A Nurse's Duty (7 page)

She looked up at him, thinking he looked grand too, with his fair good looks. There was an air of suppressed excitement about him though. Surely it couldn’t just be because she was home for the day?

‘I’m going to emigrate, Karen,’ he burst out without any preamble. ‘Me and your Joe and some of the other lads … we’re off to Australia next month.’

‘Emigrate?’ Karen stared up at him stupidly. She couldn’t believe she had heard him aright. ‘What do you mean, emigrate?’

‘We’re going to Australia, Karen.’

‘Australia? I can’t go to Australia, I’ve just started my training!’

There was a tiny silence as Dave looked down at her, his face curiously blank.

‘No, I didn’t mean … Aw, come on, Karen, let’s get off home. Me mam’s out visiting her sister up at Houghton, we have the house to ourselves.’ Dave strode out of the station and on to the road leading to Morton Main so that Karen had to hurry to keep up with him.

‘You were joking, weren’t you? About Australia, I mean,’ she panted as she caught up at last.

‘Never mind now, we’ll talk after,’ said Dave, looking down at her, and she saw his eyes take on that curiously intent look and knew what it meant.

The minute they got inside the house Dave took her swiftly and, for Karen at least, with no joy at all, on the mat in the kitchen. It was over in two minutes and afterwards she raised herself painfully and rubbed her shoulder blade which had slipped off the mat and been in contact with the hard stone floor. Carefully, she pulled her drawers on and straightened her skirt and all the time she was weeping softly inside her head. Then she remembered what he had said and turned to face him.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘tell me about Australia.’

Chapter Four

THE TRAIN FROM
Newcastle puffed to a halt in Durham Station and Karen climbed down on to the platform. Quietly she waited for the steam and smoke to clear, peering at the group of people clustered round a pile of obviously new basket-weave boxes, crammed full and tied round with an assortment of leather belts. No one had noticed her yet.

They were waiting for a train going down country, but not this one; this one only went as far as Darlington, and the journey these young men were embarking upon was much further than that, she thought bleakly. They were going to the other side of the world.

Content not to be noticed for a minute, she watched them. There were nine of them altogether, all from her home village, all dressed in their Sunday suits and with fresh-washed white shirts gleaming with starch and boots polished to such a shine they reflected the faces of their owners. And there was a cluster of mothers and sisters and sweethearts with an air of brittle cheerfulness about them. They smiled bravely and chattered and took the least excuse to touch the young men, hold their hands, pat their cheeks.

Some of the men were impatient, anxious to be off, Karen noticed. They were casting glances at the local train still standing on the platform, wanting it to be away so that there would be nothing to stop the Liverpool train from coming into the station.

Karen stood apart. Now that the time had come she found herself fighting to keep her composure. Dave and Joe, she thought forlornly, feeling that she was being deserted by both of them though she knew it was silly to think like that. As she stood, biting
her
cheek, the wind caught in her nurse’s cloak, billowing the material out in a bell and she clutched it closer to her, shivering suddenly. She wished that the Liverpool train would come in quickly, that it was over. At least when they were gone she would be free of this feeling of desolation, this silly hope that it was all a mistake, Dave and Joe were playing a joke on her. She jumped when Joe looked straight at her over Mam’s head and spoke her name.

‘Karen? What are you standing there for? Howay, come and give us a hug. You’re not letting us go off to Australia without so much as a hug?’

Karen smiled quickly and moved forward to be enveloped in a tight circle of her family. She kissed her frail mother who was struggling to hold on to her own composure. And then her father, tall and stern, grey-haired and with a hectic colour in his cheeks betraying the presence of the lung disease which plagued so many of the men of Morton Main. And Kezia, strong and practical, was there of course. There was no sign of Jemima though Karen had thought she would manage to get home to say goodbye to Joe.

‘Wish me luck, Karen,’ Joe said softly, and she gazed up into her brother’s strong, intelligent face, a face so like her own with its dark eyes and frame of almost black hair.

‘Oh, I do, I do, Joe,’ she mumbled and looked away quickly so that he did not see the tears ready to brim. And there was Dave, just lifting his head from his mother’s and staring straight at her so that she felt a tiny pang of guilt that she had not gone to him first.

‘Dave,’ she said, disengaging herself from her family and going to him. Dave, her husband of so short a time it still felt strange to think of him as such. Dave, who was going to Australia to make his fortune.

‘So you came, then,’ sniffed Mrs Mitchell. She glared at Karen, her expression mirroring her firmly held opinion that Dave was
only
going to Australia to get away from his wife and it was the wife’s fault.

‘Of course I came, Mrs Mitchell,’ Karen replied. ‘I got the after noon off from the hospital specially.’

She spoke to the older woman but she was looking at her husband.

Dave stepped forward and took her hands in his and held them to him in that way he had, smiling down at her with his lop-sided grin, his head cocked on one side. And though she told herself he was emigrating for her sake as well as his own, she still felt a sense of betrayal.

‘I must go straight back to Newcastle,’ she said, looking down at his hands on hers, not wanting to lose hold of her resentment. Wasn’t he going away for God knows how long? Hadn’t he fooled her enough already?

‘But not yet, not before we catch the train,’ said Dave, drawing her away from his mother and the rest of the party from the village.

‘Look at me, Karen,’ he murmured, ‘look at me.’

Reluctantly, she raised her gaze to his face. She looked at the light blue eyes and the fair, almost red hair; the freckled face. Dave was a handsome man, she thought with one part of her mind; with another she was thinking, Dave is my husband and he is leaving for the other side of the world. He didn’t even consult me before he booked his passage on the emigrant ship. What will people think? The resentment welled up in her.

‘I’ll send for you, Karen, I promise I will,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll find a house, you’ll see, then as soon as you finish your training you can come out. Nurses are needed in Australia just as much as they are here.’

‘Why do you keep on repeating that?’ she asked. Surely he would send for her, couldn’t she take that for granted?

‘Well, I will,’ he answered.

He’d been telling her he would send for her ever since the day
he
first told her he was going, she thought. Only now did Karen suspect he had been thinking of emigrating even before they were married, else why had he agreed to her going off to train?

‘Leave your ring at home,’ Dave had advised her when she had gone to Newcastle. ‘Someone will see it.’ But she couldn’t do that, it would be bad luck. Why, Gran thought that if you took your wedding ring off your finger something bad would happen to your marriage. And she’d been right, an’ all, Karen thought miserably. For Dave had seen the notice pasted to a wall in Bishop Auckland and he was going to emigrate. Miners were wanted for the goldfields of Australia and her men were going. There would be only Da left.

‘Gold must pay better than coal, eh?’ Dave said to Karen, and she stared at him, disbelieving. But all he could think about was Aus tralia. Even when she came home on her days off and he took her roughly, swiftly, he seemed far away from her. The distance was there in his eyes, it was a mechanical kind of loving only. And now the day had come, he was going. And not only Dave but Joe and most of the other boys she had grown up with. Oh, she thought desperately, she knew the wages had been cut at Morton Main Colliery and things were bad in the village, the future was bleak for the young lads. But Australia?

‘Howay, lass, smile,’ said Dave as he held her hands on the station platform as they waited for the train, ‘I’ll be gone in a minute.’

Karen smiled. The muscles of her face felt stiff and unyielding but Dave didn’t notice. He grinned, excitement creeping back into his eyes. Once again his thoughts were in Australia.

‘I don’t know what you have to grin about,’ Mrs Mitchell said in a voice rough with weeping.

‘Nay, Mother,’ he answered, ‘don’t be upset. You want me to get on, don’t you?’

‘There’s nowt the matter with England. You can get on in
England,’
snapped Mrs Mitchell. ‘There’s plenty of coal to dig here.’

Her mouth worked and her voice rose so that the other members of the group began to take notice. Both Joe and Da had turned to look, concerned, for if only one of the mothers broke down they all would.

They were saved by the whistle of the approaching train. There was a sudden flurry of activity as last hugs and kisses were given and boxes lifted on to shoulders strong from hewing coal underground.

‘I’ll send for you, Karen, I promise I will,’ whispered Dave yet again. He was the first to jump on the train when the doors opened. There was a chorus of farewells and the doors were closed and the train was on its way, puffing out of Durham and taking away so many of the young men of Morton Main.

Karen waved until her arm ached, everyone left behind did. But it was Joe who stuck his head out of the window and waved back. There was no sign of Dave.

‘Will you have time for a bite before you go back?’

Karen looked round at the sound of her sister’s voice. Kezia was standing with Da and Mam, all three wearing that same look of anti-climax. There would only be Kezia left in the village to give an eye to Mam now, thought Karen with a pang of guilt, and glanced at her mother.

Rachel seemed weary, and was very pale. Now that Joe had gone she had dropped her brave front and looked as though she could do with a sit down and a cup of tea. Karen studied her, remembering the last time Mam had worn that exhausted look. It had ended in her being confined to bed for a month on the orders of the panel doctor, the one Da paid fourpence a week for. Kezia and Karen noticed the look at the same time and moved forward together, both of them watching for signs of collapse in their mother.

‘We’ll go to the tea-room, it’s not far, can you manage?’ asked Karen as she took Mam’s arm. ‘I have a couple of hours before I have to be back on duty.’

They settled Mam on a seat in the tea-room and Karen brought her tea from the buffet and sat down herself before she remembered Mrs Mitchell. She would have to have a word with her mother-in-law, she realized, and hurried out on to the platform again. There were a few people from the village hanging about still but no sign of Mrs Mitchell. She must have gone straight home.

Well, there was nothing she could do about that, thought Karen. Dave’s mother knew about her mam’s poor heart, everyone in the village did; the damage done by the rheumatic fever had made her prone to fainting fits and collapsing at times of strain.

‘I told you you shouldn’t have come, Rachel,’ Da was saying as Karen returned to her family. ‘I told you it was too much for you.’

Da’s hair was grizzled now and his breath short with the lung disease. Oh, he was an upright man, one who modelled himself on Job. But he was a quiet man at home and gentle with his women. It was in Chapel that he gave his impassioned sermons. There he was a ‘blood and thunder’ preacher. The pews were full when Thomas Knight was preaching, Karen thought proudly. He could hold a congregation enthralled for hours and never need to refer to a single note. All he needed was his Bible, his dog-eared copy of the King James Version which went with him everywhere except down the pit.

Karen rose abruptly to her feet. She had to get away. It was all right now she saw her mother was not going to have one of her turns. She bent over the table and kissed Rachel, anxiously noting the dry skin of her mother’s cheek. Was it too hot? There were dark shadows under her eyes too; were they darker than usual?

‘I have to go Mam, Da,’ was all she said.

‘I’ll walk to the train with you,’ said Kezia, quiet now, the acerbic note gone from her voice.

The sisters stood on the up platform waiting for the Newcastle train. The wind grew stronger now, blowing in gusts and lifting Kezia’s shawl, showing the thickening of her waist, the start of a pregnancy.

‘You’re having a baby?’ asked Karen, feeling another pang of conscience as Kezia nodded. With Jemima in Lancashire and herself in Newcastle, Kezia had a lot to cope with already.

Kezia correctly interpreted the look Karen gave her.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, ‘I’m strong enough. I can manage fine.’

‘Maybe I should have stayed in the village.’

‘Why no, man,’ Kezia said sharply. ‘In spite of the fact that he didn’t agree with you telling the lie about being married, Da’s that proud of you getting on, he would hate it if you came home now. Anyroad, what’s the difference? You’ll be going off to Australia in a year or two, won’t you?’

Karen glanced up the line, not knowing how to answer. The small local train chugged into the station and Karen kissed Kezia on the cheek, feeling the slight shrinking. Kezia was never one for displays of affection. The train came in and Karen climbed on and found a seat by the window where she could wave to her parents, now standing in the doorway of the tea-room watching her. Kezia had already crossed the bridge and was standing next to them, alternately glancing at the train as it pulled out of the station and keeping a watchful gaze on her mother. Karen settled down for the short journey to Newcastle, trying to quieten her mind for she had to be on duty in an hour or so and already she felt tired to death, strung out emotionally. She stared out of the soot-blackened window, not seeing the fields and trees and small groups of tiny houses clustered round towering winding wheels and colliery yards and tall chimneys belching smoke. Her thoughts were still
with
her family and the mining folk she grew up with. There would be a deal of sadness in Morton Main tonight.