The Angels of Lovely Lane (17 page)

‘I have a friend who is in lodgings that she isn’t very happy with. She is close to Sefton Park and she, er, she works in one of the offices on Water Street. She needs to move closer to town and asked me did I know of anywhere. I don’t, but when I saw you I thought you might know of something that was available. She just needs a room; lodgings in a house, maybe? She’s a very professional and respectable woman.’ If Dessie did know of any suitable lodgings, she could make an excuse to take it for herself.

A frown crossed Dessie’s face. ‘There is still such a desperate shortage of housing. I feel for your friend, I really do. If I hear of anything I’ll let you know.’ For a split second, he saw fleeting disappointment in her eyes and felt confused, but then, as quickly as it arrived, it was gone.

‘Thank you, Dessie,’ she said in a voice not nearly as bright as it had been just seconds earlier.

As she walked away, Dessie thought of Jake and how lucky he had been in securing his house. It was difficult for people on the outside. The dockside community was almost locked to outsiders. Jobs, houses, lodgings, were all passed along to their own.

As Emily reached the door of the school of nursing she turned back to wave to Dessie, who struggled to tear his eyes away. She raised her hand before she stepped inside and he raised his own in response, then remonstrated with himself. Pull yourself together, lad. There’s a rich and clever doctor waiting somewhere for a woman as beautiful as Sister Haycock. It was true she was no longer a girl, but as far as Dessie was concerned, that was her attraction. She will never look twice at the likes of you, he told himself, then slipping his clipboard under his arm and straightening his cap, he marched across the yard to the porter’s lodge.

*

Once in her sitting room, which was attached to her office in the school of nursing, Emily could have wept with gratitude to discover that her maid, Biddy, had already laid the fire and the flames were licking up the chimney. She removed her hat and coat and hung them on the coat stand before turning to the fire and rubbing her hands together. She looked through the door at her tidy office. Even she knew how incredibly well she had done to have been awarded the position of director of nursing. She had been in the post for almost a year, and it had not been the easiest year as she struggled to make her mark and assert her authority with Matron and the board. It was a relief that Dr Gaskell, chairman of the board and the oldest member, was her biggest supporter. Without him, life would have been so much more difficult. Of course, Matron was still the boss, but the new reforms in Liverpool meant that Emily was responsible for the delivery of all nurse training. Warmed through now, she took the rubber bag from inside her own, extracted the wet pair of men’s pyjamas and laid them over the wide single radiator in her office. Satisfied, she folded the bag away and sat down at her desk. Biddy had never asked and Emily had never explained. She was prepared, though, because one day Biddy would say something and she knew, when that day came, she would not be able to lie. Her secret would be out. She sometimes wondered if that wouldn’t be for the best. Then she dismissed the thought as quickly as it arrived. No one would ever be able to say that Emily Haycock had been helped to reach the position she held. She had done it on her own and that was the way it would stay.

She shuffled her papers for the first lesson together, carefully counted them out into twenty-one piles, and then checked again that each pile contained the correct number of sheets before securing it with two paper clips and adding it to the stack in her leather wallet. She herself had personally typed out the information sheets for each of the new probationers, detailing the basics of the anatomy and physiology they would be required to learn, absorb and regurgitate over the following twelve weeks, until they sat their first exam at the end of the preliminary training school, known to all as PTS.

‘Thank the Lord for carbon paper,’ she muttered to herself, as she zipped up the wallet.

She wrote the words
The Epidermis
on the front page of her notes for this morning and checked off her tick list to ensure that she had covered every point she wanted to teach the probationers that day.

‘Time for a cuppa before you head into the classroom?’ Biddy popped her head around the door and then glanced over to the radiator. There was a moment’s silence. Biddy left this moment free every time it happened, just in case Emily wanted to explain. Biddy would never ask. She would not push Sister Haycock to tell her what was going on, not until she was ready. Until she was, she would give her those few seconds and if she didn’t fill the gap, well so be it. One day, maybe she would.

It was a long time since anyone had addressed Bridget Kennedy by the name she was christened with. She was Biddy to everyone at the St Angelus school of nursing, even to her boss, Sister Emily Haycock.

‘I’d love one, thank you, Biddy. The new intake aren’t due here until ten. Sister Ryan is walking them up from Lovely Lane to the school.’

‘Ah well, they will all be in a good mood by the time they get here then. Bet you anything you like, she will pull that old trick of hers again. Scare them all half to death and then ask Mrs Duffy to bring in a tray of tea and bourbons before they walk up the way. She’s wasted that one. She should have been on the stage.’

Emily chuckled. ‘Tell you what, Biddy, I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of Sister Ryan and that’s a fact. She’s a good help to me in running the clinical side of the school. I couldn’t manage without her and there is no sister in this hospital who could teach the practical skills of nursing better, but still, I wouldn’t like to cross her.’

‘Oh, I agree with you there, me neither, Sister Haycock, because sure, I know she would come off worse and I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings now, or spoil the fearsome reputation she has built up around here.’ Fearsome my fat backside, Biddy muttered to herself as she placed a sheet of paper on Sister Haycock’s desk. ‘Here you go, Mrs Duffy dropped this through my letter box on her way home last night. ’Tis the list of the new ducklings who will be waddling on their way up here right now I’ve no doubt. They all arrived, safe and sound. No last minute dropouts. There’s a Brogan on there, I noticed. That’s a good name, Brogan. My daddy’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s niece married one. We all went west for the wedding. Lasted days it did. Farmers they were, you know.’

Emily smiled while Biddy reminisced. If there was one thing Emily had learnt as a ward sister in a Liverpool teaching hospital, it was that the Irish never stopped yearning for home and talking of events that took place in a country they might not have visited for years.

Reminiscing was like cool salve on a burning wound of homesickness.

‘I wonder who will be the first to faint on mortuary day on Friday?’ said Biddy, moving on. ‘We’ll run a sweepstake in the kitchen, once we’ve had a good look at them. Let me know if you want to put a threepenny bit on, but you have to do it today, mind. Can’t have you, with the inside information, making a bet at the last minute, can we? Mind you, if you don’t want to be doing the sweepstake and you fancy tipping me off, that’s allowed. You can always do that.’

Biddy lifted the scuttle to throw a few coals on to the grate. The school was mainly heated by a noisy stove, located in the basement and fed by a porter’s lad. Emily turned her head away sharply. When Biddy bent down, the smell, if you were unfortunate enough to be behind her, was often none too pleasant. Emily was very sure that Biddy had an incontinence problem. Soon, she would tackle it with her in a sensitive way, but not today. She looked around her immaculate office.

The cleaning of the school was Biddy’s responsibility as housekeeper, and the maids worked under her ruthless daily inspection. The dark wooden floorboards shone, and reflected the daylight from the gleaming windows. Emily thought that it must be a source of great sadness to a woman with such high standards of cleanliness not to be in control of her most personal hygiene. It was hardly surprising, though.

Biddy had confided in her that she had ‘lain in’ seven times and delivered big strapping babies, but despite their healthy appearance only five had lived past infanthood. Emily knew that was not an uncommon scenario in 1930s Liverpool among the Irish immigrant population. Emily would get today out of the way and then think how she could approach the subject and help Biddy. The first priority would be to let Biddy know she wasn’t the only one to suffer and that it was a common problem among women who had delivered a number of babies, especially infants with a big birth weight. It was a silent cross many women had to carry and few thought to seek help for.

Putting the folder of notes to one side of her desk, Emily picked up the paper Biddy had laid in front of her and scanned down the list of probationers. With a start, she came upon the name Pamela Tanner.

‘How could I have forgotten?’ she whispered. She traced the letters with her finger. ‘She looks so like her mother.’ She sat back in her chair, and as Biddy poked and rearranged the embers on the fire the memories of the worst day of her life came flooding back.

‘I’m off for the tea,’ Biddy said as she shuffled out of the office, but Emily didn’t reply. The familiar feeling of loneliness swamped her as she stared at Pammy’s name.

She had been just a young woman when she had last laid eyes on Pammy’s mother, Maisie Tanner. Maisie with the cherry red lipstick and the wobbly lines drawn down the back of her white calves that looked nothing like a pair of stockings. Maisie from Arthur Street. They were like two peas from the same pod, Pammy and her mother. When Pammy had arrived for her initial interview, it had given Emily such a start that she had allowed Mr Scriven to lead with the interview. For a stupid moment, she had felt that maybe, knowing what she did, it was not her place to comment, or to question Pammy.

Mr Scriven was a man deeply steeped in prejudice and Emily had decided, almost as soon as she had been appointed to her new job, that replacing him on the panel which appointed the potential new probationers would be close to the top of her list. Everyone on the board knew that if a nurse applying for a job at the hospital was black or Irish Mr Scriven would reject the application on that basis alone. The only Irish girls he did let through the process were the daughters of Dublin doctors, and even then they were denied state registration and remained at the hospital as enrolled nurses. Many fulfilled exactly the same role as a staff nurse. They were just less expensive to the hospital.

Mr Scriven had been true to form on the morning of Pammy’s interview, attempting to exert his authority over Emily by constantly trying to undermine her. His disapproval of the composition of the list of candidates she had put through for interview came second only to the fact that she had been appointed as director of nursing in the first place, when despite his best efforts to block her appointment the board had overridden his recommendation.

Within minutes Emily knew she had made a big mistake not to have led Pammy’s interview herself. She felt conflicted. Should she say, ‘When I was just a girl I knew her mother. We were together on the worst night of my life’? Mr Scriven had taken one look at Pammy’s letter and decided that a girl from Arthur Street had no place as a professional nurse. How little he knew, Emily thought, silently fuming at his whispered words to the other trustees on the panel, while Pammy sat before them, earnest and red-faced, sweating hands clasped in her lap.

What had angered Emily more than what he had said was that almost the entire board of trustees, which met twice a year to interview potential probationer nurses, had nodded enthusiastically at his words of pious discrimination. All except elderly Dr Gaskell, who was also the chair of the Liverpool hospitals tuberculosis committee. It was obvious from his own look of dismay that he didn’t like Mr Scriven and his narrow-minded prejudices any more than Emily did.

‘She’s from the bombed-out houses down by the docks,’ Mr Scriven had blurted out. ‘Not our sort. Can’t let standards drop.’

Anger had flashed through Emily. She had no issue with the quality of nurses at St Angelus. It was one of the finest and proudest hospitals in the country. She was both delighted and honoured that St Angelus had been selected by the minister of health to trial the new entry criteria for state registered nurses in the north of England. She would not have wanted to train anywhere else herself and felt a fierce loyalty to the hospital. However, it was a fact that the body of nursing staff was largely made up from one stratum of society. There were almost no nurses in the hospital who spoke with a Liverpool accent. She knew that if things had been different and it had been up to Mr Scriven, who had no idea where she was born, she might never have made it into St Angelus herself, and the thought made her smile.

‘Oh, I don’t know. On the contrary, I think we very much need many more of her sort.’ Dr Gaskell had spoken. No one dared to challenge him. And he had supported Sister Haycock, just as he always did.

She had voiced her concerns about the fact that hardly any of the nurses in St Angelus spoke with a local accent not long after she had taken up her post as the director of nurse training.

‘What in God’s name does it matter where you were born or how ye talk?’ asked Biddy, who thought that the best way to get along was to never cross authority.

‘Well, it shouldn’t matter, because we have a new national training structure and examination process. Because we are to be a flagship hospital in the new structure. We need the best. Not those who speak with the nicest accent. The war is long over now and any woman who wants to nurse should be given a chance. We have a new national health service and the demand for our services is soaring, which means we have to increase the number of nurses we train. That is why I am here, in this post. I would like to get to a point, Biddy, where nurses don’t have to leave their jobs, just because they want to marry. The training should be open to everyone. To all girls of all backgrounds and ages, and not just those seeking a doctor husband or a worthwhile occupation to wile away the time until they marry.’