I made my way outside, clutching my directions, and stood waiting for the tram. When it came I was told it was the wrong one. My instructions were correct, but I was pointed in the wrong direction. The conductor advised me which way to go. Unfortunately, merely crossing the street wouldn’t do it. I was to go around the block and take a left at Dominion Square, which I could recognize by the Sun Life building.
A bit bewildered, I left the fortress of Windsor Station and passed the Alberta Lounge, which advertised the Johnny Holmes Band featuring Oscar Peterson, the Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie. Again I asked my way and finally succeeded in finding my tram not far from the Archbishop’s Palace behind St. James’s Basilica.
The tram came along on rail tracks with an overhead wire charging it up. I liked its reassuring noisiness, and boarded, making my way by the backs of cane seats. Straps hung suspended from the ceiling and gaudy posters warned: Loose Lips Sink Ships. Demonstrating this was an enormous hand with a swastika armband pulling under a ship of the line. I sat beneath “Rosie the Riveter” and laughed silently. The last few days Mama Kathy and Connie had been talking about the premium wages being offered to women by shipyards and aircraft factories in Vancouver. It wouldn’t surprise me if after all they did pull up stakes.
Opposite me was an ad for Wrigley’s spearmint gum, and scribbled across it in black crayon—not the KILROY WAS HERE that showed up wherever servicemen congregated, but Francophoned into KILROY ICI.
This was Mama’s French city, the city founded by Paul de Chomedy de Maisonnueve. This was sin city, beautiful, overwhelming, and subtly foreign.
I glanced again at my instructions. At the third stoplight I got off and found myself facing a stark, sprawling complex stretching several city blocks. I walked along the gray stone walls trying to imagine living behind them. Were they ever breached by sun? I passed an entrance marked Emergency, and a flight of stairs with a ramp beside it for wheelchairs. This seemed a good bet. I started up, my shoes clattering on the steps and my heart racing.
Inside I hesitated. There were statues of saints in niches, and at the rear a long counter under a wooden crucifix. A Sister was stationed there busily thumbing through sheets of documents. I waited for her to notice me.
“Student nurse, are you?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“You’re in the wrong annex.” She directed me to a smaller building partway down the street and a door marked Staff.
With fears and hopes in abeyance, I proceeded toward it. For better or worse here I was and here I would have to stay. “For the duration” had become a slogan. It was mine too: For the duration.
I followed a red arrow, painted on the floor, which led to basement stairs. There I paused to glance around a large bare room. Plank tables and benches were pulled out of the way against the wall, making room for half a dozen desks manned—I should say “womanned”—by middle-aged, overworked secretaries and a couple of supervising nuns. The desks were labeled A to F by little cardboard signs.
The Sister in charge was a jolly soul who welcomed me as she looked up from a ledger. “Yes, here you are. Forquet, Kathy. You’ve been assigned room 212. You’ll be rooming with Amanda Brydewell. The young lady checked in this morning. A double is rare. We’ve had to put as many as four girls in together. Your room is small, but you won’t be spending much time in it. If you’ll look at your schedule of classes—” Here she broke off, waiting for me to look.
But I had none.
“Didn’t you pick one up at table B?”
I shook my head.
“My dear girl, if you would simply follow the arrows—well, don’t stand there, get one now.”
I ran over to table B. But there was a queue, held up by one well-dressed young woman who was holding the schedule as if it was a menu and she was trying to decide which entree to order. I could feel Sister’s eyes boring into my back. Crouching a bit, I filched a stapled batch of mimeographed pages with a pink cover sheet.
While the Sister busied herself with my application, I checked the course list. Chemistry, Psychology, Anatomy, Biology, Pharmacology, Medical Ethics, Principles of Hygiene. Additional subjects had been added: Map Reading, Gas Warfare, Casualty Evacuation, Principles of Triage, and History of the Canadian Army. The blank spaces which at first I thought indicated free time, I saw, reading more carefully, were allocated to visiting the wards and making rounds.
I was amazed that from the outset we would have daily contact with patients. This was exciting, the best part. Perhaps Papa was right, perhaps I did have an aptitude for nursing. I hoped so. Athough we were two years into it, for me the war had just begun.
Sister Eglantine—I’d deciphered it from the scrawl on her name tag—gave me a key and pointed out the elevator. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I’d been in one—and then there was someone with white gloves sitting on a stool running it. I pressed the up button; grilled doors opened and I stepped inside. What an amazing world this was. Trolley cars and elevators, telephones in so many public places. And if I was to believe the pictures in magazines, electric refrigerators were replacing iceboxes. What next, I wondered? Of course, hand in hand with these amazing inventions were depth charges and land mines, torpedos and dive bombers, more deadly than anything in the last war.
Standing in front of room 212 I tried to insert the key, when the door swung open. Amanda Brydewell peered nearsightedly at me. “Kathy?”
“Amanda?”
She laughed. “It’s Mandy.”
It was a relief to like her. I liked her pretty face, I even liked her horn-rimmed glasses. They took the curse off her being so pretty. And here I’d been torturing myself with what-ifs—
But I could see she was a genuine person and really nice, even though she’d taken the bed by the window.
“Are you a First Nation person?” she wanted to know.
I laughed at her directness. “Yes,” I said, “I’m Cree.”
“How exciting. I’ve never known an aboriginal.”
“We don’t paint our faces anymore,” I pointed out. “We’re just like anybody else.”
She, it turned out, was the daughter of a prominent Toronto family. “If it weren’t for the war I wouldn’t be here. My family would never permit it. But I made it a point—‘service to my country, doing my bit,’ that kind of thing. And it won the day.” Her voice dropped to a confidential note. “I suppose I shouldn’t say it, I know it’s terrible of me, but I love the war.” Seeing my expression, she added hastily, “By that I mean of course, I love what it’s done for me. Being on my own is going to be so great.”
“Have you seen the schedule? It looks to me that we’ll have our nose to the grindstone most of the time.”
“On the other hand, there are all those young interns.”
Yes, I definitely liked the irrepressible Mandy.
Sister was right about it being a small room. The furnishings were minimal: army cots, two straight-backed chairs, one desk with student lamp, and a battered dresser of four drawers. At first we divided them, but she had so many more things that I wound up giving her three drawers and most of the closet.
“The bathroom’s down the hall,” she said. “We share it with the entire floor. Isn’t that the pits!”
Things here were regulated by bells. When the dinner bell sounded, I discovered the dining hall was the room in the basement where I’d registered. The plank tables and benches had been dragged into the center of the room. A Sister presided at each table. We drew Sister Mary Margaret, who ran what she termed a “taut ship.” Voices, she informed us, were to be modulated and good manners observed. Since we were seated at the far end of the table, Mandy didn’t adhere to these rules too strictly.
Before the meal was over she knew everyone. Totally at ease, she talked to the girl beside her and the one across from her and, reaching over to a girl several places removed, engaged her in conversation too. I watched with a certain wonder. Of course Mandy was a white girl amon
g white girls. I, on the other hand, knew it was only the war that made my being here acceptable. Even so, how did the others regard me? I felt I had a friend in Mandy, but did I imagine it, or were there hostile stares and whispering behind my back?
I took my cue from Mandy and laughed along with her when she made jokes about the food. Fortunately there was a lot of it, which in some measure made up for the fact that it was very plain fare: wholesome porridge, good-for-you vegetables, and a filling potato. There was a gravy that I thought best to avoid, and bread, butter, and jam for dessert. On weekends, Trisha, who had been here longest, reported, this was varied with puddings—tapioca, caramel, and butterscotch. She was waiting for a chocolate day, but so far it hadn’t come.
I was grateful to Mandy for sticking with me. We sat in the student lounge, chatting and laughing. Shedding my what-ifs, I joined in, enjoying the adventure with them.
What a nice group they were. Mandy’s contribution was to say we were all in the same boat. “Not a U-boat!” they protested, laughing. Almost 400,000 tons of Lend-Lease shipments had been lost. The best thing was to joke and make light of it.
It seemed I shared in Mandy’s instant popularity. What good fortune to have drawn her as a roommate. I tried to sort out my impressions of the other girls. Ruth, good-natured, with a mouth full of braces. Ellie, a bit on the plain side but with pretty auburn hair. Trisha, somewhat reserved. All starting out like me to help in this global emergency, to test our wings as persons, to take flight. This was a good place, I thought, to start doing something I hadn’t succeeded in yet—being Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter. The banter and small talk continued until the second bell.
AT NIGHT, CONSCIOUS of a Sister patrolling the corridors, we whispered from one bed to the other. Mandy was an only child and had had a nanny. Imagine! A child to have her own servant. And of course as a teenager she hadn’t worked. No drugstore for her; she sat on the other side of the counter. She and I would never have met if not for the war. Her father was a corporate lawyer, and they lived in a two-story house and did not, I’m sure, associate with Indians.
She was right about one thing: the war forced you to think in bigger terms; it brushed away prejudices and there was a feeling of equality as all were needed to pull together. We talked so late that it seemed I barely closed my eyes when the morning bell got us up. In robe and slippers I went down the hall to the bathroom. I was stopped by a piece of notepaper tacked to the door. WHITES ONLY.
Shock imploded in me as though I’d taken a depth charge. I ripped the paper from the door, balled it, and, entering the bathroom, threw it into the wastebasket.
“What was that?” Trisha asked, with a mocking grin.
I turned on her. “The Cree,” I said, speaking slowly, articulating carefully, “do not speak ill of anyone. They may take their scalp in the night, but they do not speak ill of them.”
The other girls watched from a distance, in an uneasy clump.
I continued in the same tight voice, “I will just say this one thing. I intend to stay here and become a nurse.”
Mention of our common goal broke the spell. To my amazement the girls crowded around me, stumbling over words in their anxiety to get them out, assuring me all together that they were behind me a hundred percent. Trisha, I noticed, slipped out to remove a similar sign pasted on the drinking fountain. I saw her crumple it in her hands. I went back to my room, my heart still pounding, still turning the incident over in my mind.
I didn’t tell Mandy, but by lunch she knew all about it. “I’m so proud of you, Kathy, for standing up to them. And most of them don’t feel that way, you know.”
“I don’t really care how they feel, as long as they don’t interfere with my plans.” I heard myself say this and thought, Wow! a new Kathy. I felt a flush of excitement. Was this new Kathy possibly an aspect of Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter, which had eluded me such a long time?
“Tell me about First Nation people,” Mandy was saying. “I really want to know, to understand.”
I couldn’t. I didn’t know that much about them. I disappointed her by having a white mama and papa and a white brother and sister. “The twins have lighter hair than you do.”
Mandy’s questions set me thinking. It was too bad to know nothing of the traditions of my own people. If I was to be persecuted as an Indian, I should at least understand why.
Three
OUR FIRST CLASS was a lecture, and we trooped into a large auditorium. There was a brief swearing-in ceremony, at the end of which we were told we were now privates, subject to the rules and regulations of the Royal Canadian Army. Our grades would be monitored, and we would have to maintain a passing average. But on graduation we would be commisioned as second lieutenants. I was conscious of a new feeling, pride and a sense of responsibility.
The assembly was turned over to Mother Superior, who welcomed us, first in French, then in English. The audience settled into respectful silence.
I hadn’t realized she was a small woman. Strength and energy seemed to overflow and escape her body.
She paused to look us over with piercing black eyes. When she had made her assessment, she launched into the body of her speech. “The history of nursing in Canada is in a very real sense the history of women in Canada. Marie Rollet Hebert was the first woman to provide nursing care. In l642 another woman, Jeanne Mance, established the first hospital here in Ville-Marie.
“Our order, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, eventually added an orphanage and dispensed free health care, funded in part by philanthropy, but mainly through a brewery and a freight company that the Sisters organized and ran themselves.” She paused, daring us to laugh. No one did.
“The next hundred years saw nurses trained to serve as administrators, doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Canadian nurses first came under fire in the Riel Rebellion.”
I pricked up my ears at the mention of Louis Riel. I knew from Papa that my mostly French grandfather, Raoul Forquet, was his lieutenant. But I judged it would be as well not to mention that here. The past was very much part of the present in these cloistered walls. It would be prudent not to trumpet the fact that I was the granddaughter of a revolutionary.
“By the last war,” Mother Superior continued, “more than three thousand nursing Sisters served as officers. They were stationed in England, France, and Belgium, and around the Mediterranean. Forty-seven died under combat conditions.”
She paused while this sank in.
“Because you young women are to be serving in a wartime situation, the entire program has been accelerated. Instead of the normal three years, it has of necessity been compressed into two. And if you inspect your handouts, you will note that instruction in military matters has been added to the established nursing classes. It will require diligence and hard work on your part, but it is our hope that you will follow the tradition of your chosen profession with the honor and dedication that is the standard for the Daughters of Charity. I ask you to remember that the eyes of your country are on you and on this institution.”
Although I laughed and joked about it afterward with the others, the sense of awe remained. I explored a bit on my own, trying to memorize the layout of the hospital. Plaques on the wall each carried the name of a donor, and one, I noticed, honored a Brydewell. Was that my roommate’s father or grandfather?
The second lecture of the day took place after lunch and was given in the same hall. I tried, as I had last night at supper, to count heads. My best guess was there were around sixty aspiring nurses. We filed in and took our seats with a buzz of anticipation. The lecturer was not only a medical man, but a distinguished professor at McGill University. He strode onto the podium, a white-haired gentleman obviously brought out of retirement. “One of your young interns,” I whispered to Mandy.
He greeted us pleasantly and stated that he was going to commence with a test, “which is by way of determining both your courage and your observation. Now then,” he continued smoothly, “I have
before me a beaker of urine. Observe it closely.”
No one ever in my memory had used the word urine in public. It was indicative of coming to grips with the functioning of the human body. Which of course as a nurse I would have to do.
“Now,” the professor’s voice filled the auditorium, “please watch carefully because I am going to ask each of you to come to the podium in turn. At which time you will do exactly what I am about to do. Observe.” With that he dipped his finger into the vial of urine, then brought the finger to his mouth and sucked it.
A murmur of horror went through the room. Ignoring it, he invited us in the most cordial terms to come up by rows and repeat the experiment. Like stricken sheep we mounted to the podium and one by one dutifully filed past the urine in its clear glass receptacle and imitated his actions.
Each in turn, wincing a bit, stuck her finger in the urine and with a final shudder licked it. When my turn came I immersed my finger and, repressing a gag reflex, proceeded to lick the substance off.
When we returned to our places the professor rocked back on his heels and, brushing aside his white coat, hooked his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. “Well, young ladies, you deserve an A for courage, but an F for observation. I stuck a finger into the urine right enough. But it was the finger next to it I put in my mouth.”
A gasp followed this announcement. Mandy and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
There was more hazing from second-year students, whose chores we ended up doing, including bedpan duty. But I was not again singled out. The story of the Whites Only incident had spread through the hospital, and it won me, if not friends, at least respect.
THE HOSPITAL WAS a massive network of services. There were the pre-op and post-op patients, on which everything from appendectomies to bowel resections were done. There was a trauma center and a burn center. Of course, as first-year students we weren’t allowed near the serious cases unsupervised.