Mess Waiter at Totland Bay Military Hospital

This story was submitted to the BBC People’s War site by Wymondham Learning Centre ^{About links} on behalf of Alex Whitelock and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In October 1942, I was posted to Totland Bay Hospital on the Isle of White. This was a hotel which had been commandeered and refurbished as a war-time hospital.

When we got off the lorry we were marched into the hospital past a large conservatory. Watching us from the windows was a line of nursing sisters probably wondering what this intake had brought them as ward orderlies.

Next morning we paraded outside the hospital again and the Corporal detailed us to our wards. When he got to me he said, “Come and stand by me, you’re the sisters’ new mess waiter.” “That’s what those sisters were up to yesterday, “ I thought, “deciding which one of us they’d pick!”

The Home Sister escorted me to the sisters’ quarters in an old country house situated in very picturesque grounds about two miles from the hospital. As we walked, she outlined my new duties. I’d have to lay the tables for meals and serve, always starting with Matron. I confessed I’d never done any waiting and she told me, “Always serve from the right and collect empty plates from the left using a clean cloth if the plates are hot. Only speak when you’re spoken to. You must also keep the coal boiler stoked up and put the black-outs up in all the rooms each evening and take them down in the morning.”

The cook, from the Army Catering Corps, was a perfectionist who made the best of meals with the minimum resources. One Monday morning he said to me, “I don’t know what I’m going to give the sisters for lunch today. All I have is this”, and he produced a two inch-square piece of roast beef left over from the Sunday joint. In a flash he said, “I know, I’ll make sausage rolls.” So, with bread, onions, Bovril, herbs and the tiny piece of beef all minced up together he made the best sausage rolls I’d ever had. He made delicacies such as I had never tasted before. One day, as he cut up apples from the garden, he asked if I’d ever had apple fritters. I said, “What are they?” “Apples dipped in batter and then fried,” he said. They were gorgeous!

The matron and sisters treated me like a brother. I received about five shillings a week extra in my pay for working there. This I learned came out of their mess funds from which they also sometimes gave me cigarettes which were always welcome.

Putting up blackouts could lead to embarrassing situations. Once I was greeted at her bedroom door by a Welsh sister clad only in a bath towel. She asked me in but I said I’d come back later. This same sister was always coming to the kitchen asking for things. One evening after dinner, she came to ask if she could have a ‘decent’ slice of bread. I gave her the knife and the loaf and she cut what we called in the East End a “door step”. I have often thought she was making a pass at me but there were strict rules and other ranks did not court Nursing Sisters.

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