sake, Powell, you’re not wrapping a Christmas present – retie your bandage properly, now!’) It was like being with my mother or Sister Margaret all over again – I could never get things right, or so it seemed.
We had to observe the doctors’ rounds on the wards each week and I was absolutely fascinated by everything. We trailed behind the doctors and consultants in their crisp white coats and pin-striped suits, stethoscopes slung round their necks, as they pronounced on the patients and snapped their orders with military precision. We were like well-behaved little goslings following behind giant ganders. Staff and Sister would always be turned out perfectly, in smart navy uniforms, and would be beside the doctors, silently obedient, and at the ready, with notes and charts at hand, ready to answer their queries or to jump to it, as they talked loftily over the patients’ heads. It was all very formal, intimidating – and bewildering. We nurses had to make sure everything was tickety-boo before the doctors did their rounds: everything had to be spotless, tidy and gleaming; sheets neatly tucked in, patients washed and hair combed. Their lockers had to be clean, with fresh water in their jugs and their flower vases refreshed. Sometimes I thought we made the beds so tightly that I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had cut off the circulation in the legs and arms of the poor people strapped neatly into bed, like strangulated sausages in hot-dog buns.
Back in our training school on the ground floor of the hospital (safely away from the real patients) we had our large rubber dolly, Araminta, to practise clinical procedures on. She lay, smiling her unchanging red-lipped smile, on a bed, and she could be zipped open from chin to pubic bone, so we could take all of her plastic internal organs out: liver, spleen, stomach, intestines, gall bladder, kidneys, bladder, and so on. We spent quite some time taking Araminta apart and putting her back together again: it was quite a game. We also had to pretend to ‘bed bath’ Araminta, and change her rubber undersheet, which involved rolling her onto her side, sliding the ‘drawsheets’ out from under, and rolling her back again. She sometimes rolled onto the floor, which, obviously, we knew we’d have to avoid with real patients (if at all possible). However, Araminta didn’t object to her mistreatment and sometimes we felt quite sorry for the punishment we gave her as we also had to practise giving her injections, which I hated doing. Back then syringes were made of glass and metal, and had to be re-used, so they were boiled in big metal sterilisers, which were bubbling away in the corner of the medical rooms all the time. Everything had to be boiled and sterilised endlessly, and was rejected as sub-standard if it wasn’t perfectly clean.
Then one day, towards the end of my first three months, Sister Burton told me I was going onto the men’s surgical ward and I was going to give my first injection. I nearly fainted. A real injection into a real person. Not Araminta? No, surely not. I wasn’t ready, was I? Sister being Sister was blunt, business-like and to the point: ‘Nurse Powell, you will give the patient his injection – now stop fussing and get on with it. You know what to do.’ So I approached Mr Brown’s bed gingerly. I stood, holding the metal kidney-shaped dish with the syringe rattling in it, while he read his newspaper, totally unaware of my inexperience. He was a good-looking, fair-haired man of about thirty with a deep, badly infected cut on his leg from a work accident. He was sitting there, all innocence, in his striped pyjamas with no idea what was about to be unleashed on him – all-fingers-and-thumbs-me.
Mr Brown looked up and saw me looking at him fixedly, just as I felt a presence begin hovering behind me. I looked round and there was Sister, glaring. Oh my God, I had to get on with it. I pulled the screens round the bed on their squeaky wheels while I was frantically trying to remember what I’d done to poor old Araminta. Sister had told me the injection, which was a thick antibiotic mixture, had to go in the outer quadrant of Mr Brown’s right buttock. Buttock! Sweet Jesus, I’d never seen a man naked before and now I was going to be looking at this poor man’s bum, and inject him, to boot. Despite my nervousness, I tried to brazen it out: ‘All right, Mr Brown, I have to give you this little injection, so could you roll over and pull down your pyjama bottoms?’
I couldn’t believe I was saying this to a real, live man, and was even more amazed when he rolled over obediently, and did just that. Luckily, he couldn’t see my hand shaking as I got the large syringe out of the dish and prepared it for him. Little it was not. I swabbed his right buttock with antiseptic and cotton wool, trying not to take in the smooth brown and hairy skin of his muscular body. I was looking at a naked man’s posterior, my first, but was seriously trying to concentrate on the job in hand (as it were). I filled the syringe with the thick Streptomycin with trembling fingers, and pushed out the air bubble, just as I’d been taught. Surely nothing could really go wrong?
Thing was, I was terrified of hurting him and I stood rooted to the spot for a minute trying to remember all that Sister Tutor had told me when I was torturing Araminta. Mr Brown was perturbed by my hesitation. ‘Anything wrong, nurse?’ he asked, innocently, trying to peer round over his shoulder. ‘No, no, nothing, Mr Brown,’ I stuttered. ‘No, not at all – just turn round, lie there and relax.’ And with that I lobbed the heavy glass syringe at poor Mr Brown’s right buttock, rather like a dart at a dart board, and it went in a bit, and then hung out of his bum at a ghastly angle. I knew it wasn’t in right, especially as he yelped, then hollered, loudly, and to cover my embarrassment I just syringed the viscous fluid in as fast as I could. It should have gone deep in his muscle; instead I injected it all under his skin. Poor Mr Brown was groaning as I could see a ball forming under his epidermis, like a ping-pong ball. Oh sweet Jesus! I tried to make it better by rubbing his buttock a great deal, and sort of massaging it; then I asked him to turn over and hoped for the best. The poor man looked pained, as he pulled his pyjamas up, but I tried to cheer him up as I tucked him in tightly before getting away as fast as I could.
Next day, I was really for it. Poor Mr Brown had now developed a deeply infected buttock. I was taken back to him, by Sister, and made to look: his buttock had gone black, and the place I’d injected had formed an ulcer. There was now a large hole which had to be packed. Mr Brown got really ill after this. My terrible injection technique was causing him almost more trouble than the leg injury that he had come in for in the first place. I felt absolutely awful, and was in floods of tears. Sweet Jesus, I was hopeless, I would never make it – my mother was right, I was utterly useless. I apologised profusely to Mr Brown, and to my utter amazement he was quite accepting about it. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It could have been worse.’ He could see I was genuinely distraught. Worse? I didn’t think it could be, and I seriously considered if I was really up to the job for the first time since arriving.
I was carpeted by Sister, who was a real dragon. ‘What on earth do you think you were doing, Nurse Powell?’ She went on and on, saying, ‘We obviously can’t let you anywhere near injections yet,’ as I blubbered in front of her, wanting the floor to open up. I explained that I hadn’t wanted to hurt poor Mr Brown, and instead I’d ended up giving him a whole load of pain. She barked at me to practise again on Araminta and stop whining. It was so humiliating as everyone on the ward knew it was me who had buggered it up and I imagined all the patients refusing to let me touch them from now on. Her? Oh, no, I don’t want her, Sister. Bring me a proper nurse. She’s the Devil incarnate. I could just hear it. Wisely, Sister moved me onto another ward the next day, telling me to ‘Toughen up, Powell.’ I certainly never gave another botched injection like that again; I learned I had to be firm and decisive from the start. Mr Brown recovered completely, I’m glad to say, and bore me no grudge. Luckily, patients didn’t sue in those days or I’d certainly have been up for the chop.
There was another time I showed myself up badly, too. We had to go to the morgue, which was also on the ground floor at the back of the hospital, and observe a post-mortem as part of our training. I was very nervous about this as I had not seen a dead body as yet, although Araminta had been taken apart and put back together like a giant female plastic Meccano set several times over. I was very intimate with her by now – but a real dead body? This brought back horrors of Clonmel cemetery and the terror I always felt there after dark with my wild imagination seeing grisly ghouls and hellfire and damnation everywhere. I was never very good with horror films, ghosts or anything spooky like that. Even the thought of the Putney Common convict ghost made me shiver, and I tried to put it out of my mind as much as I could.
So