Now the War Is Over (36 page)

Even the simplest tasks such as emptying bedpans and serving out cups of tea filled her with nervousness, as if she was bound to do something terribly wrong – scald a patient with a cup of
tea, drop the contents of the bedpans all over the place. As for writing down results of urinary and other tests, she kept checking over and over again. It made her very slow.

She was asked to go back to the kitchen when the tea trolley was going round. Melly walked along to the kitchen. She stood in the middle of the floor looking around, at a loss. Why was she here?
Someone had sent her for something but she could not for the life of her remember what. She just stood there, helpless.

Nurse Jenkins came striding along looking very irritated.

‘The sugar! I sent you ages ago. Oh, for goodness’ sake – I might as well get it myself.’

‘Sorry,’ Melly said. Sugar – of course. What felt like several hours ago, someone had asked her to bring sugar.

It was later that morning, as she battled on, that Sister Anderson asked her to assist her while she removed the IV drip from the arm of a patient called Mr Brzezinski.

Mr Brzezinski had arrived from Poland after the war. He was in his forties, had a pale, chiselled face and spoke heavily accented English in which he had, with apparent zest, mastered the words
for gratitude.

‘Thank you, thank you!’ he addressed them before they had even started.

‘I’m going to remove this –’ Sister pointed, speaking slowly. ‘Take it out of your arm.’

‘Ah, very good – thank you!’ Mr Brzezinski beamed at her.

Melly stood beside Sister Anderson. Her head felt as though it was swimming. She would have liked to sit down but that was not a possibility.

Sister Anderson pressed gently on the cannula and slid it from the man’s muscular arm. He made a small sound, an intake of breath between his lips.

‘All right?’ Sister looked at him.

‘Oh, yes, thank you – very good!’

It was then, in those seconds when Sister Anderson went to press a small dressing on the wound, that Melly saw the bead of blood. It was welling slowly bigger. Panic exploded in her. She heard
herself gasp and the next thing she knew she was tearing along the ward in utter panic, desperate to get away before the surge and flood of blood submerged them all.

Nervous breakdown, they said at the hospital.

That day, after Mr Brzezinski, after the bead of blood which had turned into a spouting deluge in her mind, Sister Anderson had come back into the sluice, after the first ticking off, and found
Melly crouched in the same spot in the corner, curled in on herself, her limbs quivering.

‘Nurse?’ Her tone was outraged at first. ‘Nurse?’ She came closer. Now there was caution, concern growing in her voice. Melly watched her shoes come closer, the sturdy
ankles, the hem of her navy uniform.

‘Nurse Booker.’ Her voice had become chilly and professional, as if Melly was another patient. ‘What are you doing?’

Melly began to tremble even more. She shook her head, kept shaking it, too many times to be normal; she knew but she could not stop doing it.

Sister Anderson bent down and Melly caught a whiff of her, a tang of sweat, lavender water, carbolic, so strong it made her stomach heave.

‘Are you unwell?’ She spoke very quietly now. They must not let the patients have any idea of this. They were professionals.

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Melly managed to say.

‘Nurse – would you please stand up and continue your duties?’ Sister Anderson clearly decided to adopt the firm, no-nonsense approach.

Melly climbed shakily to her feet. A moment later she had thrown herself, retching, over one of the sluice sinks.

Sister Anderson waited, hands on hips now.

‘Right, Student Nurse Booker, you had better call in sick.’

She turned and walked out. Melly heard the squeak of her shoes on the floor.

The next morning she could not get out of bed.

The bus crawled along the outer circle route away from Selly Oak.

Melly had climbed to the top deck and walked right to the front seat as far away from everybody as she could. The bus was not full but it was still fuggy with cigarette smoke and the stale smell
of crammed-in bodies from the busier time of the morning. The window was steamed up and smeary.

She put her bag down on the floor beside her and sat holding her hands clasped together to try and stop them shaking.

It took barely twenty minutes to get to Harborne. She wished it was much longer, that she had got on the number eleven going round the other way so that she could spend half the morning just
sitting here.

Twenty minutes for her to transfer herself back from one life – the only life she had really wanted – to another, which held nothing for her.

‘What’re you doing here?’

Her mother’s face, after the initial shock, looked stern and guarded. She stood blocking the doorway.

‘Let me in, Mom,’ Melly said.

In silence they went into the back. Alan was playing on the kitchen floor. Rachel folded her arms across her pink blouse, her apron.

‘You look like a widow. What’s going on?’

Even then, Melly could not reach the tears which she knew must come. She felt queasy all the time, and wired tight inside, so tight that she still could not sleep. But she could not cry
either.

She shrugged. ‘They sent me home.’

‘Why?’ Her mother looked even more grim. ‘What’ve you done?’

‘Done? Nothing. It’s not . . .’ She looked down at the floor, the familiar well-worn quarry tiles. She had thought she was so encased in misery that nothing could affect her.
But the way Mom was looking at her, her question, made Melly feel overwhelmed with shame and guilt.

‘They said I’m not very well. That I needed to go home.’

Rachel softened a fraction. ‘You don’t look well, babby.’

Tears swam into her eyes then and she could not look up. ‘Oh, Mom,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

‘You’ll have to sleep in with Sandra,’ Rachel said. Melly could hear a sigh in her voice. Even though Mom had not been keen on her going into nursing, she
didn’t seem any more enthusiastic about her coming home again. She’d got used to things the way they were. Having thought she’d got one child off her hands, here she was back
again and not apparently fit for anything.

‘You look as if you just need a good night’s sleep,’ she observed. Her worry made her sharp-tempered. ‘Nervous breakdown indeed. I don’t know what your
father’ll say about all this. Are they still paying you?’

‘No – I don’t suppose so.’ Melly felt herself shrinking inside. She wasn’t sure about the nervous-breakdown bit either, but Mom was acting as if she was putting it
all on and just being a nuisance.

‘But you’ll be going back, will you – they’ll take you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Melly sat hunched at the table. She was finding this interrogation, as well as Alan’s whirring about the room, very difficult to bear. She was close to
screaming, and clutched her arms tight round herself to keep the scream inside.

Matron hadn’t said that she couldn’t go back. She said it depended on her recovery and then they would see.

It went quiet and after a moment Melly looked up, to find her mother staring at her with a worried expression.

‘You look all in. Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you a bed ready.’

In the face of this kindness, as she took her bag and followed her mother upstairs, for the first time, Melly burst into tears.

‘Back later!’ Rachel called up the stairs. ‘Don’t forget to fetch Alan, will you?’

She heard a faint reply from upstairs.

‘Well, I s’pose she heard me,’ Rachel muttered, heading out of the front door. There was no time to go up and make sure. She was running late. ‘At least one of us is out
earning our living, any road,’ she added huffily.

Soon after Melly arrived back home, Rachel had decided she might just as well go out to work. It was no good both of them mooning about at home. Ricky and Sandra’s school, where Alan would
soon be going as well, had been asking for more dinner ladies. It was only a couple of hours a day, supervising the dinners and outside playtime, and Rachel jumped at it. She had let her
volunteering at Carlson House go when she had Sandra and then Alan and was yearning to have her own little job to go to again.

She was worried about the state Melly was in, but at least this gave her the chance to get out and earn a bit of money for a change. The work suited her and she signed up for three days to begin
with. Once Alan started at Michaelmas, she thought, maybe she’d work there every day. She was already making friends with some of the other women, especially a lively, dark-haired mother
called Gina who also had two children in the school.

She had said to Melly, ‘Well, if you’re around the house, you can mind Alan while I go out, can’t you? Take your mind off things.’

After all, it was no good her just moping about. Rachel wasn’t sure what all this nervous-breakdown talk was supposed to mean exactly, but she could see there was something up with Melly.
She’d been most peculiar.

‘It’s as if the wench has been turned to stone,’ Gladys remarked, when she came round and saw her. ‘She can hardly seem to put one foot in front of the other.’

‘She’s just worn out, that’s all,’ Rachel had said. ‘She says she hasn’t been sleeping.’

Finally, Melly did sleep; she barely seemed to do anything else for a fortnight. When she was awake she was permanently in tears. The other kids didn’t know what to make of it. Tommy tried
to talk to her. Rachel was grateful to the lad because she had no idea what to say herself. Kev and Ricky mostly ignored it all, but five-year-old Sandra would go up and put her head in
Melly’s lap, her little arms round her sister’s waist.

‘Don’t you go blarting, Melly,’ she’d say. ‘There, there – s’all right.’

It had been sweet, and Melly sometimes managed a little smile and stroked Sandra’s hair.

Rachel didn’t know what to do about any of it. It was as if going in for all that nursing had been too much for Melly. Best thing was for her to have a good rest. Rachel tried to make sure
she had enough to eat and good food too. Beyond that she just left her be. She’d soon pick up and then she could look for a job.

Danny didn’t have a clue either.

‘Tell you what, wench,’ he said when he saw Melly was home. ‘If you’ve packed in the hospital you can come and help me. I’m getting busy on the market and I can
always use another pair of hands.’

Melly said she would one day, but not yet.

Now, after two months, it was frankly beginning to get on Rachel’s nerves. It was time the wench pulled herself together. She was looking a bit better, less peaky in the face. She’d
stopped crying all the time. And she was helping out with repairs to the coats for Danny and other stuff for the market.

That was the best thing, Rachel thought, as she turned in at the school gates. You had to keep busy and not mope. They hadn’t got through the war years by moping, had they? It was bad
enough having Tommy with a long face, without adding Melly as well. She didn’t know what was wrong with her children sometimes. At their age she was weighed down by war and babies, with Danny
away and not knowing if he’d ever come back. What did this lot have to put up with? Nothing, when you compared them. They didn’t know they were born.

‘I knew you were aiming too high with that nursing,’ she’d said to Melly the other day. ‘I never could see what you wanted to go and do that for – but now
you’ve found out for yourself.’

‘Like your mother says –’ Danny supported her – ‘it’s not for the likes of us. Stick to what you know best, that’s my way of looking at it. And in this
family what we know best is trading and selling – buy for a shilling, sell for one and six – Bob’s your uncle.’

Melly didn’t say anything to that; she just gave them both that blank look she had these days and disappeared upstairs.

But they were right, she and Danny, Rachel thought. They should know, shouldn’t they? They’d come through far more than Melly could ever know about. Whatever had happened in that
hospital to send her running home, it obviously wasn’t right for her. But at least she was on the mend now and she could start all over again.

Melly set out to collect Alan from a lady’s house a few streets away. She had a little boy the same age and the two of them often played together.

As she stepped outside, the sunlight stroked her face. It’s a nice day, she thought. And in that moment she knew something had shifted. For the past two months she had scarcely noticed the
weather because a constant pall like heavy grey cloud had been hanging over her.

She felt as if she had passed through a terrible ordeal.

When she came home she had felt as if she was losing her mind. For the first few nights she still could not sleep, her pulse pounding, her nerves all a-jangle. She could not bear anyone near
her, could not hold her thoughts together.

One night, at last, she slept. After that she could not seem to stop sleeping. Then she started crying and could not stop doing that either.

Mom and Dad tiptoed round her. Gladys, rather to her surprise, came over to visit a number of times and was the kindest of the three. She seemed to have some idea how Melly felt.

‘It’ll pass, bab,’ she’d say sometimes. ‘It always does, in the end.’

What was more comforting than anything was that Gladys had come; she just sat there, solid and reassuring beside her.

Melly felt useless. She tried not to take in any of their comments about nursing or to think about the hospital at all. Any time it came into her head – the wards, those patients who were
there at the end – she was immediately flooded with panic. If she thought of Raimundo Alexander, instead of panic came an aching grief.

Gradually, as she spent time at home, the whirling inside her began to slow and settle. Recently she had begun to notice what was going on around her. Especially Tommy, her unhappy brother.