The Dressmaker's Daughter (13 page)

There were no showers or baths for the patients to use. Everybody was washed in their room. Bowls, screens, bedpans, urine bottles and trays were the artefacts that ruled our hours. We were the patients’ legs and often their hands. We fed them, washed them, toileted them, made
friends with many of them. If and when people recovered and went home, they gave us presents. Usually it was talcum powder and soap, which came with a floral card.

Having come from a family where sleep was viewed with such seriousness that I had been put to bed at five o’clock until I was twelve years old, I found night duty particularly harrowing. We all found it hard. Perhaps I found it no harder than anybody else but just felt that my pain was unusual. I can remember walking along the wide hallway of the maternity wing of the hospital soon after my first time on night duty and thinking I just had to lie down then and there on the shining khaki linoleum or die. I didn’t care what happened to me; I just had to lie down. But somehow I didn’t. It felt like addiction. I wondered if that was how an addict felt. What sort of addict did I think of? I had never heard of heroin addiction. Marijuana hadn’t arrived in the country, as far as I knew. I didn’t know cigarettes were addictive, nor did I know that alcohol was. Perhaps I have remembered this feeling incorrectly and have added the feeling of addiction to the memory.

When we staggered off duty after seven in the morning, we went to breakfast in the nurses’ dining room, which was attached to the hospital kitchen. But mainly we just walked to our night duty bedrooms, which were set away from the other buildings for quietness. We usually took a bath and often fell asleep in it, waking up an hour or so later in cold water. This never seemed to do us any
harm. Sometimes, to save time, we shared a bath and, laughing hysterically from tiredness, we washed and dried ourselves and climbed into bed.

At four o’clock in the afternoon we were woken with a cup of tea sent over from the kitchen. There was a taste and a feeling to that tea like no other. It was different from the tea that is taken upon waking in the morning. There was something sluggish in the air and in the tepid tea. Neither welcoming nor heartening, it was somehow more like a bell that spelt the beginning of the new upside-down day we were about to embark on.

During the night, at about eleven o’clock or midnight, we went in small groups of two or three to the dining room to have a hot dinner. This was the equivalent of our lunch. We went straight back on duty after about half an hour and the next shift of girls went to eat.

Sister Sharpen ate mainly jelly. She smoked Craven A cigarettes and stayed wonderfully slim.

Twice a night, two nurses were sent to stoke the furnace, which lay near the morgue outside the maternity wing. Enormous logs about a metre long – in my memory, they are about two metres long but could not have been – had to be forced into the iron tunnel of the great furnace that kept the entire hospital provided with hot water. It took two of us to handle these logs. There was a great poker that we used to push the wood further into the maw of the fire. The wind whistled round our
aprons. A gothic air of death, ghosts, wind and a line of white, icy nappies flapped nearby. The thought that bodies may be in the morgue was enough to make us afraid, exposed out there alone in the grounds. We rushed past the morgue when we had to pass it, looking neither to the left nor right, racing into the warm, lighted hospital, to Sister Sharpen, or Sister Mac, or Sister Lansbury in her rubber corset, quietly writing her eternal night report.

I
t was 1954 and I had just begun nursing at the Gawler District Hospital. I had recently won ‘Belle of the Ball’ at Sandy Creek Hall, wearing a full-length, lilac, shot moire taffeta evening dress. My hair was permed into curls and I was eighteen.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was on duty in the general wards of the hospital. The body of a teenage girl was brought in and laid on the theatre table. I don’t know why she was brought into the theatre because the dead were usually taken straight to the morgue. It may be that she was still breathing when they brought her in and that she died on the table. Whatever the reason, when I saw her she was dead.

My friend Doctor Bob Gillen had been called out in his old Rover to the scene of an accident near the Sandy Creek Hall. Two girls and two boys were in the car when the boy who was driving lost control in a curve of gravel. Neither of the boys was admitted to the hospital
but both girls were. One dead; one in a ward, not seriously hurt.

Bob told me a year or so ago that our friends Libby and Glen Maguire were passing when they found the accident, which had just happened. Glen was training and later became an orthopaedic surgeon. Libby was doing her nursing training at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. They, too, were out for a Sunday-afternoon drive, something people did in those days.

Glen and Bob got the most seriously injured girl into Bob’s car and, I suppose, Glen took the other in his. Driving to the hospital, Bob said that as he listened to the girl’s stertorous breathing he tried to think of what he could do to save her. There was nothing he could do as her neck was broken and she was dying on the back seat as he drove. She was sixteen and her name was Diane.

It fell to Sister Mac and me to lay out the body in the theatre. As we undressed her, I began to cry. Sister Mac took no notice but worked on. We washed her naked body and we saw that there was no mark on her body except for a Bandaid on one of her middle toes. I was thinking that when she put that Bandaid on she would not have thought that we would see it as we laid her out. When we had dressed her in a shroud, Sister Mac, who was a Catholic, crossed the girl’s arms on her chest like a medieval statue in a church. At that time I had not seen statues like this – I had to go to England to see them –
but I know now that this is what she resembled. I kept on crying throughout and Sister Mac kept command of the situation, taking no special notice of my tears but just letting them flow while we worked. She seemed to accept them without scorn but without pity either, and it may have been that she had trouble controlling her own feelings.

Somebody came and took the body to the morgue and I never saw Diane again.

In the women’s ward, Diane’s friend, whose name I don’t remember, sat up in bed, jaunty and recovering. One day, as I brought a lunch tray into her, I asked what had happened and what she and Diane had been doing out at Sandy Creek Hall, far from their homes in one of Adelaide’s suburbs.

‘We were going for a drive in the country with the boys. When we were leaving, somebody called out, “Where are you going?” and Diane called back, “There and back to see how far it is.”’

It was a long, long way that Diane went, and she is still with me fifty years later, travelling in my memory. Her effect was profound. I think it is because of the events of that mild, sunny afternoon that I have never driven a car. Many people have offered to teach me. In fact, I have had the offer of a car given to me if I would only learn to drive. But it was on that day that I saw what a car can do. I saw that in a moment a happy, careless girl can become
a perfect sixteen-year-old body with a Bandaid on her toe. And beside her in a spotless surgical theatre, a slim red-haired woman wearing the white starched veil of a nursing sister and an eighteen-year-old girl whose body only differs from the girl’s on the table in that she is alive and two years older and does not have a Bandaid on her toe. She could go back to the Sandy Creek Hall wearing the lilac taffeta frock and dance the foxtrot, the Pride of Erin, the modern waltz – which she did many times.

A
fter what seemed an interminable two years and three months, I left Gawler Hospital.

For some months I had been rejoicing in the role of Head Nurse. While all the other head nurses during those two years had led the nurses who were going on duty at six in the morning straight to the kitchen, my lot slept in and skipped breakfast altogether.

There was a theory at the time that if we ate and drank before going on duty in the morning we would be less likely to become infected by the diseases that surrounded us. There may be some truth in this, but I was keen on sleep. So sleep we did.

Rather like ten green bottles hanging on the wall, one by one the nurses left – because they were giving up nursing for other work or because they had fallen pregnant or were getting married. But I had vowed on that first day at Gawler Hospital when the Welsh nurse
had asked me if I was mad, that, come, what may I would be one of those few who reached the city. I was bent on getting to the Royal Adelaide. My Mecca.

Among the girls who had begun nursing with me were two sisters called the Lake sisters. One was fifteen and the other sixteen. Even then, this seemed to be very young to be helping women give birth, to be laying out the dead, dressing wounds and doing all the other work we did then. Yet they did it well, pretty, dark-haired, happy girls that they were, given no quarter even though they were two or three years younger than the rest of us. I don’t know if they reached the Royal Adelaide; I never saw them after I left the country hospital.

None of us were trained in what we had to do at the hospital. One day, watching a girl with an immense gift for comedy called Barbara Schultz as she dressed a wound, I asked who had taught her to do that. She turned from the work and raised a black eyebrow wryly at me. She often made us laugh until we were bent double.

On night duty, when hilarity from tiredness comes easily, especially from about five in the morning onwards, Schultz was at her merriest. She also performed pranks – sometimes she would fill a syringe with water, stand quietly behind a very deaf, elderly sister (a favourite of mine) called Sister Jessie Harkness, and slowly drench her veil until all four layers began to sag around her neck. ‘Oh you wretch!’ Sister would cry, turning around and
finding Schultz with her empty syringe. Sometimes after Sister Harkness had left her hearing-aid batteries on a heater to recharge them in some mysterious way, Schultz would steal the batteries.

On the appointed day of my departure from Gawler Hospital, I cleared out my wardrobe and dressing-table, stripped my bed and said goodbye to the nurses, the sisters and the patients. Some of the patients had been in the hospital when I arrived and were still there when I left. For all I know, they may still be there calling, ‘Nurse! Nurse! I need a bedpan,’ in their high, sweet voices.

I left the nurses’ sleepout with its canvas blinds that flapped on windy nights and the cold, clean air that possibly helped to keep us healthy. We were almost never sick. Exhausted, yes, but sick, no.

I left behind my pink dress, the white apron and the little white starched hat shaped like an origami boat and stepped into a new version. The hat at the Royal Adelaide was shaped like a conical ice-cream cone and made of stiffly starched white cloth. We held it in place with a bobby pin on each side. It slanted backwards like a wind balloon, as if each ward were an aerodrome and each flat white bed a landing strip.

The Eleanor Harold Nurses’ Home was newly built and stood on Frome Road, its wide front steps shaped by the avenue of great plane trees that had been planted fifty years before.

I was shown to my room and began to unpack. Some weeks earlier, I had been measured and fitted for uniforms. I went to collect them from the Uniform Sister. The room where uniforms were kept was unique. It had walls that were covered in wooden shelves laden with folded white aprons. Thousands of aprons left from decades of nurses lay on these shelves. One wall was taken up with the pink checked frocks that nurses – surely some dead by then – had discarded. No nurse was given, as far as I could ever tell, another nurse’s uniform or apron. None were discarded – they were kept there, sacred as dinosaurs’ footprints.

What has happened to that room of ancient uniforms? Is Sister still standing in the centre at a wooden counter with the uniforms now so far encroached that she is held in by the sheer weight of thousands and thousands of metres of cloth? Is there air left to breathe in that crowded room? Is Sister slumped over her counter under the weight of yet another fifty years of uniforms? The army has army disposals but the hospital had no such thing. This colossal waste, and strange garnering, was, had I known it, a symptom of the rules that were to govern the life of any new nurse at the hospital.

Clad in my new uniform, I was led on duty by several nurses who knew where to go. Many of the wards had beautiful biblical names or were named after Australian explorers. There were Dorcas, Faith, Hope, Light,
Leichhardt and Sturt wards. The wards with women’s names were women’s wards and those with men’s names were for men. All the nurses I met, and there were almost a thousand nurses in the nurses’ home, much preferred working in men’s wards. It was held that men complained less. I thought it was true too.

Most of the nurses had been through three months of probationer training. Some were newly let out into the wards like heifers from a barn, released from their mothers into the freedom and terror of life on the ward.

Only girls from the country, as I was, had done two years of training instead. For each year we had completed, we had a navy blue chevron strip on the arm of our pink dress. I had one because two years counted for one if you came from the country. By now I knew how to wash a person in bed – to give them a bed-bath. That was what I had learnt on my first day at Gawler. I knew how to take a pulse, a temperature and how to count respirations. I could dress a wound, take a baby from its mother in the act of birth, lay out the dead and show a young girl assisting me how to do it, and I could stay up all night without too much pain.

I did not, however, know what a fundus was or any of the other words that we made ticks against each morning when writing the night report in the Gawler maternity ward. This had worried me because I never felt comfortable ticking something that I had no idea about.
Here, in the new hospital, I was to have proper lessons, we were to study and we would discover how to diagnose diabetes and to know its causes, learn about the role of vitamins in health and much else. We would learn about glaucoma, high blood pressure, asthma and the disease that was to kill my father – coronary occlusion (otherwise known as heart attack).

The friends I met during those last two years of my training are still with me. It is fifty years since we met and smoked in each other’s rooms, drank Nescafé in teacups (mugs were not invented) and talked about our patients, the sisters and their often weird behaviour, our boyfriends – if we had one – and what we would wear to the Nurses’ Ball or the next dance.

We never saw a newspaper that I can remember; seldom a magazine; we heard no news on our radios – if we had them, and they were rare; and there was no television. Cut off in some ways, like nuns from the world, we lived a life of the wards, classes, study and dances. And those precious days off.

It amazes me that when I remember vacuuming our home or cooking lunch for my family on a day off I actually felt some resentment that I should be expected to work at all at home. Rich girls didn’t.

Yet my worn-out mother worked seven days a week, year in, year out, and seldom went out. She washed and ironed twenty-eight shirts a week, a clean one daily for
her three sons and her husband. Now I am shocked that I had that feeling, that miserable resentment. Breathtakingly selfish, I worked until after lunch, when I lay down on my bed and slept, as did my mother.

There must have been some peculiar lack of compassion, some haughty belief in my rights at home that I drew on as I walked in the back door. Perhaps I wanted some acknowledgment of my own work being exhausting too.

One of my worst memories is of the time I cleaned out a big grocery cupboard in the kitchen, thinking I was helping my mother. ‘Oh, this is disgusting!’ I said, tossing burst bags of flour into a bin, wiping sugar that had lain spilt on the floor, thick and toffee-like. Weevils were in some of the flour and in some of the old food that had been there for years, perhaps.

I went on and on, saying what a mess it was, until I looked up and saw my mother standing there sobbing. Appalled, I realised I had made her ashamed. She who worked a fifteen-hour day, working until she could barely stand, and yet there I was, in all my young fastidiousness, hurling contempt on her overflowing cupboard.

Far away, in the crowded enormous wards, the other girls – little white dots like a fluttering of geese on a lake – carried on working, while I was home on the farm resting. I wonder why it is that the day off, which was ardently awaited, is not nearly so clearly etched in my
memory as the working day. Certainly there were six times as many working days than days off, but that can’t altogether account for it. I think it’s that we were so alive, so alert and in an intense state of excitement most of the time at work, that it has stayed clear in my memory.

I had managed not to work for any length of time in an operating theatre at Gawler or in Adelaide. This is because I have an air of incompetence about me. I was never chosen. Some sixth sense told any sister who was choosing a nurse to show how to lay out instruments on a tray before an operation that it was unwise to choose me. As a result of this, I spent the six weeks allotted to my theatre training out the back rolling swabs. Sometimes I helped clean the theatre, but I never actually assisted in a senior way at an operation during my four years of training.

Certainly at Gawler I often held a woman’s leg while she lay on her side giving birth. (I admit that is, in fact, a form of operation, in that surgical procedures took place at times and it all was held in a theatre.) Once I took the head of a baby in my hands as it emerged from its mother, held it upside down as I had seen the doctor and sometimes the sister do, and waited until Sister Sharpen burst into the room after somebody had called her up from the main hospital.

But it was my role to make swabs. This infantile work consisted of taking small pieces from a roll of cottonwool and rolling them into balls. It suited me perfectly. I had no ambition at all to assist in the drama and horror of the theatre. With the patient anaesthetised there could be no interaction, and so to me the whole point of nursing had slipped away into a state of technology – and it was technology I feared. My demeanour, whether it was an uninterested expression, slow movement or dull eyes, meant that I was not one of the chosen ones.

Neither did I ever work in Casualty. This was where people came in at all hours to be assessed and then treated. In my mind some had their heads half cut off, legs dangling, arms with bones sticking through, and I was not interested. So perhaps because of a clerical error, or the fact that I had come from a country training school and there were too many nurses needing to experience work in Casualty, I escaped.

A fainter in childhood, I was still a fainter as a nurse. I had a sharp lesson in my place in the scheme of things – this cosseted only daughter – when one day, helping a sister administer some sort of fluid into a patient’s colostomy bag, I fainted. When I woke, I found somebody standing with their legs on either side of me and the work going on above me. It occurred to me, as never before, that I was not important.

Later, when I worked for an ophthalmic surgeon after
my training was done, I fainted so regularly that the other sister helping would snatch my white organdie veil as I fell so that it wouldn’t crease. There is something gruesome about eye operations to which I never really became indifferent.

A course for invalid – or as I think of it now, in-valid cookery – began for nurses in 1902 on the recommendation of one of the female members on the board of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Sister Joan Durdin has written a book called
Eleven Thousand Nurses. A History of Nursing Education at the Royal Adelaide Hospital 1889–1993
and of this course says: ‘The syllabus included the preparation of barley water, toast water, white wine, whey, junket, beef tea, chicken broth, meat, fish, poultry, custard, eggs, jellies, brains and sweetbread.’

We were still studying this wild course in the Fifties. It was as useful as growing dahlias on Venus, but still we went once a week across Frome Road to the School of Mines and Industries.

A nurse named Lynley Dohnt told Joan Durdin that one of the nurses gloated over getting top marks for toast water which she had made with cold tea instead of soaking the toast in water. The food we cooked was not tasted by the person in charge, just looked at. Who can blame them?

Vera Knappstein told Joan Durdin, ‘You’d cook your potatoes and get eight out of ten marks and then you’d lend them to someone else and they’d get nine marks for the same potatoes.’

None of us, I think, ever used our knowledge of invalid cookery. And yet that course went on for over sixty years and nobody in authority ever thought to question it.

I have never met an ex-nurse who likes to use a broom. Most nurses still use a wet mop. The training went into us so deeply. To this day, I only sweep steps and verandas. All else I wash. This habit was taught to us to allay infection to patients from dust. There were no brooms in the wards.

An outbreak of staphylococcus infection gave many patients serious infections during my last year of training. As a result of this, the hospital was placed under new rules. All staff, including the most senior sisters and the most junior probationers, were sent over the road to a lecture room in the university where we normally had our lectures given by a specialist in his field, and a whole new regime of behaviour was taught to one and all.