Observations of an Orderly | Page 5

extraordinary proposition,
that we should inaugurate a plant in a pot on the stove's lid in summer,
was, I am glad to say, negatived. It would have been the thin end of the
wedge ... we might have arrived at Japanese fans and
photograph-frames on the walls.
Not that our Company Officer would have tolerated any nonsense of
that kind. Punctually at eight-thirty, after the second parade of the day,
he marched through each hut, inspecting it and calling the attention of
the Sergeant-Major to any detail which offended his sense of fitness.
On wet mornings, instead of parading outside, each man stood to his
cot, and thus the comments of the Company Officer, as he went down
the aisle, were audible to all. Stiffly drawn up to attention, we
wondered anxiously whether he would notice anything wrong with our
buttons, boots or belts, or whether he would "spot" the books and jam
jars hidden behind our overcoats on the shelves. Nothing so decadent
and civilian as a book--and certainly nothing so unsightly as a jam
jar--must be visible on your barrack-room shelf. It is sacred to
equipment, and particularly to the folded great-coat.

"The Art of Folding" might have been the title of the first lesson of the
many so good-naturedly imparted to me by my new comrades. There
was, I learnt, a right way and a wrong way to fold all things foldable.
The great-coat, for instance, must at the finish of its foldings, when it is
placed upon the exactly middle spot above your bed's end, present to
the eye of the beholder a kind of flat-topped pyramid whose waist-line
(if a pyramid can be said to own a waist) is marked by the belt with the
three polished buttons peeping through. The belt must bulge neither to
the right nor to the left; the pyramidal edifice of great-coat must not
loll--it must sit up prim and firm. And unless all your foldings of the
great-coat, from first to last, have, been deftly precise, no pyramid will
reward you, but a flabby trapezium: the belt will sag, its buttons won't
come centrally, and indeed the whole edifice of unwieldy cloth will
topple off its perch on the narrow shelf--which was designed to refuse
all lodgment for the property of persons who had unsound ideas on the
subject of compact storage.
The second series of folderies to which the novice was initiated
concerned themselves with his bedding. This consisted of a mattress,
three blankets and a pillow. It is an outfit at which no one need turn up
his nose. I never spent a bad night in army blankets, though when out
on leave I am sometimes a victim of insomnia between clean cold
sheets. But the moment the Réveillé uplifted you from your couch, that
couch had to be made ship-shape according to rule. No finicky "airing"!
The mattress must be rolled up, with the pillow as its core, and placed
at the end of the bed. On top of it a blanket, folded longwise and with
the ends hanging down, was laid neatly; on top of that you put the other
two blankets, folded quite otherwise; then you brought the first
blanket's ends over, and reversed the resultant bundle and pressed it
down into a thin stratified parallelogram with oval ends. The strata of
the said parallelogram, viewed from the aisle, must show no blanket
edges, only curves of the blankets' folds: the edges (if visible at all)
must face inwards, not outwards. Correct folding, to be sure, gave no
visible edges, viewed from either side; and, once you caught the knack,
correct folding was just as easy as incorrect--though there were
temperaments which did not find it so and which rebelled against these
niceties.

I was afterwards to learn that this mania for matching (if mania be
indeed a legitimate word for a custom based on common-sense
principles and seldom carried to the extremes which the recruit has
been led to fear) obtains not only in the army but also in the nursing
profession. Not long after I became a ward orderly I got a wigging from
my "Sister" because I had not noticed that every pillow-case of a ward's
beds must face towards the same point of the compass: the pillows on
the vista of beds must be placed in such a manner that the pillow-case
mouths are, all of them, turned away from anyone entering the ward's
door. Similarly the overlap of the counterpanes must all be of exactly
the same depth and caught up at exactly the same angle, the resulting
series of pairs of triangles all ending at exactly the same spot in each
bedstead. These trifles reveal at a glance the professional touch in a
ward, and are, I understand, not by