The only time Sir Lancelot became at all subdued was when he talked of his retirement. It hung over him all the time I was on his firm. The prospect of losing his two days a week at St Swithin’s depressed him, though he was cheered by remembering that the hospital would immediately acknowledge him as an emeritus consultant and perhaps call him in for cases of supreme difficulty. His connection with St Swithin’s would therefore not be completely broken; he could go on meeting the students at their clubs, and as for surgery he could continue that in private.
One day, shortly after I left his firm, he disappeared. He said good-bye to no one. He left his work to his assistant and wrote a note to the Chairman of the Governors simply stating he would not be in again. The hospital radiologist explained it later with an X-ray film. Sir Lancelot had a cancer in his stomach and had gone off to his cottage in Sussex to die. He refused to have an operation.
The Nurses’ Home at St Swithin’s was known, with a fair degree of accuracy, as the Virgins’ Retreat. Virginity and nursing certainly seem to go together, and the Matron of St Swithin’s put her Ursulian duties first. Her regulations for the nurses’ conduct suggested she was convinced they went through their waking and sleeping life at the hospital in unremitting danger of rape. It is true that a student or two occasionally entertained sinful thoughts towards one of her charges; like any other bunch of young men they were romantic souls, and the fact that young ladies took off their clothes for them in the wards did not deter them from trying for the same result in their lodgings. But, taking the nurses as a whole, their Matron’s book of rules was nothing more than a blatant piece of flattery.
Intercourse between the nurses and students had to be but social to attract the Matron’s displeasure. If a nurse was seen talking to a student in the hospital, apart from a brief necessary exchange of medical matters in the ward, she was dismissed unquestioned. For her to meet a student in her off-duty time – to go to the pictures or a concert, for instance – was automatically reckoned, if discovered, as the equivalent of a weekend in Brighton. And if a nurse was found in the students’ quarters or a man of any sort discovered in the Nurses’ Home it was an event apparently unmeasurable in terms of human horror.
In order to reduce the possibility of these alarming situations overtaking the nurse the opportunities she could present for them were heavily reduced. All first-year nurses had to be in by ten every night. The senior girls were allowed out once a week until eleven, and staff nurses were permitted in comparison a life of uninhibited lechery by being able to claim two weekly passes until twelve.
Nurses, when in the hospital, were authoritatively stripped of their sexual characteristics as far as was possible without operative interference. Make-up of any sort was looked upon by the ward sisters as the prerogative of women of the streets, and hair was supposed to be tightly tucked inside a starched uniform cap designed to be worn just over the eyebrows. The nurse’s figure was de-contoured beneath uniform made out of a material similar to sailcloth, and the skirt was raised only far enough from the floor to let the poor girl walk without breaking her neck.
These regulations were naturally broken, as efficiently and as subtly as the lock on a medieval chastity belt. There were plenty of quiet corners about the hospital where a date could be arranged between student and nurse, and the couple had the whole of London to meet in. A thin, skilful brush with a lipstick could bring even from Sister Virtue nothing worse than suspicion and powder was almost invisible. As the cap had to be folded out of a linen square, with a little practice a girl could reduce it sufficiently in size so that it stuck attractively on the back of her head. As for the uniform, a nurse with any feelings of femininity in her veins immediately took her new outfit to a dressmaker to be shortened.
Shyness and the restrictions surrounding the nurses’ social contacts kept me clear of my helpmeets in the ward, apart from the small amount of professional chat I dared to exchange with them. At the same time, the nurses took very little notice of me. With the senior students it was different: for them was the favour of a quick smile behind Sister’s back, or a giggle in the sluice-room when no one was in earshot. The house-surgeons, who were doctors and therefore safe matrimonial investments, got cups of coffee when Sister was off duty and had their socks mended; and the registrar could quicken wildly any heart behind a starched apron bodice with a brief smile.
During my stay on Sir Lancelot’s firm I began to gain a little confidence in myself in defiance of my surroundings. There was one nurse on the ward who seemed different from the rest. She was a slight little probationer downtrodden by the ward staff as heavily as I, which immediately spun a fine strand of sympathy between us. I felt sorry for her; and I thought, when I was being competently reduced to nothingness by Sister for using Sir Lancelot’s special soap at the washbasin, that she was silently commiserating with me.
She was a snub-nosed brunette with grey eyes and a small mouth which she kept firmly closed in the ward. Her experience of St Swithin’s was even less than mine, for she had arrived at the hospital only a fortnight previously. It was axiomatic that any nurse who could stand the first six weeks would last the whole course and I was interested to watch her lips growing tighter and tighter as this critical period wore on, while she was discovering it was far less important to save a patient’s life than to drop a plate of pudding, and to break a thermometer was a feminine crime just short of persistent shoplifting.
By glances, shy smiles, and putting myself in proximity to her in the ward as much as I dared, I managed to indicate my interest. One morning I was in the sluice-room halfheartedly performing the routine chemical tests on my patients’ excreta when she came in and resignedly began to clean out the sink. Sister had sent her there obviously not knowing of my presence; the door shut us off from the ward; we were alone; so I took a chance.
‘I say,’ I said.
She looked up from the sink.
‘I say,’ I repeated, ‘number six looks much better today, doesn’t he? The Chief did a good job on him all right. You should have seen the way he got hold of the splenic artery when a clip came off! I’ve never seen so much blood in my life.’
‘Please!’ she said, holding her stomach. ‘You’re making me feel sick.’
‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry,’ I apologized quickly. ‘I just thought you’d be interested.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘The sight of blood makes me sick. In fact, the whole damn place makes me sick. I thought I was going to put my cool hands on the fevered brows of grateful young men, and all I do is clean the floors and give out bedpans to bad-tempered old daddies who smell.’
‘If you don’t like it,’ I suggested, shocked by her confession, ‘why did you take it up at all? Why don’t you leave?’
‘The hell I won’t! My mother was a nurse and she’s been ramming it down my throat for nineteen years. If she could take it I damn well can!’
‘Would you like to come out to the pictures?’ I asked. I thought it best to cut out her complaints and reach my object without further skirmishing. Our privacy might be broken at any moment.
‘You bet!’ she said without hesitation. ‘Anything to get out of this place! I’m off at six. Meet me in the tube station. I must get back to the ward or the old woman will tear me to bits.’
Feeling demurely pleased with myself, I went down to the King George to tell someone about this swift conquest. I found Tony Benskin and Grimsdyke sitting at the bar, energetically talking about racing with the Padre.
‘I’ve just dated up that little pro on the ward,’ I told them nonchalantly. ‘I’m taking her out tonight.’
Benskin was horrified. He had an obsession that he might one day be trapped into matrimony by a nurse and walked round the hospital as warily as a winning punter passing the men with the three-card trick.
‘It’s the thin end of the wedge, my boy!’ he exclaimed. ‘You watch your step, or you’ll end up as aisle-fodder before you know where you are. They’re vixens, the lot of them.’
‘And good luck to them,’ Grimsdyke added emphatically. ‘After all, that’s what they come to the hospital for – to find a husband. They wouldn’t admit it, but it’s buried in the subconscious of all of them somewhere.’
‘I thought nursing was supposed to be a vocation and a calling,’ I said defensively.
‘No more than our own job, my dear old boy. Why have we all taken up medicine? I’ve got a good reason, that I’m paid to do it. You’ve got a doctor as a father and a leaning towards medicine in your case is simply a hereditary defect. Tony here took it up because he couldn’t think of anything better that would allow him to play rugger three times a week. How many of our colleagues entered the noble profession through motives of humanity?’ Grimsdyke screwed his monocle hard in his eye. ‘Damn few, I bet. Humanitarian feelings draw more young fellows annually into the London Fire Brigade. It’s the same with the girls – nursing offers one of the few remaining respectable excuses to leave home. Let them marry the chaps, I say. They’re strong, healthy girls who know how to cook. To my mind the most important function of the St Swithin’s nursing school is that it provides competent wives to help in general practice anywhere in the world.’
‘Three beers please, Padre,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘Don’t you think Grimsdyke’s being unfair?’
‘You’ve got to watch your step, sir, you can take it from me,’ he said sombrely. ‘I’ve seen more of you young gentlemen caught into marriage when you haven’t a ha’penny to your name than I’d like to think about. Children soon, too, sir. Houses, gas bills, vacuum cleaners, and all the other little trappings of matrimony. It’s an expensive hobby, take my word, sir, for young fellers before they’re settled in practice.’
‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘I’ve only asked the girl to the pictures. If I don’t like her I won’t see her again.’
‘Easier said than done, sir. Ask Mr Grimsdyke about that young lady last Christmas.’
Grimsdyke laughed. ‘Ah, yes, Padre! I’ve still got it on me, I think.’ He pulled out his wallet and rummaged through the papers it contained. ‘Most tiresome woman – tried everything to get rid of her for a fortnight. Then I received that one morning, handed to me by a hospital porter, if you please.’
He gave me a note in angry feminine handwriting. ‘
If you do not send an answer to this by midday
,’
it said curtly
, ‘
I shall hurl myself off the roof of the Nurses
’
Home
.’
‘What on earth did you say?’ I asked, horrified.
‘What could I say?’ Grimsdyke demanded. ‘Except “No reply.”’
‘Did she throw herself off?’
‘I really don’t know,’ he said, replacing the letter. ‘I never troubled to find out.’
I met my little nurse at six. We passed an innocuous evening and arranged a rendezvous for the next week. But the appointment was never kept. The following day she was transferred to Sister Virtue’s ward, where she cracked up. One afternoon she threw a pink blancmange at Sister and went out and got a job as a bus conductress.
This incident temporarily cooled my enthusiasm for nurses. After a few weeks I attempted to kindle an affection for a fat blonde girl in the out-patient department, but after we had spent a few evenings together she began to drift away from me, almost imperceptibly at first, like a big ship leaving dock. It was then that I started to worry about myself. Was it that I had no attraction for women? I never enjoyed success with my consorts while my friends apparently had no difficulty in committing fornication with theirs. I slunk into the library and looked up the psychology books: horror overcame me as I turned the pages. In my first few weeks in the wards I had been convinced that I was suffering from such complaints as tuberculosis, rheumatic heart, cancer of the throat, and pernicious anaemia, all of which successfully cleared up in a few days, but now I faced the terrible possibility of harbouring a mother fixation, oral eroticism, and a subnormal libido. I mentioned these fears to my friends that evening after supper.
‘The trouble with you, my lad,’ said John Bottle, without taking his eye from the microscope he was studying, ‘is that you are suffering from that well recognized clinical condition
orchitis
amorosa acuta
, or lover’s nuts.’
‘Well,’ I said sadly, ‘I would willingly surrender my virginity if I could find someone to co-operate with me in the matter.’
‘Can’t you wait for a week?’ Kelly asked testily. ‘My path. exam is too near to let me go out for a night.’
His objection to my making an immediate start in my love life reflected the most serious menace to harmony in the flat.
We all agreed that it was important we should be able to ask our girl-friends to our home, and with the privacy without which the invitation would be pointless. As accommodation was limited it was equally important that the other three should not be obliged to tramp the streets angrily during the entire evening, or go to bed. Archie and Vera had been no problem because they kept to their own room, but some arrangement had to be made among the rest of us. We decided that each should have one evening a fortnight in which the sitting-room was to be his. A code was arranged: if the girl was brought in and presented to the others it required her host only to mention that it looked like rain for his friends to rise and troop out into the night like a well-drilled squad of infantry. (If he remarked that the weather was turning warmer they did an equally important service by sticking by him.) Then it was up to the man himself. But he had not the entire evening to fritter away in light amours. As the pubs shut at eleven he knew he could only count on the period until then as his own. His comrades would heartlessly return, considering they had left him time enough for a brisk seduction. If he failed to achieve his object in the time, that was his look-out. This probably had bad effects on our psychology, but it made us very persuasive.
‘What about that girl from the out-patient department you were taking out?’ Tony Benskin asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘No good.’
‘Won’t play?’ John Bottle asked with interest. ‘I thought as much…you want to take my tip and lay off the probationers. Altogether too young and unappreciative. They can still remember the games’ mistress said it would ruin their hockey.’
Mike Kelly was sitting in an armchair by the fire, frowning into a yellow-covered book on fevers. He carefully put his finger on his place before speaking.
‘You might try the theatre sister from number six,’ he suggested faintly.
‘Oh, she’s no use,’ John said with authority. ‘Registrars only in that department. She’s the sort of girl who’d hardly look at a houseman, let alone a poor bloody student.’
‘There’s that little blonde staff nurse just come on Loftus’ ward,’ Mike continued helpfully. ‘She looks as if she’d be worth making advances to.’
‘Hopeless!’ John said. ‘She suffers badly from tinnitus – ringing in the ears, and they’re wedding bells.’