Bittersweet (4 page)

“If you still had Thumbelina, it would be easier,” said Grace. “Daddy wouldn’t be under an obligation to Jack Thurlow, who doesn’t even come to church.”

Kitty leaped in ahead of the storm clouds gathering on Edda’s face. “Shut up, Grace, that’s not up for discussion! My perpetual question, Eds, is why you like riding?”

“When I’m on top of a horse’s back, I’m a minimum of five feet clear of the ground,” Edda said, her voice serious. “To me, that’s all the thrill of riding. Being taller than a man.”

“I wish I were tall!” Kitty said with a sigh.

The hall door rattled, flew open. Sister Bainbridge stood and glared at her charges in outrage.

“What is the meaning of this, nurses? You haven’t even begun to unpack your suitcases!”

C
orunda Base Hospital was the largest rural hospital in New South Wales, having 160 beds in its general section, eighty beds in its mental asylum, and thirty beds in a convalescent/aged home out Doobar way, where the air and the elevation were felt more beneficial. Unlike the sandstone magnificence of some other hospitals, its appearance charmed no one, for it looked like army barracks. Built of wood atop limestone piers and foundations, it was a series of long rectangular structures saved from being called sheds by the presence of a broad, covered verandah down either long side. Men’s One and Two were double-length, as were Women’s One and Two; Children’s, Out-patients, X-ray-cum-Pathology, the Operating Theatre, Kitchens and Stores were single in size, while Administration, fronting onto Victoria Street, rejoiced in a building made entirely from limestone blocks. The amount of land was acres in extent, and dotted with out-buildings that ranged from Matron’s storybook cottage to houses put up for the duration of the Great War, when it had also been an army hospital. One overall fact made the site workable: down to the
last square foot of the last acre, it was level. And this in turn had led to the struts and strands that linked the buildings together like the Brooklyn Bridge or a spider’s web — roofed walkways that everybody called ramps. Most ramps held some protection from the elements beyond roofing in the form of four-foot-high sides, though the last two hundred yards to the Latimer house consisted only of a floor and a roof. Where Men’s straddled the ramp to either side, it had been completely enclosed to form a waiting room; Women’s had been similarly dealt with. Those who waited to visit children used Men’s or Women’s. Midwifery was lucky; it was inside the administration building, as were the Casualty station and a small operating theatre.

The shocks fell thick and fast upon the Latimer girls, though if Matron’s reading of their characters had been aright, not one of them would have lasted longer than that first day at Corunda Base. They had been carefully brought up as ladies and had never wanted for a material thing, but Gertrude Newdigate’s youth had passed beyond her recollection, and she had forgotten to take strength of purpose and character into account at all.

The first and greatest shock was not personal; it was the realisation that a hospital was a place to which you, a patient, were admitted in order to die. Fully one-third of the patients left a hospital through its morgue, and a second third returned home to die. A statistic given to them by a doleful hospital porter named Harry, who thus became a teaching authority for the four new nurses weeks before they met their instructor, Dr. Liam Finucan.

“It’s in the patient’s eyes!” cried Tufts, horrified. “I feel more a minister to death than a healer — how can the other nurses be so cheerful?”

“They’re inured and resigned,” said Grace, stemming tears.

“Rubbish,” Kitty said. “They’re experienced, they know the best way to treat death is to persuade the patients that they are not going to die. I watch them, I don’t care how nasty they are to me. How they treat us isn’t important.
Watch them!
”

“Kitty’s right,” Edda said, her indignation saved for things like cut-up newspapers for toilet paper and towels too worn to dry wet skin — weren’t hospitals properly funded? “Grace, you’ve already exhausted today’s allowance of tears — don’t
dare
cry!”

“That Nurse Wilson slopped a bowl of vomit on me!”

“You copped the vomit because you let Nurse Wilson see how revolted you were by it. Govern your disgust, and it won’t happen.”

“I want to go home!”

“That’s not on the cards, Miss Piglet,” said Edda, hiding her sympathy. “Now go and change your apron before the vomit soaks into your dress. Pew! You do stink!”

Yet somehow their first week passed; at the end of it they could clothe themselves faultlessly in their starched “cardboard”, even fold the absurdly complex pleated parts of their caps that looked like a pair of wings. The other nurses wore more sensible uniforms and aprons, including short sleeves, while the Latimers, as new-style trainees, were done up in more wrapping than parcels.

The food, they discovered, was appalling for patients and staff alike, but they worked so hard that they ate everything from
watery cabbage to lumpy gravy swimming in fat; the kitchen in their quarters, Sister Bainbridge informed them, was for making cups of tea, coffee or cocoa.

“Nothing else, even toast,” said she, looming.

The Rector had sheltered his girls from the more horrible and sordid aspects of his religious calling, and excluded the words incest, syphilis and perversion from their vocabulary. Due to climate and no refrigeration, the dead were buried in a closed coffin within twenty-four hours. So when, on their second morning, Sister Bainbridge showed them how to lay out a corpse, it was the first time they had seen or touched a dead body.

“A syphilitic who raped his sister,” Bainbridge said, joking.

Their response to this explanation was a blank look.

“Keep your pride!” said Edda in a furious whisper as soon as Bainbridge moved away, laughing at their ignorance. “Remember that we are Latimers. What upsets us today will be old hat tomorrow — don’t let them beat us! No tears, and no down in the dumps.”

They were perpetually tired in a way entirely new and very hard to bear; their feet ached, their backs ached, their joints ached. Everything taught to them by dainty Maude had to be abandoned; there was neither room nor time for daintiness in Corunda Base, whose superintendent was an arch-miser unwilling to pander to the needs of any and all entities save money, to which he was fused like a leech to a piece of vein-riddled flesh.

April, May and June vanished in a thick fog of exhaustion that actually worked in the hospital’s favour. Not even Grace had the energy to think of quitting; the very notion of creating such a fuss reared as high as Everest, unattainable. They just endured.

Edda held them together, convinced in her soul that things were bound to change, as things did from sheer familiarity. Perhaps the only thing that kept them quietly resigned was the one thing they would lose if they returned to the Rectory: heated rooms. With winter upon them, it was so
beautiful
to live in warmth, no matter how enormous the indignities and insults of their nursing life might be. And, Edda was sure, once they proved themselves to the cruel women who ruled them, the rewards would come: like chairs with soft seats, the chance to make toasted sandwiches, a little kindness. For at the end of their first three months tuition would begin, they would be called upon to do something with their brains as well as their hands and voices. April, May and June had seen them no different from the West Enders.

Their tutor was Dr. Liam Finucan, the staff pathologist (and also Chief Coroner of the Shire & City of Corunda). He had agreed to take on tutorial duty for two reasons: the first, that he regarded nursing brain-power as wasted; and the second, that he had noted the quality of the four new-style trainees as they were shuttled around the hospital on some kind of speedy orientation program.

A Protestant Ulsterman, Liam Finucan had taken his medical degree at St. Bartholomew’s in London when Matron Gertrude Newdigate was there, so they were old acquaintances; his love for pathology had led him to the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and his qualifications were such that he could have headed the pathology department of any hospital in Sydney or Melbourne. That he had chosen a minor post at Corunda Base was due to his wife, Eris, a Corunda girl he met and married in London. In 1926, when the Latimer girls commenced nursing, he had been in Corunda for fifteen years.

Typical of many pathologists, he was quiet and shy, owned no bedside manner, and found the dead more interesting than the living. However, by the middle of July, after two weeks of instructing the new nursing trainees, Liam Finucan developed a side to his personality hitherto undetected by anyone who knew him, and that included himself. Out of a mental stables came a war horse, and out of a cobwebbed cupboard came a suit of armour; mounting the one and donning the other, Liam tilted his lance and rode off to make war. His quarry wasn’t that miserable skinflint Dr. Frank Campbell; it was Matron Newdigate.

“You’ve given these four girls absolutely no kind of help or support, Gertie, and it has to stop,” Liam said, his softly lilting voice steely, foreign. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! When one of the old-style nurses starts here, she’s taken into the West End fold, overwhelmed with advice and many kindnesses. Whereas these four young women have no one to turn to at all. I don’t care how new you were to your own job when they started, you had a duty to them that you shamelessly ignored
because their presence upset the West End majority. D’you think I’ve forgotten how much you grizzled to me during your first week at the thought that you were going to be lumbered with the new trainees after all? Here it is, the middle of July, and you’ve acted as if they don’t exist. You saddled them with a quarter of a dilapidated house, gave that fat and lazy crawler Marje Bainbridge charge of them, and rewarded her with
half
of the same house!” His eyes had gone the same dark grey as a stormy sea, and pinned her contemptuously.

“Your new-style trainees are even more tired than they should be,” he went on. “Their accommodation is pure Frank Campbell — hard chairs and two-foot-three beds, a kitchen they’re forbidden to use. By the sheerest accident their house is on the steam line, so at least they’ve been warm, but they have to chop wood and feed it to their boiler to have hot water, and that’s unconscionable! Hear me?
Criminal!
In spite of their privileges they’ve been brought up to think of themselves with humility — it’s just your good luck that their mother is a selfish bitch.”

He leaned forward to put the palms of his hands flat on her immaculate desk, and glared at her. “I’m off to see Frank Campbell next, but I’m warning you, Gertie, that I expect your wholehearted support in this. Since the girls are required to live in, they will each have a bedroom. You will provide a common room with easy chairs, and desks and bookshelves for studying. The kitchen will be at their command for light meals as well as liquids, and see they have an ice chest before spring. Get off your pampered bottom and see to their welfare! Use Marje Bainbridge as a chaperone, by all means, but not in the lap of
luxury. I hear that there will be money to build a new home for nurses, but until it’s finished, I want my trainees adequately accommodated.”

Gertrude Newdigate had listened, but wasn’t prepared to take the blame for Frank Campbell’s parsimony. “Fight your own battles with that awful man!” she said coldly. “My hands are tied.”

“Rot! I’ve known you for twenty years, and you don’t scare me. Nor does Frank. Gertie,
think
! Those four young women are so good, that’s the real tragedy of it! Why on earth are you risking four potential matrons just to please a gang of petty West End nurses who don’t know sodium from potassium? Who wouldn’t know a Latin or a Greek medical root if it bit them on the bum? Devote your energy with the West Enders to convincing them that in future Medicine will demand educated nurses, so look to their daughters. Don’t be so in tune with yesterday!”

Her natural detachment was returning; she could see what Liam meant, though she hadn’t intended it to happen. The trouble was that she was too new to Corunda Base, and hadn’t understood how dismal the quality of West End nursing was when it came to science and theory. Still, she had one dagger she could slip in.

“How is your wife?” she asked sweetly.

He didn’t bite, he spurned the bait. “Philandering, quite as usual. Some things never change.”

“You should divorce her.”

“Why? I’ve no mind to take another wife.”

The Latimer girls loved Dr. Liam Finucan, a solitary ray of light in a densely black tunnel. Having discovered how bright and well prepared they were, he applied himself with vigour and enthusiasm to the task of tutoring them, thrilled to find that their knowledge of mathematics and physical phenomena enabled them to understand things like the gas laws and electricity already. They were as competent as men in the early years of a medical degree. When it came to subjects new and strange, they seized upon knowledge eagerly. Even Grace, he was learning, had more than enough brains to cope with the theory; what slowed her down was lack of true interest. To Matron he had said “four matrons”, but three was more correct. Whatever Grace burned for, it was not to become a registered nurse.

His favourite among the four was Tufts, whom he always called Heather. Edda was the more gifted and intelligent, but the pathologist in Liam admired order, method, logic, and in those areas Tufts reigned supreme. Edda was the flashy surgeon, Tufts was the plodding pathologist, no doubt about it. His liking for her was reciprocated; neither the monocled handsomeness of the surgeon Max Herzen nor the bubbling charm of the senior obstetrician Ned Mason held anything like as much attraction for Tufts as Dr. Finucan did, with his white-winged black hair, long and finely featured face, ship’s grey-blue eyes. Not that the unromantic Tufts mooned over Dr. Finucan, or dreamed of him when asleep; simply, she liked him enormously as a person and loved being in his company. Understanding her nature, her sisters never made the mistake of teasing her about men,
especially Dr. Liam Finucan. Though nothing about her was nunlike, Tufts did bear some resemblance to a monk.

The fire Liam lit under Matron was a little like a torch, in that Matron lit a fire under Sister Bainbridge, who kindled one under the leader of the West End nurses, Lena Corrigan, and she felt the flames enough to set the whole West End nursing coterie ablaze. The after-burns went on for weeks.

Suddenly the nurses’ house was opened up and ruthlessly scoured: the four girls each had a private bedroom; four easy chairs and desk sets appeared in a common room, which even held a wireless set; the kitchen could be used for light meals; there were two bathrooms, and hot water was laid on at the bottom of a hastily dug trench. Harry the porter picked up their uniforms for laundering every single day, and the kitchen cupboards held hard biscuits, tins of jam, bottles of sauce, plenty of tea, Camp Essence of Coffee & Chicory, cocoa powder, saline powder for cool drinks, and blackcurrant cordial. All of which paled before the vision of the ice chest, big enough to hold a large block of ice and keep the eggs, bacon, butter and sausages cool.