Jennifer's literary journey from a life on the wards

FOR a decent, middle-class young woman intent on a career in the 1950s, there were three acceptable options: teaching, secretarial work or nursing.

Jennifer Craig chose nursing. She had wanted to become a vet after leaving Leeds Girls' High School with her School Certificate but, as women were deemed too weak for such work, she decided to become a nurse instead, to the great delight of her family, who told her she would "never be short of a job and the training is ideal preparation for marriage".

So it was that in 1952, Jenny Ross, as she was then, stepped through the imposing entrance of Leeds General Infirmary into a world that, in some ways, had changed little since the days of Florence Nightingale, 100 years earlier.

Now 76 and living in British Columbia, Canada, the retired grandmother-of-five has turned her experiences into the memoir, Yes Sister, No Sister, an evocative, often amusing account of an era long-lost although well within living memory, of a nursing profession and a post-war Britain on the cusp of change, the old order increasingly challenged and unsettled.

"What you must understand is that we require girls with dedication and strength of character and who can obey orders. Mistakes can cause the death of a patient," a fearsome Sister warned the nervous would-be nurses on their first day, adding grimly: "Most of you will prove to be unsuitable. I doubt if even half of you will finish training."

Training was indeed a trial, with the young women treated like a cross between primary schoolchildren and army recruits, expected to follow a strictly supervised routine, walking to the infirmary each morning for breakfast, then taking a bus to Roundhay Hall to start classes at 8.30am, bussed back to the Infirmary for supper at 6pm and then on foot back to the nurses' home. "You will walk in pairs, keep together and talk in subdued tones. There is to be no laughter," they were told.

They were expected to wear the uniform correctly at all times, even when dining in the nurses' home at night, duty and order in the 1950s outflanking both common sense and comfort.

The ward sisters ruled and, while some were fair-minded, many were not, handing out their displeasure, plus punishing duties and rotas, to those who failed to impress, as young Jenny found to her dismay.

Training began with simple duties, including preparing consomm and junket for patients on a light diet. "We had to be able to estimate the nutritional value of everything on a plate. Food, in my opinion, is the basis of health," Jennifer says now. "People have lost sight of that. Here in Canada, food is prepared in some off-hospital place like airline food, on plastic trays and heated up in a microwave."

As training progressed, Jennifer went out with district nurses to deprived areas of Leeds, where six houses shared an outside toilet. It was an eye-opener. "I have seen abject poverty in India," she writes (Jennifer's parents were living there, her father having been in the army), "but I did not realise it is also prevalent in my own country."

Chapters begin with a list of the rules and equipment that nurses had to learn by heart, such as the correct procedure for bandaging (very sensible it is, too). "It would be lost otherwise," says Jennifer. "It's really a memoir, but a history too, especially the surgical instruments in theatre. We had to learn that list in an hour or two and put a set together."

Matron was responsible for all aspects of hospital care, although it's a myth that nurses' duties included cleaning. The old-style Nightingale wards had beds arranged either side of a large, cathedral-like room.

"They only helped with the weekly ward clean to help get it over with. It wasn't part of their duties. I don't suppose we were any cleaner than today," says Jennifer, adding that she attributes the rise in bugs to the overuse of antibiotics, rather than general cleanliness.

There have been many changes since the 1950s, not least the fact that most nurses now are university-educated, leading to accusations that they are above what some regard as traditional nursing duties.

"Schools of nursing in the old days were attached to hospitals," says Jennifer.

"We didn't have a life outside of nursing. We were slave labour and there were disadvantages, but also advantages. We staffed the wards and worked on all the wards, and at the end of the training we were all technically very competent.

"Another thing is that patients don't get washed properly. They get their face and hands but they don't get bed baths any more," she says, explaining that she had recently given a bed bath to a friend, who had said how much more comfortable she had felt afterwards.

"That's what it did, it made people feel better."

That fearsome Sister was right, however – of the 33 young women who started out in 1952, only 13 remained when training finished four years later.

Jennifer gained her nurse's badge and became first a staff nurse at the LGI, and then a ward sister herself, although she was determined not to be the dragon some of her predecessors had been. Then, in 1961, at the age of 27, she emigrated. "Canada was advertising for nurses and it was really easy to get here. It was the Sixties and there had been a war, of course. There hadn't been the travelling until then."

She found some pleasant differences. "We worked shorter hours," she says. "I was a ward sister when I left, and I got paid three times as much, as a staff nurse in Canada."

There were opportunities for education, too. Jennifer, who is divorced with two children, furthered her own education in the Seventies, obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Nursing and a Master's degree in Education, followed by a PhD in Education. She finished at the bedside in 1975, continuing to work in nursing on projects for the nurses' association and public health. She now works as a writer (her latest book, Jabs, Jenner and Juggernauts: A Look at Vaccination, was published last year).

"I drifted out of nursing and found that academic life suited me, and that surprised me, because I was not held as any glittering, shining star at school, believe me," she says.

First published in 2002, the third edition of Yes Sister, No Sister came out last month and has become a surprise best-seller, now number three in the non-fiction paperback charts. The nostalgia factor shows no sign of diminishing.

And for all the changes that there have been in nursing since the 1950s, it's the aspects that have stayed the same that are the most compelling, chiefly the basic caring nature.

There may be fears that some modern trainees are choosing nursing now simply as any old degree course, but Jennifer is adamant that the compassion of today's nurses is just as strong as it was 50 years ago.

"It's never easy, whatever you do. There are technical differences, but whether you are putting fluid into or out of someone, whether you are

using a plastic tube or rubber, you are dealing with people in the lowest moments of their lives, and that hasn't changed.

"I am thrilled that they are just as caring now as I think we were, although they might not be running up and down as much as we were," she says.

"The young women and men who enter nursing today are more sophisticated than we were but, judging from my recent hospital experiences, are equally kind and caring," she writes in the new 2010 afterword to Yes Sister, No Sister. "I salute them... the lamp burns on."

Yes Sister, No Sister, by Jennifer Craig, is published by Ebury Press, 6.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop

call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage costs 2.75.