A Wartime Nurse Read online

  What she hadn’t bargained for was how homesick she would be. Though she was only thirty miles away, she couldn’t get home every time she had a day off as she didn’t have the fare.

  You’re eighteen years old now, she told herself. Don’t be a baby. How do you think Joss felt, going all those miles away?

  Gradually, her body adjusted to the hard, physical work and she learned to stay awake when she had to after night duty to attend a lecture. And by the time she finished her first year and was studying for her first exams, she was coming up to twenty-one and there was a war on.

  Of course, she’d known it might happen. She had been worried at the time of Munich, just like everyone else, and had felt a great sense of relief when Mr Chamberlain came home waving his piece of paper. But the war had crept up on her unawares, somehow. She had been sitting in her room with her books, as she so often was, for she had preliminary examinations coming up, when she heard the excited voices outside and went into the corridor to find out what was wrong. The door of the common room was open and some of the girls were clustered around the wireless in there.

  ‘. . . no such undertaking has been received.’ It was Mr Chamberlain’s voice coming over the air.

  ‘It’s started then,’ Nurse Lewis, one of the nurses in her year, said. ‘I have a brother in the Air Force, I hope he’s all right. I suppose the men in your family will be all right, being down the pits? A reserved occupation, isn’t it?’

  ‘My brother’s in the army,’ said Theda defensively and turned away. But for her the war was something that was happening in the background; apart from the normal stab of fear for her country, which she imagined everyone felt, she wasn’t worried for her family. Though Joss was a soldier he was far away, out of harm’s way, in the Far East and the war could be over before he came home. The hospital had been an enclosed world to her this last year or so; the patients came from the outside, it was true, but it was the world on the wards and in the nurses’ quarters that had been Theda’s reality.

  Then she went home one day to find that Frank had been called up.

  ‘But, Da,’ she protested, ‘Why? He was working again, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Aye. But if you’d been taking more notice of what was going on you’d have known he was in the territorials, had been for a few months. So he got his papers straight away.’

  ‘He’s just a bairn!’ her mother had burst out and Theda had felt exactly the same way. It didn’t seem right.

  Then there was Joss. There were no letters coming through from India but she discovered that some of his friends had landed from a troopship somewhere in the south of England. It was all very hush-hush and there was no information of more of his unit coming.

  ‘It’ll be because of the U-boats. They don’t want to let them buggers know where our troopships are,’ Matt had said, nodding his head sagely, and fear gripped her heart once again at the thought of a torpedo hitting a ship with Joss on board and him floating in the water trying to swim to safety. It reminded her of the day he’d got stuck in the pothole in the bed of the Gaunless, and she went off on her own down the garden to the strawberry beds and had a good cry. Then she wiped her eyes and went back to Newcastle as she was on duty that night.

  Sometimes she went out with the other nurses to the Brighton ballroom or the Majestic cinema; it occupied her mind and the town was full of soldiers and sailors who liked to dance. Sometimes she even met a boy and had a date but nothing ever came of it. No one ever quite measured up to Joss. She was gaining a reputation for being quiet and studious and not much interested in boys. She was studying when Nurse Lewis knocked on her door one evening.

  ‘Come in,’ called Theda, looking up from her work. Nurse Lewis popped her head round the door.

  ‘Mind, you’re a dark horse,’ she said. ‘Here, I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend, weren’t even interested?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Theda.

  ‘Then who’s this smashing fella waiting downstairs in the lobby? Tall, dark and handsome, with a gorgeous tan. A corporal, an’ all.’

  Theda hadn’t time to answer, she was pushing past Nurse Lewis and flying down the stairs, and there was Joss, home safe, and a great weight lifted from her shoulders. She flung her arms around him and he swung her off her feet and laughed exuberantly. It was the same old Joss, only older and with his skin tanned to mahogany and his body filled out to that of a man.

  ‘Steady on there, our Theda,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come all this way just to be knocked over by a slip of a lass like you.’

  They had a lovely time, dancing at the Oxford Galleries in the town, and she discovered that Joss was a great dancer, swooping around the floor with dash and verve. But, of course, he had to go back to his unit.

  ‘I have to catch the 11.10 train to King’s Cross,’ he said, and showed her his docket. ‘I only had forty-eight hours’ leave. But when Mam said she thought it was your afternoon off, I had to pop up and see you, hadn’t I?’

  ‘I’m so glad you did,’ said Theda, and behind her eyes the tears threatened. ‘I can’t come to the station with you, I have to be back at the hospital.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’ll be back. I can’t tell you where we’re going but if I see our Frank, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’

  Chapter Two

  Joss didn’t see Frank, thought Theda sadly as she sat in the bus bringing her home to Bishop Auckland, the certificate confirming that she was now a State Registered Nurse safely in her shoulder bag. It took an hour and a half to travel from Newcastle to Bishop and that didn’t include the fifteen minutes from the town to Winton Colliery.

  There was something sad about leaving the nurses’ home, having packed her bags and removed all her personal stuff from her room so that it became once again the impersonal little box with a bed and a wardrobe and dressing table that it had been when she moved in more than three years ago. On the bus she had plenty of time to reflect on the past and found herself doing just that.

  Joss had come home from Dunkirk but Frank had not; Theda had gone back to Winton to be with her family for two days, which was all the time she was allowed.

  ‘There is a war on, Nurse,’ Matron had said, implying that Theda’s was not the only family to be bereaved at this time. Theda felt like swearing at her. Of course she knew there was a bloody war on. Hadn’t it just been brought home to her in the worst way it possibly could have been?

  Now she moved restlessly in her seat on the bus, crossing her legs and folding her arms as she stared out of the window at the shops of Chester-le-Street where they had just come to a halt to pick up more passengers. The memory of that interview still made her angry though today she had more idea of what Matron had to contend with, running a hospital in wartime.

  Joss was in North Africa now, fighting under Montgomery.

  ‘The young ones didn’t stand much chance,’ he had said when he came home from Dunkirk. Too green altogether. We tried to help them but—’ He had fallen silent and Theda thought, But you weren’t much older than Frank. But she was well aware it was the scant experience he had had in the army as a boy soldier and then in the Far East that had helped him. So, after all, it had been a good thing Joss went to India.

  The bus was pulling into Durham, turning off the great North Road at Neville’s Cross and going down the bank into the city, under the railway viaduct and into the bus station. The cathedral towered overhead on the promontory on the other side of the Wear and Theda stared at it as she always did. It looked so grand; how could ordinary people have built it all those centuries ago? She didn’t notice when a soldier slipped into the seat beside her until she felt the rough serge of his uniform against her leg.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘Was I taking up more than my share of the seat?

  ‘It’s OK.’

  She looked at him. He wore the badge of the Airborne Regiment on his red beret and beneath that had a cheerful smiling face with twinkling blue eyes.

  ‘I’m on
ly going to Spennymoor. I won’t be a nuisance too long,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m going home to Shildon really. I’ll change to the Eden bus at Spennymoor.’

  ‘Really?’ said Theda. He was altogether too chatty; she wasn’t the sort of girl to be picked up like that, on a bus. She looked away and out of the window as they pulled out of the bus station. But when she happened to glance back, the soldier was looking at her openly.

  ‘You don’t mind me looking at you, do you? After where I’ve been it’s so nice to look at a pretty girl.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Oh, come on, I’m not trying to pick you up. We can be friendly just for the time we’re on the bus, can’t we? If you like I’ll introduce myself – my name’s Alan Price. I live at Shildon. Or I did before the whole world went crazy.’

  He was so friendly and easy to talk to that before she knew it, Theda was telling him she was a nurse and newly qualified, going to work at the hospital at Bishop Auckland. And suddenly they were in Spennymoor and he was getting off the bus and waving to her through the window, giving a mock salute. The bus set off again and she was smiling, lifted out of herself by his open admiration and friendliness.

  ‘Aw, come on, Theda. Come to the dance with me. You’re such a stick in the mud! I can just see you in ten years’ time – an old maid you’ll be if you don’t shift yourself and start taking an interest in lads.’

  ‘You think anybody must be on the shelf if they reach twenty without getting engaged at least! Besides, if your friend Violet Mitchell hadn’t been on night shift, you wouldn’t have cared whether I went or not.’

  Theda had a few days before she started at the hospital at Bishop Auckland and was enjoying just lounging about the house; doing nothing much was a novelty she appreciated.

  ‘Well, are you coming then?’ demanded Clara, and Theda sighed.

  ‘Oh, all right, I’ll come,’ she gave in. The dance was at the church hall in Eldon; it wasn’t as if it was a long way to go. And if she hated it, she could slip out and come back on her own. Clara was sure to find someone to walk home with.

  Of course, she thought as she stood on her own, feeling conspicuous, her sister had been claimed by an eager partner as soon as she walked in the door but Theda herself was relatively unknown to the local boys, having lived in Newcastle for the last few years.

  The band – well, really it was Mrs Phipps who played the church organ on Sundays banging away at the piano, and her white-haired husband twanging the double bass – was a bit of a comedown after the five-piece band at the Brighton or the full orchestra at the Oxford Galleries, she thought, smiling slightly.

  Mrs Phipps played the veleta and the palais glide, and when they began a rather slow and sedate foxtrot, someone tapped Theda’s shoulder and she jumped in surprise.

  ‘Now then, it’s the beautiful nurse, isn’t it?’ The soldier from the bus was standing there, handsome in his uniform, his red beret tucked into his shoulder epaulette. ‘You dancing?’

  Theda grinned. ‘You asking?’

  ‘I’m asking.’

  ‘I’m dancing.’

  She went along with the formula and followed him on to the dance floor, feeling lightheaded and relaxed. And when he took her in his arms and they began to dance, she liked the feel of it, the ease with which she could follow him in the slow foxtrot.

  ‘I’m Alan, remember?’ he said. ‘Do you live around here? And if you do, why haven’t I noticed you before?’

  ‘I was away training as a nurse, I told you,’ said Theda. ‘Now I’m going to work at Bishop Auckland.’

  ‘Lucky for me,’ said Alan, and when the music ended kept his arm around her waist and drew her to where the trestle table was set up in the corner of the hall. He bought her a coffee and afterwards they sat drinking the watery brew and talked and talked.

  ‘Just think, I might never have met you if I hadn’t been walking down the street in Nuneaton and wondering what to do with my forty-eight-hour pass,’ Alan commented after he had walked her to the back gate of her house in West Row at the end of the dance and kissed her softly on the lips. He held both her hands in his, not wanting to say goodnight, not yet.

  ‘Nuneaton?’ asked Theda, bemused.

  ‘That’s right. I was wondering where to go. Forty-eight hours wasn’t long enough to catch a train home and go back again, and anyway I hadn’t a docket. But there in front of me was a furniture van, Rutherford’s Removals, Close House, Shildon. I wasn’t lucky enough that he was going straight home, but he gave me a lift to Durham and there you were on the bus with an empty seat beside you. It must have been meant. I knew I would see you again, and here we are. I recognised you the minute I came into the hall.’

  Alan struck a pose in the manner of Charles Boyer. ‘It is our destiny, don’t try to fight it.’

  Theda laughed, even though half the boys she knew made the same quote at every opportunity. Oh, he was funny and attractive and it was so exciting to think that he was attracted to her too. She looked up at his face, though all she could see in the darkness was the shape of his head outlined by the starlit sky. Then she sobered as he drew her to him and bent his head to hers.

  ‘Eeh, our Theda, what are you doing standing there with a lad? Does your mam know you canoodle with soldiers?’

  Theda jumped back hurriedly as Clara’s voice came out of nowhere. She felt a twinge of guilt; she had forgotten all about her sister and Clara had probably been waiting to walk home with her. But she need not have worried; Clara was with their brother Chuck and Norma Musgrave. They did not linger but went on into the house, chatting and laughing.

  ‘I have to go in now,’ Theda said in the moment of silence after the door closed.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I have to be on duty in the afternoon and evening.’ It was her new job as a Staff Nurse. Her first – oh, everything was happening at once.

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning then. Oh, come on, Theda, what do you say? Ten o’clock? I’ll be going back on the last train tomorrow night and the Lord knows when I’ll be back.’

  As Theda hesitated, the back door opened and her mother looked out, letting a tiny beam of light into the yard.

  ‘Theda? Is that you? Howay in now.’ She closed the door at once because of the blackout regulations but the disapproval in her voice was evident.

  ‘I have to go,’ Theda whispered to Alan, and then, ‘All right then. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Eldon bank. Ten o’clock.’ And she fled indoors and up the stairs without looking back to face the amused glances of her brother and sister and the disapproving one of her mother. Once in bed she lay and hugged this strange and exciting feeling to her. She was going to see him tomorrow . . . by, it was grand! He was a lovely man.

  They walked along Old Eldon to the crossroads and waited hand in hand while the cows crossed the road and then they hid behind a barn and kissed. The farmer opened his mouth to tell them to move on and not forget to close the gate behind them, but there was something about them and instead he whistled up his dog and went on his way to inspect the green shoots in the pasture land which had had to be turned over to grain. The couple were young and judging by the lad’s uniform had enough to put up with without his bothering them.

  They had to go back to Winton, of course; there was Theda’s new job to prepare for. Alan waited for her at the end of the row and went with her to the town on the bus.

  ‘Don’t come any further,’ she said as they were passing the station. ‘You go back to Shildon now.’ She felt so bereft, the fact that she was starting her new job hardly entered her mind.

  I’ll write,’ said Alan. ‘And you know that song “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree?” Soppy, I know, but I mean it.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Theda, and hurried off to the hospital gates. When she looked back, he had gone.

  The layout of the hospital at Bishop Auckland might be different from that at Newcastle, but the work, the discipline and the comradesh
ip were the same, Theda found. And as ever there was a chronic shortage of trained staff so she was kept busy the whole time she was on the ward, at first on a ward for officers, separate from the old workhouse section. Going back to her room in the nurses’ home, tired and ready for her bed, she had little time to worry about her men at the front, Alan now beside Joss.

  ‘You are always in my mind,’ she wrote nevertheless in her twice-weekly letters to Alan. She sat one night, just before lights out, and thought about him, her writing case open on her lap in bed, the fountain pen he had sent her for her birthday in her hand. She looked at it, a blue marbled bakelite case with a gold nib. Somehow in the time since he went away they had grown closer. Every morning her heart beat a little faster as she went to check her pigeon hole to see if there was a letter from him, and when there was she would thrust it under the bib of her apron and save it for her break.

  She would take it up to her room, foregoing her cup of tea and half a teacake, and devour the letter instead. She would kiss it in the place where his fingers had been, and smile at herself for being a lovesick idiot. Then the intensity of her worry for him would hit her with full force and she would close her eyes and will him to stay alive.

  You only knew the man for a couple of days, she told her reflection in the dressing-table mirror as she sat in bed and thought what to write in reply. For she couldn’t let him know just how terrified she was that she was going to lose him, have him snatched away by the war. The bloody war . . . who invented war, anyroad?

  There was a small supply of the new wonder drug, Penicillin, solely for the use of the British officers on the ward. Understandable really, it was in such short supply and the officers were needed to win the war and save them all from the Nazis. But if anything happened to Alan, if he was wounded (God forbid!), would there be any of the wonder drug to save him? Oh, she hoped so. She hoped some doctor would use it to save her Alan.