For King and Country (3 page)

Her glance stole back to the corporal. By, but he was a bonny lad. She dropped her gaze to examine the clean hands folded in her lap. There would be plenty of men who needed her, probably for
years to come, judging by the numbers of soldier patients they were getting lately. The hospital was bursting at the seams, with fifty-odd men crammed into wards designed for half that number.
Except the officers’ ward, of course. They didn’t cram officers in like sardines.

Still, officers or men, they were all heroes and they were all hurt, and the hands that would minister to them were scrubbed immaculate, the nail-tips white. She looked at those hands, pictured
them ministering to a grateful blue-eyed corporal, imagined his expression of admiration, and smiled to herself until the wheels rattled her over the points of the largest railway crossing in the
world and carried her into Newcastle Central Station.

Off the train then, to hurry along the platform under its domed glass roof, to stream out through the exit with the crush of people and hasten towards the hospital, and the patients who awaited
her.

As soon as the maid called her, Sally was out of bed and brushing and pinning up an abundance of brown hair. A good wash came next, and then she began to dress, fastening the
corset that pulled in her already trim waist, pulling up the black stockings and hooking them carefully to the suspenders. Now for the beautifully laundered long-sleeved dress that she would wear
for half a week before it was washed again, and then the collar and cuffs, rigid with starch, and then the apron. It was pressed into a long, hard board, and Sally carefully pulled out the folds
and put it on, adjusting the starch-stiff bib at the front. How on earth did the laundry manage to get the things so beautifully stiff, and white? They were generous with the starch at home, but
they could never get things done as well as the hospital laundresses managed. Her cap was the same. She pulled the strings at the back to gather it to fit, and carefully pinned it on. It flattered
her features like a lace-edged halo. She gave her image a smile of approval and then tightened the stiff white belt around her waist. And lastly the shoes with their smart, two-inch heels, black
and gleaming with polish. Standing before the mirror she smiled, for once liking the look of herself: trim, and shining clean, her hazel eyes clear, her pale face as bright as the morning.

They had done no real nursing at all yet, she and the other new probationers, but had got through plenty of work that any housemaid could have done: dishing out bedpans and stripping beds and
making them up again, and interminable rounds of cleaning, and careful damp-dusting, making sure no bacterial-laden dust particles were scattered into the air – as if any bacteria would dare
show their faces in those wards, with their enamel painted walls and tiled dadoes, and polished parquet floors. There wasn’t a corner for a microbe to hide in. Much of the sheer drudgery that
maintained that gleaming, sterile splendour fell to the lot of the first year probationer; hard, unremitting work that made Sally’s legs and back ache so much they kept her awake at night,
and all done for nothing but bed and board, as part of the famous ‘trial period’. It seemed to her that the trial period was nothing but a way of getting a lot of unpaid labour for the
hospital.

Sacrifice? It was that all right. It was a system of slavery, really, but at least the uniform was provided, and she’d managed to get a watch and a pair of scissors
and
a nursing
dictionary second hand and hardly used, from a girl who’d just failed the trial and been sacked for being ‘not interested in her work, and too free with the soldier patients’.

With a fluttering apprehension in her stomach, she made her way to 7b. A faint smell of sepsis greeted her as she entered a full ward of thirty-odd men lying in the cast iron beds ranged along
the walls.

‘This ward’s only meant to take twenty-four, but when we’re “on take” we end up with beds squashed down the middle, as well,’ Staff Nurse told her, pushing a
strand of brown hair back under her starched cap. ‘We’ve sometimes had to find space for fifty, and ended up with beds in the corridor as well. Amputees, gunshot wounds, shrapnel
wounds, bullet wounds, fractures, we get the lot, wounds everywhere they can get a wound, from head to foot. The lucky ones have got clean wounds, the unlucky ones septic. Depends whether the
missile bounced into the mud or not before it hit them. Some chaps are in for their hernias doing, massive ones, some of them – they’ve taken some punishment with that incessant trench
digging, and heaving stuff about – constant heavy labour. I’ve no time to take you round them all now, but tag along when Matron comes to do her round, and you’ll get an idea.
Here, Nurse Armstrong!’ she called to a third year Sally had seen often in the Nurses’ Home, ‘take her and show her the ropes, will you?’

The routine was similar to the women’s wards Sally had been on, and she and Armstrong sped down the ward making beds, easy when the patients could sit out, a bit more difficult when they
couldn’t. A corporal of about fifty, who was lying flat on his front, put a foot to the floor and gingerly eased himself onto his feet. The pillows were on the chair placed at the bottom of
the bed, and the bed stripped almost as soon as he was upright.

‘What happened to you?’ Sally asked, tightening his clean bottom sheet, working like an automaton in perfect rhythm with her partner.

‘Me? I got a lump of shell-casing in my backside, and it ploughed right down my thigh. Plenty a lot worse, though, lass.’

‘Half of his buttock shorn away,’ Armstrong told her, when they were out of earshot. ‘He’ll be limping the rest of his life. We had to knock him out before we first did
the dressing. Why, man, the stink! We were glad to get down into that sluice for a smoke when we’d finished, to get the stench out of our nostrils. Sister always turns a blind eye to that. I
reckon she thinks we need a few puffs, at times!’

She nodded towards the couple of sufferers they were approaching, both just skin and bone, and both attached to saline drips. ‘That one broke both legs, and had to drag himself yards into
a shell-hole. Says it must have been about five days before anybody found him. The one next to him got it through the chest, and while he was down the bloody Germans gave him the bayonet in the
stomach, and then they walked over him, and he was on the battlefield two days before they got him to the field ambulance. It’s a miracle he got here alive.’

When the beds were done, Sally went round with a bowl of disinfectant and a cloth, taking the dust off locker tops, windowsills and bedsteads. Many of the men said very little, but a few wanted
to talk, and one man of about twenty-five became so familiar she blushed with embarrassment, and turned the conversation by asking about his wound.

‘Bullet in the shoulder, bonny lass,’ he told her, with a hunted look in his eyes. ‘A clean wound, and healing well, worse luck. It’s odds on I’ll be back in France
before long’

She stopped her wiping and stared at him. ‘Why, you wouldn’t want it septic, would you?’ she asked. ‘You might end up with septicaemia. People die of that.’

‘I’d risk it. It would be a sight better than having to go back over there.’

She shook her head wonderingly and hesitated, then moved briskly off, unwilling to risk any accusations of fraternizing, or slackness.

‘The lucky ones have got clean wounds,’ Staff Nurse had told her, but as she was beginning to learn, a lot of the patients saw it differently. For some, the truly lucky ones were
those whose filthy wounds or massive hernias would keep them in Blighty for good.

Clean or dirty, there was little chance of Sally being allowed to dress any of the wounds. Sister was a middle-aged martinet, who made herself clear. ‘I’ll have no untrained juniors
poking their fingers into wounds on my ward. There’s too much of that in the auxiliary hospitals, society women with their pearls and their nursing outfits from London fashion houses meddling
with matters they don’t understand.’

‘Why, I suppose they’re only trying to do their bit, Sister,’ Sally said.

‘They’re trying to get their photos in the papers, you mean. Usually before they’ve even worked a week – wearing caps as big as bed-sheets that would be flopping in
septic wounds and then in the soup, if they had to do any
real
work! No, they’re out to take all the credit for the work
we’re
doing, the
real
nurses.
It’s an absolute scandal! But I’ll have no amateurs let loose on my ward. You’ll need a bit more experience before I’ll let you touch any of the patients here.’

Half the patients and staff on the ward had overheard her, and most were grinning from ear to ear.

‘Crikey,’ said Sally after she’d shot off up the ward, knowing instinctively that it would be useless to say that she’d helped with many a sterile dressing while working
in Dr Lowery’s house, and had helped him set more than one broken limb. That would cut no ice with this sister.

‘She hates the society clique,’ Armstrong said. ‘If there’s anything in the papers about the wonderful VADs, or the honourable Lady So-and-So and her convalescent home,
it’s like a red rag to a bull. We see eye-to-eye on that one, though. I was a VAD for a year in a Red Cross hospital, and I saw some very rough-and-ready methods, and not much discipline
either. Still, I don’t suppose they thought it mattered much, as we were dealing with the “typical products of the slums”, to quote one lady. Anyway, I decided I’d get a
decent training, and then go back and work in a military hospital. Only
now
I won’t get in.

‘Why not?’

‘The Army Council’s decided that only VADs of two years’ standing will get their names on the roll of military nurses, and that’s a piece of work that’s been
managed by the Red Cross as well, I’ve
no
doubt. Sister thinks so, too.’

‘Why do you want to be an army nurse, anyway?’ Sally asked.

‘I come from an army family. My father’s a regimental sergeant major’

‘Ah.’

‘Still, we live in hope. A lot of things are going to change after the war, once soldiers and women get the vote. Even the War Office will have to move with the times then! Have you joined
the Nursing Association yet?’

‘No,’ said Sally. She hadn’t even thought of it.

‘Well, you should. “
L’unionfait laforce
”, as our allies say. If workers want their rights, they’ve got to make themselves felt, and we can only do that
together. You will join, won’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Sally said, but wondered why she should, while she was being kept strictly to routine menial work, interminable cleaning and bedpan rounds. Worse was washing out the
sputum mugs used by men who had been gassed. That was a job that made her stomach heave, and worse still was having to clean the filthy, blood-stained, slimy stuff off the ward floor if a container
was accidentally knocked off a locker. That made her gag until the tears filled her eyes, and none of that sort of work seemed to have much to do with real nursing as far as she could see, other
than ensuring the essential cleanliness.

Still, real nursing might be even more horrible in this place. She occasionally caught the sight and the scent of some of the wounds during the dressing round: wounds to make you sick, wounds to
make you weep, wounds that were far and away worse than anything she’d ever seen at Dr Lowery’s. A mere glimpse of Sister or Staff Nurse pulling yards and yards of pus-drenched gauze
out of holes big enough to put your fist in was enough to make her feel woozy. All in all, she didn’t envy Armstrong who, as a third year probationer, had the dubious honour of helping with
such dressings and even doing some of the more minor ones on her own.

‘It makes you sick at first, but in the end you seem to cut yourself off from it and treat it as just another job,’ she assured Sally. ‘They get them down to theatre and pack
their wounds with antiseptic paste as soon as they can, so you’re not usually doing the really bad ones for long.’

Sally was far from convinced, and secretly she began to wonder if she’d made a mistake; if this was a job she was really cut out for after all. She often sat with the other nurses at the
long ward table during visiting hours, when everything was done and the ward was quiet, cutting dressings or rolling bandages, watching the visitors troop in and occasionally jumping to her feet to
take a bouquet of flowers to the sluice to put it in a jug of water then triumphantly bear it back and place it on the patient’s locker, a sweet-scented testimony to loveliness. She
couldn’t help but hear the visitors’ enquiries and the usual responses from the men: ‘I’m all right . . .’; ‘I’m all right, hinny . . .’;
‘I’m all right, pet.’ She sometimes glanced up for a minute or two to watch them all, bathed in the golden light of the afternoon sun, and wondered what the visitors would say if
they could be on the ward in the middle of a dressing round, to inhale the smell of sepsis and see just what it was that lay beneath the neat bandages, the clean sheets, and the smiles.

There was a less long-suffering, less dutiful, revolutionary little cabal, though, who often gathered together on the verandah or in the day room to smoke and conspire against the state.
Whenever she overheard them Sally felt as if she were back in the Cock Inn, listening to her brothers and brothers-in-law.

A private with a shattered ankle and a dirty chest wound who looked about twelve years old often had an ominous glint in his feverish eyes. ‘Do you know what field punishment number one
is?’ he once demanded. Sally didn’t, but was soon enlightened. ‘It’s having your pay stopped for up to three weeks, being worked to death shovelling shit or something just
as nasty, and then being tied to a gun wheel for hours every day with your arms stretched up above your head. The buggers did that to me last spring.’ He paused for breath for a moment or two
and gazed into the middle distance, in spirit probably back on that gun wheel. ‘Oh aye,’ he added, ‘I hope I may run into the officer that did that to me again once the
war’s over, supposing I’m still fit to stand. We take orders from one-pip wonders who cannot tell their arses from their elbows . . .’