Becoming a Nurse
The first thing Madge did once her move to High Wycombe became permanent was to start looking for a job. In truth, her real ambition was still to become a hairdresser, but she knew there was no way to find the money for the apprenticeship. Instead, with the help of an impressive reference from Wiggins Teape, she quickly landed a job in the secretarial department with Ernest Turner, an electrics company.
There was an active social side to her job and Madge soon became friends with Stella Peaty, who was a few years older and spoke keenly of how wonderful it would be to help the brave, injured soldiers by becoming a nurse. Stella’s passion made Madge wonder whether she might also be able to do her bit once she turned eighteen, so the pair started attending Red Cross meetings at Naphill, the headquarters of Bomber Command, where they went on a series of first aid courses and learned how to deal with medical emergencies.
They were encouraged to volunteer as nurses, but the plans were hit by a strange twist of events. During the weeks it took for the volunteer paperwork to be completed, Stella fell in love with and married Eric Moorby, an RAF officer. Just days after the marriage ceremony Stella told Madge, very calmly, that she would no longer be going to the meetings for she wouldn’t be volunteering now that she was married. Madge was disappointed to be embarking on her adventure alone but she enrolled anyway and within days she received instructions to report to Stoke Mandeville Hospital to begin training as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse.
‘Good on you, my girl,’ said her mum. ‘Although I’ll be incredibly sad to see you moving away to live in the nurses’ home but you won’t be far.’ Lily looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what, I was never too keen on that Stella. I think you’ll make some much nicer friends at Stoke Mandeville. And by the way, there’s something I want to say.’
‘You’ve worried me a bit now,’ said Madge. ‘What is it?’
‘Only that your dad would have been ever so proud of the way you’re doing your bit for the country,’ replied a beaming Lily before giving her a hug.
On the morning Madge first reported for training at Stoke Mandeville towards the end of 1941, she woke with a sense of nervous excitement. She couldn’t wait to get started but she also seemed unable to control the feeling of butterflies in her stomach. She managed to eat only half a slice of toast, before slipping on her coat and shoes and making her way to her new job.
The hospital was divided into two sections. One was for civilian patients from Middlesex Hospital in London and the other was for the ‘Services’ and was staffed in the main by Emergency Medical Service nurses, a unit set up at the outbreak of war in preparation for the anticipated mass casualties.
When Madge arrived at the hospital reception, a kind-looking lady with glasses and a beaming smile greeted her warmly.
‘Hello, dear. We’re so pleased to have you. You young ladies are doing wonders for this country. I only wish there were more of you!’ She grinned at Madge, who felt a surge of pride rising in her chest. ‘Follow me, dear. You’ll be working with civilians to begin with, and Rose will show you the ropes. She’s been a nurse for donkey’s years so there’s nothing she can’t teach you and she’ll be pleased to have you. She has two daughters right around your age.’
Madge quickly settled in, but after following Rose around like a little duckling for a couple of days, her first unsupervised job was to clean the mouth of an old lady, teeth and all.
For Madge, this turned out to be her worst nightmare! The task made her feel so sick she instantly retched into a strategically placed bucket and had to be very careful not to let the old lady’s dentures disappear into the bucket as well when she cleaned everything up. Madge was surprised how quickly she got over that little hurdle and realised with a rush of relief that she could do the job after all.
Not all aspects of life at the hospital went as smoothly as the work, though. Her very first shift just happened to fall on the day after the weekly issue of hospital rations. Nurses were given a little string bag which contained portions of sugar, jam, margarine and bread to be eaten as snacks. But when Madge went to collect her allocation there was only dry bread left, and no sugar, which was important to her!
Feeling somewhat dumbfounded, and incredibly hungry, she asked the storekeeper, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could have a little pot of jam as an advance on next week’s rations, could I?’
‘Sorry, miss, there’s nothing I can do because rules is rules,’ he said with a pompous sniff, and proceeded to dunk a biscuit in the cup of tea he was slurping behind the counter.
Madge was far too shy to ask other nurses if she could borrow some jam and margarine, so she ended up eating dry bread until the following week’s rations were handed out. At least I know the system now, she thought. I won’t let that happen again!
After just a few weeks treating civilians, Madge was secretly relieved when the head nurse took her aside and said she would be transferred to the services section of the hospital. It was really just a hop across the corridor so Madge didn’t think it could be that different and was surprised when she realised that the EMS nurses, which made up the majority, were mostly much older than her. She was in the middle of her first rounds when a tall, broad sister with a heavily starched white cap pulled well down over her forehead and rosy-red cheeks marched into the ward like a ship in full sail. Madge stopped still with her mouth open.
‘Right then, you must be Graves,’ the sister said with an Irish accent. ‘I see you’ve got yourself stuck in already so you’ll do fine here, eh? You can call me Sister Crowley.’
Madge soon noticed that she was not the only one in awe of Sister Crowley’s presence. Whenever she walked into a room not only the nurses but also the patients, whether soldiers, sailors or airmen, would fall quiet.
Sister Crowley’s height and demeanour might have been intimidating but she had a twinkle in her eye and Madge learned that as long as you did what was asked, Sister Crowley wouldn’t give you any grief. Her ward had to be the best in the hospital, in the country even, and that meant the nurses had a lot to live up to. Sister Crowley made endless, exhaustive checks on the ward inventory and if so much as a flannel was missing a major inquiry would begin and every nurse would be quizzed until the item was accounted for.
She was a stickler for process and insisted that all patients should be tightly tucked in. The open ends of pillowcases had to be pointing away from the ward door and if the sheets’ hospital-style corners weren’t absolutely perfect, the beds had to be made again. Everything had to be spick and span for Matron’s round. Or else!
Madge smiled when Victoria, another trainee, told her that there was no Christmas Day respite for nurses on Sister Crowley’s ward. Instead they were instructed to make sure it was ‘the best decorated and happiest in the whole hospital’. Not even the young doctors dared to argue with her once they had been told it was their turn to carve the turkey. She made it clear to everyone that the patients came first under all circumstances.
The demands of ‘HMS Crowley’, as the girls nicknamed her, were the furthest thing from Madge’s mind some weeks later as dawn began to rise after an exhausting night on the men’s surgical ward, one of ten wards in the services section of the hospital. It was one of her favourites because even though many of the soldiers were recovering from serious injuries they were endlessly cheerful.
Even at the end of a busy shift, Madge still had a long list of tasks to complete. Many patients needed help to wash and there could be thirty in the ward with only Madge to look after them. On one particular night she realised she didn’t know where to begin – bedpans and bottles had to be cleaned and sterilised, temperatures needed to be taken and tea and toast for breakfast prepared. Madge sighed as she remembered sitting in the kitchen with her mum, eating bread crusts, which Lily always described as ‘chef’s treat’ because of the work she had put in. On this occasion Madge had over a hundred slices of bread to cut but there was no one around to distract her from the boring job. At least there was a very large and sharp bread knife which should hopefully make the job a little quicker and easier.
Even though dawn had passed, Madge kept the ward’s lights off so patients could get as much sleep as possible. Suddenly the sound of footsteps, unusual at that time in the morning, made her look up and there, silhouetted in the doorway of the kitchen, was a patient who seemed disturbingly agitated. Madge recognised him as a man who had previously shown signs of instability after being brought in to hospital suffering from shrapnel wounds sustained on a raid in northern France. Eyes bulging, he marched over, shouting and yelling as he demanded the knife.
She had dealt with rude and grumpy patients before but never anything like this. Stepping back, she stuttered, ‘W-w-w-would you like a cup of tea?’
Madge kicked herself mentally for the question but before she could move, the soldier reached out, shook the knife free from her hand, waved it menacingly in front of her chest and was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
By then the commotion had woken several other patients who had seen the man running out into the hospital grounds and security staff instantly mounted a search. Later that morning he was found sitting peacefully in the sunshine on a bench in one of the gardens.
As Madge and a worried hospital security officer stood and watched him being led away to be placed in a ‘more secure environment’, she said, ‘I feel so sorry for the poor soul. He needs help. Who can blame him for being so unsettled after what he must have seen?’
‘I know,’ replied the security officer. ‘It doesn’t even bear thinking about what that poor boy’s witnessed.’
The incident had upset many of the badly injured soldiers on the ward because they had come to adore their little teenage nurse, who bustled in on duty with a cheerful smile every day. For the duration of that shift, there were touching words of comfort as they urged her ‘not to worry’ and ‘just forget about the whole thing’ but once they realised that this remarkable young woman had taken it all in her stride the teasing began.
Vera Clark, who Madge had met shortly after starting work at the hospital and who had quickly become a friend, knew every detail after tuning in to the most efficient communication system in all hospitals – the NGL (Nurses Gossip Line).
‘Are you OK, Madge?’ she asked, as they queued to get bowls of the thick and creamy pea soup that was such a favourite in the canteen later that day. The concern touched Madge as she nodded in answer to the question.
‘Well, if that’s the case, you’d better watch out for the bogeyman again tonight,’ laughed Vera.
The teasing went on when Madge’s shift started again that evening. ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an English woman,’ said a handsome young lance corporal as he lifted his heavily bandaged hands, pretending to be Dracula. Madge had written letters for him to his parents every week since he was brought into the ward and it was his way of letting her know just how concerned, and grateful, he was.
She was asked if the tea ‘really was that awful’ and was told never to be late with the breakfasts again ‘because you know what might happen’. It was affectionate humour that made her feel as though the boys on the ward were as fond of her as she was of them. They were treating her, without ever overstepping the mark, as one of the gang!
Madge joined in the laughter. If even the most grievously wounded soldiers were enjoying the fun and nonsense, she thought, then perhaps they could recover to lead a normal life once more.
Just when things seemed to have calmed down, Madge heard steps running along the corridor.
‘Watch out because HMS Crowley is as mad as hell,’ a laughing young Welsh nurse, Maggie, warned. ‘She’s on the warpath because that man ran off with a brand new pair of pyjamas from the inventory!’
For the last ten minutes of her eight-hour shift, Madge made sure to keep out of Sister Crowley’s way, just in case she was in trouble. At 8 a.m., having clocked off, she walked the ten minutes back to her room and fell into bed with her uniform still on. Well, she thought as her eyelids drooped, if I can survive that, I should think I can survive anything.
Over the next six months, Madge’s routine was much the same, although during that time she was taught how to use the many different medical instruments and types of bandages, and the kindest way to give injections. With the alternating shift patterns, there was not much time for fun but in her spare time she started going to the cinema in the town centre either on her own or with Vera or Phyl, who she’d also become friendly with. After six months Madge was also due a pay rise of one shilling, upping her wages to £1/11d a week. This was especially welcome as she was still paying off the cost of six thermometers that had broken when she put them in a jar that promptly fell off a shelf. That mishap took place in Madge’s second month on the ward.
Nurses had to pick up their weekly wages from Matron’s office, but by the time they got the money she had taken 2s 6d out for government savings stamps, which were issued in a bid to raise funds for the national coffers as part of the war effort. The Treasury never benefitted for very long, however, as the next time the nurses had a day off they went straight into the post office in Aylesbury and cashed the stamps in!
Just before her eighteenth birthday Madge woke up one morning with the worst stomach ache. She remembered how sarcastic Matron had been when Phyl had asked for the afternoon off because of her monthlies and thought better of staying in bed. Instead Madge joined the group following the surgeon on his ward rounds that morning. Matron was second in line, then came the senior nurses and, being the most junior member of staff, she was at the end.
That turned out to be the best place because the very observant surgeon took one look at Madge and baulked.
‘Get that nurse to sick bay straight away,’ he said. Matron gave Madge one of her most withering looks, almost as if it was all being put on. Madge flushed red at the reprimand but almost swooned with relief. Just two hours later she had her appendix removed by the very surgeon who had spotted how unwell she looked in the first place.
The following morning, she was still feeling groggy from the anaesthetic gas, which was administered via a rubber mask, when she woke to see Vera sitting beside her bed with a cup of tea and toast.
‘I’m glad to see you’re still here with us,’ Vera smiled.
‘I do hope I haven’t been an awful nuisance,’ Madge replied, wincing at the pain as she attempted to lift herself up to talk to her friend. She gave up and rested her head back on the pillow.
‘Hardly!’ Vera said. ‘You were good as gold on the night shift. But you won’t believe what Matron said.’
Apparently, as soon as the surgeon came out of the operating theatre, Matron had rounded on him and asked if the appendix had really been in a bad enough condition to warrant an emergency operation and take her nurse off duty.
‘You’ll never guess what he said!’ Vera went on. ‘He told her, “Madam, it was in such a dreadful condition that it is still aching in the jar,” and he said it completely straight-faced!’
Madge laughed so much that she almost pulled her stitches.
She recovered well from her operation but not quickly enough to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, which she spent cooped up as a patient. There had been fleeting visits from Vera and Phyl and birthday wishes from many of the boys on the wards, but as the sunny July afternoon wore on it had all the makings of the gloomiest birthday she could remember. The anaesthetic had taken a lot out of her and Madge was taking forty winks when Mum and the girls burst into the ward singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’, having caught the bus over from High Wycombe once school was finished for the day.
As there were ten wards in the services section of the hospital, when the new rosters went up there was always a scramble among the girls to see where they would be next. As luck would have it, after Madge’s return from sick leave she was allotted to the tightly knit team run by Professor Tommy Kilner, one of an elite group of brilliant surgeons who were practising what the hospital called ‘plastic surgery’. Along with Sir Harold Gilles he was one of just two plastic surgeons in the country in the early 1920s, and by 1940 he was still one of only four such surgeons.
Pipe-smoking Professor Kilner operated frequently at Stoke Mandeville on Allied air crew, many of whom had fought the Luftwaffe over ‘Hellfire Corner’ in the Battle of Britain.
‘Watch out, Graves,’ Clarissa, one of the EMS nurses, warned when the roster went up. ‘He runs his operating theatre like a military exercise.’
Madge soon found out, however, that he also loved a bit of fun.
Halfway through an operation in which he was reshaping the distorted features of a once fresh-faced young pilot he said to Madge, without looking up, ‘Please remove the patient’s glass eye now and put it in this wooden box. Don’t drop it under any circumstances,’ he added. ‘It will then need to be sterilised.’
Because the patient on the operating table was unconscious after the anaesthetic there was simply no way of knowing which eye was the glass one, and when Madge realised she didn’t know what to do, she felt very silly. She looked round in desperation for help and spotted one or two of the surgical team doing their level best not to laugh. Madge then looked over at the surgeon and realised he was almost smiling as well.
‘Very funny,’ she moaned when the penny finally dropped!
Professor Kilner made it clear to Madge and his hand-picked team that successful recuperation was a key element in patient recovery. The sight of young men walking around the hospital with new noses growing on their arms or stomachs became quite normal after undergoing operations that Professor Kilner called pedicle grafts.
Patients also had to wear an ‘aeroplane splint’ to keep an arm at ninety degrees while the skin that had been grafted grew straight and strong before being transplanted and shaped into a new nose. Madge found that she was in constant demand by men worried about the life-changing injuries and burns they had suffered. They weren’t always the most serious, but they were unquestionably the most disfiguring and, as a result, often the ones that caused the soldiers the most trauma.
The fact that Madge had seen these boys walking round the hospital grounds meant it wasn’t a complete shock when she first joined Professor Kilner’s team, and she found that her endless patience was a huge asset when she stayed behind, often long after her shift was over, to write deeply personal letters to girlfriends and parents for the incapacitated war heroes. She would encourage the boys to open their hearts and help them to add a signature and two big XXs.
Archie McIndoe, a New Zealander, was another plastic surgeon who worked at Stoke Mandeville as well as at the Burns Unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead. He was always very charming and courteous to staff and patients alike. He and Tommy Kilner were chalk and cheese when it came to the way they dressed for surgery. McIndoe dressed in white, from head to toe, whereas Kilner looked as if he were wearing dark green pyjamas, and his surgical cap was the same colour. The only white items he wore were his boots. Both, however, were unified in telling their patients to look upon their wounds as badges of honour, and believed that the key thing in overcoming their psychological problems was to concentrate on leading normal lives, as much as was possible.
As Madge’s experience grew, she was given the responsibility of looking after several wards and became ever more certain that nursing was the route for her. The pace at the hospital increased dramatically with the influx of casualties brought home to England as brutal fighting continued in the weeks after the D-Day landings. It meant Madge was so madly busy she was almost able to forget the bitter disappointment of being rejected after responding to Lord Mountbatten’s plea for nurses to serve in the Burma Campaign. When the instructions from the Military Department of the India Office arrived, however, with the news that she had finally been officially accepted, Madge was left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness.
She had witnessed acts of tear-jerking kindness as the wounded warriors in the services section strived to help one another. A soldier on double crutches hobbled the length of the ward to read a newspaper to a young airman with bandages over both eyes. Another with his left arm immobilised in a sling carefully wrote a note to an almost completely deaf and badly wounded lad from one of the artillery regiments, inviting him to play chess. The boys simply refused to give in. Their courage amazed her.
It was little wonder Madge had grown fond of this group of men who had every right to complain about their truly dreadful injuries, but simply got on with life instead.
She hadn’t cried when she ran for her life as the Luftwaffe bombed and machine-gunned the good citizens of Dover. Nor had she shed a tear when the deranged soldier threatened her with the bread knife. Now, excited as she was to go on her great journey, it broke her heart to receive news that she was to walk away from a hospital she had joined as an inexperienced teenager and where she had developed into a compassionate and efficient young nurse.
An overwhelmingly delighted Vera, along with Phyl and the switchboard operator were among the first to congratulate her. Madge received endless good luck messages and so many thank-you notes from her boys on the wards that although she wanted to be going closer to the action, where she believed she could make more of a difference, she truly meant it when she resigned from Stoke Mandeville Hospital ‘with considerable regret’.