‘I can’t wait to try this on,’ Nessa whispered shyly to me.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I hate walking around the hospital in mufti.’
Linda chuckled. ‘Hark at you!’ she teased. ‘A week ago you didn’t even know what the word meant!’
My cheeks reddened. It was true. I’d had no idea nurses used the term ‘mufti’ when referring to their ‘civvies’ or ordinary clothes, but I’d heard it so many times since our arrival that it had slipped into my vocabulary without me even realising.
‘We’re going to be proper nurses now,’ I grinned, picking up my prized laundry bag. ‘We have to use the correct language!’
We carried our uniforms back to the nurses’ home with some ceremony, and all agreed to meet in my room for a ‘fashion parade’ before tea.
My mum had taken me on a shopping trip to Manchester a few weeks earlier and bought me two pairs of comfortable brown lace-up brogues in Freeman Hardy Willis. We had tea and scones with jam and cream in Kendals department store before visiting its grand lingerie section, where she bought me two suspender belts with metal clasps and seven pairs of brown, 30-denier Pretty Polly seamed stockings.
Now I took the underwear out of its tissue wrappers for the first time, and set about clipping, buttoning and lacing myself into my complete nurse’s uniform. I was beside myself with excitement as I pulled on my dress and attached its crisp white cuffs and collar, which had to be buttoned onto the dress. Next I used half a dozen brand new kirby grips to pin my neatly folded cap on top of my hair, which I had scraped back off my face and fixed in a tight bun using several brown elastic bands.
Finally, I placed my stiff white apron over my dress. It was huge! The lower part amply covered my wide skirt, which reached almost halfway down my calves, and the two enormous front flaps that pulled up and over each shoulder came so high they covered half of my neck. The wide straps had to cross over my shoulderblades before being brought back round and attached with a thick safety pin in front of my waist. What a procedure!
I turned and faced myself in the vanity mirror above my washbasin. It was a moment I’ll never forget. I thought of Sue’s sister Wendy, whose uniform I’d always coveted. I thought of all the nurses I’d been impressed by at the hospital. I pictured them soothing brows, pushing trolleys, calming anxious relatives and offering tea in pale green cups and saucers that matched their dresses. Now, in this moment, I saw myself amongst their ranks. ‘I really am becoming an MRI nurse!’ I said to my surprised reflection.
When Nessa and Linda arrived a few minutes later we all shrieked and hugged each other.
‘Will you look at the state of us!’ Linda exclaimed as we ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ over each other like bridesmaids before a wedding.
Nessa and I both knew she was feeling exactly the same as us, though: pleased as punch and bubbling with pride.
Sharing such exciting new experiences with the other girls helped me through the first few weeks, although I still felt horribly homesick. Graham visited a couple of times a week, turning up in the hospital car park in his bubble car and taking me into Manchester for a cup of coffee and a chat. Once or twice he drove me home to visit my parents at the weekends, too, but I’m not sure that helped my feelings of homesickness as I always found it very hard to say goodbye to them.
Several weeks on, after my eight-week school-based ‘block’ was complete, I reported for ward duty for the first time with Sister Craddock, who paired me with an efficient-looking third-year student called Maggie. I was assured Maggie would ably instruct me in the arts of completing a bedpan and bottle round and giving bed baths, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
‘Most patients can manage by themselves if you draw the curtain and give them a bottle or a bedpan,’ Maggie said brightly, which immediately put me at my ease. She had already dished out half a dozen stainless steel bedpans, and she asked me to follow her round the ward and help her collect them by placing a paper cover on them and loading them on a trolley.
‘Nobody likes this job,’ she said as we went into the sluice. ‘The golden rule is to look the other way and stand back so you don’t splatter your apron.’
There was a porcelain sink on the back wall, into which Maggie tipped the contents of the pans before flushing the metal chain that was dangling beside it. The smell that rose up my nostrils as the urine and faeces were washed away made me heave, and I held my breath.
Maggie turned on the taps on either side of the sink and swilled out the pans before loading them one at a time into a sterilising unit that looked like a narrow metal washing machine. Each bedpan was blasted with boiling, steamy water before Maggie removed it with a thick linen cloth and placed it on a clean trolley ready for the next bedpan round.
‘The trick is to get it over and done with as quickly as you can,’ Maggie said. ‘Grit your teeth and just do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that bedpans won’t clean themselves and, believe me, the smell gets worse the longer you leave it!’
I felt at ease with Maggie and hung on her every word, eager to learn from her experience. Our next task was to perform a bed bath on Mr Finch.
‘He’s a good one to start with as he lives up to his name and is as light as a bird,’ Maggie whispered as we approached his bed.
‘Good day, Nurses!’ Mr Finch beamed as Maggie pushed a trolley beside his bed and I closed the curtains around him. ‘Is it bathtime? Oh, go on then, if y’insist!’
Mr Finch put down his Daily Mirror and rubbed his hands together cheekily, eyes glinting.
‘He’s just teasing,’ Maggie said. ‘Aren’t you, Mr Finch?’
‘I am indeed,’ he tittered. ‘I’m a good boy really.’
Maggie caught my eye and winked, but I still felt slightly nervous. Mr Finch looked a bit scruffy, with nicotine-stained fingers and blackened teeth, and I shivered as I wondered what we might have to deal with under the sheets.
‘Any trouble from him, Nurse Lawton, and we’ll make sure the water is ice cold next time,’ Maggie said in an exaggerated whisper.
On the trolley Maggie had a pot of zinc and castor oil cream, a metal bowl filled with warm water and a tin of talcum powder. Mr Finch reached into his locker and produced a toilet bag containing a bar of Palmolive soap, two grey flannels and a small, thin towel.
Maggie showed me how to strip the counterpane back and pull the blanket off the patient and over an A-shaped frame she had placed at the foot of the bed.
‘Keep the top sheet in place and work underneath it as best you can,’ Maggie said quietly. ‘That’s the privacy guard.’
She demonstrated by washing and drying Mr Finch’s face first and moving on to his arms, chest and underarms without exposing an inch of flesh unnecessarily.
‘Ooh, that’s grand, Nurse,’ Mr Finch commented. ‘You’re right good at this!’
Next I helped turn Mr Finch on his side, so Maggie could wash down his back and I could dry it. He certainly was as light as a bird. He was skin and bone, in fact, and I realised he looked rather like the old man in the television comedy Steptoe and Son, which amused me.
‘Would you wash your private bits?’ Maggie said, making it sound as though she was posing a question when in actual fact she was instructing Mr Finch politely to do so.
‘Course,’ he said. ‘I tell ye what, it’s a damn sight easier t’ get m’self clean nowadays. Used to be murder when I were down the pit.’
It turned out that Mr Finch was born at the turn of the century and had worked nearly all his life at the Astley Green Colliery in Wigan, mining coal for decades until his retirement a few years earlier. He had seven children and seventeen grandchildren, and had served