Astray

My copy of Dante’s Inferno begins “I found me in gloomy mood, astray, gone from my path”.

In 1930 from rural Ireland, I had come to train as a nurse in the Royal United Hospital, Bath, an institution run by single women, the only visible male being the hospital porter; and did they faun over him!

I was alone. I spoke with an Irish accent. We had lectures in nursing practice, anatomy, surgery, medicine, where I had to lip-read their strange language.

“What am I doing here? Is this a mistake?” All I could do is to try. Friends I had none; by watching I began to learn.

Our salary was £20 each year. We had one day off each month and two half days, one a Sunday morning, and the second a Sunday afternoon. This was probably to enable us to attend church.

We were called at 5.45 a.m.; Breakfast at 6.30 a.m.; on the wards at 7 a.m.; dinner midday; tea 4p.m.; supper 8.15 pm; lights out 10 p.m. There were three compulsory roll calls; breakfast, dinner, and supper. We had three hours off each day.

Alas, my efforts were in vain and after seven months I was told to leave. I had come from a broken home; I was 18 and unemployed in a strange country.

The spontaneity of youth is great. I got a job as a housemaid whereby I got to understand the English way of life.

At the age of 20 I tried again in a smaller hospital, the Infectious Diseases Hospital, Portsmouth (now Milton Cross School). Two years later I started to train as a State Registered Nurse in St. Mary’s Hospital.

I nursed in medicine and surgery, rheumatics, arthritis; skin complaints; pneumonia; diabetes; tuberculosis; venereal disease; heart and kidney complaints; infectious diseases such as scarlet fever and diphtheria, both very serious, before anti-toxins were discovered. I nursed typhoid, and tropical complaints; sleeping sickness; caused by bites from the tsetse fly after a sojourn in Africa. We had no preventative measures in those days.

I still write to Helen, a colleague of those days.

Rose Lynch 2-May-2005