Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (65 page)

So, for the third time, I went like a returning somnambulist to Devonshire House, and was interviewed by Lady Oliver. I had hoped that foreign service might restore me, as it had done twice before, to some kind of clear-headed vitality, but I found that, for me, foreign service was no longer available. There was now, I was told, ‘a rule’ - Heaven knew in whose bright brain it had originated - that V.A.D.s who had broken their contracts for any reason whatsoever while on active service might not go abroad again until they had been once more through the ‘grounding’ in home hospitals that they would have required had they never served at all.

I could not, I learnt, be posted to any place in which my long practice in dressing wounds under active service conditions would be of the least use to anyone - though every month numbers of ‘green’ V.A.D.s were being sent abroad whose knowledge of emergency nursing had to be acquired at the expense of long-suffering Sisters and patients. Instead, the Red Cross authorities went to the other extreme; they sent me to a big civilian hospital which had a few military wards, and for the purposes of this volume shall be known as St Jude’s.

7

My surgical experience might just as well have been taken to the Devonshire Hospital in Buxton; it would have been quite as useful there, and some awareness might even have emerged of the fact that I possessed it. At St Jude’s I came across nothing, and no one, that could have restored in any wounded spirit the will to do and endure. ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’, might appropriately have been inscribed for me above its grim, gloomy doors. Even today I cannot pass without a shudder those uninviting acres of brown brick with their Victorian elaborations of worn grey stone.

A number of us, including myself, were housed a short distance from the hospital in a large ecclesiastical mansion, where we occupied part of the servants’ quarters. Here the small, single rooms at least allowed reasonable privacy, but one dark basement bathroom with a limited supply of hot water was again, as at Denmark Hill, thought sufficient for a number of us, in spite of the infectious diseases or the septic dressings with which we were in contact all day.

Not one V.A.D., I think, would have raised any objection to the servants’ quarters or even to our drab apology for a bathroom, had the rest of the mansion been full. Accommodation in wartime London was, as we all knew, by now expensive and difficult to find, but the inescapable supposition that we were not thought good enough to sleep in the empty bedrooms or important enough to wash our cold and weary persons in the unused bathrooms on the upper floors of the great house was not calculated to produce in us that gay, affirmative spirit which causes a young woman to fall in love with her work.

From time to time, when our clerical host was in residence, an invitation which was practically a command would come for a few of the V.A.D.s to take coffee with him and his wife. I found my own invitation one Sunday evening when I was off duty and had already arranged to go to Kensington, and though I knew that the elderly cleric merely intended a gesture of ecclesiastical goodwill towards the ‘War Office tweenies’ who occupied the humbler quarters of his establishment, this indication of benevolent despotism filled me with irrational fury.

At that stage of the War, I decided indignantly, I did not propose to submit to pious dissertations on my duty to God, King and Country. That voracious trio had already deprived me of all that I valued most in life, and if the interminable process of attrition lasted much longer, the poor surviving remnants of the writer’s career that I once prepared for so fiercely would vanish into limbo with the men whom I had loved. My only hope now was to become the complete automaton, working mechanically and no longer even pretending to be animated by ideals. Thought was too dangerous; if once I began to think out exactly why my friends had died and I was working, quite dreadful things might suddenly happen. Without the discipline of faith and courage, disillusion and ferocious resentment would ravage unchecked; I might even murder my Ward-Sister, or assault the distinguished ecclesiastic. On the whole it seemed safer to go on being a machine, so, none too respectfully, I declined the invitation to coffee and took refuge in Kensington.

This minor discourtesy gave me a childish, triumphant feeling that I had scored off the Church, but the hospital in general, and my Ward-Sister in particular, presented a tougher proposition. Like other civilian nurses, the Sisters at St Jude’s hated the necessity of using V.A.D.s, but I never came across any institution where they showed it so plainly.

Whatever training or experience a Red Cross nurse might have had before going there, they were determined that she should not be permitted to imagine, even for a moment, that this entitled her to any kind of status. The longer a V.A.D. had performed the responsible work that fell to her on active service, the more resolutely her Ward-Sister appeared to relegate her to the most menial and elementary tasks. At St Jude’s I was never allowed so much as to attempt the simplest of the dressings: I was not permitted even to remember the experience in nursing malaria and pneumonia which I had acquired in Malta and in the medical wards at Etaples.

Instead I was set, together with the rest of the V.A.D.s and the ordinary probationers, to that multitude of soul-killing, time-wasting tasks so dear to civilian hospital tradition, and so infinitely destructive of young energy and enthusiasm. Not even in the first ignorant days of nursing in Buxton had the years deliberately stolen from Oxford been so unintelligently spent. My ward at St Jude’s seemed to be a regular ironmonger’s shop of metal rails, brass sterilisers and instruments which required perpetual polishing. No one, I felt, would have suffered had the brass sterilisers been replaced by white enamel, the metal rails by polished wood and the instruments - except for the sharpest - by stainless steel, but probationers were cheap, and it never seemed to occur to anyone that the dissipation of their bright-eyed keenness and their youthful idealism upon monotonous, unconstructive and completely valueless duties mattered in the least.

The drabness of this stultifying, wasteful routine was made yet more discouraging by a cast-iron, unimaginative discipline which could hardly have been better qualified to replace the positiveness of eager initiative by the negativeness of submissive resignation. For me this discipline, with its determined inculcation of that type of inferiority complex which undermines self-confidence for ever, came to be particularly associated with meal-times.

When first I sat down to the hospital supper and remembered the rough and ready plentifulness of Army meals, I realised with dismay the lower valuation of equally hard-worked civilian women both by the Food Ministry which estimated their requirements, and the hospital authorities who apparently witnessed without perturbation the maltreatment of the meagre rations permitted them. But I should have remained quite indifferent to what I regarded as a daily massacre of common-place food had it not been for the ceremony of disapproving vigilance which turned each unappetising repast into a nightmare.

The medical ward in which I worked at one end of the huge building was several minutes’ walk from the dining-room at the other end, but ‘etiquette’ and my Ward-Sister alike forbade me to leave it until the exact hour appointed for luncheon, and we were sternly reprimanded if we were ever seen running or even conspicuously hurrying through the long ground-floor passage. In the dining-room the Assistant Matron stood censoriously over the luncheon-table with watch in hand, ready to pour a volume of sarcastic reprimand over any V.A.D. or probationer who was even half a minute late.

Inevitably, for me, each luncheon-hour became an ignominious tussle with my Ward-Sister and an apprehensive scuttle along the corridor, followed by another and worse tussle with the Assistant Matron. Had the miserable meal been ten times more attractive than it was, I should never have been able to reach it inconspicuously or to eat it with enjoyment. In consequence I welcomed with passionate relief the occasional days on which my time off happened to come in the morning.

In France and in Malta, except during a push, off-duty time had followed a pre-arranged schedule, but at St Jude’s, as in Camberwell, it was seldom allotted until the actual day. The three-hour afternoons and evenings made it possible to go to Kensington for tea or supper without prearrangement, but ‘mornings off’ only lasted for about two hours, and as my Sister seldom told me that I was free until ten or more minutes after I ought to have gone, they were usually, in practice, shorter still.

Plans for spending such brief and sudden off-times obviously could not be made, but the opportunity that they gave for having luncheon away from the hospital was sufficient compensation for their solitude. Once again I became familiar with the restaurant at Gorringe’s, which had supplied me with such large and satisfying teas in my early days at the 1st London General. I can still remember the profound satisfaction with which I lingered over the attenuated egg-cutlets and cups of coffee which were all that my ludicrous salary would now run to at wartime prices, far from the sight of critical eyes and the sound of scolding voices.

8

One evening at prayers I remembered reading somewhere a passage which had referred in impressive terms to the sanctity of the nursing profession.

That’s just the trouble, I thought, as the others devoutly murmured the Lord’s Prayer; it’s considered so holy that its organisers forget that nurses are just human beings, with human failings and human needs. Its regulations and its values are still so Victorian that we even have to do our work in fancy dress, struggling perpetually with an exasperating seven-piece uniform, always changing caps, collars, aprons, cuffs and waist-belts that accumulate germs and get lost in the laundry, or collecting the innumerable studs, clips and safety-pins required to hold the cumbrous outfit together, instead of wearing one loose-necked, short-sleeved overall that could be renewed every day.

Had I been able, in 1918, to imagine that anything so remote as 1933 could possibly arrive, I should never have believed that even in so distant a future nearly all hospitals and nursery training schools would still be clinging with pathetic conservatism to their mediæval trappings. But in the long interval between that year and this, I have often thought, as I thought then, that the ‘holiness’ of the nursing profession is easily its worst handicap; a profession, it seems, has only to be called a ‘vocation’ for irresponsible authority to be left free to indulge in a type of exploitation which is not excused by its habitual camouflage as ‘discipline’. It is true - it has to be true - that most of the women who choose this harsh, exacting life are urged by semi-conscious idealism, but idealists, being eager and sensitive, are often more liable to nervous strain than the less altruistic who take care of themselves before they think of others.

Four impressionable years spent in a number of very different hospitals convinced me once for all that nursing, if it is to be done efficiently, requires, more than any other occupation, abundant leisure in colourful surroundings, sufficient money to spend on amusements, agreeable food to re-establish the energy expended, and the removal of anxiety about illness and old age; yet of all skilled professions, it is still the least vitalised by these advantages, still the most oppressed by unnecessary worries, cruelties, hardships and regulations. St Jude’s to-day may be, and probably is, quite different from the hospital of fifteen years ago, but the recent Report of the
Lancet
Commission on Nursing has shown the unimaginative stupidities which then oppressed me to be still only too prevalent in a large number of training schools.

As I gradually realised, during that autumn of 1918, how St Jude’s, because of its great tradition, collected within its walls some of the best nursing material in the country, and then, by its unillumined routine and its rigid sectarian orthodoxy, crushed the gaiety and independence out of the young women who went there so hopefully, I developed a ferocious hatred of all civilian hospital authorities from Florence Nightingale onwards. For years I continued to detest the founder of modern nursing and all that she stood for - a state of mind which persisted until, quite recently, I read her essay ‘Cassandra’ in the Appendix to Ray Strachey’s
The Cause
, and realised the contrast between her rebellious spirit, her administrator’s grasp of essentials, and the bigoted narrowness of some of her successors.

My wrathful consciousness of inhuman idiocy reached its height one October evening, after an unusually exhausting round of bed-making, bed-pans and bowl-washing, all of which had fallen to my unaided share because the beginning of the ferocious influenza epidemic was already making us short of staff. By means of sustained and violent energy I managed to complete these enthralling tasks a few moments before the night people were due, and, in accordance with custom, reported the fact to the staff-nurse in charge of the ward that evening.

‘I’ve finished, Sister,’ I informed her.

There was not a Ward-Sister in France or Malta or even at the 1st London who would not have told me that after such a hard day’s work I could go off duty, but the staff-nurse, from beneath her starched cap, regarded me critically with bright, hard brown eyes.

‘It isn’t eight o’clock yet, nurse,’ she said. ‘You can go into the annex and polish the wheel chairs.’

An obscure rage burned in my tired brain as I obeyed her, and this, by the next morning, had translated itself into a determination to leave at once.

‘I won’t stay here for six months even if it means a row with Devonshire House that finishes me for good,’ I told myself grimly, but I didn’t intend to remain at the mercy of chance, and before putting my resolve into practice, I took the precaution to discover a reasonable alternative.