Observations of an Orderly | Page 9

my troubles were at an end. Soda made the ward-kitchen seem like
heaven. Alas, the supply of soda considered sufficient by the Dry Store
authorities never lasted beyond Wednesday. On Thursday, Friday,
Saturday and Sunday the dinner-tin had to be cleaned out not by
alkaline agency, but by sheer slogging hard labour. And when at last I
stood it on edge to dry, and thought to go off duty with a clear
conscience, I generally found that I had overlooked the waiting
pudding-basin.
On the whole I am inclined to pronounce the pudding-basin a more
obdurate utensil than even the dinner-tin. The pudding-basin, however,
only appeared every second morning. On duff days (duff being served
in the same tin as the meat and vegetables, though in a separate
compartment) we had no pudding. By pudding I mean milk
pudding--rice or sago or tapioca. Now a milk pudding, such as those
my patients received, though perhaps it was looked askance at in the
nursery, is food which, as an adult, I am far from despising. Rice
pudding I have come with maturer years to regard as a delicacy. Sago
and tapioca I still eat rather with amiable resignation than from choice.
But any milk pudding, as I now know, has a most vicious habit of
cleaving to the dish in which it was cooked. Rice is the least evil
offender. The others are absolutely wicked. To clean oleaginous scum
from a dinner-tin is not easy, but it is a mere bagatelle compared with
cleaning the scorched high-tide-mark of tapioca or sago from the shores

of a large metal pudding-basin. I have tried scraping with a knife blade,
I have tried every reasonable form of friction, and I can simply state as
a fact from my own personal experience (perhaps I am unfortunate) that
those metal pudding-basins of ours would frequently yield to nothing
less powerful than sandpaper.
I need scarcely say that sandpaper was not supplied by the deities of the
Dry Store. Sandpaper did not come within their purview. It had no
recognised use in hospital. Therefore it did not exist. But, observing
that a succession of metal pudding-basins would be an insupportable
prospect without sandpaper, I laid in a stock of sandpaper, paying for
the same out of my own private purse. It was a cheap investment.
Never have earnings of mine been better spent. Moreover, having once
hit on the notion of giving myself a lift illegitimately, so to speak, I
added to the smuggling-in of sandpaper a secret purchase of soda.
Except that our scrub-ladies, each and all, discovering that the Dry
Store's allowance of this priceless chemical had at last apparently been
generous, caused it to fly at a disconcerting pace, and as a result
sometimes left me short of it, my career as a washer-up afterwards
became more comfortable.
I shall never like washing-up. In the communal households of the
future I shall heave coal, sift cinders, dig potatoes, dust furniture or
scour floors--any task will be mine which, though it makes me dirty,
does not make me greasily dirty. But if I must wash-up, if I must study
the idiosyncrasies of cold fat, treacly plates, frying-pans which have
sizzled dripping-toast on the gas-ring, frozen gravy, and pudding-basins
with burnt milk-skins filmed to their sides, I shall be comparatively
undismayed. For sandpaper is not yet (like the news posters) abolished;
and soda--although I hear its price has risen several hundred per
cent.--is still cheaper than, say, diamonds.

IV
A "HUT" HOSPITAL

People have curious ideas of the kind of building which would make a
good war hospital. "The So-and-So Club in Pall Mall," I have been told,
"should have been commandeered long ago. Ideal for hospital purposes.
Of course some of the M.P. members brought influence to bear, and the
War Office was choked off...." And so forth.
It would surprise me to hear of anything that the War Office was held
back from doing if it wanted to do it. Perhaps the least likely
obstructionist to be successful in this project would be a
club-frequenting M.P. The War Office has taken exactly and precisely
what it chose--even when it would have been better to choose otherwise.
In this matter of commandeering buildings for hospitals it may or may
not have acted with wisdom; but at least it has been safe in avoiding the
advice of the individual who jumps to the conclusion that just any
pleasingly-situated edifice will do, provided beds and nurses are
shovelled into it in sufficient quantities.
The indignant patriot who was convinced that chicane alone saved the
So-and-So Club from being dedicated to the service of the wounded
was quite unable to tell me whether the lifts--assuming that lifts
existed--were roomy enough to accommodate stretchers; whether, if so,
no interval of