8. Winter 1955-6 Wokingham Hospital

By October 1955 I was back with my parents and family in our red brick house in the middle of a Berkshire field, trying to bring an Algerian shantytown back to life in a newspaper article. By December, when the News Chronicle printed the piece, I was working as a ward orderly in Wokingham hospital. There were no work-camp openings available at that time, the job more or less conformed to my alternative service requirements. But instead of my ten shillings a week pocket money, I now got about £10.

Again, I'm not clear of the dates, but I remember working on the wards over Christmas. The hospital was a red brick building, a former work-house converted to provide maternity and geriatric services.

Perhaps I got a day off to get the train to London. Perhaps I went with my father who travelled up each day to his civil service job. I had sent my shanty-town piece to James Cameron –the one who invited me to lunch – and he passed it to features editor Tom Hopkinson who asked me to come up and talk about it..

I didn’t know it then, but Hopkinson had been editor Picture Post magazine and was later to become the UK’s first Professor of Journalism. He had me in to the Fleet Street office to go through the piece with me, and suggested a few small changes. I was grateful for the attention, but put off by the smell of his breath.

Forty years later I came across a framed copy of Picture Post in a Swansea industrial museum. It was open at a picture-spread about life in the Swansea valley, dated some time in 1943-4. Swansea was bombed, but this report was looked to a more fundamental reconstruction: how to transform the dirt and dereliction of a declining industrial valley. The pictures and extended subtitles featured all sorts of people, at home and work, in pubs and British Restaurants. It was at once democratic and ground-breaking, and the reporter in the byline was Tom Hopkinson.

Unlike young people in Olympic UK 2012, or my recent neighbours in the Algerian bidonville, I had no trouble finding work in Autumn 1955. The Wokingham hospital was on the near side of town, a two-mile cycle ride compared to the five miles that my brothers and I were used to cycling to school. Although I was now paid, I dont think it crossed my mind to offer my parents anything for my keep. The only inconvenience was occasional split-shifts: mornings and evenings, with a four hour break in the middle, (rather like our long mid-day breaks in Algeria, but without the sun and flies.)

And the hospital work was indoors, duties largely confined to a male geriatric ward. When Cal my stepson did a porter’s job at a Llanelli hospital in the ‘90s, he got neat, blue non-iron shirts and trousers with sewn-in creases. I still wear some of these, but cant remember getting any uniform in Wokingham beyond a short white coat to wear over my own clothes.

The nurses wore uniform dresses, which they sometimes slipped on over their underclothes when they got to work. Apart from doctors visits, the other staff on the ward were all women - sister, nurses and 'state-enrolled assistant nurses.' The patients were men, aged from 55 to 95  and it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. Two thirds were long-term patients, and of these about half were mentally as well as physically deranged. Among the alert was Mr Dollery whose bed across from the door commanded the ward and, through a little glass window, the staff kitchen. I don’t remember seeing Mr Dollery out of bed. He sat erect, like a sardonic pope, propped high on pillows. As a novice, I found it helpful to seek his advice. He knew the routines and where things went.

My job was mostly to care for patients, rather than the trolley-pushing that kept Cal busy as a hospital porter in Wales. All manual work can be reduced to fetching and carrying, picking things up and putting things down, but most of mine was person-to-person. With the nurses, and then on my own, I fed, washed, changed clothes annointed bums and backs against bedsores. In the dayroom I chatted and sorted out disputes among the fractious fraternity who could get that far in their dressing gowns. Conflict often arose when people dropped or mislaid their tobacco, spectacles or papers, then picked up someone else’s. After seeing the pleasure these old men got from their pipes, I consulted them and bought a pipe of my own. I didn’t smoke on duty, but sometimes lit up for my ride home. One day my pipe fell out of my mouth and I ran over it. More often I would just forget to puff, until I heard the hiss of dribble slaking tobacco.

I enjoyed the chat and interaction with patients and nurses, didn’t much mind changing clothes and wiping bums. We washed our hands and odds and ends in deep square sinks with Niagara taps. At the other end of the line from Mr Dollery lay Jack, flat on his back. He ate heartily when food was put to his mouth but otherwise hardly moved, said nothing and showed no response when spoken to or touched. Pink face and head with a ring of white hair, a picture of health like a Toby jug.  Jack was incontinent, had no visitors and, because his condition hardly changed, was rarely examined by a doctor.

When the pressure was on, it was Jack whose bed was left unchanged. Across from Jack, at the furthest corner from the watchful Dollery was a prurient old sailor, as long and lean as Jack was short and fat. I've forgotten his name, but he may have been Scottish and mostly called me George, as in ‘George, bottle,’ when he wanted to piss. Occasionally the name would change to Fifi, when he called me to admire his super-senior erection.

I liked the daily bed-making routine with the nurses, working down the ward in pairs. Different dances for empty beds and occupied, two or three partners. It took me a while to speed up and as I did, my relations with the nurses improved. They'd waited to find what if anything lay behind my posh accent and smooth face.

When somebody died, the screens went up and a semblance of normality was maintained all round. It may have been partly to test me that in my second week I was sent in to help lay someone out. He’d been just about alive the day before, but the screens were up when I got in next morning. The man’s eyes were already shut and his body composed. The night staff must have seen to that, and I didn’t know him well. I didn't much like the nurse who took me in with her - big, and loud, though not in this little tent. As we undressed and washed the cold body between us, she was quiet and businesslike. At some point, we turned him over, she took a wodge of bandage and lint in a pair of tweezers and pushed it up his bum. She cut me another length of bandage to tie up his poor old dick in case that leaked. Some more padding went into his mouth and helped fill out his cheeks. The shroud was like a long apron with a stiff, dress-shirt front and nothing at the back but tapes to tie it with. That done, we laid the body straight. I brushed his hair, she smoothed the shirt-front round his neck then placed a sort of sandbag up against his lower jaw.

As we were leaving, she said ‘He could do with a shave.’ I fetched razor, soap and hot water, and replaced the jaw-stop with a towel to keep the shirt front clean. I was nervous about cutting the skin, though it wouldn’t hurt or bleed. I need not have worried. The shaving was easy, a familiar, almost comforting business, and we both seemed more ourselves as I turned his head this way and that, smoothing his cheeks and throat to make way for the razor head.

The rest of the day went normally, no comment or questions asked. I don’t know how soon I mentioned this new experience when I got home. A bit later, when I went to my room, I felt myself sob and lay on my bed until it stopped.

Most of the nurses were kind to me and the patients. The one I most liked and respected was married with a family and only worked part time. The sister in charge of this and the neighbouring women’s ward would now be called ‘old school.’ One time she gave me a mild dressing down for something unimportant. We were standing rather stiffly face to face and I remembered a trick we’d practiced at school. We must have been a bit over six feet apart and without warning I let my body fall forward in her direction, arms to my side like a wooden soldier. By the time I raised my hands to break the fall, the good sister was reaching out, but too late to catch me.

She straightened up and I got up. I don’t know who else was watching, but we looked at each other, neither of us knowing whether to laugh. She shook her head and turned away.

Certain minor abuses went unchecked. There was a B/O book - bowels open - that was filled in everyday. As with proverbial army rations, the ticks in the BO book would sometimes appear by the names when patients had moved on. Main meals were brought up from the hospital kitchen. Everyone got fed if they needed help and that was another job I quite liked. It was sometimes left to staff on the wards to make tea for the patients and themselves. That was before homogenised milk and the staff who opened the bottles would often pour the top of the milk into their own cups before the patients were served. The patients neither knew or cared and a low-fat diet was probably healthier... Before a doctor’s round, the patients to be examined would be changed, whether or not they needed it, even if that meant leaving others in their mess.

At Christmas, there was a Christmas dinner served by the Mayor. But not on Christmas day, and the patients, the more active ones who looked forward to getting up, were kept in bed. They looked tidier there, and could be served in procession down the ward. For Christmas we also got a couple of crates of beer. Patients who showed an interest would get their share, or more. And so would we, the staff.

Only one incident really upset me. A wild and wiry old farmer was admitted, not because he himself was incurably ill or incapable, but his wife had fallen ill and was no longer able to look after him. I’m not sure whether she was ever in our hospital, just a ward away, but her husband often asked after her. He had been working what was left of his farm but now, transplanted, he became confused. Perhaps the older we get, the more dependent we become on familiar cues and handholds.

The nightstaff found it difficult when the  farmer began getting up at night. Sometimes he might have been heading for the toilet, but forget where it was. Sometimes he would get there but return to the wrong bed... I once did that at prepschool, and woke up to find two of us in one bed, each thinking it was our own. What I didn’t do at school was go through other peoples' bedside lockers. This was where the old farmer got into trouble, though when stopped for questioning be mumbled about chickens.

Not seeing his wife was one of the things that most upset him. II wonder now that I didn’t pursue this further at the time, especially if she was ever in the same hospital. As a newboy, I took things as I found them, who was I to reason why?

When the midnight rambling became disruptive, two techniques were used, together or separately. Sometimes, when he went to sleep, a soft rope net would be tied over his bed to keep him there. When he would not settle, he was given a sleeping draft. At first this came mixed with orange juice, until he realised what was happening and refused the juice. Then, when I was on duty, the droplets were put in a cup of tea. I took him the tea, he thanked me and lifted it to his mouth. Then his face changed. ‘Tastes like orange juice,’ he said, and pushed the cup away. I felt ashamed.

I was off for a couple of days after that, and when I got back, the old man was bed-ridden. There had been an incident in the bathroom. I gathered he had been unwilling to go for his bath, and a nurse had said ‘What would your wife think? You wouldn’t want her to find you like this.’ Whatever she said, he must have thought he would be seeing her, and it worked. Once in the bath, something aroused his suspicions, made him realise he'd been misled. While the nurse’s back was turned, he reached for a pair of nail scissors and stabbed at her.

No serious wound, but now the old man had to be restrained and sedated in earnest and that was the beginning of the end. For all I know, his wife was already dead and they hadn’t felt able to tell him. I did not write a newspaper piece about that, but a clumsy ballad some years later: ‘We took the old couple apart / Two bodies and one broken heart...’

Often, working in that old men's ward, I wished I could see more of the other end, where people were coming into the world not leaving it. Sometimes I got across the landing, as far as the old women’s ward, but Maternity was out of bounds. I was a man, and not a doctor. Years later, in 1972, it was only a last minute change of hospitals that allowed me to be in at Sam's birth (I was made to feel useful, holding up one of my wife's legs and looking in under it to watch the head appear and report back to her). In Wokingham hospital, when one of the old women was playing up, I would sometimes be given a longer white coat and told to go in as a doctor. That sometimes had a calming effect. One woman reminded me of Mrs Faversham. I found her sitting up in bed, combing through her long white hair and wailing ‘Let me die, why dont you let me die?' I said I understood.

There was a curious little annexe I was also allowed to visit. This was for babies with outsize blotchy heads. When a normal-looking baby died, over in maternity, the body would be taken to the chapel-morgue at the back of the hospital and nurses from other wards would go down to look. When I went to the morgue, it was not for this sight-seeing. I was sent to help a porter wheel a grown-up body down. The trolley was like a wooden market trolley, with two high wheels amidships and side-bars projecting to form handles at one end. The main challenge was the ramp that led up to the chapel door. The porter warned me to be careful, since the doorway was only a fraction wider than the trolley axle and we had to take a run at it. Sure enough, one hub hit a doorpost, the trolley stopped and slewed around while the corpse continued on its way. Letting go our handles, the two of us threw ourselves forward to grab its legs before it vanished, shroud and all, down the central aisle. Saved, by the skin of its heels.

A week or so later, on a day off, I broke my ankle skating and that put paid to the hospital job. Perhaps with another article in mind, or just concerned by the ups and downs of hospital life, I wrote to a specialist to see what 'geriatric care' might mean. 'Geriatric'? It may only have been after leaving the hospital that I learned the word. Then someone gave me the name of Lord Amulree. I wrote to him and, like James Cameron before, he invited me to meet him in London. His hospital was very different, with all sorts of equipment and therapies. Senility was no longer just something to be attended and endured. I was impressed but not excited by the kindly Amulree and what I saw of his wards. Perhaps that's the trouble with old age.

Then as now my heart was not in it and there was nothing much I wanted to declare to the world on that subject. Unless, perhaps, the question raised by the old woman I was sent to shut up.

Half a century later I heard my mother talk in a similar way. My father, as his mind tacked this way and that towards the end of his life, has already asked me to help him out. I refused, knowing that he only had to refuse his medicines. Or his food, which is what my mother did when it came to her turn.

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Shortly before my father's death, my parents were also separated by illness. With my father ill and confused, my mother had been taking it in turns with a carer to look after him at home. The strain got too much, she went down with pneumonia and was taken into hospital. With none of us able or willing to look after him, my father was moved to an old people’s home. Well-recommended, but horrible. He sat hunched up by himself in a small dark room. When the carers forgot to put in his teeth, then lost them, nobody thought to sit and feed him. When I visited him, I was shocked, but determined that this time the old man should see his wife.

I had brought his wheelchair, but for some reason did not feel able to arrange things properly with the staff. Although within our rights, I felt like a thief and looked to see that the coast was clear before wheeling him out across the hall. George, my father, was rising to the occasion and  clear in mind. Outside in the sun, I helped him into the passenger seat, and folded the chair into the boot. Both of us were in high spirits as we drove through the country roads to the Wantage cottage hospital where my mother was by now recovering. Out of the car, back into the wheelchair and through more doors. It was afternoon, and Mary, my mother, was awake, sitting in a chair beside her bed. She looked grey, but as we approached her face lit up. I pushed my father towards her up the aisle between the beds. She reached out towards him and he threw himself forward, taking me by surprise. The wheelchair tipped and George fell, arms outstretched, face down into Mary's lap. Triumphant, farcical, unrestrained delight, including me.