Chapter two: Student Nurse McDonald

It was 10th October 1983, and after two years at college everything started to change. Until now the only jobs I could claim on my Curriculum Vitae or resumé included part time waitress, bar maid, summer holiday fruit picker and Christmas holiday turkey-plucker. These colourful job titles would soon be superseded by the status of student nurse at Colchester School of Nursing. The time had come to not only leave home, but to start three years of training to become a qualified general nurse. My new home would be in Colchester which, although situated only 19 miles from Ipswich, in 1983 for an eighteen year old who didn’t drive, proved impossible to get to for a variety of shift times and patterns spread over the seven days of the week.

Classified as a ‘remote student’ because I lived with my family in Ipswich, I qualified for hospital staff accommodation at a subsidised rate which would be deducted at source from my earnings. The pre-employment paperwork confirmed that I had been allocated a room in a shared hospital house situated in Mill Road to the rear of Severalls Hospital. The majority of the hospital provided the psychiatric services for both in and out patients with a small part allocated to general hospital care services, including surgery, medical and respiratory wards. The hospital grounds were also home to the Colchester School of Nursing classrooms and library. After the closure of Severalls Hospital in the late 1990s, the education unit, part of the North East Essex Health Authority, became affiliated to the Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford and nursing students achieved degree status upon qualification. With its long history in psychiatric care and experimentation originating from its asylum days the hospital has many features and stories which I found really insightful. For any readers interested in the asylum history of the hospital, formerly known as the Second Essex County Asylum and Severalls Mental Hospital and the part it played in the 1950s psychiatric experiments including lobotomies, there is a supplementary chapter called, ‘Step back in time’ at the end of this book.

Use of the phrase ‘nerve-wracking’ to describe the day I left home and moved into the hospital accommodation probably sounds dramatic, but at eighteen years old a little drama is allowed. The emotional process of saying my goodbyes to my mum and my sisters turned out to be one of the hardest parts of this new adventure that I was starting out on. You would be forgiven for thinking that I was in the process of moving to the other side of the world given my age, immaturity and blatant emotional outbursts. The reality in fact was that I would be only thirty to forty minutes away by car which now sounds ridiculous. However, at the time, neither I, my mum, nor my sisters had a car so that analogy carried no weight on the way I viewed my situation. This next part however would be even more daunting, a step into the unknown, living alone away from home. I would not be moving into the comfort of a setting up home with my boyfriend or husband, which is how I always imagined the day I left home would be. No, this would be a whole new ball game. My boyfriend Keith collected me and my belongings from home in Ipswich and as we turned off the A12 and drove into Colchester the reality what was happening suddenly kicked in.

We drove to Severalls Hospital, as per the instructions in my starter pack, and picked up an envelope from the Porter’s Office. The envelope contained a letter and a shiny silver coloured Yale door key with blue plastic tag labelled number SN/58MR. The hand written letter contained a crude pencil drawn map with a star marking the location of the property. The letter said that I had been allocated a room upstairs and that my room key would be hanging in the entrance hall at the property.

The hospital accommodation was a semi-detached house with three bedrooms, which would have made a lovely family home. I would discover that, instead, the three bedrooms and the room at the front downstairs, which would have been the lounge, had been made into individual bed-sits for students and newly qualified nurses. Not that I considered myself to be a nurse at that stage, I didn’t even have a uniform! As I unlocked and opened the front door the first thing I noticed was that the entire length of the hallway was scattered with shoes of all shapes, sizes and type. High heeled fashion boots, shoes, slippers and even some wellington boots and most of them not in pairs or in any kind of order. I wondered how many people lived there or if a big group of people were visiting. Behind the door, slightly hindering it from opening fully, a row of wall-mounted coat hooks visibly strained, with wall plugs slightly protruding out of the plasterboard wall, under the weight of nurse’s capes, raincoats jumpers, anoraks and shopping bags.

My boyfriend Keith stood in the hall near the front door looking a bit scared. He eventually followed me. The only room key hanging in the hall, as we let ourselves in, was labelled ‘upstairs – Room 2’. The carpeted stairs were in dire need of a vacuum, as dust and fluff had accumulated in each corner of every stair tread. At the top of the stairs there were four doors. Three with numbers on and the other sporting an old-fashioned porcelain plaque with the word ‘Bathroom’ and a painted yellow duck illustration. My room, number two was to my right as I reached the landing. I used the key from the entrance hall to open the lock and went inside. My first impression was that there must have been a mistake because the room did not look ready for a new arrival. The evidence suggested movement from room two to room four at the back of the house. This evidence came in the form of an incriminating trail of tissues and dusty fluff balls along the hallway landing area thus exposing the culprit. One of the other house mates had obviously taken the opportunity to move rooms when one had become free. According to the information pack three other student nurses lived here.

Basic is the most accurate word I can use to describe my room. A single bed, a three drawer unit hand basin with a small oval mirror above it and a big window which faced the road covered by a yellow stained net curtain. The bed, unmade with no bedding in sight, and the carpet scattered with hole-punch waste paper circles, paperclips and hairgrips, formed a daunting image. It’s no wonder they hadn’t used the vacuum in there. I felt very lost and really wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to upset Keith before he left, which was rather quickly, and this upset me a bit more. I sat on the unmade bed and cried when he left.

This sudden sense of being lonely, small and inadequate heightened when I heard what I presumed to be the other house mates arrive home within a few minutes of Keith leaving. I wondered if they had seen or spoken to him as he left the house. I don’t know why, but I presumed they were in their rooms studying or sleeping when I arrived as the house was so quiet. Now congregating in the hall and kitchen by the sounds of their voices, they talked about questions in the Hospital Final’s examination and what they planned to do that evening. I opened my door a little wider to try to listen harder and to work out how many voices I could hear. However, they obviously heard the door creak because they ran up the stairs like excited kids hearing an ice cream van in the street on a hot sunny day. Before I had chance to move or do anything there they were in front of me, all wearing their nurse uniforms and standing looking at me. I immediately also realised that my makeup and mascara, diluted by my tears, made it obvious that I had been crying because Josie, whose room was downstairs lunged forward and hugged me. As I would discover over the coming weeks, Josie was the extrovert, party animal of the house. She was tall, with dark, short cropped hair and large brown eyes.

“Don’t cry sweetie, we don’t bite,” she said.

The other two girls were different in both physical appearance and their personalities. Tracy had long dark hair, which she had released from its hair band during my uncomfortably elongated hug from Josie. She said hello, introduced herself and pointed to her room, number 3, then left. Tracy was a classic biker chick, wore no makeup and had an extremely pale complexion. Karen, the third girl, had short spiky hair and piercing blue eyes, which for some reason made me feel uneasy. After a short introduction, she didn’t hang around either. I later discovered she had moved out of my room to take the room that I had been allocated, number four. So that was that. With the introductions over, Josie helped me to find some bed linen and gave me a tour of the house while she chattered continuously about the local pubs, her recent dates in intimate detail and her plans for when she qualified in the next couple of months.

The tour of the shared kitchen became quite comical in hindsight, but at the time it shocked me as it was nothing like our kitchen at home or any that I had worked in. There was a combined fridge freezer tucked into an alcove near to the back door, with each of us supposedly allocated a shelf. As I opened the fridge to unpack my box of provisions, which resembled a Red Cross food parcel and had been sent to me from Keith’s mum Dorothy, my first impression was, ‘Why is there no food in here?’ That was not strictly true; I discovered a piece of unwrapped cheese, hard and cracked like the sandal injured heels of some women in summer. There was a half-eaten Mars chocolate bar and the remainder of the shelf space...