A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin (35 page)

‘God damn your eyes! Can't you use your common sense?' an enraged Sheila shouted after her. ‘You get me my pocket money, or else. And as for the radio, there's only Martha here what is capable of hearing it – and she'd be thankful to have the music, wouldn't you, Martha?'

Before Martha could open her mouth, the Matron
turned swiftly and snapped, ‘Bad language is not allowed here. Please learn to control yourself.'

Martha saw Sheila heave herself more upright with her hands, as she prepared to respond. She hastily hissed, ‘Watch it, Sheila. Don't lose your rag!'

Matron swept across the hall and down the stairs. She entered in her patient records that Sheila Mary McNally was showing signs of being out of control: anger and abusive language.

Sheila leaned back into her mass of pillows and burst into tears of frustration.

‘Don't take on so, Sheila, love,' begged Martha. ‘She's right. A priest could find a volunteer to help us, I bet.'

But Sheila was still crying when lunch was delivered by a harassed Dorothy.

In an effort to feed all the patients on Martha's floor as rapidly as she could, the aide nipped backwards and forwards to the old-fashioned dumbwaiter in the wall of Martha's room. The dumbwaiter rumbled up and down, on its frayed rope and block and tackle, bringing up two trays at a time from the kitchen. Trays were whisked out of the dumbwaiter and plonked onto each patient's lap or bedside chair.

Furious, Sheila looked disgustedly at the mass of
spaghetti and tomato sauce with its thin sprinkling of cheese, and swept it off the bed. Tray and plate fell with a crash to the linoleum floor.

Dorothy was just placing a tray on a small table by the bedside of the stroke victim. She was wondering how long it would take her to shovel the sticky strands of pasta down the throat of someone who could barely swallow.

At the noise, she whirled round, ‘God Almighty!' she exclaimed. ‘What have you done?'

‘It's nothing,' Martha hastily interjected. ‘It's an accident. She can't balance stuff very well on her lap, as you should know by now.'

Dorothy ignored Martha's remark. She left the stroke victim and came over to Sheila.

‘What a damned mess you've made!' she scolded. ‘And I can't get you another one, either. Cook puts out the exact number, and there's never nothing left over.' She turned, and marched towards the dumbwaiter. ‘I'll have to get Rosie to come up to clear it.'

Sheila regarded her in sullen silence.

Martha called to Dorothy, ‘She can have some of my lunch.'

Still silence. Dorothy had reached the end of her tether. She had done a double shift and was exhausted. Now, she had no real idea what to do.

‘Dorothy!' persisted Martha. ‘Ask the kitchen for a clean plate. Sheila can have half of mine.'

Dorothy slowly turned back from the dumbwaiter's horn.

Then she said reluctantly, ‘OK, I'll get one.'

She looked again at Sheila, and advised, ‘You'd better cheer up and hurry up. Doctor's coming to see you this afternoon.'

Sheila abruptly swallowed a sob. ‘He is?'

‘Yes. There's six patients he's going to do an “altogether” on. Says he's going to do six a week until he's examined everybody in the home.

‘You're all going to have a bath as soon as I done the lunches.'

Martha was suddenly very apprehensive. An examination all over? What did the doctor think they were suffering from? She had never been examined since she had arrived from the hospital.

She trembled at the thought of the pills that she might have to take. Was it to find an excuse to sedate her and Sheila?

‘It's me nerves,' she told herself almost inaudibly, as she flung her arm across her pattering heart to stop herself shaking. ‘Dear Lady, be with me now. Intercede for me!' She knew that the Madonna was not omnipotent, but she could do a bit for you, Martha was certain. ‘Hear me now.'

She remembered Matron's remark that a priest was also to visit them. This recollection now frightened her even more.

Had some awful disease broken out in the Home, like the flu, which might cause the doctor's visit to be followed by that of a priest, so as to be on hand to give extreme unction?

If it were so, that bitch downstairs would never tell you, never warn you, she felt sure of that.

Cut off from everything, except what happened in the little ward, without hope of any kind, poor Martha's common sense was rapidly seeping away.

Meanwhile, Sheila lay quietly, while Dorothy set down two remaining dinners for the dementias, safely out of their reach. Then she turned and shouted down the horn of the dumbwaiter to the troglodytes toiling in the basement to send up another plate, an empty one, and a clean spoon. ‘And ask Rosie to come up to the first floor to clean up a spill.' She pulled the rope to send the dumbwaiter down to them.

With a rumble like a distant earthquake it returned within a minute, with a white dinner plate, shiny, empty, and a spoon of doubtful cleanliness.

‘Want me to divide it for you?' Dorothy inquired of Martha.

Sheila turned wearily towards Martha, and said, ‘I really don't want any, Martha. Ta, ever so.'

‘Ah, come on now. Just a bit.'

‘No. I'm not hungry.'

‘You will be later, love.'

Sheila managed a smile. ‘I'll be all right. I really couldn't eat now.'

Dorothy tapped the iron bed end with the spoon. ‘Hurry up. Make up your minds.'

‘I guess she won't,' said Martha, and began hurriedly to eat, while a stout complaining maid, carrying a bucket, a mop and a dustpan and brush, arrived to pick up the broken plate, which she threw into a bin. The further unaccustomed noise upset the dementias and they began to whimper.

Sent down again, the dumbwaiter delivered two more trays and, with a tray in each hand, Dorothy fled into the next bedroom.

1965

Martha had barely emptied her plate before Dorothy left the half-fed stroke patient and told her to come for her bath. She held her firmly by the elbow, and took her to the bathroom. The bath itself had already been filled. She ordered her to get in and wash herself all over.

A scared Martha obeyed. The water was already cool, and she shivered as she carefully lowered herself into it.

‘I'll be back,' promised Dorothy and ran back to the stroke victim, to push another mouthful of spaghetti into her, before she gave a quick bed bath to an exhausted, acquiescent Sheila. She then tucked the woman in and ran back to rescue Martha, who had been trying ineffectually to get
out of the bath by herself.

With Martha safely reinstalled in her bed, Dorothy was still trying to persuade one of the dementias that the stone-cold meal she proffered was meant to be eaten, when the Matron walked in with the doctor. Dorothy, almost panic-stricken was still three bed baths short of the list given her to do. But it was no good worrying: the doctor would have to accept the stroke patient and the two dementias as they were: she was desperate to go home and sleep.

Matron frowned at Dorothy, but made no comment. A curtain was pulled round Sheila.

Martha swallowed. When you spoke to him, would this doctor be like the Vet, the dreaded Public Assistance doctor, provided by the City to look after the health of the poor? He was called the Vet because of his callousness: nobody went to him unless they were in unbearable pain.

A very apprehensive Martha listened attentively to the subdued conversation between the doctor and Sheila.

Unaware that the doctor was perhaps being prompted by the Holy Mother herself, Matron tried to interrupt him. The eavesdropper in the next bed felt much better when she heard the doctor curtly reprimand her. She don't know what Our Lady
can do, Martha thought, remembering her frantic prayers and sensing her beloved presence.

Judging by Sheila's wincing, he was gently probing the healed stumps of her legs. He asked where they hurt and what exercise she was getting.

She heard Sheila laugh and say, ‘I don't get none, Doctor.'

‘But we have to strengthen your arms and back, Mrs McNally, so that you can help yourself, as the legs become less painful. I will see what can be arranged.

‘I can't promise anything, but if your arms and upper back are strong, you should be able to do all kinds of things for yourself from a wheelchair. We'll have you breaking the speed limit yet!'

Martha heard Sheila chuckle. He sounded very kind, as he teased her into a better frame of mind and continued to give her hope that she might yet have a reasonable life.

‘Dear Holy Mother, thank you,' breathed Martha with profound relief. No Vet ever talked to you like that.

She was so impressed by his voice that she took her artificial teeth out of their glass, where they had lain unused for a week in the same few inches of water. She stuffed them into her mouth. They tasted foul.

When the curtain was pulled around her bed, she sat up, however, and welcomed the physician with her best toothy grin.

He put his clipboard down on the bed, and said, ‘Mrs Martha Connolly, I believe?' As he sat down on the commode, he held out his hand to be shaken.

She shook his hand heartily and let it go only reluctantly: she was so flattered to be addressed as Mrs Connolly. For once, she felt that she was a real person. He asked her questions similar to those he had asked Sheila, and her replies were the same.

‘You see, I'm not really sick, Doctor, any more than Sheila is.' She glanced defiantly up at the Matron's stony face, and then back to the doctor.

‘Me problem is that I don't have no home to go to. Nobody to help me if I leave here.' She did not bother him with the detail of how she came to be homeless; Liverpool always had plenty of waifs and strays.

He asked, ‘What drugs are you taking?'

It was a leading question, because Matron had no record of her taking any medicines.

In response, Martha gaped at him. ‘I has to take what Matron gives me,' she said.

‘Were the pills prescribed by your general practitioner?'

‘I don't know, Doctor.'

‘Humph.' Many of the patients seemed to be on sedation of some kind. He must check the origins of their prescriptions: he knew that it was not uncommon for nursing homes to drug their patients ‘to calm them, while they got used to their new surroundings'. He did not approve of the practice.

He stood up and turned to the Matron, who seemed unusually tense.

‘I would like to examine Mrs Connolly's hip. Also, check her heart and lungs.'

Martha gulped, but allowed herself to be stripped of her backless nightgown by a silent, angry Matron.

After his examination, Martha modestly gathered up her nightgown to hide her flaccid breasts and bulging tummy.

‘Do you have a next of kin, Mrs Connolly?' the doctor inquired. ‘Nobody is named on your chart.'

‘You mean a relation?'

‘Yes. Somebody with whom you are usually in contact?'

‘I got squads of kids; one of them's in Manchester,' she told him with a grin. ‘But I don't hear from them, except for Number Nine.' As the doctor opened his mouth to say something, she hastily added, ‘You see, Doctor, I can't read nor write. And
you lose touch with people when they is scattered all over the earth.'

He understood. ‘And who or what is Number Nine?' he inquired, his eyes twinkling.

Martha laughed. ‘Oh, him? That's me youngest, James. Number Nine is his nickname.'

‘And where is he? Do you know his address?'

With considerable pride, she told him that she certainly knew his address: he was in Manchester, doing a stint as assistant priest. ‘But he don't know where I am. There was nobody here to write to him for me. And I don't have no money for a stamp.'

The doctor looked dumbfounded. ‘Nobody could write for you?'

‘No, sir.'

The Matron fidgeted uncomfortably: the doctor's examination of his patients was going much further than she had expected. She realised, too, that in this case, the next of kin had, somehow, been omitted from her meticulously kept records. As far as she could see, it was the first technical error that Dr Williams had found in his inquiries about her patients.

‘Surely, Mrs Connolly, anybody would have done that for you,' the doctor protested.

‘There was nobody who come to speak to me, except Angie – she's the aide – and she don't have
time to breathe, with sixty patients.' She paused, and then went on, her voice trembling at the recollection, ‘For ages, nobody but me in this ward could even speak or do anything: they was paralysed, or like them over there.' She pointed towards the dementias. ‘Not until Pat died; and Sheila, who you just seen next door, come in.'

The doctor decided that from somewhere he would have to get help: his practice had become so heavy that he could not take on much more. But to whom could he turn?

It can be safely assumed that the Holy Lady took note of the need for assistance from someone on earth who could be inspired to aid him and also give the Matron some guidance.

The doctor carefully lifted the bedclothes over Martha's naked legs, and promised to arrange exercise for her.

Dr Williams was a conscientious, well-respected man, but now he berated himself for having taken for granted Matron's goodwill towards her patients.

It was often said that there were two places in which you most needed a friend outside – when in hospital or when in gaol. Add to that a nursing home, particularly a privately owned one, he decided angrily.

It was certain that there had been neglect, and, in
some cases, malpractice, that the patients were too poor, too alone, too lacking in physical strength, often too ignorant, to defend themselves. They lacked someone to speak up for them.

The Matron had originally approached him to look after the medical needs of her patients, because, otherwise, the insurance company would have been chary about covering her.