Life squeezed down to a metal bed

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Aug 17, 2007 

The summer I left school, 18 years old and waiting for exam results, I got a summer job working as a nursing auxiliary at the local hospital in the geriatric ward. I don't know why I chose the hospital. I could have worked in a shop, a bar, a restaurant. Maybe I fancied myself as Florence Nightingale. Anyway, I liked old people. I liked their gentleness, their patience, their stories.

Gentleness, patience - what a joke. That summer and that job turned out to be one of the most savagely illuminating of my life. The ward I was in was known as "long-stay " and I soon learned what it meant. The difference between this one and all the other wards in the hospital was that no one here was ever going home again.

I found the concept very shocking. These elderly women - it was a female-only ward - who had known families, homes, kitchens, babies, marital beds, now had their whole worlds squeezed down to a metal bed frame, a plastic-covered mattress and a bedside table. Of the married ones, most were widows and bafflingly few had children who visited. Many had suffered strokes, most were incontinent and dementia was like a brand new language that I had to learn on the spot.

As I learned to deal with bedpans and commodes, change soiled linen, help lay out the dead and rinse the urine off my spattered shoes at the end of a shift, what broke my heart the hardest was the way these women pined for their old lives and the familiar, comfortable fabric of their homes.

So, while dressing or washing or feeding them, I didn't get the fascinating dialogues of bygone days I'd (naively) hoped for. Instead I caught urgent, painful snatches - glimmers of daily lives that were gone forever. Elizabeth - 93, tall, slim and bed-bound - wanted to know when the plumber was coming to fix the tap. I had to hold my breath while pulling her stockings on because of the amount of skin that flaked off her legs and went up my nose. She talked of a boat on a canal and a man called Abe.

"Was Abe your husband? " I asked her hopefully.

"Abe's the plumber, " she (confusingly) said. "My husband doesn't know about him. Abe's coming to take me back soon. Back to the boat. "

Lucy was more worrying. She woke every morning screaming that the house was burning down. Often I'd arrive for the early shift and as I walked down the linoleum corridor at 6am, breathing in burnt toast and sickly hospital soap, I'd hear chilling screams of "Fire! Fire! " and know that Lucy was awake.

"Did she have a fire in her house? " I asked Jan, the youngest and nicest of the auxiliary nurses who chatted to me on her cigarette breaks. Jan shrugged and flicked ash into the sluice where the bedpans were emptied.

"No one knows much about her. She's got a son who visits about once a year - Roger. "

Once when I was feeding Lucy some mashed potato and she seemed steady and calm, I asked her why she always shouted "Fire ". She turned to gaze at me, eyes empty. She licked her lips.

"You ask Corrie what she makes of it, " she said. "Ask her where she left the matches. And if you find anything out, come back and tell me. "

I spooned some more potato into Lucy's mouth. "OK, " I said. "I will. Did Corrie set fire to the house? "

That, unfortunately, was a question too far. Lucy threw a hand out and caught me on the side of my cheek. Tough yellow nails left tracks which lasted for the rest of the summer.

A welcome contrast to Elizabeth and Lucy was Mrs Elton. (No-one called her by her Christian name.) Mrs Elton was pretty mobile - mobile enough to help serve the meals sometimes. It was nice to have a patient who didn't have to sit in a chair all day, who could carry on a cheerful conversation, who could even make her own way to the toilet.

Mrs Elton had lots of photographs of family on her bedside table - blonde toddlers in party hats, a plump couple with their arms around each other, a black-and-white snap of a man digging.

"Potatoes, " said Mrs Elton, when she saw me looking.

None of these people ever seemed to turn up in the hospital but Mrs Elton said it didn't matter because she was going home one of these days and I think she believed it.

"Why's she even in here? " I asked Jan, because it seemed to me she'd have been very capable of looking after herself.

Jan rolled her eyes. "Because she's barmy, that's why. "

"I don't think she is. "

Jan roared with laughter and patted my arm. She already thought I was a joke because I was going to university. "You're posh, " she said. "I don't know what you're doing mucking around in this place. "

I was being Florence Nightingale, that's what.

One day I ran a bath for Mrs Elton and called her when it was ready. "Let me just fetch my handbag, ducks, " she said. Mrs Elton liked to have her handbag with her at all times, another thing I took as a sign of normality.

But as she came into the bathroom, she stumbled at the door and dropped her bag. It snapped open and its contents fell out over the floor: half of the hospital cutlery was in there, as well as 50 or so pieces of her own faeces wrapped in newspaper.