The goings-on at Christmas-time were conducted with the excuse that the staff was obliged to entertain the patients, just as adults take themselves off to circuses and pantomimes on the pretext of amusing the children. The wards were decorated, the out-patient hall spanned with streamers, and on Christmas Day even the operating theatres were festooned. The hospital presented the grotesque appearance of a warship during Navy Week, when the guns and other sinister implements aboard are covered with happy bunting. Relatives, friends, visiting staff, old graduates, and students overran the place; it was an enormous family party.
I had dutifully returned home the first Christmas I was in the hospital, but for the second I decided to stay and join in the fun. I was then coming to the end of my second session of medical clerking, this time as a protйgй of the Dean, Dr. Loftus, on Prudence ward.
A week before Christmas Eve the ward sister distributed sheets of coloured crepe paper round the patients and set them cutting frilly shades for the bed-lamps, paper chains, cut-outs for sticking on the windows, and the other paraphernalia of Christmas. Sister Prudence was different from the majority of her colleagues at St. Swithin's. She was a fat, kindly, jovial woman with an inefficiently concealed affection for Guinness' stout. She never had a bitter word for the students, whom she regarded as pleasantly irresponsible imbeciles, and she treated the nurses as normally fallible human beings. Above all, she had the superb recommendation of hating Sister Virtue's guts.
'I'm so worried about number twelve,' she said to me quietly one afternoon. I followed her glance to a wizened, sallow old man lying flat on his back cutting out a red paper doll with no enthusiasm. 'I do hope he won't die before Christmas,' she continued. 'It would be such a pity for him to miss it all!'
On Christmas Eve the students and nurses tacked up the paper chains and fixed the Christmas tree in front of the sanitary-looking door of the sluice-room. Sister beamed at the volunteers, as she was by then certain her ward would be more richly decorated than Sister Virtue's. It was a vivid jungle in paper. Red and yellow streamers hung in shallow loops across the forbidding ceiling and the dark woodwork of the walls was covered refreshingly with coloured stars, circles, and rosettes, like a dull winter flower-bed in springtime. The severely functional lights over the beds were softened by paper lanterns, which emitted so little light, however, that they transformed even a simple manoeuvre like giving an injection into an uncomfortable and dangerous operation. The black iron bedrails were garlanded with crimson crepe, the long table down the middle of the ward was banked with synthetic snow, and blatantly unsterile holly flourished unrebuked in every corner. Most important of all, a twig of mistletoe hung over the doorway. By hospital custom, to avoid interruption in the daily working of the ward the sprig was not put into use until Christmas morning; before then the nurses and the students took a new and keen appraisal of each other with sidelong glances, each deciding whom they would find themselves next to when the sport opened. As for Sister Prudence, she would have taken it as a personal insult not to be embraced by everyone from Dr. Loftus down to the most junior student. 'I do like Christmas!' she said enthusiastically. 'It's the only time an old body like me ever gets kissed!'
The students had a more exacting task at Christmas than simply decorating the ward. It was a tradition at St. Swithin's that each firm produced, and presented in one of the main wards, a short theatrical entertainment. This was in accordance with the established English custom of dropping the national mantle of self-consciousness at Christmas-time and revealing the horrible likeness of the charade underneath. No one at St. Swithin's would have shirked acting in, or witnessing, the Christmas shows any more than they would have contemplated refusing to operate on an acute appendix. They were part of the hospital history, and it was handed down that Sir Benjamin Bone himself when a student contributed a fine baritone to the Christmas entertainment while the young Larrymore accompanied him on a violin, deliberately out of key.
The dramatic construction of these performances was as rigidly conventional as classical Greek drama or provincial pantomime. There were certain things that had to be included, or the audience was left wondering and cheated. It was essential at one point for a large student to appear dressed as a nurse, with two pairs of rugger socks as falsies. There had to be a song containing broad references to the little professional and personal idiosyncrasies of the consultant staff-oddities that they had previously been under the impression passed unnoticed. Equally important were unsubtle jests about bedpans and similar pieces of hospital furniture. One scene had to represent a patient suffering under the attentions of a scrum of doctors and students, and there was always a burst of jolly community singing at the end.
The players had their conventions as well. No troupe would have contemplated for a moment taking the boards sober, and the most important member of the cast was the supernumerary who wheeled round the firkin of beer on a stretcher. It was also essential to carry a spare actor or two in the company, as on most occasions some of the active performers were overcome before the last scenes and had to be carried to the wings.
Two days before Christmas Grimsdyke took the initiative by ordering our firm to assemble in the King George at opening time that evening. There were seven of us: Grimsdyke and Tony Benskin, John Bottle, the middle-aged student Sprogget, Evans, the brilliant Welshman, the keen student Harris, and myself. We collected round the piano in a corner of the bar.
'Now, look here, you fellows,' Grimsdyke began with authority. 'We must scratch up a bit of talent between us. Time's getting short. We've only got a day and a half to write, produce, and rehearse what will be the most magnificent of performances that ever hit St. Swithin's. Can any of you chaps play the piano?'
'I can play a bit,' I said. 'But mostly hymns.'
'That doesn't matter. Those hymn tunes can be turned into anything you like with a bit of ingenuity. That's one thing settled at any rate. What sort of piece shall we do? A panto, or a sort of pierrot show?'
'I think I ought to tell you,' said Harris aggressively, 'that I am considered pretty hot stuff at singing Little Polly Perkins from Paddington Green. I gave it at the church concert at home last year and it made quite a sensation.'
'Please!' said Grimsdyke. 'Can anyone else do anything? You can conjure, can't you, Tony?'
'One does the odd trick,' Benskin admitted modestly. 'Nothing spectacular like sawing a nurse in half, though-just rabbits out of hats and suchlike.'
'It'll amuse the kids, so we'll put you in. You can also dress up as a nurse somewhere in the show. John, you'd better take the romantic lead. What can you do, Sprogget?'
'Me? Oh, well, I don't do anything…that is, well, you know…' He gave an embarrassed giggle. 'I do child imitations.'
'Good for you. Child imitations it shall be. Evans, my dear old boy, you shall be general understudy, stage manager, wardrobe mistress, and ale carrier. You haven't got one of those lilting Welsh voices, I suppose?'
'My voice is only any good when diluted with forty thousand others at Twickenham.'
'Oh well, Harris will have to sing, I suppose. It's unavoidable. That seems to have settled the casting difficulties.'
'What about you? What are you going to do?' I asked him.
'I, shall write, produce, and compиre the piece, as well as reciting a short poem of my own composition in honour of St. Swithin's. I think it should go over very well. I suppose nobody has any objections to that?'
We shook our heads submissively.