Authors: Maggie Hope

Tags: #Nurses, #World War; 1939-1945, #Sagas, #War & Military, #Fiction

A Wartime Nurse (9 page)

BOOK: A Wartime Nurse

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Major Collins halted at the door of the office and looked up the ward directly at Theda. She finished drying her hands and went to meet him.

‘Morning, Doctor. Sister isn’t back from her break,’ she said, acknowledging Major Koestler with a brief nod.

‘No matter, Staff, I have something I want to do in the office. Will you take the round with Major Koestler this morning?’

No! was Theda’s instinctive reaction. For a moment she thought she had shouted it out loud but it resounded only in her mind. She tried to control her expression, not let it show on her face, but something must have done.

‘You will do the round with Major Koestler,’ said the Englishman, and this time it was an order.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Theda.

Chapter Seven

Theda walked across to Block Five during her dinner break. She had the latest copy of
Film
Fun
for the children in the side ward and wasn’t feeling very hungry anyway, the last hour on the ward having taken away her appetite. In any case, she felt like a chat with Laura Jenkins if the ward wasn’t too busy.

Major Collins had made her feel like a naughty child, she thought rebelliously. Surely it was natural to feel some resentment toward the German doctor? After almost five years of war, and Alan and everything? Oh, he had said nothing, he hadn’t needed to: it was his tone of voice when he spoke to her; it was the steely look in his eyes when he looked at her.

‘Perhaps you would find it easier if you called me Doctor?’ Major Koestler had suggested, looking at her keenly. Obviously he was well aware of the tension in the atmosphere and what had caused it.

‘If you insist, Major Koestler,’ she had said stiffly, and he instantly turned his attention to the patients, saying no more to her than was absolutely necessary for them to get round the ward. But the constraint she felt soon eased as her professionalism took over.

The Italians, usually so vociferous, especially when there were pretty nurses about, fell silent as he approached their end though Major Koestler did not examine them, most of them being medical rather than surgical cases anyway, Theda realised. They had been prisoners since the North African campaign and their main camp was further up the dale.

‘Good morning,’ he said to them. They stared back, their normally merry faces impassive, but he didn’t appear to notice anything, merely going smoothly to a middle-aged German who was sitting by the stove, one arm in a sling.

‘Don’t get up,’ he said in German, or at least that was what Theda surmised he said for the elderly soldier half-rose from his seat and then subsided again.

Afterwards, when the round with Major Koestler was over and she had gone back into the office with him to leave the case notes, the English doctor had looked at her impersonally, almost as if he had trouble recollecting who she was. Sister was back and he was deep in an animated discussion with her over Johann Meier.

‘Oh, Helmar,’ he greeted the German, and barely glanced at Theda. ‘We were just discussing the shoulder wound, Meier. I think we should withdraw the Sulphapyridine and try—’

Theda heard no more as she left the office, closing the door behind her. She carried on with the work of the ward automatically, dishing up mince and cabbage and potatoes for Nurse Harris, a new auxiliary nurse, and Nurse Cullen to give out to the patients who, practically to a man, looked in horror at the grey meat and watery vegetables. Yet all the plates were cleared when they came back to the kitchen, she noticed. Food was food after all in this year of war, 1944.

Laura Jenkins was coming off duty when Theda got to Block Five and waited while Theda delivered her comic book and had a few words with the children. Then they walked together to the dining-room.

Over plates of mince and vegetables, exactly the same as those eaten by the prisoners earlier, Theda gave an account of her morning. Laura ate steadily saying nothing, until she put down her knife and fork and went to the counter to bring back two plates of rhubarb and custard.

‘Well,’ she said as she sat down again and picked up her spoon, ‘at least you have got over the first time. It will get easier, I’m sure.’ She pulled a face at the taste of the rhubarb, sweetened with saccharine and tasting like it, but carried on eating stolidly.

‘I’m all churned up though,’ said Theda, who was pushing her spoon round and round in the custard and eating little. ‘And I don’t see why I should feel in the wrong. Surely anyone would feel the same as I do in the circumstances?’

‘Aye, I can see you’re right upset,’ agreed Laura. ‘What I reckon is, you’re just going to have to get used to working there. What can’t be cured must be endured, as my old man used to say.’ She put down her spoon and gazed across the table at her friend. ‘Oh, look, I know how you feel, believe me I do. You’re still raw from losing Alan, I know that.’

Theda stopped playing with her food and began eating stolidly, the stab of pain at the mention of Alan’s name fading slowly, robbing her of her appetite. But after all, she had to work the rest of the day and needed the energy. Laura was right of course, she knew it, and moaning about it wasn’t going to help. At least it was her day off tomorrow. She could go back to Winton Colliery tonight and forget about the hospital for a while.

It was a dark and bitterly cold morning when Theda awoke in the bedroom she shared with Clara when she slept at home. She snuggled down under the bedclothes, leaving only the tip of her nose in the icy air. She heard voices downstairs as her sister came in from the factory, her mother’s greeting and Clara’s reply. Her father would still be at work, he didn’t usually get home from his night shift until almost midday, and Chuck was at the pit too.

She could help her mother with the housework today, she thought. Clara would be in bed and they would have the house to themselves for most of the day. But not yet. It was so lovely to be able to stay in bed a little longer, snug under the blankets.

Theda must have dozed off for the next thing she heard made her sit up, careless of the cold, and look across at the other bed. Clara was already there, she could see her from under the pile of blankets which was heaving slightly and hear what sounded very like sobs coming from underneath.

‘Clara?’

The sounds stopped and the blankets became still but Clara did not answer. Grabbing her woollen dressing gown from where it lay at the bottom of her bed, Theda hurriedly pulled it on and went over to her sister. There was nothing to be seen but the top of her head.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked softly, and Clara turned on her side, still keeping her face hidden.

‘Just the sniffles, let me sleep,’ she replied. ‘I have to go to work tonight, remember.’

Theda stepped back. Maybe it was just a cold, though that wasn’t what it had sounded like to her. Still, if Clara didn’t want to talk . . . oh, maybe she did just need a good day’s sleep.

‘Has Clara got a cold, Mam?’ she asked later as she speared a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and held it to the bars of the fire.

‘A cold? No. At least, she seemed perfectly all right when she came in this morning,’ Bea answered. ‘Why? Does she look poorly to you?’

‘No, it’s nothing, I just thought – no, it wasn’t anything,’ said Theda. She took the toast off the fork and went to the table. There was some dripping Bea had made from beef fat that she had managed to get from the butcher and Theda spread some on the toast and bit into it before the dripping melted altogether. Sighing happily, she sat in her father’s chair before the fire and stretched her legs out along the steel fender towards the blaze, feeling the heat seep into her bones. The day was very dark and the main light in the room came from the fire, gas was too dear to light during the day. Bea could not get used to the idea that they were all working and bringing in money now, she was still careful with the gas.

Toast and dripping eaten in the half-light – how it reminded Theda of family suppers before the war when they would sit around the range and Da would tell them stories because it was too dark to read. Thursdays mostly, the night before payday when there was no penny left to feed the gas meter.

It was a black moonless night when Theda walked up the yard and to the end of the row to catch the bus back to the hospital. She had an extra few hours to work because of the number of nurses off sick.

It had started to rain and wind was stirring the few remaining leaves in the gutter so that they eddied and swirled around her legs, making her shudder. She pressed the switch on her flashlight, creating a small pool of light around her feet as she turned the corner and set off across the small piece of waste ground to the road to Winton village. The buses to Winton Colliery stopped early and so she had an extra half-mile to walk to catch another.

As she walked, Theda thought about Clara. Her sister had got up about six o’clock, looking puffy-eyed and pale, but then she often did when she had had insufficient sleep and no one else seemed to notice anything. Perhaps she had been wrong, it was all her imagination, Clara was just grumpy and tired from working night shift.

It had been a relaxing day, in spite of her niggling worry about Clara. Theda had ironed the clothes her mother had washed the day before, standing at the kitchen table ironing her father’s shirts on an old blanket while Bea sat by the fire, leaning forward to the light as she sewed on buttons and darned and mended frayed patches. They had listened to
Workers’
Playtime
and laughed and chatted as they worked, Theda exchanging a cooling flat iron every now and then for a hot one from the bar, spitting and making it sizzle to make sure it was just the right temperature.

Bea told her of the new scare story in the rows. Her neighbour, Mrs Coulson, had her daughter-in-law Renee staying there, a cockney girl who had married one of the Coulson boys in 1939 when he went to London in search of work. When her husband had gone into the army and the bombing started, the girl had fled up to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house with her young baby and stayed there, for her parents’ house in London had been bombed and she had nowhere to go back to. She swore she had heard a bloodcurdling scream and been followed in the dark one night as she took the short cut from the bus stop, and only escaped because she had run for her life.

‘But then,’ Bea had commented, ‘I suppose she’s always been used to living in a town. There’s likely a lot of things frighten her here. It was likely that fox that’s been about, I’ve heard it myself.’

There was news from Germany too. Betty Young’s husband, Billy, who had been missing, presumed killed, had turned up in a prisoner-of-war camp.

‘An’ I only hope he is getting as good treatment as those ones in your hospital,’ Bea had said as she finished sewing on a button and bit through the thread. ‘There now, I’m about finished. We’ll have a cup of char, will we?’

Theda smiled as she walked on down the road. Her mother picking up expressions from the wireless. But the smile disappeared as she heard the bus in the distance. Goodness, she was going to miss it! She began to run and dropped her flashlight which promptly went out. Theda stumbled over the kerb in the blackness. Oh, where was it? She was torn between running for the bus and finding her flashlight – she would need it and they weren’t so easy to replace – when she heard a man’s footsteps. And suddenly she was nervous, remembering Renee Coulson’s tale; she began to run towards where she could see the outline of the first houses in Winton village and was just in time to see the lights of the bus as it rounded the corner and set off on its return journey to town.

She bumped into the fence at the side of the path, catching her shoulder painfully, and moved out into the middle of the road, beginning to run headlong for the village as the footsteps grew louder. She had reached the houses, which were all dark and blacked out, and thought she would knock on a door anyway – surely the inhabitants would be inside on a night like this? – when she felt a hand on her arm and was pulled roughly back on to the path. She had opened her mouth to scream when he spoke.

‘Staff Nurse Wearmouth, isn’t it? What are you doing out here at this time of night?’

Theda pulled herself away and closed her mouth before a scream escaped. ‘Major!’ she cried, her voice sharp with shock. ‘What do you think you’re doing, grabbing me like that? You frightened me half to death.’

Major Collins laughed. ‘I was only trying to help. You seemed in danger of falling on the road. Due back at the hospital, are you?’

Theda took time to catch her breath before replying. Across the road the front door of the Pit Laddie public house opened and a beam of light spilled across the road. As she gazed up at him she saw he was smiling, looking almost human. Why couldn’t he be like that in the hospital?

‘Close that door!’ roared someone from inside the pub. ‘Do you want me to be summonsed for showing a light?’

‘Sorry,’ replied the man who had come out, and hastily closed the door, cutting off the light. Now the major was just a dark shape beside Theda again.

‘Yes, I suppose I’ll have to walk now,’ she replied.

‘I can give you a lift, if you like? I was going back in any case. My car’s just around the corner.’

BOOK: A Wartime Nurse

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