Flowers on the Grass (34 page)

“Oh no, look, I can’t,” she said. “You know Sister hates the beds to be moved, and, anyway, I haven’t got time—oh well, come on then. If I must. Here, someone give me a hand.”

They could not move Daniel, so they pushed Sonny across and fitted his bed in askew among the Balkan beams, sticking out into the middle of the ward.

“Let’s pray Matron doesn’t choose to do a snap round,” Jacky said. “What I risk for you—oh, not you, Daniel. I wouldn’t do it for you. Only for Sonny.”

Everyone in the hospital liked Sonny because he was an institution, but Jacky truly loved him for his own staunch self which had never sagged under his load of bad luck. He aroused all her campaigning instincts. She was always wanting to make causes of things—van horses, lunatics, old people who didn’t want to go to’the infirmary, the bath water in the nurses’ hostel. It was terrible about Sonny. Someone ought to do something about it. If she had been in court when they dismissed his claim she would have told them where they got off. The unspecified thems and theys of the world were all Jacky’s enemies. She could not read a newspaper without getting incensed.

Sonny had been twenty-two when his life went wrong, a house painter, engaged to a quiet girl called Nelly, whom he was going to marry if they could ever find somewhere to live. Painting the outside of a third-story window two years ago the cradle rope broke and pitched him to the pavement, and
since then he had been in and out of plasters and splints and jackets, manipulated, operated, drugged and X-rayed, but all the orthopaedic surgeons in London could not say whether he would ever walk again. His claim against his firm had failed, because they said it was his duty to check the ropes each day. When his appeal failed, his mother, who was pugnacious, wanted to go on with it, but Sonny, who had taken to books since his accident and had just finished
Bleak House
, said he didn’t want the case hanging found his neck for the rest of his life. When Nelly’s parents went away to Scotland she stayed behind and lived with his teeming family so as to be near him. Patient as a dog, she waited for him to come out of the hospital and marry her, although if he ever did they would have no home and no money for the hope of one.

Sonny had a perfectly round head with sandy hair which had to be cut very short because it preferred to stand straight up in bristles instead of lying down. After his accident, when it had not been cut for weeks, he had looked like a porcupine. He had vivid blue eyes with stubby fair lashes that looked as if they had been singed, and with his smooth face and gap-toothed smile, his neck and arms grown thin with disuse, he seemed more like a small boy than a man of nearly twenty-five. Strange chaplains and good women visiting the hospital were apt to call him Sonny, which was how he got his nickname.

Galloping up and down the ward, for if she obeyed the maxim that a nurse never ran she knew she would never get anywhere, Jacky was touched to see him and Daniel, propped sideways with pillows, contemplating the chess-board contentedly there. Every time she went by she asked Daniel to put out his pipe and told them that they must finish the game so that she could get the beds straight before Sister came back. They waved her away and she became involved with something in the specimen room, until the bump and sigh of the swing doors brought her flying into the ward to see Sister coming back too early with a strange and impressive doctor, and the most unholy row blew up and it was all Jacky’s fault.

Probationers Barnes and Potter thought that Sister had got Nurse Saunders put on night duty because of spoiling the pattern of her Balkan beams. What a sell for old Fergie that
she had got her back as night nurse on her own ward! She played war with her in the mornings over the report, for Sister thought that everything was always the night nurse’s fault, and doubly so when it was poor old Jacky, because everything was always her fault anyway, night or day.

The day nurse they had got in her place was a God-bothering drip who was heading for heaven, but if Barnes and Potter had anything to do with it would go through hell on the way. They had liked Jacky. She had let you alone and was good fun and not uppish. Fitt was a sow, but they paid no attention to her. Sister was just Sister, inevitable as clouds over the sun, but Nurse Fewling was the end, a pain in the neck that would get you down if you didn’t cut her right out of your life like a carbuncle. You had to watch out that she did not corner you in the annexe and try and convert you, and Winnie was more use on the ward, for when something was really up and a man trying to beat you to the pearly gates, Fewling would be crying for his soul instead of running with hot-water bottles and trying to get the bubble out of the saline drip.

So they ignored her, and the creature, who was terrified of Nurse Fitt and almost fainted when she heard Sister’s skirts coming, had to go to Sonny for all her information. She
would
have to be there for the wedding. It was going to be the biggest thing ever, but Fewling would probably sing hymns or forbid the banns or something mad. She was queer, said Barnes and Potter, who applied this adjective to everyone who was not like themselves.

The wedding was not for three weeks, but already Sister had started sending Barnes and Potter up step ladders to wash down the walls, or on to the floor with a knife to scrape bed wheels. Anyone would think it was going to be a surgical operation instead of the happiest day in Sonny’s life.

Ever since what he called his little tumble he had been trying unsuccessfully to persuade Nelly not to ruin her life for him. He had finally decided that if she was going to wait, as she said morbidly, to the grave, she might as well be Mrs. Burgess while she was doing it. He had prevailed on the hospital chaplain to let him be married in the ward, and Nelly was going to be there in white satin and a silver headdress, with two children in organdie, and be joined in holy matrimony to Sonny in his plaster trough. Potter had started his nails on an
intensive course already, and in her off-duty Barnes was making a white and gold satin banner, which was to hang over his bed saying Good Luck. The newspapers had got hold of the story through Fitt’s milk-bar man, and there were going to be pictures taken, and a great crowd of guests, and altogether the wedding was going to put St. Patrick’s, which had always played second fiddle to the bigger London hospitals, right on the map.

Then Sister launched a bombshell by saying that one of the probationers must have her day off on the day of the wedding. They could decide between themselves, she said, and they had a terrible quarrel about it in the linen cupboard and didn’t speak to each other for a whole day, except through the patients: “Please tell Nurse Potter to pull the draw sheet tight her side.” “Ask Nurse Barnes whether she’s
eaten
that last bit of soap or what.”

Although they were bosom friends and shared not only a bedroom but each other’s aprons and stockings, they fought often. They were either as thick as thieves, so that no one could get a word in edgeways through their giggling gabble, or waging war in every way they knew.

They had entered the hospital on the same day, but because one must be senior on the ward Barnes was put over Potter, since she had actually entered the portals first, having come by a slightly earlier train. This Nurse Potter could not forgive. As first and second probationer, they had their own jobs allotted, and if Barnes was up to the neck in dirty lines and the bell long gone for supper would Potter give her a hand? Like hell, she would, for Barnes would not dream of helping her clean the bedpans except on her day off, and then she did not do them properly, so that Sister raised Cain and it was Potter’s fault, for the bedpans were her responsibility her sacred trust.

They had their ways of getting back to each other, a never-ending game, because each dirty trick must be countered by another. When Barnes, who was bulky, and slow in her movements, but thorough, had spent an hour cleaning tooth-mugs, Potter would stain the insides of half of them by using glycothymoline too strong. So when they were making the bed of a heavy, helpless patient, Barnes would get him rolled over to Potter’s side, and then while she was standing on tiptoe, red in the face, bursting her heart to hold him, Barnes would remember that she had left the steriliser boiling
dry and leave her—” But don’t let him go, or we’ll never get him over again.”

At dinner-time Potter would stay in the kitchen, soaping round Sister by offering to put the spinach through a sieve, so that Barnes would have to feed Daddy Ledward, who would not swallow, but just held it in his mouth, moving his gums feebly, until you nearly went mad. On fish days Barnes hurried out with the first platefuls and took them round the top of the ward, where the men felt too ill to complain, so that Potter had to suffer the grumbles of the far end, where they always said the fish was stale. When Sister had gone to lunch, they both made a rush from wherever they were to finish up the pudding before Winnie got it.

When Sister allowed Barnes to take out some of Mr. Brett’s stitches, there was no holding her. They were the first stitches she had ever removed, so she looked on him thereafter as her private property. Until Potter was allowed to take him downstairs and help put the plaster on for his walking splint, so yah.

They came together somewhat over Mr. Brett, who, now that he had got over making a nuisance of himself, was becoming quite ward-minded, and was always good for a laugh. He had got a sketch block and would draw anybody’s picture, as good as the lightning caricaturist at the Olympia fun fair. There was not a plaster cast in the ward which was not adorned with some of Mr. Brett’s art work, and Winnie took twice as long to sweep the floor that side because she had to stop half-way and pose for a few touches to her potrait that Mr. Brett was doing for her young man. Barnes and Potter were always hanging round his bed giggling and making him draw things for them, and Sister said she didn’t know what young girls were coming to, but then she had never known that within living memory.

He had better visitors than most of the other patients. There was a dear old girl called Mrs. Weissmann who always brought him bags full of cakes and sweets. One day, Barnes stopped, goggling by the bed while she was unloading them.

“I hope it doesn’t matter that I bring these, Nurse dear?” she said. “But I am sure this poor boy goes hungry here.”

“Too true,” said Barnes. “So do we.” Mrs. Weissmann was horrified, so Barnes, calling Potter to corroborate, drew a heart-breaking picture of the food in the nurses’ dining-room. Ever after that Mrs. Weissmann never came without bringing
cakes and pies and a loaf of her own braided cholla bread for the starving nurses.

There was also a visitor called Ossie, who made a joke every time you came near the bed, and seemed to be telling Mr. Brett funny stories all the time, judging from the laughter.

“He’s a scream,” Barnes and Potter said afterwards. “You have got killing friends, Brettsie. What was he telling you that was so funny?”

“Nothing special. Telling me about his girl, among other things. She’s gone off with a man from some dog kennels.”

“Was that funny?” asked Potter.

“He’s doing his best to think it is.”

“Gosh,” said Barnes, “how
queer”

“What are you doing gossiping there, Nurses?” Sister called. “Get on with your work.”

“We are,” they said. “We’re making a bed.”

“It doesn’t look like it. Anyway, Mr. Brett is to get up for bed-making now. You’re not to baby him any more. Come along now, Mr. Brett. You’re not going to stay in my ward for the rest of your life. You’ve got to start using that leg.” She came clapping her hands at him and he groaned and turned up his eyes at her. “You made enough fuss about getting out of here at first,” she scolded him, “but now you’ve got too spoiled and lazy to make the effort.”

“Yes,” he said.

Barnes and Potter giggled. “He’s afraid you’ll send him home before the wedding, Sister.”

“He’ll walk for the wedding,” she said, “or not see it at all. I’ll need to have half these beds out with the crowd there’s going to be, and Daddy Ledward will have to go in the side room, poor old soul. It’s a terrible upset. I can’t think what the Reverend was about to allow it to happen on my ward.”

But the probationers, who knew all the gossip of the hospital, on every stratum, knew that Sister Ferguson was really as excited as anybody and had bored everyone to death in the sisters’ sitting-room by talking about nothing else.

On the morning of the wedding she was in a flat spin and had been over to the hostel to change her apron at least three times, although nothing would happen until after lunch. Nurse Fitt had washed her hair the night before and wore it in rolls under her cap, ready to comb out later. Nurse Fewling was not there,
for Barnes and Potter had resolved their argument by foisting the day off on to her. They were both as excited as if they were going to be married themselves, and kept goading Sonny for lying there so calmly, although he could do nothing else. “You are queer,” they said, “you’re not a bit romantic.”

One of the men said something which made Potter collapse on to the end of a bed and stuff her giggling face into the blanket, but Barnes did not understand, so Potter took her out to the annexe to explain it.

When they were not teasing the bridegroom, the men spent all morning shaving each other, and there was a constant stream to the door of the ward of wives bringing brown-paper parcels of clean pyjamas. People kept coming along from other wards to ask if they could come and bring their up-patients, but it was to be the fracture ward’s day, and no outsider was invited except Matron and Sonny’s gallery of doctors and surgeons. There would not be room, because of the size of his family. They began to arrive even before lunch was over, and Sister kept them lined up in the corridor in their wedding clothes, until the last plate of treacle batter had been served, although no one wanted treacle batter with the sight of the wedding feast arriving on trolleys.

Then the sheer weight of Sonny’s mother burst open the doors and the guests streamed in, aunts, uncles, cousins, fat and thin, shy and jolly; pimply youths and vague old men who were steered about and told: “Not there, Grandpa!” Children who stared at the patients, and Sonny’s twin sisters, who stared at them, too, but in a different way. Sonny’s father, with a strawberry nose and a buttonhole as big as a cauliflower and Sonny’s mother looking like a bulldog in an aggressive black hat and a young tree of carnations hanging upside down on the shoulder of an edge-to-edge coat that was made to be a wrap-over.