From The Kitchen Table

Alright, now I am quite interested in the US elections. And Hillary is hanging on in there. Strangely enough, I can understand this apparently odd response to Barak Obama’s win. Hillary has been in this for the long haul and giving up on the dream, acknowledging it is over is almost unbelievably difficult.

The night of the General Election in 1992 was one of the most emotional of my life. Just before midnight on 9 April I had been at Woolwich Town Hall for the count, supporting Rosie Barnes, the SDP MP for Greenwich. We all of us knew that this was the end whether Rosie won or otherwise. There were only two people from the SDP defending seats, David Owen was not standing, the party was truly over. My head knew it but my heart had much difficulty in actually understanding that the cause that I had devoted most of my free time to for over 10 years had gone.

I was at the Town Hall to oversee the vote counting. And of course one began to get a feel for the way the vote was going. The atmosphere was almost volatile with supporters of the other parties hustling, spitting and swearing at us and as it became more apparent that our woman had lost we became more obdurate in response. When Rosie arrived we gathered round her, she looked at us and asked how it was going. We just shook our heads slightly and I remember her saying “oh well, never mind”. After the announcement, she gave a terrific speech, brave and gracious against a background of belligerent noise. A Conservative swore aggressively at a female colleague of mine. We cheered and screamed wildly and until my throat was raw.

After the count, we went back to our HQ in an old shop where all the supporters were gathered having watched the count on TV. I got back a bit before Rosie and her agent. We determined we would give her the most rousing welcome home. She had told her agent she would not cry. She walked in, we cheered, she started to speak and got as far as “well everyone” before she choked to a halt.

I have never experienced an evening like it. The wild, friable mood swinging from tears to laughter in seconds, and the desperate need to hang on to the community we’d built up over years, people who spoke the same language and had shared the disappointments and kept on going. Over the years we’d all seen our friends’ bemusement at our passion for politics which took us out on miserable Sundays to walk around the council estates, our descent into dullness as we obsessed about electoral systems and national insurance reform.

You don’t give that up easy. I bet there’ll be a few tears at Hillary’s party this weekend. And if they have the same sort of hangover that I had all those years ago, it will, at least be one thing they remember.

So, it looks like Hillary’s going to be handing in her pass after today’s primaries.

Politically minded friends keep saying how absolutely riveting the competition for the Democratic nomination has been. Which it has of course but which I’ve found very unsettling. I don’t have a deep enough knowledge of the US political scene to really comment but on a visceral level I really, really wanted them to choose a woman as a Presidential candidate. And I’ve found, perhaps because I have looked, a faint sour taste of misanthropy in some of the reports I’ve read from both the US and less so in the UK press.

I can’t say I’m sympathetic to the Clinton’s very close relationship with the Saudis. I remember a fair amount of the early White House problems when Bill was first in post as President when Vincent Foster committed suicide and the whole Arkansas old boys business. I also can remember wanting change from the tired and cynical established politics of Nixon and I know that if I were in my 20s I’d be looking for Obama, with hope, to bring about a better world.

Whether it’s just age or wisdom I couldn’t say but now I think that the mess that the new President will take over needs experienced hands – as Hillary emphasized, she can hit the ground running on taking office. But the truth is that I’m just partisan. I want to see a woman President and I hate the way that Hillary has been labelled (and often by women of course) as only succeeding because she was the President’s wife.

She is immensely skilled, knowledgeable and talented. I imagine she is also cunning, devious, manipulative and ruthless. That’s right. It tends to come with the territory and just being youthfully untouched by long-term politics doesn’t make you right or necessary capable, although it probably does make you more attractive.

When Margaret Thatcher was first Prime Minister, the late Jill Tweedie, a wonderful journalist wrote that although she was against much of what the new PM stood for, she couldn’t help but be thrilled when she heard the commentators refer to the PM as she who would be selecting her cabinet.

Me too.

At the weekend I returned to my alma mater, St Thomas’ Hospital in London to re-unite with other survivors of my set who began training together at the Nightingale School.

This is the weekend that is always set aside for such a meeting of the Fellowship because it is the nearest to the birthday, today, of Florence Nightingale who founded the school. It was a joyful and also poignant get-together. Poignant, not just because of the friends who weren’t there and the reuniting with people who see each other rarely but fall into conversation with ease and comfort within about 3 minutes. The other cause is that the school we that nurtured us closed in 1996 when it amalgamated with others at Kings College in the Strand and nursing training was taken away from hospitals. The badge we had to work so hard for and were required to return ‘ultimately’ to the hospital is no longer awarded.

In the central hall, along with the busts of the famous men of St Thomas’ are two display cases with badges returned and the names of the original owners and date of qualifying 1889, 1923, 1948 and more recent. A young workman was sitting on one of the benches and asked me what the “medals” were. I told him about the badge and how long one had to work to win one. He smiled with understanding “Oh yeah” he said. “You mean like McDonald’s”

Now that was fast food for thought.

I don’t normally do politics on the blog – there are just too many commentators out there and to keep up seems to mean spending a lot of time at the computer – and I am basically a bit lazy about that. But this week has been a real treat for everyone, not only anoraks like me.

There’s been a mass of comment about the implications for the PM, the government, London and the renascent Conservatives. Out of the swirl of opinion, fact, graphs, comment, observation and so on I want to pick a couple of thoughts.

A comment I heard on Radio 4 that the abolishing of the 10p rate of tax for lower earners thus increasing their tax burden is “a poll tax moment” for the Government. In other words, whatever is said to defend the measure, it will always be seen as unfair and that won’t recede from the public consciousness. Gordon Brown had been told what would happen to the tax of the lower paid – indeed, he must have realized himself – but because of the other measures he had put in place for poorer people he refused to budge on it.

Part of the problem is that it affects such a wide range of people. Even if his plan of reimbursement through cold weather payments or family credits were acceptable – and the family tax credit has been bungled horribly so many people wouldn’t think of risking it again – it means that working people are put in the position of petitioning the state for money rather than being able to earn and keep their own.

As well as the impoverished working families, retired people between the ages of 60 – 64 are affected, part-timers (like me) and young people. Many of the so-called “early” retirees are women who retired at the age of 60 as they are entitled and in some cases obliged to do, would be appalled at having to seek out state aid to make up for what they see as a tax raid on their pensions.

Many of the young people, like my son who is a recent graduate starting on the ladder, earn modest salaries but are already bowed down with student debt. They are told to save for a pension and are wondering if they will ever own a property or have enough money for family life. So they aren’t too happy with the Labour government, and nor are their families.

Secondly, if this is a poll tax moment and ends like the real one, then given the pattern of Government over the past couple of decades – long terms in Government with the opposition having to refigure itself – the Labour party is likely to be in opposition for about 10 years. I wonder what goes through the minds of the ambitious and talented younger politicians who have achieved high levels of office at a relatively young age – David Milliband, becoming a very respected Foreign Secretary, Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper, both in cabinet. It must be a difficult call. Wait in opposition (assuming you hang on to your seat) and hope for high office down the line or risk the next generation eclipsing you when the time comes. That’s politics. I don’t worry unduly about them though – I suspect they will be able to find suitable and well remunerated alternative employment should the worse come to the worst.

The English department at Oxford University is running a project archiving WWI memorabilia and it’s stirred me into doing something I should have started a long while ago.

My great aunt, Bessie Marks who trained as a nurse in 1908 was a WWI nurse posted to Whalley Bridge Military Hospital near Manchester and after her death (well into her ’90s) I inherited her autograph book from that time as well as her many photographs of hospitals she had worked in and nurses she knew from the early part of the 20th century. I also inherited her Queen Alexander nursing cape, torn at the shoulders where her epaulettes held it to her uniform and, delightfully, a little black woollen doll pinned to the inside.

So each day I scan in a few more pages. Many of the entries are in pencil and fading fast so I’m glad to have the impetus to record them. Some entries are angry, some poignant, several are upbeat and humorous. My great uncle, a trained artist, was one of her patients and has drawn a beautiful picture of Arab children.

There is also a note ‘Only a word of grateful thanks to one of the very best from a patients mother Amy Harwood’ and on the opposite page a note that has resonances.

When War is raging and danger is nigh
God and the soldiers the civilians cry
But when war is over and the wrongs are righted
God is forgotten and the soldiers slighted

It’s a wonderful collection and when I first came across it I was constantly surprised and thrilled by discovery. And not least by this drawing. It illustrates a little poem called “Tea Time, K1 ward”

I’ve never tasted tea so fine
The bread and butter is divine
The cake is topping, so you bet
KI I never will forget.

So lively and humorous, drawn by Alfred L Pike of the 17th Royal Fusiliers on January 15, 1917. Evidently Alfred had been taught ‘the line’. I’m glad to share him.

RITA MARSHALL

Since I posted my story about Rita Marshall I have found out that she died on 17 February. Two people have kindly left a message and Magnus Linklater wrote about her in his column in the Times. I can only say that I’m glad to have met her, sorry not to have known her.

There was once a book called the Shell Guide to London Weekends which featured ways in which Londoners could amuse themselves. Two sections always worried me slightly, mainly because I wrote them. Those sections are about ice skating (which I knew something about) and kite flying which I didn’t. Fortunately the book is decades out of print so I’m hoping there won’t be any disappointed kite-flyers writing to complain.

The editor of the SG to LW was a friend and he found he had too many subjects to cover so he farmed them out to reasonably educated and literate mates like me to do some research, find some names and write 250 words. The research required talking to people in the pub in case any of them knew about kite flying, then a bit of looking up stuff in the library and lot of looking up stuff in the phone book and some telephoning. I couldn’t help but feel I’d missed out on the good stuff, simply by not knowing about it.

In the Guardian last year there was a piece about bloggers who promote the cities they live in. The article felt a bit like my piece on kite flying -probably OK – workmanlike if not comprehensive. The selection seemed a bit random and rather small again like my kite flying and he missed out a couple of the sites I like.

My suspicions as to the depth of the research were heightened when I looked up the piece on-line and discovered that it had been amended because one of the sites had referred to Norwich in Vermont rather than Norwich Norfolk. Dear oh dear. Someone was in a hurry.

For the record one site I like is the Brummie Blogger which I visit a couple of times a month. I got interested for the obvious reason that one of my sons lives there and I like the city and so does he. Its got several good universities, two great art galleries, a lovely Georgian jewelry quarter, more canals than Venice (or so they keep saying) and also Harvey Nicks. As its in Birmingham I find it rather less intimidating than the Knightsbridge store – perhaps because it’s staffed by chic Brummies. The Blogger has, to be fair to the Guardian, moved more to diary mode than city promoter but nonetheless is a lovely fluent, natural writer who makes me laugh.

And the other is Diamond Geezer which I visit about every two months to remind me that London is still a city of hidden and half-hidden places (as well as a place of glittering hubris.) Geezer is a north Londoner I think while I’m a south Londoner by birth and inclination, or at least I was for the larger part of my life that I lived there. Now of course, I’m not qualified to say having swapped Catford for Oxford.

Well, it’s another year and not only have I not made any resolutions, I’ve broken them all already. As a Guardian columnist remarked, once the big one, stopping smoking, has been cracked one ought to be excused and so I do. My plan, and I put it no firmer than that, was to write a little and often on the site but hey, it’s been a whole month and more.

For a Christmas present I was given a thick book on Web 2.0 blogs and sooner or later I shall get down to seriously learning about leveraging the latest Web technologies and encouraging content development at the very least and goodness know what else it might lead to. Unfortunately, my laptop died during in 2007 and this means I can’t note down things as I think of them (which, to be fair, is normally when I’m walking to work) or in the kitchen cooking something. And another thing, my camera broke. Also, I’m a bit more mentally alert in the mornings so what with the work and no laptop or camera the odds against my plan are short. Still, so what. No-one died.

To start off the year though, I fear that I might be becoming reconciled with the country. Not, of course, the bleak, rain-tossed flatlands leading to an indeterminate horizon, the mist broken only by septic tanks and damp vultures. No, I mean the civilised villages with their very civilised pubs that abound in Oxon. So even a country-phobe like me can appreciate spending a Saturday morning going to a farm shop to buy decent, properly raised meat and then adjourn to a wood paneled country pub for a pub lunch comprising, in my case, seared scallop with spring onion champ (mashed potatoes and spring onion) with bacon. It’s called the Abingdon Arms and I’ve since discovered it was where Evelyn Waugh spent his honeymoon and in the village which inspired the chess match in Alice in Wonderland.

The other bit of country that beguiled was way to the north in Yorkshire when we stopped en-route to Leeds with the returning scholar. We just managed the last day of the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition and it was stunning. And the park is set in magnificent rolling countryside – although it helped that the sun shone. Worth a visit even thought the Goldsworthy exhibition is over.

When I lived in France a century ago I marveled at the small restaurants in town and out in the countryside which served such delicious meals at such a good price. After some thought I realized that the pubs are the British equivalent of the local eatery but then, way back in the early- late 20th century the food was awful and quite often the beer too. The wine could have cleared sewers of rats. But not any more. Despite some ghastly places I could name, the corner has been turned.

Simon Hoggart in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago was commenting on how British pubs seem to get better and better and are so much nicer to break a journey in than a horrid motor-way services. I’m going to start finding some for the Oxford Leeds run where I imagine we’ll come across large numbers of Guardian readers also transporting their offspring to places of learning at the beginning of term. But then, that’s not so bad.

I’e just been given a lovely present which pleases on several fronts. Firstly, because it’s from a friend who I’ve not seen for 6 years because she lives in South Africa and I don’t and secondly because it is a pretty thing which is designed for a Christmas tree. This means that after its festive outing it will go back in the box with all my Christmas baubles for a year until next time when I will bring it out and say ‘ah ha – Cornia’s angel’. Which will remind me of the person who gave it to me, just as many other tree adornments remind of friends.

The third thing about it is that it is recycled from a drinks can -in this case as so often in Africa, Coca Cola. As I’ve said before I am keen on wasting not in the hopes of wanting not (still to be fully realized unfortunately) and so I like the way that Africans use what it is to hand to make new things. I understand that the Cubans are way ahead on this sort of thing and can keep a 1940 Singer sewing machine in fine order as well as never allowing a little thing like a complete absence of replacement parts stop them keeping a 50 year old chevvy on the road.

My angel is called an Angel with Attitude and is sponsored by Angels against Crime. It was made by a Zulu school child living in Zululand and is part of a project to help AIDs orphans. So it comes with a story and I like that too.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU MIGHT NEED IT.

It occurs to me that given the consuming nations are going to have to stop consuming so much we could do better than looking at how the ‘make do’ nations manage. Recycling and inventiveness are obviously thriving and they will have skills that we have lost because we have discarded them as technology has made them redundant.

For instance, midwives of my generation were taught to listen to fetal hearts through a kind of trumpet which was placed on the abdomen. The midwives could tell by palpation and listening to that heart how the baby was lying and if there were any gross disorders, a skill that I suspect is almost gone now. And, of course, it was nothing like as efficient or effective as the technology which replaced it, but if the batteries all failed I’m not certain who could do the next best thing with the old ways.

I think that map reading is about to go the same way as GPS systems improve and get cheaper – although as my son found out a week or so ago, if they do fail, it can be quite a problem finding the motorway, especially in a snow storm. That’s the problem with efficient technology – it really is efficient and there’s quite enough for people to know about without keeping a load of unused skills, just in case. Perhaps it’s another aspect of not wanting to waste things -after all some redundant skills are quite hard come by – technical drawing or printing or map reading accurately and it does seem a shame not to use them. I bet the Cubans do. And when the environmental big bang comes, I hope they can remind us.

Reuters fellows who remember the dinner seminars will remember the man who cooked them. I really don’t think this could happen to a nicer person.

Just after the College kitchen had been refurbished Jim took me to have a look. I was astonished to see the ceiling in the main kitchen and said ‘you’ve got a hammer beam roof Jim’

‘1437’ said Jim with a nonchalant pride before pointing out to me a picture of the definitely unrefurbed kitchen in about 1750 with the hunks of meat spit-roasting in the great fireplace where now a sophisticated range and extractor system were in place. Call me sentimental but I loved the fact of cooks producing food in that kitchen for over half a millennium. And I doubt it has always been as good as the food they enjoy now. I’m so glad that the current chef will be a permanent part of the history of the College.

Picture: Student nurses with ward sister, St Thomas’ Hospital circa 1965

Here is quite a long story about the first journalist I ever met. It took place a long time ago in the middle of the night at St Thomas’s Hospital. I was, for the first time, the senior night nurse on duty which both excited and frightened me in equal measure. I was also on a ward where I had not worked before.

Opposite the desk where we put our sickest patients was a man who had returned from a long operation shortly before I arrived on duty. He was obviously very ill and in some pain. After taking the night report we checked his drips and drains and wounds. We sat him more comfortably in his bed, we gave him some analgesia and talked to him. As I turned to move on I heard him faintly speak and I leaned toward him to hear him whisper to me “thank you nurse.”

He was so ill, so weak and probably rather frightened but he still made that effort to thank me. At that moment I remember thinking that St Peter would have to wait because this one was mine for the time being.

That man was called Jack Marshall and over several long slow weeks he made a recovery. He was remarkable in several ways. Firstly, he had had a laryngectomy about 20 years before when his voice box had been removed to excise a cancer. He had been told that he would never speak again. But he did by inventing the system of speech known as oesophageal speech. This requires the speaker to swallow air and then force it back through the oesophagus. The speech is hoarse and whispered and also comes in short bursts of about five words.

He told me how it had come about. “Well, nurse – I used to drink whisky in those days – but after the operation – I took a lot of – soda in it. One day – I belched and -I just said pardon- out of habit – and the belch sounded – like the word. So nurse I practiced and – (triumphant smile ) I drank – a lot of whisky! He told me that he’d taught the actor, Jack Hawkins to use this form of speech (the only available to such people then) but that he was the most difficult pupil he’d every had probably because for an actor the loss of voice is such a profound loss.

And it was a loss for Jack too because he was working on the sports desk of the Daily Express and without a voice couldn’t use the phone or talk to other journalists or sports people. But with the use of much whisky -or so he said-he got back to the Express where, with the aid of a microphone attached to his telephone, he was back on the sports desk which is what he was doing when I walked him through the Valley of the Shadow and out the other side.

Later, he took me and several other nurses to the Express Building in Fleet Street one evening for a tour. He loved that paper and loved showing it off. And I doubt his reputation was damaged by being accompanied by half a dozen young women with very short skirts. We saw the news floors and the library and the canteen all busy and active as the first edition went to bed and then we went down Fleet Street to the Express pub. Jack bought me a whisky and introduced me to the political editor as ‘my nurse, she saved my life’. The political ed, digested this info and turned to me ‘so you saved his life?’ I smiled in what I hoped was a modest acknowledgement. ‘Don’t know why you bothered’, he said. Jack laughed, if not out loud, certainly enthusiastically. I thought it was hilarious and suitably deflating of any pomposity and it carried a degree of hospital-humour mordancy.

Whilst Jack was a patient of mine, he would greet me every morning and point out something or someone in the newspapers. He took the Express, of course, and the Times, both broadsheet. One day he called me over to show me a byline on the front page of the Times. ‘ That’s my daughter’. Rita Marshall, his daughter was the first woman to have a byline on the front page of Times and he was inordinately proud of her. One evening she came to me at the desk while I was doing the evening report and apologised for her father. I wasn’t certain what for but she said she was sure he must have been difficult so she’d thought it as well. I reassured her that we’d never seen anything but courtesy (although having pre-emptively apologised for my own father from time to time I did understand her motivation).

Jack died sometime in the later 70s and I haven’t come across Rita Marshall since. But I’ve never forgotten him (evidently) nor watching and hearing the presses roll under the magnificent old Express Building, or seeing the papers bound in batches loaded onto the vans to go to the stations and then on to the north. It seemed almost as exciting as my job. I realised that journalism didn’t necessarily mean spending a lot of time in Crewe recording weddings and garden fetes. And it was the first time I went home with a paper dated for a day that hadn’t actually arrived.