第18章 The Petition

By the spring of 1966 Adela Hastrey had been six years in the building and was a medical registrar, and she had learned what Effa Ivaline had told her on the first morning without ever putting it into a sentence, which was that a hospital trains the people inside it whether or not it means to, and that the training is in the small visible habits and not in anything a course can teach. The paper Pelham Druce had begun in the autumn went before the council's health committee that spring, and it recommended the district hospital at Staddleford and the closure, in stages, of the Marrowden, and it recommended, in the same careful sentences, that the ground at Alderfield, where the paupers of the old house and the old infirmary had been buried for a hundred years, be kept clear and not built on, because the graves could not be moved without a scandal and the scandal would not be worth the two acres. The committee was chaired that year by a councillor named Cordelia Okeford, who had come up through housing and had a name for being able to read a report she disliked and pass it anyway, and she read Druce's report and disliked it and did not pass it, and called instead for a public consultation, which is the thing a council does when it wants a decision to be made by somebody else. The consultation was held in the hall of a school at the foot of the slope on a wet Tuesday, and the hall was full, and the people in it were the people the building had served for sixty years: carters and mill hands and mothers and a good many old women who had been in the wards and had come to say so. The staff were divided, and not along the lines a stranger would have guessed. It was not the old against the young, because Effa Ivaline, who held the keys and the book and had boiled the ward's linen in her mother's copper before she could read a temperature, was for staying where the patients were, and Adela, who was young, who had trained in the new medicine and had been sent on a course to a hospital with a modern theatre, was for the new building and hated herself a little for the warmth with which she argued it. Effa said the thing that could not be answered. She said that the new hospital would be three miles from Craddon and would be reached by a road and a bus, and that a woman with a child and a fever would not take the bus at midnight, and that the whole history of the building was a history of the distance between a sick person and the nearest door, and that the building had been built on the wrong side of the city for exactly that reason and had spent sixty years being the nearest door, and that the two acres at Alderfield were full of the people who had died before it became the nearest door. Then Coline Marchen came back up the slope to speak. She was seventy-one and had not been inside the building for eleven years, and she stood in the school hall in a plain coat and said the thing that no one else in the room had the standing to say, which was that she had entered the Marrowden as a probationer the year before the first war and had left it the year after the second, and that in those years she had watched it bury a hundred thousand hours of work in walls that were now falling down, and that she loved it, and that a thing a person loves is not therefore a thing that should be kept alive at the expense of the people it was built to serve. She said that she had come to speak for the young doctor and against the sister, and that she had been both of them in her time, and that she was old enough to know that the two of them were both right, and that when both of the people who know the building best are both right, the decision has to be made on the figures and the figures have been made honestly. The reporter, Aura Pring, wrote it up for the paper in a column that the building clipped and kept in the office, and the column said that the consultation had divided the staff of the Marrowden, and Coline, reading it, remarked that the staff had not been divided at all, that they had merely been made to stand on two sides of a question that had one answer, which is a different thing and a harder one. The committee met in June and voted. It voted for the district hospital at Staddleford. It voted for the Marrowden to close in stages over three years and for a clinic to be kept somewhere in the north end of the city, the site to be named later. It voted to preserve Alderfield. And it thanked the staff, in a resolution, for their long service, which is the sentence a council writes when it has decided to close a building and does not want to say so in the first person. Adela and Effa walked back up the slope together in the rain, past the school and the tram stop and the bottom of the lane, and neither of them said anything for a while, and then Effa said the only thing she would say about it that night. "I read the label twice for twenty-eight years," she said, "and now I have to read the whole building twice, and I do not know which time I am on." "You are on the second time," Adela said. "Then God help the patients," said Effa, and they went up the slope to the wards, which were full, and would be full in the morning, and would go on being full until the day the doors closed, whenever that was, and that was the only part of the whole question that had not been voted on and could not be. ---