Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [90]
Grace stifled a yawn and told them ruefully, ‘Staff Nurse had me and the other junior doing five bed baths this morning, and they all went and got you-know-whats.’
The others all laughed.
They might have been on the wards for just over a month but it seemed a lifetime ago since they had been in PTS, with its male torso minus any sexual organs. Grace might be able to laugh now at the shock it had given her on her first week on the ward the first time she had been instructed to give a patient a bed bath. Both her face and the poor patient’s had been bright red when the unfamiliar male arrangement of ‘bits’ had suddenly stiffened into an erection.
Staff Nurse, who must have been watching, had called her over to the large desk in the middle of the ward afterwards and calmly explained the workings of the male anatomy to her, advising her that the male patients, much to their own embarrassment, tended to get erections when pretty nurses bed bathed them, and that it was a fact of nursing life that Grace would have to get used to. On the other hand, Staff Nurse had added firmly, if any male patient suggested that she do anything with that erection, she was to walk away and report him to a more senior nurse immediately.
The routine of the hospital wards, with its temperature, pulse and breathing rate charts, its timed-to-the-second visits from stern-faced doctors and consultants, who never ever acknowledged the existence of the most junior nurses, plus the fearsomeness of staff nurses and sisters, might now be familiar to them, but they all agreed that the exhaustion caused by the amount of physically hard and often dirty work they were required to do had proved far harder to adjust to.
‘Me hands are red raw from cleaning floors and scrubbing sheets,’ Doreen complained. ‘And me feet feel like they’re on fire after walking up and down that ruddy ward. They were that swollen last night I thought I’d have to sleep in me stockings and shoes.’
‘On fire?’ Iris chivvied her. ‘You’re lucky. Mine are half frozen, and covered in chilblains.’
It was the coldest winter that anyone could remember, although you wouldn’t have known it, since the Government had given orders that there was to be no weather reporting in the papers or by the BBC because, so rumour had it, it might be bad for morale.
All manner of things were ‘not being reported’, or so Teddy had told Grace when he had taken her to the pictures earlier in the week on her half-day off. And yet on the other hand there were constant ‘Chinese whispers’ about Hitler’s imminent invasion, and there had definitely been sightings of enemy reconnaissance planes over Liverpool, as well as an attempt to destroy the Forth Bridge, with bombs dropped in Scotland.
But worst of all for a city like Liverpool to bear was the increasingly bad news about the number of British vessels being torpedoed and sunk. Everyone in the city knew how much the whole country relied on safe passage of the convoys crisscrossing the Atlantic and bringing home much-needed supplies for the war effort; and virtually everyone in the city also had or knew of someone who had a family member on board those ships.
The bombing raids they had been warned to expect might not have materialised, the stored cardboard coffins may not have been needed as yet, but death had still come to the streets of Liverpool and mourners were still weeping for those they had lost.
The cinema newsreels, of course, focused on those things that would boost the country’s morale rather than damage it; scenes of the routing of the Graf Spee; of British troops abroad enjoying ENSA-sponsored shows; cheery WVS workers manning tea urns, and happy evacuated children frolicking in a sunny countryside.
Just seeing that sunshine had made Grace long for its warmth. Everyone was saying that they couldn’t remember there being such a bitterly cold winter. Even in the cinema it was so cold that Grace had half hoped that Teddy might put his arm around her once they were inside, but he hadn’t.
They had several patients on the ward who had