Sheila's First Posts

For one thing it was a dark, dirty, gloomy, and thoroughly depressing hospital where we were worked off our feet. We did not even have telephones in our bedrooms, but were summoned at night by Night Sister, whose heel-taps we could hear coming across the concrete floor as she approached. During the day one was summonsed by a series of telephone bells, three longs and a short, or four shorts and a long, or various combinations, and one only answered the phone when it went the requisite number of rings. You can imagine the chaos! In addition I'd left my only boyfriend, if that he may be called, back in Taunton. He was a very tall young man called Donald Short. I was very smitten, but I realised subsequently that we totally incompatible, and the only reason I would have married him was to escape from the total slavery of the job at the Royal Free. Fortunately he was wiser than I and went off and joined the Navy, and incidentally married the hospital dietician at Taunton.

After the job at the Royal Free was over I was so shattered and exhausted physically and mentally, that I took about two and a half months off, living at home with my father, and finding any pretext not to look for another job. Finally with gentle encouragement I embarked upon a six month post in obstetrics at the Central Middlesex hospital in Harrow, London. This was one of these enormous Victorian edifices built as a workhouse, with about a thousand beds, and a central corridor about half a mile long. It was extremely busy, very shabby, and as I recall, most of our clientele came from the local abortionists, criminal abortionists, that is, and that kept us pretty busy until the late hours of the night repairing their handiwork. On the obstetrics side we had about eighty beds, and each firm of which there were two, covered half the beds, so that meant I had forty beds to look after on alternate nights and alternate weekends. Deliveries came thick and fast, and if the midwives were kind they protected one from endless calls to the labour ward to suture. Quite often they would store them all up until the morning for one, so that you would go along and stitch up all the ladies before breakfast that had been delivered in the previous three or four hours. That may not have seemed very kind, but at least it gave the ladies a rest from their labours, and a cup of tea, and some breathing space, and enabled us to arrive on the scene clothed and washed.