Hearts of Gold (5 page)

‘Remember Cardiff Infirmary?’ Laura murmured wistfully. ‘There I could talk to anyone I wanted

‘And generally did.’

‘You can’t blame me,’ she retorted. ‘Not after being wrapped up in cotton wool by Papa and Ronnie until the day I left home. And to think I was stupid enough to come back. I must have been insane to have even considered it.’

They walked across the women’s exercise yard and made their way towards the towering, grey stone maternity block.

‘And now look at me,’ Laura continued to grumble, ‘working on a maternity ward of all things, when I really want to be on men’s surgical.’

‘Last time I looked in there, I didn’t see any tall dark handsome men waiting to fall in love,’ Bethan teased.

‘Were there any fair ones?’ Laura mocked, still thinking of Haydn.

‘None that would have interested you.’ Bethan opened the heavy oak door of the ward block that housed the maternity unit.

‘Oh well I can live in hope. And who knows if Frederick March or Gerald du Maurier is brought in, they may mix maternity up with men’s surgical. And even if they don’t, by the end of the day we’ll know whether we’re qualified or not. And if we are,’ she lifted her eyebrows suggestively; ‘we can always request a transfer.’

‘You’re a hopeless case,’ Bethan laughed as they climbed the steep flight of stone stairs. ‘I really must remember to warn my brothers about you.’

‘Both of them?’ Laura asked indignantly.

‘Both of them,’ Bethan retorted firmly, as she unfastened her cape and prepared herself for duty.

As far back as she could remember Bethan had wanted to be a doctor. The proudest day of her life was when she passed the entrance examination to Pontypridd Girls’ Grammar School, the saddest when she realised that a drastic cut in miners’ wages had robbed her father of sufficient money to keep her there. Her mother’s unemotional, realistic attitude had taught her to accept the inevitable. Enlisting the aid of a sympathetic teacher she applied to every hospital in the area; and at fourteen left home to take up the position of a live in ward maid at Llwynypia hospital in the Rhondda. When she was sixteen the Sister on her ward recommended her for nursing training in the Royal Infirmary in Cardiff, and she’d loved it.

Laura arrived to train alongside her, and they’d shared a cubicle in the nurses’ hostel. Both of them soon discovered that trainee nurses were treated worse than domestics. The work was hard, the split shift hours impossibly long; their superiors demanding,

But Bethan found her patients and their ailments fascinating, and when things were really tough, Laura was always there with a joke to lighten the load.

During the three years she’d trained she and Laura had scarcely seen their families. Trainee nurses’ holidays rarely coincided with Christmas or Easter, and summer visits to Barry Island on the train with the other girls, and winter window shopping trips around Cardiff had taken up most of their fortnightly free afternoons. But just as they’d finished their third year finals, Bethan had received a letter from her mother suggesting a move to the Graig hospital so she could help out with family finances. Realising that Elizabeth would only have made the suggestion as a desperate last resort, she saw Matron, and applied for a transfer without giving a thought to what her own plans might have been.

And Laura, always the supportive best friend, decided to make the move with her.

Times were hard for everyone, but when she returned home they managed. Her father had three days’ work guaranteed in the Maritime every week. The boys had left school, although Haydn like her, had dreamed of going to college, and both boys occasionally brought home the odd few shillings.

However, it was her own and her father’s much reduced wages that kept the family going.

‘Only sixty seconds of freedom left and then it’ll be twelve hours before we can call our souls our own again,’ Laura muttered as they shuffled into line behind the qualified nurses ready for the ward sister’s inspection.

‘Ssh,’ Nurse Williams, one of the qualified nurses, admonished as the squeak of rubber soled boots over linoleum heralded the approach of authority.

Both Laura and Bethan had found the Graig hospital very different from Cardiff Infirmary. The first thing she and Laura had discovered was that the place was known by many names, any one of which was enough to strike fear into the hearts of the poor and elderly who were terrified of dying alone and abandoned in one of its wards. The name least used was the official one, “The Graig Hospital.” In newspaper reports of its social and fundraising functions it was generally referred to as “The Central Homes” because all the wards, although housed in separate blocks, occupied the same vast tract of land sandwiched between the railway lines at the bottom of the Graig hill.

Despite the efforts of the staff to educate patients, few people differentiated between the hospital wards and those of the homes, although they were run as separate units, the hospital dealing with the sick and the homes with the destitute.

The destitute and “casuals” generally entered the site through massive, high wooden doors that fronted High Street, and the sick and maternity cases by the huge metal main gates situated around the corner in Courthouse Street. To the locals, the whole complex was known by its Victorian name, “The Workhouse”.

And they, like their parents and grandparents before them, knew many who had entered its high walled precincts only to leave for an unmarked grave in a derelict corner of Glyntaff cemetery.

Bethan and Laura had only ever worked on the maternity ward of the hospital. A VD ward, euphemistically described as the “clinic” because one was held there two days a week, and wards for the terminally ill were housed in the same block as the maternity unit. On these wards were mainly miners, young girls, and children who’d contracted tuberculosis or one of the other severe, often fatal, respiratory illnesses that haunted the mining valleys. A separate block behind the maternity unit held “J” ward, a unit for children under three, sick, orphaned and those whose parents had been admitted as destitute.

J Ward was the only ward in the hospital where the sick and “parish” cases overlapped. The rest of the Homes side was virtually a closed book to Bethan. She came across the inmates often. It was difficult not to. Squads of young, pregnant girls from the “unmarried mothers” wearing the workhouse uniform of grey flannel were often commandeered to scrub the miles of stairs, corridors and outside steps of the complex. If it wasn’t the pregnant girls and women who were hard at work, then it was the orphans from Church Village homes who’d reached the age of sixteen without finding a foster parent, job or sponsor.

The council had no other recourse but to send these “adult orphans” to the Homes, where they carried coal, laid fires, swept yards and washed bed linen for their daily bread and marge until they found either a sponsor or a job. And with the town strangled in the grip of a depression that was vacating shops and bankrupting longstanding, respectable traders at an alarming rate, most of the inmates could be forgiven for believing that they were in the workhouse for life.

Those who could no longer pay their rent, the elderly who couldn’t look after themselves, girls who disgraced their families – they all ended up in the Graig. Occasionally Bethan heard cries from the yards as families were split up. Men to the male, and women to the female casual wards, their children under three to J ward, those over three and under eleven to Maesycoed Homes, a couple of miles away, and those between eleven and sixteen to Church Village homes several miles away.

The elderly went into the geriatric wards.

In addition to these semi-permanent inmates, every evening Bethan and Laura passed lengthy, verminous queues of “occasionals” waiting to sign into a casual ward for the night. Three hours of coal shovelling or stick chopping earned them a delousing bath, evening meal, breakfast and bed. There were always more casuals in winter than summer, but if they were capable of walking, they signed themselves out the next morning even in a snowstorm.

The nurses on the casual wards had a more difficult job in many ways than the nurses in the hospital, but Bethan sensed a “looking down” by the medical staff on those who worked with the destitute. It wasn’t only that they spent their days delousing patients, and supervising menial tasks; it was the lack of any real medical work.

Bethan knew one or two of them, widows or women with unemployed husbands, who’d been forced to take on the role of family breadwinner. She felt sorry for them and, when she wasn’t too busy to think, wondered why they didn’t apply for a transfer to the hospital wards.

One of the reasons could have been Lena Church. Sister Lena Church was the martinet who ran the maternity ward. She’d been christened “Squeers” by a nurse when a stage production of Nicholas Nickleby had played at the Town Hall.

The name had stuck, and not only because she had a squint. If she had any saving graces, neither her nurses nor her patients had seen any sign of them.

‘Homes side has rung through. Unmarried has gone into labour.’ Sister Church paused in the doorway of the sluice room where Bethan was scouring bedpans. ‘I only hope they’re not sending her over too early. The last thing we need is workhouse clutter on this ward. When you’ve finished that, get the delivery room ready and the bath run. But mind you don’t skimp on those bedpans to do it. There are enough cases of cross-infection without you adding to them.’

‘Yes, sister.’ Bethan fought the temptation to bite back. Sister’s commands were like sergeant-majors’ orders, with never a “please” or a “thank you”. But three years on the wards of Cardiff Infirmary had accustomed her to routine brusqueness. What she found difficult to accept was the underlying hint that any job entrusted to her would not be carried out properly.

Head down, she continued to scrub until she heard the squeak of sister’s rubber soled boots walking past the door and down the ward that housed the mothers. Then she turned on the cold tap, rinsed and disinfected the pans, and stacked them on the shelf above the sink. She washed and dried her hands, mournfully examining their cracked and sore state, before removing her rubber apron. Straightening her veil, she left the sluice room and turned left, out of the main ward into a corridor. She walked into the principal delivery room and reflected, not for the first time, that it was a miserable place in which to make an entry into the world.

Its one small paned window overlooked an inner courtyard hedged in by high, grey stone walls which darkened the atmosphere even further. The room itself was half tiled with brick shaped tiles. Time and countless trolley knocks had cracked and stained their surface, transforming them from white into a patchwork of grubby beiges and greys. A mahogany dado separated the tiles from the upper wall, which was glossed the same sickly shade of green as the rest of the hospital.

A grey metal bedstead covered by a pink rubber sheet was the only furniture. No table, no chair, no pictures on the wall to relieve the monotony, only a cumbersome radiator built on a gigantic scale, that ironically did little to warm the room. Bethan laid her hand on it. It was warmer than the air. Marginally.

Rubbing warmth into her hands, she left the room to fetch bed linen and a birth pack.

‘Patient’s on the stairs and sister’s screaming because the bath isn’t run.’ Laura poked her head around the door. ‘Here, I’ll finish that, you sort out the bathroom.’

Bethan ran.

There was only one bathroom on the ward, off the same corridor as the delivery rooms and linen cupboard. It contained two baths. Bethan sat on the edge of the one nearest the door and pushed the wrinkled rubber plug into the hole. She turned on the hot tap. A thin stream of lukewarm, brownish water trickled into the tub, covering a bottom long denuded of porcelain covering by the friction of countless bodies and scourings with Vim.

As soon as she sat down she realised how tired she was. She’d been on her feet all morning, and her nerves were stretched.

A porter had mentioned that Matron was calling the final-year students into her office one at a time to give them their examination results. Bethan hadn’t worked in the hospital long enough to know if this was normal practice. If it wasn’t, did it mean that the results were dreadful? If she failed would she lose her job, or would the hospital authorities give her a chance to repeat the year and try the examinations again? So much depended on Matron’s recommendations in cases of failure, and Matron based her decisions on sister’s reports. She really should have made more of an effort to get on with Squeers.

Reaching out she fingered a thin wedge of foul-smelling yellow soap in the dish at the side of the bath. It fell to pieces in her hand, melted and watery.

‘Powell!’

She jumped as though she’d been scalded. ‘Yes, Sister.’

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Testing the bath water, Sister,’ Bethan lied promptly, standing stiffly to attention. Three months’ training on Sister Church’s ward had given her an aptitude to tell untruths she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of acquiring a year ago.

‘I see,’ Sister echoed baldly. ‘Well, while you’re “testing the water,” the patient is waiting at the door of the ward. Bring her here and supervise her bath. I’ll turn off the tap,’ she said coldly, as though she couldn’t even trust Bethan to complete that simple task.

The wards in the maternity section led into one another, and Bethan walked quickly out of the side corridor into the room that housed the mothers. Pushing open the double doors at the end she went into the nursery. She loved this ward, with its aroma of talcum powder and fragile new life, and normally took time to linger among the rows of placid pink babies tucked up in their cots. Even now, rushed as she was, her steps slowed as she glanced into the cot of baby Davies, a sweet little girl with a mop of dark curly hair who’d rapidly become the staff favourite, although none of them would have willingly admitted such favouritism.

‘Nurse! Nurse!’ The cry was accompanied by a furious knocking on the far door that led into the main corridor. She broke into a run.

‘She’s in a lot of pain, Nurse.’

‘All right, Jimmy.’ Bethan smiled reassuringly at the tall, thin gangly porter who’d been sent from Church Village Homes to the Graig hospital on his sixteenth birthday, and worked his way up from the status of inmate to porter, a position he’d held for over thirty years.

‘Breathe deeply.’ Bethan looked from the pale, strained face of the young girl to Jimmy.

‘Maisie, Maisie Crockett, Nurse,’ Jimmy supplied anxiously.

‘Maisie?’ Bethan looked for a resemblance between the young girl who stood, hunched and trembling before her, to her old school friend from Danygraig Street.

‘You remember me then?’ Maisie clutched her abdomen as another pain gripped her.

‘Of course I remember you.’

‘I’ve seen you around the hospital. I didn’t think you wanted to know me,’ Maisie gasped.

‘Now, why should you think that?’ Bethan wrapped her arm around Maisie’s thin shoulders.