I’m getting thinner and thinner.’ It was true. The waistbands of her uniform dresses were hanging loose. Before going back to the hostel she would take a basket down to see Cook, and fill it with hothouse fruit, cold chicken, cheese and cakes. When she returned, Moira and the others who lived too far away for regular home visits would fall on the basket with cries of delight.
When their studentships were confirmed after the first month, Moira’s with a stern warning from Matron that she must do better, Amy felt as if she had known her companions for the whole of her life, and that some of them were almost as close to her as Isabel.
There were only one or two exceptions to the rule of friendship and mutual support. Mary Morrow, a doctor’s daughter from Hampstead and consciously a social cut above the rest of the group, took an instant dislike to Amy. Usually she took the trouble to disguise it, and Amy was irresistibly reminded of acquaintanceships struck during her debutante years when girls would appear to be friendly whilst actually checking the pedigrees of her dress, her jewellery, and Amy herself, as well as the number and quality of her partners in the course of the evening. It wasn’t Amy’s fault that Mary chose to measure herself against her in some kind of battle of social standing and found herself losing on every count. But she discovered herself beginning to meet dislike with dislike, and the two girls tried to keep as far apart as possible in the claustrophobic world of the wards and hostel.
Amy was opening one of the first Bruton Street baskets when Mary’s narrow, watchful face appeared in the doorway. Her eyes went straight to the crested white linen napkins that had covered the impromptu picnic.
‘What has Lady Bountiful brought back for the deserving poor today?’
Amy went bright scarlet. She looked down at the basket at her feet and suddenly saw how her well-meant gesture might be interpreted.
Moira looked up from the cheerful scramble around the food. Deliberately, she recited, ‘Chicken with a sauce straight from Heaven itself. Pineapples and strawberries, and a real cake thick with cream and chocolate that I’m sure won’t taste of hospital bandages like every other thing I’ve eaten today. Now, I’m deserving enough, and I’m glad Amy took the trouble to bring the stuff back to us. What’s more, I’m going to eat it and enjoy it without you staring down on me like a squinty old sheep. Sit down and share, will you, or get away with yourself.’
‘I’m going home myself tomorrow, thank you very much,’ Mary said stiffly. She turned away from the doorway and disappeared. Amy was still standing, rooted by the basket, wishing she had never even thought of bringing the food.
‘I didn’t mean …’ she began, but Moira put her arm briskly around her shoulders.
‘No, you didn’t, and we all know that. Sure, she’s an old cow that one, and you’re not to take any notice of her.’
‘Sheep or cow, which?’ Amy said, laughing with Moira in spite of herself.
‘Auch, who cares. Pass me that chicken, now, will you?’
‘Moira’s right,’ quiet little Dorothy Hewitt said. ‘You shouldn’t pay any attention.’
Amy took their advice, but Mary’s covert hostility remained a wrinkle in the days which grew smoother as her confidence increased.
As she grew more adept at the tasks set for her, Amy found brief intervals in between them during which she could stop and breathe, and talk to the patients. She began to distinguish between them as individuals instead of thinking of them as so many beds to be made, so many blanket baths to be given or so many cupfuls of hospital food to be spooned into slack mouths. It was especially true of night duty.
Sometimes, the twelve-hour darkness shifts were terrifying. Often, because of staffing shortages, a whole ward might be left under the supervision of a third-year student nurse with only Amy and one other junior student to assist her. When these nights were busy with new admissions from the accident department, or when there was more than one dangerously ill patient, Amy was too rushed to be frightened at the time, but afterwards, retrospective fear of the responsibility would make her feel almost faint.
It was on one of the busy nights that her first patient had died.
‘Nurse! Nurse!’ a woman had called her urgently from one bed as she passed. ‘You’d best take a look at the old gel over there.’ Amy whirled round to the opposite bed. It was an old woman who had only been admitted that afternoon. She had been dozing quietly only a few minutes before. Now her head had lolled inertly forward and her arms were slack over the bedcovers. Amy lifted one of the ancient, fragile wrists and felt a single flutter. Then she heard a faint sigh, almost politely regretful, and the pulse was gone. Amy dropped the arm and opened the nightgown on the thin, yellowish chest. She put her head to the old woman’s heart, but there was nothing. Desperately she turned and ran, against all the hospital rules, up the ward to the senior nurse. The senior was busy at another bedside where a younger woman was moaning softy and rolling her head against the pillows.
‘Bed eight,’ Amy gasped. ‘She’s … dead.’
The other nurse glanced at her.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, I’m certain.’
The nurse turned back to her own patient. There was a kidney bowl waiting beside her with a syringe and she was swabbing the flesh in the crook of the patient’s arm with antiseptic. Calmly she picked up the syringe and checked the volume of the contents.
‘Would you hold her steady, Lovell, while I administer this.’
‘But …’
‘There is nothing we can do for Mrs Hughes now. When you have finished helping me here you can draw the curtains round her and ring down for the mortuary porter. Now hold, please.’
The needle slid smoothly into the vein and within seconds the patient was quieter.
‘Come with me, Nurse Lovell.’ On their way up the ward they took the pillows from the old lady’s back and laid her flat, and then pulled the curtains across to shield her. Amy thought that she would never forget the open, sightless eyes, but the older nurse had closed them with perfect composure.
In the privacy of the ward office the senior said with brisk sympathy, ‘Was that your first?’ When Amy nodded miserably she touched her shoulder. ‘It’s part of the job, you know that. And remember that once a patient is dead, your immediate responsibility is to those who are not. Go down and make yourself a cup of tea now, we can spare you for a few minutes. You can bring one up for me, too.’
But not all the nights were busy.
Sometimes there were long, quiet hours when there was nothing to do at all except the routine chores that would assist the day staff. If any of the patients were awake and well enough to talk, the nurses were not exactly encouraged to do so but it was allowed, provided that every bowl and jar in the sluice room already shone like the sun.
It was on just such a quiet night that Amy first talked to Helen Pearce.
‘Nurse–Patient Demeanour’ was the title of one lecture in the introductory series attended by Amy and the rest of her group. From it, as her notes reminded her, she had learned that ‘a nurse must at all times be cheerful, reassuring and encouraging to her patients. She must be sympathetic and approachable, but she must remember always that it is a professional relationship and she must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, allow it to progress beyond that. Over-familiarity with any one patient is ultimately as detrimental to that patient as to the others under the nurse’s care.’
‘I am sure,’ Amy recalled the sister adding darkly, ‘that I do not need to caution you girls further, except to say that particular vigilance is necessary in the case of male patients.’
At least Helen was female, but Amy broke all the other rules as soon as she met her.
Helen Pearce was lying in one of the six beds in the corner of the L-shaped ward. She must have been admitted or moved in from elsewhere during the day because the bed had been empty the