My daddy used to work in Lurgan Hospital and it was his best job ever. He was brought up posh, but due to the collapse of the linen industry when he was wee, he didn’t get to finish his post primary education at Inchmarlo Prep followed by Inst. He left school about age 12, knowing a great deal of poetry (for which he had little respect: “Hail to thee, blythe spirit, bird though never wert!” What’s a wert? He would say. He liked The Highwayman, “Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed” and “The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor” and “The landlord’s blackeyed daughter, Bess the landlord’s daughter,” and of course the highwayman himself, “And the highwayman came riding, up to the the old inn door.” There are a few years blank to me, because there was a terrible family tragedy and my father never, ever talked about the past, and my mother didn’t know him yet. By late teens, her version of events, he worked for the railway, was that he spent his whole time at the pictures or sitting on her back step while she worked hard and got a history degree and a decent job in Belfast. It was only to afford me that he settled himself and did nightclasses, had to go to London to do the exams for some reason, and became a Chartered Secretary. Don’t ask me. When people in my new primary school asked me what my daddy did and I said he was a secretary, well of course they all laughed and said men couldn’t type.
In Lurgan hospital he was in his element. He loved working with nurses, who he felt held up the sky. He hadn’t much time for doctors, whom he likened to the kind of car mechanic who lifts your bonnet and makes worried noises, taps a few things and then goes trial and error with what they hit with a hammer or pull out. His favourite person in the world was always the Matron, with whom he had many rows (the worst when she wanted to throw out a student nurse about to qualify because she found the boyfriend hiding under the bed. I took note of which side of the argument my daddy was on just in case it ever applied to me in any guise). He and the matron, however, cheerfully went in at night to set rat traps, stanch leaks or deal with a patient on the rampage. He just loved it. It was his hospital and every non-medical problem in it was his very own problem. I should also mention that he attended management meetings, and the doctors had set a wee school desk at the side for him while they sat round the grand mahogany. He didn’t settle for that and wriggled in. He described a management meeting when they were organising the annual report. They added up all the broken legs, the dead people, the mad people, the cuts and bruises, the babies and the leftover people from the workhouse etc. and produced a grand total. It didn’t happen again.
Then the powers that were decided to build Craigavon and to have Craigavon Hospital at its centre, as if anyone has ever found the centre of Craigavon. He would have happily stayed in Lurgan forever, but presumably us three were costing him more money by that time. For example he had never bought a house. He applied for and got the job of starting Craigavon Hospital from the admin. end. Then he discovered the idea of the high heidyins was that he would move into a new tower block nowhere near the hospital. He lasted a day, discovered you weren’t allowed to open the windows and decamped to the office right above the main hospital entrance. The hospital entrance was one of the things he was particularly proud of. Craigavon includes a mental hospital, and he wanted everyone to come in the one door so that nobody’s illness or condition was advertised by the door they went into. When he washed up here years later after retiring, he was raging that nobody had remembered why the joint entrance was so important. He was pretty grumpy about the staff complaining that the plugholes were in the wrong place, but he pointed out that somebody had also forgotten why the beds had been stationed where they were supposed to be, and had changed it all round without thinking of plugholes.
However, he soon discovered something lovely that persisted. He had become great mates with the landscape gardener who was young, had just gone out on his own and really wanted to make his name on the hospital contract. Daddy encouraged him to look at all the wee dark spaces in between the bits of building and to make every one into a mini garden. He was delighted to see so many were still thriving. The hospital has grown and I am sure many have been built over, but I passed one last night when I was being wheeled off for a scan.
On what turned out to be one of my daddy’s last trips to the hospital where he got to die in 2003, he heard about the then new admissions suite. He persuaded the person he referred to as the Sister, to run him in the wheelchair down to see it. He was delighted with a new approach. Then on Sunday, when I arrived here, sore and miserable, I got processed through that very admissions suite. AND, when I gave my name at the window, they said Ellen McVea, Caroline Avenue, which is where I lived fifty years ago.
Lastly a weird thing. I get snazzy pyjamas for my Christmas present every year from my wee brother. He buys the same ones for me, Laura and Annie and we humour him by doing a smirking photo. But I don’t own a dressing gown that would go round me any more. (I do still own the wee one that got hit by a spark from the fire and mammy embroidered the burn mark into a daisy, but I cry every time I see that one. My mother never said a nice word, but she did plenty of nice things that she would never admit to.) So, I reached into one of the endless drawers of other people’s clothes my house is full of, and pulled out a light one, all set for potential hospital hothouse. Alicia came to visit me this afternoon and it was only when I was walking down to the door with her that I realised daddy’s dressing gown, if not his ghost, was walking through his hospital again. And it really hadn’t occured to me till then. I wish I could tell my wee brother (recently turned 60) but his is a total fusspot and would definitely fret if he knew I were in here, and just might get on a plane, and I definitely don’t need that.
Commenti