Part 5 (1/2)
And the fat man, leaning on his counter, and likewise examining the soldier, cried, ”Ol' Bert it is!”
”Knew you in two ticks,” grunted Bert. ”Same ol' 'Arry.” (This was the derelict.) ”Same ol' 'Erb.” (This was the fat--and once again jolly--man.)
Explanations ensued. Bert, the young soldier, was a native of these parts. He had emigrated to Canada five years previously. To-night, _en route_ for the front, he had returned. Earlier in the evening there had been ill-advised libations; he had started for his home, felt sleepy, sheltered from the wet in a tunnel quite familiar to him, and there been discovered by the ladies and roused by myself. Arrived at the coffee-stall he had recognised in its proprietor a former pal and another former pal in 'Arry the derelict. To throw the spoon at 'Arry was merely his playful mode of announcing his ident.i.ty.
I left the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present.
My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal.
He and his mates gave me a hearty good-night.
I did not guess how intimate was soon to be my a.s.sociation with the Berts and 'Arries and 'Erbs of the world. I was to be their servant, to wait upon them, to perform menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress them and undress them, to carry them in my arms. I was to see them suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, ”grousing”
humour which is their almost universal trait. In my own wards, and elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many c.o.c.kneys of the slums. Even when one had not precisely ”placed” a patient of this description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the clue to the stock from which he sprang. The mother was sometimes a ”flower girl”; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably worked in a factory. These people, if the patient were confined to bed, sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper. But I have seen the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on visiting afternoons at the hospital gate. There is a crowd at the hospital gate, pa.s.sing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting, some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes the drive. The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public.
Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not conceal its feelings--it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds, and privacy is not an essential of its ardours. Be that as it may, these meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the drama belonged to the cla.s.s which produced Bert.
In a higher cla.s.s there is restraint and a rather stupid bashfulness. I have seen a wounded youngster flush apprehensively and only peck his mother in return for her sobbing embrace. That is not Bert's way. He knows--he is not a fool--that his mother looks a trifle absurd as, with bonnet awry, she surges perspiringly past the sentries, the tails of her skirt dragging in the dust and her feet flattened with the weight of over-clad, unwholesome obesity they have to bear. But he hobbles sprily to meet her, and his salute is no mere peck, but a smacking kiss, so noisy that it makes everyone laugh. He laughs too--perhaps he did it on purpose to raise a laugh: that is his quaint method; but the fact remains that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother.
She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard Bert shout ”Mother!” from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming through the gate. No false shame there! No smug ”good form” in that--nor in the time-honoured jest which follows: ”And 'ave you remembered to bring me a bottle of beer, mother?” (Of course visitors are not allowed to introduce alcohol into the hospital--otherwise I am afraid there is no doubt that mother would have obliged.)
In one of our wards we harboured, for a while, a costermonger. This coster, an entertaining and plucky creature who had to have a leg amputated, received no callers on visiting day: his own relatives were dead and he and his wife had separated. ”Couldn't 'it it orf,” he explained, and with laudable impartiality added, ”Married beneath 'er, she did, w'en she married me.” As the lady was herself a coster, it was plain that here, as in other grades of society, there are degrees, conventions and barriers which may not be lightly overstepped. ”Sister,”
however, thought that the patient should inform his wife that he had lost his leg, and prevailed on him to send her a letter to that effect.
A few days later he was asked,
”Well, did you write and tell your wife you had lost a leg?”
”Yus.”
”I suppose she's answered? What has she said?”
”Said 'm a liar!”
Her retort had neither disconcerted nor offended him. He was a philosopher--and, like so many of his kind, a laughing philosopher. When he was sufficiently recovered from his operation to get about on crutches he was the wag of the ward. He took a special delight in those practical jokes which are invented by patients to tease the nurses, and devoted the most painstaking ingenuity to their preparation. It was he who found a small hole in the lath-and-plaster wall which separates the ward from the ward's kitchen. Through this hole a length of cotton was pa.s.sed and tied to the handle of a mug on the kitchen shelf. At this period, owing to the Zeppelin raids, only the barest minimum of light was allowed, and the night nurse, when she entered the kitchen, went into almost complete darkness. No sooner was she in the kitchen and fumbling for what she required than a faint noise--that of the cup being twitched by the cotton leading to the mischievous coster's bed--arose on the shelf and convinced her that she was in the presence of a mouse. She retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and caused the trick to be detected.
The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and the early slumber-hour which the hospital rules prescribe is not welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous music: its mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to the crime's perpetrator. The fl.u.s.tered nurse gropes her way down the ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting it. Half an hour after the ward has quietened, the other gramophone (some wards own two) whirrs off into impudent song: it also has been primed. Nurse is wiser on future occasions: she stows the gramophones, when she comes on duty, where no one can tamper with them. Even so, she may have her nerves preyed upon by eerie tinklings, impossible to locate in the darkness; these are caused by two knives, hung from a nail fixed high up in the rafters. By jiggling a string, which is conducted over another rafter and down the wall to his pillow, the patient makes the knifeblades clash. Sometimes two strings, leading to different beds, complete this instrument of torture. After a determined search, nurse finds one string, and, having cut it, flatters herself that she has got the better of her enemies. Not a bit of it. She has scarcely settled in her chair again before the tinklings recommence. The second string is in action; and as she hunts about the ward for the source of the melody in the ceiling, m.u.f.fled convulsions of mirth, from the dim rows of beds, furnish evidence that her naughty charges are not getting the repose which they require and to ensure which is part of the purpose of her presence.
A nurse who happens to be unpopular never has these pranks played upon her. They are in the nature of a compliment. Nor do they occur in a ward where there is a patient seriously ill. It is impossible to imagine war-hospital patients acting inconsiderately towards a distressed comrade. This observation renders all the more amusing the scandalised concern which I once beheld on the demure physiognomy of a visiting clergyman when he gathered the drift of certain allusions to a case on the Danger List.
The name of the Danger List explains itself. When a patient is put on the Danger List, his relatives are sent for and may be with him whether it is the visiting afternoon or not. (If they come from the provinces they are presented with a railway pa.s.s and, if poor, are allotted lodgings near the hospital, a grant being made to them from our Benevolent Fund.) For the information of the V.A.D.'s who answer visitors' questions in the Enquiry Bureau at the main entrance to the hospital, a copy of the Danger List hangs there, and it is on record that an awestruck child, seeing this column of patients' names, and reading the heading, asked, ”What does 'Danger List' mean? Does it mean that it's dangerous to go near them?” Now in Ward C 22 a patient, a c.o.c.kney, was on the Danger List--which circ.u.mstance availed nothing to depress his spirits. In spite of considerable pain, he poked fun at the prospect of his own imminent demise, and was himself the chief offender against the edict of quietness which ”Sister” had issued for her ward.
He _would_ talk; and he _would_ talk about undertakers, post-mortems, epitaphs and the details of a military funeral. ”That there top note of the Last Post on the bugle doesn't 'arf sound proper,” he said--a verdict which anyone who has heard this beautiful and inspired fanfare, which is the farewell above a soldier's grave, and which ends on a soaring treble, will endorse. ”But,” he went on, ”if the bugler's 'ad a drop o' somethin' warm on the way to the cemetery, that there top note always reminds me of a 'iccup. An' if 'e 'iccups over me, I shall wanter spit in 'is eye, blimey if I won't.”
This persiflage had been going on for a couple of days and getting to be more and more elaborate and allusive, infecting the entire ward, so that the fact that the man was on the Danger List had become a kind of catchword amongst his fellows. Entered, in all innocence, the clergyman.
(”The very bloke to put me up to all the tricks!”--from the irreverent one.) At the same moment a walking patient, also a c.o.c.kney, who had been reading a newspaper, gave vent to a cry of feigned horror. ”Boys!” he announced, ”it says 'ere there's a shortage of timber!”
Guffaws greeted this sally. Everyone saw the innuendo at once--everyone except the clergyman, and when he grasped the point, that Ol' Chum So-and-So was on the Danger List and a shortage of timber was supposed to imply that he might be done out of a coffin, he was visibly shocked.
Perhaps he did not understand c.o.c.kney humour.... However, one may add that our irrepressible friend, at the moment of writing, is off the Danger List (albeit only after a protracted struggle with the Enemy at whom he jeered), and is now contriving to be as funny about life as he was funny--and fearless--about Death.
I caught sight to-day of another c.o.c.kney acquaintance of mine, whose Christian name is Bill, trundling himself down the hospital drive in a wheeled chair. Perched on the knee of his one leg, with its feet planted on the stump which is all that is left of the other, was his child, aged four. Beside him walked his wife, resplendent in a magenta blouse and a hat with green and pink plumes.
The trio looked happy, and Mrs. Bill's gala attire was symbolical. When Bill was in my ward he too was on the Danger List. I remember that when he first came to us, before his operation, and before he took a turn for the worse, his wife visited him in that same magenta blouse (or another equally startling) and that for some reason she and ”Sister” did not quite hit it off, ”had words,” and subsequently for a period were not on speaking terms. Later, when Bill underwent his operation, and began to sink, his bed was moved out on to the ward's verandah. Here his wife (now wearing a subdued blouse) sat beside him, hour after hour, while little Bill, the child, towed a cheap wooden engine up and down the gra.s.s patch, oblivious to the ordeal through which his parents were pa.s.sing. It was my business, as orderly, to intrude at intervals upon the scene on the verandah, to bring Bill such food as he was able to tolerate. On the first occasion, after Bill's collapse, that I prepared to take him a cup of tea, Sister stopped me. ”Don't forget to take tea, and some bread and b.u.t.ter, to that poor woman. She looks tired. And some milk for the child.” ”Very good, Sister.” I cut bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and filled an extra mug of tea. ”Orderly! What are you doing?” Sister had reappeared. And I was rebuked because I was going to offer Mrs. Bill her tea in a tin mug (the patients all have tin mugs) and had cut her bread-and-b.u.t.ter too thick. I must cut dainty slices of thin bread-and-b.u.t.ter, use Sister's own china ware, and serve the whole spread on a tray with a cloth. All of which was typical of Sister, who from that day treated Bill's wife with true tenderness; and Bill's wife became one of Sister's most enthusiastic adorers.
It came to pa.s.s, after a week of pitiful anxiety, that the Medical Officer p.r.o.nounced Bill safe once more. ”Bloke says I'm not goin' ter peg art,” he told me. I congratulated him and remarked that his wife would be thankful when he met her, on her arrival, with such splendid news. ”I'll 'ave the larf of my missus,” said Bill. ”W'en she comes, I shall tell 'er I've some serious noos for 'er, and she's ter send the kid darn on the gra.r.s.e ter play. Then I'll pull a long fice and hask 'er ter bear up, and say I'm sorry for 'er, and she mustn't tike it too rough, and all that; and she 'as my sympathy in 'er diserpointment: _she ain't ter get 'er widow's pension arter all_!”