The Valeta and Other Stories

 

In yesterday’s comments Lizzy asked how such a quiet, clearly gauche young Welshman like me became a psychiatric nurse at the tender age of twenty.

The answer, is probably more complicated than I realised at the time, they always are, but the overwhelming reason was that I was looking for a career was that I hated my life as grade 2 bank clerk in the National Westminster Bank in Rhyl.

I wanted a job with kudos

Something I could be proud of 

Something my family would be proud of.

And my decision to be a nurse was thanks primarily to a woman by the name of Nerys Griffith 

Now Nerys was a student nurse at Wrexham Maelor hospital .She was and is,very Welsh, was a seriously committed General nurse and briefly was my second or third girlfriend ( I know it was a phase) I was also quite in awe of her general nurse tales of blood guts and gore so thought that I could be a nurse of sorts and psychiatric nursing seemed a logical move even though I knew absolutely nothing of what it would entail. 

Up to then my sole experience of mental illness was that I watched the film Ordinary People with Timothy Hutton in 1981

I hadn’t got a Scooby Doo!

And so I applied to three school’s of nursing .

The local psychiatric hospital in rural Denbigh.

The school of nursing based at the West Cheshire Hospital in Chester

And a dreadfully scary gothic looking hospital in Chesterfield of all places in Derbyshire 

I was accepted for both the English schools

Now my spoken welsh wasn’t good enough for the local hospital .

And so I chose Chester , a city I revisit weekly even now.

My nurse training was dominated by a camp,multifaceted Quaker tutor by the name of Leslie Brint. He opened my gauche, small town mind not only to mental illness and it’s treatments , but to different lifestyles, cultures, sexualities as well as to aspects of social injustice, pacifism and culture and literature

He was my Jean Brodie. 

A man of great charm

Safari suit jackets 

And a lover of the Valeta 

 

So , apart from the Valeta what did I learn from my three years at the West Cheshire hospital? 

I learned that fragments of human beings that were ravaged by mental illness were still people that required respect and care.

I learned to give physical contact to people before I even leaned to receive it for myself and

I realised that an unhappy childhood was a common experience of so many.