By kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
This is rather special among the papers at St Hilda’s, being the only one entirely in Broster’s own handwriting. It’s signed ‘D. K. B.’, but there is no date or other information; and nor do I know how fictional it is—although it was evidently written from some experience, and I have no idea what the writer was doing on a children’s hospital ward or when. (She had no children of her own; her nursing work during the First World War was all of soldiers, as far as I know.)
While Broster’s handwriting is both attractive and reasonably good, occasional words are difficult to make out and I can’t swear to the exact word-for-word accuracy of this, but I have done my best.
They had had their Christmas-tree on Saturday, but it still glorified the upper ward; on Saturday too the dramatic performance had taken place. Now they awaited their Christmas dinner, the visitor was privileged to help in its distribution.
The children, in their toy-littered beds, received it differently. Savoury stuff in a bowl approached Cornelius (aged one year) who was sitting bolt upright looking exactly like a very hungry, very ugly fledgling; but when it proved too hot its temporary withdrawal was to Cornelius the shattering of all that makes life’s dream. He wept, loudly, bitterly, and unbecomingly. When Clifford (note the glow of Plaistow nomenclature) perceived upon his plate trifle, jelly, a morsel of plum-pudding, he also wept, but surely from some reason, however obscure, the very opposite of that which had caused the sorrow of Cornelius. Apparently he did not like the look of these delicacies. “Will you have a large spoon or a small?” enquired the visitor of one child. “A large one,” unhesitatingly replied the wise youth. He also was wise to whom a piece of bread was proffered as a “pusher” to help the bits of turkey into his struggling spoon; he nibbled the bread and “pushed” with his small fingers, bread in hand.
In a corner cot Albert (aged five) partook rather languidly of what seemed, to the visitor, a helping of turkey designed for a giant. It was cut into small portions, so that its exact amount was perhaps misleading. Anyhow Albert was daunted by it in the end, and passed to the pudding course; that too he failed to finish. But a banana, carved into the semblance of a dolphin, that opened its mouth at him when squeezed, drew from him that curious, delicate, evanescent smile which is one of his greatest charms. And later in the day, when the ward was full of the patients’ visitors, and there sat on either side of his bed two small boys, Albert, being implored to cause to unroll for our delectation one of those fascinating paper tongues which, having blown, shoot out at the beholder, was unable to do so for mirth. His mother, a stout, coarse-looking woman (Albert is probably a fairy changeling) adjured him to do his best; the doctor likewise besought him, but every time that little faint laugh came in the way. Only, just as we were turning to go, the proboscis suddenly unrolled at us, like a banner of farewell.
If they are happy on Christmas Day, these children, it is not with a boisterous mirth. They have many toys, but they do not play with them absorbedly. One small person indeed did the honours of his collection with a stolid volubility; (unused to the infantile tongue of the East the visitor did not understand a single word of his discourse.)[1] And[2] they will not go back to physical conditions like those of the pleasant, airy ward, the clean and comfortable little beds. Yet, though they have never had, will never have again, so be-toyed a Christmas, they are not there for fun. Albert of the shy smile, the pointed chin, the rose-leaf complexion, has been lying in his crib since October. He has had an operation, he is mending. The doctor says that he has been quite extraordinarily patient under the twice-a-day dressings. “Old chap”, I heard her call him, and I know that she has an extra soft corner in her heart for him.[3] It is over all of them, that undefinable air of suffering.[4] There was another pale little boy to whom it was suggested to blow his toy trumpet, for it was time for the ward to be cleaned. Willingly he attempted to comply, but he seemed to have no breath for a blast; only the feeblest sound quavered out, and you saw his neck, so horribly thin....
In a little swinging cot in the middle of the ward was an object which the visitor had almost taken for a monkey. It was a tiny baby of four months old, smaller than many a new-born infant, a “waster”. It had been in hospital before, had gone out, then “hadn’t done so well” and was back again, with more than the usual lost, astonished air of babies in its shiny eyes and little restless hands—reminding one somehow of Buffon’s image of humanity helpless in the universe, “engendrée un matin à bord d’un vaisseau qu’elle n’a pas un partie et qu’elle ne verre pas arriver.”[5]
A girl of fifteen, formerly in the hospital, had come in with the visitors—quiet, charming, and doomed. Under the conditions of life that are hers she will not see twenty, the doctor says, for she has heart-disease. She was the last child that the visitor saw on Christmas Day, the feast of the child.