Nursing 1939 -1945 Chapter 2

Early in May, during one of our daily cleaning sessions, Sister came in and said the German army had invaded Belgium and Holland. We didn’t have our own radios, but Sister had one in her room, she also had a daily paper, which she left in the common room for us to see, otherwise we were cut off from the outside world. The news was horribly reminiscent of our parents’ experience of the 1914-18 war, and became frightening as the enemy advance continued into France and on to the coast of Dunkirk. One of our set, who had more reason to feel anxious than the rest of us was a Jewish girl, Gertrude Lerner, who had been sent out of Germany by her parents to escape the Nazis and had been cared for in London by a refugee organisation before coming to Norwich. She found the written work difficult as her English was rather basic and although Sister Hale gave her extra tuition, it was obvious that she wouldn’t complete the course and she went back to her friends in London. Sister kept in touch with her for a few weeks, but we never knew the end of the story; one would like to think that her family survived and that they were re-united.

After the first month in PTS, we spent one morning or afternoon a week on the wards. We were not allowed to do anything on our own, but helped with simple tasks — feeding and bed- making, and fetched and carried for our seniors as instructed. I was in a constant state of worry about infringing unwritten rules of etiquette, of which there seemed to be a great many. The patients were very understanding and often whispered useful reminders. We were treated kindly by the junior staff and with complete disdain by the ward maids, powerful people, as I soon discovered, who could be very helpful on occasions, or threaten to report you to Sister for some minor infringement of their domain.

At the end of the PTS, there were written and practical exams and then we were assigned to various wards and allocated rooms in the Nurses Home. From then on, our set met as a group only at meals and for lectures, but we had bonded — in today’s language — and the link stayed strong throughout our training years. The sets above and below were treated with some restraint, Staff Nurses and Sisters even more so, but we were friends and equals. It was a hierarchical society — one stood aside or opened doors for someone who had been there three months before you — and it only began to change after five years of war.

With the retreat from Dunkirk, the threat of invasion was very real and the authorities knew it was only a matter of time before air raids would start. School children in Lowestoft, my sister among them, were hastily sent off to safer areas in the Midlands. The basement of the hospital already had areas reinforced as shelters and a section had been set aside as a Gas Decontamination Centre. This was brought up to a state of readiness and everyone was taken on familiarisation rounds. Looking back, I suppose it would have worked if needed, in a sort of Dad’s Army fashion, but thankfully it never was, sheer weight of numbers would have made it impossible to operate in such a limited space. By the end of the war it became a useful meeting place, well away from the public gaze. In the streets, huge brick and cement static water tanks were put up to help with fire fighting and many of these were not cleared away until long after the war ended.

As part of the early air raid precautions in the hospital, one of the duties of the night nurse, known as the runner, was to fill all the baths in the Nurses Homes with cold water. This was done between 11pm and midnight and it was a job I particularly disliked when it fell to me. The baths were big and took a long time to fill to the brim and it was only other people’s experience of having a flood on their hands when they tried to speed things up by filling several at the same time, that kept me awake as I waited, fighting off the urge to sleep. One particularly spectacular flood had resulted in the dirty laundry sacks of sheets and towels being raided as the water spread along the corridor and under the bedroom doors. Needless to say, this resulted in a severe reprimand from the authorities. Another occasional duty at night was to go out with the ambulance and bring in patients needing emergency treatment, or to pick up road casualties, notified to the hospital by the police. I can remember being called out one night in the middle of an air-raid and seeing searchlights sweeping across the sky, hearing anti-aircraft guns firing and watching as flares from enemy planes floated down on the city.

The uniform when I started was long sleeved blue-grey dresses, the hemline fourteen inches from the floor and with two tucks near the bottom, detachable stiff started collars, cuffs and belts, organdie “frills” for putting over our sleeves when they were rolled up, and starched aprons with wide crossover straps. Caps were also starched and came from the laundry ironed flat and had to be drawn up with a tape and coaxed into pleats, an art it took me several attempts to acquire. They were supplied to cover as much hair as possible, but the bolder spirits pulled them in much smaller, with the result that matron summoned the culprits to her office and said, “ I will not have my nurses looking like Victorian parlour maids”. On completion of each year’s training we were presented with a stripe, a piece of tape stitched round one sleeve, a useful marker for staff and patients to know our seniority. As the war went on and clothing was rationed, our long dresses got shorter, sleeves were cropped, the starched upright collars were replaced by soft ones and the pleated caps exchanged for the simpler American type, envelope-style with a button.

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