Memoirs of a British Nurse – Part 2 By JM Hayward

Memoirs of a British Nurse – Part 2

By JM Hayward

 London, England – 1954 

After that, I went to the Royal Free Hospital in London as a midwife. I had not been working there for long when a lot of nurses came down with a mysterious illness. They had to close the unit down and had one ward turned over to all these sick nurses; various ailments, but nothing they could pin down to a cause or have any idea what to do with them. A general feeling pervaded that a lot of it was just made up. I was well and was on night duty there for a long time. I think I left after about 8 months as it seemed to be going on so long. Years later the illness was identified as the Eppstein-Barr virus. I was not surprised when in the 1990s a programme about its history and to see the Royal Free Hospital was mentioned, and one of the nurses that I had nursed years ago was talking about it.

I was already well on my way to arranging to go to Canada. There were jobs for nurses all over the world. I had been keen to go to Rhodesia or South Africa, but my father talked me out of that. I obtained a nursing job at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario, and made all the arrangements. I had to go through all the arrangements – passport, medical exam, TB tests, chest x-rays, and so forth. There was a big to-do about buying a trunk. However, I still had months to wait. Dulcie, my friend from Bath, and I were going to go together. We both took a week’s holiday and had to take another job.

I took a 3-month course on polio nursing at Western Hospital in Fulham, a London suburb. It was fall, not the time that people normally contracted polio, but there was an outbreak in the area. The hospital was a real shock: it was extremely old, with enormous high ceilings, dingy paint, and a fireplace in the middle of the ward for heat. The sluice room (the place for bedpans and such items) had the windows open and the London fog would roll in there; how cold and damp it was! The nurse’s residence was not much better; so dingy.

The polio ward was one room with men, women, and children in it. It was heavy, demanding work. One child died who was in an iron lung. Two women who lived streets away from each other were both in iron lungs – everything had to be done for them. They had families at home and must have been desperate. One young man, aged 21, who had contracted polio in Malaysia, was there and unable to move a muscle or talk. His parents were well off and they hired a private nurse to look after him on the ward. The parents got a typewriter for him with a long stick that he held in his mouth, and he learned to communicate a little that way. Some years later, the young man’s mother sent me some magazines; there was a small article and the young man’s picture. He had married his private nurse and was living at his parent’s home.

I had a real battle to get Christmas off that year. In all my years of nursing, I had not been home at Christmas. You were expected to work the full 12 hours or maybe a longer day, to keep the patients going all day. Christmas Eve was also an extra-long day to decorate the ward, so when you eventually had time off you were zapped. This was 1955. It was still rare for a nurse to be married. Visiting hours were very strict. No matter how ill the patient, the rules had to be obeyed. I don’t remember any relative sitting beside a dying patient. When a patient died, we had to lay them out and put them in a shroud before they went to the mortuary. There were no funeral homes then, so they must have been taken to the house or church in a casket. I remember Sister Wooten being very kind to me when the first patient on the ward died.

When I started my training at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, there were a lot of student nurses living in a big old house near the hospital. The assistant matron and teaching sister lived there with us. We were all given our cleaning jobs that that to be done each morning before classes. I shared a room with a girl named Margo – she was in her late 20s. She had seen her mother and father shot when the Germans came to Latvia. She was forced to march with thousands into Germany to work in their factories. She had no idea what happened to her brother. She did eventually find him on the march. He was a doctor, or in training still. They managed to stay together.

After the war, they came to England as displaced persons. He worked as an orderly and she was doing domestic work in a hospital. She started her training and had a tough time with it. She was a small person and had been very malnourished. However, she did manage to handle it all and became a registered nurse. Her brother became a doctor. As far as I know, she married a fellow countryman and came to Canada.

NOTE: The book, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002. It describes the same time that I was at Mile End Hospital. The non-fiction book was eventually made into a TV series that was very popular in 2012. Jennifer Worth was the author.

Author’s Bio: JM Hayward is a retired nurse who lives in a picturesque town in the province of Ontario, Canada. She is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who enjoys reading, music, cultural events, and her friends. She has visited Turkey a few times and has fond memories of her trips there.