And again: ‘I was cared for kindly at that hospital and I was sorry to leave it. I was wounded twice after being at that Hospital but I wasn’t cared for anywhere else so kindly as I was at Endell St.’
Contributions came, too, from Australia and New Zealand, from Canada, America, and South Africa; and during the year 1920, enough money was subscribed to name a second cot after the Military Hospital, Endell Street.
* * * * *
Endell Street was a changed place. The dreary, empty wards, where equipment was collected and counted and checked, were miserable in their loneliness. The busy kitchen was handed over to the R.A.M.C. cook. The girls who remained counted linen and glass and china, or sorted cutlery, furniture, pianos, wheel-chairs, and all the hospital impedimenta. They concentrated on ledgers and registers. They entered and checked and corrected, from morning till night. Romance had gone out of the life and ‘Finis’ was written on the walls; but the old unquenchable cheerfulness still dominated the stores and offices.
The Office of Works invaded the buildings early in November. After that, workmen, who seemed to be always waiting for something or some one, hung round the empty wards and staircases. A discourteous foreman lounged about, with his hands in his pockets, and smoked and spat and pushed his way into the offices without asking permission. The noise in the square became intolerable: carts and vans and motor-lorries came and went constantly; workmen played football at all hours, and the bell clanged to summon them to and from work. In a confidential moment, an officer at Headquarters said that ‘the Office of Works was almost more than flesh and blood could bear.’ And the Doctor-in-Charge fully endorsed this opinion.
By the end of November the ledgers and returns were practically finished, and it was possible to demobilise the remaining members of the staff. When they separated, as they did reluctantly and with sorrow, the closure of the hospital was complete.
There was other work for professional people, like doctors and nurses and clerks, to take up; but the future was blank to the young girls who had been there so long and who were now to be unemployed. They missed the hospital and the hospital life sadly. In many cases there was no special place in the home circles for daughters who had been living away for some years; those who had experienced the joy of work and of responsibility, had to exchange these for the comparative inactivity of home-life. Parental restrictions had become unfamiliar and now seemed irksome to them; and they found unrelieved amusement a poor substitute for work. Thus they suffered considerably, until they were able to adapt themselves to new conditions or to find new openings.
The Doctor-in-Charge and Miss Draper, the chief compounder, were detained for some weeks longer to supervise the removal of the stores and equipment. Once this was accomplished, their work was finished, and on the 8th January 1920 the buildings were formally handed over.
The Office of Works took final possession of the premises, and devoted them to a different purpose under a quite different name, and ‘The Military Hospital, Endell Street,’ became a wonderful and cherished memory.
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty, at the Edinburgh University Press.