A Wartime Nurse (17 page)

Authors: Maggie Hope

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

BOOK: A Wartime Nurse

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Matt and Chuck came in from fore shift at one o’clock and the family sat down to cold belly pork and chicken saved from the Christmas dinner, and potato and turnip mashed together and fried in the iron frying pan on the fire. Christmas pudding had been impossible this year and there was no rice to be had either. So Bea had made a huge milk pudding with the goats’ milk and barley and part of the sugar ration she had been saving for weeks and there was enough left over to warm up too.

Theda’s thoughts were still running on those early days when they had come to Winton Colliery. When Chuck and Matt had had their baths and Chuck had gone out to meet his girl, she sat opposite her father by the fire. Bea was sitting back in the leatherette chair, newly bought when Matt got his rise at the pit, her apron over her head. She was having her two minutes, ‘resting her eyes’.

‘Tell me about how you came to Winton, Da?’ said Theda.

‘Eeh, lass,’ he answered, leaning forward and poking a newspaper spill through the bars of the grate to light his pipe, ‘I’ve told you many a time.’

‘I know. But I’ve forgotten.’

Matt puffed at the pipe until he had it going to his satisfaction and then he sat back. ‘You know me name came out of the hat.’

Theda nodded. ‘I was just thinking about it this morning.’

‘Aye. Well, there I was, four bairns still at school and no work. And we had to leave the house, it belonged to the colliery, you know, and if I didn’t work there, well . . . Anyroad, I reckoned I would get a job if I looked hard enough. I walked round the county looking an’ all. Five weeks it took but then I stayed one night with your grandma at Ferryhill and next morning I went to Chilton pit.’

Matt fell silent. His pipe had gone out and he lit another spill and puffed away.

‘And you got taken on?’ Chilton pit was eight miles away from Winton.

Matt grinned. ‘Aye. Well, I had my cornet with me, I was taking part in a concert that night. And, praise the Lord, they were short of a cornet player for the band. Only trouble was, there were no colliery houses empty in Chilton. But the pit here belonged to the same company and there were houses here, so here we came.’

‘But how did you get to work?’

‘I got a bike on a five-pound club from the Co-op. It was grand that first fortnight. But then some flaming . . .’

‘Matt!’ The exclamation came from under Bea’s pinny.

‘Aye, well. It was enough to make a saint swear. Me bike was pinched from the pithead yard. I had the eight miles to walk back and forth till the club was paid and we could afford to get another. Aye, well. At least I got transferred here at the beginning of the war.’

Theda stared into the fire, thinking of the hard times before the war. The days when the food her mother could put on the table made today’s rations seem like an abundance. Maybe things would change after the war, who knows? If the pits were nationalised Utopia might come.

Matt went to his bed and Bea had fallen into a proper sleep under her apron. Theda sat half-dozing herself, memories of Alan crowding in on her. There was no bitterness, just his face laughing down at her, a lock of his hair, free from Brylcreem, falling over his forehead.

They had been to a dance at Coundon and had a great time, jitterbugging to a band made up of piano and drums and the trumpet played by the cornetist from the colliery band, and it sounded funny somehow, not really like the records of Glenn Miller or Joe Loss which they heard over the wireless on the Forces network. But they had danced nevertheless, Alan swinging her off her feet and whirling her round so that she ended up a breathless heap in his arms. And afterwards they had walked the couple of miles home to Winton Colliery, one couple amongst many but spread out along the road so they were quite alone under the stars.

Alan had pulled her gently into the shade of a tree at the entrance to the bunny banks and they had kissed, softly at first but then with increasing urgency, and he had undone the buttons of her coat and slid his hands inside and ran his fingers up and down her back, and shivers of ecstasy had engulfed her. And he had cupped her breast with one hand and the nipple had thrust out against his palm and he moaned.

‘Marry me, Theda,’ he had said. ‘Marry me . . .’

She sat up with a start, disorientated. She must have fallen asleep. The feeling of happiness and love fell away from her, leaving her bereft and cold. Picking up the poker, she pushed it through the bars of the grate and stirred the fire, then raked coal down from the shelf at the back on to the red and grey embers. The fire crackled and spit and sent showers of sparks up the chimney.

‘Shale in the coal,’ said Bea, sitting up straight and smoothing her apron down over her hips. ‘The coal here isn’t as good as the roundies we got at Wheatley Hill, not by a long chalk.’

‘Are you expecting Clara back soon?’ asked Theda. The nagging worry about her sister had returned, deepening the depression she felt as the dream of Alan faded. She would have to have a real talk to her.

‘After tea, I expect. I don’t know what gets into those girls’ heads, I don’t really. All our Clara cares about is being away with Violet. Chasing lads, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t know. I reckon it’s not good for them to earn so much money, that’s the trouble. It can’t be good for them.’

‘I think I’ll go for a walk before tea,’ said Theda, a feeling of restlessness taking hold of her.

Bea looked out of the window at the darkening sky. ‘Mind, it’ll be cold enough out there. You’ll want your top coat buttoned up, and don’t forget to wrap your scarf round your head. Nurses can catch pneumonia an’ all, you know.’

‘It’s stopped raining at least.’

‘If you walk up by Old Winton you can take the accumulators for the wireless – they’ve ran down. Tommy Handley’s on tonight, I always get a good laugh from him.’

‘It’s Boxing Day, won’t the place be closed?’

‘No, he always opens up for a couple of hours in the afternoons.’

Theda placed the two accumulator batteries in the old basket kept for the purpose and set off up the back row for the shop. She turned round by the corner shop, closed and shuttered, the faded letters of ‘Armstrong’s’ peeling away from the wood above the window and an equally faded notice stuck to the shutters, ‘Closed for the duration’. She smiled as she remembered buying a penn’orth of black bullets there but now Tommy Armstrong was under the sod somewhere in France, had been since Dunkirk along with Frank. Now the only place to shop in the village was the Co-op and, of course, the bicycle shop where she was heading, with the shed behind where old Mr Jones mended wirelesses.

There was a strong smell of accumulator acid in the shed. Theda wrinkled her nose as she waited for Mr Jones to replace the batteries with newly charged ones.

‘I hear Churchill’s away to Athens for a conference,’ he remarked. ‘Must be nice to go off to the sun, eh? All right for some? Old bugger!’

Theda smiled to himself. There was a running battle going on between the Tories, and Churchill in particular, and the mining folk since the last war when he had ordered in the troops to South Wales. Evidently Mr Jones was one of those who wasn’t going to let a little thing like Churchill’s being a great war leader alter his opinion of him. ‘Attlee would have done as well, mebbe better,’ was a comment he often made.

Looking at his gnarled hands, Theda noticed the acid burns on them, some just pink scars and others more recent, angry and red.

‘You want to be more careful with your hands,’ she told Mr Jones. ‘Haven’t you got some of those industrial gloves? Our Clara wears them when she’s working with gunpowder; they save her hands a lot.’

Mr Jones gave her a scathing look. ‘Aye, well, your Clara’s a lass now, isn’t she? A few burns aren’t going to hurt me.’

Suitably told off, she paid over her eightpence and picked up the basket, carrying it carefully now. Acid from the accumulators could burn holes in clothes and she couldn’t afford a new coat, not yet, though she had the coupons left.

Outside, the winter’s afternoon was closing in, a cold, dark mist beginning to swallow up the houses only a few doors away. Theda tucked her headscarf inside her coat collar and burrowed her chin into the soft, woollen folds. Dark was approaching fast but at least she didn’t have to use her flashlight. Now that the blackout was reduced to a dim-out there was a little light seeping through the curtains of the houses though the street lights had not been lit since 1939.

There was a car parked on the end of West Row. As she drew near she saw it was Major Collins’s. Now what did he want? It wasn’t time for her to go back to the hospital, it was far too early for her. She wanted to have a quiet word with Clara.

There was an unpleasant smell from the earth closet, which stood by the coalhouses at the end of the yards. Normally she didn’t notice it, but now, with Ken here, she was embarrassingly conscious of it. I bet there’s a water closet in the manager’s house, she thought to herself. But why should she care what he thought? He knew well enough the conditions . . .

Her thoughts were cut off as, staring at the car and not looking where she was walking, she stumbled against the base of a blacked out street lamp and the basket jerked in her hand. Acid slopped out on to her feet and ran down inside her shoes, stinging and burning so that she cried out in agony.

Chapter Fourteen

Ken had spent the day with his uncle. Simon, Tucker’s son, was on leave from the RAF and he and his wife Anne, who was six months pregnant, had come up for the Christmas holidays.

‘Can’t you come home, at least for one day?’ Ken’s mother had asked wistfully. But he was on call and had to stay near a telephone, close enough to the hospital to be able to get in if there were any emergencies. Mr Kent, the senior surgeon, lived in Darlington.

It had been a good day at Winton, though. Uncle Tucker seemed to have forgotten about the pit for a while. He was happy with his family around him, displaying a dry wit which kept the atmosphere bright and cheerful as they sat around the dining table.

‘We’re going over to Marsden to see Grandma Meg and the others tomorrow,’ Simon said as they gathered round the fire in Tucker’s comfortable sitting-room after the meal. ‘Come with us, Dad. You too, Ken. Let’s make it a proper family day.’

‘Oh, yes, why not?’ Anne enthused. She was a pretty girl, obviously madly in love with Simon. Her blonde hair was cut in the style of Veronica Lake, hanging loose over one eye, and she flung it back now in a gesture that was becoming habitual.

‘Sorry, I can’t get leave,’ Ken answered. ‘Give my love to them all, though.’

‘No, I can’t go either,’ said Tucker. ‘The pit will be going full blast by tomorrow.’

The afternoon was wearing on. It was cosy there before the fire, with Simon reminiscing about holidays spent on the farm at Marsden and Tucker and Ken putting in the occasional word. Thankfully, the telephone didn’t ring to summon either of them to work. Anne and Simon sat close together on the leather couch, and Ken watched them indulgently.

Oh, how they reminded him of himself, not long ago it seemed, when he was waiting to go to North Africa with his mobile hospital unit and there had been Julie sitting just as close beside him on the couch in Grandma’s front room.

Julie . . . he hadn’t thought of her for ages, deliberately put her out of his mind. He had no choice, anyone in his position had to otherwise they would go mad. But now he felt the old aching longing for her. How she had clung to him when he got his orders!

‘You come back, you hear?’ she had said. ‘No heroics now.’

‘I’ll come back,’ he had promised, and kissed her and hugged her to him. It had been raining and her tears mingled with the raindrops as she held her face up to him.

He had come back, limping it was true but whole. It was Julie who had been taken, as she worked with a team of doctors and nurses and first-aid men down at the quayside in Newcastle during an air raid.

Ken moved restlessly in his chair, uncrossing his legs and crossing them again the opposite way. He was only one amongst many. Julie was one amongst many. But his memories were hard to bear, his contentment with the afternoon and the company gone. He got to his feet.

‘I think I’d better go, I might be needed at the hospital,’ he said.

Tucker looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh, we’ll be having tea in a minute or two. And I thought you were staying for supper? Mrs Parkin has gone off to see her daughter but I can soon fettle something. She said there would be cold rabbit pie and pickles.’

‘Sounds tempting,’ Ken admitted. ‘But needs must . . . In any case, I gave a nurse a lift here this morning, I’d better see if she needs a lift back.’

‘Theda Wearmouth, would that be? You mentioned her before and she’s the only nurse I know lives in Winton Colliery,’ Tucker answered.

‘Yes. She lives in West Row.’

‘A bright girl,’ said his uncle. ‘Good-looking, too.’ He looked at Ken, his gaze thoughtful. ‘A shame about her fiance.’

‘Her fiance?’

‘Missing at Arnhem.’

Ken nodded. Another victim of the war, he thought.