Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson

In the late summer of 1973, quite unexpectedly, I stumbled into a job as a nursing assistant at an old and magnificent psychiatric hospital in Surrey called Holloway Sanatorium.

I didn’t know the first thing about nursing care. I was just a young American college student hitchhiking around Europe, and was supposed to fly home in a couple of days to resume my studies, but two girls I knew who worked at the hospital urged me, during an awfully agreeable evening in a local pub, to apply for a job. The hospital, they explained, was perpetually desperate for menial staff, so impulsively the following day I applied, and the next thing I knew I’d been given a big set of keys, two grey suits, some white lab coats and instructions to present myself at a place called Tuke Ward at 7 a.m. the following morning.

Tuke Ward was high up in the building with splendid views over the hospital grounds and village of Virginia Water beyond. The patients, all male and all long-stay, were placid and cheerful and more or less looked after themselves. They went off every morning after breakfast to occupational therapy or gardening detail and didn’t return till teatime. The charge nurse, an amiable fellow aptly named Jolly, likewise cleared off just after breakfast the first morning and I seldom saw him again.

Having expected to be on the way back to the United States, instead I found myself in sole charge of an empty ward in a large English hospital. I passed the days sitting with my feet up, reading old copies of Titbits and Reader’s Digest that I found in the back of a large store cupboard, and from these I learned all about this new and remarkable country that I had now become part of.

I have seldom been more enthralled. I learned that there was something you could eat in Britain called blancmange, a pastime called morris dancing, a drink called barley water. I learned of the existence of Morecambe and Wise, seaside rock, Belisha beacons, milk floats, Poppy Day and a kind of strange voluntary prison known as a holiday camp. What an intriguing country! Every page was a revelation.

Then a second wonderfully unexpected thing happened. A few days after I started work, I found a note from Mr Jolly instructing me to go to a nearby ward to borrow a bottle of Thorazine, a medication. So I went to the neighbouring ward and, while I stood waiting for the bottle to be fetched, I saw across the room a pretty young nurse sitting with an elderly patient, spooning food into his mouth and dabbing his lips with a serviette, and I remember dreamily thinking: ‘That’s just the sort of person I need.’

By chance, later that evening I met the young nurse at a social gathering, and we got to talking and it turned out that she was just the sort of person I need. Her name was Cynthia. We were married two years later.

So the National Health Service has given me a wife, a new country and nearly half a century of kindly, world-class healthcare. That’s why I stand on the front steps on Thursday evenings these days and bang a pot with a wooden spoon and shout, ‘Thank you, NHS!’ at the top of my voice. I am so pleased and grateful that I have decided to keep up the practice for ever.

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