Bootham Park Psychiatric Hospital York
Christmas Night 1986
It was very cold and snowy and I remember.
I wasn’t very happy.
I had just started work in the November.
A new staff nurse role, in a new city of York
I’d barely been there a month and still lived at the nurses’ home at Clifton Hospital a couple of miles out of the city.
I knew no one properly and I was homesick
And already I had been put onto night duty.
The ward was quiet.
A psychiatric admission ward with ten general admission patients and an attached mother and baby unit with a half complement of two mums and two newborns.
We had three staff of duty. Staff nurses clive and I covered the main ward and Sue who was a motherly enrolled nurse took charge of the nursery.
Around midnight Sue and I were in the darkened office, each of us feeding a baby.
I couldn’t see her face properly just a glint of her glasses from the lights from the snowy garden.
She was asking me about me, and I had been yacking on in the dark for an age.
I had no idea what I was doing but my baby was large and content and sleepy so from the get go..so I was lucky.
“ Are you gay John? “ she seemed to ask me out of nowhere and she nodded when I defensively replied no, just a little too quickly .
“it’s ok if you were you know? ” She said slowly in her broad flat Yorkshire accent “I’ve always loved gay men”
And in the comfortable silence that followed, something quietly and inexplicably shifted in me
As we fed babies in the dark on Christmas Day
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/5JOKj1r
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