Secrets (30 page)

‘Yes, Sister,’ Adele said, and once Sister was out of view thumbed her nose at the bossy woman who ran Women’s Surgical with an iron hand.

It was 1 January and the hospital was short-staffed on every ward because of an outbreak of influenza. Adele wasn’t feeling too good herself, not because she’d got flu, but because she and several other student nurses had stayed up late to see the New Year in and celebrated with cheap sherry. She was sure Sister MacDonald knew this as she’d been hounding her all day.

She had started her nursing training at the Buchanan Hospital in Hastings in April. The pay was just ten shillings a week, and the hours very long, but she shared a nice room in the nurses’ home, she got three meals a day, and she had made dozens of new friends. Angela Daltry, her room-mate, was a lovable, scatterbrained girl from Bexhill, and as they almost always worked the same shifts, they spent much of their spare time together.

Nursing wasn’t anything like Adele had expected. As she’d never even been in a hospital until she began her training she supposed she’d romanticized it, imagined herself as a kind of angel of mercy, wiping fevered brows, taking temperatures and arranging the flowers. She did know that people would vomit, bleed and need bedpans of course, but she hadn’t anticipated it being quite so relentless, or that as a student nurse she’d be the main one to deal with all the mucky jobs. She had never imagined so many rules either. Everything from not sitting on beds to making sure not a single hair escaped from her starched cap. Sister MacDonald was exceptionally fussy, and she had eyes in the back of her head. Adele was hauled over the coals on her very first day on the ward for eating a toffee. One of the patients had given it to her, but to hear Sister rant and rave about it, anyone would think she’d stolen a whole box and shoved them all in her mouth at the same time.

Yet despite the drawbacks, she loved nursing. It was so rewarding to see people gradually getting better after operations, to know that although she was only one very small cog in the hospital wheel, it was vital work. The patients were grateful for her care, they took as much interest in her as she did in them, and there was so much gaiety and laughter with the other nurses.

With the clean bedpan back in its rack, Adele grabbed the dressings trolley and made for Mrs Drew. She was a plump woman in her early forties, with greying hair, who had almost died of a ruptured appendix, and Adele had grown very fond of her.

‘Time to change your dressing,’ she said as she pulled the curtains round the woman’s bed.

‘Not again,’ Mrs Drew sighed, and put down the magazine she was reading. ‘I sometimes think you wait for someone to look really comfortable, then pounce on them.’

‘Of course we do,’ Adele laughed. ‘We’ve got to do something to justify the enormous amount of money we get paid.’ She folded down the sheets and blankets to just below the woman’s stomach, then lifted her nightdress to expose her dressing over the abdominal stitching. She removed it gingerly. ‘It’s healing very well,’ she said. ‘I expect you to be able to go home very soon.’

‘I’m in no hurry,’ Mrs Drew said with a smile. ‘It’s nice and warm in here, and a real treat to put my feet up. Soon as I’m home my lot will all expect me to wait on them again.’

Mrs Drew had six children ranging from eighteen down to a three-year-old. She had ignored the pains in her stomach for months because she had no time for herself and she couldn’t afford doctors’ fees.

‘Sister will tell them what’s what,’ Adele said with a grin. ‘You’ve had major surgery, you’ve got to take it easy when you get home, no carrying heavy shopping, coal buckets or even your toddler. Your husband or one of the older children will have to do it all for you.’

Mrs Drew gave Adele a withering look. ‘Some chance,’ she said. ‘I’ll get back home to find the place like a midden. If you’ve got any sense, nurse, you’ll stay single. Once the honeymoon’s over it’s down hill all the way.’

Adele had met many stoic women like Mrs Drew since she began nursing. They always put their husband and children first, their own needs ignored. Mostly they had brought up their large families in poverty, with appalling housing conditions, yet somehow managed to retain a lively sense of humour. Mrs Drew had a particularly black one – she called her husband Eric ‘The Pig’, because he grunted rather than spoke to her. She claimed she’d thought of rounding her kids up and dumping them on an orphanage doorstep to get a bit of peace. Yet her face broke into a wide smile when Eric walked into the ward to visit her, and she wrote separate little notes for each of the children, because they weren’t allowed into the ward.

‘I bet if you could start all over again you’d still marry Mr Drew,’ Adele said as she cleaned the wound before redressing it.

‘I suppose so. I’d clout him round the ear the first time he grunted though,’ Mrs Drew chuckled. ‘Are you courtin’?’

Adele shook her head.

‘Haven’t you even got your eye on anyone?’

Adele giggled. For a woman who often said marriage and children was a mug’s game, Mrs Drew was very keen on seeing everyone else getting paired off.

‘I suppose I have,’ she admitted, thinking of Michael. ‘But it’s not going to work out. His parents will never approve of me.’

‘I’d be over the moon if my boy Ronnie found a nice girl like you,’ Mrs Drew said. ‘You’re clever, pretty and talk nice. His parents want their heads seeing to.’

Adele pulled the woman’s nightdress down and tucked the covers back over her. ‘I’ve often thought that about them myself,’ she said with a wink. ‘Now, you have a rest, Mrs Drew, no gallivanting off up the ward to talk to someone.’

As Adele wheeled the dressings trolley back down the ward she wondered where Michael was right now, and if he’d been to Winchelsea to see his mother over Christmas. She had been working on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day, so she hadn’t been able to get home. But she had two days off as from tomorrow and she hoped her grandmother would have lots of gossip for her.

Michael had written to her last January to apologize again for his parents’ behaviour. It was an odd sort of letter, she could feel deep sadness in it, and a great deal left unsaid. Reading between the lines, she felt his father had laid into him about her and almost certainly insisted he was never to contact her again. Michael probably felt he ought to obey his father, maybe he even thought there was nothing to be gained by continuing their friendship anyway, but being a kind person he wouldn’t say all that as it would add insult to injury.

Adele waited a couple of weeks and wrote a cheery letter back to him at Oxford. She told him she was applying to go into nursing and that he mustn’t feel bad about anything because things had turned out for the best. She said she had no hard feelings towards either him or his mother, and hoped Mrs Bailey was managing all right.

It was almost three months before he wrote again, just a few days before she started as a probationer. He said he was thrilled she was going to be a nurse as it was in his eyes one of the most important jobs anyone could do. He also said he thought she was born for it. He asked if she would meet him if he came to Hastings, but he couldn’t say when that would be. His hopes that his parents would get back together again had been dashed.

The rest of the letter was taken up with flying and the Corps at Oxford. He was jubilant that he was now a fully qualified pilot and said he was seriously considering a career in the RAF once he’d got his degree.

As a probationer, Adele didn’t have time to think about Michael much. There was so much theory to learn, with tests every week, and every evening and day off was spent studying. Then there was the coronation of George VI in May and Adele was roped in to help make bunting and other decorations for the hospital. Some of the nurses went up to London to watch the celebrations there, but all the probationers were expected to help at the hospital tea-party in the grounds, either serving teas or escorting the patients who were well enough to attend down to it. For Adele this proved to be a real initiation into the social life of the hospital, as that day she got to know many more people – the clerical and domestic staff along with doctors and other nurses.

It was that day she began to see that England might really have to go to war again. The rumblings about Adolf Hitler and his ever-increasing power in Germany had been going on for so long she hadn’t taken much notice. She was horrified of course by the way he was treating Jewish people, but it wasn’t until she overheard one of the doctors echoing something Michael had said in his last letter about the man being set on ruling the whole world that she realized what that really meant.

He would have to be stopped, and it would be young men like Michael who would be called upon to do it. A chill ran down her spine as she looked around her and saw Raymond and Alf, the two young porters, who always teased the student nurses. They would have to go too, so would most of the doctors here, all her friends’ fathers and brothers, and it would be just the same way as it was in the first war, women taking over men’s jobs. Waiting and hoping that their sons, husbands or brothers wouldn’t be on the casualty lists.

All at once Adele understood why she had been accepted so readily for nursing training. She’d chosen to believe she was exceptional, and that she’d shone at her initial interview. But that probably wasn’t the way it was at all. England would need hundreds more nurses if war really was coming, and perhaps anyone able and willing to train could get in. But though it was a bit disappointing to know she wasn’t that special, it made her that more determined to prove herself.

Michael came to see her at the start of his long summer vacation without any forewarning. He was only staying a couple of days with his mother before going up to Scotland and he took the chance she’d be off duty. As luck would have it she was; she’d had the day off, and though she usually went home to see her grandmother, on this occasion she had stayed in the nurses’ home to do some studying.

Some of the other nurses saw him waiting for her in the hall and they teased her unmercifully about it afterwards. It seemed that calling there, rather than arranging to meet in town, implied a serious romance. It also meant Matron would be watching her like a hawk in future.

It was pouring with rain, so they went in his car to a tea shop in Battle. It was a pretty place with gingham curtains and tablecloths, and lots of bright copper pots hanging from the beams.

Adele was still in the first throes of enchantment with nursing, having just started on the ward after her probationary theory lessons, and she could talk of nothing else as they drank tea and ate crumpets and cakes. Michael was almost as one-track-minded. He was off to stay with some people who sounded impossibly grand, with a castle on a loch and a private plane which he would be able to fly. Neither of them mentioned the marshes – it was almost as if they were both trying to be different people.

He looked so suave in grey flannels and a blazer, and he often lapsed into undergraduate slang which she didn’t always understand. He had also grown very handsome; his hair was much longer, his face thinner, and while he was ordering more tea from the waitress, the light from the window caught his angular cheekbones, and she felt a surge of what could only be desire.

Yet however lovely it was to see Michael again, Adele was left with a sinking feeling that he had weighed her up and found her lacking. She couldn’t blame him – in her cheap cotton dress, with bare legs, prattling on about taking temperatures, bedbaths and the like, she must have looked and sounded so ingenuous.

She knew he must meet many girls both at Oxford and through friends like the ones in Scotland. She imagined them all terribly well bred, speaking as if they had plums in their mouths and wearing clothes straight out of fashion magazines. Why would he stay interested in someone his parents disapproved of? Especially when there were countless girls out there all prettier, smarter and less trouble than her?

Michael had to be back at his mother’s for dinner at seven, and when he dropped her back at the nurses’ home he kissed her cheek.

‘Next time we’ll arrange it well in advance so we have more time,’ he said. ‘I’d like to take you to dinner or dancing.’

Adele took a deep breath before replying. She wanted Michael on almost any terms – he made her legs feel wobbly, her heart pound, and she could look into his dark blue eyes for ever and never get bored. But she was a realist, and however much they felt they had in common five years ago when they first met, they were grown up now and poles apart. Even if his parents hadn’t been so against her, it still couldn’t work, and she didn’t want Michael to feel he had some kind of debt to pay back to her.

‘No, Michael,’ she said firmly. ‘No dancing or dinner, just drop me a postcard once in a while so I know what you are doing.’

She had expected that he would look relieved, even laugh and say he was glad she hadn’t grown out of being so direct, but to her surprise he looked stricken and turned off the car engine.

‘You don’t like me any more?’ he asked. He put one hand on her cheek so she couldn’t turn away from him and his eyes bored into her.

‘Of course I like you, silly,’ she said and made an attempt at a laugh. ‘You will always be a special friend, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to keep turning up and giving me treats to make up for your father being so horrible to me.’

‘Is that why you think I came here today?’ he asked.

‘Well yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe you didn’t actually decide that was the reason, but I think it is. You don’t have to feel bad about all that, I’m nursing now, the experience with your mother helped me get there. I haven’t got any hard feelings towards you, or her.’

He put his other hand on her cheek too, cupping her face between his two hands. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to take you to dinner because I feel guilty, it’s because I want you to be my girl.’

‘But you can’t possibly want that,’ she said, feeling almost faint at the touch of his hands on her cheeks. ‘How could I ever fit into your world?’