NURSES ON WAR SERVICE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 72, Issue 6198, 25 February 1946, Page 3

NURSES ON WAR SERVICE

NOT ALL CLOVER ADDRESS BY RETURNED SISTER Italy was a land she would go back to any day, “a lovely land—except for the Italians,” concluded Sister P. Greenfield-Brown last week, addressing women of the English-Speaking Union, at their first luncheon held this year. Sister Greenfield-Brown returned to Wellington about 12 weeks ago after four and a quarter years with the N.Z. Army Nursing Service. Contrasted to the superbly-interior-ed villas where the wealthy hung exquisite brocades, devised perfect settings for pictures, washed in fabulous bathrooms and sometimes slept in bedrooms with hand-painted walls, was the appalling poverty in which the poor people Jived. Nobody seemed to worry. She had never seen such bathrooms as belonged to the wealthy Italians. One, walled with squares of black marble for about six feet, was banded with lapislazuli, gradating to more marble and then a blue ceiling. Another, with pale peach coloured walls, had a special peach coloured marbje alcove for the bath, surrounded by mermaids and fish silhouetted in black, indirect lighting being supplied from the glass overhead. Poor people hardly ever saw the inside of a bath. Things were grim when the nurses arrived at Naples. Twenty cigarettes sold for 10s in the streets, black market bread was 255, and £3 bought about two and a half pounds of butter. Old and young queued up with empty billy cans waiting for the canteen scraps to bo thrown out. The speaker corrected the impression lying behind the oft-expressed phrase “I suppose you had a marvellous time.” Though they were able now to remember the lighter side of their experiences, they had earned their fun. For three and a half years she was with a mobile hospital unit which held the record for “rapid moving” in the Middle East. Once they dismantled and shifted from Helwan to Mersa Matruh (about 300 miles) in ten days, the British hollow.” There was no means of bathing when they arrived at Italy. If a nurse wanted a bath she heated a tin billy on a primus stove and made do with a “bird bath” out of an enamel basin. New Zealand engineers came to the rescue with a 40-gallon drum, which once connected with a hose, ablution shed and various devices looked as though “Heath Robinson would have been rather proud of it. But nevertheless we got a bath.” Half a Nissen hut was the cookhouse, and they ate in the other half. Early cooking conditions, involving bricks and blowlamps, were described by the speaker, who emphasised that in spite of everything, the patients had the best in the way of meals, plenty of porridge, roast meat, green vegetables and sweets. For some unknown reason, women were restricted to half rations. Nurses, on their feet for eight and ten hours a day, felt this keenly. It annoyed them when they heard about the watersiders at home, for some of them did not see butter for months, and even the margarine served to them was so “off-colour” that manners lapsed when they talked about it. Eventually, towards the end, they were put on full rations, though but for the canteens there would often have been times when they would have gone hungry.