Nurse Trent's Children (2 page)

Cathy’s eyes had filled with tears, and she had been grateful that Miss Watts had pretended interest in some papers while she whisked them away.

Presently Miss Watts had asked, “You were serious when you said just now you had no intention of sitting for another final?”

“Quite serious.”

“Then, my dear, this is something you cannot afford to miss. Not in your position. Although I just said there would be plenty of jobs available, they would not be the sort of position you would want, or to which your ability would direct you. Little Families is the only solution.”

“I...”

“Don’t rush in now. Think it over, nurse.”

“I have thought, Miss Watts. I was just going to tell you. This is, as you said, my only solution. My answer then, is yes.”

“Sensible girl. I’ll get in touch at once with Mr. Prentice. You will probably transfer to the foundation immediately and receive short instruction on child management, psychology, elementary kindergarten work, and the rest of the data. Really, my dear, you will be an excellently trained young woman by the time you are through.”

“Though not a trained nurse
...
”

“No, I am not a trained nurse,” admitted Cathy honestly now, and she saw the man’s rather sensitive lips curl upward in a humorless smile. One more point, she thought bitterly, for two months had made her an ardent supporter of the foundation, to the debit side of Little Families.

Anything more he had been going to say about the medical well-being of the children was lost in Christabel’s decision to rejoin her “sisters.”

Without a word of goodbye she darted off, and without a word of goodbye herself, Cathy darted after her. Together they returned to C Deck, where Janet was still busily controlling the other girls.

The harbor was unrolling
on each side of them. There was more green foreshore, red roofs tiptoeing to a blue sky, and around the bend was the bridge—“impressive”—as Miss Watts had said.

The g
i
rls danced excitedly, and the boys, who had joined them with their Uncle David, who was Mr. Kennedy, made derisive remarks about baby elephants, to which Cathy’s children responded with enjoyable rancor.

“Come now,” reproved Mr. Kennedy, who was young, athletic, bright eyed, and bronzed from the Mediterranean sun, “we must all be on our best behavior for our first day in our new country. Probably we’ll all be photographed.”

“Aunty, too,” said a voice. “If she poses nicely some susceptible paper might even add that she looks little older than her charges herself. Smile sweetly, Aunty Cathy.”

“Hello, Dr. Jeremy,” said a dozen little girls.

“Hello, Dr. Jerry,” shouted the boys.

“How long has this fraternization been going on?” whispered Cathy to David Kennedy as they tried to reassemble the children. The doctor had gone to the rail. Each hand held the trusting hand of a small child.

Kennedy looked surprised. “Right throughout the voyage. Didn’t you know?”

“I hadn’t met him until a few minutes ago.”

“Really? Now that’s extraordinary. He looked me up the first day. I was sure he had looked you up, too. Most extraordinary.”

“He couldn’t,” smiled Cathy impishly, “have liked my appearance.”

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t that,” said Mr. Kennedy. He said it warmly. He considered that Miss Trent looked everything she should.

“It could be that other business, though
...
” He pondered,
adding cryptically, “A pity if it is. A pity to carry a chip on your shoulder.”

Cathy would have liked to know what business, what chip, but she was determined to evince no interest.

Crossing to the rail, she stood by the little girls and stared out at this new country that would soon be her home.

The children and Catherine Trent were alike, she was thinking, they were all alone in the world and they faced new pastures. What lay ahead for them in this vast place of red roofs and blue sky and people they did not know? The children at least had their friends around them, most of them had brothers or sisters. They, too, had the resilience of green youth, the loving protective wisdom of kindly adults. She had nothing and nobody.

She turned away slightly and found to her discomfort that the doctor was regarding her speculatively.

“If you were intending to slip down to your cabin for a quick puff of powder, let me assure you your nose is quite mat. Anyway, it will not show in the picture.” He waved a lazy arm in the direction of an approaching press photographer.

“I don’t wish to have my picture taken.”

“Come now, that’s bad policy for Little Families. It’s from charming publicity like this they rake in the public’s shekels. Didn’t you know?”

David Kennedy must have known. He was busily grouping his boys together. “Mingle your girls among them,” he called to Cathy. “It looks more family and makes for better reader reaction.”

At that
i
nstruction the doctor’s face changed noticeably. He almost glowered at the girls that Cathy obediently “mingled” among the boys, and turned quite furiously away.

Cathy was so puzzled that the photographer had to call twice for a smile, and when she did, it was to a camera behind which a sardonic onlooker watched with a distinctly unamused expression.

“Apparently Mr. Malcolm is no Little Families fan,” she murmured to David Kennedy.

David opened his mouth to tell her something but—the way it always was with children around—they were interrupted.

“Uncle, can I have my sixpence now?” asked Tony Curtis, brother of Cathy’s Brenda and Shirley Curtis.

“Uncle David, where is Sydney?” inquired George Bannerman, who had twin sisters in Cathy’s group.

Mr. Kennedy had no time to comment on her statement regarding the doctor. Neither of them had much time ever for conversation, thought Cathy with sincere regret, for she liked and respected David.

The ship was passing beneath the bridge. “We’ll be off in half an hour,” said Kennedy. “I’ve gone through all this before.” He was, Cathy had learned, a New Zealander who had lived equal parts of his life in England, Australia and his own birthplace. Wherever boys were, he always said, was his home.

“You’d better take your girls below for a final brushup,” he advised Cathy. “There’s sure to be a welcoming party, including some
VIPs
.”

Cathy nodded and shepherded her wards downstairs. She hurried them along to the dormitory that had been set aside for the girls’ section of Little Families, twenty beds in a row and a bed with a partition around it for herself.

Twenty
beds? But once more there were only nineteen children.
Oh, dear,
thought Cathy,
where is Christabel?

CHAPTER TWO

There were several VI
Ps as Mr. Kennedy had warned; also, and much more to the children’s liking, vast quantities of pink
-
iced cakes and lemonade, and two waiting buses.

Cathy kept one eye anxiously on Christabel and the other politely on a patronizing
VIP.
She kept the girls reasonably quiet through several addresses of welcome, meanwhile eyeing the two buses with certain misgiving. As soon as she could, she edged around to David Kennedy.

“Why two conveyances?” she whispered.

“We’re going to different homes.”

“What?” Cathy could not help that. She was astounded.

Mr. Kennedy looked at her sympathetically. “I really should have prepared you for this.”

“You should have. Why the separation?”

“You should have said segregation. It’s an Australian custom. In time our children will come together again, but never, according to rules, under the same roof. The boys and girls are always kept apart.”

“But that doesn’t follow the English foundation.”

“My child, out here it has to follow the
Australian
foundation. You must remember that such things are more or less in their infancy in the Commonwealth. They have not progressed to the small mixed house units we have in Little Families in England. They have not reached the stage of accommodating together, as in a
real
family unit, both sexes.”

“Oh, dear,” fretted Cathy, “that means the Curtises and the Banner-mans are split up.”

“Luckily they were separated before Little Families selected them in London, so they are inured to it. There is still plenty of the old system left there, don’t forget. One thing, they are well broken in. Don’t worry, in a few weeks the nippers will at least be on the same grounds, if not under the same roof. Besides, you might have noticed that none of these children are particularly sensitive types.”

“No thanks to the Australian system,” frowned Cathy. “I’d
h
ate to have a child who did feel strongly about it.” She felt rather strongly about it herself. Those few weeks spent with Little Families before sailing had given her some very definite ideas regarding child welfare. It grieved her to think that brothers and sisters were ever separated. Of course, as David said, it still existed in England today, in the mid-fifties, but never in English Little Families.
They
, she thought proudly, were more enlightened. A pity the enlightenment had not reached these shores. She sighed, then brightened determinedly. It appeared there was nothing at present she could do about it, and since the children’s hosts seemed so kind and genuinely interested in their new wards, she decided to look at things in the same light that David Kennedy did—that child study was still comparatively in its infancy here—that there was time and space to expand.

“Where are the girls going?” she asked him.

“Place called Redgates, subrural, about twelve miles north. Quite charming. You’ll like it.”

“And you?”

“Temporarily in the midsuburbs. The boys’ wing at Redgates is being renovated.”

Cathy felt suddenly lonely. She wished David was coming, too. “I don’t like it,” she sighed. “It’s too bad the children are not being kept together.”

“You must try to keep in mind that most of these kind people don’t like it either. It just happens to be an Australian law. Give Australia time, Miss Trent. It’s very young, remember.”

“Shouldn’t it have a wider outlook then?”

“When it gets around to matters like this I believe it will have, it’s the getting around that takes time. There’s so much more to be done in a young country.”

A
VIP
came up to Kennedy and Cathy edged away, suddenly
concerned because she had lost Christabel.

She found her, as she had found her on the ship, in the company of Dr. Malcolm. She looked at the ship’s surgeon
i
n surprise. The rest of the passengers had quickly dispersed in waiting cars and taxis. “Still here,” she said.

“Just as well for Christabel,” he returned coolly. “Small girls do fall over edges of wharves or run into busy streets, even if housemothers are ‘never long absent.’ ”

Cathy flushed. His would be an unforgiving nature, she thought. “I was tied up with the welcome,” she said unwillingly.

“And the future housefather?” he insinuated; then, before she could answer him, “How was the welcome? Sufficient iced cakes and soothing syrup? I must say the natives don’t stint on
that
.”

She regarded him speculatively.

‘You must be a native yourself by now. When were you brought here?”

“At the lowest age Little Families transport their experimental young.”

“Five,” murmured Cathy, ignoring his sarcasm. “Then you are an Australian. This country must have made you what you are.”

“You praise the result?” One eyebrow had tilted upward. It gave him an almost sardonic look.

Cathy flushed. “I think it unfair to deride a place that at least has afforded you success in life.”

“Am I a success?”

She shrugged. “The
Winona
is a considerable ship. I should scarcely say ship’s doctor was a pauper’s position.”

“Couldn’t
I
have the credit?”

She stuck her lower lip out obstinately. Hers was a full mouth, he thought detachedly, the fluted, bee-stung shape that had given way nowadays to wide toothpaste smiles.

“Not entirely,” she argued, “someone—some institution—must have stuck by you.”

“
Quite right. Little Families did.”

“The
Australian
branch of Little Families?”

“Quite right again.”

“Then
...
”

“I know what you are going to say. You are going to ask why I dislike them then? I don’t. Not entirely. I just can’t stomach some of their outmoded rules.”

“A country must grow to a certain stage, not arrive there.” Cathy was echoing David Kennedy’s tolerant words.

“You sound like a very tolerant person, Aunty Cathy.”

“I hope I am, with twenty girls in my charge.”

“There will be ten more when you get to Redgates.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “How do you know that?” She had believed by the way he spoke that he had washed his hands of any association with Little Families.