'Sister'

August 1916

We wash our hands of all responsibility for this series of contributions. The writer seems to us to become every month more outrageous. We are not surprised that he continues to preserve a strict anonymity.

SISTER

It was a corridorderlim whom we encountered at the entrance to X103, and, in the discharge of our high function, we ventured to detain him.
"Where," we enquired, "shall we find Sister?"
He regarded us with something of a truculent air. "Search me," he replied briefly. "I haven't got her."
His air of marked hostility was explained by his further remarks.
"Ticking me off," he exclaimed indignantly, "because she happened to find two of my white mice in the Dressings Box ... I wish to Hades it was winter!"
"... Winter?" we queried, slightly puzzled.
"I'd stop her coke," he said with simple malevolence. "Not a scuttleful should she see - not if it snowed icicles; not a ruddy clinker. As it is, I shall have to think of some other way to slip it across her. Leave it to me; I bet my spectacles I'll make her spit blood before the week's out. Look to it, my Bird of Paradise, look to it!" And the indignant youth departed.

Just inside the ward we perceived an orderlette mopping furtively at her eyes with her handkerchief. Our duty to our journal compelled us to make some enquiry as to the cause.
"It's the Diet Sheets again," she explained wearily. "Sister never can understand the difference between today's Diet and tomorrow's Extras. It makes Sergeant Peacemaker so cross, and I get told off at each end. You'll find her in there, making them out now.

It was with some trepidation that we found ourselves in the presence of Sister herself. A noble figure of a woman, planned on a generous scale, she seemed born to command - and be obeyed. On her table were spread a number of printed sheets, a dictionary, and a Lightning Calculator.
"I'm very busy," she said doubtfully when we stated our errand. "This Diet Sheet has to be in by 10.30, and I'm not half-way through with it yet. I never can get the bl..., the blinking thing right, somehow."
She regarded the result of her labours with a puzzled frown. "I know there's a mistake somewhere - seven and eight are fourteen ... How many 'g's' are there in 'egg'?
We hazard a guess, and quietly lead her back to the subject of our visit. "Tell us something," we begged, "of the personnel of the Ward. Firstly, as to the staff ... ?
"I should hardly call it a staff," Sister corrected us; "a gang of impudent, incompetent ... Well, what would you think if you found your Staff Nurse in the kitchen boiling eggs in the steriliser while the V.A.D. stood smoking a gasper and making glad eyes out of the window at the corporal of the Linen Store?"
With a brief expression of pained astonishment we turned to a subject calculated, as we imagined, to awaken more pleasing thoughts. "Your patients," we suggested, "what of the Boys in Blue - the lads of Loos and Suvla? Surely there you find your recompense?"
A hypercritical observer might have detected a grudging inflection in Sister's reply.
"I've nothing particular to complain of," she admitted. "They run much alike, I suppose, all over the hospital. There was one man," she added indignantly, "a one-legged man with a mouth-organ; I caught him playing it after hours - and he was saucy about it into the bargain. I got him sent to D Ward over that."
"For long?"
Sister's austere countenance assumed a still more grievous aspect. "He refused to come back!" she almost shrieked. "He said it was like a peaceful dream after my ward; said it reminded him of a little home he had in the country where he used to keep chickens. Wait till he does come back! Will I not tick him off ... !

We were distinctly conscious of a feeling of embarrassment, and it was with something like a sigh of relief that we greeted the entrance of the Mainorlawdly.
"Matron wants to see you Sister, at once," he announced with a cheerful grin. I shouldn't keep her, Sister; she's waiting for you now in her office, with her tongue hanging out. I think it's about that dose of Perchloride of Mercury you gave Robinson by mistake instead of the 2oz. Mist. Alb."

The corridor was unaccountably lined by a double row of expectant faces. On each was reflected the same gleam of pleasurable anticipation. Unconsciously the sentence which was formulating in our brain rose to our lips; "Who, I wonder, is going to get ticked off now?"
And, like the distant murmur of the surf where it breaks upon a sun-kissed shore, the answer floated back; "Sister."