Night after night old Dad Hobson would stay awake till two or three o’clock, without complaint or murmur. Any man a little past his prime was called ‘dad’ or described as ‘old’ in this land of youth. And in sober fact Dad Hobson had seven children. He had been a miner before he made the great sacrifice that had left him maimed and insane. He was always courteous, always considerate. Even on those days when he refused to eat it was with a polite ‘I’m sorry not to oblige you, nurse.’ He believed himself guilty of some crime—he had murdered Sir Ian Hamilton—and in trivial ways too he held himself responsible for any disturbance in that much-disturbed ward. At times he was so much better that we hoped he was regaining his wits, but always there would come a relapse and his face would be downcast, and ‘I’m puzzled someway, something’s wrong. I can’t get things clear in my mind,’ would be the explanation. He had odd delusions too, for a doctor clad in a dressing-gown provoked his question to an orderly, ‘Is that Lord Nelson?’
It was a strange little party altogether in that ward. Hobson would lie there by the hour, dimly annoyed by Jimmy in the bed opposite. Jimmy had nearly died of wounds and later of pneumonia, but he had rallied, only to reach a state of discomfort and nervous temper that was liable to fiendish explosions. For the most part he was a lovable boy, with a curious charm of his own. Sleepless, like Hobson, till the small hours, he played cards with the orderlies. When things pleased him Jimmy was an angel, but at other times he was a fiend. A certain soldier, a clarionet player once in the Queen’s Hall orchestra, came to the ward. He was suffering from insomnia and melancholia. Jimmy’s drawling voice and his card-playing and, perhaps, his popularity annoyed the clarionet player, and they quarrelled. Jimmy merely remarked:
‘I’ll do for him—see if I don’t.’
The clarionet player was removed to the next ward, separated from the other only by a glass and wood partition.
‘He shan’t sleep to-night if I don’t,’ said Jimmy, and he took careful aim at the glass partition with his tin mug. He hit the woodwork and missed his enemy’s head in the next ward, so he fell into heavy-browed sulking, with the threat ‘I’ll do for myself.’ This is often a mere threat, but he did make an endeavour by biting up a blue-lead pencil—a tedious and uncertain form of suicide. The pencil was taken away and, blue-lipped and weary, like a naughty child he fell asleep. Poor Jimmy! He went to a Scottish asylum where many of our patients were sent for further treatment. I heard lately that he was really better and likely to be discharged.
One of the beds was occupied by Andy—Andy of the picturesque speech and uncertain behaviour. He came in raging under the effects of alcoholic poisoning. Such cases always spent a night or so in the X-ray room with a special orderly. I saw him that night, a flushed unhappy-looking boy, who was sane enough to speak politely and to say ‘Nurrse,’ with the delightful roll that our Jocks put into it. Later Andy came down to the ward, and was duly established in a corner bed. Here we got to know him for the loquacious rattle-pate he was. By day he was sane enough, but at night he was subject to awful dreams and fits of horror, which caused him to roll out of bed with an alarming bump. One night he thought the German prisoners were coming to murder him—two inoffensive boys with very little strength between them; another time I found him a hump at the foot of his bed.
‘Come out, Andy,’ I said.
‘I’ll kill you if I do, Nurrse; I’ve killed all my chums.’
But he crawled out flushed and weary. His face was coarsened and weakened by too much drinking, but it was a pleasant boyish face. He had, too, that quick imagination which gives vivid charm even to stories which tax belief. Andy told us wonderful stories of his doings at Loos and elsewhere. He had been a bomb-thrower, one of three survivors from a party of one hundred and sixty. The story was declared to be untrue by someone who knew him, but Andy could spin a yarn to keep Sister B., the orderlies, and myself in amazement round his bed. His own history, too, was a chequered, strange record. He had run away from home at ten years old and had joined a circus. He had been with Barnum, Wombwell, ‘Lord’ George Sanger, and travelled the kingdom from town to town. At fifteen he had enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders, deserted after a time, changed his name and joined the Gordons. He had been a champion boxer for—I forget the place. He had been everywhere and done most things, and was—poor Andy!—a nervous, dyspeptic wreck at twenty-four. Yet he had ‘a way with him’—a way that made us fond and disapproving at the same time.
The night before I started for a holiday, the Sister in charge had given orders that Andy was to wear pyjamas. He preferred a night-shirt. The point made a dispute. To humour him I said: