A Wartime Nurse (3 page)
Authors: Maggie Hope
Tags: #Nurses, #World War; 1939-1945, #Sagas, #War & Military, #Fiction
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘Was I taking up more than my share of the seat?
‘It’s OK.’
She looked at him. He wore the badge of the Airborne Regiment on his red beret and beneath that had a cheerful smiling face with twinkling blue eyes.
‘I’m only going to Spennymoor. I won’t be a nuisance too long,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m going home to Shildon really. I’ll change to the Eden bus at Spennymoor.’
‘Really?’ said Theda. He was altogether too chatty; she wasn’t the sort of girl to be picked up like that, on a bus. She looked away and out of the window as they pulled out of the bus station. But when she happened to glance back, the soldier was looking at her openly.
‘You don’t mind me looking at you, do you? After where I’ve been it’s so nice to look at a pretty girl.’
‘Well—’
‘Oh, come on, I’m not trying to pick you up. We can be friendly just for the time we’re on the bus, can’t we? If you like I’ll introduce myself – my name’s Alan Price. I live at Shildon. Or I did before the whole world went crazy.’
He was so friendly and easy to talk to that before she knew it, Theda was telling him she was a nurse and newly qualified, going to work at the hospital at Bishop Auckland. And suddenly they were in Spennymoor and he was getting off the bus and waving to her through the window, giving a mock salute. The bus set off again and she was smiling, lifted out of herself by his open admiration and friendliness.
‘Aw, come on, Theda. Come to the dance with me. You’re such a stick in the mud! I can just see you in ten years’ time – an old maid you’ll be if you don’t shift yourself and start taking an interest in lads.’
‘You think anybody must be on the shelf if they reach twenty without getting engaged at least! Besides, if your friend Violet Mitchell hadn’t been on night shift, you wouldn’t have cared whether I went or not.’
Theda had a few days before she started at the hospital at Bishop Auckland and was enjoying just lounging about the house; doing nothing much was a novelty she appreciated.
‘Well, are you coming then?’ demanded Clara, and Theda sighed.
‘Oh, all right, I’ll come,’ she gave in. The dance was at the church hall in Eldon; it wasn’t as if it was a long way to go. And if she hated it, she could slip out and come back on her own. Clara was sure to find someone to walk home with.
Of course, she thought as she stood on her own, feeling conspicuous, her sister had been claimed by an eager partner as soon as she walked in the door but Theda herself was relatively unknown to the local boys, having lived in Newcastle for the last few years.
The band – well, really it was Mrs Phipps who played the church organ on Sundays banging away at the piano, and her white-haired husband twanging the double bass – was a bit of a comedown after the five-piece band at the Brighton or the full orchestra at the Oxford Galleries, she thought, smiling slightly.
Mrs Phipps played the veleta and the palais glide, and when they began a rather slow and sedate foxtrot, someone tapped Theda’s shoulder and she jumped in surprise.
‘Now then, it’s the beautiful nurse, isn’t it?’ The soldier from the bus was standing there, handsome in his uniform, his red beret tucked into his shoulder epaulette. ‘You dancing?’
Theda grinned. ‘You asking?’
‘I’m asking.’
‘I’m dancing.’
She went along with the formula and followed him on to the dance floor, feeling lightheaded and relaxed. And when he took her in his arms and they began to dance, she liked the feel of it, the ease with which she could follow him in the slow foxtrot.
‘I’m Alan, remember?’ he said. ‘Do you live around here? And if you do, why haven’t I noticed you before?’
‘I was away training as a nurse, I told you,’ said Theda. ‘Now I’m going to work at Bishop Auckland.’
‘Lucky for me,’ said Alan, and when the music ended kept his arm around her waist and drew her to where the trestle table was set up in the corner of the hall. He bought her a coffee and afterwards they sat drinking the watery brew and talked and talked.
‘Just think, I might never have met you if I hadn’t been walking down the street in Nuneaton and wondering what to do with my forty-eight-hour pass,’ Alan commented after he had walked her to the back gate of her house in West Row at the end of the dance and kissed her softly on the lips. He held both her hands in his, not wanting to say goodnight, not yet.
‘Nuneaton?’ asked Theda, bemused.
‘That’s right. I was wondering where to go. Forty-eight hours wasn’t long enough to catch a train home and go back again, and anyway I hadn’t a docket. But there in front of me was a furniture van,
Rutherford’s Removals
,
Close House
,
Shildon
. I wasn’t lucky enough that he was going straight home, but he gave me a lift to Durham and there you were on the bus with an empty seat beside you. It must have been meant. I knew I would see you again, and here we are. I recognised you the minute I came into the hall.’
Rutherford’s Removals
,
Close House
,
Shildon
. I wasn’t lucky enough that he was going straight home, but he gave me a lift to Durham and there you were on the bus with an empty seat beside you. It must have been meant. I knew I would see you again, and here we are. I recognised you the minute I came into the hall.’
Alan struck a pose in the manner of Charles Boyer. ‘It is our destiny, don’t try to fight it.’
Theda laughed, even though half the boys she knew made the same quote at every opportunity. Oh, he was funny and attractive and it was so exciting to think that he was attracted to her too. She looked up at his face, though all she could see in the darkness was the shape of his head outlined by the starlit sky. Then she sobered as he drew her to him and bent his head to hers.
‘Eeh, our Theda, what are you doing standing there with a lad? Does your mam know you canoodle with soldiers?’
Theda jumped back hurriedly as Clara’s voice came out of nowhere. She felt a twinge of guilt; she had forgotten all about her sister and Clara had probably been waiting to walk home with her. But she need not have worried; Clara was with their brother Chuck and Norma Musgrave. They did not linger but went on into the house, chatting and laughing.
‘I have to go in now,’ Theda said in the moment of silence after the door closed.
‘Can I see you tomorrow?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I have to be on duty in the afternoon and evening.’ It was her new job as a Staff Nurse. Her first – oh, everything was happening at once.
‘I’ll see you in the morning then. Oh, come on, Theda, what do you say? Ten o’clock? I’ll be going back on the last train tomorrow night and the Lord knows when I’ll be back.’
As Theda hesitated, the back door opened and her mother looked out, letting a tiny beam of light into the yard.
‘Theda? Is that you? Howay in now.’ She closed the door at once because of the blackout regulations but the disapproval in her voice was evident.
‘I have to go,’ Theda whispered to Alan, and then, ‘All right then. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Eldon bank. Ten o’clock.’ And she fled indoors and up the stairs without looking back to face the amused glances of her brother and sister and the disapproving one of her mother. Once in bed she lay and hugged this strange and exciting feeling to her. She was going to see him tomorrow . . . by, it was grand! He was a lovely man.
They walked along Old Eldon to the crossroads and waited hand in hand while the cows crossed the road and then they hid behind a barn and kissed. The farmer opened his mouth to tell them to move on and not forget to close the gate behind them, but there was something about them and instead he whistled up his dog and went on his way to inspect the green shoots in the pasture land which had had to be turned over to grain. The couple were young and judging by the lad’s uniform had enough to put up with without his bothering them.
They had to go back to Winton, of course; there was Theda’s new job to prepare for. Alan waited for her at the end of the row and went with her to the town on the bus.
‘Don’t come any further,’ she said as they were passing the station. ‘You go back to Shildon now.’ She felt so bereft, the fact that she was starting her new job hardly entered her mind.
I’ll write,’ said Alan. ‘And you know that song “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree?” Soppy, I know, but I mean it.’
‘I won’t,’ said Theda, and hurried off to the hospital gates. When she looked back, he had gone.
The layout of the hospital at Bishop Auckland might be different from that at Newcastle, but the work, the discipline and the comradeship were the same, Theda found. And as ever there was a chronic shortage of trained staff so she was kept busy the whole time she was on the ward, at first on a ward for officers, separate from the old workhouse section. Going back to her room in the nurses’ home, tired and ready for her bed, she had little time to worry about her men at the front, Alan now beside Joss.
‘You are always in my mind,’ she wrote nevertheless in her twice-weekly letters to Alan. She sat one night, just before lights out, and thought about him, her writing case open on her lap in bed, the fountain pen he had sent her for her birthday in her hand. She looked at it, a blue marbled bakelite case with a gold nib. Somehow in the time since he went away they had grown closer. Every morning her heart beat a little faster as she went to check her pigeon hole to see if there was a letter from him, and when there was she would thrust it under the bib of her apron and save it for her break.
She would take it up to her room, foregoing her cup of tea and half a teacake, and devour the letter instead. She would kiss it in the place where his fingers had been, and smile at herself for being a lovesick idiot. Then the intensity of her worry for him would hit her with full force and she would close her eyes and will him to stay alive.
You only knew the man for a couple of days, she told her reflection in the dressing-table mirror as she sat in bed and thought what to write in reply. For she couldn’t let him know just how terrified she was that she was going to lose him, have him snatched away by the war. The bloody war . . . who invented war, anyroad?
There was a small supply of the new wonder drug, Penicillin, solely for the use of the British officers on the ward. Understandable really, it was in such short supply and the officers were needed to win the war and save them all from the Nazis. But if anything happened to Alan, if he was wounded (God forbid!), would there be any of the wonder drug to save him? Oh, she hoped so. She hoped some doctor would use it to save her Alan.
He had been away for almost two years, apart from one Christmas when he came home on a fortnight’s leave. Theda had been transferred to the Children’s Ward and felt she had really found her niche – she loved working with the children. She had a week’s holiday though, and when Alan climbed down from the train on Darlington station she was there to meet him. There was what looked like a whole regiment of red-bereted men, looking fit and sun-tanned and smiling hugely as they grabbed hold of their wives or girlfriends, but she knew Alan straight away, even though she had seen so little of him before he went away.
He dropped his kitbag and swung her off her feet and the first thing they did was buy an engagement ring at the jeweller’s on the High Row: a gold ring with three small diamonds set in platinum, slightly on the cross, as was fashionable.
‘I love you,’ said Alan as he slipped it on to her finger. ‘I want to marry you when the war is over.’
‘Are you sure? Are you really sure?’ asked Theda, looking up at him. She herself had been sure, had been filled with a wild elation when he stepped off the train and she had seen him again, for she had feared he would be not at all as she remembered him, had worried he would be different from his letters somehow. But he was the Alan she remembered and Theda knew now that she loved him.
‘I’m sure,’ he said and put his arms around her, there in the shop, and the shop girl had tittered and the jeweller had coughed drily and sent her into the back on some pretext or other.
They went into Binn’s tea room and had spam fritters and chips and jam roly-poly and custard, and Theda was proud when all heads turned to look at the handsome, brave paratrooper sergeant and his girl.
Afterwards they went back to the station and took the local train, which wound its way through Aycliffe and Heighington and stopped at Shildon. They sat with their hands clasped all the way and anyone looking in their compartment for a seat changed their mind and left the young couple alone, standing in the corridor if they had to.
At Shildon, they got down from the train in the old station. ‘The first passenger station in the world,’ said Alan proudly. They walked their different ways then, he to tell his mother and father he was engaged to be married and Theda taking the Eden bus to Winton Colliery and then going in at the back door of the house in West Row to display her ring.
‘Nobody asked me,’ growled Matt.
‘I’m sorry, Da. Alan only has two weeks, and we wanted to get used to the idea before he has to go back. And it was so handy, being in Darlington; we could look at all the jewellers.’
‘Oh, Da, don’t be old-fashioned!’ cried Clara. ‘I think it’s grand, Theda. Congratulations, I wish you all the best, I do an’ all.’ And she flung her arms around Theda and hugged her, and after a moment so did her mother and father.
‘You’re not getting married yet though, are you?’ asked Mam. ‘Not for the duration, anyway.’
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