The patients saw plenty of Christmas Day. They were woken up by the night nurses at five a.m. as usual, given a bowl of cold water, and wished a Merry Christmas. After breakfast the nurses took off their uniform caps and put on funny hats, and shifted into hidden side-wards any patients who seemed likely to spoil the fun by inconsiderately passing away. Sister Virtue was particularly successful in the role of Valkyrie: her long experience of diseases and doctors enabled her to spot a declining case several days before the medical staff. She had only to fix her glare on an apparently convalescent patient and give her bleak opinion that ‘He won’t
do
, sir,’ and the houseman confidently made arrangements for the post-mortem.
When I arrived on the ward in the middle of the morning I found a wonderful end-of-term spirit abroad. People were allowed to do things they felt forbidden even to contemplate at any other time in the year. Smoking was permitted all day, not only in the regulation hour after meals, the radio was turned on before noon, and, as if this wasn’t enough, the patients were issued with a bottle of beer apiece.
Sister was visiting each of the beds distributing presents from the tree, and two up-patients, dressing-gowned old gentlemen with a brace of alarming blood pressures, were dancing the highland fling in nurses’ caps and aprons. Three or four of the students were steadfastly pursuing nurses with sprigs of mistletoe: the chase was not exacting.
As I entered the ward a giggling nurse ran out of the sluice-room followed by Tony Benskin, who had a look of intense eagerness on his face.
‘That’s enough, Mr Benskin!’ she cried. ‘You’ve had enough!’
Benskin pulled up as he caught sight of me.
‘I thought you said you were coming early to test urine,’ I remarked.
‘One meets one’s friends,’ he explained simply. ‘One must be social. After all, it’s Christmas. Come in the sluice-room. I’ve got a bottle.’
I followed him in.
‘And I thought you were scared of nurses.’
‘Delightful creatures,’ said Benskin, beaming. ‘So refreshingly sex-starved.’
I noticed the gin bottle he had invited me to.
‘Good God, Tony,’ I said. ‘Have you got through all that so early in the day?’
‘It’s Christmas, old boy.’
‘Tony, you’re sloshed already.’
‘What of it? There’s plenty more gin in the instrument cupboard. Grimsdyke hid it there yesterday. After all, it’s Christmas. Have a drink.’
‘All right. I suppose it’s my party as much as yours.’
The gin in the instrument cupboard was finished by midday, when Dr Lionel Loftus appeared with his wife, and his two ugly daughters that were produced every Christmas-time like the decorations but without success. He got a hilarious reception.
‘Here’s the old Dean!’ cried Benskin, leaping up on a bed. ‘Three cheers for the Dean, boys! Three cheers for old Lofty! Three cheers for the jolly old Dean!’
The Dean stood, all smiles, in the doorway, while three cheers were given and the ward broke into ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’ He kissed Sister under the mistletoe, presented his housemen with a bottle of sherry, and shook hands with the patients. His own part in the programme was fairly simple: all he had to do was put on a chef’s hat and carve the turkey in the middle of the ward. He was not good at carving and the last patients had a cold meal, which was the disadvantage of eating Christmas dinner on the medical side of the hospital. The surgeons were naturally more skilful, and Sir Lancelot Spratt had been known to slit a bird to ribbons in a couple of minutes.
During dinner Grimsdyke appeared. I was sitting on a bed with my arm round a nurse. Both of us were blowing squeakers.
‘Hello, old boy,’ Grimsdyke said in a worried tone. ‘Merry Christmas and all that sort of thing. How are you feeling?’
‘Fine! Have a drink.’
‘All the boys are pretty high, I suppose?’
‘Of course. Benskin’s as stiff as a plank.’
‘Oh God! I hope he’ll be all right to go on this afternoon.’
I put my squeaker down contritely.
‘I’d clean forgotten about that! Perhaps we’d better go and see how he is.’
‘Where’s he got to?’ Grimsdyke asked nervously.
The nurse told him. ‘I saw him going into the sluice-room. He said he felt tired and wanted a rest.’
Benskin was resting when we found him. He was lying on the stone floor with his head against the base of the sink.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ Grimsdyke commanded, with an anxious note in his voice. ‘The show, man! We’re due to start in half an hour!’
Benskin grunted.
‘Oh Lord!’ Grimsdyke said in despair. ‘We’ll never get him on the stage… Tony! Benskin! Pull yourself together!’
Benskin opened his eyes fleetingly.
‘Merry Christmas,’ he muttered.
‘Why not try an ice-pack on his head?’ I suggested. ‘Or an intravenous injection of vitamin C? It’s supposed to oxidize the alcohol.’
‘We’ll try throwing water over him. It might be some use. Give me that measuring glass.’
We poured a pint of cold water over the ineffective actor; he lay dripping like a cherub on a fountain, but equally inactive.
‘Let’s hold him by the arms and legs and shake him,’ I said.
‘Do you think it would do any good?’
‘It may do. Shock therapy is sometimes effective.’
Grimsdyke held Benskin’s arms, and I took his feet. He was a heavy man, and we strained as we lifted him.
‘Ready?’ Grimsdyke asked. ‘Right – one, two, three, shake.’
We were still shaking when the sluice-room door opened and Sister Prudence walked in.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Mr Benskin fainted,’ Grimsdyke said quickly. ‘I think the excitement was too much for him.’
Sister Prudence shot a diagnostic look at the patient. Her professional training enabled her to act swiftly and decisively when faced with an emergency.
‘Nurse!’ she called, starting to roll up her sleeves. ‘Run down to the accident department and bring up the suicide box. Take your jacket off, Mr Grimsdyke. You can help me with the stomach pump.’
Benskin’s stomach was washed out with bicarbonate solution, which was always kept handy to frustrate local suicides. He was given a cup of black coffee and a benzedrine tablet. By that time he maintained that he was ready to face his audience.
‘It will be a pallid performance,’ he admitted thickly. ‘But at least I shall be on my feet.’
The show was due to open in Fortitude ward, on the male surgical side.
‘Always test on men’s surgical,’ Grimsdyke said. ‘Surgical patients are either well or dead. They don’t hang about in the miserable twilight like medical ones. Besides, half the medical patients have got gastric ulcers, and who can feel jolly on Christmas Day after a poached egg and a glass of milk?’
Our troupe arrived made-up and in the costume of white flannels and shirts with green bow ties that Grimsdyke had ordered. The stage was improvised on the floor at one end of the ward out of the screens otherwise used to hide patients from their companions. Grimsdyke, who succeeded in looking smart in his flannels, worried his way round his indifferent actors like the headmistress at a kindergarten play.
‘Are we ready to start?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Where’s the piano?’
‘It looks as if we’ve lost it somewhere,’ I told him.
‘It doesn’t matter about the bloody piano,’ John Bottle cut in. ‘We’ve lost the beer as well.’
Grimsdyke and Bottle disappeared to find these two essential articles of stage furniture, while Harris muttered the words of Polly Perkins over to himself repeatedly, Sprogget stood in the corner with a look of painful concentration on his face talking like a three-year-old girl, and I rubbed red grease-paint into Benskin’s white cheeks.
‘What are you feeling like now?’ I asked him.
‘I often wondered what it was like to be dead,’ he said. ‘Now I know. Still, the show must go on. One cannot disappoint one’s public.’
The piano, the actors, and the beer were collected on the same spot; the audience, who had been waiting uncomfortably on the floor, on the edge of beds, or leaning against the wall began a burst of impatient clapping.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Grimsdyke frantically. ‘Let’s get going. Are you ready, Richard? What the hell are you doing underneath the piano?’
‘I seem to have lost the music for the opening chorus,’ I explained.
‘Play any damn thing you like. Play the closing chorus. Play God Save the King.’
‘I’ll vamp.’
The screen representing the proscenium curtain was pushed aside, and the only presentation of Jest Trouble took the boards.
The performance was not a great success. It happened that Mr Hubert Cambridge, the surgeon in charge of Fortitude ward, had a desire to remove two hundred stomachs during the year and had approached Christmas in a flurry of gastrectomies. As the patients had not a whole stomach between them and each had suffered a high abdominal incision that made even breathing painful they were not a responsive and easy-laughing audience. The nurses, students, and doctors who made up the bulk of the house were already unsympathetic to the actors because of the long wait for the curtain to be pulled aside when they could have spent longer over their dinner. Only the cast, who (with the exception of Benskin) had been going strongly at the beer, thought themselves devilishly funny.
The opening chorus successfully defied the audience to make out a word of it, then Grimsdyke told a joke about a student and two nurses that extracted a languid round of clapping. The next item was Benskin’s conjuring act. He appeared in a black cape and a tall magician’s hat, and scored instant applause when, during his preliminary patter, John Bottle was seized with the idea of setting a match to its peak over the top of the backcloth. The hat blazed away for some seconds before Benskin realized what had happened and angrily put it out in a bowl of goldfish.
His proudest trick was pouring water from one jug to another and changing its colour in the transference; but his aim was not good that afternoon and at his first attempt most of the liquid slopped on to the ward floor.
‘Nurse!’ came an easily audible hiss from the back. It was Sister Fortitude. ‘Go and clear up the mess that young man’s making!’
A nurse with a mop picked her way through the audience and started swabbing round the performer’s feet while he pretended that he, out of everybody else in the room, did not notice her. After that he angrily produced a string of flags out of a top hat and left the stage in a huff.
The rest of the performance was received by the audience with good-natured apathy. Harris made his appearance to sing Little Polly Perkins in a Harry Tate moustache, standing in front of Bottle, Sprogget, and Benskin, who joined in the choruses. Towards the end of the third verse a roar of laughter swept the audience. Harris felt the glow of success in his heart, and sang on lustily. When the laughter rose to a second peak a few seconds later he hesitated and glanced behind him. The cause of his reception was obvious at once. Benskin, finally overcome, had been suffering a sharp attack of hiccoughs before being sick in the corner of the stage. At that moment the lights fused, and no one thought it worth finishing the performance.
At Christmas-time came the few hours of every year that the official barrier between students and nurses was gingerly raised: there was a dance in the nurses’ dining-hall which the young men were allowed to attend.
The dance disorganized life in the Virgins’ Retreat for some weeks before the French chalk went down on the floor. Each nurse’s escort was discussed in detail that would have been justified only if the young lady expected to remain in his arms for the rest of her life. Dresses were cleaned, repaired, and borrowed, and the probationers wept in front of their mirrors at the devastation already done to their figures by the carbohydrates in the hospital diet and the muscular exercise of nursing. On the evening of the dance the girls flew off duty eagerly, bathed, powdered, dressed, and scented themselves, and went down to meet their men under the marble eye of Florence Nightingale in the hall.
As I had no particular attachments in the hospital at the time I approached a gawky nurse on the ward called Footte and asked, with a smirk, if she would be my consort. She gave her gracious acceptance. Shortly afterwards I met Benskin in the courtyard.
‘Are you going to the nurses’ hop?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve just let myself in for taking the junior staff on Prudence.’
‘You bet I am, old boy! Having recovered from the excesses of Christmas Day I shall be taking old Rigor Mortis along. It’s the biggest party of the year.’
I was surprised.
‘Is it? I thought it was a strictly teetotal affair.’
‘And so it is. You don’t imagine the Matron would allow liquor to befoul the chaste floors of the Virgins’ Retreat, do you? It’s as dry as a bishop’s birthday. This has the effect of making everybody get a big enough glow on beforehand to last them the night, and results in some interesting spectacles.’
On the evening of the dance Benskin and I spent an hour of determined drinking with the Padre before crossing over to the Nurses’ Home to meet our partners. Benskin immediately suggested a few scoops. ‘Bad form to arrive too early, you know,’ he explained to the girls. ‘People think you want to hog all the sausage rolls.’ The four of us went back to the King George, which was now full of young men and young women in evening dress taking prophylaxis against a dull evening. We settled ourselves at a corner of the bar. After some time Miss Footte started looking mistily at me and stroking the back of my neck; I noticed that even Rigor Mortis, who had an apparent amnesia about the incident in the flat, was becoming mildly animated.
The first time I looked at my watch it was after ten.
‘It’s getting on,’ I said. ‘Hadn’t we better go?’
‘Perhaps we’d better. Where’s the Padre?’ Benskin leaned over the bar counter. ‘Padre! I say, how about a little this-and-that for the hip?’ He handed a silver flask across the bar. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’
‘Certainly, sir! How about you, Mr Gordon? If I might advise you, sir, from my experience…’