The Dressmaker's Daughter (12 page)

W
hen I took it into my head to leave Siemens and take a job being a shorthand typist at the fertiliser company, it fell to me to make the tea, morning and afternoon. ‘Do you think you could make the tea hot?’ Mr Clark asked me mildly, after several days of lukewarm tea. I saw that letting the filled teacups stand around while I took my time adding a biscuit to each saucer and filling the milk jug was a mistake. I should do these things first and hustle the tea to the workers quickly. Not being a tea drinker, I had no idea that it was more palatable when hot. So I learnt to make hot tea.

What I didn’t learn was how to wash up in a reasonable space of time. When we returned from our lunch hour, I began my afternoon’s tasks by washing up with breathtaking slowness. Appearing in the main office not long before three o’clock, I was ready to type letters or to file or to take dictation from Mr Clark.

Mr Clark seemed to me to have almost nothing to do. Yet he never left the office before ten past five. I realised it was a tactic so that Mr Morphet, the manager, would not realise that he had little to do. I learnt these things and slowly became more worldly.

Daily at nine I walked to the General Post Office with a key and removed the mail from the box belonging to the company and took it to the office. Passing a patisserie on the way, sometimes I bought cakes for our morning tea. One day I bought strawberry-and-cream tarts, one for each person. After I had given them out, I lifted mine to my mouth and a young man called Peter Clooney, who had already eaten his tart, pushed it onto my face. I have noticed that I have an effect on some people that gives them an irresistible desire to do something like this, and he was the first.

By the time I was given the sack, in a courtly fashion, by Mr Morphet, I had learnt to serve hot tea, and I knew that men deceived each other. More in sadness than in anger, Mr Morphet had said, ‘We think you are a very nice girl, Jill. However, we think that you are unsuitable for our company, so I must ask you to leave.’ I stood up and left his office, knowing I had failed.

Too many cold cups of tea and too much paper wasted, I suspect. He had never spelt out what exactly my failure had been but I could not blame him. The next two weeks,
the period of my notice, were the longest I had ever known. On the last Friday, the staff gathered and I was presented with a dark green fountain pen that I liked very much and soon lost.

I
t was in a truck and I was knitting when the well of my mouth was first broached. I forget his name – it may have been Doug or David or Chris, perhaps. He was a student at Roseworthy Agricultural College, a little way out of our town. He was driving me home from my typing job. I was sixteen and like the song ‘Sweet Sixteen and Never Been Kissed’.

I kept on knitting, which I could see bothered him, yet I couldn’t stop because I was embarrassed at the situation I sensed I was in. Then he pulled the truck up by the side of the road and turned off the engine. I was thunderstruck when he put his tongue in my mouth. (It was as astonishing as if he had put his thumb in my ear.) I told him he was disgusting. Surprised, no doubt, he must have realised he was the first to taste this bitter draught and yet, to my surprise, he persisted.

This is another illustration of how I formed my early opinion that males, to a man, were demented when it
came to trying to get under brassieres, demented in their eagerness to get my friends and me alone to kiss us. What did they get out of it? It was years before I found the answer to that in my own body.

Doug-or-David-or-Chris’s friend, who was at the same school with him, became my boyfriend. Perhaps his name was Geoffrey. Now grandfathers most likely, these boys taught me that it was normal to put their tongue into my mouth, and I learnt to accept it like a cow in her stall at milking time.

Later, at a ball, I met Michael, who had a twin called Des. The twins were farmers’ sons. One night after a ball, Michael offered to drive me home, and with him, because they had only one utility, came his brother. When we drew up at the gate of my family’s farm, Michael gave me a resounding kiss. Then, amazingly, Des did too. ‘What’s yours is mine!’ was, I suddenly saw, what Des must have felt. A fine example of sibling rivalry and I wonder now how long it went on. Suddenly, as Des drew back from the kiss he had taken, the necklace of green glass beads around my neck broke and spilled like water on the seat and floor of the ute. I was much more embarrassed than Des seemed to be and I kept apologising. But he took it in his stride with equanimity and I got out and they waved me off through my gate.

I imagine the boys must have carefully swept out the floor that night before they let their father have the ute back.

M
y mother said, ‘You can cook and you can clean but you can’t sew, so you should go to the Myer clothing factory and learn.’

I dug my heels in and told her I wouldn’t go; I didn’t need to know how to sew. ‘Girls run the machine needle through their finger and they call it their initiation. I’m not going to be a farmer’s wife. I’m going nursing.’

One day in 1954 my application to begin nursing at Gawler District Hospital was accepted. I had already enrolled to train at the children’s hospital in North Adelaide and I only expected to stay at the local hospital temporarily until I was called to begin my official training in the city.

At dusk on the appointed day, my father drove me in to the hospital and carried my case up the steps. Sister Smith, tall and regal with a white flowing veil, greeted us. She dismissed my father after a moment or two and led me over to the nurses’ home.

Having introduced me to a nurse called Yvonne Atyeo, she left me. A party was beginning as the happy girl who was to be my friend showed me around. I was shown a dressing-table that was to be mine in a room full of other dressing-tables and wardrobes. I had never seen a room set up in this way. Then I was led to a sleepout, an enclosed veranda with green canvas blinds stretching the length of the stone building. There were twenty black iron beds, the feet of which pointed towards wire screens. A doorway leading back into the passageway of the building made a gap in the line of beds.

In the midst of the party, a short, stout, dark-haired nurse was riding a bicycle along the foot of the beds. She had a flagon of sherry in one hand and was very drunk. I had never seen anybody drunk before, let alone a girl. I learnt that this girl was pregnant and was about to leave the hospital. (Maternity leave had not been invented.)

In a sitting room, other nurses were sitting around complaining about the hospital and their lives. It soon became clear that nobody was happy with their conditions and that this sort of discussion was a normal occurrence. But I could see that they were enjoying themselves complaining. My first experience of comradeship in adversity. Not for a minute did I think that I might have made a mistake in coming to the hospital to nurse. I was soon to join in and to have as
much pleasure in these sessions as any of the others who were already teaching me.

Atyeo took me back to the dressing-room and showed me my uniform, which was lying folded on the table. She took a pile of big safety pins and began to pin white starched cuffs and a collar to a pink checked dress. Then she took a pile of white buttons with a small brown steel hook at the back of each one and inserted these down the front of the entire dress. The thick white starched apron had wide straps, which crossed over and were buttoned on the waist at the back. I had brought black lace-up flat shoes, black stockings and a suspender belt.

Atyeo showed me my bed at the far end of the sleepout. The nurses slept in a line of seniority and I was the least senior of all. When the party died down, as it soon did because everybody who was on duty next morning had to be up by six, I put on my nightdress and climbed into bed.

Next morning, we all dressed in a hurry and walked over to the kitchen block. A big teapot was waiting, and fresh bread, which we cut into slices and spread with plum jam and cream. We ate and drank and walked down into the hospital. There we lined up in a row in order of seniority. A sister dressed entirely in white, down to her shoes and stockings, read the night report. She left and I was led down to the women’s ward.

About a dozen elderly women lay in bed awaiting us. Somebody told me to turn on the stove in a small kitchen
adjoining the ward. I went out and turned it on. I was told to take a bowl from the backs – a long, narrow room behind the ward, which held silver washing bowls, bedpans, sinks, mops and buckets. Mrs Paul was my first patient. I watched what the nurse next to me was doing and began to do the same. ‘I’m not made of tissue paper, nurse,’ was Mrs Paul’s first croaky comment. It was like washing a butterfly. Nervously I decided I should rub her arm with the facecloth a little harder. With one eye on what the other nurse was doing, I kept on until Mrs Paul had had her bed-bath for the day. I took the bowl and tipped the water down the sink.

Food was arriving on big trays and tureens from the main kitchen. We were to hold it in the oven as we set up the trays and took the breakfasts out, one by one, to the patients.

‘Are you mad?’ said a Welsh nurse called Jones.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You are supposed to have turned on the stove.’

‘I have.’

‘No, you haven’t; you haven’t turned it on at the wall. So now all the breakfasts are going to be cold. We can’t heat them.’

So that day people had cold breakfasts, one had a soft wash and I was sternly told off. I looked hard at that Welsh nurse, who I felt had bad manners, and thought, ‘I will outdo you. You may or may not get to the city but
whatever happens I shall outdo you.’ Within a year, the nurse was gone, another fallen to the spell of pregnancy that lurked like a virus, ready to take the unwary. Had we been gazelles, pregnancy was our lion.

The reason I didn’t fall to the lion that took so many and spoilt the careers of good nurses was, I think, because I was sexually unawakened. I was twenty-two before I lost my virginity to a doctor, a Scot who was a GP in an Adelaide suburb. His name was Peter and later he became a psychiatrist. It was all so vague and unsatisfactory that I hardly know if I lost my virginity to him or not, but I think I probably did. Yes, I’d say so. It was in his car after a visit to a nightclub and I think I was just weary of the battle. I hope he felt it was worth it. But I think it was probably as unsatisfactory and full of pathos for him as it was for me.

One effect of this loss of a battle, but not the war, for me was that it did not hearten me to change my mind. I did not think there was anything to recommend sex so I remained as before. I had been seen by the lion, chased a short distance, but had melted back into the herd and gone on grazing while some other creature had probably been taken in my stead. Men and lions never stop being driven in their need.

After a few weeks at the hospital, I met Bob Gillen, a local GP who was to teach the first-year nurses Anatomy and Physiology. We had these classes after duty in a room in the maternity ward, a separate building away from the main
hospital. We learnt about the vertebrae and the lymph system. The heart, its valves and ventricles. I loved it.

After three months, Bob heard that I had enrolled at the children’s hospital and would soon be leaving. He did me an enormous favour. He advised me that the training at the children’s hospital was not a complete training and that I would only ever be a children’s nurse. He told me that I would not be able to travel because the diploma from the children’s hospital was not recognised overseas and that I should stay on at Gawler and do a general training. Then I could go on to the Royal Adelaide for the required two years and complete my training as the other girls intended. (If they didn’t get pregnant.) I immediately saw the sense of this advice and decided to act on it. I enrolled the next day for a general nursing training.

By now, three months had elapsed since I had begun at Gawler District Hospital. Every girl who enrolled around the time I did had done three months less training than I had. It gave a nightmarish feeling to my training, especially in the last months, because after four years that extra three months, although so little now in retrospect, loomed like an endless track, the finishing line of which I could never reach. For years afterwards, twenty or thirty years later, I had nightmares that I was back trying to complete my training and yet another reason for me not to finish had been discovered. Month after month I seemed to struggle on in these dreams, never able to be free.

When I finished work on that first morning at the hospital and went off duty for lunch and to wait until the bout of the shift at three o’clock, I rushed down to Dinah’s house, which was near the hospital. ‘Bottoms, Dinah! Bottoms! I’ve seen nothing but bottoms!’ It was what struck me. Turning people over on their side and massaging their buttocks with methylated spirits had taken up the rest of the morning after those cold breakfasts had been distributed. I felt I saw more buttocks than faces and that my way of seeing the world had been reversed. Bottoms seemed to greet me every minute of the day.

We worked for six days a week. Our days off were rostered according to what the sister-in-charge thought appropriate to the needs of the hospital. However, we could ask for a specific day off if we needed to. There was one shift where we worked straight through from early morning until five o’clock. But, in the main, we had split shifts where we went off duty at quiet times of the day and returned at five to wash and settle the patients. We had to ready them for visitors by seven o’clock. This involved much work. All beds needed to be straightened; patients had to be washed, fed and have their hair combed. They had to be given their medicine and have their pulse, temperature and respiration taken.

Queues of visitors formed outside the wards as we raced to ready the patients for them. If somebody had died or there had been a flurry of admissions or some
other event that made extra work, we were late. People waited so patiently. Husbands clutching flowers stood with their children in the hallway. Parents, children, teenagers, the whole gamut of humanity stood there, waiting to see a friend or family member. Why were they so patient? Why didn’t they complain? Why were they kept there? What was so special about a straightened bed that they couldn’t see the person they had come to visit? Even though there was, I think, more kindness back then, and less law, in this case, the law – the rule – was cruel and could not be bent unless a patient was dying, and then a member or two of the family was allowed in to sit beside them, whatever the hour.

Finally, the visitors swarmed in. Children sat on those straightened beds, bunches of flowers lay on bedside tables, and husbands stroked wives’ hair. After an hour, if they had been lucky and had been allowed in on time, the visitors were ushered out. One of us rang a hand-bell, the signal for the departure of visitors. People clung to each other and, walking backwards, waving, the visitors left the wards.

Supper was brought around. People were tucked in, their pillows arranged, and lights were turned out. Only floor lights were left on. Night nurses appeared, carrying torches, and it was then that we were allowed to go off duty and head for the nurses’ home, a bath, a big grizzle and bed.

A few months into my training, I was sent on night duty. ‘Ah, night duty, thy name is cruelty!’ said tall, blonde Sister Sharpen, gathering her red woollen cape around her chest.

We worked eleven-hour shifts if we got off on time. Sometimes a death meant we had to stay on past the end of our shift. The rule was that when a patient died, the staff who were on duty at that time had to lay them out, whatever the time of day or night. It did not matter if the death occurred five minutes before you were due to go off duty; you stayed and laid out the body. Laying people out in those days was not the swift matter it is today. First, the body was completely washed. The orifices were stuffed with cottonwool, the hair combed, rings removed (but sometimes they were not – I never understood who decided that), and if the body was that of a man then it was dressed in his own pyjamas. If it was that of a woman, we dressed her in a clean nightdress from her locker. If, for some reason, they had no clothes with them, we dressed the body in a shroud made of cream calico. It was a sort of shift with a tie and a frill at the neck. Then the body was lifted onto a barouche and taken to the morgue to await the undertaker. And then, more importantly to us, we went off duty. But before we left we had to wash the structure of the bed, take the mattress outside into the sun, if it was daylight, to air it, or, if it was night-time, turn it over. We washed the iron
head, foot and sides of the bed, and then washed the locker and emptied it of its contents.

So you can see that it did not oblige us if a person died shortly before we were due to go off duty. I have always been determined not to die in hospital at night. The night staff are too hard pressed and it is very melancholy to be laying out the dead in the early hours when you feel half dead from tiredness yourself.

We went on duty at eight o’clock in the evening and were due off at seven in the morning. For three weeks without a night off we continued until we had three nights off. I would stagger home to the farm, head for the bedroom and sleep most of those two days and all of the three nights. Then we returned for another three weeks. Seventy-seven hours a week for six weeks. Then we went back on day duty, wiser and weaker. If there was a union, we hadn’t heard of it. These sorts of hours were a tradition, as were most things with nursing, and we complied – not without complaint but without questioning the tradition.

During the night, there was a curious practice of waking a certain amount of patients and giving them a complete bed-bath. We had doled out strong sleeping pills only hours before and now we woke these sick patients and washed them by the light of pale lamps set into the floor. Of course, this woke those sleeping nearby because it is almost impossible to wash a person, change their bed
linen if needed and to talk to them in whispers while having no effect on a person sleeping two metres away. This work was done because there was not enough time during the day for the staff to wash the entire population of the hospital and to do all their other work as well. I don’t know how this seemingly intractable problem has been solved but this practice has ceased. Perhaps more people wash themselves.

At that time, there were very few ambulant patients. Once a person was put into bed, they hardly ever got out, except perhaps to sit in a chair for an hour or two in the morning. People, I suppose, got weaker and weaker. For instance, in that ward where I washed Mrs Paul on that first day, almost all those old women sat year in, year out in their beds, slowly obliging themselves by dying. There was no physiotherapy, no entertainment, no occupational therapy, no psychology. Just three good meals a day and endless washing and their bed being changed around them. Sometimes they sat on a chair while we made their bed or changed all the linen. But mainly they lay there while we rolled them over and rolled sheets and waterproof wraps over the mattress.