(i) Short story as something that is fabulous and broken:
“Smallhouse and Gordonpole polished the whole hospital every night. It took them all night. They emptied the bins too and they were allowed to smoke which was fair enough when you saw what was sometimes thrown away from the operating theatres.”
Elizabeth Jolley was an English expatriate Australian writer who was originally a nurse, and said about both professions that they “require a gaze which is searching and undisturbedly compassionate and yet detached.” As both nurse and writer (and English expat) I could not agree more. It’s not always a comfortable position to be in — the inside outsider — but it’s inescapable. It’s probably why I chose nursing when I realised I didn’t have the balls to commit to writing.
‘Hilda’s Wedding’ is classic Jolley: innocent yet biting, playful yet profound, mired in the everyday grime of common reality even as it spins off into a deeply weird and quintessentially Australian gothic surreal. Night Sister Bean (a recurring character in Jolley’s stories) is, everyone says, a witch. “‘Always stand between Sister Bean and the drip,’ they said.” Our unnamed narrator decides to test this hypothesis, but then the story steps sideways into poor simple “always pregnant” Hilda’s lack of a suitable husband, and while Sister Bean is away recovering after her own surgery, the hospital’s night crew stage an impromptu wedding. The Casualty Porter is pressed into service as the bridegroom, Smallhouse volunteers to give Hilda away, and Feegan the Warden conducts the ceremony, at one point mixing up the marriage liturgy with the funeral service to hilariously screwball effect. The kitchen boy gets rather left out, and is seen crying near the end, though the whole wedding was a play-act (we assume). And then suddenly in the last paragraph we’re back to Night Sister Bean and the possibility of karmic retribution for her infusion witchery. It’s such an oddball rattle-bag of a story, and entirely loveable, not least for its spot-on description of a large hospital:
“One block for hearts and one for chests, a block for bladders and one for bowels, a block for bones, one for women’s troubles, one for mental disorders, one for births and all for deaths.”
Written in 1976 and set easily 20 years earlier, it’s still a horribly accurate picture of where I work now.
First published in Looselicks, 1976. Collected in Woman in a Lampshade, Penguin Books Australia, 1983
A Personal Anthology 