Authors: Maggie Hope
Tags: #Nurses, #World War; 1939-1945, #Sagas, #War & Military, #Fiction
A Wartime Nurse (10 page)
Theda hesitated, tempted. If she walked back she would be late and Home Sister could be snotty about the rules. On the other hand, if she were seen getting out of Major Collins’s car, there could be more trouble. But she couldn’t really spend yet another night at home, the ward would be short-staffed. She would just have to swallow her resentment of him.
‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to accept a lift from me?’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘Just, you must know what Home Sisters can be like. If she sees me getting out of your car at this time of night, she’ll think I’ve lost my virtue or something.’ As soon as she said the old-fashioned phrase, Theda felt embarrassed. He would think her a fool.
‘I’ll drop you off on the corner,’ he offered, and she realised he understood what she meant. Of course he would, he was used to hospital rules.
‘I would be glad of a lift,’ she admitted, and walked with him round the corner to a Hillman car and waited for him to open the door for her. Rain was falling heavily now and she was glad to get inside. The major soon had the car on the road and headed towards the town, blue shaded head-lamps lighting the road poorly and glinting eerily on puddles in the gutters. There was very little traffic; all was dark and silent except when they passed a pit head with the wheel whirring above and the twinkle of rights as the cage came to the surface and spilled out its load of miners with their lamps.
Theda glanced sideways at her companion. All she could see was the outline of his face, darker than the night outside the car, and a faint flash as he sensed her eyes on him and looked down at her.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘what were you doing in Winton?’
‘I live there. At least, my family lives there. It was my afternoon off and I was visiting them.’
‘Oh? Then you will know my uncle, Mr Cornish? He’s the manager at Winton Colliery.’
‘Yes. Well, of course I know him. Everyone in a pit village knows the gaffer. But my father and brothers are just ordinary miners.’ Theda bit her lip, she hadn’t mean to sound as though she had an inferiority complex about it.
He glanced at her again. ‘Does that matter? After all, I understand Uncle Tucker started as an ordinary miner. Worked his way up from the bottom, so it’s said.’
Theda sighed. ‘Sorry. Of course it doesn’t matter, not nowadays, I was being silly. I’m tired and have to work four hours tonight
and
I’m on days tomorrow.’
and
I’m on days tomorrow.’
‘Almost there.’
The car was entering the town now and he turned into the road that ran along the side of the hutted wards, though nothing could be seen of them even in daylight for they were surrounded by a high wall surmounted by rows of barbed wire. He stopped the car before he got to the corner, about a hundred yards from the nurses’ home and the entrance to the hospital.
Theda gathered up her flashlight and gas mask from her lap and turned to him. ‘Thank you for the lift, Major,’ she said. ‘I would have been late if I’d had to walk.’
‘Not at all, it was no trouble,’ he replied, almost as formally as she. ‘Best hurry in now, before Home Sister catches you.’ Theda got out of the car and hurried off down the road, looking back only the once as she turned for the gate of the home. The car was still there, headlights dimmed, but as she went up the path to the door she heard the engine rev up to go on.
It was nice to think that he had watched over her until she was safely inside, she mused as she went up to her room and took off her wet coat. Not that there was anything to fear on the streets of Bishop Auckland, but still . . . it was nice. It reminded her of the way Alan . . . Good Lord! What on earth was she thinking? She certainly didn’t think of Major Collins in that way. Why, it was only three months since Alan was posted missing at Arnhem. The familiar ache started up as she thought of her dead fiance.
Theda did her stint on the ward. It was quiet, only the occasional snore from the sleeping men, and some muttering when the porter came in to replenish the stoves and the clattering noise of the coke going in woke them. She busied herself refilling dressing drums for the autoclave.
Dear Alan, she thought miserably, how I loved you. The misery she had felt when she learned of his death returned full force and was still with her when she slid between the icy sheets of her narrow bed in the nurses’ home. She cried into her pillow for a moment or two before looking for a handkerchief in the drawer of her bedside cabinet and blowing her nose.
That’s enough, she told herself sternly. There’s work to be done tomorrow. Settling herself down once more, her body gradually warmed up and, against her expectations, she fell asleep.
Chapter Eight
The week before the Christmas of 1944 was a comparatively happy time at the hospital. There was a new mood of expectancy; everyone thought the war would be over soon, or at least the British did.
‘Won’t be long now,’ said Tom, the guard on the gate to the POW section, as Theda showed her pass. ‘Hitler’s in for it now. Our lads will be in Berlin before the spring, you’ll see.’
‘I hope so,’ she replied. ‘I think we’ve all had enough of this war.’
Even the prisoners were different, she thought as she walked down the ramp and into the ward. There was a much lighter atmosphere altogether as some of the men made wooden toys for the children’s ward and the singers among them, having formed a choir, were practising singing carols at the far end of the ward.
One lot of prisoners from another ward, who were fit enough to be allowed out to work the regulation three hours on surrounding farms, had brought back bunches of holly and tree ivy and shared it out so that all the huts had greenery decorating the windows. Some was sent over to the civilian side too. Nurses were forever dodging bunches of mistletoe hung by enterprising Italians.
‘I’ll be glad when they all go back to the camp,’ commented Nurse Harris. ‘They shouldn’t have been on this ward anyway – it’s surgical.’
Nurse Harris was becoming quite knowledgeable about hospital ways. At the moment she was busy laying yet another dressing trolley with freshly sterilised instruments from the stainless steel boiler and flashed a cheerful smile at Theda as she said it.
‘You’re in a good mood this morning,’ commented Theda as she reached across the bench for the drum of dressings and swabs, freshly autoclaved overnight by the theatre porter. She smiled to herself. Nurse Harris spoke with such an air of knowing it all, considering the scant time she had been working in the hospital. The Italians were in the ward because the medical wards were overflowing with chest infections this winter. They were all convalescent and considered non-infectious.
‘My boyfriend has seven days’ leave over Christmas,’ explained Nurse Harris. ‘I had a letter this morning. Sister says I can have Christmas Eve and a half day on Boxing Day.’
‘Oh, that’s grand,’ Theda said warmly, and was genuinely pleased for her colleague despite a stab of envy and aching regret that it wasn’t Alan coming home. In case the other nurse had noticed anything, she turned away as she removed her cuffs and rolled up her sleeves before she scrubbed up.
Nurse Harris’s sweetheart was a Durham Light Infantryman but since the Italian campaign when he had caught a lump of shrapnel in his shoulder he had been reduced from Al fitness category to C3. Consequently he was confined to home duties though stationed far from his home somewhere in the south. Theda knew him slightly; he had worked at Shildon Railway Shops, the same place as Alan before the war.
‘How are you today, Johann?’
The young boy stared up at her and refrained from answering. One of those, she thought. Brought up in the Hitler Youth no doubt. She hadn’t been on the prisoner side very long but had soon learned to recognise them. The best thing to do was ignore their attitude; most of them softened after a while.
‘Your temperature is nice and steady now,’ she remarked as she returned from washing her hands and begun to clean the wound in his shoulder which Nurse Harris had already uncovered. The dressing she removed was almost clean, Theda saw, the wound nearly healed. There would be a nasty scar but at least he would be able to use his arm as normal. He lay passively, accepting her ministrations, but keeping his head turned away.
‘It won’t be long before you can leave us and go up to the camp among your friends,’ Theda said. ‘Now you have the plasters off your leg and arm.’
She knew he could understand English but he didn’t answer her.
‘Waste of time talking to him, Staff.’
They finished the dressing and made him comfortable in bed, cradling him in their arms and lifting him up against the pillows. He was a tall boy but thin, only just beginning to put on a little weight as his appetite returned. He would have been easy to lift were it not for the fact that he tensed as they held him, his face turned away in disdain.
‘You will soon be going up to the main camp up the dale,’ Theda persevered. ‘This afternoon we will get you out of bed, we must have you walking again.’ She smiled at him. He was so like her own brother Frank had been, patriotic as only the young can be. He was just a boy after all.
‘I will get away,’ he said, surprising them both as they were in the middle of removing the screens from around the bed. It was the first time he had spoken to either of them.
‘Don’t be silly!’ snapped Nurse Harris, her patience exhausted. ‘Where do you think you will go?’
‘I will get away,’ he repeated. ‘You will see, I will escape. It is my duty.’
His voice had risen and he raised himself from his pillows, his face flushed as he glared at them. ‘It is the duty of us all, everyone who is prisoner. Some have forgotten—’
‘Private!’
A sergeant had risen from his seat by the stove and was stamping down the ward as fast as his game leg would let him. He raised his walking stick as he reached the bottom of the bed and drew himself up.
‘You will be civil to the nurses, Private, you hear me?’
Johann’s flush deepened. He subsided on to his pillows, muttering something Theda took to be a yes. Obedience to authority was too well ingrained in him for it to be anything else.
‘What is happening?’
She turned and saw that Major Koestler had come into the ward and was standing just behind her. He looked very inch the arrogant Prussian officer, she saw, completely different somehow.
‘It is nothing, Doctor—’ she began, but the sergeant was speaking in rapid German and Major Koestler was asking questions and completely ignoring the nurses.
‘Come on, Harris,’ she said. ‘We have plenty to do without joining in their squabbles.’ They moved on to the next man to be dressed and pulled the screens around the bed.
‘Let them sort out their own,’ said Nurse Harris. ‘What do we care what a silly kid thinks? Mind, you’d expect him to be grateful at least for what we’ve done for him. I bet one of our lads wouldn’t have got the same treatment in Germany.’
Theda didn’t answer. The man in the bed was looking from one to the other of them, straining to understand what they were saying. He caught the gist of it for he nodded his head vigorously.
‘Oh, yes, good treatment in Germany,’ he said.
Theda smiled at him. ‘I’m sure there is, Hans.’
‘Well, come on then, let’s have a look at your leg. We haven’t got all day, even if you have.’
The corner of the ward where Johann lay was quiet now, the boy seemingly asleep and the sergeant back by the stove where he was whittling a small horse from a piece of wood. Theda watched his hands, swift and sure as they formed the head, the mane flying back as though in motion, the legs at the gallop. All the time he chatted easily to a friend or whistled under his breath, turning the wood in his hands, bringing it alive. He felt her gaze upon him and looked up.
‘I clean up after,’ he said, indicating the chips of wood on the red-tiled surround of the stove. He was a man in his forties – ‘Poppi’ the other prisoners called him – old enough to be the father of most of them, though not so old as some of the recent prisoners. Regular army, she supposed.
‘That’s all right,’ she replied. ‘Just so long as Matron doesn’t see the mess.’
‘She will not.’
She returned his conspiratorial smile. It was hard to keep her distance from men like the sergeant, enemies though they were. Every day there was a further chipping away of the reserve between them.
The sergeant could have been her father, carving a wooden dolly for her when she was younger out of the discarded end of a pit prop, sitting by the fire and letting the bits drop on to the tin hearth plate, being told off for the mess when her mother saw it. Mam would bustle about with a brush and small shovel, sweeping up the chips and throwing them on the fire so that they flared up with blue and orange flames, just as these did when the sergeant threw them in the stove.
The dressing round ended and Joan Harris went for her break. There was no sign of Major Koestler who must have left the ward. Theda couldn’t get used to calling him ‘Doctor’ as he had asked, for he was a surgeon. If he had been English she would have called him ‘Mr Koestler’. In any case, he was still in the army and he
was
a major.
was
a major.
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