Indefinite Nights

by Patricia Ferguson

Book by Ferguson, Patricia

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 1988

About the author

Patricia Ferguson was brought up in Kent, read history at Leeds university, and completed a two-year graduate nursing course at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. This was at rather the end of an era; she was perhaps amongst the very last young women shown how to coax starched linen hats into the requisite five pleats, or told that pillow cases must always face away from the ward entrance; but she was also taught many vital and graceful nursing techniques.
Pat loved the obstetrics part of the course, and completed midwifery training too. She had always wanted to write and finished her first novel, Family Myths and Legends, whilst working as an obstetric nurse in Canada. This won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask, and the David Higham prize in 1985.
Working as an agency nurse in London Pat completed her acclaimed short story collection about nursing, Indefinite Nights.
Several more short stories have been broadcast on Radio 4, and Pat has published four further novels, two of them listed for the Orange Prize. She taught Creative Writing at the University of Bristol, for many years and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Reading University. She is married with two grown-up sons, and lives in Bristol.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

one from the library I work in - not normally interested in the books here as it's a Health faculty library and they're usually about the insides of bodies and nursing. This one's written by a nurse but it's a collection of stories. Sound pretty good too...

..was excellent, tempted to give it five stars.. more later..
[later]..great to read such fine, intelligent stories about nursing and nurses, after so much recent bad publicity for the NHS (thinking about the Stafford Hospital scandal). Not that these stories paint rosy pictures, far from it, they detail the struggles and human stories of nurses coping with pressures, with the blood and shit and pain and screams of the night wards in the title story. The reader is not spared, another story ‘Products of Conception’ is set in an abortion clinic:

I saw a foot, a little foot half an inch long, a perfect miniature as if of ivory, not rounded with fat like a baby’s but slender, with a long-boned foetal elegance, ending just above the ankle in a jagged bloodless tear.

It is not just physical illness, another story is set in a psychiatric ward where the nurses deal with patients such as the little Bengali woman [who] had cut off the end of her tongue with a pair of scissors or Mhairi, who was very quiet, because whenever she spoke live rats.. wriggled free with her every word.

So how do they cope? While everyone believes themselves immortal, nurses believe it more… visit any hospital canteen at lunchtime and you’ll see the protection at work. Straight from the cancer ward, straight from dressing the amputated leg stumps of thirty-a-day men, a nurse will sit fresh-faced over a cup of tea, lighting up her Silk Cut or her Rothmans Kingsize, discussing death and sickness with tender detachment.. with her nurses’ protective immunity like a warm cloak round her shoulders.

But sometimes the cloak comes off. These intelligent, closely observed stories show when the limits are reached, as when a nurse at the end of her tether witnesses her boss hit a patient and does not report it – not just because she would not be believed, but because she had already slapped him, in her heart.

There is one not-nursing story, also excellent, about childhood arson, but the rest all centre around the profession. And for me maybe there is a nostalgia because I have worked in a nurses’ library for nearly 30 years (started in 1984) and have seen many changes happen to the training, including being absorbed by a university and becoming part of a larger Health faculty (that happened in the mid-90s). In one story here a ward sister resists some of the ‘new fangled’ changes, especially the ‘Nursing Process’ (basically a patient centred approach as opposed to a ward one). How I remember all the student nurses coming in and asking for articles on the ‘Nursing Process’. This book was originally published in 1987, and brings back so much.

Highly recommended, they're not always as grim as I might have painted them above, they have many moments of humour (although usually black), but they are truthful and run deep.

[Josephine (Jo) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a little unsure how I feel about this book, it gives an insight into the world of nursing in the nineteen eighties which is at times amusing but mostly depressing and grim. Maybe it is that I read things that I would rather not have known.
Patricia tells us about the time she spent as a student nurse doing the rounds of various specialist wards in a hospital i.e. the mental health ward, obstetrics, and oncology. Some of the events were depressing and some were really shocking, there is also an event from her childhood that was thrown in in the middle of the book that I found astonishing. After training as a midwife Patricia goes with her husband to Canada initially for a year where he has been offered a well-paid job. As that year progresses their differences start to become more obvious and the marriage is difficult, they are both working in the hospital and do not see much of each other; they live in hospital accommodation which you can move between via an underground walkway, never needing to even breathe fresh air.
It all left me giving a sigh and saying to myself "oh dear".

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I knew what the point was. The point was control. Strap a woman into dorsal lithotomy, paralyse her with Amethocaine, and you'd be at least partly in control, of that terrifying messy unpredictable botch-up, a natural birth."

You can tell that Patricia knows her stuff. The scenes read effortlessly, reflective of the work climate in a hospital from the perspective of a compassionate yet darkly humorous nurse.