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  • Published: 5 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784706883
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $26.00

The Language of Kindness

the Costa-Award winning #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

Extract

I didn’t always want to be a nurse. I went through a number of career possibilities and continually exasperated the careers advisor at my failing secondary school. ‘Marine biologist’ was one career choice that I listed, having visions of wearing a swimsuit all day in a sunny climate and swim­ ming with dolphins. When I discovered that much of the work of a marine biologist involved studying plankton off the coast of Wales, I had a rethink. During one summer in Swansea I spent time watching my great­great­aunt gutting catfish in the large kitchen sink; and once I went out on a boat with hairy, gruff and burly yellow­booted men who pissed in the sea and swore continually. I’d also eaten cockles and laver bread for breakfast. Marine biology was definitely out.

‘Law,’ a teacher remarked, when my parents, also exasper­ated with me by then, asked what I might be suited to. ‘She can argue all day long.’ But I had no aptitude for focused study.

Instead I looked towards other animals and conservation. I dreamed of doing photography for the National Geographic, leading to travel in hot and exotic locations where the sun would shine and I would wear a swimsuit all day after all, and live in flip­flops. I joined marches and anti­vivisection campaigns, and gave out leaflets in the grey­brick town centre of Stevenage showing pictures of dogs being tortured, rabbits having cosmetics tested on them until their eyes became red, and bloody, skeletal cats. I wore political badges that were outdoor­market cheap and came loose, stabbing me until one evening I found a tiny constellation of  pin­prick  bruises on my chest. I refused to go into the living room after my mum bought a stuffed chick from a car­boot sale and placed it amongst her ornaments, and instead ate my vegetarian dinner on the stairs in protest, saying, ‘It’s me or the chick. I cannot   be  associated  with murder.’

My mum, with endless patience, constantly forgave my teenage angst, removed the chick, made me another cheese sandwich and gave me a hug. It was she who taught me the language of kindness, though I didn’t appreciate it back then. The next day I stole a rat from school, to save it from dissection by the biology department. I called it Furter, and hoped it would live safely with my existing pet rat, Frank, which used to sit on my shoulder, its long tail swinging around me like a statement  necklace.  Of  course,  Frank  ate Furter

Swimmer, jazz trumpeter, travel agent, singer, scientist… Astronomy was a possibility until, at the age of twelve, I discov­ ered that my dad, who had taught me the name of every constellation, had made it all up. I didn’t tell him, though;      I still let him point upwards and tell me his stories, with his enthusiasm for narrative bursting into the sky. ‘There – the shape of a hippo? You see it? That’s called Oriel’s Shoulder. And that is the Bluebell. You see the shape? The almost silver­ blue colour of those particular stars? Fishermen believe that if you look to the stars hard enough, they will whisper the secrets of the earth. Like hearing the secrets of the sea inside a shell. If you listen hard, you can hear nothing and everything, all at the same time.’

I spent hours and hours looking at the stars to hear the secrets of the earth. At night I pulled out a cardboard box full  of treasures from underneath my bed: old  letters,  a broken key ring, my dead grandfather’s watch, a single drachma; chewing gum that I had retrieved from  underneath  a  desk, and which  had  been  in  the  mouth  of  a  boy  I  liked;  stones  I had collected from various places, and a large shell. I would stand in my bedroom looking up towards the stars, holding   the shell to my ear.

One night, burglars came to steal meat from our freezer, which we kept in the garden shed. Those were the days when people bought meat in bulk at car­boot sales, from men on giant lorries with loudspeakers and dirty white aprons. Those were the days when police would come at night to investigate frozen­chicken theft, and my star­watching  was  interrupted by police shouting. The universe had answered my shell­call: vegetarianism mattered. I am not sure which would have been a more unusual sight that night: a few young men carrying a frozen chicken and a giant packet of lamb chops, or a skinny teenager in a moonlit bedroom, with a large shell pressed against  her ear.

What I would do – and who I would be – consumed me      in a way that didn’t seem to worry my friends. I didn’t under­ stand then that I wanted to live many lives, to experience different ways of living. I didn’t know then that I would find exactly what I searched for (minus the swimsuit and the sun): that both nursing and writing are about stepping into other shoes  all  the time.

From the age of twelve I always had part ­time jobs. I worked in a café cleaning the ovens – a disgusting job, with mean women who used to make the teabags last three cups. I did a milk round, carrying milk during the freezing winter, until I could no longer feel my fingers. I did a paper round, until I was found dumping papers in dog­shit alley. I didn’t make any effort at school; I did no homework. My parents tried to expand my horizons, give me ideas about what I might do and a work ethic: ‘Education is a ticket to anywhere. You have a brilliant brain, but you don’t want to use it.’ I was naturally bright but, despite the tools my parents gave me and their joie de vivre, my poor school­work ethic and my flightiness continued. They always encouraged me  to  read,  and I was consumed by philosophy,  looking  for  answers  to my many questions: Sartre, Plato, Aristotle, Camus – I was hooked. A love of books was the best gift they ever gave me. I liked to roam and not be far from reading material; I hid books around the estate: Little Women in the Black Alley; Dostoevsky behind Catweazel’s bins; Dickens under Tinker’s broken­down  car.

I left school at sixteen and moved in with my twenty­ some­thing boyfriend and his four twenty­something male lodgers. It was unbelievably chaotic, but I was blissfully content working a stint at a video shop, handing out VHS videos to     the Chinese takeaway next door in exchange for chicken chow mein, my vegetarianism now beginning to wane, as I concen­ trated on putting on 18­rated films  in  the  shop  and  filling  the place with my friends. I went to agricultural college to become a farmer and lasted  two  weeks.  A  BTEC  in  travel  and tourism lasted a week. To say  that  I  had  no  direction  was  an  understatement.

I was truly devastated when, after turning up late for an interview, I did not get the job of children’s entertainer  at Pizza Hut. It was a shock when my relationship broke down, despite being only sixteen and completely naive. My pride meant  that  I  would  never  go  home.  No  job,  no  home.  So I  worked  for  Community  Service  Volunteers,   which   was the only agency I could find at the time that accepted sixteen­year­olds instead of eighteen­year­olds and provided accommodation. I was sent to a residential centre run by the Spastics Society (now called Scope),  earning  £20  pocket money a week by looking after adults with severe physical disabilities: helping them to toilet, eat and dress. It was the  first time I felt as if  I  was  doing  something  worthwhile.  I  had begun eating meat and  I  had  a  bigger  cause.  I  shaved  my head and lived in charity­shop clothes, spending all my pocket money on cider and tobacco. I had nothing, but I was happy. And it was the first time I’d been around nurses. I watched the qualified nurses with the kind of intensity that       a child watches her parents when she’s sick. My eyes didn’t leave them. I had no language for what they were doing, or for  their job.

‘You  should do nursing,’  one of them said. ‘They give you a bursary and somewhere to live.’

I went to the local library and discovered an entire building full of waifs and strays like me. I had been to my school library, and to the library in Stevenage, many times when I was much younger, but this library was about more than simply learning and borrowing books. It was a place of sanctuary. There was     a  homeless  man  asleep,  and  the  librarians  left  him  alone.  A woman on a mobility scooter was being helped by a man who had a sign round his neck that said he had autism and was there to help, reaching a book on a top shelf for her. There were children running around freely, and groups of younger teenagers huddled together, laughing.

I found out about Mary Seacole, who – like Florence Nightingale – nursed soldiers during the Crimean War. She began experimenting in nursing  by  administering  medicine  to a doll, and then progressed to  pets,  before  helping humans. I hadn’t considered nursing as a profession before,  but then I began remembering: my brother and I  purpose­ fully ripped the stuffing out of soft toys  or  pulled  the glass eyes from dolls, so that I could fix them. I remembered my primary­school classmates queuing for an anaemia check­up;   I must have bragged about my specialist knowledge, before  lining them up outside school and pulling down their eyelids, one by one, to see if  they  needed  to  eat  liver  and  onions;  and   the   endless  friends  with  sore  throats  whose  necks     I would gently press with my fingertips, as if on a clarinet. ‘Lymph  node.’

There wasn’t much written about what nursing involved,  or how to go about it, so I had no idea whether or not I’d be suitable. I discovered that nursing pre­dates the history books and  has  long  existed  in  every  culture.  One  of  the  earliest written  texts  relating  to  nursing  is  the  Charaka-sam·  hita, which was compiled in India around the first century bc and stated that nurses should be sympathetic towards everyone. And nursing has strong links with Islam. In the early seventh century, faithful Muslims became nurses – the first profes­ sional nurse in the history of Islam, Rufaidah bint Sa’ad, was described as an ideal nurse, due to her compassion and empathy.

Sympathy, compassion, empathy: this is what history tells us makes a good nurse. I have often revisited in my head that trip to the library in Buckinghamshire, as those qualities seem to have been lacking all too often during my career – qualities that we’ve now forgotten or no longer value. But, at sixteen, I was full of hopeful energy and idealism. And when I turned seventeen I decided to go for it. No more career choice changes and flitting around; I would become a nurse. Plus, I knew there would be parties.

A few months later, I somehow slipped onto a nursing course, despite being younger by a couple of weeks than the official entry age of seventeen­and­a­half. I moved into nursing halls in Bedford. The halls were at the back of the hospital, a large block of flats filled with the sound of banging doors and occasional screaming laughter. Most of my corridor was made up of first­year nurses, with a few radiographers and physiotherapy students, plus the occasional doctor on rotation. The student nurses were almost all young and wild, and away from home for the first time. There were a signif­ icant number of Irish women (‘we had two choices,’ they’d tell me, ‘nurse or nun’); and a small number of men (univer­ sally gay at the time). There was a laundry room downstairs, next to a stuffy television room with plastic­coated armchairs which the back of my legs stuck to, in the heat from the radiators on full blast twenty­four hours a day. I met a trainee psychiatrist in that television room, after inadvertently blurting out that I was stuck to the chair, and he became my boyfriend for a few years. My bedroom was next to the toilets and smelled of damp, and one of my friends once grew cress  on the carpet. The kitchen was dirty and the fridge was full of out­of­date food, with a note on one cupboard stating: DO NOT  STEAL  OTHER  PEOPLE’S  FOOD.  WE  KNOW   WHO   YOU    ARE.

There was one telephone in an echoing hallway, which  rang at all hours of the day and night. There were arguments, and the sound of heels running and of music being played loudly. We all smoked – cigarettes usually, but the smell  of weed was like a constant low­level background noise that you didn’t even notice after a while. We went in and out of each other’s rooms in a communal fashion, and our doors were never locked. In my room Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings of the chambers of the heart were on a poster above my bed; there was a shelf full of nursing textbooks and tatty novels, and a pile of philosophy books next to my bed. Plus         a kettle, a radiator that wouldn’t turn down  and  a  window that didn’t open. There was a sink to wash in ( bodies and cups), to flick ash in, to vomit in and, for a few weeks when    the   toilets   were   continuously   blocked,   to   pee   in.   To  my contemporaries, it wasn’t much; but after sharing a room in   the residential centre for so long, and previously a house with  a boyfriend and his male lodgers, it was heaven to me.

The first night, though, is always the worst. I had no idea what I would be doing as a nurse, and had begun to regret     not asking more questions of the nurses who had encouraged me to apply. I was terrified of failure; of the look on my  parents’ faces when I announced yet another change of heart. They had been shocked enough about my decision to become    a nurse: my dad actually laughed out loud. Despite my work as a carer, they still saw me as the rebellious teenager who couldn’t care less about anyone. It was a far stretch to imagine me  being  devoted  to kindness.

I lay awake that night and listened to the sound of my immediate neighbour arguing with her boyfriend, a moody, lanky security guard who, against all the rules, appeared to     be living with her. Even after they  were  quiet  I  couldn’t  sleep. My head was dancing with doubt. I knew I’d be class­ room­based for a while  at  least,  so  I  wouldn’t  kill  anyone  by accident, or have to wash an old man’s penis or experience similar horrors. But I was full of anxiety.  And  when  I went that night to the toilet, which was shared by those on the entire floor, I found a used sanitary towel stuck on the  bathroom  door.   I   retched.  Aside  from  how   vile  it   was, I remembered then that the sight of blood had always made  me  feel  faint.

My queasy nature was confirmed the following morning when we had our occupational health screening. Blood samples were taken from all of us. ‘To hold on file,’ the phle­ botomist announced. ‘In case you get a needle­stick injury and contract HIV. We can then find out if you were HIV­ positive already.’ It was 1994, and misinformation and fear about HIV were everywhere. The phlebotomist tied a tour­ niquet around my arm. ‘Are you a student nurse or a medical student?’ she asked.

I watched the needle, the blood filling the tube, and the room began to blur. Her voice sounded far away.

‘Christie. Christie!’ When I came  round,  I  was  lying  on  the floor with my legs up on the chair, and the phlebotomist above me. She laughed. ‘You okay now?’

I slowly got to my elbows, regaining focus. ‘What happened?’

‘You fainted, dear. Happens. Though you might want to rethink  your career.’

Twenty years in nursing has taken so much from me, but  has given me back even more. I want to share with you the tragedies and joys of a remarkable career. Come with me on the wards, from birth to death; past the Special­Care Baby Unit and the double doors to the medical ward; run through the corridors to answer the crash bleep, past the pharmacy and staff kitchen, and to Accident and Emergency. We will explore the hospital itself, as well as nursing in many of its aspects. What I thought nursing involved when I started: chemistry, biology, physics, pharmacology and anatomy. And what I now know to be the truth of nursing: philosophy, psychology, art, ethics and politics. We  will  meet  people  on the way: patients, relatives and staff – people you may recog­nise already. Because we are all nursed at some point in our lives.  We  are  all nurses.

 


The Language of Kindness Christie Watson

The Sunday Times bestselling memoir about nursing and an urgent call for compassion and kindness

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