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“If you still had Thumbelina, it would be easier,” said Grace. “Daddy wouldn’t be under an obligation to Jack Thurlow, who doesn’t even come to church.”
Kitty leaped in ahead of the storm clouds gathering on Edda’s face. “Shut up, Grace, that’s not up for discussion! My perpetual question, Eds, is why you like riding?”
“When I’m on top of a horse’s back, I’m a minimum of five feet clear of the ground,” Edda said, her voice serious. “To me, that’s all the thrill of riding. Being taller than a man.”
“I wish I were tall!” Kitty said with a sigh.
The hall door rattled, flew open. Sister Bainbridge stood and glared at her charges in outrage.
“What is the meaning of this, nurses? You haven’t even begun to unpack your suitcases!”
4
Corunda Base Hospital was the largest rural hospital in New South Wales, having 160 beds in its general section, eighty beds in its mental asylum, and thirty beds in a convalescent/aged home out Doobar way, where the air and the elevation were felt more beneficial. Unlike the sandstone magnificence of some other hospitals, its appearance charmed no one, for it looked like army barracks. Built of wood atop limestone piers and foundations, it was a series of long rectangular structures saved from being called sheds by the presence of a broad, covered verandah down either long side. Men’s One and Two were double-length, as were Women’s One and Two; Children’s, Out-patients, X-ray-cum-Pathology, the Operating Theatre, Kitchens and Stores were single in size, while Administration, fronting onto Victoria Street, rejoiced in a building made entirely from limestone blocks. The amount of land was acres in extent, and dotted with out-buildings that ranged from Matron’s storybook cottage to houses put up for the duration of the Great War, when it had also been an army hospital. One overall fact made the site workable: down to the last square foot of the last acre, it was level. And this in turn had led to the struts and strands that linked the buildings together like the Brooklyn Bridge or a spider’s web — roofed walkways that everybody called ramps. Most ramps held some protection from the elements beyond roofing in the form of four-foot-high sides, though the last two hundred yards to the Latimer house consisted only of a floor and a roof. Where Men’s straddled the ramp to either side, it had been completely enclosed to form a waiting room; Women’s had been similarly dealt with. Those who waited to visit children used Men’s or Women’s. Midwifery was lucky; it was inside the administration building, as were the Casualty station and a small operating theatre.
The shocks fell thick and fast upon the Latimer girls, though if Matron’s reading of their characters had been aright, not one of them would have lasted longer than that first day at Corunda Base. They had been carefully brought up as ladies and had never wanted for a material thing, but Gertrude Newdigate’s youth had passed beyond her recollection, and she had forgotten to take strength of purpose and character into account at all.
The first and greatest shock was not personal; it was the realisation that a hospital was a place to which you, a patient, were admitted in order to die. Fully one-third of the patients left a hospital through its morgue, and a second third returned home to die. A statistic given to them by a doleful hospital porter named Harry, who thus became a teaching authority for the four new nurses weeks before they met their instructor, Dr. Liam Finucan.
“It’s in the patient’s eyes!” cried Tufts, horrified. “I feel more a minister to death than a healer — how can the other nurses be so cheerful?”
“They’re inured and resigned,” said Grace, stemming tears.
“Rubbish,” Kitty said. “They’re experienced, they know the best way to treat death is to persuade the patients that they are not going to die. I watch them, I don’t care how nasty they are to me. How they treat us isn’t important. Watch them!”
“Kitty’s right,” Edda said, her indignation saved for things like cut-up newspapers for toilet paper and towels too worn to dry wet skin — weren’t hospitals properly funded? “Grace, you’ve already exhausted today’s allowance of tears — don’t dare cry!”
“That Nurse Wilson slopped a bowl of vomit on me!”
“You copped the vomit because you let Nurse Wilson see how revolted you were by it. Govern your disgust, and it won’t happen.”
“I want to go home!”
“That’s not on the cards, Miss Piglet,” said Edda, hiding her sympathy. “Now go and change your apron before the vomit soaks into your dress. Pew! You do stink!”
Yet somehow their first week passed; at the end of it they could clothe themselves faultlessly in their starched “cardboard”, even fold the absurdly complex pleated parts of their caps that looked like a pair of wings. The other nurses wore more sensible uniforms and aprons, including short sleeves, while the Latimers, as new-style trainees, were done up in more wrapping than parcels.
The food, they discovered, was appalling for patients and staff alike, but they worked so hard that they ate everything from watery cabbage to lumpy gravy swimming in fat; the kitchen in their quarters, Sister Bainbridge informed them, was for making cups of tea, coffee or cocoa.
“Nothing else, even toast,” said she, looming.
The Rector had sheltered his girls from the more horrible and sordid aspects of his religious calling, and excluded the words incest, syphilis and perversion from their vocabulary. Due to climate and no refrigeration, the dead were buried in a closed coffin within twenty-four hours. So when, on their second morning, Sister Bainbridge showed them how to lay out a corpse, it was the first time they had seen or touched a dead body.
“A syphilitic who raped his sister,” Bainbridge said, joking.
Their response to this explanation was a blank look.
“Keep your pride!” said Edda in a furious whisper as soon as Bainbridge moved away, laughing at their ignorance. “Remember that we are Latimers. What upsets us today will be old hat tomorrow — don’t let them beat us! No tears, and no down in the dumps.”
They were perpetually tired in a way entirely new and very hard to bear; their feet ached, their backs ached, their joints ached. Everything taught to them by dainty Maude had to be abandoned; there was neither room nor time for daintiness in Corunda Base, whose superintendent was an arch-miser unwilling to pander to the needs of any and all entities save money, to which he was fused like a leech to a piece of vein-riddled flesh.
April, May and June vanished in a thick fog of exhaustion that actually worked in the hospital’s favour. Not even Grace had the energy to think of quitting; the very notion of creating such a fuss reared as high as Everest, unattainable. They just endured.
Edda held them together, convinced in her soul that things were bound to change, as things did from sheer familiarity. Perhaps the only thing that kept them quietly resigned was the one thing they would lose if they returned to the Rectory: heated rooms. With winter upon them, it was so beautiful to live in warmth, no matter how enormous the indignities and insults of their nursing life might be. And, Edda was sure, once they proved themselves to the cruel women who ruled them, the rewards would come: like chairs with soft seats, the chance to make toasted sandwiches, a little kindness. For at the end of their first three months tuition would begin, they would be called upon to do something with their brains as well as their hands and voices. April, May and June had seen them no different from the West Enders.
Their tutor was Dr. Liam Finucan, the staff pathologist (and also Chief Coroner of the Shire & City of Corunda). He had agreed to take on tutorial duty for two reasons: the first, that he regarded nursing brain-power as wasted; and the second, that he had noted the quality of the four new-style trainees as they were shuttled around the hospital on some kind of speedy orientation program.