Sister Julienne and I left Nonnatus House and cycled towards the tenements, known as the Canada Buildings. We made our way to Alberta House, to a patient I had not met before – a man with leg ulcers that required daily dressing. Sister had told me the ulcers were severe, and warned that dressing such wounds in the patient’s home was very different from doing so in a surgically equipped and sterile hospital. The man was a Mr Joseph Collett, aged over eighty, and he lived alone in one of the ground-floor flats.
We knocked at the door. There was no immediate response, but we heard movement inside. The door was opened by a very old and rather dirty man. He peered at us through thick-lensed glasses, and it was obvious from the way he was looking and trying to adjust his focus that he could not see at all well. Nonetheless, he must have recognised us, for he opened the door wide, drew himself up very straight, and bowed slightly, saying: “Mornin’, Sister. I’ve been expecting you. Good of you to come. Who have you got with you today? Someone new?”
“This is Nurse Lee, and when I have shown her the routine, she will be looking after you.”
He turned towards me, and put out a hand to touch my coat sleeve, as the partially sighted do. He couldn’t quite see me, but he was obviously assessing my height and general contours, by which he would recognise me. “It’s nice to have you here, young lady, and I am sure we are going to get on famous. Allow me, Sister.”
He said this with old world courtesy, took her bag, and slowly walked with it to place it on the table.
“I’ve got the boiling water ready for you, and the flavine, and lint. I think you’ll find everything’s there.”
Sister Julienne started unpacking her bag, and I looked around the room. The smell was none too pleasant, but I had got used to that in the tenements. The walls were a dirty beige, with wallpaper peeling off. The paint was dark brown, blistered and cracking. A small gas stove sat in one corner, by the stone sink. Next to the sink was a lavatory, which was an obvious addition to the room and not part of the original structure. The windows were so dirty that very little light could penetrate, and there were no curtains. An open doorway revealed the bedroom, with a brass bedstead. The whole area – living room, bedroom, kitchen area and lavatory – could not have been more than about fifteen to eighteen feet square, and there was no separate bathroom. It was quite adequate for an old man living alone, but I knew that many such tenement flats housed whole families. How did they manage, and stay sane?
A fire was burning merrily in the hearth and a hod of coal stood beside it. I noticed a tin bath full of coal under the sink. A very beautiful grandfather clock stood proudly against the opposite wall, next to a large wooden crate full of sticks and old newspapers. A heavy wooden table – the sort antique dealers would fight over today – filled the centre of the room, and some grimy plates and mugs were spread out on a newspaper. The room was full of old military photographs, prints and maps, and what looked like medals and trophies, yellowed with age and dirt. I concluded that Mr Collett had been a soldier.
Our patient sat down in a high wooden chair next to the fire, took his slippers off and placed his right foot on a low stool. He pulled up his trouser leg, revealing horrible blood-and-pus-soaked bandages. Sister Julienne told me to do the dressing, whilst she watched me. I knew everything had to be disposed of in the patient’s house, so I placed newspapers on the wooden floor. I kneeled down and started to undo the bandages with forceps. The stench was revolting, and I felt nausea rising as I struggled to peel off the layers of bandage, which were stuck to each other with slimy fluid. I let them fall onto the newspaper, to be burned on the fire. The ulcer was the worst I had ever seen, extending upwards from the ankle for about six to eight inches. It was deep and suppurating badly. I cleaned it with saline, packed the cavities with gauze soaked in flavine, and rebandaged. Then the other leg had to be treated.
Mr Collett didn’t complain whilst I was attending to his legs, but sat back sucking an old pipe with no tobacco in it, talking now and then to Sister Julienne. The grandfather clock ticked loudly, and the fire crackled and blazed. The siren of a cargo boat echoed through the room as I completed the second dressing and bandaged up the leg, with the quiet satisfaction of knowing that I had made this dignified old soldier more comfortable.
I cleaned up, saw that everything was burned, packed my bag, and Sister and I prepared to leave.
“Won’t you stay for a cup of tea, Sister?” he asked. “It won’t take me a minute.”
“No, but thank you; we have other work to do.”
I thought he looked crestfallen, but he said quickly, “Then I won’t keep you, marm.”
This old-fashioned use of the royal “marm” surprised me, but strangely it didn’t sound out of place.
“Nurse Lee will come to you each morning from now on.”
He laid his pipe on the mantelpiece and stood up. He was very tall, more than six feet, and stood very straight. He walked slowly over to the door and opened it for us, then bowed again slightly as we left.
Out in the courtyard the air smelled sweet and fresh. A horse-drawn coal cart entered, and a huge man jumped out, lifting a tiny child of about two or three onto the cobbles. The man strode through the courtyard calling in a distinctive and penetrating yodel: “Co-al, co-al,” the second syllables rising a perfect fifth from the first. The long strides of the man took him swiftly through the court and the little boy, running as fast as he could to keep up, tumbled and fell. As he picked himself up, he lifted his fluffy blond head, and in a tiny, piping voice called out: “Co-al, co-al.” A perfect fifth!
Women came out of many doors and hailed the coal man, who carried a bag, or half a bag, up the stone steps to the balcony where it was required. No one had a real bunker or space to store coal, so small amounts of half a hundredweight had to be bought frequently. Coal fires were to become obsolete due to the 1960s Clean Air legislation, but in the middle fifties they were the only form of heating for most people.
Inevitably, if you see a person daily in his own home over several months, you will cease to regard him as a patient and come to know him as a person. Treating Mr Collett’s leg ulcers took about half an hour, during which time we talked and, as old people can always remember the distant past more easily than they can remember yesterday, we talked about his early life.
Mr Collett was not a typical Cockney in appearance, speech or manner. He was much taller than average, and had a slow, thoughtful way about him. His quiet dignity and formal way of speaking commanded respect and I never presumed to call him ‘Joe’. He was a Londoner, first generation, and spoke with a London accent, but it was not heavy Cockney, typified by an idiosyncratic use of grammar and idiom. He told me his parents were country people from Sussex who had been tenant farmers. The family had been displaced by the Enclosure Acts of the nineteenth century and, unable to sustain themselves even at a subsistence level, they had drifted towards the city in search of work. They had settled in Croydon, where Mr Collett had been born in the 1870s, the oldest of eight children. His father had been a painter and decorator, and an unskilled builder’s labourer. He was often out of work, because in the nineteenth century painting was a trade at the mercy of the weather. Paints had no chemical quick-drying components in them and would take about four days to dry, so in wet weather no painting could be done externally, and the men were laid off. The building trade was in the same position, because cement would not dry in less than three days.
“But my father was a good man,” said Mr Collett. “He would not see his wife and children go without. There was always stone-breaking to be done for road-building and railway construction, and he would go to the yards and break stones all day. He would come home at night wet through, aching all over, with a few pence in his pocket that he had earned, and my mother would rub his back and chest with liniment and apply flannel soaked in hot mustard water to keep out the cold. He was a good man. He wouldn’t go to the pub and drink away his money, like many we came to see.”
Mr Collett shook his head in disapproval, and cut off a chunk of tobacco, which he proceeded to shred finely in the palm of his gnarled hand and stuff into a leather pouch, in which he kept a piece of apple peel “to keep the tobacco moist”, he told me. I was fascinated by this tobacco, called shag or twist, which was sold in lengths. Shag was the tobacco my grandfather smoked, and the smell of it filled me with happy childhood memories. Tobacconists kept long coils of it, perhaps two or three feet long, like a curled, black sausage, and a few inches would be sawn off and sold to a customer. I thought the smell was lovely as Mr Collett shredded it in his hand (or perhaps it was just an improvement on the usual fusty smell of the room), and I encouraged him to cut it up and smoke the stuff, which produced clouds of thick, grey smoke when a match was applied. Incidentally, shag was the same tobacco that men often chewed. You would see a lot of old men chewing away with toothless gums, sucking the last drachm of juice from the tobacco, after which they would spit it out.
Mr Collett always asked me to join him in a cup of tea, and I always refused, for two reasons: I had never been able to drink strong tea, the unvarying brew of East Londoners; but, more importantly, the thought of drinking anything from the filthy mugs that I saw on the table made me feel sick. Neither of these reasons could I tell him, so I always said that I was too busy. He accepted this, but he always looked sad, and once he just nodded his head quietly and swallowed hard, as though there was a lump in his throat. I could see him, of course, better than he could see me, and if he had known that I was studying his face, trying to read his thoughts, he would have stood up quickly and turned away; but I was packing up my bag and watching him at the same time. There was a patient weariness and sorrow written all over his strong features, which made me think he was lonely, and that my visit was the bright spot of his day. I didn’t like to leave him, even though it was always a relief to quit the all-pervading smell of the place.
Then I had a brilliant idea. Boiling water poured into those filthy mugs would melt the grease and accumulated dirt, which would then float to the top. If I asked for a cold drink, the dirt would remain stuck to the sides of the mug. It was foolproof. So I said that I didn’t like hot drinks, but would enjoy something cold. I was thinking of orange juice.
His face burst into smiles, like the sun coming out on a grey day. “That’s what you shall have, my maiden.”
He stood up, and went to a small cupboard near the sink. He fumbled about, feeling for the things that he could not see clearly, and came out with two hand-cut crystal glasses and a bottle of sherry.
“Oh no, no,” I protested, “I can’t drink alcohol, not when I’m on duty. I meant orange squash, or something.”
His face fell. The sun went behind the clouds. I realised how much it meant to him, and how little it meant to me. The scales are unevenly balanced, I thought. I laughed and said: “All right, I’ll just have half a glass. But don’t you dare tell the Sisters, or I shall get the sack. No nurse is ever allowed to drink on duty.”
I sat down on the wooden kitchen chair by the big mahogany table, and we drank a glass of sherry together, sharing the secret of my disobeying orders. The light was dim, because of the dirty windows, but the fire glowed red, transforming the squalor into cosiness. Mr Collett’s eyes gleamed with pleasure, and I had the impression that he was so happy he could hardly speak. Two or three times he dabbed his eyes with a filthy old handkerchief, and muttered something about having a cold in the eye.
That moment was significant in my life, because I understood that he had wanted to give me something, but had not known how. A cup of tea was all he could think of. My refusal had been a rebuff. By joining him in a clandestine glass of sherry, we had shared more than just the drink: we had shared a conspiracy of silence. It obviously meant more to him than I could have imagined, and I felt all my youthful pride and arrogance crumbling to dust beside his humble, unaffected joy in my company.
That day was the beginning of a friendship that was to last until his death.
As I left and stepped out into the court, a woman with a shopping basket was entering the flat next to Mr Collett’s. She was old, but brisk and spritely. She looked up at me, challenge written all over her features.
“You seein’ vat dirty old man agen – phew!” She spat out the sound, with a hiss.
“Nasty old bugger, I says. I’m tellin’ yer, you Sisters oughta have somefink better to do than run around after him all the time. Phew!”
She spat on the cobbles again.
“Him, who is he, any road up? He’s not nobody, he’s not. He’s not one of us, he ain’t. Where’s he come from? – that’s what I wants ’a know. And look at ’ow he keeps ’is place. Filthy. It’s disgustin’, I says. He ain’t not got no right ’a be livin’ there among God-fearing folks as likes to keep themselves respeckable.”
She nodded her head emphatically. The curlers under her scarf stuck out at angles, making her look particularly vicious. She smacked her gums together, and repeated “disgustin’” as though she were stating the ultimate in moral depravity, and disappeared through her doorway before I could say a word.
I was seething with fury. What right had this woman to speak to me, or anyone else, in that way about her neighbour? I felt deeply protective of Mr Collett, as obviously she would not hesitate to spread such venom about him to anyone who cared to listen. It was insufferable. He was dirty, admittedly, but no worse than many. And anyway, he was partially sighted. The sherry had left me with a warm glow inside, and this gratuitous attack on a gentle old man whom I respected sent my blood racing. No wonder he was lonely, if he had this woman as a neighbour.