Observations of an Orderly | Page 2

she had taken me for a visitor. My explanation
dispelled her frowns. She was expecting me. Her present orderly had
been granted three days' leave. He was preparing to depart. I was to act
as his substitute. Before he went he would initiate me into the secrets of
his craft. She called him. "Private Wood!" Private Wood, in his
shirt-sleeves, appeared. I was handed over to him.
Herein I was fortunate, though I was unaware of it at the time. Private
Wood, who was not too proud to wash dishes (which was what he had
at that moment been doing), is a distinguished sculptor and a man of
keen imagination. At a subsequent period that imagination was to bring
forth the masks-for-facial-disfigurements scheme which gained him his
commission and which has attracted world-wide notice from experts.
Meanwhile his imagination enabled him to understand the exact extent
of a novice's ignorance, the precise details which I did not know and
must know, the essential apparatus I had to be shown the knack of,
before he fled to catch his train.
He devoted just five minutes, no more, to teaching me how to be a
ward-orderly. Four of those minutes were lavished on the sink-room--a
small apartment that enshrines cleaning appliances, the taps of which, if
you turn them on without precautions, treat you to an involuntary
shower bath. The sink-room contains a selection of utensils wherewith
every orderly becomes only too familiar: their correct employment, a
theme of many of the mildly Rabelaisian jests which are current in
every hospital, is a mystery--until some kind mentor, like Private Wood,
lifts the veil. In four minutes he had told me all about the sink-room,
and all about all the gear in the sink-room and all about a variety of

rituals which need not here be dwelt on. (The sink-room is an excellent
place in which to receive a private lecture.) The fifth minute was spent
in introducing me, in another room, the ward kitchen, to Mrs.
Mappin--the scrub-lady.
A scrub-lady is attached to each ward; and most wards, it should in
justice be added, are attached to their scrub-ladies. Certainly I was to
find that Ward W was attached to Mrs. Mappin. Mrs. Mappin was
washing up. Private Wood had been helping her. The completion of his
task he delegated to me. "Mrs. Mappin, this is our new orderly. He'll
help you finish the lunch-dishes." Private Wood then slid into his tunic,
snatched his cap from a nail in the wall, and vanished.
Mrs. Mappin surveyed me. "Ah!" she sighed--she was given to sighing.
"He's a good 'un, is Private Wood." The inference was plain. There was
little hope of my becoming such a good 'un. In any case, my natty grey
tweeds were against me. One could never make an orderliesque
impression in those tweeds. "Better take your jacket off," sighed Mrs.
Mappin. I did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet
plates. For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water.
Then she withdrew them. "I think," she sighed, "you an' me could do
with a cup of tea."
And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.
I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her
labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin's
part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree
reprehensible. But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest, and
diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who
discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is
seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter
of the law in discipline. Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing interludes,
toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never complained.
Her sighs were no index of her character. They were not a symptom of
ennui (though possibly--if the suggestion be not rude--of indigestion
caused by tannin poisoning). She was the best-tempered of creatures. It
is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have given Mrs.

Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do so. She
would, without a murmur, shoulder other people's jobs as well as her
own. Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front--it
was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier
son, said, "'E's in France; I don't rightly know w'ere the place is, but it's
called 'Dugout'"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her
sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work. A little
more or a little less made no difference to her. She had nothing else to
do, but work; nothing else