第16章 A Probationer of the New Kind

Effa Ivaline had been a probationer in Letham Ward in the spring of 1932, and in her third week she had taken the wrong bottle from the cupboard and poured a measure of the stronger mixture for the woman at the end bed, and the sister of the ward had knocked the glass out of her hand in the last instant and the woman had not been hurt. The sister had not put the mistake in the report and had not raised her voice, and at the end of the day she had told the girl the truth instead, which was that she would do it again, and that what would save her was not being careful but reading the label twice, every time, until the reading twice was a part of the hand and not a part of the thinking. Effa had read the label twice for twenty-eight years. She had done it as a probationer and as a staff nurse and as a sister, and she did it now as the sister of Letham, the ward her mother had boiled the linen for, and she did it in front of the probationers on purpose, so that they would see the sister of the ward reading a label twice and would think it was ordinary and would do it themselves. She had come up from Craddon with dark eyes and a thin face, and she had her mother's flat patient way of standing, and at forty-five she was the sister of the ward and had the keys to the drug cupboard and the poison register and the whole small government of twelve women and, that spring, thirteen patients. Coline Marchen retired in the autumn of that year. She was sixty-five and had been thirty-two years in the building, and the board gave her a clock and a paragraph in the annual report and a chair at the front of the room where the prizes for the probationers were given, and Coline thanked them and took the clock and did not make a speech, because she had learned from Selvine that a matron makes her speech in the round she walks and not in the room she is given. On her last morning she did the round as always, and at the end of it she stood in the door of Letham and looked at Effa for a while, and what she said was not a blessing and was not advice; it was the one thing she had carried out of the building and could hand on. "Read the label twice," Coline said. "You will have it now. The keys, and the book, and the woman at the end bed. Read the label twice and do not be kind in the way that is easiest for you, which is the way that costs the patient nothing and costs you nothing and does nothing. Be kind in the way that is hardest, which is to tell them the truth and then stay in the room while they hear it." She went down the stairs for the last time as a member of the staff, and at the gate she turned and looked up at the building, which she had entered at eighteen with her box tied with string and her mother's words in her ears, and she did not go back up the slope for eleven years, and the building did not miss her, which was the highest thing she had ever been able to say about the work: that she had done it so well that her going made no difference to the patients, because the people she had trained did it the way she had taught them, which is the only immortality a hospital ever gives anybody. The probationer who came to Letham that autumn was the first in the building's history to arrive with a council grant and a school certificate and the expectation, written on her face, that her work would end in a profession and not a post. She was a young woman doctor doing her house year, which had begun to be called a house officer's year, and her name was Adela Hastrey. She was twenty-three and had come up from Craddon, and her father had been a carter, and her mother had cleaned the Quillock, and she was the first of her family to have been in a hospital except as a patient, and she had not come to the Marrowden to be taught by a sister; she had come to teach, or so she believed on the first morning, when she stood in the middle of the round with her hands in the pockets of her white coat and told Effa that the old practice of putting two children and a mother into one bed in an emergency ward was out of date and ought to be ended. Effa did not argue with her. She took the young doctor down the ward and stopped at the bed where the two children were, and the mother was out at work and would be back at six, and the sister told the doctor, in a plain voice, what the ward knew and the books did not, which was that a mother who could come at six and put both children to sleep herself would go home at nine and come back at seven and keep the pair of them fed, and that if the ward took the children apart and put them where the rule wanted them, the mother would not come at all, and one of the two would be on the ward a fortnight longer and the other would go home to a cold house, and the rule would have been kept exactly. The doctor listened and said nothing and went away and came back the next morning and did not raise the point again, and Effa, watching her across the ward, saw her read a label twice, once out of caution and once out of imitation, and understood that the imitation would outlast the caution, and that this was how the building had always trained anybody, by making the good habit visible until it was copied by people who did not know yet why it was good. ---