves during the War ‒ were accustomed to leaving their houses for various official reasons. They accepted their new labels of expectant motherhood, together with the orange juice and cod-liver-oil capsules, as the automatic follow-on of the cardboard gas-mask cases and tie-on name-labels of their evacuee past. The prospect of the highly organized and publicized bus-ride away from their husbands and parents bothered them not at all. ‘It makes ever such a nice change, dear, and the nurses are lovely.’

  The local council had leased to St Gregory’s the large house standing nearest to Elmhall itself. The name of this house was ‘The Spinsters’, The Spinsters had for several years now held approximately forty ladies all enjoying the last ten official days of their pregnancies. The ladies moved to Elmhall for their deliveries. On certain occasions they moved with incredible speed.

  Elmhall was a mock-Tudor country house, built in the early ’thirties. It consisted of a long, twisting building which had had two floors
, a multitude of bathrooms, and a couple of lengthy corridors lying one above the other, and from which all the rooms in the house opened and faced towards the south. The original plan was a gift to its conversion into a hospital. The first owner had meant it to be a home for his children and his children’s children. His two sons had been killed in the War. His only daughter had married an Australian airman and had now settled in the Antipodes with her squadron-leader. Mrs Rennie, his wife, had died during my first month at Elmhall. The last thing Mr Rennie, who was now an old man in mind, if not in actual years, wanted was to live in the house, even had he been able to afford and procure the household staff and gardeners necessary for the upkeep of the place. So he continued to let it to the local council and visited us occasionally, clucking at the babies and giving the women an opportunity to say that you could see he was a real gentleman and all and it was ever so sad.

  There were forty-eight maternity beds at Elmhall. The dining-, drawing-, and billiards-rooms on the ground floor had been converted into wards. Upstairs the bedrooms became nurseries, first-stage rooms, and labour wards. We had a small operating theatre set up in a transformed bathroom. Here on Sunday mornings the Caesarian sections were performed. The reason this was invariably done on a Sunday was that we always had a senior member of the staff down from Gregory’s for a Caesar, and Sunday was their only free day.

  After the women had had their babies they were moved down to the ground-floor wards. There was no lift. They were carried down by the students, who acted as porters. There were no porters at Elmhall either.

  There are three stages to normal labour. Since the demolition of the Midder Block in London early in the War, Gregory’s students have always maintained the obstetrical text-books are wrong, and that there is a fourth stage. This came when they carried the newly delivered mother on a collapsible canvas stretcher down the twisting oak staircase. There were not many stairs, but there were a good many twists. The house echoed with cries of ‘To You’ and ‘From me’. Eventually the triumphant mama was dumped on a bed in one of the wards by the sweating, exhausted students. Most babies are born at night ‒ approximately 75 per cent, in fact. The men said they felt the necessity of carrying lighted bicycle lamps in their mouths added a piquancy to the whole situation. The staircase, for no clear reason, had never been electrified.

  Miss Bascombe, the Matron of the Unit, had formerly been Sister Alice in London. Alice was the name of the old Maternity Block. The Matron had five Sister-midwives to assist her with the administration and teaching, a couple of staff-nurses (namely, Beth Durant and myself, Joanna Anthony, and twelve pupil-midwives scattered between day and night duty. On the medical side there were the two resident obstetrical house-physicians and eight students. The students were called midder-clerks. There was, of course, an illustrious list of non-resident senior obstetricians, who drifted regularly in from Gregory’s and Harley Street.

  The medical unit lived over the garage. There, every three weeks, came a fresh batch of young men, to share the minute plywood-partitioned bedrooms, whose walls were lined with charts, diagrams, and notices which depicted in Rabelaisian terms the prowess of a whole decade of medical students as accouchers. The house-physicians, being resident for from six to twelve months, occupied the only habitable bedroom; even so, they were within constant earshot of the young men. This, if hard on the H.P.s, was handy for the nursing staff, as officially no white woman was allowed to set foot over the garage. The acoustics of the doctor’s flat rendered this quite unnecessary; you need only walk half-way up the wooden stairway to the loft and whisper to raise the dead. The housemen, being permanently in residence and having had a surfeit of disturbed nights, took strong measures with heavy sleepers. Their principle was that the quicker the clerk on call was up and away, the quicker they could get back to sleep. Occasionally a new pupil, forgetting the rule, would rush in to call a specific man. In which case utter confusion followed. The beds were so close together that by torchlight it was impossible to guess whom to shake; consequently at least two men were shaken unnecessarily, and the clerk on call invariably denied his own name and said, ‘Not me, Nurse ‒ he’s over there.’ The harassed new girl would return shaking to Night Sister, who would assume horror and say awe-fully, ‘Nurse, you didn’t go into their bedrooms!’ Then she would cross the stone courtyard from the house herself, and firmly inform the staircase that Mr So-and-so was wanted immediately, leaving it to the tired house-physicians to produce the man.

  The nursing staff, with the exception of Beth Durant and myself, lived in the east wing of the house. The theatre and labour wards lay in the west wing. The nurseries joined the two. The east wing was an extremely noisy area. It was by a stroke of pure luck that Beth and I lived out. When we had first come to Elmhall fourteen months previously we had been part of the largest set of pupil-midwives the unit had taken. A set is the name given to each fresh course of nurses. There was no room in Elmhall to house us all, and as our names headed the alphabetical list of our set we were asked if we would mind sharing a room in the head-gardener’s cottage. The request was a politely-worded order (Gregory’s is a polite hospital). Equally polite, we said we were most pleased with the arrangement before we had seen the cottage, the head-gardener, or, most important of all, the head-gardener’s wife. As things turned out we could not have done better. Our room was large and warm and private. Mrs Hicks, the gardener’s wife, was a Londoner, born under the very shades of St Gregory’s, who knew the hospital, ourselves, and our little ways backward. She was a lady who had a passion for bandanna handkerchiefs which she tied round her head, curlers which she never removed from her hair, and strong cups of sweet tea which she offered Beth and me whenever she saw us.

  ‘The poor nurses,’ we would quite often hear her tell the amicably grunting Hicks. ‘Ever such lovely girls! Seems a shame!’

  I was off at 9.30 that morning. I handed over the Nursery to the senior pupil, a North Country girl named Ellen Grayson, who was a trainee of a famous Lancashire hospital. She wore a very attractive dark-green uniform. We all wore our own parent hospital’s uniform at Elmhall, which made things rather confusing for the patients and doctors at first, but was a refreshing change for everyone in the long run after years of looking at identically dressed young women.

  Ellen Grayson was a fresh-faced girl with tidy little rows of curls. Her skin had a faint sun-tan even this early in the year. She was an ardent youth hosteler, and she spent her days off walking innumerable miles round England. She knew every famous and infamous beauty spot in the country before she had been a month at Elmhall.

  We looked at the new baby, whose cry was quieter now. The baby’s surname was Peters. I said I had to give him a drink of saline.

  ‘Did he take it?’ she asked.

  ‘Some. A good deal got spat out at me.’

  I told her about the phenobarbitone and not lifting him out of his cot. She nodded; this was all routine.

  ‘Who delivered him, Nurse Anthony?’

  I had been checking up. ‘New one on me. Mr Ormorod.’

  She chuckled. ‘That one! Eee! God’s gift t’ pupil-midwives, that lad.’

  ‘Is he?’ I was interested, her description fitted few young men in St Gregory’s Hospital Medical School.

  ‘He is,’ Grayson was firm. ‘Wow!’ she added as an afterthought, tying on a green towelling nursery apron over her own white linen one.

  ‘I say, Nurse Anthony ‒’

  I stopped in the doorway, held the mask I had just taken off over my face, and turned round. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Has that chap Peters been baptized?’

  ‘No.’ I thought, as I had often thought before, what a reliable person Grayson was, she was invariably a couple of mental steps ahead in her work.

  ‘No,’ I said again, still holding the mask like a yashmak. ‘I don’t think there’s any immediate worry, but if there is you know the form.’

  ‘Aye,’ she nodded, ‘boy ‒ John, girl Mary.’


  ‘That’s it, and he’s a boy. Have a nice morning.’

  ‘Thanks, Nurse Anthony. You too.’ She vanished into the milk cupboard. The milk cupboard had once been a large built-in wardrobe. On the inside of each door was a long mirror. Nurse Grayson was built on the chubby side. I saw three large green bustles jiggling busily as she mixed up the dried milk powder. Then I opened the Nursery door, and folding my mask, put it into my pocket.

  Beth Durant came out into the corridor from the labour ward as the Nursery door closed behind me. She was labour ward staff-nurse. She still wore her mask, over which her eyes were smiling.

  ‘Joa ‒ have you seen the new boys?’

  ‘I’ve seen the handiwork of one of them. The poor infant’s black and blue, and Allan had to get up and patch a third degree on the mum.’

  She looked serious for a moment, then took off her mask and smiled properly. ‘I know. But Night Sister said he couldn’t help it ‒ and the mum is fine.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘How’s Junior?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He’s got a hellish high-pitched cry. I wish Muir was here.’

  Something was niggling in my mind about that baby, just as I had felt it had in Allan’s mind. He did not seem to know what it was, and I did not either. I just knew I was not happy, but was not sure what, if anything. I could do about it.

  Miss Muir was the Nursery Sister who was away for the week-end. I was generally quite pleased to be on my own for a couple of days, but whenever something odd came out I wished her back. Babies, new-born babies, are tricky things at the best of times, and when things go wrong with them they go wrong very quickly. Miss Muir had an extra sense where the babies were concerned. She was the best baby-doctor I have ever met in my life, and I was not alone in my high professional opinion of her. For twelve years she had specialized in babies, and she certainly had no equal on the medical or nursing staffs of Gregory’s. As a Nursery Sister she was, as I have said, admirable. I wished she had not gone away that morning.