Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Double dose of Senokot

Sister Heel wanted our ‘bowels opened’ daily. She would come round with Senokot for those whose bowels hadn’t been shrewd enough to take the hint. So we learned to lie, to say we’d opened them even if we hadn’t. This might work for a single day, but no longer. Then it was Senokot in a double dose. I wondered if this was the same as the castor oil which Mum remembered with such revulsion. Perhaps they’d just changed the name. Then I realised that if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t do tuppennies, however much Senokot I was given, and I was very tempted to go without. No tuppennies — no bedpan torture.

It was extraordinary to learn that there was an authority even higher than Sister Heel. Matron was over and above everything, over all the sisters and nurses. She also seemed to have established a sort of dominance over the doctors. I heard that even Ansell went rather quiet when she approached. Matron was to Heel as Granny was to Mum. I could hardly imagine a person so formidable.

One day from my side ward I heard a cadet nurse sobbing in the little corridor, then a voice of familiar huskiness.

‘Just learn to pull yourself together, my girl!’ Heel was telling her roughly. ‘I have no control over thermometer stock here. When you break one, you have to report to Matron to get a new one. Yes, of course you’ll get a scolding. You will indeed. As did we all!’

That word ‘scolding’ was full of fascination for me. Mum had told me about what happened when hot liquid fell on the skin, about scalding and the rawness and blistering that followed. Bad scaldings never really healed. It stood to reason that a scolding was a verbal scalding, when someone else’s mind boiled over on you, like milk on top of a stove. If ever I became too cocky, too knowing, too plain happy, I’d get a scolding. Someone would be sure to say, ‘You’re getting too big for your boots.’ That’s to say, too big for my built-up shoes. ‘You need to be taken down a peg or two.’ I was always being told about pride going before a fall. I didn’t know why that proverb seemed to have my name on it.

It was thrilling to imagine Heel as a cadet herself, trembling before the mighty Matron. Interesting too that Heel, while informing the poor cadet about hospital procedure, was also delivering a scolding of her own. A scolding about a scolding, a scolding to tell her about the scolding she’d get from Matron. How fascinating! I reasoned that if Heel could scold the ward, and Matron could scold the hospital, then there must be someone who had the power to scold Matron, and calculated that there must be some kind of Super-Matron of all England who had the power to scold any matron in any hospital in the country. But who would have the power to scold her? My mind just naturally lost itself in such cosmological labyrinths.

So when I was told Matron was doing her rounds and would be visiting me in my side ward, I was distinctly nervous. It made sense that she would be completely terrifying. I hoped she would just take a quick look at me and go out again. I didn’t think I could stand being on the receiving end of Matron’s rough tongue. When Heel licked cadet nurses into shape, after all, they might sob for hours.

Then when Matron swept in at the head of a train of attendants it was a delicious surprise. She wore a purple uniform, which I immediately loved, and a starched hat which fitted tightly round her head, splaying out in a pleated fan around her shoulders like a peacock’s tail upside-down. The world went very still when she came in. This wasn’t an enforced or punitive silence but a rapt stillness, hushed and attentive.

‘Good morning, John,’ she said.

‘Good morning, Matron,’ I replied.

‘Sister Heel tells me you were admitted last week, so I want to say how sorry I am that I have not visited you earlier. I hope all the nurses have been making you feel comfortable and At Home?’

They hadn’t, or not all of them had, but Matron was so nice I wasn’t going to squeal on the ones who wiped my bottom harshly. It would have made more sense to appeal for an improvement in the quality of the paper itself, but I didn’t think of that.

‘It’s a little strange here,’ I said, ‘but I’m starting to get used to it. I’m very happy to meet you, Matron.’

‘It’s entirely my pleasure, John,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that I am very busy at the moment, but I shall make time soon to pay a longer visit and get to know you better.’

‘I would like that very much, Matron.’

‘I hope you feel, John, that if anything is worrying you, or even if there is anything you do not understand — I hope you will send word to me any time you want. Say you have my express permission. Can you remember that, John? “Express permission”?’

‘Yes, Matron,’ I whispered. ‘“Express permission from Matron”. Thank you very much.’ I was really beginning to understand the phrase ‘angel of mercy’. As the purple vision withdrew from my side ward with her retinue, I heard her murmur, ‘What beautiful manners! Such a treat in this day and age. If only we could …’ But then the end of the sentence was swallowed up by the sounds of the ward.

This was the longest conversation I had had with anyone in Taplow — and it had been with Matron! It was balm, it was soul-ointment, and I basked in the glow of it. I began to think that the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital might be the right place for me after all.

Flakes of delight

Soon after that the assessment period came to an end and I was transferred to the ward proper. Some ministering angel or humane administrator had seen to it that Ivy and the girl who had threatened me with her, Wendy, were both a little way off. My nearest neighbours were gentler souls, Mary and Sarah.

Even before I took my place on the ward I had been initiated into the sorrows of the communal life. While I was still in my side ward a nurse had pounced on my sweetie tin, saying brightly, ‘These’ll go into the pool …’ I was appalled. Why was this horrid nurse going to throw my sweeties in the swimming pool?

I wasn’t much better pleased when I understood the workings of the system which operated in the hospital. Sweets were not private property. They went into a common hoard, to be shared out equally. I suppose this system was designed to benefit the less fortunate children, by taxing those with regular supplies of luxury choccies, but I wasn’t wild about it. I would almost rather my personal sweets were ritually drowned in the pool than made into common property. My objections weren’t ideological, really, it’s just that I never liked the sweets I ended up with. I didn’t think much of a system which dispersed my Milky Ways far and wide and repaid me in chunks of Pic-Nic, which I happened to hate.

The reply was waiting for any protest: ‘Well, John, you’re lucky to have sweets at all.’ And I wasn’t clever enough to say, ‘But not as lucky as if you’d let me keep the ones Mum packed in my own little tin.’

In any case, there would have been no possibility of chilling and slicing the Mars Bars Mum brought, so as to turn the sticky logs into flakes of delight. Without access to a ’fridge the operation wasn’t practical.

There was someone at the hospital who wasn’t a doctor and wasn’t a cleaner but something in between, and he did something to me soon after I arrived that I didn’t like. He didn’t seem to know my name, he just called me ‘Sonny’, but I had to do what he said. His name was Mr Fisk, and he took pictures. He had one of those moustaches that hang over the lower lip, like a weeping willow trailing its branches down towards the water. Mr Fisk was a fearful figure, not because he was nasty personally, but because it was nasty being photographed, naked and standing up as best you could, without shoes.