She was telling them that cracked cups were worse than useless and should be broken outright. ‘A crack in a cup’, she crowed, ‘is an open invitation to germs.’ Not that germs would dare to multiply in her presence, her very voice would sterilise them. ‘If you wish to drink from unhygienic crockery, then you will do so in your own time and from your own dirty cups. No patient of mine will be exposed to infection because of the laxness of the staff. Is that understood?’
A voice hardly audible. ‘Yes, Sister.’
‘I couldn’t hear that.’
‘Yes, Sister!’
‘Now clear up this mess and know better in future.’
The country might be on its knees after a heroic, self-sacrificial war, the National Health Service still struggling to be born out of the ashes of a vanished prosperity, but there was no excuse for a hospital cup having a crack in it.
In fact the economic aspects of the place were oddly unpredictable. We slept between linen sheets as a matter of course, like royalty, sheets washed and ironed in the hospital’s own laundry. Ansell insisted on this extravagance — we were children, after all, who spent more than the usual amount of time in bed. The linen even had a wholesome taste against the tongue.
The discrepancy between the smoothness of the sheets we slept between and the roughness of the ones that were scraped against our tender little bums was part of the mystery of the place. In an institution where we had to have our bottoms wiped for us, by nurses whose tenderness was very variable, soft tissue would have made quite a difference, taking the abrasion factor out of the brusquer wipings.
Somehow Sister Heel was so terrifying she shot off the scale and blew back in at the other end, as a hurricane of reassurance. It made me feel better to know that she had the staff running round in small circles. She didn’t have anything that corresponded to the modern term ‘people skills’. She just shouted at the world until it fell into line, usually sooner rather than later.
Double dose of Senokot
Sister Heel wanted our ‘bowels opened’ daily. She would come round with Senokot for those whose bowels hadn’t been shrewd enough to take the hint. So we learned to lie, to say we’d opened them even if we hadn’t. This might work for a single day, but no longer. Then it was Senokot in a double dose. I wondered if this was the same as the castor oil which Mum remembered with such revulsion. Perhaps they’d just changed the name. Then I realised that if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t do tuppennies, however much Senokot I was given, and I was very tempted to go without. No tuppennies — no bedpan torture.
It was extraordinary to learn that there was an authority even higher than Sister Heel. Matron was over and above everything, over all the sisters and nurses. She also seemed to have established a sort of dominance over the doctors. I heard that even Ansell went rather quiet when she approached. Matron was to Heel as Granny was to Mum. I could hardly imagine a person so formidable.
One day from my side ward I heard a cadet nurse sobbing in the little corridor, then a voice of familiar huskiness.
‘Just learn to pull yourself together, my girl!’ Heel was telling her roughly. ‘I have no control over thermometer stock here. When you break one, you have to report to Matron to get a new one. Yes, of course you’ll get a scolding. You will indeed. As did we all!’
That word ‘scolding’ was full of fascination for me. Mum had told me about what happened when hot liquid fell on the skin, about scalding and the rawness and blistering that followed. Bad scaldings never really healed. It stood to reason that a scolding was a verbal scalding, when someone else’s mind boiled over on you, like milk on top of a stove. If ever I became too cocky, too knowing, too plain happy, I’d get a scolding. Someone would be sure to say, ‘You’re getting too big for your boots.’ That’s to say, too big for my built-up shoes. ‘You need to be taken down a peg or two.’ I was always being told about pride going before a fall. I didn’t know why that proverb seemed to have my name on it.
It was thrilling to imagine Heel as a cadet herself, trembling before the mighty Matron. Interesting too that Heel, while informing the poor cadet about hospital procedure, was also delivering a scolding of her own. A scolding about a scolding, a scolding to tell her about the scolding she’d get from Matron. How fascinating! I reasoned that if Heel could scold the ward, and Matron could scold the hospital, then there must be someone who had the power to scold Matron, and calculated that there must be some kind of Super-Matron of all England who had the power to scold any matron in any hospital in the country. But who would have the power to scold her? My mind just naturally lost itself in such cosmological labyrinths.
So when I was told Matron was doing her rounds and would be visiting me in my side ward, I was distinctly nervous. It made sense that she would be completely terrifying. I hoped she would just take a quick look at me and go out again. I didn’t think I could stand being on the receiving end of Matron’s rough tongue. When Heel licked cadet nurses into shape, after all, they might sob for hours.
Then when Matron swept in at the head of a train of attendants it was a delicious surprise. She wore a purple uniform, which I immediately loved, and a starched hat which fitted tightly round her head, splaying out in a pleated fan around her shoulders like a peacock’s tail upside-down. The world went very still when she came in. This wasn’t an enforced or punitive silence but a rapt stillness, hushed and attentive.
‘Good morning, John,’ she said.
‘Good morning, Matron,’ I replied.
‘Sister Heel tells me you were admitted last week, so I want to say how sorry I am that I have not visited you earlier. I hope all the nurses have been making you feel comfortable and At Home?’
They hadn’t, or not all of them had, but Matron was so nice I wasn’t going to squeal on the ones who wiped my bottom harshly. It would have made more sense to appeal for an improvement in the quality of the paper itself, but I didn’t think of that.
‘It’s a little strange here,’ I said, ‘but I’m starting to get used to it. I’m very happy to meet you, Matron.’
‘It’s entirely my pleasure, John,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that I am very busy at the moment, but I shall make time soon to pay a longer visit and get to know you better.’
‘I would like that very much, Matron.’
‘I hope you feel, John, that if anything is worrying you, or even if there is anything you do not understand — I hope you will send word to me any time you want. Say you have my express permission. Can you remember that, John? “Express permission”?’
‘Yes, Matron,’ I whispered. ‘“Express permission from Matron”. Thank you very much.’ I was really beginning to understand the phrase ‘angel of mercy’. As the purple vision withdrew from my side ward with her retinue, I heard her murmur, ‘What beautiful manners! Such a treat in this day and age. If only we could …’ But then the end of the sentence was swallowed up by the sounds of the ward.
This was the longest conversation I had had with anyone in Taplow — and it had been with Matron! It was balm, it was soul-ointment, and I basked in the glow of it. I began to think that the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital might be the right place for me after all.
Flakes of delight
Soon after that the assessment period came to an end and I was transferred to the ward proper. Some ministering angel or humane administrator had seen to it that Ivy and the girl who had threatened me with her, Wendy, were both a little way off. My nearest neighbours were gentler souls, Mary and Sarah.