Mary Hazard - Sixty Years a Nurse

Of course, I loved shopping. Window shopping, mainly, as I had little money and none to spend on clothes. Putney High Street was a broad, posh, leafy road, with lovely shops, and I liked nothing better than to stroll up and down it, lusting after goods. I remember longing for a pair of red stilettos in Saxone’s that cost £3.00 and wondering how long it would take me to save for them. I knew I would have to save for weeks, even months, as, in those days, if you didn’t have the money, you simply didn’t have something you wanted. You had to ‘save up’ and that could take ages and ages. I thought ‘I’m going to have those’ and, eventually, after weeks of saving hard, I did.

I liked fashion a great deal. Back home I had been used to my mother being able to run up anything. She made my fabulous pale strapless green evening dress, which I wore at sixteen to my first grown-up dance in Clonmel, which doubled as my leaving ‘do’. In those days you had one good frock, and one good pair of strappy evening shoes, and they lasted you for years, too. I brought the green dress with me to Putney, in the hope I’d have occasion to wear it one day, and I was always amending it: putting some ribbon on it here, or a corsage or bow, or a little flourish, there. It’s what we did in those ‘make-do-and-mend’ post-war years.

I also bought my first proper two-piece suit in Richard Shops: it was pale grey with a pleated skirt. It was all the rage to have big skirts with net under-petticoats, and to wear gypsy-style blouses on top. Everything was waisted and girly, and I knew I looked good as I had a tiny waist back then. It would all be topped by having a ‘shampoo and set’ at a new, modern hair salon on the High Street, which had those dome hairdryers we sat under in rollers (although this would only happen on very special occasions). I would have to save for a cut and set, and would have one maybe every two or three months or so. Meanwhile, I would snip my fringe myself and, being me, it was usually lop-sided once I’d finished hacking at it in the bathroom mirror.

During these first few months of settling in, I would write dutiful letters home, making my London life sound busy and meaningful, and would make my job sound important (which it was to me). I certainly didn’t tell of the men I saw naked, or the cigarettes and booze, or even what I had encountered on the wards. My mother would write back, telling of local and family news, but would ask almost nothing of my life in England or as a trainee nurse. She simply didn’t want to know. This hurt me, but I knew how proud and stubborn my mother was. So I had to rely on my sisters for the real news from back home. I felt very nostalgic thinking of the lovely rural countryside, the orchards, and my dear sisters, brother and father, and the dogs, but I didn’t miss either my mother, really, or the nuns. And of course, I never asked for money. I certainly knew I would never get any for wasting my time in that ‘Godforsaken Protestant country’, so I didn’t bother asking. I knew that I had to make it on my own, and I was utterly determined to do so, no matter what it cost.

Hospital life is all about disease, birth and death, so I knew, sooner or later, I would have to be dealing with all these things first hand. I was quite trepidacious, but also curious. Plus, after my disgrace of fainting away in the morgue, I had begun to get used to seeing all sorts of things on the wards, although we were usually given very menial tasks to do, which were still mainly about scrubbing everything in sight with carbolic and Dettol, or rolling up bandages, emptying bedpans, folding linen and mopping the floors. However, after a few months we were being given more challenging, albeit still fairly basic, tasks to do. Fairly soon after I started, I was on a stint of night duties, which was also all very new to me. In charge was a horrible woman, whom we nurses called ‘the Beetle’. She was small, dark, with a tight bun, and she scuttled around, keeping us in check. We were terrified of her, and Sister Morten became ‘the Beetle’ thereafter: someone we always had to keep our eyes open for, but who would often surprise us by appearing and scaring the life out of us.

It’s often the way that people die in the early hours of the morning, something to do with our bodily rhythms, whereby people reach a low ebb in the middle of the night. Thus it was I was confronted with handling my very first dead body one dark mid-winter night. It was three in the morning, and I was already feeling exhausted, when Sister came and told me that Mr Johnson had died. He was a retired ex-policeman, a nice old man with a big handlebar moustache, rather like Jimmy Edwards, the popular entertainer. That night I was on the ward with twenty patients, all of whom needed things like bedpans, fresh water jugs or more medication. The nurses would sit at the end of the ward at a little table with a light on, doing paperwork and keeping watch. It was quite a quiet night, until Sister came up to me and whispered, ‘Nurse Powell, go and lay out Mr Johnson.’

The flowery curtains were already pulled round Mr Johnson’s bed when I arrived on the scene, jittery as a kitten. I felt quite spooked by what I might see, and hesitated for a moment, feeling anxious. Luckily, the twenty other patients on the ward were snoring away, but I was alone, as the other nurse had gone on her ‘lunch break’ (which was a meal in the middle of the night). I was very nervous as I drew the curtains and saw him lying there, in the half light. I sort of half expected he might sit up and start talking, like in a horror film, so I watched him to see if he was really gone for a minute or two. There was no breathing, so that was it. Next, I had to wash him down, so I got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge, then starting at the top of his head worked my way down all the way to his toes. This turned out to be a very long way as Mr Johnson was about six foot five, with his huge bony feet hanging over the end of the hospital bed.

I felt so sorry for him having died that I started crying. I was uncontrollable. Poor old Mr Johnson, I was thinking to myself, dead and gone. His life was well and truly snuffed out. What would his family be feeling? Would they miss him? As usual the tears were flowing, and mixing with the soapy water as I washed and wiped away at his poor old body. I actually felt quite horrified by what I was doing. I’d never touched a dead body before, although I’d seen the headless monster in the morgue. I was curious at the icy marble texture of his skin and how his face had begun to sink in as his jaw slackened. I saw his eyes had sunk into his head and I shook involuntarily, feeling quite spooked out by it all. He now looked very different from the Mr Johnson who had sat up in bed while I took his temperature and pulse, only yesterday. There was an eerie silence in the ward around me as I washed my way down the poor old man’s body. I noticed, slightly squeamishly, that he had started oozing from his orifices and I had to plug them with cotton wool as I worked. It felt so weird to do this to what had been a warm human being only a few hours earlier: he had been a sentient being, with a history and feelings. Now he was like a waxwork, although he’d never be an Araminta, I thought wryly.

Anyway, the worst part was to come, when I got to his middle, or rather, to his ‘private parts’. I had no idea what to do at all. The poor man had a catheter sticking out of his penis and I had absolutely no idea how to get it out. There was no one around to ask, and I couldn’t bear the idea of going to ask Sister, in her hidey-hole office, who would bite my head off as soon as look at me, so I got the rubber tube and started yanking, then pulling, then wrenching, trying to get the damned thing out. Poor Mr Johnson’s body was going this way and that, and his head was bobbing up and down, in a very undignified way, as his willy was yanked hither and thither by me. I was desperate to get that tube out. I could feel my heart racing, while my mouth was dry, as panic was rising. I bent over the poor man’s penis, and was examining the tube close up, yanking and pulling all the while, when I suddenly heard a fierce whisper hissing behind me, ‘Nurse Powell, what on earth do you think you are doing?’