Caring for Tommies, by one who knows

The volunteer nurse’s life may be divided into phases: after the necessary examinations, you enter a hospital, full of hope and courage, expecting to ‘nurse the wounded’ at once. The rude awakening follows immediately. This is the first phase.

If on the first day of your arrival you can manage to keep in your head the names of 30 or 40 strange men and the nature of their individual ailments, all may go well. After two or three days you will be expected to interpret from a slight movement of the Sister’s lips exactly what she requires to be handed or brought to her. Later on, you hardly wait for the movement of the lips but trust to thought waves. If you happen to make one or two good shots at the outset, you may get on.

The first few weeks are spent mostly on the knees, cleaning, polishing and dusting floors. This prayerful attitude invariably calls forth one of Tommy’s stock jokes: ‘Say one for me, Nurse.’

If you have patience and perseverance and do not ‘go under’, you will reach the second phase, when you are allowed to do an occasional bandage. Should you prove neat and avoid sticking the safety-pin through the patient’s

limb while the Sister is watching, you will quickly reach a third phase. At times there arise awful problems which need careful solving.

During my first few weeks dialects were my bugbear. The Durham Light Infantry proved particularly nerve racking to me. I recollect on one occasion a dark handsome lad (a Durham miner) spoke to me for quite a long time before I could ‘place’ him.

I had just decided that he must be either Flemish or Spanish and was about to try talking French to him when by great good luck he introduced the word ‘Yes’ into this conversation, and I knew where I was.