Bittersweet Read Online Free PDF Page B

recollection, and she had forgotten to take strength of purpose and character into account at all.
    The first and greatest shock was not personal; it was the realisation that a hospital was a place to which you, a patient, were admitted in order to die. Fully one-third of the patients left a hospital through its morgue, and a second third returned home to die. A statistic given to them by a doleful hospital porter named Harry, who thus became a teaching authority for the four new nurses weeks before they met their instructor, Dr. Liam Finucan.
    “It’s in the patient’s eyes!” cried Tufts, horrified. “I feel more a minister to death than a healer — how can the other nurses be so cheerful?”
    “They’re inured and resigned,” said Grace, stemming tears.
    “Rubbish,” Kitty said. “They’re experienced, they know the best way to treat death is to persuade the patients that they are not going to die. I watch them, I don’t care how nasty they are to me. How they treat us isn’t important. Watch them! ”
    “Kitty’s right,” Edda said, her indignation saved for things like cut-up newspapers for toilet paper and towels too worn to dry wet skin — weren’t hospitals properly funded? “Grace, you’ve already exhausted today’s allowance of tears — don’t dare cry!”
    “That Nurse Wilson slopped a bowl of vomit on me!”
    “You copped the vomit because you let Nurse Wilson see how revolted you were by it. Govern your disgust, and it won’t happen.”
    “I want to go home!”
    “That’s not on the cards, Miss Piglet,” said Edda, hiding her sympathy. “Now go and change your apron before the vomit soaks into your dress. Pew! You do stink!”
    Yet somehow their first week passed; at the end of it they could clothe themselves faultlessly in their starched “cardboard”, even fold the absurdly complex pleated parts of their caps that looked like a pair of wings. The other nurses wore more sensible uniforms and aprons, including short sleeves, while the Latimers, as new-style trainees, were done up in more wrapping than parcels.
    The food, they discovered, was appalling for patients and staff alike, but they worked so hard that they ate everything fromwatery cabbage to lumpy gravy swimming in fat; the kitchen in their quarters, Sister Bainbridge informed them, was for making cups of tea, coffee or cocoa.
    “Nothing else, even toast,” said she, looming.
    The Rector had sheltered his girls from the more horrible and sordid aspects of his religious calling, and excluded the words incest, syphilis and perversion from their vocabulary. Due to climate and no refrigeration, the dead were buried in a closed coffin within twenty-four hours. So when, on their second morning, Sister Bainbridge showed them how to lay out a corpse, it was the first time they had seen or touched a dead body.
    “A syphilitic who raped his sister,” Bainbridge said, joking.
    Their response to this explanation was a blank look.
    “Keep your pride!” said Edda in a furious whisper as soon as Bainbridge moved away, laughing at their ignorance. “Remember that we are Latimers. What upsets us today will be old hat tomorrow — don’t let them beat us! No tears, and no down in the dumps.”
    They were perpetually tired in a way entirely new and very hard to bear; their feet ached, their backs ached, their joints ached. Everything taught to them by dainty Maude had to be abandoned; there was neither room nor time for daintiness in Corunda Base, whose superintendent was an arch-miser unwilling to pander to the needs of any and all entities save money, to which he was fused like a leech to a piece of vein-riddled flesh.
    April, May and June vanished in a thick fog of exhaustion that actually worked in the hospital’s favour. Not even Grace had the energy to think of quitting; the very notion of creating such a fuss reared as high as Everest, unattainable. They just endured.
    Edda held them together, convinced in her soul that