I got on very well. I only missed getting a medal by four marks for being half an hour late—and I’ll tell you what made me late. We didn’t have buses or taxis in those days—it was trams from Hackney down to Seven Sisters Road and down to Amhurst Road. I was playing tennis that morning in the grounds of the hospital at Homerton, and the sister passed by and I was representing the nurses, being the one picked out to compete with other nurses at the hospital. She saw me and said, ‘Nurse Phelps, don’t you be late!’
And I said, ‘I won’t, Sister.’
I was enjoying my game of tennis—but when I went I didn’t realise that buses didn’t run and it was just trams, and I was a bit late and I started to run. I never ran so much in my whole life as I did then but I arrived half an hour late—and when I went in I was sweating because I’d run all the way. The matron used to say I was a good runner, and I got to the hospital and found the room. The sister was sitting there, supervising the nurses, and she pointed to the first chair, so I went in—boiling—and sat down. She never even came and gave me a drink of water. I started reading, and the first words I caught were ‘oculogyral spasms’, which I knew about, and I was writing and I went all through that paper, and I was bang on time. It was over and the bell went to stop, and, instead of going to the top, she came to me first to collect my paper. I was just on the last sentence, and she wouldn’t let me finish—she was really a nasty bit of work—because I could have completed that last one. I knew about oculogyral spasms. But she took it away and so I lost out on the medal by four marks, for being half an hour late. I got higher marks than the medallist in the practical and oral—but I still didn’t get the medal.
For nearly five years I worked as staff nurse at different hospitals, but I was never altogether content because, after a while, hospital routine didn’t satisfy me. It was the social conditions attached to nursing that got me down. In my early years, a nurse’s pay was ridiculously small and the hours terribly long, and worst of all was the snobbish and hypocritical discipline, which I thought an insult to any intelligent woman. It was just exploitation. Nurses were often spoken to by members of the senior staff in a tone no factory girl would have put up with. What irritated me most of all was that, on duty, a nurse was supposed to be a woman with enough brains to carry responsibility, but off duty we were treated like children. We were given hardly any free time and made to keep absurd rules, particularly about seeing men friends, and all because of the Victorian tradition that nursing wasn’t work—it was a noble sacrifice—so we could dispense with decent hours and pay.
I finished my hospital training—I came top in the hospital—then I went on to apply to voluntary hospitals. I applied to one of the best hospitals in London but I hadn’t had the secondary education for it. It didn’t matter what my hospital experience was, even though I nearly always came out top. Eventually I applied to Charing Cross, and they did take me. I asked to have a talk with the matron before the interview. She was a motherly sort, and I was candid with her. She said she could quite understand how I felt—and she said she would give me a chance. ‘You can go to the hospital training school and see how you go—but if you’re no good, you’ll have to leave.’ And that was it. I went to Charing Cross for my training, which was a wonderful experience, and that was the beginning.
I was getting on well, but then I became very, very ill and my mother was called. I’d been to see a friend in Brentwood and was coming home late—you had to get in by twelve o’clock at the nurses’ home from your day off. I realised it was late and I was going to miss my bus to take me to Hackney, and I ran when I saw the bus coming. It slowed down and then went on again, and I ran after it, and, as I ran, I missed it and slipped. I had a big gash on my leg. Nobody had seen me fall, and I knew it was my own fault. Then a motorist came along and said he’d take me to the hospital, but I said ‘no’—with my nurse’s discipline, I was afraid not to get back in time—so he said he’d take me to the house where I could get something to clean my leg and put some iodine and a bandage on it. He took me as far as Hackney and I met one of my night nurses and I explained to her. She said, ‘Come on, Phelps,’—they always called you by your surname—‘that needs proper dressing and stitches.’ The night sister came along, bound my leg, ticked me off and put me in the sickbay.
I didn’t think much of the injury, but after a while my temperature went up, and I thought my neck and face felt queer. When the doctor came, I told him I felt a queer stiffness at the back of my neck. He asked me if I was sickening for mumps, but when I told him I’d had mumps he left it at that. But that night the stiff pain got worse—at times I felt as if the muscles of my face were being pulled out of their sockets—and I couldn’t breathe. Early in the morning I had some kind of convulsion. Another nurse who had served during the war was also in the sick ward. Immediately she saw my condition she ran to the telephone, calling the night nurse, ‘My God, the girl’s got tetanus! I saw it during the war and you can never forget it!’
The night nurse came just as I had a second convulsion. The doctor came rushing in and there was a lot of telephoning for serum. Suddenly they were charging around like mad, sending to the lab to get tetanus antitoxin. They even sent an ambulance to collect it. There was talk of desensitising me, and I was given chloroform and morphine to ease the convulsions, but all the time I was conscious and in worse pain than I had ever imagined possible. While I was given a spinal serum injection, I had such a convulsion that my hands and feet felt as if they were being torn off.
I suppose this should have been the end of me, because the survival rate for tetanus, if not treated in time, is pretty small. For a week I was critically ill, but I don’t remember much about it. My mother was called and the matron said, ‘You don’t know what tetanus is, do you? Well, it’s lockjaw’, and the next thing [my mother] knew she was being given some brandy. I was very ill, but they got to me in time. Tetanus was very rampant in those days.
I returned from convalescing and told the matron that hospital routine had become empty for me. She was sympathetic and suggested I take a whole year’s rest from nursing. She also knew of my home circumstances and that we had no money, and thought I shouldn’t return home but look for other work. I didn’t know how to set about it, but when staying with my elder sister Violet, long since married, I was lucky enough to meet Mr Turner again. He thought I should try to study and suggested I apply for a bursary at Hillcroft College for Women in Surbiton.
I found the principal there sympathetic and understanding and I told her how I felt something was lacking in my present life, and how I knew nothing about social conditions, and above all how I had great difficulties in expressing myself—which I wished to get over. She listened very patiently. I hadn’t much hope, but not long afterwards I had a letter saying that, while no regular bursary was available, an unforeseen vacancy meant they could offer me a place, and with a second bursary from the Middlesex County Council I would be provided for.
They were well equipped for adult education, university and degrees. One tutor was Miss Street—who was very strong—she’d put the fear of God into you if you so much as looked at her. Then there was Miss Ashby, the Principal of Hillcroft College, a loveable, kindly, intellectual person, very gentle. Then Elsie Smith, who was a philosopher. They also took an interest and encouraged me, and they helped and influenced me a lot.
Miss Ashby took a special interest in me. She always called me ‘Penelope’, which wasn’t my name—it was Ada Louise—but it stuck. Elsie Smith also took an interest in me. Hillcroft was a traumatic experience, a place apart where I never knew what was going on in the outside world. In a way I just didn’t know how I was going to adapt myself, but I became great pals with Miss Ashby and her brother, Sir Arthur Ashby. He used to supply me with reading matter that I would never have got elsewhere.
That was 1934. I studied at Hillcroft College for one year, taking courses in English, economics, psychology and history. It was hard work for me but, in between spells of feeling very disheartened, I learnt a lot. At last I was also growing up, shaking off
