I thought I had come a long way from being the pretend-nurse people pleaser that I was three or four years ago, in the last days of my relative innocence of loosely orbiting around my parents in Gainsborough. Working full time for Windrush Nursing Home was going to be my first shift work job and my first proper nursing job. When I started the job I did not know how big the step up was going to be, from working part time in a comfortable office, for the council to working full time and in shifts for a private nursing home.
But I figured that there was only one way to find out, and as long as there was a safe exit from the job-which there was no way of asking about in the interview for being accepted for the post-then I would be okay. I would find the exit route later. I had grown up with the instruction to no more be fussy about work than food, and with the idea that I should be grateful for any job; it had to be better than being on the dole. The staff in Gainsborough Job Centre must have been surprised when I ask one of them if I could get a job as a chicken in the chicken processing factory. But beyond easy sarcasm about feeling badly processed the instruction to grateful instruction clearly did not work; many jobs disappeared circa 1980 as if they were snow in summer. Their replacements were government subsidised substitutes for work which buried all discussion of how to value of work and the differences between what local employers collectively thought in private and any utterance on their behalf in public.
That December 1988, for the first time in my life I was living where there were the jobs to be had where if a person was unfussy enough to take them at face value. If the pay was poor and the job was one that did not have career prospects, then that was their publicly accepted and fixed base line value. So, knowing that my Manpower Services contract was about to expire, I accepted the Nursing Assistant post. If the money was poor-from memory I was paid £2.20 an hour rising to £2.40 before I left-then I could still get my Housing Benefit. If was I scraping by then, I would be able to test for myself the non-monetary value of a low paid job, assuming it did not test me beyond endurance.
Including the laundry room in the cellar, Windrush was a former four storey grand house that had all trace of it's former grandeur erased with it being turned into a nursing home for thirty residents. It was owned by two women in their forties, both of whom were married to dentists who worked in the same practice. Windrush was the wives' business empire, where the original source money was from their husbands' work. Every fortnight these two short to medium height women would appear, their hair dyed black and usually wearing dark furs, to make sure all was well in the place. Neither of them ever spoke to me and I said little about them. But seeing them walking together, their dark furs sweeping all before them as they brushed against the narrow magnolia painted walls, did remind of some vaguely genteel but threatening scene that might have originated from the pen of Franz Kafka.
The thirty patients had their beds in six rooms, across three floors, from ground floor to attic. With one ground floor room being for only one person. In addition there was a small Matron's office, and bath/shower rooms and toilets on the ground floor and the first floor. There was a large kitchen next to a living room that was lined with comfy chairs, where a television could often be heard addressing nobody in particular. Last and least was a small well maintained garden beyond the living room which was there for show more than anything else. The staff had their tea breaks on the foyer on the ground floor where they were called on to be sociable to any passing residents, several of whom in their dementia would ask every five minutes 'Have you seen me mother? Only I was meant to be seeing her.... ....I don't know where she is.'. If we even slightly hinted at a less than deferential and appeasing answer to this question repeated every five minutes then matron would hear of us saying it. So it was not worth the risk even if we assumed that in their dementia they would not remember us saying what we had. We might well have believed the walls had ears given how much the staff were made responsible for any aggression that the lack of personal space and packed layout of the home both engineered and denied. The only space where some degree of openly asking 'Why are we doing this?' was in the laundry room in the cellar. It was the only place in the home that no resident ever went near.
With the distance of hindsight I don't know how long it should have taken me to adjust to a thirty five hour week of shift work, morning - 7am through to 2 pm, day time 9 am through to 4 pm and evening 4 pm through to 10 pm, where the only allotted slack moment in the day was our break. Even then we had to stand or lean in the small foyer, talking to residents as they passed. The only perk was that we sometimes got were free meals from the kitchen that fed the residents, but even that perk mostly made us more available for more work. The best description for the place was to call it 'a care factory'. That factory like urge of making maximum use of all available space. It was self evident that there was no physical space allotted to mental retreat from why the place was organised as it was.
The staff/patient ratio was what made the work harder. In a care home for the elderly with dementia that also cares for it's workers too a ratio of four patients to one front line member of staff is stretching it, but adequate. In Windrush Nursing Home the staff/patient ratio was one member of staff to six patients, which in addition the lack of rest from the shifting shift patterns made the staff more or less perpetual motion machines. There was one other male nursing assistant, every other nursing assistant was female and most of them were in their early twenties. One black woman who was in here fifties was the nearest there was to my idea of being fun to work with. l don't know how many times I was on duty with her on the evening shift, starting to put residents to bed, and I asked her 'Have you got a pencil?', to which she did not need to have a reply. My next line was 'Well, first we have to draw the curtains.', All I will say in my defence is that repetitive jobs require repetitive humour to leaven the pressured circularity that the jobs create.
To be directed to Chapter Fourteen please left click here.
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