Delivering Love

(Week 2 of 52 week blog challenge)

I was walking around a shop the other day and heard the song that titles this blog. For me it will never belong to Ronan Keating, its real beauty is only heard when Garth (Brooks) sings it, it is his song after all. I haven’t heard it in a long time and found myself singing it quietly to myself. A painfully profound memory came flooding back to me causing me to pause and reflect. This week’s blog is the result of that musing , I hope it touches someone.

As a young midwifery student in the nineties it was still common for hospitals to provide their trainees with cheap, affordable, onsite accommodation. I lived in the gounds of the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the innovatively names Florence Nightingale Nurses Home, or as the world called it ‘The Flo Home’. In it’s hey day I’m sure it was a delight but by the time I got to call it home it was an ancient old antique. Six storeys and a ground floor of concrete, scratchy green felt carpets and inumerous brown fire doors.

The ground floor housed a never used common room, a couple of offices, the laundry, and the hospital mortuary. Yup you read that correct. The first five floors were carbon copies of each other, three coridors in an ‘N’ shape full of bedrooms, a shower block, a couple of rooms with ‘baths’ some toilets, two kitchens and two lifts, one operational one never. The top floor had formerly been a training suite that some day clearly ceased use mid demo and was never visited again – creepy , very creepy, place. Our rooms had a whiteboard at each door that was supposed to be for messages. If, and it was a big if, anyone had a pen on their board the best you could hope for was that the obscenties were inventive and the crude drawings artistic. There were rarely actual notes. The home was rarely cleaned ( I don’t rememeber ever seeing a cleaner) and at one point we went to the newspapers because we were all eaten alive by bedbugs!

Ever willing to make or save a buck, I found out that there was such a thing as a senior resident. Basically it was a wee job that involved inspecting the building certain nights of the week and reporting to the security office that all was well in the FLO home world. In return, my £80 a month rent became gratis. Result. I will admit that us ‘senior residents’ were less than fully attentive and many was the night we ticked the boxes, delivered the book to security having only traversed the parts of the home necessary to reach the gaurds office. Some never checked ever, but consience always bettered me so I would make attempts to do the job in hand. I was also terrified of the home manager. A tiny wee lady who had an office on the ground floor. For the life of me I cannot remember her name (definitley a Ms something or other) and I am vainly hoping someone reading this will put me out my misery.

It was strange place where odd things happened. Headline making things, should any of them have occurred in the here and now, but back then it was simply part of life. For instance, the time when one of the floor pay phones developed a fault that meant you could phone anywhere in the world and it took not a brass cent. The queues stretched for miles and a prison like system of ‘time management’ was introduced after certain foreign students monopolised the system. We never gave a second thought to the fact that it was likely costing the NHS a fortune, we were not socially aware never mind conscious in the way kids are now. All we saw was a free phone in a world where mobiles and internet was a thing of the furture.

There was also the Philipino student who used to peer over the bathroom doors ( you know those swinging types that hit neither ceiling nor floor) especially in the rooms with the baths in them. I vaguely recall something about him being arrested and deported and I seem to rememeber that the common joke was that it wasn’t his peeping Tom habits that were criminal but rather the red and black shacket he never took off. This is the way it was. Incidentally those baths were heaven. we had no plugs but soon learned that a bunch of paper towels sufficed. Those huge baths were so big I could lie completley prone in them. The hot water was never ending and as most of us came from houses with immersion boilers that took an hour to even heat a half full bath we thought we had landed the big time. What was a perverted Pilipino in comparison to such luxury?

There was often vomit in the corridors (this would get cleaned up to be fair) and more squatters than a commune. One of the girls in my year had a boyfriend living in her room that actually turned out to be a guy who was AWOL from the army and I met more than one illegal person in hiding. Many more than one. The communal kitchens were places that harboured every food crime in existence, salmonella and campylobacter had their own rooms and you entered at your own risk. Those who dared to use the oven very often would find their food stolen by some hungry stoner and only those with death wishes used the fridge. The result was that on any given day if you viewed the Flo Home from outside you’d witness a sea of Costcutter and Safeway bags dangling from every window. These were our fridges. I can’t remember who first aquired an actual fridge in their room but it set off a wave of buying that meant the Comet delivery team started to meet us in the grassmarket for nights out. The microwave ownership followed and we all rested happily in our tiny little studio existences.

As I mentioned this was years before phones and personal PC’s never mind smart phones and email. All correspondance was by letter and to get one of these required a 378 mile walk into the bowels of the old infirmary basement to the mail office. A sorting room of a by-gone era where endless wooden pigeon holes lived and people popped up here and there to put things in them. The ‘collection’ days/times were generally short and at ungodly hours that required someone to beg their ward sister to allow them to go on the ‘mail run’ for them and their posse. Security was nada and interesting looking packages with the recipients name visible were often claimed by whoever saw it first. We would ring the bell and then settle ourselves in for a VERY long spell of being liberally ignored. Huffing or repeated ringing of the bell only resulted in being told there was nothing for you – before you even gave a name !

Then there was the fire-alarms. So regular was the Lothian fire-brigade a visitor to the Flo home, none of us ever left our rooms. In the end the firemen stopped protesting, would assertain whatever illegal toaster, bomb (of the drug smoking kind), ciggie etc had set it off. Deal with it and if required the stoner that owned it and leave. It was also not uncommon for the rsidents of the home to have ‘friends’ in the fire service and many a ‘visit’ was had while fire bells shattered the whole area. I have to add that it was rarely if ever nice candles. Such things were luxuries and not part of our lives in the Flo home. The odd insense stick maybe, Yankee’s … not so much.

We often slept four or more to a tiny room, single beds over occupied as friends came to visit. My room was directly above the mortury and I freaked many a pal out when they were awakened in the night with the sounds of the big metal trolley. It was wild and crazy and we knew no different . The radiotor had one setting – burning hot – we sweltered in winter and melted in summer. We piddled in our sinks at night when we were too tired or too frightened to make the trip to the communal toilet and we dreaded a Thursday night shift because the 10 minute fire alarm test of a Friday ruined all our sleep.

There is no doubt that I had some of the best times of my Edinburgh life in that building. I made friends that haven’t just lasted, they have loved and treasured me for decades. We partied, we cried, we laughed and we lived our young lives with the abandon that only youth can muster. Room 417 lives on even in the dreams of this almost fifty year old.

However the dreary monotony of the building, the nameless, faceless nature of its pictureless stone walls had a bleakness that is hard to portray. It was VERY easy to jump out the lift on the wrong floor and become totally disorientated. The huge fire doors that peppered the hallways were like big, brown, uniformed soldiers gaurding every two meters of wall space. They kept fire out and silenced the whole building, save for the clatter they made as they closed behind people. It could be opressive and lonely even for the most robust hearts. When your people were on shift or away visiting home it was easy for anxieties to creep in and lonliness and isolation to take over. Thankfully, for me, I was surrounded. I worked hard and played hard and I was rarely alone.

The truth is suicides happened with more frequency than I think even we realised. We didn’t focus on the rumours and stories that scared us . We brushed them aside and moved on. We ignored what we didn’t need to see. I wss no different . Happy in my ignornance until I wasn’t.

As senior residents it was our job to look into complaints and report them to management or security. This particular day I was approached by several people on the third floor reporting a terrible odour. I reported the smell to management in the book and left it at that. Later that night I received a knock on my door from security to say that nothing had been done and that several residents had been to security to complain. They had knocked at the doors where the smell seemed worst and had been able to access all but one voluntarily. They needed to enter the room to investigate (remember the carrier bag fridges.. it was not uncommon for people to go somewhere and leave food to go off) a female lived in the room so I was needed to chaperone them. Off we went, completely unaware of what was to follow.

After several chaps the security team used the master key to enter the room. I saw little, but enough. The smell, the flies and crumpled mottled legs. The occupant was dead. She had taken her own life by hanging herself on the radiator. The door was closed and one of the security gaurds leaned against it, ashen , while the other one used his radio to ask for a police presence. They attended quickly, asked us some questions. One of the officers had a letter in his hand and wanted to know if I knew the deceased. I did not. He read me her suicide note. It was short, crisp and to the point. She asked her family to forgive her but said she could no longer live so alone and without anyone to love her. It was devastating.

In the weeks after, I was privvy to more information simply due to my very brief involvement. She was a pharmacy student , she came from a country that would then be described as third world. She studied and worked, nothing else. She supported her entire family back home and was their hope for a better life. She was beset with loneliness and lack of love and human contact. She longed to be understood, seen, heard … she simply couldn’t live the life that was ahead of her. It wounded me in so many ways, not least of all that she had nobody to even check on her. Her demise was reduced to nothing but a bad odour.

A year or so after this I happened to be talking to a visiting staff member in the maternity. How the subject of this girls death came up I don’t recall, but as it happens she had been in the same class as this person. The girl broke down, explained that she had liked the girl enormously and that they often lunched together during days of class tuition. They developed a friendship over time but as the other girl worked so much they didn’t socialise as frequently as they would have liked. She told me that she knew how lonely her friend was she just didn’t think to ask her about it.

I changed. I made a point of talking to everyone I passed (rarely was it wanted or reciprocated) but none the less it was my reaction to trauma. That short note contained words that impacted me forever, the tears of her friend a year letter stayed with me always. I decided that what we don’t say can have just as lasting a legacy nas what we do.

So I say it. If someone looks beautiful I will tell them. If someone has touched my heart I will tell them. If I feel love for them, I will tell them. If they help me, make me laugh, bless me with friendship, food and love .. I will tell them. Some accept this , some don’t like it, some don’t understand it. Some value it and treasure me because of it. I suppose the only reaction that really matters is the one that hears nothing at all. I have no power to change the deepest parts of people’s souls. I’m not trying to . However I know how it feels to witness hopelessness in its most final form.

So I try, in my own way, not to hold back. Actually it’s not easy. Every time you reach out to a person you make yourself vulnerable to rejection and misundersatnding. Some people are dismmisive of what they don’t understand and some I suspect might even feel a little invaded. They didn’t see what I saw, and I make peace with it. I try to forgive myself any time I am invasive and move forward.

I don’t often think of that whole event, what I’ve described has stopped being something I do and something I am. So I don’t need to remind myself of why I am that way. Then, every once in a while, something, like the words of this song, take me back and I am reminded why it’s important to never forget. If tomorow doesn’t come will the people I love know that they matter? I hope so.

The Flo Home

Room 417