Look Back in Hunger Page 19

  I managed to get the job, despite some reasonably stiff competition, probably because I was a good nurse with a lot of experience and I could manage people. In practical terms, this translated into the fact that nothing appalling in terms of injuries or damage to the place had ever happened on my watch, and I didn’t rub people up the wrong way. They all seemed to get on with me. Plus I’d been a staff nurse there for nearly four years, which was unheard of due to the high staff turnover. I had a reasonably good relationship with management, because I kept my mouth shut and did what I was told.

  One of the other candidates who applied, also a staff nurse, didn’t get the job and held it against me for quite some time until, thankfully, she left. I did have a bit of trouble adjusting to being in charge. It’s always been in my nature to be one of the boys, and it was hard to have authority and be liked at the same time. Despite being a Leo, I am not a natural leader. But I’ve always thought star signs were bollocks anyway; horoscopes should just be for entertainment. I used to have a soft spot for the ones in the News of the World, which was constantly available at the clinic on Sundays, courtesy of one of the porters. Their predictions were always so specific: ‘You will meet a man dressed in yellow outside a kebab shop.’ It took me about six months to a year to get used to being in charge. There was a senior charge nurse too, so if the going got tough I just passed things up the line to him.

  During my time at the Maudsley, the Brixton riots occurred. In fact, there were two lots. The first, in 1981, happened while I was still a student and wasn’t actually in south London. The riots that had a major impact on my life were the second lot, in 1985.

  Things had been tense between the police and the black community for a while, given the Sus laws, which gave the police carte blanche to stop and search anyone they fancied. As you can imagine, it didn’t tend to be old ladies dressed in lilac, dragging shopping trolleys home from Tesco. So when Cherry Groce was accidentally shot and killed by the police in Normandy Road in 1985, the simmer became a boil.

  It was the talk of the hospital. Many of our patients lived in or around Brixton and rumours filtered down to us through the more talkative ones. We were told Molotov cocktails were being stockpiled and it was all going to get very nasty.

  On the worst few days, we could only sit tight and get on with our caseload. One day, in the midst of all the rioting, the police arrived with someone on a section 136 whom we knew well. He was a long-term attendee who followed a pattern of being sectioned, admitted, stabilised on his drugs and discharged, and then failing to take his tablets or turn up for his injection and being sectioned by the police again. We all marvelled at the fact that in the midst of petrol bombs, fighting, and screeching the police had been able to pick him out of the melee and work out that he needed psychiatric help.

  We had an uneasy relationship with the police, who were not famed for their diplomacy and pastoral care in the eighties. I remember once they brought in a woman on a 136 and she arrived in the department completely naked, handcuffed to a young policeman. I was appalled at the lack of dignity accorded her and wondered if it would have made any difference if she had been white. Someone ran to get a blanket to cover her while the young policeman got on the phone to his sergeant and very loudly proclaimed to most of the outpatients department: ‘We’re at the Maudsley, sarge, trying to find out whevver she’s a nutter or not.’

  On another occasion, a police van screeched to a halt outside the department on a Sunday morning and out jumped six policemen carrying a man who some while earlier had been arrested in a graveyard. Just before they grabbed him, he caught a pigeon, bit the head off and stuffed it down his throat. By the time the police brought him in, he was a purple colour and we immediately dispatched him to Room One, hung him upside down, banged him on the back and out flew the remains of the pigeon. I asked the policeman in charge why they had not attempted to remove the pigeon to stop the man choking. His answer? ‘Well, we did, love, but he made so much fucking noise, we shoved it back in again.’

  That evening, as I was heading home from work, I braked at the lights on Denmark Hill and sailing past me went a stark-naked woman on a bicycle, with her hair flying out behind her like some modern-day Lady Godiva. She looked magnificent but, of course, rather incongruous in the south London traffic. I wondered how far she’d get before the police spotted her and if they’d take her to the clinic. I came in the next morning to discover she had indeed been brought in, but had managed to get as far as the Elephant and Castle, a good four miles.

  On another occasion a patient I knew, who was as gentle as anything when he was well, but quite dangerous when ill, was brought in on a 136. I sat him down in a chair and asked how he was. He opened his mouth to speak and most of his teeth tumbled out. By the time I had a moment to ask the police who had delivered him and what had gone on in the van, they had disappeared, having signed him over to us. I decided to make a formal complaint—the only one I made throughout my entire nursing career. So I wrote a letter to the relevant department, and waited … and waited… and waited. Several months later, I received a summons to see a very senior police officer and was interviewed in his office. I told my story very matter-of-factly with the minimum of emotion. At one point during my story the officer intervened and asked whether it was possible that any members of staff at the emergency clinic had knocked the man’s teeth out. I was pretty upset by this, considering that when the incident had occurred there had been just myself and another female nurse on duty.

  The outcome was somewhat unsatisfactory: not much happened and the police were angry about the complaint. On a number of occasions, when we called for help because of a violent incident, they seemed to be dragging their feet. I’d like to think things have changed, and friends still in the biz say it’s better. I’ve met so many really good policemen in my time, so I have never felt the poison is all-pervasive, but it certainly depressed me as a nurse.

  My appearance came up for some more criticism once I was promoted, as I think it was felt that I should slip into a twin-set and pearls.

  I suppose I am just a natural scruffbag. I don’t have the ability to look smart and stay looking smart. Even if I make a supreme effort to get dressed up, something always happens to spoil it, like me spilling food down myself, or someone’s child wiping a bogey on me. I think some women have the ability to maintain their sartorial dignity whatever the challenges, and I’d love to be able to do that. I have always been very last minute, and so some days, if I got up late for work, which I frequently did because an extra ten minutes in bed was more important to me than being smartly turned out, I found myself with about thirty seconds to get ready. I’d pull stuff out of the washing basket, compare it to see which item looked the least dirty, maybe scrub at unsightly stains with a dishcloth. I am the antithesis of Anthea Turner. My room—wherever it was, be it in student halls or a shared house—was always a complete tip, with overflowing ashtrays, records and CDs scattered everywhere, old cups with mould in them, unmade bed, drawers full of unwearable clothes and a general air of chaos.

  Also, I absolutely bloody hate shopping, always have. I cannot understand the whole concept of retail therapy. To me, shopping involves slogging round hot, sweaty buildings full of snooty assistants who look at chubby losers like me as if we are the scum of the earth, or being battered about in tiny changing rooms with girls who weigh three stone and always have on the most attractive underwear you can imagine, while I, with my too-old Marks & Sparks pants and bra, cower in the corner waiting for an opportunity to try something on when there is no one in there, which, in a busy department store, is never.

  That’s why being asked to do Trinny and Susannah in 2003 made me roar with laughter. I suppose I agreed to do it because I was fascinated to see just what kind of hideous garment they would come up with for me. Plus I wanted to give as good as I got on behalf of all those women who do not take great joy in their appearance and who just want to get through the day without their clothes
either falling off or being covered in food.

  The resulting outfit was fucking hilarious: a creepy, brown two-piece suit with a fairly tight top with a plunging neckline (which I hate, I’ve never liked cleavage, not sure why, just think it looks horrible) and a long, flared skirt and ridiculously high-heeled, uncomfortable shoes. The practical result of very high-heeled shoes is that you can’t bloody run in them, and I think there are plenty of times in a woman’s life when she needs to run.

  So anyway, when I was a nurse my clothes were either purchased in charity shops, given to me by others or grabbed in a head-down run though a clothes shop, a bit like Supermarket Sweep. I gave up trying things on because it was such a bloody nightmare, so half the stuff I bought didn’t fit properly and looked shit, and that kind of became my style. And that just was not acceptable for a senior nurse, apparently.

  I made every effort not to get sucked into the New Romantic fashion phase, because, although I am a scruffbag, I am a scruffbag who knows what I like and New Romantics were the most ridiculous set of individuals I had set eyes on since Glitter Rock in the seventies. Especially the blokes. They all looked like disturbed, effeminate pirates to me. I stuck steadfastly to my uniform of baggy T-shirts and jumpers, workmen’s dungarees, monkey boots and a donkey jacket. I was a big fan of Michael Foot, who was the Labour Party leader for a while. There was an enormous fuss in the press about him wearing a so-called ‘donkey jacket’ to a First World War commemorative event at the Cenotaph because royalty were there. Jesus Christ, I remember thinking to myself, haven’t they got anything better to talk about? Michael Foot was someone, in my opinion, who should probably not have been in politics—he was far too nice. A sensitive, educated man who looked slightly eccentric, he allowed the press to rip him to shreds and ruin any credibility he had.

  My social life outside work was a mixture of things. I was part of a big, friendly, amorphous group that would expand and contract depending on who was around. The people on the degree course tended to stick together, and our social lives were mainly based in the pub and at parties, with the occasional gig or trip to the theatre thrown in when we could be bothered.

  I sometimes went to the theatre with my very good friend Helen, who was on the same course as me but the year below. Once she decided to go for a rather dramatic haircut, as she was going to the wedding of one of her boyfriend’s relatives. In fact, she had the sides of her head shaved and looked like a Mohican princess. The night before she was due to go to the wedding, she and I went to see Piaf starring Jane Lapotaire, a famous West End and TV actress at the time. We didn’t really enjoy the production and left at the interval, both of us in quite bad moods because of the amount of money we had wasted. A theatre employee asked as we passed, And where are you two ladies going?’ in as sarcastic a voice as he could manage, to which Helen replied, ‘We’re leaving ‘cause the play’s shit.’ Quite pleased with her riposte, we carried on walking, and his voice came floating through the air behind us: ‘So’ your hair, dear.’ Touché.

  Every year for a few years we would go away at New Year and stay up in the Lake District for a week. I tacked on to a group of Helen’s friends, who did this as a regular thing. We would hire two big cottages and there would be about fifteen of us, a mixture of men, women, singles and couples. It worked pretty well. We would go for long walks during the day, up peaks like Helvellyn, and then get rat-arsed in the pub every night.

  One year it was particularly cold and there was a lot of snow on the ground, so we decided to go sledging. We managed to get hold of a couple of trays, bought a couple of cheap sledges and set off up the side of a very steep hill. I ended up on a sledge with the girlfriend of a doctor who I was eventually to share a house with a year or so later. We were on one of the proper sledges and set off, her on the front, me on the back, whooping and screeching as we whizzed through the sharp, frosty air. I’m not sure at what point it dawned on us that we were heading for a massive dry-stone wall at about thirty miles an hour, but we didn’t have very long to plan our strategy of evasion.

  We just threw ourselves off in an effort not to get knocked unconscious or worse. In the process, my fingers were bent backwards onto my hand as they got caught under the sledge and I felt a sharp pain and a cracking noise. We picked ourselves up from the ground. Of course everyone was pissing themselves laughing.

  Over the next couple of hours my hand began to swell alarmingly, so I was taken off to the local casualty, which was the tiniest, sweetest little place you have ever seen, and seemed to be staffed by one nurse and one doctor. The doctor, I remember, looked about twelve and was wearing the most hideous knitted tank top I had ever seen (one of those Christmas presents). His treatment for me, after having ascertained that I had broken my knuckle, was to bandage my hand very tightly, with my fingers bent round a cotton reel. I wondered if he was a bit bonkers. Back in London, I was referred for physiotherapy at my local hospital, where they laughed their heads off at the cotton reel and made me plunge my hand into a bowl of ice for ten minutes every day for two weeks. It was SO PAINFUL. And my hand never got any better.

  Anyway, back to nursing. I’d toned down my appearance as much as I possibly could, but was not prepared to go to work looking like a Sunday school teacher. Consequently, I received a letter from the chief nursing officer saying there were ‘some concerns’ about my dress. By this point, I was really fed up. I felt I’d worked my bollocks off in the job and we had a department that ran as smoothly as it could given the challenges we faced, and all they could do was whine on about how I looked! In a temper, possibly hormonally motivated, I sat down and wrote a letter of resignation. I had no idea what I’d do if they accepted it; it was really a challenge to the hospital, to see whether they would allow someone to leave because of something relatively trivial. Thank God, as soon as the chief nursing officer received my letter, she called me to her office and backed down. One of the few battles I have won.

  Not long after this the senior charge nurse left and I was promoted to his level. By then I’d been there four years or so. The average turnover was six months for qualified staff, as the department was considered so stressful and not everyone was suited to the emotionally charged atmosphere of a place like that. One thing that the NHS doesn’t seem to be able to do is sack bad staff. The tendency is to move them round the hospital till they’ve been on every ward and then start again at the beginning.

  I was asked by one of the nurse managers to take a staff nurse who was struggling on another ward. I pointed out that we were not the best place for someone who had a record of being rather awkward and sometimes inappropriately censorious with patients. He would not have it, though, so we agreed to a month trial.

  Unfortunately, within a week, an incident occurred which secured her propulsion back whence she came. Someone we knew very well came in in a highly agitated state, demanding to be seen. I would have taken him off to a quiet room and got a doctor to see him immediately. Our new nurse didn’t really know him and didn’t ask anyone about him. Instead, she turned to him with a headmistressy expression on her face and said, ‘Sit down and wait your turn.’ I’m afraid she got her face punched, resulting in a broken nose, and although all our clients had to be held responsible for their acts of violence, it could have been so easily avoided.

  But most of the nurses at the emergency clinic were brilliant, from the West Indian nursing assistant who could handle anyone in any given situation and fed us regularly with enormous amounts of homemade curry to a state-enrolled nurse called Kristina, who is still a really close friend of mine. She was the one person I always wanted with me when the going got really rough. This was because Kristina was so approachable, straightforward and instinctively knew what to do in those situations. Her working-class roots shone through, and when you are facing some hulking, great, angry Camberwell brute, the last thing you want is a Sophie from Hampstead with a Cambridge degree in social relations. Kristina formed great relationships with all the regulars and
they loved her to bits. She was the biggest asset we had. Of course, she had a bad side, we all do. She could be argumentative, stubborn and annoying at times. But these traits paled into insignificance when she got stuck into a situation and saw it through to the bitter end.

  Sadly, Kristina had only been at the clinic a month or so when she became ill, with some numbness and difficulty walking. She was immediately admitted to the general hospital over the road from us and a few days later was diagnosed as having MS. What a nightmare: new job in London, didn’t know anyone and the prospect of a deteriorating body to look forward to.

  Myself and the junior charge nurse, a fantastic, feisty woman called Frankie, between us managed to visit her almost every day for three months and things gradually improved. Kristina is still going strong today and I suspect, although I have no medical evidence to back this up, that she fought the illness in the right way, by simply refusing to acknowledge it or give in to it.

  I still see Frankie to this day as well. She had a brilliant, sardonic sense of humour of the most biting kind and this would be turned on everyone. She was gorgeous-looking too, blonde, blue-eyed and buxom. Later on she lost quite a bit of weight and I always berated her about it, but she’d just tell me to fuck off and mind my own business. She was absolutely loaded with common sense too. This is a much-maligned characteristic in my eyes. I saw many nurses over the years make ridiculous decisions because they fell back on the textbooks rather than use some gumption.

  There were times when things did go horribly wrong. One day the police brought in an absolutely huge Irishman from a building site. He was hypomanic—talking nineteen to the dozen and threatening people—and generally very scary. He was about 6ft 6ins and weighed approximately twenty-five stone. On very rare occasions, if we felt we didn’t have the manpower, we would ask the police to stay, so we all tramped into Room One with this man. There were probably about six policemen and six nurses, and we tried to contain him while we awaited our poor senior registrar, who had to assess him. The senior reg, a lovely doctor who was mild-mannered, very funny and very sweet-tempered, arrived and began to question our patient. Within seconds, it all went wrong. Our patient managed to land a huge punch under the chin of the doctor, lifting him up in the air and knocking him unconscious. Pandemonium ensued. The police and we nurses immediately jumped on the patient while someone dragged the doctor out of the room. He came round pretty quickly and another doctor was immediately called to sort things out. She prescribed intravenous Valium, which is a last resort, to enable someone to be sedated really quickly. I’ve only seen it used this one time. We all held the guy down, the needle went into his arm and he was sparko immediately.