If You Were the Only Girl, page 33
‘I know,’ Gwen said. ‘Shame, isn’t it, but we will just have to cope with it like we do everything else.’
‘And,’ said Lucy, with a wide smile, ‘there is no good complaining, for don’t you know there’s a war on?’
‘Get away,’ Chris replied with a sardonic grin. ‘You know, I never noticed that.’ And they all laughed gently together.
Chris left soon after that, as he said he had a couple of early-morning visits before surgery the following day. Lucy thought that when he left it was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.
She washed up with Gwen and they chatted amiably together as they always had, but it was as if some of the essence had gone. Lucy couldn’t really understand why she should feel that because she had never seen that much of Chris to talk to. When he had visited the house before she moved to the General, he mainly spoke to Gwen, but he had seemed different this evening. It was all very confusing, and it was only much later tucked up in bed that Lucy realised that she hadn’t even wished Chris a ‘Happy Christmas’. That was a shame because she knew she probably wouldn’t see him again for some time.
It was the heartfelt and genuine enjoyment of the patients that made Christmas for Lucy that year. On Christmas Eve, nurses helped some of the patients into the dining room, where a makeshift stage had been set up. Others came under their own steam, and a couple were on crutches. Then there were those in wheelchairs, and even some of the bed-bound were wheeled in by the nurses. They all settled down to watch the show.
They seemed to forget their aches and pains, and laughed as uproariously as the nurses at the funny sketches. Lucy was astounded that their stiff and starchy doctors and surgeons could don a myriad of silly costumes or go cavorting around the stage using the guise of Christmas to raise a smile on patients’ faces. Everyone joined in with the music-hall songs and then they began singing Christmas carols. Lucy kept her eye on the clock because she had been given special dispensation and a late pass so that she could attend midnight Mass at St Chad’s. She slipped out into the black icy night as the audience were singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ with gusto, and felt her feet slide on the ice, which the blackout made impossible to see. Picking her way gingerly, she was glad that she hadn’t far to go.
The familiarity of the midnight Mass interspersed with carols seemed to soothe her very soul. As Lucy had become a familiar face to many, she left the church at the end of Mass with Christmas greetings ringing in her ears. She nearly cannoned into a man standing in the doorway, but it wasn’t until he turned on his torch that she saw who it was.
‘Chris, what are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you,’ Chris said, taking her arm and shining the torchlight in front of them so they had a chance of seeing the ice patches.
‘At this time of night? Don’t be so silly.’
‘Doctors don’t work normal hours, you know that,’ Chris said. ‘Tonight I was called out to a woman with breathing problems. Didn’t like the sound of her chest, so I called for an ambulance and they took her to the General, and I followed to keep a check on her. There was very few people about. The nurse on duty said that they were all at the show, which should be finishing any minute. But when I asked were you there she said that she thought you had gone to midnight Mass, so here I am.’
‘Yes, but why are you here?’
‘Well, first and foremost I wanted to see you,’ Chris said. ‘I have a present for you,’ and he pressed a bag into her hand as they reached the door of the nurses’ home. ‘Sorry I couldn’t wrap it up all fancy for you.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Lucy said. ‘Thank you very much, Chris. Can I peep?’
Chris gave a shrug. ‘If you like. It is after twelve, and so officially Christmas Day now anyway.’
Lucy gave a squeal of delight when she looked in the bag. ‘A torch! Oh, Chris, you angel. And spare batteries too.’
Chris smiled. ‘Glad you’re pleased. Came from one of my patients. Seems able to lay his hands on most things. I didn’t ask many questions because I really thought you needed a torch.’
‘I did,’ Lucy said. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘It’s a pleasure,’ Chris said. ‘But I have another reason for wanting to see you – as well as wishing you a very Happy Christmas. I have enlisted and must join my unit the day after Boxing Day. It is unlikely I will get down again and I wanted to ask a favour.’
Lucy smiled. ‘Ask away.’
‘Lucy, will you write to me?’
It was the last thing Lucy was expecting Chris to say; and so when she didn’t answer immediately, he said, ‘Please, Lucy. It will mean the world to me if you say yes.’
‘But of course I will, Chris,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t answer straight away. It was just that I was surprised.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Not at all.’
Chris’s sigh was one of relief and he drew her towards him and kissed her cheek gently. ‘Happy Christmas, Lucy.’
Lucy felt the spot Chris had kissed burning into her cheek, and she said, ‘And you, Chris, look after yourself.’
‘Don’t worry, I am not a fighting man. I am just there to patch up the rest. But you had better go in now. It’s freezing and we will both stick to the ground if we stay out here much longer.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy said, ‘and though I have got a late pass, I will get it in the neck if I am too late.’
She watched Chris melt away into the darkness. She was glad he had asked her to write because he was a good, kind man and she liked him very much. She would pray that he would come back safe and sound.
TWENTY-THREE
Lucy hadn’t time to miss Chris, or indeed to miss anyone, because on 1 January the four girls began their three-month stint on nights, which all nurses had to do every year. This first involved packing all their belongings and moving to rooms above Matron’s office, as they were quieter and they would need to sleep in the day. They would be on duty for twelve nights from 11 p.m. until 8.15 a.m. and then have two nights off.
‘I’m not looking forward to this,’ Lucy said to Babs as they surveyed their new accommodation. ‘I’ve never been very good at night.’
‘Nor me,’ said Jenny. ‘I need my sleep, I do.’
‘Yeah,’ Babs said, ‘we’ve noticed. You would have missed breakfast a few times if it hadn’t been for us.’
‘And then fainted on one of the wards from starvation, like as not,’ Vera said. ‘I am always ravenous for my breakfast.’
‘I can’t help being sleepy,’ Jenny complained. ‘What I’m afraid of is that on night shift you will find me in a corner somewhere fast asleep like a dormouse.’
‘You’d make a flipping big dormouse,’ Lucy said. ‘And don’t worry about falling asleep, Jen, we’ll pinch you awake.’
‘Yeah, and take pleasure in it,’ Babs said with a grin.
‘Sadistic tendencies are not one of the attributes a nurse should aspire to,’ Jenny retorted.
‘Neither is being asleep on duty,’ Vera added.
‘Come on, girls,’ Lucy said. ‘Whatever we think of night duty we have to get used to it because it is part of the job, and that is that.’
‘You sure your second name isn’t Pollyanna?’ Jenny asked Lucy derisively.
‘No, surely, it’s Florence Nightingale?’ Vera said.
‘Give over, you lot,’ Lucy said, but she was laughing herself because the ribaldry between them was always good-natured.
‘So we have got a day off,’ Babs said. ‘What are we going to do with it?’
‘Look,’ Jenny said, ‘the day might be cold but the sun is shining so let’s take a gander into town, have a bite to eat at Lyons in New Street, and come back here. That will be long enough to get a bit of shut-eye before we have to go on duty.’ There was a chorus of agreement to this plan.
Lucy thought it very strange to begin work when normally she would be tucked up in bed, and the others all said the same. The senior nurse in charge, Nurse Pat Cornley, told them she had felt the same at first, but that they would soon get used to it.
The first thing they did was walk around the ward, introducing themselves to any of the patients that were awake and checking they were comfortable. They might only need a drink or a warm hot-water bottle or a bedpan fetching, or asthmatics might need adrenalin administered. However, those in distress or discomfort had to be seen first. And when the initial patients’ needs had been met there was stock to cut and fold, the dressing drums to pack, bandages to roll, columns to draw in the book to record each patient’s temperature, pulse and respiration function, and sulphonamide to be spread on lint and stored for future use to prevent the spread of infection.
Doing all this, plus checking the patients, did help the time pass quite quickly, but Lucy was still pleased when Nurse Cornley sent her off for something to eat at three o’clock. ‘I’m starving,’ said Babs as they trotted down the corridor towards the canteen. ‘Can’t understand it. I mean, I’m not usually hungry at three o’clock in the morning.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not running about then either,’ Lucy pointed out. ‘And if I were you I’d have a good feed because it’s still a long time until quarter past eight.’
They had a bowl of soup each, followed by cheese sandwiches, a slab of cake and two cups of tea. Lucy sat back contentedly as she drained the second cup of tea.
‘Oh, I feel better for that,’ she said. ‘You know I didn’t feel that hungry until I started eating.’
‘It’s like that sometimes,’ Babs said. ‘The thing about eating a big meal, though, is it can make you sleepy. I mean, I could drop off lovely now.’
‘Not a chance,’ Lucy said with a smile. ‘In fact, we’d better head back. Nurse Cornley said half an hour, and anyway, Vera and Jenny must be just as hungry as we were.’
They were, but they were back on the ward again when they had a visit from the night sister, who quizzed the younger probationers on the names of the patients and what they had wrong with them. Fortunately, they were able to answer every question correctly and as the ward was clean and tidy she could find nothing to criticise.
After her inspection it wasn’t that long till the day staff started. Then they helped with breakfast, making drinks, buttering bread or feeding those unable to feed themselves, while the day nurses got those who had eaten ready for the doctors’ rounds
By the time the girls had worked on nights for twelve days they were so weary that they spent most of their two days off sleeping. Lucy had kept up with her letter writing, though, because she knew that people looked forward to receiving letters from her telling them she was all right, and, though she told her mother she was doing her spell of night duty, she didn’t stress her tiredness.
She also wrote to Clara. It was her second letter since Clodagh had told her where she and Cook had moved to, her first she had received a lovely letter back inside a Christmas card. Clara had written that she was sorry that she hadn’t told Lucy of her plans but in the end it had happened in a rush and she had felt quite numb at the time.
I am fine again now and realise that I was holding on to Maxted Hall like some sort of security blanket, afraid to move. Ada said she felt the same, but in the end, having been almost forced into leaving, it is the best thing we have ever done. We get on as we always have and we both have the freedom to do whatever we choose when our work is done. We often talk of you and would love to know how you are faring.
Lucy sent Clara a reply similar to the one she had sent her mother, but in the letter to Chris she was much more honest. She told him that though she was thoroughly enjoying nursing, night duty had come as a shock. She was more than tired, and felt as if sheer fatigue had seeped into her bones. She knew he would understand that better than anyone else.
At last, night duty was over and the young nurses celebrated by heading off to the Bull Ring to get themselves some clothes for the coming spring, for they had spent very little while they had been on night shift. Lucy looked around the cobbled streets and contrasted this visit with the one she had made with Clara and Clodagh when she had first arrived in Birmingham, as a callow and naïve girl who knew nothing about anything.
Now there were no flower sellers grouped around Nelson’s Column or in front or St Martin’s, and, as the girls began weaving their way between the stalls, Lucy noticed there was precious little fruit on the barrows that once had been heaped high, and no eggs or butter and only a couple of sad lumps of cheese for sale on the barrows selling dairy products. The butchers’ barrows were worst and housed only bloody trays of offal, though most had rabbits hanging on the rails above them.
Lucy had no problem eating rabbit, which she viewed as pests to the farmer, and Minnie had always been grateful for any person passing a rabbit her way. Rabbit was what they had usually had for Christmas because it was the cheapest meat. In fact, it had surprised her that in Britian rabbits had been sold as pets to be kept in hutches in suburban gardens, and she had never seen dead ones hanging up from stalls in the Bull Ring before.
‘Probably because of meat rationing,’ Jenny said when Lucy commented on this, and she realised that despite Gwen mentioning that rationing was being introduced in January, being on the night shift had sort of inured her to the war, and, though by the end of March, bacon, ham, sugar, butter and, meat were on ration, food always seemed plentiful in the hospital.
‘Our mum nearly bust a gut about it,’ Jenny went on. ‘I mean, she just about coped with four ounces of butter and bacon, and twelve ounces of sugar in January, though our dad used to moan ’cos he used to like three heaped teaspoons of sugar in his tea. He will really have something to moan about now, though, ’cos you can only get meat worth one shilling and eight pence. I mean, what can you get with that? Our old man could eat that much at one sitting and still not be full.’
‘So could mine,’ Vera said, ‘but he is partial to a bit of rabbit.’
‘Is he?’ Lucy asked, surprised that Vera’s father, so obviously well-heeled, was keen on something so lowly.
‘Oh, yes,’ Vera said. ‘Nothing pleases him more than when a man arrives at the door with a brace of rabbit. They are normally poached, you know, from someone’s private land but, in my father’s opinion, ridding the place of rabbits, which he considers vermin, can only be good, so he asks no questions. He wouldn’t have partridge or pheasant or even venison, though he has been offered them, but rabbit, he thinks, is fair game, which anyone should be able to shoot or trap.’
‘Oh, what it is to have connections,’ Babs said, rolling her eyes to the sky, and the girls fell about laughing.
‘The rest of us will have to make do with liver or something similar,’ Jenny said, ‘’cos offal isn’t counted. How would you fancy brains on the canteen menu?’
‘Ugh!’ said Babs and Vera together, but Lucy had a broad smile on her face as she said, ‘I wouldn’t mind brains, especially if by eating it I contributed to my own bit of grey matter. We are starting those series of lectures come Monday, remember, by senior doctors who are so lofty they’ll probably use high-falutin’ terms and words that I won’t know the meaning of. Any help in the brain department is fine by me. I need all the help I can get.’
‘You and me both,’ Babs and Jenny said in unison.
Vera said, ‘Don’t know about you lot, but all this talk of food is making me hungry. Why don’t we get what we came for and then pool our money and see if we have enough for a bun in the Market Hall?’
Everyone was agreeable to this, so they headed down past the old lady outside Woolworths and her constant cry, like a litany – ‘Carriers! Handy carriers!’ – to where a lot of the stalls selling clothes had positioned themselves.
Lucy was able to buy herself a flowery dress, a red spotted skirt, a pair of sandals and a lightweight coat from the rag market and still have money left. She was, however, a bit disappointed to find that the stalls inside the Market Hall sold similar things to the stalls outside.
‘Never mind,’ Jenny said to Lucy as they carried the buns to the table, ‘we’ve still got the clock.’
‘What clock?’
‘That one. Look up.’ Jenny was pointing and Lucy saw a magnificent and elaborate structure made of solid oak, which showed three knights and a lady. It was very nearly four o’clock, she noticed, and suddenly a hush fell as many shoppers stopped in their tracks as the tinkling tone heralding the hour began, and the knight and lady emerged to strike the bell four times.
When it was over and the babble of voices began again, Vera said, ‘My father used to say there was a curse put on that clock by the man who made it because he said he was never paid in full.’
‘Bit of a swizz if that’s true,’ Jenny said.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, ‘because it must have taken him hours to make it, but I don’t believe in curses really. I think it’s just something he said ’cos he was so cross.’
‘Isn’t there a lot of unfairness in the world?’ Jenny said.
‘There definitely is,’ Babs replied. ‘My dad gets mad about it sometimes and he hates to see those poor beggars on the Market Hall steps with trays round their necks. He says they fought in a war to make this a land fit for heroes, and just look at them.’
‘I hate it too,’ Vera said, ‘but we must keep our peckers up because we have patients relying on us. Hard though it is we must try and leave our troubles behind us when we go on the ward. So let’s treat ourselves to the pictures. The Philadelphia Story is on at the Odeon, with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.’
Jenny groaned. ‘Oh, I’d love to, but I haven’t enough money left.’
‘Nor me,’ Babs said.
‘Ah, but look what I have,’ Vera said, pulling something out of her bag and holding it aloft.
‘Cinema tickets!’ Lucy cried. ‘Where the hell did you get cinema tickets?’
‘My dad,’ Vera said. ‘He sent them a few days ago and said they were for us to use when we finished night shift, and goodness knows when we will have a Saturday night off all together again.’
