There is a photograph on my phone – a photo of a photo, technically, taken on my last visit home before I flew to London – of my grandmother in her nursing uniform. She is standing outside the Royal Melbourne Hospital sometime in 1943. She is twenty-two years old. She has the same jaw I have, which my mother always pointed out with a mixture of pride and faint apology, and she is looking directly at the camera with an expression that I can only describe as entirely unintimidated by the situation.
Her name was Jean. Jean Patricia Williams, née Callahan, from Ballarat originally, which is perhaps why I’ve always felt that the women in our family were quietly supposed to end up somewhere larger than where they started. She nursed through the war years at the Royal Melbourne, through the tail end of the Depression’s long shadow, through the particular exhaustion of a hospital stretched thin by a world that was busily injuring itself. She married my grandfather in 1947, moved to Daylesford, had four children, kept a garden that was the envy of the street, and never, to my knowledge, spoke at length about what those years in the hospital had actually been like.
I’ve been thinking about her a great deal since I came to London.
What She Passed Down Without Knowing It
Gran died when I was seventeen, which is old enough to have known her properly but young enough that I didn’t ask her the right questions. I knew she’d been a nurse. I knew she’d been good at it, in the way that good nurses are always described – capable and calm, someone others turned to. I knew she’d done her training in an era when nursing was gruelling in ways that went mostly unremarked upon, when nurses were expected to be something close to invisible as individuals while being indispensable as a workforce.
What I didn’t understand, until I started nursing myself, was how much of her she’d passed into the water. My mother is a practical woman who doesn’t panic. My aunt is a nurse. I became a nurse. There’s something about the women in this family and the particular discipline of care – its combination of technical skill and sustained human attention – that appears to be heritable in ways that genetics doesn’t quite account for.
I don’t think I consciously chose nursing because of Gran. But I think she made it imaginable. I think she made the uniform feel like something earned rather than merely worn.
Melbourne in the 1940s and London Now
I’ve tried, since being here, to do some rough mapping – to understand what Gran’s nursing life looked like and hold it alongside my own. The differences are vast and obvious. She worked in an era before antibiotics were widely available, before the organisational scaffolding of a national health system, before the assumption that patients had rights that exceeded the doctor’s preference. She would have been subordinate in ways that would make most contemporary nurses baulk – to consultants, to matrons, to a medical hierarchy that had very firm ideas about who spoke and who listened.
The Royal Melbourne in wartime was also receiving casualties from the Pacific theatre, which brought particular clinical pressures. I don’t know what Gran saw on those wards. She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, and now the window is closed.
What strikes me now, though, is not the difference but a specific and unexpected continuity. The Chelsea and Westminster is, in many obvious ways, nothing like the Royal Melbourne in 1943. It is vastly better resourced, far more technologically sophisticated, staffed by people from every part of the world, and governed by an ethical and legal framework that would have been unrecognisable to Gran’s generation. And yet the core of the work – the being present, the reading of a face, the knowing when to speak and when to simply stay – that part has not changed. I feel it on night shifts especially, in that particular quality of quiet that falls over a ward at two in the morning, when the clinical machinery goes on humming and the human beings in the beds are doing the slow, private work of recovering. Gran was present in that same quiet, in a different city, in a different century, in a different war. The work was the same work.
What London Would Have Meant to Her
Here is something I find myself returning to. My grandmother grew up in Ballarat, trained in Melbourne, and as far as I know never left Australia. London, to her generation and her circumstances, was at once intimately familiar – the motherland, the place the maps were made, the source of the BBC broadcasts and the royal family photographs in the hall – and entirely remote. You read about it. You did not simply go.
I boarded a flight in Melbourne and was here in twenty-two hours. I applied for my NMC registration on a laptop in the Daylesford house where Gran used to drink her tea. I found a room in Hammersmith – eventually, and after the adventures I described in a previous post – on a website that didn’t exist until a decade ago. The frictionlessness of it, by the standards of her life, would have been astonishing to her. And I think, perhaps, slightly vertiginous.
But I also think she would have understood the impulse entirely. The women in this family, as I’ve said, have tended to end up somewhere larger than where they started. Gran went from Ballarat to Melbourne. I went from Daylesford to London. The scale is different. The underlying motion is the same.
What She Would Make of the Chelsea and Westminster
I try sometimes to imagine Gran walking onto my ward. It is an exercise in managed absurdity, partly, but also in something more serious.
She would find the technology bewildering, I think, but would adapt to it faster than she’d let on. She was not, by any account, a woman who was easily flustered. The electronic patient record system that took me three weeks to find natural would have been, to her, just another thing to learn, and she would have learnt it.
The diversity of the patient population would have been, I suspect, genuinely novel to her in a way it can’t quite be to me – I grew up in a more multicultural Australia than she did, and even so my Chelsea and Westminster ward was an adjustment. The interpreter services, the culturally specific approaches to birth and postnatal care, the patient notes flagging religious practices and dietary requirements – these would have taken some orientation. But I think the underlying instinct – ask, don’t assume; listen more than you speak – was there in her generation too, even if the formal framework around cultural competency wasn’t.
What I think she would recognise immediately, without needing any orientation at all, is the team. The particular quality of nurses working a long shift together – the shorthand that develops, the humour that lives specifically in the dark corners of difficult work, the loyalty that forms between people who have seen the same hard things – that is, I think, a constant. She would have walked into the staff room at the end of a night shift and known exactly where she was.
The Thing I Wish I’d Asked Her
There is a particular question I’ve composed in my head, in the eighteen months since I’ve been nursing seriously and especially in the eight months since I’ve been here, that I would ask Gran if I could.
I would ask her whether the work ever felt like too much.
Not whether she coped – I know she coped, the evidence of that is the life she built afterwards – but whether there were shifts, or patients, or particular nights, when the emotional weight of it reached some interior limit and she had to make a conscious decision to continue anyway. I ask myself this question on certain shifts. I’d like to know if she did too.
I suspect the answer is yes. I suspect the women in nursing, across every generation, have been making that decision quietly and without particular ceremony since long before anyone thought to write it into a wellbeing policy. There is a continuity in that too, which is not comforting exactly, but which is something. You are not the first person to stand in this corridor at three in the morning and need to find something to keep going. That’s not nothing.
What I Think She Would Think
I’ve been circling the question in the title of this piece without quite answering it, and I suppose that’s because the honest answer is: I don’t know. I didn’t know her well enough, in the end, for that level of certainty.
What I can say is this. I think she would find it remarkable that I’m here. I think she would find it equally unremarkable that I’m nursing – that part, she would have understood without any explanation. I think she would have something dry and affectionate to say about the NHS paperwork. I think she would like my colleagues very much.
And I think – this is the part I hold onto, when London is hard and Daylesford feels very far away – she would simply nod at the uniform. Not at the NHS logo on the chest or the Chelsea and Westminster lanyard or any of the particulars of this version of the life. Just at the uniform. Just at the fact of it. A Williams woman, in a hospital, showing up.
That’s enough. That has, it turns out, always been enough.
Gran, if you’re somehow reading a blog post – and I acknowledge this would require a significant theological adjustment on your part – I’m doing alright, love. The tea here is also not great. I think you’d understand.