If You Were the Only Girl, page 31
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I can enlist now and be part of the medical team for the Royal Warwickshires or I can claim exemption and stay a civilian.’
‘Can you claim exemption?’
‘Yes,’ Chris said. ‘But I wouldn’t be doing it to get out of military service. I am just thinking that if there is a lot of aerial bombing, like people say, there will be casualties and some of them will probably be severe, so I might be more use here.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lucy. ‘I can see your dilemma there.’
‘I think the only thing to do is wait and see what happens in the next few months,’ Chris said as he drew up outside the nurses’ home. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’
No men were allowed upstairs in the nurses’ home, and the home sister, Sister Magee, made sure that that rule was strictly adhered to. Lucy took her case from Chris at the door. He would have liked to have given her a kiss goodbye but, under the watchful eyes of Sister Magee, he didn’t dare. ‘Goodbye then, Lucy,’ he said, putting out his hand. ‘Look after yourself but don’t forget where we live.’
Lucy shook Chris’s hand warmly. ‘I won’t forget, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘And thank you for all you have done for me.’
He turned away as Sister Magee began directing Lucy to her room. ‘It’s on the second floor. Left at the head of the stair. Number eighteen.’
There were four beds and beside each one was a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The walls were distempered cream and the floor was covered with blue lino with a mottled pattern. The only thing that spoilt the room were the black shutters fitted to the windows.
There was a girl already in the room, who looked immensely glad to see Lucy. She was a little on the plump side and had blonde hair tied up in a chignon at the nape of her neck and big blue eyes, which Lucy saw glittered with unshed tears. She introduced herself as Barbara Irvine.
‘Everyone calls me Babs, though,’ she added. ‘What about you?’
‘Lucy Cassidy,’ Lucy said. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit upset?’
‘It’s because I was on my own in the room,’ Babs said. ‘I started feeling sorry for myself, and then started to feel most incredibly homesick. Mad, isn’t it? I mean, I only left them this morning.’
‘You haven’t left home before then?’
‘No. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy said. ‘When I was fourteen.’ And she told Babs the bare bones of what had happened to her. Babs was impressed by what she called her courage, but couldn’t understand why she didn’t go with her family to America.
‘I didn’t want to go.’ Lucy said. ‘It was really that simple.’
‘Didn’t you miss them most dreadfully?’
‘Of course,’ Lucy said. ‘I missed them with an ache that I thought would never go away. But I’m over that now and looking forward to the next chapter in my life.’
Babs was so impressed by Lucy, she told their other two roommates when they arrived. Jenny Black had deep brown eyes, bright red hair she said she had tried to calm down with a Marcel perm, so her head was full of corkscrew curls, and she had a fair face peppered with freckles. Both things, she declared, were the bane of her life.
Vera Winstanley, on the other hand, Lucy thought stuck up till she got to know her better. She spoke correctly and without an accent of any sort, and her mid-brown hair was cut short. It framed her face and made her grey-green eyes stand out even more, so she was quite striking to look at. She was, in fact, one of the nicest and kindest people, Lucy was to find, but had a naturally reserved nature.
All the probationary nurses had to have an interview with Matron Turner and a medical before they were finally accepted on the nursing course. Quite a few were worried about the interview, for Matron was said to be a formidable woman who could rip a body to shreds in minutes with her tongue.
‘People say that the army’s loss is our gain,’ Babs said, ‘and that she would make a good sergeant major.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Probably her bark is worse than her bite.’
And so it was proved when it was her turn to be interviewed, though it didn’t seem so at first. As she entered the room she cast her eyes over the woman on the other side of the desk. She wore a dark blue dress covered with a pure white apron, and the ruff at her neck seemed as stiff as the woman herself. Her grey hair was scraped back from her head so tightly that her eyebrows arched and deep worry lines furrowed her brow and scored down either side of her nose. She wore a starched white matron’s cap on her head. Lucy also noticed her eyes were the most dazzling blue and these darkened and the frowns deepened disconcertingly as she bade Lucy sit. She sat gingerly on the chair opposite the matron and felt decidedly uncomfortable.
Then Matron smiled, which transformed her face, and Lucy began to relax as the matron told her she was about to embark on a noble profession and so her manner at all times must reflect this. All student nurses, she said, must strive to show refinement of mind, clean habits and tidy ways, and then these attributes would be carried on to the ward.
‘And of crucial importance is cleanliness, hygiene,’ she said to Lucy. ‘I am sure that this has already been explained to you at the Cottage Hospital in Sutton Coldfield.’
‘Oh, yes, Matron.’ Lucy said. ‘They said I had to keep my nails short, and I had to scrub my hands before I went on the ward and before I dealt with any patient, and also between patients.’
Matron nodded approvingly. ‘And because you have been doing this type of work for some time, I do not have to tell you that the hours are long and some of the work arduous?’
Lucy smiled. ‘No, Matron.’
‘And I must say I have seldom had a student here with such glowing testimonials, both from the hospital and a Dr Christopher Gilbert,’ the matron said. ‘If only half of what they said about you was true then you will make a first-rate nurse, because between you and me, as well as their commendations, you gained almost full marks in the exam.’
‘Oh!’
‘You are surprised?’
‘Oh, yes, Matron,’ Lucy said, ‘because I left school at fourteen. It was Dr Gilbert who taught me what I needed to know. I lodged with his mother, you see. That’s how that came about.’
‘I would have said then that you were an attentive student because you want to nurse a great deal,’ the matron said.
‘I do, Matron,’ Lucy said earnestly. ‘Very much.’
Then Matron’s smile was very wide indeed as she got to her feet and said, ‘Well, I will be expecting good reports of you,’ and she shook Lucy by the hand. ‘Welcome aboard, Miss Cassidy.’
Not everyone was welcomed as warmly as Lucy, so she kept quiet about her interview and listened sympathetically to many of the others moaning about Matron. But in the end they all got through the interview and all passed their medicals as well. Lucy felt she was on her way at last. In talking to the others, and in particular the girls who shared her room, she found she was the only one with so much experience and the only one so passionate about nursing.
Babs was there because her father was a Methodist minister and thought that his eldest daughter should be seen to be doing something useful with her life. Jenny’s parents, meanwhile, had both worked their socks off at unskilled low-paid jobs in order to give their two children a future. Now her brother was an apprentice toolmaker, and she hadn’t the heart to tell them that she didn’t really want to nurse when they had set their hearts on it. Vera had taken it up as a sop to her mother, who had wanted her only daughter to make some sense of her expensive private education and become a doctor. She hadn’t the brains, and the teachers had told her mother the same. In the end her father had suggested nursing instead, maybe to stop her mother fussing.
‘And has it?’ Lucy asked.
Vera shook her head. ‘No. Not really.’
‘I’m glad that I haven’t had pressure either way,’ Lucy said. ‘And it is just as good as I thought it would be.’
She knew, though, with her limited time off and her shift patterns it was going to be very hard to see Clodagh. Clodagh was aware of this too because just two nights before Lucy had moved into the nurses’ home, as she waited for the bus back to Sutton after a night at a cinema in Aston, Clodagh uncharacteristically put her arms around her and said, ‘I’m going to miss you, Lucy.’
Lucy, a little embarrassed, had said, ‘What you talking about? I’m not emigrating, you know.’
‘Might as well be, according to Hazel’s sister,’ Clodagh said. ‘She had a friend went into nursing and she said her time off was dismal.’
And it was dismal, Lucy had to agree. It put paid to her dancing lessons and her evenings at the cinema, and unless you were really passionate about nursing she doubted many would stick at it. They certainly wouldn’t do it for the money, which was thirty pounds for the year, and rising in increments of five pounds a year until your period of training was over, and you didn’t get anything at all for the first six weeks of the first year, and nothing if you failed your exams either. She was immensely glad of her savings, which she could dip into if she had to.
What Lucy found harder to cope with was the crippling exhaustion. Most of her off-duty time was spent trying to catch up on sleep for the first fortnight or so. She had thought she wouldn’t feel it like the others, but as a volunteer in the hospital she hadn’t been subjected to the same hours as the other nurses and she had had her weekends free. Now she was on duty from half-past six, when she had to help with the breakfasts, and did not finish until eight o’clock at night apart from half an hour for her dinner and two hours recreational time spread throughout the day, which had to be spent away from the wards.
She was off duty every Tuesday, from 2 p.m. until 9.30, and alternate Sundays, from 9.00 a.m. until 12.30 one week, and the following week from 2 p.m. to 9.30. Then, once a month, she was off from 2 p.m. until midday the following day. Like everyone else, Lucy found the shift patterns difficult at first.
However, she had no trouble with the training. They had lectures on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, which she found both interesting and challenging, and the basic nursing they were being shown was more or less a continuation of what she had been doing at the Cottage Hospital.
‘It seems to come naturally to you,’ Jenny said as they reached the room after a particularly gruelling session.
‘It’s just months and months of practice, that’s all.’
‘But that’s it,’ Babs complained. ‘We haven’t got months and months. We have an exam in a few weeks and I seem to be all fingers and thumbs at the practical stuff.’
‘Me too,’ Jenny said. ‘And I’m not too hot on the theory either.’
There again Lucy had the advantage, for Chris had done far more than teach her the basics that she would need to know. The nurses too had given her quite a few nuggets of knowledge, which she often found useful. Suddenly she felt very sorry for her friends.
‘Do you all feel this way?’ she asked. ‘Vera, what about you? Are you struggling too?’
‘Oh, rather,’ Vera said. ‘All help gratefully received down this end.’
‘Right,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll help you all I can. I can at least teach you the basic stuff.’
‘That would be great,’ Jenny said.
‘I would be most awfully grateful,’ Vera said, while Babs put in, ‘Anyway, exams aside, we need to know as much as possible as soon as possible, just in case there is going to be the aerial bombing everyone was talking about. I know that nothing has happened yet but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to.’
‘I know,’ Lucy said. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to realise we are at war. I mean, I know Poland’s gone, another notch to Hitler’s belt, but that was more or less expected. But apart from the loss of a couple of ships there has been nothing else.’
‘What does your doctor chap think of it?’ Jenny said, because they all knew about Jenny lodging with the doctor’s mother and his views on claiming exemption to work with those injured from the bombing on his own territory.
‘Oh, I had a letter from his mother just this week and she said he is really cheesed off. I mean, it’s not that he wants people to be injured, but if the bombers are going to leave us alone he feels he might be better employed elsewhere. Anyway, he told her that he’ll leave it till Christmas and if there is still nothing, he will enlist.’
‘His mother will miss him, with you gone as well,’ Babs said.
‘Well, he didn’t live at home, anyway,’ Lucy said. ‘And Gwen isn’t giving herself time to get miserable. She has joined the WVS and said that she is ashamed to admit that she is happier than she has been for many years.’
‘Feels of some use, I suppose,’ Vera said. ‘Oh, I wish my mother would find something to occupy her and not worry about me so much.’
‘And mine,’ Jenny said. ‘Always asking how it’s going and if I’m working hard, as if there is any flipping chance to do anything else.’
‘Oh,’ Babs said, ‘you have it easy. I have the entire church praying to me. What sort of pressure is that if I fail?’
‘Yes, while Lucy floats through life without anyone getting at her,’ Jenny said.
‘At first my mother didn’t even want me to stay in Britain once war was declared,’ Lucy said as she remembered the passionate letter her mother had sent her.
Please, think seriously about joining us here now for there may be desperate and dangerous times ahead for Britain. I know how you feel about nursing but you could do your training here. Declan is sure they would recognise your qualifications because British nurses are well thought of over here. Please, please, consider this, my darling girl, for I will worry about you so much if you insist on staying there now that they have declared war on Germany.
The letter had arrived before she’d left for the nurses’ home, and she had passed it to Gwen to read.
‘What will you do?’ Gwen had asked.
In answer, Lucy had said, ‘I wanted to nurse to make people better, ease their suffering, and I think there might be a great deal of suffering here, especially if the bombing raids do come. This isn’t the time to try and keep myself safe at all costs when I might be needed more here.’
Now, Lucy said to her roommates, ‘But I must admit, now that Mammy has accepted that I am not going to hide the war out in America all she does is send me encouraging little missives.’
‘Yeah, with ten-dollar bills inside.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Lucy said. She hadn’t wanted to accept the money, but her mother had insisted since she had learnt that she’d begun at the hospital.
I am so very proud of you, for you have done this all yourself and accepted no help, which was hard in a way for me because it is the only time in my life that I was able to help you. Now Declan puts money in the bank for me every month. It is for my own personal use and if I choose to send some to my dear daughter who I still miss so much then please don’t refuse it. I know trainee nurses are not overpaid.
How could Lucy not accept money from her mother after she had sent a letter like that?
She said to the girls, ‘I am getting quite a little nest egg in the Post Office because I never have time to spend it,’ and the other three nodded sagely because they knew exactly what she meant.
TWENTY-TWO
In the end, with the extra work Babs, Jenny and Vera put in with Lucy’s help, which was reinforced by the lectures and the time spent on the wards, the girls approached the exams at the end of October with quiet confidence, and found them not too bad at all.
There were still no raids, so they were surprised when the Evening Mail reported on 15 November that one hundred thousand air-raid shelters had been delivered to Birmingham.
‘Makes chilling reading,’ Vera said. ‘Think they know something we don’t?’
‘Probably,’ Lucy said. ‘But it is reassuring that they are ordering these shelters. Better be safe than sorry, surely?’
‘I’d say so,’ Babs said, spreading the paper out so that they could all see the diagrams. ‘Look, they come as corrugated-iron sheets that have to be bent over and bolted together. Then they’re partially buried and the whole thing covered with earth and sandbags.’
‘Not much use to those without gardens,’ Jenny said. ‘My parents will have to use a communal brick-built shelter, I suppose, ’cos we haven’t got a cellar either.’
‘Yeah,’ Babs said. ‘And I know they are sandbagged and have no windows and that, but they don’t seem much safer than a house to me.’
‘No, and,’ Jenny said, ‘scurrying down underground and sitting out the raids in a comfortless tin shack won’t be much pleasure either.’
‘It isn’t supposed to be a pleasure,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s about keeping safe. We will have no say in the matter if raids threaten the hospital. You heard Matron. If we are on duty, nurses will be selected to take those who are able down to the cellars.’
‘Yeah, and if they can’t go down there, we have to fit those steel cages over the beds,’ Babs said. ‘And if the bombs are coming fast and furious I just might crawl under those cages myself.’
‘What about you, Vera?’ Lucy asked.
‘Huh, my father didn’t believe that treaty Chamberlain signed last year, so he had a big concrete bunker built. I feel a bit embarrassed about it because Four Oaks, where I live, is unlikely to be bombed.’
‘How can you be so sure of that?’ Babs said. ‘’Tisn’t as if the Jerries have done a dummy run and dropped a few little ones to give us a sort of clue as to where the action is going to be, is it?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Look,’ Lucy said, ‘we cannot be responsible for things our parents do, only the things we do ourselves. Doesn’t everyone agree with that?’
They did and she went on, ‘So, Vera, don’t feel embarrassed about any old bunker your dad has had built.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Babs, and continued, with a broad wink to the others, ‘In fact, I have a good idea. Why don’t you write your address down and if there is a humdinger of a raid, we’ll all come and share your bunker? Then you might feel a wee bit better about it.’
