"You'll Never Make a Nurse"

Jan as a young nurse, Ayr, 1964

Jan Clyde is telling me about cycling through the Gorbals:

‘This was early 60s, the last days of gang warfare. Often there was trouble on the streets, and I remember feeling scared, but Sister would say, “Keep cycling. Look ahead. Don’t turn your head!” The thing is, they wouldn’t touch you because they knew you were there helping the community. They’d stop fighting to let you past.’ Jan laughs at the memory now. She was placed with the district nursing team in the Gorbals and would cycle out each day with her supervisor to attend the sick in their homes. ‘I had never seen deprivation like it. People had nothing – nothing but ten children – but they were lovely, and so grateful for anything you could do. The sister I had was terrific. I always say that I learned my complete basic nursing care from her.’

Jan is my neighbour on the Rosneath Peninsula. When we first met she’d just retired after more than forty years nursing in hospitals and the community. This year she celebrates fifty years a registered nurse. I told her that I was trying to write about nurses’ lives and she agreed to tell me some of her experiences.

Like many nurses I’ve talked with, Jan had close experience of illness in her childhood. Her father suffered the aftereffects of a severe fall at work, and became one of the first people to be given replacement hips. However, she credits her decision to become a nurse more to defiance than virtue. Jan, who has a flair for art, wanted to go into stage design, but her mother pressed her to get a ‘real’ job. The subject of nursing came up and her mother opined, ‘You’ll never make a nurse’ and that was it.

‘I was so naïve’, she says, ‘I thought it was all headaches and bandages. But I did take to it, and nursing has been good to me.’

Jan started nursing in an environment very different from today’s. Fierce ward sisters ruled and god help you if you were caught out, as Jan was, occasionally wearing nail polish or with too-high beehive hair or having a run in your stockings. The need for order was paramount. ‘But I liked the uniform, the stiff belt, the apron, you did take pride in it. It’s about respect, and having respect for yourself and your role. When they took the aprons away, and the caps, I just thought, I hardly feel like a nurse anymore.’

Working first at a hospital in Ayrshire, Jan was drawn to a surgical role. Having abandoned her early hopes of working in one kind of theatre, she spent seventeen years in another, as part of the operating team. ‘I like the drama, you see,’ says Jan, a light in her eye.  What she didn’t like was not knowing what happened to patients after they left theatre. Later, when working at a hospital in the Central Belt, Jan and other surgical nurses negotiated a system whereby the could visit patients in the wards to check on their recovery and talk with them. It echoes something I have heard from many nurses – the deep need to find out what happened next, what the outcome for ‘their’ patients was.

I can’t do full justice to Jan’s long career in a short blog post except to mention that she also ran an army medical centre, worked in a cottage hospital and spent the last fifteen years of her career as a practice nurse in a Glasgow community where she enjoyed the sense of continuity. ‘I was inoculating the children of people I had inoculated when they were small.’

Since retiring, Jan has re-connected with her creative ambitions and works as a textile and jewellery artist, but she remains a registered nurse and keeps in contact with former colleagues. Now her niece’s 19-year-old son has decided to enter the profession. ‘I tell him about life on the Nightingale wards and what is was like then and he looks at me as if to say, did you train with Florence?’

Jan is modest about her many skills and the thousands of people who have come under her care and passed out the better for it. At one point she uses the phrase just an ordinary nurse. I think that while the individual acts of nursing may seem ordinary to those that perform them, the accumulation of those caring acts over more than four decades is an exceptional thing.



Gorbals scene 1960s



Calling All Writers

sculpture: Bourrasque by Paul Cocksedge

Okay, not ALL writers. I’m interested in hearing from nurses (past or present) , based anywhere in the UK or beyond, who would consider contributing a piece of their writing to the blog. It can be a short piece of memoir, a poem, a story, and opinion piece. All I ask is that it is no more 600 – 700 words long and can fit (even obliquely) under the theme of ‘Nurse Stories’. You don’t have to be a published writer, just someone interested in reflecting your experience in words.

To start off this new section of the blog, I’m pleased to be including the work of some fine new voices here – Rosemary Mander, Deborah Ritchie and Corrienne McCullough – all individuals associated with Nursing Studies at University of Edinburgh. Just click on the ‘Writing by Nurses’ tab above to see their work.

It’s easy to get in touch – my 'nursingwriter' email address is on the top right under 'Our Project'. I look forward to hearing from you.

Professor Tonks

Tonks (centre) with some 2012 graduates

Josephine 'Tonks' Fawcett has been teaching in Nursing Studies since 1982 (‘Of course, I was a mere egg at the time!’). When you talk to students, Tonks’ name arises often – her humour, her habit of turning up during night shifts to visit her students, her perfectionism, her sayings. On first meeting, I was struck by her lithe energy and the individuality of her office – as much sitting room as workspace, with comfortable chairs, kettle ready for tea, and looking down from every wall and shelf, photographs and cards from past students and friends, an international web of nurses.

Tonks has just been awarded a Professorship at Edinburgh, providing an excellent opportunity to persuade her to submit to some questions.

One I have to ask – where did the name Tonks come from?

Well, I was the third girl from parents who really only wanted a boy. When I was born I was very dark, with ‘sticking up’ hair and my mother (a total blond) somewhat aghast, called me Tiddly Tonky. My eldest sister was known as Wimpy and my second sister Pepita (a mistake by my mother. She meant it to be Perdita) was called Pippity-Poppity-Poo, or Poo - though luckily that didn’t stick - and we once had a budgie called ‘Shivermetimbers’. It was all my mother’s doing; she was very creative with names! It wasn’t that Tonks was a pet name that stuck – it is simply my name’.

What for you is the core of nursing?

I always hope my students will see it as the caring understanding of each individual’s unique human response to the experience of illness (and health of course). Others would say communication – the heart of nursing. I would also add knowledge, always knowledge.

What achievements are you most proud of?

I am delighted by the professorship, and what I hope I can do with it, in a small way, as a catalyst for student learning. Also, Nursing Practice, the three editions of the book I co-edited with Margaret Alexander and Phil Runciman. (note: Nursing Practice was the first UK core textbook for adult nursing. The first edition was published in 1994. Grateful students refer to it as ‘The Bible’)

Who inspires you?

So many! My co-editors of Nursing Practice were, and continue to be, a great inspiration - Margaret for her energy and endless enthusiasm and Phil for her gentle ways and affirming understanding. Both are perfectionists. Also Annie Altschul, who was the nearest I had to a mentor (though she never called herself that) when I first started at the University of Edinburgh and who encouraged me to do my Masters in Nursing Education. I admired her capacity to be quite heretical at times in a way that only someone as respected as she was, could be; and of course all the wonderful students who go out into the world. So often when I write to them I find myself saying ‘…so proud of you’. They are an inspiration.  The patients also constantly inspire me with their courage and endurance and, again, my mother who taught me the value of resilience in the tough times and a little of how to ‘dare to be different’ - and to smile.

Which words or phrases do you overuse?

Gosh, probably too many. ‘We’ll get there’ a phrase so commonly said between nurses on particularly challenging days.  I give students lots of little phrases that I hope they will hold their heads like ‘Asepsis, Safety and Comfort’ –three all embracing principles of patient care and my three ‘Cs’ of bedside documentation – comprehensive, concise and (always)caring. And when the students first go on the wards and are nervous and a little unsure what to do, when everyone around seemed to be so confidently busy. I say, ‘Wash your hands, smile and circle the ward. Someone will need you’ Perhaps now I would be more likely also to add… find your wonderful mentor.

What was your first nurse uniform?

I first nursed on the degree course at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts) in London and the City University. My uniform had a wonderful cap, created from a large starched white square, an equally starched white apron, tight belt and detached collar with a brass stud that left a mark like a tracheostomy on your neck. I was smallish, and felt like I had been wrapped in a stiff white tube, but it really did give you a sense of yourself as a nurse and it somehow brought about a sense of mutual professional respect. The current universal uniforms, though necessarily serviceable, cannot have that ‘feel’.

Tonks (back row, centre) as a young nurse at Barts

Tell me one story from your nursing that sticks with you.

There are so many but probably one that has stayed with me from my earliest days as a qualified nurse at Barts was the day of the Moorgate tube disaster, when an underground train crashed into Moorgate station. I ‘grew up’ that day. I had only been a staff nurse for less than eight weeks, and at 8a.m. was preparing patients for surgery. The phone rang and the nursing officer (as they were called at that time) said ‘Are you ready to receive the disaster victims?’  Within two hours the whole ward had been re-organised. I saw the very best in people that day. Everyone pulled together, the nursing officers relinquishing administration priorities and literally ‘rolling up their sleeves’. One of our ‘firm’ surgeons particularly comes to mind, working in the darkness of the disaster tunnel to amputate a trapped woman’s foot. As well as the horror, it brought out amazing capacities in people. There was one young woman, a social worker, who had been badly crushed. We cared for her for six months but, in the end, could not save her. 
We can do so much more now.