set exactly straight and pinned over her tightly coiled hair …
Feverishly counting the seconds remaining, Amy peered at herself in the tiny square of mirror over the shelf that doubled as work desk and dressing table, judged that her appearance would be acceptable even to Sister Blaine, the head nurse of the ward, and ran for her life.
Seven minutes to six a.m. and she was due to present herself on the ward, correct to the last button, at six o’clock precisely. She was aching in every limb and joint from twelve hours on her feet yesterday, twelve the day before and the day before that, and her eyes were heavy with sitting over textbooks late into the night. Of all the things she had learned to do since arriving at the Lambeth, Amy found waking up at five in the morning the hardest.
The stairs and corridors of the nurses’ hostel seemed ominously deserted, and then Amy heard the sound of pounding feet behind her.
‘Glory, Lovell, we’ll be late again. Sister Blaine will kill me, that’s for sure.’
Student nurse Moira O’Hara was pinning her cap on as she ran, hopelessly tucking the wiry strands of hair in at one side as they escaped on the other.
‘Come on, Moira. We can make it.’
They chased down the stairs into the narrow, dirty street, ducked down an alleyway lined with dustbins, and came round a corner to the nurses’ entrance to the hospital. Once inside, hospital discipline made them slow their pace to a brisk walk and Amy couldn’t help laughing at the anguished glances Moira shot back at her as they climbed the scrubbed stairs. They reached the ward door, with seconds to spare, and found Sister Blaine waiting inside them.
‘I was wondering if prize nurses Lovell and O’Hara were planning to grace the ward this morning. O’Hara, go and fix your cap and don’t ever appear on my floor improperly dressed again. After that you will attend to the sluice room. The night staff have left it looking like a battlefield. If you are quite ready, Lovell, you can begin with Mrs Marks.’
Amy marched away down the ward. She wasn’t exactly afraid of Blaine, although most of the other juniors found her terrifying. The sister’s cruel tongue was her chief weapon against the generally fumbling inadequacy of her new recruits, and her vitriolic criticism simply made Amy try harder in order to show the old witch just what she could do.
‘Hello, Mrs Marks. How is it this morning?’
‘Murder, bleedin’ murder. Me legs is like red ‘ot bolsters.’
Her first patient of the morning was a cheerful Cockney grandmother whose arms and legs were grotesquely swollen, taut and tender to the touch. She was the salty commentator on everything that happened in Blaine’s ward, and Amy liked her very much.
‘Come on, then. I’ll give you a cool wash, and then we’ll see if we can make your bed more comfortable.’
There were five more patients to attend to before seven-thirty, when Amy and Moira had a ten-minute break during which they made toast and gulped tea in the tiny staff kitchen off the ward.
‘God forgive me, but I hate her,’ Moira murmured as Sister Blaine’s ramrod figure passed the door.
‘She sounds worse than she is.’
‘She just likes you, Lovell, because you’re grand. She’s a bloody old snob, as well.’
They grinned at each other over the last mouthfuls of toast, brushed away the invisible crumbs and scurried back to the ward.
There were forty-five minutes for lunch, which according to the rota organized by seniority often didn’t come around for the juniors until three p.m. After that, depending on their workload, another ten-minute tea break might be squeezed in before the shift ended at six.
All through the rest of the day, Amy went to and fro under the orders of the sister and staff nurses. The juniors did the dirtiest and least rewarding jobs. All the bedpans, the cleaning and scouring that didn’t fall into the ward maids’ duties, the lifting and washing of inert patients, were delegated to the newcomers. Amy was perpetually exhausted, but she had never felt more alive in her life. She liked and admired the stoicism of the Lambeth’s mostly working-class patients, and the proper nursing duties that were the province of the staffs and senior students fascinated her. She watched everything she could, and remembered how it was done. She resented all the wearying scrubbing and polishing and mindless routine as much as every junior but when she was given something more interesting to do she found it so absorbing that she forgot all the drawbacks of the work.
To her pleased surprise, Amy discovered that the theoretical and written work came easily to her. She could remember the lists of procedures for care of septicaemia, the treatment of infantile diphtheria, and the bones of the leg and foot almost effortlessly. She was physically clumsy and uncoordinated and would never be as quick and deft as little Dorothy Hewitt, a clerk’s daughter from Clapham who was destined to carry off all the prizes of their year. But she was streets ahead of the unlucky Irish girl, Moira O’Hara, who had become her closest friend. Moira was always late, dropped things, and could never remember a list of five classic symptoms for more than half an hour at a time. The other nurses would cover for her surreptitiously, and coach her for tests in their short dinner breaks.
The sense of companionship and solidarity among the girls of her intake was like nothing Amy had ever experienced before.
When she had first arrived, in the bewildering early days when life had seemed reduced to exhaustion, confusion and the fear of doing the wrong thing, the other girls had treated her with suspicious reserve. They would sit with their heads together at hostel canteen meals, and when Amy joined them they eyed her wanly. In the rare free hours they looked curiously at her clothes and Amy was suddenly acutely conscious of her glove-soft handmade shoes, her cashmere sweaters and silk scarves. She had felt isolated and awkward, but instead of trying to compensate by being over-friendly Amy had simply behaved as naturally as she could, and slowly the reserve had been broken down.
Dorothy Hewitt had obligingly shown her how to fold and tuck in the bedclothes at the end of a hospital bed in exactly the way that Sister Blaine favoured. Amy had never made a bed or polished a floor in her life, and it was the simple household tasks, so familiar to most of the other girls that their tutors didn’t bother to explain them, that were her major pitfalls.
In her turn, Amy had told Sister Blaine that Moira O’Hara had taken a pail to the sluice room when really she was late back up the stairs from dinner.
‘You said that?’ Moira gasped when Amy slipped out of the ward doors to greet her with an empty pail.
‘Ssshh. Quickly.’
‘Oh God, but you are a friend in need. I could not have lived through another roasting.’
Moira, from a village in County Cork, had dreamed of nursing at a great London hospital ever since she was old enough to dream of anything. But as soon as she arrived, she was crippled by homesickness which made it hard for her to keep up the demanding pace. Amy, who was also homesick and as much at a loss in Lambeth as Moira, warmed to her at once, and after the sluice-pail episode they became friends. The unlikely pairing attracted the attention of the other girls, and they stopped assuming that Amy was a stuck-up snob because her father was a lord and she had crystal scent bottles on her bedroom shelf.
By the end of the first month they were saving a place for her at the draughty corner table next to the canteen service hatch that belonged to the newest intake. The hostel corridor became a friendly place where girls tapped on her door in search of a stamp, or to borrow one of her scarves or blouses for a special evening, or to invite her to feast on buttered toast and cocoa whilst perched in a row on somebody’s bed.
Hospital food was sparse and tasteless, and they were all perpetually starving. Amy had never been so hungry; she had never thought about food before except as something that happened automatically, and on her days off at Bruton Street the size and sheer splendour of the meals was newly surprising. She ate ravenously, enjoying the subtle flavours and the freshness of the ingredients.
‘Darling, are you sure