Climbing the Stairs (16 page)

At another place they were getting a piano up the stairs and halfway it stuck and they couldn’t move it up or down. Well the old dear whose piano it was came down with plates of Hovis
bread and butter. She said, ‘Hovis gives you strength.’ Well, I don’t know whether it did or not, but when they’d eaten it they gave a mighty heave gouging a great lump out
of the wall and the piano went up. The company had an extremely irate letter from the landlord afterwards and they had to repair the damage. But as I said they ought to have passed the letter on to
the baker, it was his fault.

Then there was a couple of young men that lived together – they had to move six times. Very charming young men so Albert said, but probably they got so charming around the place that they
had to move on. Anyway every single thing in the house was marked with their initials. Except the pots under the bed – they were marked HIS and HERS.

16

T
HE THREE MONTHS
that I spent in hospital – I had two periods of six weeks each – were very different indeed.

I first went because I had a gastric ulcer. It was in 1944 and there was no National Health Service then. I was suffering from indigestion according to my doctor.

I said to him, ‘I can’t understand why I can’t breathe properly.’

But he said it was indigestion and indigestion it had to be till I had a haemorrhage and was rushed into hospital to have a blood transfusion.

I often think that these people who talk about blood and breeding and who have to have blood transfusions don’t know what poor old plebeian stuff they’ve got knocking around in them.
I remember when they were giving it to me I said, ‘I hope you’re giving me blue blood, I’m only used to the best.’

The nursing was splendid but the food and amenities for the patients in the public wards were deplorable. And the lack of privacy most distressing, especially for older people and particularly
for those who had gone into hospital for the very first time.

None of the beds had curtains and only in the direst circumstances did they put screens around them. Some of the old people used to complain bitterly about this but it never did them any good
because the more they complained the less consideration they got.

I always found during my stay in hospitals, and that includes before and after the National Health Service, that it’s best to accept everything that happens to you with the spirit of Job
because that’s the only way you can really enjoy it. That way you get a reputation for being long suffering and uncomplaining and you’re held up to the other patients as a shining
light.

The nurses say, ‘Look at Mrs Powell, she doesn’t ring her bell all day long and she doesn’t ask us to keep doing this, that and the other for her.’

The fact that all the other patients get to detest you doesn’t matter because they’re not looking after you. It’s the nurses you’ve got to rely on for your comfort. So I
never complained about anything. I just let it all happen to me.

Once I had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk around the other patients soon forgot their animosity because I did little jobs for them – like getting a jug of water or something out
of their locker or bringing them their tea. And then patients are always dying to talk to someone about their home, their husbands and their children. Curiously enough I never found many patients
wanted to talk about their operations or what they were in there for. Not then.

When they get home they do, but I think it’s too near to them in hospital. They try to pretend almost that it doesn’t exist. It’s rather like a conversation I once overheard
between two women.

One was saying to the other, ‘Oh, I’ve got such pains in my stomach and I have to keep on taking these Rennies to relieve it.’

So the other said, ‘Haven’t you been to the doctor, then?’

She said, ‘No. I’m scared to go to the doctor because he might send me to the hospital and they might say it’s cancer.’

Well, the pain wouldn’t go away would it? But she thought that if she didn’t give it a name, it wasn’t there. And that’s how I found they were in hospital.

Although as I’ve said I kept quiet, before the National Health Act there was plenty to complain about in the public wards.

The meals were the worst thing. They used to be served on battered old tin trays with no cloth on of course, and as I was in there with ulcers it was mainly cod that tasted and felt like
cottonwool. And the mashed potatoes had hard concrete lumps in them and were nearly always stone cold. You really had to be hungry to eat it. Mostly the sweet was a milk pudding and it was either
so stiff you could have bounced it on the floor, or it was hard grains floating around in milk.

And when it was time for the bedpans the nurses used to deal them out on beds as you would a pack of cards. And there we used to sit parked on them, in full view of each other, and there was one
toilet roll between four. And we’d throw it from bed to bed and sometimes we’d miss and it would roll down the ward like a large streamer. And we’d go into hysterics of mirth. It
was the only way to accept the humiliation of it all.

That was my first stay in hospital and I hoped it would be my last.

But some years after, by this time there was the National Health Service, I discovered that I had a lump about the size of a small marble underneath my breast. I went straight to the doctor and
he sent me to the hospital for an examination.

And what a change I found. You were treated as though you mattered. Even the waiting-room was different. No dark green paint, whitewash, and wooden benches. There were separate chairs with
modern magazines – not the kind that Noah had around in the Ark.

They told me that I should have to have a minor operation for the cyst to be removed, but that I would only be in there about a week.

And again what a difference I saw. The beds for instance. The bed that I’d had before was like lying on the pebbles on Brighton beach. I got to know every lump in it and used to arrange
myself around them. But now I had a rubber mattress. I felt as though I could have lain there for ever.

And the food was beautiful. All served on brightly coloured trays with the right cutlery. I remember one day I was waiting for my lunch when the matron came round; she saw my tray and said to
the nurse, ‘Isn’t this patient having fish for her lunch today?’

And the nurse said, ‘Yes, Matron, she is.’

‘Well why hasn’t she got a fish knife and fork then? Change it instantly.’

I was amazed. I couldn’t have cared less because we hadn’t got any fish knives and forks at home. But that just shows you, doesn’t it?

And there was variety. I don’t think we ever saw the same meal twice in one week and that needs some doing. It just showed what kind of kitchen staff they’d got. Presumably under the
National Health Act they could afford to pay them more wages than before. When I was in service you were considered the lowest of the low if you worked in hospital kitchens.

And every bed had got curtains and they were drawn not only at bedpan time but at any time you were attended to.

There was only one thing that was exactly the same and I suppose always will be and that is that neither nurses, house surgeons nor the visiting specialists would ever answer any questions about
your condition. In fact they never stayed long enough by your bed for you to get the question out.

I think that a generation that’s brought up on
Emergency Ward 10
and
Dr Kildare
must suffer great disillusionment when they go into hospital. In all the time I’ve spent
there no doctor or house surgeon has ever sat on my bed talking to me about my complaint.

As for the specialists they don’t even look at you. They seem to stare right over your head. They frighten you to death. They stand there looking so stern you feel you’ve got every
ailment under the sun and you’re not likely to last much longer and they’re weighing up who’s coming into your bed when you’ve gone.

And the nurses seem to think that along with physical deterioration goes mental deterioration. You get these young nurses saying, ‘Come along, Mother, be a good girl. Put your nightie on
and pop into bed.’ As though you were suffering from senile decay and didn’t understand plain English. It riled me the way they did that. I hate being jollied along at any time, let
alone when in hospital.

As I said, I went into this hospital to have this cyst removed from my breast and the night before the operation the Sister stuck a form under my nose for me to sign. I hate forms at the best of
times and when I’d recovered from the shock I read it and discovered that I’d got to agree that in the event of them discovering that I needed major surgery I was prepared to have it
done. At once I knew that they were going to slash my breast off otherwise why go into all this palaver if it was just a cyst.

So I signed – and I knew what it meant.

I wasn’t shocked when I came to after the operation and found I was bandaged up in miles of bandages. I knew it hadn’t been just a cyst.

I asked the nurse of course but she just said, ‘Go to sleep, Mother.’

But Mother knew. The nurse wouldn’t tell me because she felt I was going to suffer from the shock. But I’d suffered from the shock the night before when I read that form.

About a couple of days after the operation the house surgeon told me that they had found a tumour there and had to remove the breast, but that it was a non-malignant one and I would be going
home shortly. It didn’t take me long to get over the operation and I was soon able to get up and help a bit.

We had some lively people in that ward. There was an unfortunate woman there who used to suffer with the most rude noises. She couldn’t help it. But when she let one go the patients would
call out, ‘There’s a bomb just gone off, Nurse,’ and then a little later, ‘It’s all right, the all clear’s gone now.’

There was another woman. She was only in there to have her bunions done. She was a card if ever there was one.

She said to me, ‘This is the first time I’ve had a bed to myself for forty years.’

So I said, ‘Is it? It must be awful being separated after all those years.’

‘It isn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody marvellous. Sharing a bed with my old man is nothing but sweat and swill.’

She said she wasn’t going back to sharing a bed, which shows that hospital life has a lot to answer for.

Some of the patients looked at me a bit queerly. They told me later that they thought I’d have delayed reaction emotion about losing my breast. But strangely enough I wasn’t ever
really upset.

My mother was more. She kept weeping like mad by my bedside. But if you’re a young girl and you’re hoping to get married it’s a far more serious thing, isn’t it?
You’d have to tell your young man and explaining it away would be a bit embarrassing. But I’d got a husband who I knew wouldn’t think any the worse of me because of it. And when
they told me it was non-malignant I was quite happy about it. Naturally I would have preferred to have kept it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I could chuck off and not know I hadn’t
got. It’s not the kind of an appendage that doesn’t matter whether you have it or not. It’s not like your appendix. But no, I wasn’t too upset about it.

Then three days before I was to go home they came up to me again, put the curtains round the bed and I prepared myself for another shock.

In came the Sister this time. I’d always thought of her as a bit of a martinet. Mind you, you need a Sister that’s a martinet because the other hospital I was in the Sister was very
strict indeed and I used to feel sorry for the nurses, but we realized when she went on holiday what a difference a strict Sister made to our lives because once she was out of the way the nurses
didn’t care a bit. They used to laugh and joke and make the most terrible row and we never got half the attention that we had when she was there. But this one I’d thought was a hard
woman – unfeeling – but what a change. She was kindness itself to me. She sat there by my bed for half an hour. She told me that they’d got a report back from the Marie Curie
hospital in Hampstead that my growth was malignant and that I’d got to go there and have radium treatment.

It was only then that I really thought about cancer. As soon as she mentioned the Marie Curie I knew what the hospital was for so I knew I’d got cancer and I was very upset then for the
rest of that day. I know I wept a few times to myself and that. The thing I asked Sister to do for me was to catch my mother before she came in to visit me and tell her because I didn’t feel
as though I could. I knew she’d be terribly upset about it, which she was.

But strangely enough by next morning I’d recovered. I thought – oh, well, here goes. Lots of people go to the Marie Curie and they don’t all die. I mean if you’ve got to
have cancer you couldn’t have it in a better place than in the breast because once you’ve had it removed most of it’s gone.

So by the next day I’d got over it and as I wasn’t due to go for a week I asked if I could go home. ‘No,’ came the answer. They wouldn’t let me go because they were
frightened I wouldn’t come back. But after a day or two I got lively and me and this woman with bunions kicked up such a shindy larking around that Sister said, ‘All right, you’ve
won, you can go home for the weekend but don’t forget to come back.’ Of course, I would come back in any case.

When I got to this Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead I found there were many far worse than me because they’d let it go such a long time before they’d been to a doctor, and it had
spread and gone into an arm as well. So really and truly it really does pay to see a doctor in the very early stages because it never affected me in that way.

I used to go every day for radium treatment – just five minutes a day. It was in a little room that there was this sort of Heath Robinson contraption that hovers over you. You have to lie
down and there’s a door about a foot thick, which is closed on you and of course I suffer appallingly from claustrophobia. I didn’t mind the radium treatment but the thought of being
shut in that room was almost too much for me. But the nurses were very good. There was a little glass window and they’d look at me. But although it was only five minutes it seemed like half
an hour and I’d imagine they’d forgotten the time.