The Dressmaker's Daughter (14 page)

It was an enormous process. If it hadn’t worked, the hospital may have had to close because the infection was so severe and life-threatening that I think people may not have been willing to come in as patients, even if they were ordered to.

Practices that had been normal in the wards since before the turn of the century were overturned. New sterility and hygiene methods were begun. One day, however, in Light Ward, a famous elderly sister of whom some of my friends were fond, and whom I found perfectly normal, asked me what I was doing as I was sterilising a vessel in the new way. When I explained, she said, ‘Oh, we don’t do that here!’ ‘But, Sister, this is the new way and we all have to do it.’ ‘No, we don’t,’ she said. ‘We do it my way. We have been using pans all these years up here and we are not going to change!’ In other words, the thousands of pounds spent educating each and every one of us was wasted. The culture was too set. They might have been pouring warm water on aged terrazzo. It made no difference what we were taught, Sister herself included. She would have her way, come what may. So I did as she said and held my tongue.

Implacable as rocks, some of these elderly sisters had almost no other contact with the world except for their lives in their wards. They were given wards to run as lord mayors are given gold chains and there they remained, many of them, until they retired. Hauteur and vindictiveness grew in some of them like the staphylococcus in their wards and nobody, it seemed, could do anything about it.

To describe the culture within the ward, from the hierarchy downwards, is as difficult as describing the rules of Greek gods. Sometimes a ward sister would be benevolent and fair and we could glean rules that were reliably kept. But at other times we seemed to be in the power of women more aligned to Aphrodite, Hera or Semele. Born on the winds of their whims, their decisions were given from a desk at the entrance to the ward. Some of these women – not all of them were old but in my memory they seem to be – were isolated, unsupported, unadvised, unsupervised (except by Matron on her daily round), and, as a result, some ruled these wards like drunken queens. Many girls left, unable to withstand persecution, cruelty, or any form of misery the ward sister decided to inflict.

There were, of course, some noble exceptions. A pretty 28-year-old sister who ran a women’s ward, and, as we understood, not popular with her superiors, was called Sweetie Wallman. She lived, unlike most, away from the hospital. In other words, she had a life not entirely entangled with her work and her power. Agile, slim and friendly, her ward was clean and efficient and I thought it a heady experience to go on duty when Sister Wallman was in the ward, simply because of the atmosphere being free of fear, even casually happy.

My friend Jane said that when she went to work in one particular ward, a single-stripe nurse (that is one who had
only been nursing for a year) came up to her and said, ‘Don’t ever speak to Sister unless you must. Keep away from her. I have been here six weeks and I’ve lost ten pounds. Two nurses have left. She’s mad so stay away from her.’ During Jane’s six weeks on that ward, two nurses left, one of whom had a nervous breakdown.

And even recently, my friend Clare said to me out of the blue about the same ward, ‘When I went to work there, I had already finished my training. I was amazed to find the junior nurses hiding out in the “backs” because they were so frightened of Sister. I thought it was such a useless thing because they couldn’t work being so frightened, so I went to Matron and told her what was going on. She told me that she would do something about it and speak to Sister, but when she did the ward round the next day it was obvious that she hadn’t spoken to Sister at all. So things went on as usual with the nurses being terrified.’

It seems disloyal to mention cruelty or derangement when in fact I loved nursing at the Royal Adelaide, but nonetheless these things did exist. There was a culture of tyranny and exploitation. Were we indolent, unhappy in our work? Not really. We had every reason to work hard because the harder we worked the happier everybody was and the more likely we were to get a good assessment in the secret reports the sisters wrote on our performance. These reports were never seen by us, but were issued
behind our backs after every six-week stint on a ward. If a sister took a disliking to you, she could say whatever she wished and we would never know.

I can remember being so afraid once when working in the ophthalmic ward that at morning tea with Sister, a portly tyrant in her fawn dress and starched cap (first introduced as part of the uniform in 1901), my hand shook so much the cup rattled in the saucer and the noise startled us all.

Along with the ancient uniforms were ancient practices. In many ways the hospital was run on medieval lines. I think in some ways we benefited from the conservative nature of our training but in many other ways we suffered unnecessarily.

I see only now that one of the things I most responded to during my training was the rigid structure. Every day was ordered, starting with the ringing of a large brass hand-bell through the corridors and the three floors of the nurses’ home at five-thirty in the morning. (Usually the bell was rung by a night porter, but sometimes by a medical student intent on fantasies, or just mischief, perhaps.) At about six, the huge courtyard leading to the wards would be full of nurses in white aprons and caps scurrying like seagulls. In winter we wore woollen, navy blue capes lined with red. Sisters wore red capes over their fawn dresses and they did not have aprons. If they needed to do any work that might soil their dress, they wore a doctor’s gown. We
nurses wore doctor’s gowns too, whenever we dealt with some contagion. These gowns were like shrouds. Made of unironed white cotton, they tied at the back of the neck and at the waist, and were entirely open down the back. Patients wore them at times (it was very hard for patients to walk naked in them when they were going for tests with any dignity at all). The universal garment and yet they were called doctor’s gowns.

Sometimes when we went to church after coming off night duty on a Sunday morning, I took it into my head to carry a hot-water bottle under my cape if it was wintry. I thought this the height of practicality but it never caught on. Neither, in fact, did dying my hair purple and wallpapering my room with paper printed with violets to match.

The completely reliable rhythm of the hospital was good for me, even though I bucked against the regularity and the rigidity of the hours and complained mightily. I think it is in my nature to need to be noticed. Perhaps the reason was that having three brothers, all of us born within five years of each other, I wanted to be distinguished from the rest. The discipline and the structure of the hospital moulded me, gave me order, strength and perhaps courage. Euripides says that half of a good life is order. And order was what we had. Orders too, and, though many of the orders seemed to have no sense at all, I needed to be brought to heel in some way.
The fact that it was applied from above and there was no questioning it, any more than poor Io might have questioned Hera when she turned her into a cow, was in fact helpful in forming me. It may mean that I learnt to fight only when extreme injustice or pressure was brought to bear. In other words, I think I learnt discipline and that was what I sorely needed.

O
ne day I said wearily to a continually complaining elderly woman who had been admitted days before with a mysterious injury, ‘Oh, you are a frightful grizzler, Mrs Smith. Will you never stop moaning?’ The next day she died. Oops!

I put my face in my hands when I saw her empty bed. She hadn’t been malingering after all.

Once, when I was turning a man over while giving him a bed-bath, he suddenly said, ‘I don’t feel too good.’ And with that he died. The man was in his forties and a tree he was felling had fallen on him. The rolling movement I instigated had dislodged a thrombosis in his leg. I skulked around the ward guiltily while his sad family came to view his body behind the screens we had set up around his bed. Why had I moved him? That was what plagued me. Why was it that he had to have a bed-bath at all? Why hadn’t he been left without movement, even if he did smell a bit, until the thrombosis, the clot, had dissolved?

My friend Lindy tells me that once when we were both on night duty, she in Light ward, the men’s ward, legendary for its size and busyness, and I in another less busy ward, I came up to see her for a while to ask if I could help. She had three men there who had tried to kill themselves. She asked me to feed one who was called Joe. Joe had put a rifle to his mouth and shot himself after a quarrel with his wife. She tells me I shrieked and fled. ‘Some friend!’ she says.

On another occasion I gave a woman who had returned to her room from theatre a few hours before, a dose of morphia that had been ordered four-hourly by her doctor. As soon as I walked to the sister’s desk, I saw something that made me realise she had already had a dose of morphia. ‘Oh God, not another one!’ I thought. To tell or not to tell. I told Sister Hansbury, whom I feared. She rose to the occasion kindly and said that it would not kill the woman and we would say no more about it. In future, she said, I should be more careful when injecting morphia. I certainly was.

Sometimes a dying person seemed to fight and fight the death that drew inexorably on towards them. They would lie panting and dying, expected to die within the next twenty-four hours or so. Three days later they would still be there. No, I didn’t give them extra morphia, though no doubt they were given some if they were in pain. One old man in particular seemed terrified. He was
simply unwilling to die. He had no strength left and if he had not fought he would have died sooner. I realised he was a Catholic and was perhaps afraid of hell. I have never seen anybody so unspeakably afraid. The answer was to call a priest.

Sometimes people need to be given permission to die. They need to be freed to take this step. It is not easy to die, in spite of what is commonly believed. Not hard, I admit when a thrombosis stops your heart, but with other diseases it is an enormous struggle. Sometimes people die when their relative or the nurse leaves the room for a few minutes. As if they need privacy.

Another old man came into Light ward when it was full of patients. We had a row of what were called black beds down the centre of the room. These old black iron beds on wheels were brought in whenever a ward was full. While he lay on the bed, I unpacked his small brown case, which held a copy of
Wordsworth’s Complete Poems
and a pair of striped pyjamas. Immediately he had my full attention. If he recovered, I intended to discuss Sir Walter Scott with him. But when I turned away, sheltered by the great stone fireplace in the ward, he died. He died quietly and alone, with only his book of poems as a witness.

A woman of about thirty came into a surgical ward in the last stages of melanoma. Her name was Pearl and she had a husband and a small son who came every evening to visit her. She may have been much younger but at that
time everybody over twenty-five seemed much older to me than they perhaps were.

Pearl had earphones – big black earphones with which she listened to songs on the radio. At that time there was a hit tune called ‘The Twelfth of Never’ and I would find Pearl with tears running down her face and say, ‘Oh Pearl, you’re not listening to that song again, are you?’ She would say, ‘Why am I going to die, nurse?’ I had no answer. Blonde with blue eyes, she was a victim of the sun and yet, even so, none of us ever stopped sunbaking in a very hectic way. We seemed not to make the connection between those patients with mortal illnesses and ourselves. In fact, many of us left our night duty shifts in the morning and went to the beach to lie in the sun. My friend Margie Saint fell asleep and was so badly sunburnt she had to spend a week in the nurses’ sick bay. She says Matron’s withering look during her ward round is with her yet.

A senior physician did a ward round one day with a train of students around him. He paused at Pearl’s bed and gave a full commentary on her melanoma, its effect and her expected death. He left and they all trailed out of the ward. I found her again in tears. She told me what had happened. Suddenly an immense rage filled me. I ran out of the ward, chasing the physician down the corridor. But for whatever reason, because perhaps cowardice intervened, or he disappeared, I let him go and
turned back to the ward. Pearl died soon after this mercy visit of his. It was, I think, hearing the words that did it. Words make things real. ‘From talk comes action’ has been my motto. We are all killers in the end.

M
y friends and I lived a life of extremes for those four years. Washing the sick, dealing with every fluid of the body, we carried out work of the most humble kind. If the patients were humbled by their need, we too were humble in our work. In the end, it was the need of the people we nursed, their extreme vulnerability, that kept us anchored. (Try feeding a man a bowl of soup who has blown half his mouth out.)

The other extreme was the life we often led when not on duty. We threw off our uniforms, put on strapless ball gowns and walked across North Terrace to the Palais de Dance. A huge mirrored ball of light turned slowly while we danced to a band playing ‘April Love’, ‘Roaming in the Gloaming’, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’, ‘Memories are Made of This’, ‘My Heart Cries For You’, ‘See the Pyramids Along the Nile’ and ‘Wild Irish Rose’.

Sometimes, when the ball was over, we went to a nightclub. There, because of the licensing laws, we drank
whiskey from coffee cups and listened to recorded music or a band in the half dark. Then back to Frome Road where, in the boy’s car, outside the Nurses’ Home, we kissed and then wrestled while he tried to undo our brassieres. Whether he did or not, we soon ran up the steps, towards our room. There we unzipped the frock, and got into bed, as often as not wearing the night’s make-up with the smudged lipstick. Then the bell and back to pinafores, black stockings and lace-up shoes.

When we were off duty and not at a nightclub or a ball, we went shopping or visited our dressmakers. Once, at two o’clock in the afternoon, when climbing down a ladder out of a window on the first floor of Eden Park Nurses’ Home (the place we would be taken on a bus to sleep after night duty), wearing a white linen sheath dress, a wide navy straw hat with a navy-and-white spotted ribbon around it, I was greeted by Sister as my foot hit the ground. ‘Going somewhere, nurse?’ (Best to brazen it out.) ‘Yes, Sister, I am going shopping.’ ‘Well, go on then, just this once, but let this be the last time.’

We were very busy. To get a ball dress made, the fabric had to be chosen and bought, the design drawn up in the mind, if not on paper, and a booking made with the dressmaker. After about two or three weeks, which included two fittings with the dressmaker crawling around the floor, her tape measure around her neck and a pincushion tied with a ribbon around her wrist, or sometimes
with pins in her mouth, we would be told the day to come for a final fitting and to collect the dress. On that day, the dressmaker was paid. We also needed day dresses and dinner dresses to wear when we went to dinner at a nightclub.

When the hours we worked were taken into account, the hair appointments, the shopping for jewellery, gloves, shoes and hats, it seems a wonder that we had time to study and to go to lectures.

A few weeks after I began nursing, there was a ball held in the Gawler Town Hall. All the nurses who could get the evening off meant to go. In the nurses’ home, ball dresses were laid out on our beds, ironed and ready. Purple, green, pink, gold and white, they lay there like dead parrots. None of us wore black; it was not fashionable.

As soon as we came off duty, we showered and dressed. I was introduced to a ritual. The nurses always walked in their ball gowns over to the general hospital and showed themselves to the patients. Apart from their visitors, this was the only entertainment the patients had. Some lived for a decade or more in those narrow beds and over that time they saw dozens of girls dressed for the ball. The old women in their ward laughed and exclaimed as we twirled around, spreading our skirts for
them to see. Then, if we didn’t have a boyfriend to collect us in his car, we walked down the hill to the ball.

Winter was the time for balls. (Who, on these cold nights, were those people who came out from their homes on farms or in the town to play in the band? Were they paid? I think they must have been. I didn’t think of them up on the stage with the piano, drums, violin and piano accordion – shadowy as feathers.) Lined up on straight-backed chairs around the edge of the ballroom, the floor polished with candle grease, the band on stage playing such tunes as ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, we waited to be invited to dance. One by one, like butterflies leaving a branch, we stood, unleashed our skirts and began to flit around the floor. Those who were not chosen chatted among themselves, looking as unconcerned as possible, waiting to be invited next time. And the thing is, we all did dance. There were no wallflowers that I can remember.

I loved dancing. The feeling of freedom as we twirled around a huge room, a boy’s arm around my waist, our hands held up together as if about to halt traffic, it felt like flight.

At suppertime, the boy with whom you were dancing the supper dance (because he had chosen you before supper was announced), went in with you, side by side, to the dining room at the back of the hall. There we drank tea and restored ourselves with a few cream puffs
and then went back to our seats ringed around the hall. The boy then left you and went back to his seat with the other boys and men. When the band struck up, invited, you stood up and twirled some more in that hypnotic swishing of satin on your legs, the skirt sweeping the floor, feet skipping, body dipping and rising in time to ‘Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea, he’ll come home and marry me…’

And who would marry me? It did not occur to me to consider it. I am amazed to think that I had, as far as I can remember, no plans other than to finish my training. Marry? Travel? Work? Have babies? That went with marriage as an unchangeable equation. The future lay before me, flat and sterile as an operating-theatre tray the moment before the surgeon stepped up.

Marry a doctor? I wouldn’t mind that. They had all the cards. Yet we saw them, too, with all their idiosyncrasies. The older they were, the more mess they seemed to make of the theatre. (We, as cleaners, keenly noticed these things.) One elderly doctor at Gawler usually left blood halfway up the walls of the maternity theatre. The sisters made it their practice to leave it as long as possible before calling him to a birth in the hope that they would be able to deliver the baby and avoid the mess.

Once, on night duty with my friend Atyeo, we laughed behind our masks and were bent over with mirth as this old man called the mother ‘Angel’ over and
over while blood flew up the wall as he worked. Then the mother named the baby Angela and our merriment knew no end.

Miss Dior perfume only needs to be dabbed onto a wrist to fill the room or the train carriage, car or bus with the smell of taffeta and warm blonde curls. It was the smell of dressing for a ball, and the warm hair that I attach to the memory is, I think, because our single rooms were fitted with a bar radiator beneath the dressing-table in a gap where we sat to study and, as a result, our hair, newly washed, was always warm.

Off to the ball. And yet once I didn’t make it to the ball. Our drink of choice was a sparkling wine called Barossa Pearl. Sweet and bubbling, it had an immediate effect. Overexcited, having invited a few friends to my room for a drink, before we walked together across North Terrace, I found myself too drunk to go, so sat on the floor in the strapless ball gown, snug beside the radiator, and slept.

I have kept my ball gowns. For years they lay rolled up in green, plastic rubbish bags. Then one Sunday I took them out from the top of the wardrobe and showed them to my two granddaughters. I went to Granny Llewellyn’s wooden glove-box on my dressing-table and took out the elbow-length pale pink kid gloves. I got out my Merry Widow corset from a chest of drawers. And, standing one
by one on a chair on the back deck, my granddaughters had these huge strapless dresses with their great petticoats slipped over their heads. They held their arms up like divers and felt for the first time the seductive delight of satin and taffeta. Dresses made of tulle, the taffeta lining, pale pink under lilac hail-spotted net, clothed their little hips like water.

The black Merry Widow corset had been given to me by an old boyfriend. John’s parents owned a roadhouse between our farm and the city. He was a dark-haired boy who liked to laugh. Once, in his car after a ball, we crossed the Gawler River, which was in flood. We became stuck. Laughing, he climbed out and lifted the bonnet as I sat inside wondering what to do. There was no hint of danger in my mind; I was more concerned with not getting my dress wet. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m just going to get it to start. Don’t worry, Brink, there’s nothing to it.’ And start it did, as he revved the engine and drove slowly from the water.

One day when I arrived home for a day off, I found a long white cardboard box on the dining-room table. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a present from John,’ my mother said. I opened it and found the black corset wrapped in pink tissue paper. He had come to visit my parents, with whom he was friends, told them what was inside and left the box.

‘I’ve been wearing it around the roadhouse for a day or two!’ he said when I next spoke to him. I asked what I had
done to deserve this present. ‘I am sick of seeing your shoulder straps coming out from that dress of yours,’ he said.

From then on, no more shoulder straps were to be hitched up between dances, champagne and cream puffs.