A Wartime Nurse

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Authors: Maggie Hope

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

BOOK: A Wartime Nurse
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About the Book
‘Theda hadn’t given much thought to what would happen after she became a nurse. But by the time she finished her first year and was studying for her exams, she was coming up to twenty-one and there was a war on...’
Against the odds, miner’s daughter Theda Wearmouth succeeds in gaining a nursing place at Newcastle Hospital. By the time war breaks out, she is newly qualified and working in a children’s ward, a role she adores.
She also finds herself being courted by a young soldier. Only Theda’s dreams of becoming Mrs Alan Price are shattered when he is killed in action before he can make good on his promise to marry her.
Broken-hearted, Theda finds herself re-assigned to a special unit of the hospital dealing with German prisoners of war. Her duty is clear. But will she be able to cope with nursing the very men her fiancé died fighting?
About the Author
Maggie Hope was born and raised in County Durham. She worked as a nurse for many years, before giving up her career to raise her family.
A WARTIME NURSE
Maggie Hope
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Epub ISBN: 9781446446614
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First published as
A Time to Heal
in 1997 by Piatkus Books
This edition published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, a Random House Group Company
Copyright © 1997 by Una Horne writing as Maggie Hope
Maggie Hope has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
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Contents
 
To the staff of Bishop Auckland General Hospital, past and present
Acknowledgements
The early part of this book is based on the old hospital at Bishop Auckland. It was a workhouse hospital, which became a general hospital serving the people of south west Durham. During the Second World War, part of the hospital was used for the treatment of prisoners of war.
I was a student nurse there in the fifties and often heard stories of what happened in the war days from older nurses.
The characters and happenings in this book are entirely the products of my imagination and if there is any resemblance to real people it is accidental.
I am immensely grateful to the doctors and retired nurses who helped me with background details and apologise that there were too many to mention by name.
Part One
1936
Chapter One
‘Don’t go, Joss – please don’t go. I don’t want you to.’
Joss Wearmouth gazed solemnly at his sister, his eyes hopeless. ‘I know, I don’t want to go neither.’
They were sitting on a grassy bank speckled with wild strawberries and the tiny red fruit sparkled in the sun. A small, much-battered wicker basket which Theda had had as a child lay beside them, half-filled with strawberries. But now she had forgotten about the fruit altogether, for Joss had come down the garden path and out on to the bank beside the old waggon way and told her that he was ‘surplus to requirements’ at the pit.
‘Well, don’t go, you don’t have to. You’ll find a job here if you look hard enough, surely you will. There’s the Railway Waggon Works at Shildon and there’s Bishop . . . now there’s bound to be something at Bishop Auckland.’
Earnestly she looked up at him, her Joss, the one who always looked after her and never talked down to her the way the elder brothers of other girls did.
Joss picked a blade of grass and rubbed it between his fingers, staring into the distance over the old waggon way and grassed-over mound which was an old pit heap really. Over to the ruined buildings of Old Pit, their harshness softened by distance and sunlight.
‘You know we talked it all out yesterday, Theda. There is no other work,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll get no dole, not when I’m living at home – not when Da’s working anyroad. We should be thanking God his name didn’t come out of the hat again like it did at Wheatley Hill. At least he’s working.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘It’s no good, Theda. There’s you and Frank and Chuck and Clara to feed. You’re only fourteen, but you know how it is. No, I’m sixteen, big enough to fend for meself. I said I’d go in the army and that’s what I’m going to do.’
‘I could leave school, I’m nearly fifteen,’ she said. ‘I can, I don’t have to go till I’m sixteen just because it’s the Grammar School. Everybody else leaves school when they’re fourteen.’
Joss got to his feet and she scrambled up after him, looking into his face, her own so woebegone that he grinned and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘What, and waste that scholarship we’re all so proud of?’
‘You could have had a scholarship, Joss. If you had, you’d have had a posh job in an office by now,’ Theda countered. But she knew that Joss couldn’t have taken up a scholarship, not when it fell in the year the family had had to move to Winton Colliery. He was the eldest and when he was old enough to go down the pit his money was needed, that was how it always worked. And, anyway, Joss had wanted to go down the pit; that was what men did.
‘Aw, howay,’ he said now. ‘I’ll help you fill that doll’s basket and we’ll take it in to Mam and then go swimming in the reservoir. How’s that sound?’
‘I don’t know about the reservoir,’ said Theda doubtfully, thinking about the amount of frogspawn there had been in the reservoir at Old Pit that spring. Not to mention what else might be lurking in the weeds that grew out ever further into the water from the bank!. ‘Can we not go down the wood and paddle in the Gaunless?’
Joss laughed. ‘Howay then.’
In the end, Frank and Chuck and little Clara trailed behind them down to the wood and the place where the bed of the Gaunless river was paved with large stones that didn’t hurt their feet when they paddled, and just along from the paving a deeper pool where Joss could swim. They had pop bottles of water and slices of bread and fish paste and some wild strawberries for after.
‘Keep an eye on the young ones, our Joss, and you an’ all, Theda,’ Mam had said. ‘I don’t know whether you should take them anyroad . . .’ But there were howls of protest and in the end they all went. Mam watched them go from the gate of the back yard and Theda could see that her eyes and nose were red as though she had been crying.
‘Are you sad, Mam?’ Theda had asked. ‘I wish Joss wasn’t going, don’t you? It’s not fair, you know – I bet the gaffer cheated when he drew Joss’s name out of the hat.’
‘No, pet, Tucker Cornish wouldn’t do that,’ said Mam. ‘No, I’m not sad, the army’ll be the making of Joss. I’m just getting a summer cold, I think.’
Mam needn’t have worried about the little ’uns. They never went near the deep pool, not even Frank. He was more interested in roaming through the wood than paddling in the stream anyway. So he wasn’t there when Joss suddenly disappeared under the water. Theda, her woollen knitted costume hanging from her skinny body, was treading water when it happened. She blinked and rubbed her eyes with one hand – where had he gone? Panic rose in her.
‘Joss? Joss?’ she cried and dived under, for a streak of red was bubbling through the water at the spot where he had been diving. Taking a deep breath, she ducked under again. The water was brown and peaty but still clear enough for her to see that the top half of Joss’s body was sticking out of a hole in the bed of the stream, his eyes wide open as he tried to move a rock that had rolled over, restricting the opening.
‘Frank! Frank!’ she screamed the moment her head was clear of the water, but there was no sign of Frank, only Chuck and Clara standing on the stones and staring at her.
‘Stay there!’ she shouted and swam to where she judged Joss to be before ducking under the water again. She heaved at the stone, adding her small strength to that of her brother, and for an eternity of perhaps two seconds she thought she couldn’t do it. And then it moved and Joss shot up through the water and he was there, above her, and they swam the two or three strokes it took to reach the bank.

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