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The Author

Margaret Stewart was born in England and came to live in Glasgow in1952. She was educated at Whitehill School in Dennistoun. She trained as a general nurse in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and as a midwife at the Eastern General Hospital. Margaret Stewart worked as a staff nurse in Glasgow both in the Royal and Western Infirmaries. After she was married she moved to Aberdeen and worked as a part time staff nurse in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. She then qualified as a district nurse and worked as a district nursing sister in Aberdeen. Whilst working on the district, Margaret Stewart developed her knowledge of palliative care, and became a teacher of district nurse students in the practical aspects of their work.

During her nursing life, Margaret Stewart met and recalled many patients, she remembers the good times and the bad, and in this story describes the many changes that have occurred in the nursing profession for better or worse. The patients and nurses are all real people and every incident described is true, only the names have been altered.

Margaret Stewart is a wife, a mother and a grandmother. She lives in Aberdeen and enjoys hill walking and spending time with her five grandchildren.

Chapter 1: The survival of the fittest

Whenever I was asked “What will you do when you leave school?” I only had one answer - I want to be a nurse. My grandmother told me that nursing was hard work. Brought up on a farm in the windswept Orkney islands, Granny knew what she was talking about - but how could I have any idea what she really meant? At eighteen I felt I could conquer the world. I applied to do nurse training, and in May 1960 with some other young hopefuls, all as apprehensive as myself, I was ushered into a classroom in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

We chatted nervously. Most of us were local but one girl had come from Perth, a long distance compared with my 15 minute journey on the 102 trolley bus along Royston Road and off at Castle Street right at the hospital door. She had brought an orange for her return journey. It sat on her desk, a bright splash of colour. It cheered me up during the essay writing and dictation tests, following which we were interviewed separately by the matron and a senior tutor.

The name ‘matron’ conjures up a formidable woman riding the high seas of hospital life like a ship in full sail, but this was a frail little lady in a grey dress and a starched cap. She would retire from the hospital during the next year but, full of presence and dignity, she made each of us feel it was a great honour to be accepted for training in this teaching hospital. After all, Lord Lister had pioneered antiseptic surgery here but the laurels didn’t only go to the medical profession. The very first matron had been one of Florence Nightingale’s nurses. The lady with the lamp had left a lasting legacy. Her aim had been to train young women to be ladies as well as nurses and her word was still law among the nursing sisters who would teach us the discipline and craft of our profession.

Buoyed up by being told we had passed, we went back into the classroom - and there on the desk was that solitary orange. To this day I can see it sitting there. Its owner had failed the interview, a sobering reminder that difficulties lay ahead to be faced and hopefully conquered.

We were not to be let loose in a hospital until we had completed a three month probationary period in pre-nursing school. This was a separate building in Glasgow’s West End, housed within the elegant portals of three Victorian terraced houses. The dedication and demeanour of the Sister Tutors, Miss Black and Miss Clark, were what you could expect in a convent. Miss Black informed us in her opening talk, “The primary function of nurses is service. The nursing profession exists solely to assist and actively support the well-being of mankind. Our tuition will ensure that you learn how to create an atmosphere conducive to the patient’s physical, social and spiritual well-being.”

After this awe-inspiring preamble we were shown to rooms we would call home for the next three months. We were all strangers, quartered two or three to a room. I shared with Sally and Carol. We chatted as we unpacked. Sally laughed as she ripped open a packet of black nylon stockings. ‘Hey, dig these! How’s this for style!’

“Yes, and they cost me ten and sixpence,” I said. “Ordinary nylons are only three bob a pair. Where did you get yours, girls?”

Those black nylon stockings, such an essential part of our nurse’s uniform but not readily available in local shops, had taken us on a foray through the select department stores along Sauchiehall Street: Treron, Copland and Lyle, Pettigrew and Stephen.

“What about these clumpy black shoes? They’re just what my mother always says are good for your feet,” Carol joked as we tied shoe laces for the first time for years. Our fashion shoes with high heels were consigned to the back of the locker and we turned our attention to the starched caps and collars, aprons, purple and white striped cotton dresses and a navy cloak lined with red all neatly laid out on the bed. This uniform had hardly changed in the last half century.

Gales of laughter accompanied our fashion parade: uniforms had been issued with little regard to individual size. Six-foot Aileen appeared at our door and struck a mannequin pose – she had been given a skimpy short dress. Behind her Joan, all of four foot ten, bunched up a dress so long it trailed across the floor. But we sorted ourselves out and when we put on the uniform we felt as though we were on the road to being professional nurses. The cloaks certainly added to our distinctive appearance and we all enjoyed wearing our uniforms, not least when one of our boy friends said “your outfit makes plain girls look pretty, and pretty girls look stunning” - which was not what the sister tutors had in mind at all.

The first hurdle we encountered next morning was making our beds in the correct hospital style before going down to breakfast. We had been warned that the penalty for not meeting the required standard was to be hauled out of the classroom to remake your bed. I can’t remember this dire threat being carried out but we lived in fear that it would be, so we tucked the starched sheets under the mattress in a neat triangle known as an envelope corner. Our pillows had to be positioned with the open end of the pillow case facing the wall. We only finally left the room when we’d checked that each cotton bedspread had been smoothed without a crease.

One night, while Sally was asleep her pillow fell out of bed on to an electric night storage heater. “Look at this girls, whatever will I do,” she wailed next morning, pointing to the charred remains of her feather pillow with its thick striped twill covering. “What will Miss Black say?”

“Cheer up, Sally, it will give the old dragon something to think about, then she’ll not worry if our sheets aren’t tucked in right,” Carol consoled her.

“Let’s stuff it in the bucket and hope it’s emptied before she inspects the rooms,” I suggested.

We fled down to breakfast, but nothing could be hidden from the eagle eyes of the stern senior sister tutor. We were all sitting in the class when Miss Black marched in. “Look at this,” she stormed, holding up the offending object. “You must learn more respect for hospital property!”

After she’d left the room wee Joan remarked, “You could have been burnt in your beds, you three girls, but all she cared about was that lumpy old hospital pillow!”

Most of our time was spent in the classroom where Miss Black and Miss Clark taught principles of nursing. “Who is the most important person in the hospital?” Miss Black asked. “The matron” we chorused. “No of course not, it’s the patient, and don’t you ever forget that,” she answered sternly.

No, we weren’t in any danger of forgetting – we just wanted to get there and start caring for real people but first we had to study anatomy and physiology, also Latin abbreviations used in drug prescribing: b.i.d., bis in die twice a day; t.i.d., ter in die, three times a day, or, confusingly t.d.s., ter di sumendum, which also meant three times a day, while o.n., omne nocte, meant every evening

We studied nutrition and invalid cookery. This was a light relief from textbooks. We went off to the kitchen and made scrambled egg, steamed whiting and parsley sauce and a variety of milk puddings that we then presented to the tutors for criticism before sampling each other’s efforts.

Our health and hygiene course took us outside to look at damp proofing and drains – no, we weren’t training to be plumbers. We had to understand the connection between insanitary housing and diseases rampant in Glasgow such as tuberculosis, para-typhoid fever and gastro-enteritis in small babies.

Back inside it was time for a spot of bed making. Bed making practice was done in the classroom without the added worry of having a real patient in the bed: we pretended by taking it in turns to be ‘bodies’. None of us had realised that there were so many different ways of doing such a mundane task.

We learnt how to make beds to receive patients on admission to the ward, theatre beds, beds for steam kettles used to treat chest infections, cot beds, and the special technique of arranging sheets and blankets for patients on traction. This word ‘traction’ was a mystery. Did it have something to do with farms? No, it seemed to be about weights and pulleys, which made me think of the kitchen at home with washing dripping on the wooden pulley after the weekly labour at the sink. In fact traction was for people with broken legs – or as our tutor said, a fractured shaft of femur.

Tray and trolley setting was an essential part of our course. All dressings for wound care were made up, packed and sterilised, then reused. Every practical procedure from bathing patients in bed to complex dressings required bowls, basins, instruments and lotions to be set up on a tray or trolley. We had to remember the correct items for each course of action.

“It’s all so complicated isn’t it, Margaret?” Carol whispered, and I nodded. “Perhaps it will all make sense when we’re actually on the wards,” we reassured one another.

So over mince and mashed potatoes at lunch-time we would rehearse, “Trolley for bathing a patient in bed… a long rubber mackintosh to protect the floor and a draw mackintosh to go under the patient, a large basin of water…”

“Yes, but, oh help, what temperature is it?” Sally asked. “I know, it’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit… but what about the bath thermometer, which wee metal dish does it go in…”

“It’s not a metal dish, it’s a gallipot,” Carol reminded her, “But where do we put it on the trolley – top shelf or bottom?”

As probationers we were nevertheless salaried employees, paid £9 per month for a forty-two hour week with bed and board provided. The hours spent in classroom corresponded to the shift patterns of the wards: eight a.m. to five p.m. with a split shift on a Wednesday. One Wednesday afternoon Sally, Carol and I went horse riding. The horses seemed very big when we got close. Was this really a good idea? No riding boots or jockey caps for us, but undaunted, we climbed into the saddles and tried to canter off. Carol’s horse went under a low branch, leaving her stuck up the tree.

“What’s she doing up there?” I wondered but I couldn’t stop to find out. My horse decided it was training for the Derby and galloped away with me clinging on to the reins in desperation. Sally meanwhile couldn’t get her horse to start.

“Wait for me, I’m being left behind,” she called.

Carol got down from her perch, my mount gave up its dreams of fame and fortune and we went back to the stables, breathlessly greeting each other, “Are you all right? Will we come back for another go next week? I’ll never get on to a horse again… at least it’s made a change from lectures…”

However, by five o’clock we were back in our uniform for four more hours in the classroom, studying the four stages in the life of pulex irritans, the human flea. We learnt how this nasty parasite entered the body and how to get rid of it. We noted that it has hooked feet and very strong back legs for jumping – unlike our horses, we joked afterwards over bedtime drinks – cocoa made with hot water.

“My Mum heaps in three spoons of drinking chocolate and always makes it with milk,” I sighed. “And imagine we all have to be tucked up in bed at eleven o’clock!”

“It sure puts a stopper on your social life,” Carol said gloomily.

And indeed, I still wonder how we managed to get engaged or married, but by the end of three years some of us had achieved a diamond ring as well as our nursing certificate and hospital badge.

But for now we sat in the classroom in our new uniforms whilst the sister tutors tried to mould us into nurses.

A week in a real hospital ward was the next step. Dressed in full uniform, including those eye-catching cloaks, we were driven across Glasgow in a green and orange double decker Corporation bus.

“Well, girls, this is it at last,” we agreed, caught between excitement and apprehension. We teenagers were about to be let loose on unsuspecting patients who thought we were special because we wore purple armbands which in fact only designated our lowly status. Little did those patients realise how nervous we were! I still remember the long line of beds, all so beautifully made with their white starched sheets and counterpanes. It was all exactly to the standard taught in the classroom but the difference was there were real people in those beds who needed to be fed and washed, helped out of bed to sit in a chair – and I was one of the nurses they called for. I was now part of a team who would have to cope with all emergencies. Suppose somebody died? They might even have diarrhoea! The classroom seemed a long way away!

We made beds, gave out bedpans, helped to feed and wash patients, and started to believe we could become ‘proper’ nurses. Sister, however, was unimpressed if we had forgotten to roll up the rubber mackintosh, or had not laid it neatly on the bottom shelf of the bathing trolley, or if we had left the tin of dusting powder on the locker of a previous patient during our expedition up and down the ward on the bathing round.

My first job was to delouse an old lady’s hair. She was lying flat in bed and I tried to remember classroom tuition as I got to work dragging a fine toothed bone comb through straggling grey hair, dabbing on a solution of lorexane from a brown bottle, first making sure I had spread a waterproof cape over the feather pillow.

Then there was the bedpan round! I went to the white-tiled sluice at the top of the ward with another junior nurse. We sprayed stainless steel bedpans with steaming hot water to warm them up for the comfort of the patients. Then down the long ward we trundled the trolley. We lifted helpless patients with paralysed limbs on to warm bedpans, then went back and took them all off again. The other junior nurses seemed to work at a great speed, how would I ever catch up with them? Nowadays, watching the flight attendants pushing the food trolleys up and down an aeroplane, I am reminded of those bedpan trolleys. Thankfully the ones on the planes smell much better!

After the patients’ lunch the whole nursing team gathered round the sister, to be given the ‘report’. We stood around her wooden desk at the bottom of the ward with our pencils and notepads at the ready to be informed about every patient’s care; “Mrs Smith, 2 oz water every hour, Miss Brown may get up to sit for half an hour, Mrs Anderson is to have a barium meal –“ whatever’s that” I thought – “tomorrow, so she will fast from 12 midnight.”

No concessions were made to help beginners understand what was going on. The week in the wards proved to be a make or break experience for some of us; some trainee nurses were already beginning to change their minds about a nursing career.

Back in the college we prepared for our first written tests. Girls in starched caps could be seen wandering up and down the lofty Victorian staircase dreamily reciting “Bowels: a regular daily action is necessary… Tudor Edwards’ spectacles are used for giving oxygen…a bowl for the dentures goes at the front right hand-side of the tray for cleaning the mouth… The loop of Henle is in the kidney… the tympanic membrane is situated at the deepest part of the external auditory canal…”

We’d all heard about wiping the fevered brow but basic nursing care involved more than any of us had imagined. I realised that staying the course was going to be the survival of the fittest – but I’d started and I was determined to go on.

Chapter 2: First Impressions

Our new life as student nurses began in the Nurses’ Home. Nobody of the male species was allowed through the doors. The austere rooms were on three floors with an old-fashioned lift wheezing up and down.

“They’ve put us on different floors so it won’t be so easy to meet,” Carol remarked.

Each room had a bed, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a chair. There were no facilities for making tea or coffee. Our uniforms were sent to the hospital laundry and personal washing was done in the bathroom. We soaked ourselves in the bath using unlimited hot water with long strings of other people’s undies dripping on top of us. Showers were non-existent – but they were unheard of in most homes in Glasgow at that time.

Everyone had to be in by midnight – if we wanted to stay out later we had to submit a written request to Matron. When we were on duty until 9 p.m. we had to be back in the Home by eleven. To snatch a brief date with a boyfriend we would rush off duty, dab on Max Factor crème puff, add a dash of our favourite scent, trying to disguise the fact we’d spent the last nine hours running up and down the wards non-stop.

Residence in the Home was compulsory for the first two years, even if, like me, you lived within travelling distance of the hospital. Students came from all over Scotland. Many, especially those from the Western Isles, could only go home once a year.

The first morning we assembled in the dining room for breakfast at seven fifteen. Our uniforms looked so new, and we did too, among hundreds of more senior, self-assured girls. We all hoped to be sent to the surgical wards where the excitement of patients “going to theatre” and having wounds dressed or stitches taken out made the work seem glamorous and exciting. Everyone dreaded being sent to a ward with a tyrannical sister. This had happened to Sally during her probationary week on the wards and we spent the next four weeks building up her damaged self-esteem. Was this ordeal in store for me?

The assistant matron came in for Roll Call – the daily procedure took place immediately after breakfast. This superior lady was immaculate in a green dress and a cap with a frill.

She sat in an office all day, attending to mysteriously important affairs. She called out everybody’s name. If you failed to answer “Present” everybody knew you had committed the dreadful crime of sleeping in. We sat in total silence while she went through a list of four hundred names. “Nurse So and So… assist Ward Such and Such…”

I was allocated a female medical ward. I have nursed hundreds of people since then, but I can still see these, my first patients, as clearly as when I walked into the ward on that first day. I can visualise the beds they were lying in, their faces and their hair colour.

Miss Smith, a woman in her forties with a fresh complexion had multiple sclerosis. Her glasses slipped down her nose as she lay in bed. She was unable to push them back in place, to stand or walk unaided, or wash and feed herself.

Next to her, Mrs McDonald had congestive cardiac failure. She was nursed sitting up day and night. In the classroom we had learned how to make a cardiac bed. Then it was just a name, now as I pulled out the metal back rest and piled six pillows into an armchair position I saw how this enabled Mrs McDonald to breathe more easily.

Granny Clark had diabetes. (All the old ladies were known as Granny and the old men were Pop, no Christian names were ever used.) Granny Clark wore a purple dressing gown and used to love the attention of the nurses when we cared for her in bed, but she resisted our attempts to get her up to walk. ‘Och, hen, I cannae walk the day, I’m no feeling awfu’ weel. I’ll jist sit here in ma chair and hae a wee rest,’ she’d say. She was one of the patients from the tenement flats around the hospital without a bath or hot water: being in hospital was a rest from the difficulties of life.

Another patient I remember well, Mrs Douglas, had had a stroke which paralysed her down her right side and meant that she couldn’t speak. I had never met anyone who had lost the power of speech and I felt so inadequate trying to understand her. She was only fifty with nicotine stained fingers, the same nicotine that had furred up her arteries. The association between smoking and arterial thrombosis wasn’t understood. Hospital wards were wreathed in a haze of cigarette smoke at the patients’ rest hour after lunch, and indeed doctors prescribed tobacco to help people with asthma, as it encouraged them to cough.

Two ladies in adjacent beds had both had heart attacks, and during the six weeks of enforced bed rest they became good friends. Mrs Taylor went home the day before Mrs Brown. Just then, we had a phone call, Mrs Taylor was to be readmitted after another coronary thrombosis. Sister told Mrs Brown the news. While they were still speaking, word came that Mrs Taylor died in the ambulance. Mrs Brown was shocked and so was I. But I was being trained not to show my feelings or become emotionally involved with the patients so I absorbed myself in the work of the ward.

Bedmaking was an important daily ritual. We changed the sheets every day, putting the top sheet to the bottom and giving a fresh top sheet. The patients in the freshly made beds were frightened to breathe in case they spoiled the starched crispness of the sheets.

Soiled bed linen had to be sluiced down by the junior nurse. Sheets, blankets, pillow cases and counterpanes, towels and patients’ night- clothes were piled up in heaps on the floor of the sluice, ticked off on a list and packed into a wicker laundry basket. This was also one of the tasks tackled by the most junior nurses.

Syringes, needles, blood transfusion and intravenous infusion sets, catheters, drainage tubes and bottles for the drainage of wounds or urine were all sterilised and re-used. Nothing was disposable, except the harassed nurses!

Who was the most important person in the hospital? The patient seemed to come far down the list when cleaning and scrubbing took so much time. There was so much to do that sometimes you felt you couldn’t cope with the cry, “Nurse” from somebody in the ward. When I saw my friends in the dining room, I never let on if things were getting me down, and neither did they, instead we talked ‘shop’ and swapped stories about our patients.

Sally worked in a male surgical ward. “This man came in bleeding all over the place. Imagine, he’d tried to kill himself. He’d swallowed broken glass. They poured loads of blood into him before he went to theatre.”

It made my medical ward seem very tame!

“Well, we had a lady admitted who must weigh at least twenty-six stones,” I said, not to be out-done. “You should try lifting her in and out of bed!”

But that didn’t sound so dramatic. The surgical wards possessed the excitement and glamour of the popular television series, Emergency Ward Ten, and we imagined dealing with every drama and crisis that came our way.

Carol was on a male medical ward and had to shave men recovering from heart attacks.

“They’re on warfarin to thin their blood,” she said. “The problem is I keep nicking their skin with the razor. I can’t get the bleeding stopped so I stick bits of tissue on their chins. What a sight they make for the doctors’ round! I try to pretend it has nothing to do with me.”

The ward round was an intimidating affair, conducted with great dignity. The consultants were eminent men who played the role of God to the junior staff. The medical team crowded into the ward, junior doctors and students bringing up the rear. They all wore white coats with stethoscopes sticking out of their pockets (nowadays they wear them casually draped round their necks.)

A complete hush prevailed during doctors’ ward round. In the medical wards it often lasted an hour or more; patients and nurses alike were afraid to break the sacred silence. I took cover in the sluice and got on with the work there. If a patient needed a bedpan, or was sick, it made me feel marked for life as I tiptoed down the ward to attend to them. I was glad if another nurse got there first.

My main help in those early days came from a girl called Anna who was next on the ladder of seniority. She came from Keith in the North East of Scotland. She worked alongside me as we bed-bathed patients and gave them drinks. She showed me how to complete charts measuring patients’ fluid intake, and how to record temperature and blood pressure readings. Once the sister thought I had gained a bit of competence she let me move on to more complicated procedures, such as giving injections, or dressing simple wounds.

Sometimes I was allowed to accompany the senior nurse on the medicine round. Medication was kept in a locked cupboard beside Sister’s desk and she or the senior kept these keys pinned to their aprons, a mark of authority. The aura of this rubbed off on me as Nurse Clark and I set the trolley with bottles of mixtures, tablets, powders, medicine glasses and measuring spoons, not forgetting the bowl of warm soapy water to put glasses and spoons in after use before we washed them in the kitchen.

One lady whom Anna and I were very fond of on our medical ward was Mrs Docherty. She had been admitted in an extremely ill state with massive haemorrhaging caused by liver failure. She was a devout Catholic and received the last rites, but amazingly recovered and went home eventually. She had thick white hair and a thin, jaundiced face with enormous dark eyes. A lady on that first medical ward who was very different from Mrs Docherty was called Miss McGregor. She was ninety-two. In those days that was a remarkable age attained by few, but I remember her because she was such an old battle-axe! She was a retired hospital matron. She had trained in the same hospital some seventy years previously and never let us forget it. Her only visitor was the housekeeper she called her companion. This old woman in a maroon hat and coat seemed as ancient as Miss McGregor, but she was probably about twenty years younger.

Nothing ever pleased Miss McGregor. “You haven’t dried my face properly, you used far too much soap. You haven’t tucked that sheet in correctly.”

“What a moan you are,” I fumed to myself. Of course I couldn’t say anything – after all who was the most important person in the hospital! But she really showed her true colours on Christmas Day.

I wondered what Christmas would be like. Women’s magazines gushed over doctor and nurse romances and portrayed hospital Christmas full of festive cheer. If you believed them you would believe anything, we joked. What would the reality be like?

I decorated my room with festive sprigs of holly. On Christmas Eve, I had a split shift, so at two p.m. I went off duty for a couple of hours’ break. Stuck to my mirror was a slip of pink paper. How nice, Home Sister had sent us all a message of goodwill! But no! With disbelief I read this curt order, “Nurse take these green twigs off the wall. If there are any marks on the newly painted wall you will be sent to Matron.” Angry and near to tears I complied with the demand. I wished that some of my friends were around so that I could tell them about it, but it was later that night before we met together.

We were going to a midnight carol service in Glasgow Cathedral. We assembled in the Nurses’ Home in our uniforms. Our navy cloaks with their red lining gave us a festive look appropriate to the season. We processed into Glasgow’s ancient High Kirk. All my anger and hurt melted in the beauty of those mediaeval arches, soaring to the vaulted ceiling, their glorious stonework enhanced by the light of hundreds of candles. The service was televised and shown on black and white screens throughout Scotland. We nurses sat together, so the cameras often focused on us. I was amazed that many months later patients and their visitors said to me, “I ken who you are, hen, I saw you on the telly amang a’ thae nurses.”

That Christmas morning a crowd of us got up at six and went carol singing round the wards, still dimly lit before the rush of the new day. I’d never seen my ward in the subdued night lighting – it added to the atmosphere of stillness and peace. When we came on duty after breakfast, the ladies told us how much they’d appreciated the singing. Some of them were in tears.

“Och, hen that was grand,” said Mrs Docherty. “There was me lying in bed missing my weans and in you came.”

“It was just like the heavenly angels,” added Miss Smith with a smile.

There was only one dissatisfied customer.

“And guess who that was,” I told Anna when she came on for the late shift.

“Dinna tell me, It was that auld wifie, McGregor,” Anna lapsed into her north east speech. “There’s nae pleasing some folk at a’.”

So we had a laugh at the sour old woman.

“She said it was a disgraceful performance. ‘Who organised that?’ she said to me when I was putting her on a bedpan. She said we should have marched smartly into the ward two by two instead of straggling in. Does she think we’re in the army? Anyway,” I went on, “we got so busy I didn’t have time to worry about her. That lady who was admitted last night died at ten a.m. The two seniors did the body, so I was left to do all the temps and blood pressures and see to all the teas. I’ve been hectic. I hope it’s quieter for you. Happy Christmas!”

So my first experience of hospital Christmas showed that life and death went on as usual whatever the season.

It wasn’t customary to visit patients after their discharge, but one day while we were making beds Anna said to me, “ Margaret, you remember Mrs Docherty? It would be fine to visit her. What would you think if we both tried to find her house? Have you any idea where she stays?”

“That’s a great idea, Anna. I know where she lives. She’s from Moodiesburn Street in Blackhill. I noticed her address because I live across the road.”

The next week I’d finished work at 5p.m. and Anna had been off at 3.30, so we put our plan into action. It was dark in the early days of January. Yellow neon lights cast an eerie glow over the grey, three storeyed tenements of Blackhill. Groups of little girls bounced balls against the wall, or skipped in and out of an old clothes rope. Boys clattered metal hoops along the pavements to the accompaniment of barking dogs and the cry of ‘Co-al, co-al briquettes!’ The man selling the briquettes flicked the reins across the back of his old horse. His cart rattled along, carrying bricks of coal dust to people too poor to buy proper coal for the fires, their only means of heating.

A gang of teddy boys with drainpipe trousers, jackets with padded shoulders and winkle-picker shoes wolf-whistled as Anna and I crossed the road from the trolley bus stop. We quickened our pace. The wind blew greasy chip papers around our feet as we hunted for the open close and climbed dimly lit stone stairs to the third floor. Mr Docherty opened the door.

“Sure, lassies, it’s great to see you. Come away in. Herself will be delighted to see you.” Mrs Docherty was still thin and pale, but the jaundiced colour had gone.

“Och, nurses, I’m so pleased you’ve come to visit me,” she said.

We all laughed at the term ‘Nurses’.

“We’re not being nurses now, just friends,” said Anna.

So we all enjoyed a good evening together, drinking cups of tea and being served cheese slices on plain white bread by Kathleen, the fourteen-year-old daughter. The younger boys and girls crowded round wondering who we were. We looked so different out of uniform and away from the hospital ward. The fire warmed our faces and we chatted away until the clock on the mantelpiece chimed nine.

We caught the trolley bus back to the hospital along Royston Road, past old black tenements with shop windows boarded up.

“They have to barricade the windows like that to stop burglars,” I told Anna. “My granny’s newsagent’s was up the hill from here. It was broken into regularly because two goods trains went by together at one o’clock in the morning and that’s when they got in to steal cigarettes.”

“I’m glad that it’s nae like that in Keith,” Anna replied. “No one ever locks their front doors. You know, it was great to see Mrs Docherty in her own home. Folk are just bodies in the bed in the hospital.’

I agreed with her. Perhaps that was when the idea of working as a district nurse first took root in my mind, although it would be more than twenty years before I would actually begin that phase in my life. At eighteen I couldn’t look so far ahead. For now, I was moving on to night duty on a male surgical ward. New challenges lay ahead.

Chapter 3: Cut throat Razor and Coddled Eggs

“Pack bags everybody, we’re on the move,” Carol announced. “The change list is up and we’re on night duty as from Sunday. We’ve to sleep out at the Home in the infectious diseases hospital, you know the one beside the Celtic football ground. All right for you, Joan, you’re a great Celtic fan.”

“Aye we’ll maybe get to see the game,” Joan laughed.

“Don’t be daft – we’ll be asleep on Saturday afternoons,” we told her.

“That’s a pity. Why are we going away out there?”

“Home Sister says it’s quieter and we’ll sleep better,” Carol said. “We go there on the hospital bus. By the way I like your hair, Joan, you really suit that style.”

“Thanks. I was needing a new perm. It’s much easier to keep tidy. Sister Mack was always girning on about my hair. I’m going to Ward Nine and I want to impress my new patients,” Joan patted her fashionable bouffant style.

“Not just the patients,” Carol teased. “Doctor Gordon, the resident on that floor is drop-dead gorgeous.”

“Fantastic! I’ll knock him up at two a.m. when somebody’s drip runs through.”

“Don’t kid yourself, your senior will do that. You won’t get a look in.”

“Och, you never know, she might be away to her dinner,” replied Joan as we went away to pack.

On my first spell of night duty, I was on a male general surgical ward. It was the first time I’d nursed men. No nice scented soap and talcum powder, just imperial leather soap and the occasional Old Spice after-shave. There were far fewer flowers in a male ward, a good thing from the junior nurses’ point of view because flowers were taken out of the ward each night, lined up in their vases in the corridor, and brought in again in the morning. Although thick Glasgow smog polluted the winter air, it was thought that carbon dioxide given off by the flowers at night might be bad for our patients, so out the dahlias, daffodils, carnations and chrysanthemums had to go.

A female ward had so many flowers it took ages to trail them in and out, and there were complaints from the ladies if they didn’t get their own flowers back beside their beds in the morning. The men didn’t worry about such niceties.

The first night on duty, I came into the ward at nine o’clock on Sunday evening. Sister Jones gave Mary, the senior nurse and me the report, went off the ward and left us to start settling the patients for the night.

“This is the first time I’ve been in a male ward,” I confided to Mary, who turned to me with a smile.

“Don’t worry, we’ll work away together and you’ll be fine,”

We went round the patients, tucking them in for the night. Old Mr Hickey at the top of the ward had been admitted with a hernia, but was found to be suffering from scurvy, a result of impoverishment and malnutrition. This was early 1961. Lonnie Donnegan was hitting the big time with skiffle, and red haired Lulu went from Dennistoun to the Top of the Pops. Where were the swinging sixties for this old man? Before he could go to theatre he had to have his general condition improved. Scurvy would cause bleeding so he was a poor subject for surgery.

He used to sit up in bed in the middle of the night peeling oranges for his vitamin C supplement, the recognised treatment for scurvy since the days of Admiral Nelson. As he sucked at his oranges with his toothless gums he made good use of the wee small hours by sharpening his cut-throat razor on a leather strap. At first I wondered what the rustling and swishing noises were at two o’clock in the morning. The ward was lit with a green shaded night-light, and we had a similar light on the desk where we wrote reports and filled in charts. Looking up, it took a minute for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. I would tiptoe up to Mr Hickey’s bed. “Shsh,” I would whisper loudly because his hearing wasn’t too good. “You’ll wake up the other men.”

“Sure, darlin’ I’m after getting my vitamins,” he’d whisper back even more loudly. “An’ I’m just making sure my razor’s sharp enough so I don’t cut myself in the morning. Feel the blade I’ve put on it now.”

One night just before we put the lights out for the night we became aware of a smell of burning.

“Nurse, where’s the nurse? Nurse, call the fire brigade! We’re gaunnae burn in our beds,” yelled three or four voices together as Mary and I rushed across the ward. We knew who the culprit was because old Pop Ferguson always smoked his pipe in bed and we were forever scooping charred matchsticks from between the sheets.

“I’m awfy sorry, lassies, I must hae nodded aff,” he confessed. “But the bed’s no’ gone up in flames, it’s only a wee bit scorched.”

“Aye, but what’s Sister Jones going to say when she sees that big brown singed hole in your counterpane,” scolded Mary with a twinkle in her eye. “She’ll give you a good skelping.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Ferguson, we’ll stick this counterpane in the laundry basket and once it’s been to the wash Sister will never know whose bed it came from,” I said. I told Mary about Sally’s burnt pillow at the pre-nursing school. “I’m getting good at hiding the evidence.”

The ward specialised in the strange-sounding peripheral vascular disease – narrowing of the blood vessels. One man, a retired general practitioner, had his leg amputated. He suffered phantom pains and became so addicted to methadone he kept shouting, “Where’s the Nurse? Bring my methadone at once.” With him and Mr Hickey, the night watches were far from peaceful.

At first when Mary went for her meal break at three a.m. and I was left alone in the ward, I thought something dire would happen. When she came back I said, “All the men are still lying peacefully in bed, it’s just as well they don’t know that their lives have been in my hands! I should have asked Doctor Taylor to come and keep me company.”

“Good idea,” Mary replied. “Though I don’t think he would be too happy – he’s worked seventy-two hours non-stop already and there will be loads of new admissions tonight.”

Sometimes it seemed as though the whole of Glasgow’s stabbings and slashings were admitted to our ward on Saturday night, especially when there was a Rangers and Celtic game and bottles and knives flew freely.

Mary escorted a team of doctors round the new admissions, while I looked after patients still coming up from Casualty. We had already prepared receiving beds. Four months before I had been learning this in college with Joan or Sally tucked into the bed. Now I was on my own and it was for real. Men were brought in with perforated duodenal ulcers, writhing in acute pain and vomiting blood. Children were admitted with appendicitis, frightened and crying with pain and shock. These were the usual sights on receiving night but we also had to deal with patients mutilated after horrific mining and road accidents.

Two porters lifted each badly injured man on a stretcher from the hospital trolley. “One, Two, Three, Lift” and there was the casualty lying on the bed before he had time to blink. They slid the long stretcher poles out of the canvas, and I rolled the patient over as they pulled the canvas out from underneath him. In hospital every one is part of the drama of life and death and the porters always boosted the patients’ morale with a laugh and a kind word.

“You’ll be fine noo Jimmy, this young lassie will see you aw right,” they would say.

Then off they’d go with the empty trolley ready for the next admission.

As the beds filled up porters wheeled extra beds from the store and lined them down the middle of the ward. Mary and I carried screens up and down to try to give a modicum of privacy. At five a.m., still in the half-light we started the daily routine of nursing care for the very sick, washing and changing severely injured patients before switching the main ward lights on at six o’clock. We checked temperatures, pulses, blood pressures and respirations. Mary went round with the medicine trolley and I trundled the bathing trolley to men who were bed-bound. Our shift ended with the ward report when the day staff came on duty at eight o’clock.

I met up with my usual crowd at breakfast. The day nurses had left for their shift and we swapped stories over scrambled eggs on toast in the half empty dining room.

“You should have seen my ward last night,’ I said. ‘It was like a battlefield. A guy was brought in with his legs sliced to bits.’

“No – what had happened?” the others asked.

“He works down the pits. He got caught in the coal-cutting machine. I tell you, it was really gruesome. There was blood everywhere. He was in theatre all night. And there was this other boy, he’s only twenty. He came off his motor bike. He’s in a complete coma. I had to put ice packs on his head – his eyes were so swollen.’

“That’s awful. There’s no hope for him, I suppose. I had someone in a coma too,” said Joan, fresh from her first medical ward. “She’s only eighteen like us and she’s diabetic. Remember Miss Black going on about how their urine smells like fresh mown hay – well, it does! I just couldn’t believe it.”

“Colour of normal urine, pale amber and clear…” Sally recited, quoting our college notes. “And for examination the nurse must note colour, smell, reaction and specific gravity. But, look, we’re having our breakfast, let’s talk about something else.”

“Breakfast, don’t remind me,” Carol groaned.

“Why, what’s the matter?” we asked.

“Well you know how we have to cook the eggs for the patients’ breakfast on Sunday mornings? These young guys in my ward got me into a right tiz. One asked for his egg to be boiled for one minute, another said, ‘Two minutes, please, nurse.’ And the third one asked for his to be done for three minutes, and even then I didn’t realise something was up. I was so worried I’d get it wrong I made Mum test out all the different times at home and then I phoned her from the call box in the Nurses Home to find out how she was getting on.”

We all laughed.

“They were pulling your leg,” said Joan, “But you’ll never guess what I was asked. This woman in my ward demanded a coddled egg!”

We looked mystified. We’d heard about coddling people but not eggs.

“Even Miss Black didn’t tell us about that,” Sally said. “Although she made out she knew everything.”

So we spent our nights on duty and our days sleeping out in the Home to which we were bussed each morning. I felt tired and disorientated by the night shift, but as soon as I put my uniform on things fell back into focus and I felt able to face anything.

Three sisters went round the whole hospital every night. They expected us to know the names and conditions of the patients by heart. So we would mug it up. “Mr. Smith 1^stpostoperative day following an appendicectomy, Mr Stewart 2^ndpost-op day after a partial gastrectomy.” Then there were all the amputations, were they below or above the knee, the right or left leg, and would Sister Mills remember better than I did? She would bustle into the ward during the night between one and four a.m. and expect you to drop everything, including the patient, and conduct her round. If the ward was going like a fun fair and the bed wheels were crooked or the curtains not neatly pulled back, she would let you know about it. People could be rushed to theatre for emergency surgery, relatives could be anxiously waiting outside the door, blood and guts and gore had flowed freely all night; none of that seemed to matter. Sister Mills’ priority was order and discipline.

No matter how hectic the night had been senior student nurses had to present a full written report for the day sister.

“Mr. Black was in theatre for a choledochojejunostomy. He’s got a drain in situ to be removed in four days. No soakage from the wound.”

Now how could you write that at seven a.m. with so much else to do? So you wrote it earlier and had to alter things: ‘Mr Stuart had a good night and slept well – but died at 5a.m.’

Deaths occur more frequently at night. One morning Joan told us there had been so many deaths that she heard the porter singing “Gin a body meet a body,” as he trundled his trolley into the ward yet again.

Romance was in the air for Joan and her “drop-dead gorgeous” resident doctor.

We kept hearing stories about Kenny Gordon. One night ever-so- fabulous Kenny and Tommy the porter hoisted Joan into the trolley used for bodies. She laughed about it when she told us the tale but it hadn’t seemed so funny at the time.

“I nearly wet myself, I was so scared,” she confided. “I thought they were going to wheel me down to the morgue! But I got my own back.”

“What could you do to cap that?” Sally asked.

“My senior, Jeanette said Kenny’s fond of chocolates, so we got some mersalyl, you know the stuff the patients get as a diuretic? We injected an ampoule into his favourite Dairy Box.”

“The poor guy would have to run to the loo day and night,” we laughed.

With escapades like this the three months’ night duty passed quickly. Now it was back to the classroom for a month. Each weekend would be free and we could catch up on normal sleep.

Chapter 4: Love and Loss

Back in the classroom for junior nursing lectures and exam we met up with the rest of the crowd from the probationary course. By now nearly everybody had started to smoke. Sally struggled hard to master the technique.

“Sally, why on earth do you bother, you’re obviously not enjoying it,” I said.

“It’s all right for you, Margaret, you’ve never started. Go on, have one,” said Sally, offering her packet of Senior Service.

“No thanks, I took a puff once. It made me feel so horrible I’ve never wanted to try again.”

One of our practical subjects was bandaging. Soon we were adept at spiralling crepe in figures of eight up and down our arms and legs, fingers and thumbs: if it went up it was called ascending spica, descending spica if it went down. We bandaged each other’s heads, eyes, ears, hands and feet. We learned to do a mastectomy bandage and a stump bandage.

We were taught to make poultices – linseed, starch and kaolin. The only one actually in use in the wards was kaolin. It was used to reduce inflammation if the contents of an intravenous infusion had leaked into the tissues surrounding the veins. We were taught the theoretical use of leeches, making us feel decidedly mediaeval. These small worms manufacture a powerful anti-coagulant to encourage bleeding and also suck out infected material from the wound.

The dressings materials used in wound care had strange sounding names like gutta percha tissue, jaconet and oiled silk.

“It sounds like we’re going fishing,” Carol remarked. “You catch a perch with your net and wear oilskins to keep out the wet,” she chanted.

“Hey, dig the poetry!” Joan put in.

Nursing in those days was an art based on established tradition. We learnt facts and practical skills without asking questions. The patients were not encouraged to ask questions either. Is that why they were called patient?

Once the exam was over we went back on day duty, but now, nine months into our training our original crowd was smaller. One girl left to be married. The shift pattern and compulsory residence in the Nurses’ Home made it impossible for a married woman to carry on with nursing training. Some girls had developed back problems and were compelled to give up and one or two had decided that nursing was definitely not for them.

The rest of us went on through our training. Joan’s romance was going strong with Dr Kenny. Carol was dating one of his friends, I had fallen in love with David, an engineering student, and Sally had met a handsome young policeman during her time in Casualty.

“Roddy’s very musical,” she said. “He plays in the Police Band.”

“Kenny is too,” said Joan. “He really likes the cello. We went to a symphony concert last week. What does your man play?”

“Well, actually,” Sally confessed. “It’s the big drum. He’s six foot two, they picked him for the drum because he can see over the top.”

We fell about laughing and Sally chuckled too. “Never mind,” she said. “You keep in with me because Roddy’s from Lewis and he can get us tickets for the dance at the Highlanders’ Institute. Who’s off to the jigging?”

We laughed again, but then I remembered pretty little Anne Marie.

“Oh, girls, I said, “we can go dancing, but this wee girl was admitted the other day. She’d been run over by a car.”

“Oh no,” my friends exclaimed. “Was she badly hurt?”

“She’s had her leg amputated. She’d loved Highland dancing and that’s what reminded me. She’s only nine and now her dreams are over. The resident was almost in tears when he had to break the news to her Mum and Dad.”

Little Anne Marie was the only child in the adult ward and the ladies who were up and about enjoyed making a fuss of her.

“There, doll, you’re a wee star,” they would tell the pretty wee girl when they’d piled her black curls high on her head.

“She’s getting on so well,” I said to Anna whom I met in the dining room one day. We hadn’t seen each other for months, and it turned out Anna was about to go on to my ward for her final spell on night duty. “You’ll love her. She’s very brave. She’s already running around on her artificial leg.”

“Aye, children can be so brave,” Anna said. “There was this wee lassie I nursed in the Burns Unit. She was only four, and you wouldna believe what happened to her. Some boys wrapped newspapers round her and set her alight. She was covered in burns from head to foot!”

“That’s really awful. How could anyone do such a thing? Is she getting any better?”

“I got moved away from that unit so I never found out the end of the story. Mind the time we went to see Mrs Docherty?”

“Yes, but we never managed to go back,” I said. “I went on night duty, you went away for your fevers’ block and we haven’t really seen each other since.”

“That’s how it goes,” Anna said, philosophically. “By the way, I’ve applied to Raigmore for my midwifery.”

“Raigmore? Oh, up in Inverness. That’s near to Lossiemouth. I’ve met this gorgeous guy who belongs there.”

“So you’re going out wi’ a Lossie loon! That’s fine! I’ll maybe see you if he takes you up to meet his folks.” We both agreed on that, but once Anna had moved away we never saw each other again.

In the same ward as Anne Marie was a lady with terminal cancer. Mrs Wishart was so uncomplaining although her condition was rapidly deteriorating. There was so little we could do for her but she still appreciated small things like her own pretty nighties and fragrant talcum powder and soap.

“My hands always smell so nice after I’ve helped you wash,” I’d say and she’d smile with pleasure.

One day, a neighbour from her Bridgeton tenement, sharing the

same stairhead toilet was admitted to the bed opposite. She was an emergency patient with a festering carbuncle and Mrs Wishart was very distressed to see her.

“Oh no, no’ that yin,” she whispered. “She’s bad for the drink and you dinnae want to hear her language. I never thought I’d end my days with her opposite my bed,” she added in tears.

I didn’t know what to say. I realised that she had guessed the truth we’d all kept hidden from her. However, within a day or two Mrs Wishart was moved: her bed was wheeled into the side ward to enable her to die in privacy.

Dying patients were cared for in this way. Doctors on the ward round walked past their beds, unable to offer any hope. It was out of this that the hospice movement developed when Dame Cicely Saunders realised that the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of dying patients and their families were not being met in general hospitals.

This was especially the case when a child died. I nursed Andrew, a little boy of three, suffering from leukaemia. Today there is an 80% success rate in the treatment of childhood leukaemia, but in the early 1960s there was very little anyone could do and we knew that this dear little boy had only six weeks at most to live. One morning I dressed him up in my cap and apron and carried him round the ward.

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