Night staff slept on the top floor of the Nurse’s Home, an area forbidden to visitors. We piled our loose belongings into the sturdy counterpane, making an outsize bundle to bump up the flights of concrete stairways to our allocated bedrooms, with a laundered supply of bed-linen and blankets left neatly folded by vacating nurses.

The drawers of the dressing-table were removed bodily, carried between two girls up the stairs if the lift was not working, to be replaced by the empty drawer inherited.

Like children sent to bed in the daytime, a blackout curtain shutting out the sunlight, one lay awake hearing the muffled street sounds surrounded by a false silence, constantly thinking, ‘Sleep now. This is your last chance. Think of the middle of the night. Awake.’

‘Half past seven, nurse!’ the maid yelled, the slamming door echoing behind her down the corridor.

The setting sun filtered into a mirror-image dining room on the other side of the central Kitchen. In an attempt to right an upside-down world, we were served breakfast to celebrate the start of the day, of scrambled egg, a powdered yellow substance with hidden lumps of unreconstituted mixture.

Sister Tutor appeared to read out the list of assignments. ‘Nurse Brown to Men’s Surgical, Nurse Davies to Relief, Nurse Jackson to Women’s Surgical... and remember if anyone is unhappy with her lot it is just for three months.’ I thought, in other words, if you’re stuck with Nurse Davies for four nights relief,. remember it is just four nights before your regular probationer comes back,’ for we worked non-stop for three weeks and three nights to have four nights off in a block, for twelve hours at a stretch, 8:30 p.m. to 8:30 am, not leaving the ward during that time, taking a meal on duty.

"Pick up your meal box," my Senior Nurse warned as we filed out, passing a table set with wickerwork baskets, lidded, the top fixed with a wooden skewer held between two leather loops, reminding me of one carried by my father, going off to work as a car mechanic in the early thirties.

Surgical wards carried a pro each, but the three medical wards shared one. We walked out in pairs, wearing our navy blue, wrist-length, woollen cloaks, scarlet lined, held by two crossed scarlet straps, vivid across the white apron.

The hospital kitchens were silent, the windows open on deserted tables, the boiler room doors closed where, in daylight, men came out to rest on their shovels for a breath of fresh air.

Lights were still on as we passed through the archway into the front square, the couples breaking away to pass into the shadowy blocks. To arrive in time to join in prayers to ‘Lighten our Darkness.’

The first task was to water the milk held in an enamel jug in the fridge... ‘Please Defrost me on Friday,’ a notice read... for the kitchen was closed and the day staff had not left enough for our needs. All those cups of tea.

Thence to clean the bedpans, resting the pan on a towel to deaden the sound, looking out of the small, square-paned, dirty window of the sluice onto the lighted street, people scurrying off to the cinema or home, beings standing on their feet, not their heads as we were.

This task was repeated on the two floors above, each ward in the charge of a second-year nurse. One Night Sister for the entire hospital on permanent nights... ‘crossed in love’ it was said... having overall responsibility for every drug or medicine, emergency, admissions, death, emergency operation, assisted by a third-year nurse near the end of training, receiving help in preparing for her Finals, in quiet moments.

Like Dickensian lodgers sharing the same bed, alternating day and night, Night Sister and Staff occupied an office in the archway building between the front and back squares, used during the day by the ‘Secretary’ who ran the hospital, a voluntary establishment relying solely on charity for funding.

By nine thirty, bed quilts folded in four to the foot of the bed, false teeth deposited in mugs on lockers, the last frantic request for ‘Pan, nurse,’ the central lights were turned out, and like sleepy eyes closing, the wall lights went out above each bed, leaving the green shaded light on the desk constant, with a heavy torch each nurse carried, beam down, a mobile response to a whispered call, a ‘night light’ to the wakeful.

Our voices were hushed, doors closed gently, only the lights of the kitchen and bathroom complex pushing at the darkness like flood water held back by the door.

Night Sister made her first round between then and ten o’clock expecting us to know every patient by name, even the latest admission, not referring to their bed number.

The nurse in charge would have found out who needed a sleeping pill, for none was administered after 11:30 p.m..

"You’re nice," the patients said, "Not like that heartless day staff. We like you."

The probationer was shared between the nurse on the home base or the other two nurses-in-charge, on the floors above, who could request help with lifting a heavy patient or for a drug to be checked, a patient in pain.

Carrying an enamel kidney dish, the hypodermic needle nestled in cotton wool, resting on the patient’s notes, a phone call was made to the porters’ lodge to track Night Sister.

"She’s just left Surgical Women’s, Nurse," a cockney voice said.

Walking down the shadowy ward in soft-soled shoes to come out on the landing furnished with a backless bench; on the uncarpeted stone floor, occupied sometimes by anxious relatives starting up hopefully at the sight of a nurse, any nurse, asking... "Nurse, how is she?" only to be met by "Sorry..." over the shoulder hurrying up the flights of stone stairs, the lift cage stilled, under restriction during the hours of darkness.

"Rats," I was told, "on the staircases. They come out at night," my shadow huge in the dim light. Cutting through the marble hall used for Prize Giving as this was forbidden, and it was a shortcut.

"Left for Casualty," the nurse on Gynaecology said, annoyed at the interruption.

Finally catching up with Night Sister, quizzed on the patient’s name, medical condition and the conversion of the drug using decimals. Facing her sharp eyes, probing voice to be found wanting on mathematics, face to face with a lifetime’s inadequacy. Squirming.

Quicker on the return journey through private wards, the nurses in their offices coming out to glare at the interloper, passing the kitchen where stainless steel tea sets are laid out for the later morning call.

After cleaning bedpans on the other words on the rota it was time for the first meal to be prepared, at midnight for the senior on the last ward. A nonentity, a repast peculiar to night duty fitting neither breakfast lunch or supper, simply called The Meal, prepared from one uncooked potato and one egg, each.

"Scrambled egg and toast, please," she thought.

The light in the kitchen was bright, the silence shocked by the refrigerator starting up, the kitchens of other wards like outposts in the night, glimpsed from the window.

Cockroaches crawled out from behind the radiator, blind and black.

Without greasing the saucepan or melting a knob of butter, not even adding the top of the milk to the one, small beaten egg, and on a high gas I started cooking, snatching the blackened toast from under the grill just as the egg disappeared into holes.

Throwing that away I started again, using my egg with much the same result but making passable toast and a pot of tea, setting this down on the bare topped kitchen table, taking the senior’s place in the ward.

Anxiously I patrolled the ward feeling the weight of responsibility, having whispered conversations with people glad to talk.

Two more meals were cooked, keeping to a simple boiled egg and toast before, at two o’clock in the morning, it was time for my meal, creeping past the bed nearest the kitchen, to be surprised by the present of a slice of cake wrapped in the pages of a tabloid newspaper by the patient, putting a finger to her lips.

The two o’clock round of Night Sister was most to be dreaded for, even in summer, the run down hours were cold and we sat, or moved about, with a blanket wrapped below the waist, anxious to rise at the first creak of the door and not be surprised by her presence.

Help was summoned by telephone to treat a patient on the floor above, suffering from a bedsore, not our shame but a transfer from an L.C.C. hospital, for the development of a bedsore was not considered to be an inevitability but lack of nursing skill. And everyone knew L.C.C. nurses were less skilled and better paid.

The screens around the sixteen stone woman did nothing to fence in her shouts which disturbed the ward as she yelled at two nurses insisting on turning over her obese body to treat a wound in the flesh the size of half a crown. Reddened, painful, the area treated, the sheets changed, we offered tea to the wakeful patients.

On another night the call was for a heart patient, propped up on pillows, who had been ordered the application of leeches by the aged physician. The black, sightless creatures were positioned on the white swollen abdomen of the patient, dropping off when sated with blood. The senior nurse caught the creatures using a bell-shaped glass container and flushing the bodies down the bedpan sterilizer, not expecting the junior to do the dirty work.

A child was dying on Men’s Medical, such cases separated from the Children’s Ward to an adult ward, as if the span of its life might be quickened by adult company. A hasty promotion.

Male patients, who were mobile, helped one another. A capable man organised breakfast whereas the women stayed in bed with an unspoken, ‘I get enough of this at home. I’m in for a rest.’

Men snored at night, a sonorous siren call, the sound changing abruptly, like a dog snapping at a biscuit, swallowing that note to resume on a different scale.

Men would light up a cigarette at night, ignoring the notice placed above each bed stating hours when smoking was acceptable, common to all wards. but only male patients received a nightly allowance of bottled beer.

An old man lay dying, brought in from Rowton House, a charity providing somewhere decent, in tall buildings, centrally situated, for itinerants to live in dignity.

"I am sorry to be giving you ladies all this trouble," the tramp said in an educated accent. He died apologising.

Teenagers faced with death, neither of us for the first time but unable to square up to it, to mutter a prayer or to work in sacred silence, to afford it the dignity death deserved; instead we talked of the film the senior nurse had seen the previous evening, our training coming to our aid as we closed his eyes, bandaged his jaw, stuffed his anus with cotton wool, and tied his feet together, the muscles collapsed like spent elastic.

Without any formal instructions my peer had taught me how to ‘lay out a body’ and how to deal with the paper work, listing his few possessions in the bedside locker. Night Sister, with a porter, accompanied the trolley, the body dust-sheeted under a purple mantle, to the morgue.

The first signs of dawn showed in the greying of the windows in the darkness and the sound, in the street outside, of a costermonger’s cart pulled by a lively horse rattling over the stone setts on their way to Covent Garden at three in the morning.

At four o’clock we enjoyed a pot of tea and toast, sitting at the desk in the ward, the night’s mending set aside, towels and sheets darned by hand under the dim light.

Previously I had cut and spread with margarine the bread for breakfast, hiding the plates, covered with a clean tea cloth, and laid up the three-tiered trolley.

At half past four we picked off the most seriously ill, unlikely to complain at any diversion, it being impossible to carry out the work load in the set time.

Bedpan or bottle round, the central lights now turned on to reveal our stealthy work; temperatures, dealing with emergencies from mislaid teeth to blood-soaked bandages, brought us to breakfast at six o’clock. Eggs, provided by the patients, were boiled, soft, medium to hard alike contained in a net in a large saucepan, and dished up to cries of... "Nurse, this isn’t my egg!"

Suddenly, overwhelmed by so much to do, the day staff coming on duty at seven a.m. to help in bed-making, it was broad daylight: the lights still on and the sluice and kitchen to be tidied before Ward Sister would allow night staff to go off-duty.

To be pacified by dinner, roast and three veg., followed by ‘Floating Islands,’ a favourite sweet, listening to shop talk.

The hours following were for recreation or taken up with lectures. On hot days we sometimes took towels and pillows up to sunbathe on the roof, the tar sticky in the heat, using a small staircase. And a daily hot bath, each corridor having four bathrooms and a kitchen, with an endless supply of hot water (unlike the trickle of water at home heated by a gas geyser ignited from a pilot tap, causing a loud explosion.)

Towards the end of the stint I would fall asleep across my bed, wearing the choking clerical collar, the starched belt and cuffs.

We lost one of our number, a girl of eighteen, going to bed in the morning to wake up that night, blind. Another was dismissed, it was rumoured, for coming in late on nights off, a girl nearing the end of her second year who found the energy to go out daily, smartly dressed in a suit, wearing a fox fur, its glass eye glinting, tiny teeth bared in a snarl, its paws leather mounted, snuggling into the wearer’s neck, held by a silken clasp, the brush hanging loose.

With the big front gates locked at eleven thirty, the back gates shut, leaving access for ambulances, the Nurses Home locked, a girl breaking in would need the help of her boyfriend to climb the iron railings, bridge the gap across the basement, and climb in through a window left open by an accomplice.

..................

Men’s Surgical, a probationer on each of the three wards in that block, was restless, lights on above some beds despite the curfew of nine thirty ‘lights out,’ shining like distress signals.

I was taught how to lift by the senior nurse, both of us short statured, but linking hands under the patient’s knees and across his back we hoisted him back to set upright against cool pillows, straightening the crumpled rubber sheet, pulling through the draw sheet, the smell of pus, blood and sweat wrinkling one’s nose.

The night was disturbed by an admission, the darkness invaded by porters trundling a trolley, with ‘Staff’ accompanying them, every patient awake. Some grumbling at the interruptions, the noise. The patient was a railway worker, my age, crushed between the bumpers of a shunting train, his pelvis broken, painfully conscious, still wearing a dirty, oil-stained railway uniform.

"If he doesn’t pass water," the senior nurse confided, "that means the bladder’s pierced. There’s no help for him then."

His thin, broken body was suspended, by weights, in a canvas cradle not touching the bed. ‘Staff’ would take him up to ‘Theatre,’ the only occasion the lift could be used, its noise searing through all the floors, like a groan from the injured boy’s lips.

A robber had been brought in during the day, a police guard mounted day and night, the policeman, his helmet placed underneath his bedside chair, who otherwise never moved. I resented the fact that he did not help carry a heavy screen and my sympathies were all with the patient.

But that night the robber’s yells carried across the square as he demanded the ‘dagger’ be removed from his knee, a metal cap holding his shattered kneecap. The surgeon was called in and the lift again in use to carry the patient to Theatre, the metal plate removed to leave him with a identifiable limp.

Frances was welcome to this bedlam.

..................

Off to Women’s Surgical, named Annie Zung by its benefactor, founding wards celebrating the name of his wife in several London hospitals in the 18th century. It held thirty beds on two levels, including a flight of stairs and a ramp and reputed to have a haunted sluice. A smelly place to choose to haunt with large bottles of wee, twenty four hour specimens, the urine from straw colour to burnt orange, a medical spectrum of a shade card. With a notice from Sister ordering medical students to rinse all specimen glasses after use.

A surgeon specialising in the removal of the thyroid gland, had seven beds operating on one day a week, the patients like overgrown babies propped up in bed, reduced to dribbling infancy, each woman with a bib around her neck. Distressed.

No peace on Annie Zung.

..................

Faced every fifth night with a change of ward, holding twenty to thirty patients, strangers with dietary differences.

Maternity, having a relaxed atmosphere, staffed by older women wearing strange uniforms employed by agencies and paid far in excess of what we earned.

At night the babies were removed from the ward to a night nursery. They slept in metal framed bassinets, rocking from a metal pole draped in starched white muslin curtains, the cot flounced in white muslin.

The obstetrician slept on the floor below, a big woman wearing a Harris Tweed suit, the skirt box pleated, a mannish shirt and a bow tie, her hair Eton cropped. Lazily she called all the patients ‘mother’ and objected to being woken at night by babies crying.

A few we wheeled into the Day Nursery, one even into our office, to the bathroom, anywhere to lessen the concerted sound, avoiding complaints by the red-faced specialist. To me, in the middle of the night, the laundry room looked inviting, warm and dark, with space to curl up on the shelves and sleep.

I admitted a new patient, giving her a warm relaxing bath, as instructed, to her protest that she had washed before coming in, the temperature of the water reduced by me lest the head suddenly pop out.

Later in the night she was transferred to the Labour Room, climbing onto the narrow bed, robed and shaved, surrounded by nurses jollying her along.

The pro was sent to call the medical student who slept over the boiler room, each having to witness twelve normal deliveries as part of training.

It was a joy to wake someone asleep when you had been on the go all night, waiting as she stumbled into her clothes, left beside her bed, and run to the ward, hoping to be in time.

An atmosphere of chatter, of jokes and laughter, a matter-of-fact acceptance of pain... "one good heave now"... "I can feel the head. Stop bearing down now, dear," before the surprisingly-large baby slithered into view, fielded by the midwife’s hand, curled up in foetal position, protesting. To be slapped on the back, mouth and nasal passages cleared, weighed, rested before being washed, wrapped in a blanket, given to its mother as a civilised baby not slimed with blood but already disciplined.

The Meal was a feast that night as one of the agency nurses brought in a presented duck, popping the prepared bird into a smuggled-in larded roasting dish, the smell of cooking tantalising the atmosphere with Night Sister, on her round, unable to complain, agency nurses being beyond her disciplinary powers.

We ate at five o’clock standing up in the kitchen, delicious moist meat torn from the bone, with chunks of bread. Juicy.

By now, I had progressed from a boiled egg to a fried one, with chips, the dripping stored in the fridge, improving until the night the fat overheated, the thrown-in raw potato bursting into flames. Without thinking I snatched the pan off the stove, inverted on the floor,, mopping up as best I could. Shaken. What the ward maid said in the morning was eloquently expressed in Welsh.

My first four nights off came around, coinciding with pay-day and I went to Oxford Street to buy a flowered lawn from John Lewis for sixpence a yard and a pattern, cutting out the dress on the floor of my room, sewing it by hand. Adding a pair of suede sabot shoes for one pound from Dolcis. Time which should have been spent studying, overwhelmed by the desire to create, to make something.

On the Sunday I adventured on a riverboat from Westminster to Kew Gardens, standing by the guard rail, one hand holding down the dirndl skirt, the other smoothing my curls, unaware of the young man following me until a voice in a la-de-da accent asked me the way to the Pagoda? We kissed before we knew each other’s names, staying together all day, taking tea in a Garden, travelling back together sitting in the bow of the river steamer.

Only parting at the last moment, at half past eleven as the wicket gate in the great double doors opened to the press of the bell and I stepped through to disappear inside.

On my last free day we arranged to meet again at the cinema on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, each not quite expecting the other to keep their promise, smiling broadly as we walked towards one another.

I was a few weeks short of my nineteenth birthday, the country a few months short of going to war.