Boarding Three Streets From Home, Then Inspecting Tomorrow

In Cetinje, in the years after the Second World War, a girl training at the medical school as a nurse lived three streets from home and boarded anyway. Students boarded. That was the rule, and the rule was not interested in how close her mother was.

The school provided her clothes and made sure she knew it. The uniform was made to her measurements. The stockings belonged to the state; the darning belonged to her. And there was a housemistress who inspected everything: collars, fingernails, beds.

I have run a version of this boarding school in my own house for fourteen years, without the uniform and without the authority. My inspections cover teeth, homework and whether anyone has seen the youngest’s other shoe. The difference between me and a post-war Montenegrin housemistress is that her pupils did what she said.

Then the hospital took over. Practical training ate the holidays. She learned the wards, the store cupboards and what happened when something was not where it should be.

Her first post was the operating theatre at the hospital in Cetinje. Readying it for the surgeon was now her job: instruments counted and laid out, linen folded, everything in its place.

And here the story takes the turn that makes me look nervously at my own kitchen. She lived near the hospital, and in the evenings she began walking back. Not for a shift. To look. She let herself in, stood in the theatre and went through the next day with her eyes, checking that it was ready.

She had spent her training being inspected, and now she had nobody to inspect her, so she did it herself, at night, for fun.

The housemistress had won. There is no other word for it. Somewhere in those years the collar inspections had gone in and become a person.

I would like to report that my inspections have had a comparable effect. Last week I went into the eldest’s room at ten o’clock to check his bag was packed for the morning. He was asleep. The bag was packed. On top of it was a note, in his handwriting, reading: “Yes, the PE kit is in it. Go to bed.”

This is either the beginning of a nursing career or the end of mine. I folded the note, which nobody had asked me to do, and checked the bag anyway.