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Observations of an Orderly

<h2>III</h2> <h2>WASHING-UP</h2> The following substances (to which I had previously been almost a stranger) absorbed much of my interest during my first months as a hospital orderly: Coagulated pudding, mutton fat and beef fat, cold gravy, treacle, congealed cocoa, suet duff, skins of once hot milk: Plates, cups, frying-pans and other utensils smeared with the above: Knives, forks and spoons, ditto. I am fated to go through life, in the future, not merely with an exalted opinion of scullery-maids—this I should not regret—but also with an only too clear picture, when at the dinner table, of the adventures of each dish of broken meats on its exit from view. I have been behind the scenes at the business of eating, or rather, at the dreadful repairs which must be instituted when the business of eating is concluded in order that the business of eating may recommence. There were days when the ward-kitchen was to me a battlefield and I seemed to be fighting on the losing side. This was when our scrub-lady was ill or had "got the sack" and it fell to me, the orderly, to do the washing-up single-handed. Those patients who were well enough to be on their feet were supposed to help. (I speak of a men's ward, of course, not an officers'.) They did help, and that right willingly. Sometimes I was blessed by the presence of a patient with a passion for cleaning things. When there were no dishes to clean he would clean taps. When the taps shone like gold he would clean the hooks on the dresser. When all our kitchen gear was clean he would invade, with a kind of fury, the sink-room and clean the apparatus there. When this was done he would clean the ward's windows and door handles. Between-times he would clean his boots and shave patients in bed. The new army is thickly sown with men like that. They are the salt of the earth. I would place them at the summit of the commonwealth's salary list, the bank clerk second, and the business man, the artist and the politician at the bottom. At all events these were my sentiments when a patient of this type, convalescing, began to be able to help me with my kitchen chores. But it occasionally chanced that every single patient in the ward was confined to bed. It was then that I made my most intimate acquaintance with the catalogue of horrors I have cited. You behold me, with my shirt-sleeves rolled up, faced by a heap of twenty plates, twenty forks, twenty knives and twenty spoons, all urgently requiring washing. Were these my whole task I should not shrink. They would be nicely polished-off long ere one-fifteen arrived—the time when I should (but probably shall not be able to) leave for my own meal in the orderlies' mess. But there are two far more serious opponents waiting to be subdued—the dinner-tin and the pudding-basin. This pair are hateful beyond words. Their memory will for ever haunt me, a spectral disillusionment to spoil the relish of every repast I may consume in the years that are ahead. The dinner-tin was a rectangular box some three feet long, twenty inches wide and six inches deep. It was made of solid metal, was fitted with a false bottom to contain hot water, and was divided internally into three compartments to hold meat, vegetables and duff. These viands were loaded into the tin at the hospital's central kitchen. I had naught to do with the cookery—which I may mention always seemed to me to be excellent. My sole concern was with the helping-out of the food to the patients and the restoration of the dinner-tin to its shelf in the central kitchen. For unless I restored that tin in a faultless state of cleanliness, the sergeant in charge of the central kitchen would require my blood. The tin's number would betray me. The sergeant needed not to know my name: all he had to do, on discovering the questionable tin, was to glance at its number and then send for the orderly of the ward with a corresponding number. He was a sergeant whose aspect could be very daunting. I never had to come before him on the subject of a dirty dinner-tin. But he and I had some small passages concerning "specials" (separate diets ordered for patients requiring delicacies). Sometimes the necessary forms for the specials had been incorrectly made out by a Sister with no head for army accuracy in minor clerical details. Thereafter it was my unlucky place to see the sergeant, and put the matter straight with him. I have survived those encounters. I have survived them with an enhanced respect for the sergeant and the organisation of his large and by no means simple department. There were moments, nevertheless, when I approached his presence with a sinking heart. For if I failed to "get round" him in the matter of coaxing another special for a patient, there was Sister to placate on my return to the ward; and it was quite impossible to persuade Sister that she could have made a mistake with her diet sheets, or, if she had, that it was of any consequence. The dinner-tin was somewhat larger than the sink in which I was supposed to wash it. It was also very heavy. When full of food, and its false bottom charged with hot water, I could only just lift it, and my progress down the ward, carrying it from the trolley in the corridor to the ward-kitchen, was a perilous and perspiring shuffle. As soon as all the patients had been served I placed any left-over slices of meat in the larder: these would be eaten at tea. Then I drained out the hot water from the false bottom. Then (but only after experience had given me wisdom) I ran hot water from the geyser tap into the now empty meat, vegetable and duff compartments, and gave them a hurried swill: this to rid them of the pestilent dregs of fatty material which would otherwise have dried and glued themselves to the floor of the tin. The latter had now to be put on one side, for I must be back in the ward attending to my diners. Only when they had finished their meal, and their bed-tables had been removed, folded up and placed neatly behind each bed, could I tackle the tin in earnest. I abhor dabbling in grease; but life is full of abhorrent dilemmas which must be endured; and the interior of that dinner-tin somehow got itself cleaned, every day, in the long run. During the early part of any given week I was almost happy over the job. For Monday was "Dry Store" day. On Monday, and on Monday only—and you were helpless for the remainder of the week if you forgot the rule—you could obtain, on presentation of a chit, blacklead for the stoves, metal-polish for the brass, rags for cleaning the floor, floor-polish, one box of matches, bath-brick, soft soap, and—soda. It is an extraordinary chemical, soda. Before I became a ward orderly I had no idea of the remarkable properties of soda. A handful of soda in boiling water, and behold the grease dissolve meekly from the nastiest dinner-tin! It was miraculous. When a pitying scrub-lady first showed me the trick I thought that all my troubles were at an end. Soda made the ward-kitchen seem like heaven. Alas, the supply of soda considered sufficient by the Dry Store authorities never lasted beyond Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday the dinner-tin had to be cleaned out not by alkaline agency, but by sheer slogging hard labour. And when at last I stood it on edge to dry, and thought to go off duty with a clear conscience, I generally found that I had overlooked the waiting pudding-basin. On the whole I am inclined to pronounce the pudding-basin a more obdurate utensil than even the dinner-tin. The pudding-basin, however, only appeared every second morning. On duff days (duff being served in the same tin as the meat and vegetables, though in a separate compartment) we had no pudding. By pudding I mean milk pudding—rice or sago or tapioca. Now a milk pudding, such as those my patients received, though perhaps it was looked askance at in the nursery, is food which, as an adult, I am far from despising. Rice pudding I have come with maturer years to regard as a delicacy. Sago and tapioca I still eat rather with amiable resignation than from choice. But any milk pudding, as I now know, has a most vicious habit of cleaving to the dish in which it was cooked. Rice is the least evil offender. The others are absolutely wicked. To clean oleaginous scum from a dinner-tin is not easy, but it is a mere bagatelle compared with cleaning the scorched high-tide-mark of tapioca or sago from the shores of a large metal pudding-basin. I have tried scraping with a knife blade, I have tried every reasonable form of friction, and I can simply state as a fact from my own personal experience (perhaps I am unfortunate) that those metal pudding-basins of ours would frequently yield to nothing less powerful than sandpaper. I need scarcely say that sandpaper was not supplied by the deities of the Dry Store. Sandpaper did not come within their purview. It had no recognised use in hospital. Therefore it did not exist. But, observing that a succession of metal pudding-basins would be an insupportable prospect without sandpaper, I laid in a stock of sandpaper, paying for the same out of my own private purse. It was a cheap investment. Never have earnings of mine been better spent. Moreover, having once hit on the notion of giving myself a lift illegitimately, so to speak, I added to the smuggling-in of sandpaper a secret purchase of soda. Except that our scrub-ladies, each and all, discovering that the Dry Store's allowance of this priceless chemical had at last apparently been generous, caused it to fly at a disconcerting pace, and as a result sometimes left me short of it, my career as a washer-up afterwards became more comfortable. I shall never like washing-up. In the communal households of the future I shall heave coal, sift cinders, dig potatoes, dust furniture or scour floors—any task will be mine which, though it makes me dirty, does not make me greasily dirty. But if I must wash-up, if I must study the idiosyncrasies of cold fat, treacly plates, frying-pans which have sizzled dripping-toast on the gas-ring, frozen gravy, and pudding-basins with burnt milk-skins filmed to their sides, I shall be comparatively undismayed. For sandpaper is not yet (like the news posters) abolished; and soda—although I hear its price has risen several hundred per cent.—is still cheaper than, say, diamonds. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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