Sisters of the East End Read online

  Before long we lurched into the forecourt of a vehicle dealer. I noticed two men come to the window and stare as three Sisters struggled to get out of a beaten-up Morris Minor. Once free of the car, Mother Sarah Grace unhurriedly and meticulously straightened her habit. It was something of a revelation to witness her outside her natural habitat: she had lost none of her dignity and authority. She stood naturally poised and still, until the dealers realised she was expecting them to come out and greet her. They hastily stubbed out their cigarettes and strode out.

  ‘Hello, madam … I mean your reverend … Majesty.’

  ‘Reverend Mother will do, thank you. And you are?’

  ‘Steve. I mean Stephen: Stephen Hawley, Madam Reverend.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Hawley.’

  There was a pause as Mr Hawley looked uncertain what to do next and Mother Sarah Grace looked at him intently.

  ‘Good morning. Can I help you, Reverend Madam?’

  ‘I hope so, Mr Hawley. Our youngest member, Sister Catherine Mary,’ she made a graceful gesture and nod in my direction, ‘needs some transport and I believe you may be able to help.’

  From somewhere inside the folds of her habit she produced a folded newspaper and, holding it out for inspection, pointed at a ringed advert for a white moped. My heart sank. I had presumed that, miracle of miracles, they were going to buy me a car. Goodness knows the Community could do with some new transport. I tried to quash my toddler-like disappointment.

  ‘Yes, Reverend Majesty. You are in luck! Despite massive interest, this little beauty is still available.’

  ‘I doubt if it is luck, Mr Hawley. Now I would be delighted if we could see the vehicle.’

  ‘Yes indeed, Reverend Majesty. Follow me.’

  We trooped around the back of the saleroom and there, down the far end, past all the Jaguars and Rolls-Royces, Fords and Minis, was a row of motorbikes and, finally, tiny mopeds.

  ‘Here we are, Madam Majesty.’

  He pointed to a white moped. It was no more than a bicycle with an engine stuck on the side and reminded me of one of my big brother Edward’s early purchases, which was affectionately known in the family as ‘the hairdryer’.

  ‘Well, it looks very satisfactory, Mr Hawley.’

  ‘Would you to take it for a spin, Reverend Madam?’

  There was a delicious pause. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. For a second it actually looked as if she might do it. I didn’t trust myself to look at Sister Clemence.

  ‘No, thank you, Mr Hawley. I will have to decline your offer today. But I think it would be wise for Sister Catherine Mary to give it a trial run. Would you be kind enough to lend Sister Catherine Mary a helmet?’

  ‘Yes of course, your Reverence.’

  He nodded to his companion, who came back holding a large white bike helmet. Then he stood in front of me looking awkward: he obviously expected me to take off my veil. Without thinking I started to untie it. I heard Sister Clemence gasp and Mother Sarah Grace quickly said, ‘No, Sister Catherine Mary. It will not be, and indeed will never be necessary for you to take off your veil. You will put the helmet over the top – I’m sure it will prove big enough.’

  It did indeed prove big enough. With great awkwardness, Mr Hawley’s colleague helped me to buckle it up under my chin and then they wheeled out the moped. Feeling slightly ungainly I swung my leg over and climbed on to the seat. Mr Hawley showed me how to start it, and suddenly I was off.

  It was an absolutely exhilarating feeling. ‘Lord forgive me the hairdryer thing,’ I chuckled as I spun round the backstreets of Hastings, habit flying, hands gripping the handlebars, head bent low for greater aerodynamics; I felt like Evel Knievel. No car could ever be this much fun, I thought as I hooted my horn at waving children. It was only with a great sense of disappointment that I realised I had gone too far to be seemly and I had to turn back. As I approached the garage I straightened my back, slowed down to a more appropriate pace and glided sedately into the forecourt.

  ‘Well, Sister?’ Mother Sarah Grace asked.

  During my time with the Community I had been practising my serious face and I used it now.

  ‘I think this will be adequate for my transport, Reverend Mother.’

  She examined my face carefully and then turned to Mr Hawley.

  ‘Well, Mr Hawley, it seems that this moped is the answer to our prayers.’

  From within the seemingly boundless capacity of her habit, she produced a wad of notes.

  ‘I think you will find this is sufficient.’

  Mr Hawley looked surprised. I wondered whether he had the nerve to count his cash in front of the Reverend Mother, but it seems he didn’t, and before I knew it I was off again, flying back to the Mother House on the seat of my new moped.

  So in the spring of 1960 I started my three years at the hospital. The nurses’ home was in the grounds. We each had our own small room, with a bed, a wardrobe and a desk. As soon as I had unpacked my constant travelling companions – the Daily Guiding Light, The Cloud of Unknowing and my sacred poetry, I felt at home. We were allowed to put up our own pictures. Most of the girls put up posters of fluffy cats or Cliff Richard. I restricted myself to my favourite icon of St John. There was a small kitchen and a communal sitting room that was immediately a hub of cosy jollity.

  On the first day I felt rather self-conscious. I stood out somewhat in my habit. This wasn’t helped by the prickly reception I got from the nurse tutor. As we went round the class introducing ourselves, she said to me, ‘Oh, hello. Perhaps you’ll get us all back on the straight and narrow.’

  The class laughed and then her smile disappeared.

  ‘Well, Catherine Mary, if you don’t mind we won’t be calling you Sister here because you are not entitled to be called a Sister here. In this hospital you will have to work to earn that title.’

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ I replied, although I could have pointed out that senior nurses were only called Sisters because they were originally all nuns.

  ‘You will have to wash your habit once a week, you know,’ she continued. I bristled and my usual attempt to pursue a course of unconditional positive regard failed.

  ‘I do have more than one habit actually, Sister. In fact I think you’ll find I have enough to make sure that I will be able to wear a clean habit every day.’

  The class was suddenly quiet and I said a prayer for greater patience but I was bristling with her contempt. In our novitiate classes we had been taught the history of our Community, and I knew that the Sisters of St John had played a central role in the transformation of nursing into a profession rather than a disgrace.

  Our founder Robert Bentley Todd’s aim was to create a rather superior, a pedigree if you like, kind of nurse. In an unusually enlightened approach, Todd decided that the way to do this was to treat the first Sisters of St John the Divine very differently to their peers.

  At that time, most nurses worked a 17-hour day and slept in the hospital attics and basements, or in cupboards off the wards. Their bedding was dirty and overrun with rats. They had to shop for their own food and cook it for themselves, eating in the wards. However, the St John’s Sisters and nurses were housed in an elegant Georgian mansion in Fitzroy Square, central London and had a housemaid, a housekeeper, a cook and a laundress at their disposal. They went to work early in the morning, but were expected back at St John’s House at 11.30 a.m. for dinner and to start their duties again at 2 p.m. They were to do no dishwashing or cleaning and their duties were exclusively looking after the sick. After 12 years’ service they were entitled to a pension and they were given a cottage in the country to use when they needed time to recuperate. Tea, sugar and beer was given to the nurses on night duty and regular day trips out were organised for them to Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens and London Zoo.

  Each Sister underwent intensive training for two or more years with classes given by the Sisters on hospital management and lectures on medical matters from doctors, who c
ame into St John’s House specially. Their moral education was seen as equally important. They had two services a day – morning and evening prayer taken first by the Chaplain and then, as Mary Jones wrested control, by the Mother Superior herself.

  Gossip was seen as dangerous. Mother Mary Jones forbade talking at meals except at tea, after which Sisters then had to retire to their rooms and the lights were turned out after half an hour.

  A uniform was introduced of a purple-and-white gingham check dress with a black outdoor cloak and bonnet for the nurses and a full habit of blue for the Sisters, covered by a bib and apron. The nurse’s cap was intricately pleated and ribboned, while the Sisters had a plain bonnet, tied at the chin with a huge bow. All the dresses had a short train to make sure that no unseemly ankle was shown when they bent over a patient’s bed. The nurses had a bronze badge and the Sisters a large silver cross, both of which had an Eagle of St John on them.

  At the beginning the nursing was on a very small scale – when it opened in 1848 there were three sisters, seven nurses and two probationers, undertaking a mixture of private nursing for the rich and nursing of the ‘deserving poor’. References and baptismal and marriage certificates had to be produced before the patients would be taken on by Mary Jones (she kept a scrupulous eye on the moral compass of her patients as well as her nurses). Funding came from annual donations from the great and good, and a box which was placed outside St John’s House, where the grateful poor put what little spare change they might have in return for services rendered.

  The Sisters’ private work helped fund their charitable work, such as the case of a poor woman in 1852 who was suffering from severe abscesses after giving birth. A nurse was sent out to her morning and evening in all weathers to change her bandages and bedding, and bring her a lunch of beef tea and jelly and eggs, and a glass of porter or wine at dinner. Another nurse was sent to sit nightly with a poor patient who was dying. She stayed for a fortnight with only two and a half hours’ rest a night, and when the man died, she stayed with his widow for six more nights, keeping her company and giving her a present of a pair of curtains when she left. And then there was the case of ‘Jane’ suffering from a very bad ‘ether’ from which her recovery seemed hopeless and which made her unremittingly ‘fidgety’. Due to the excellent care of the St John’s nurses who supplied ‘every aid and comfort’ she was ‘by God’s blessing restored to health’, but not before two of the St John’s nurses caught the infection themselves and had to spend the next 16 weeks being nursed back to health at the Mother House.

  As word grew about the Sisters’ skills, they found it difficult to keep up with demand. The Committee complained, ‘The popular idea of a nurse has unhappily become so low that respectable women hesitate to attach themselves to such a lacklustre society.’

  The shortage of Sisters was not helped by the high standards being demanded by the Committee – only one in 20 of those who applied were accepted into the Community. Alarmed, the Sisters advertised in The Times. I don’t know how successful this was, but the great cholera epidemic of 1853 proved to be a turning point for the Community.

  Cholera came to British shores via merchant ships at the start of the nineteenth century. The victim’s sunken eyes, blue-grey skin and prolonged, agonising death from vomiting and diarrhoea led to a general sense of panic which wasn’t helped by the fact that the disease spread so quickly – in six months in 1853, 11,000 Londoners died and no one had any idea what the cause was. In fact the reason why cholera was so deadly was because it was carried by a bacteria that lives in water and the Thames in London was effectively a giant sewer. Once the cholera bacteria had got into the water system, the whole city was at risk. However, the poorest areas were hit the hardest. The city was rife with rumours that the rich were poisoning the poor.

  Into this fevered atmosphere stepped the Sisters of St John the Divine. They were given the task of nursing the cholera wards of Westminster Hospital and greatly impressed the medical profession and the public with their caring and yet professional nursing of the suffering. Articles were written in the newspapers, suitable ladies of a high moral character flocked to join them and within a couple of years the Sisters were approached by King’s College Hospital and offered a contract to nurse the whole hospital.

  Within their first year of taking over King’s, the hospital governors spoke of the Sisters’ ‘gentleness, intelligence, affection, untiring zeal and self-denial’. In 1866 a report in The Lancet said ‘the nursing by the ladies is the very best that England has ever seen’ and the Sisterhood embodied ‘intelligence, keenest sympathy and refinement’. Within a year they were awarded the contract to nurse Charing Cross Hospital too. By 1872 they had to turn down offers to take over the nursing in hospitals as far away as Birmingham and Cambridge. Even Florence Nightingale said, after visiting, how pleased she was with the wards, how cheerful and ‘right’ an appearance they had. The reputation of the Sisters started to spread across the Channel. Before long they were visited by delegations sent by Napoleon III, the King of Prussia and Tsar Alexander II. The Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse came in person to see the Sisters, as did visitors from Milan and a number of women from New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

  St John’s House was the first nurse training institution to be opened in this country, four years before Florence Nightingale set up her own, later more famous, institution down the road at St Thomas’s. It was St John’s House and not St Thomas’s that set the blueprint for the training hospitals like St Bartholomew’s and University College Hospital, which were established in the following decades. With this knowledge under my belt, my nursing tutor’s hostility seemed a little misplaced. However, she didn’t tackle me openly again and I later found out that she’d had a bad experience at a convent school. In fact whenever I encountered a certain coldness from either the staff or patients there was invariably a bad experience in a religious school at the bottom of it, of which unfortunately there seem to be so many.

  However, after the first few days everyone seemed to forget my habit and people stopped trying to be polite around me. They even started offering me alcohol and cigarettes, and inviting me to parties; then they stopped again when they realised there was only so far I could and would go. There was a part of me that could never join in, really: that part was given to God.

  And that was a really important test. Did I mind that such a joyful part of me was reserved for someone who I couldn’t touch or hold? Someone that I couldn’t see, and, yes, at the risk of saying the unspeakable, someone who might not even exist? And I didn’t. There was no choice or dilemma in my mind. I remembered my anguish at missing my last parish Christmas party and that opportunity to get dressed up, have a drink, flirt with a nice young man. Barely two years had passed and I had no interest in these things; they seemed irrelevant. Coming to the hospital I realised that I had found a meaning and a purpose that transcended having fun. I knew God existed because I was experiencing Him. It is really hard to put into words, but it was something about seeing Him everywhere: in other people, in the world around me. In my solitary moments of prayer I felt Him alongside me, His love and His care. I felt blessed.

  Right from the beginning I enjoyed studying. Before we were allowed on the wards we had to spend three months in lectures and tutorials but unlike at school, I was engaged. There seemed to be a real purpose behind what we were learning and I had no problem applying myself. While around me my young companions spent the evenings at parties (and yes, the Sixties had started: I was aware that there was plenty of drug taking and sleeping around, there were even a couple of girls on constant rounds of antibiotics to ward off sexually transmitted disease). I spent my evenings at my desk marvelling at the wonders of the human body, trying to make sense of it and master how to look after it.

  It was a happy time for me. I had passed the test, my vocation was safe; indeed I surprised myself with how solid it proved (although I had a feeling Mother Sarah Grace knew I would be safe too, other
wise she would never have let me out into the wild). But saying that, still I enjoyed the camaraderie. It was a lot more fun and relaxed than I was used to. While I didn’t join in the parties, I started to find myself in another role – that of priest-confessor. My fellow trainees would pop into my room and talk to me.

  What I did miss was the intensity and spiritual companionship of the convent. I only had St John to share my spiritual journey. I tried to keep five daily Offices of Prayer and I turned my room into a mini chapel. I kept a cross in the table drawer beside my bed, which I brought out and propped up; a candle would also be produced and lit. Sometimes I would burn a stick of incense and of course I had my Bible and prayer book. Always aware of what would be happening back at the Mother House and as close to prayer time as possible, I would run back to my room to say my Office – early morning prayers were easy, Compline could be a bit noisy with the partying going on outside my door and of course at lunchtime I couldn’t give myself Communion. I wouldn’t have had time anyway. As it was I would be running to get there and back to say a few simple prayers, stuffing an egg sandwich in my mouth, robes billowing behind me.

  My fellow trainees complained about our workload. I found the opposite: I had much more free time than I was used to. Instead of half a day off a week, I had two whole days. Now I looked forward to a day spent digging the rhododendrons with Sister Rachel: it felt like coming home. One stark reminder of the difference between my fellow trainees and me came over the issue of our salary. At the end of the month there was always lots of talk about how they were going to spend their next month’s wages. Clothes, records, vehicles and even houses were being saved up for. ‘What are you going to spend your money on, Catherine?’ they’d ask. It didn’t matter how many times I told them, I didn’t see my salary: it was paid directly to the Community and shared out among all of us. They couldn’t get their heads around it.

  ‘Gosh, that’s hard! Do you really not mind? I couldn’t be doing with that,’ they’d say, shaking their heads. But I could no longer grasp the concept of money and the whole idea that you might actually only be nursing in order to earn money, and without it you might leave. At the time the opportunity to nurse felt like a gift.