A Nurse's Duty Read online

  Not Robert of course. He was in the vestry with his father and the Chapel steward. In any case, Robert, at twenty, was far too old to hang about outside the Chapel. Not that he ever had done, thought Karen, grinning to herself at the idea. Robert had been a serious boy, always by himself if his father wasn’t around and always teased by the other boys.

  ‘He is nice-looking,’ Kezia said judiciously.

  ‘But not as nice-looking as your Luke, eh?’ laughed Karen as Luke detached himself from the boys and came over to claim Kezia for their regular walk. This was what usually happened; the courting couples gradually paired off for a walk and the unattached eyed each other surreptitiously before reluctantly walking home on their own.

  ‘Not as nice-looking as me either, is he, Karen?’

  She spun round in surprise. Dave Mitchell had crossed the road and was standing before her. Behind her she could hear the other girls tittering.

  ‘Whoever said you were good-looking needs a pair of glasses, Dave Mitchell,’ she retorted, drawing herself up and glaring disdain fully at him. Dave was not put off.

  ‘Aw, go on, I know you like me really,’ he said, grinning all over his freckled face. ‘Howay, lass, come for a walk with me up the lane.’

  Karen studied him haughtily. He didn’t seem in the least put out by her remark. ‘I’m walking up no lane with you,’ she said at last, and set off for home. As that was the house next to the Chapel she had only a few steps to go but when she opened the gate and turned to fasten the latch after her, she found she was staring straight into his blue eyes.

  ‘Dave Mitchell,’ she snapped, ‘will you leave me alone or have I to fetch my father?’

  ‘You da’s not in yet though, is he?’ said Dave, grinning. ‘And your Joe’s gone down the dene with his mates. Come on, Karen. I crossed the road for you after Chapel, didn’t I? You know that means I’m serious about you.’

  ‘Maybe you are,’ she said, ‘but I’m not. I haven’t got time to go out with lads, I’m going to be a nurse.’ Without more ado, she walked off into the house without looking back.

  ‘Who was that you were talking to?’ her mother asked as she hung her hat up on the row of hooks under the stairs.

  ‘Nobody special,’ Karen answered, but Rachel noted the colour in her normally pale face and her curiosity deepened though she said no more.

  Casually, Karen glanced out of the window before putting the kettle on for tea. No one was looking over the back gate, the row looked deserted. Maybe Dave Mitchell had at last got it into his thick head that she didn’t want to go with him, she told herself, but strangely she felt a little flat as she got out the Sunday table cloth and set the table for tea.

  It was May when Karen travelled to Durham to sit her matriculation examinations. She fingered the piece of coal in her skirt pocket. Joe had dug it up specially for her to bring her luck. Taking it out, she gazed at the outline of an oakleaf, miraculously preserved from eons ago in the black coalforest beneath their feet.

  ‘A black diamond, it is,’ Joe had said.

  ‘Karen, you know what the good Book says about superstition,’ Da had warned, frowning heavily. ‘If it be the Lord’s will that you should pass then you will, without the help of a dead lump of coal.’

  ‘Yes, Da,’ said Karen meekly. But all the same she wrapped the coal up carefully and put it in her skirt pocket. It might not bring her good luck but on the other hand it might and she didn’t think that God was so mean-minded as to penalize her for thinking it.

  The week of the examinations went off in a blur of nervousness and work, so that she did not even notice that the other girls looked at her askance, so obviously a pitman’s daughter in her black serge skirt and cheap shirtwaister and with her hands so red and roughened with the scrubbing in the workhouse kitchen for some extra pennies. But then came the weeks of waiting for the results, when, for the first time in years, Karen had a little spare time after the flurry of excitement caused by Kezia marrying her Luke.

  ‘Why don’t you go walking with Dave?’ Kezia asked her one Sunday afternoon after Chapel. ‘Goodness knows, he asks you often enough. You should get out more, Karen, and going for a walk with a chap doesn’t mean you have to marry him.’ Though in Kezia’s case, it had meant that which made Karen smile. They were standing with Rachel by the back gate for a few moments, enjoying a chat in the summer sunshine before Kezia went on to her own house with Luke.

  Karen went pink. ‘Don’t be daft, our Kezia,’ she said, keeping her voice low, for Dave was still standing on the opposite side of the road with his friends. But she looked sideways at him as he laughed at something his friend said. He was so tall and handsome in his Sunday suit and highly polished boots and with his sandy hair glinting golden in the August sun. As she watched he detached himself from the group and came over to ask her to walk with him as he had done so many times before, or so she thought, as she got ready to say no yet again.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Knight,’ said Dave, nodding to the girls, and went whistling off down the row.

  ‘He’s fed up with asking, Karen,’ said Kezia after a moment.

  ‘A good thing too,’ she snapped, opening the gate and starting up the yard. ‘I was sick of him asking an’ all.’ Rachel and Kezia looked at one another and smiled, both knowing that Dave was trying a new approach.

  ‘Dave Mitchell was in the queue for the Eden Theatre with a lass,’ commented Joe the following Saturday evening as he sat down to supper. He had just returned from Auckland where he had spent the afternoon and early evening. Karen didn’t falter as she placed a plate of baked cow heel and onions before him and cut him a round of bread. Joe glanced up at her.

  ‘I said –’

  ‘I know what you said, Joe,’ she said quickly. ‘It matters nothing to me what Dave Mitchell does. Anyroad, what were you doing in the queue for the music hall? You’ll catch it from Da if he finds out.’

  ‘Aw, we didn’t go in,’ said Joe easily. ‘We were just looking at the posters outside.’

  Karen gave him a sceptical glance but she said no more. Instead she poured herself a cup of tea and sat down at the table beside her brother, sighing. For some reason she felt restless and dissatisfied with her life and she couldn’t imagine why. Well, she thought wearily, tomorrow was her turn to work even though it was a Sunday and she had better go to bed or she would never get up in time for the walk in to Bishop Auckland. Saying goodnight, she went up the narrow, ladder-like stairs to bed. Only one more week before the results came out.

  But thoughts of her examination results were driven from her head as she walked back through the fields the following afternoon, for as she drew near to Morton Main she could hear the mournful sound of the colliery hooter. Karen broke into a run, her heart pounding and her throat dry. Oh, how she hated the sound, so different from the one which signalled the start of a new shift in the mine. This one was only blown when something had happened in the pit. Her steps slowed to a walk as she realized this was Sunday. How could there have been an accident when it was Sunday and the pit was idle? Only maintenance men went down the pit on Sundays.

  As she rounded the corner of the row she saw that the usual knots of boys and girls loitering outside the Chapel were missing. Only a few housewives stood at their gates, talking quietly to each other.

  ‘What’s it? What’s happened?’ she asked breathlessly as she went in the house. There was only her mother there, sitting before the fire in spite of the heat of the day.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ answered Rachel. ‘Your father and Joe have gone to the pit yard to see if there’s anything they can do. It has to be a maintenance man, there’s nobody else in today.’

  The women got the full story when the men returned. Both Da and Joe looked grim and tired. Michael Mitchell, a maintenance man and father of Dave, had been checking on reported movement in the rock strata above a thin coal seam when a wooden pit prop buckled and broke and a large stone fell on his head, killing him instantly.
r />   ‘Eeh, poor man,’ sighed Rachel, shaking her head sorrowfully. ‘I feel for Mrs Mitchell an’ all. It’s a good job she has Dave still at home.’

  ‘Aye, well, I suppose it means she won’t have to move out of the colliery house at least, not when Dave’s a hewer,’ Da agreed. ‘Now, I think we’ll say a prayer for the poor widow and the lad.’

  Obediently the family fell to their knees and bowed their heads.

  ‘Dear Father,’ cried Da, lifting his head up to the white-washed ceiling as though he could see through his closed eyes and the ceiling and through the slate roof of the house to the heavens beyond, ‘we ask you to give comfort to your servants, Millie Mitchell and her son, David. Be with them in their affliction, oh God, help them to know that their loved one has gone to a happier place where there is no pain or sorrow. We are assured that our brother Mitchell is with you now in glory, dear Lord, but we ask that you lay your hand on his family and give them peace. We ask it through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.’

  Da got slowly to his feet and helped Mam up also. ‘We brought him home on the flat cart, Rachel,’ he said to his wife. ‘No doubt you and Karen will be going to pay your respects after tea.’

  Karen put the kettle on to boil and set the table. No one spoke. Even Joe was sitting grim-faced, staring at the fire. But when they sat down to tea, he broke his silence.

  ‘We said that seam needed more supports, Da, the deputy told the under manager. Now there’s a man dead.’

  ‘Joe, we don’t talk about work on a Sunday.’ In spite of the tragedy which had happened that day, Thomas Knight was not about to relax his strict observance of the Sabbath any more than he had had to do already.

  ‘But what if it had been tomorrow instead of today?’ demanded Joe. ‘That seam’s nobbut two and a half feet high. That stone could have brought more down with it and blocked men behind it and then there would have been –’

  ‘Joe! I said we won’t talk about it today,’ said Da, and he reached for the sugar bowl and spooned sugar into his pint pot of tea. ‘I have a meeting to go to the night, over at Coundon. I would like some peace and quiet to think about it.’

  Joe subsided into his seat and stared at his plate and Karen gazed at him with a new terror in her heart. Oh, she knew there was always danger in the pits but from the way Joe had shown he was familiar with the coal seam in question, she realized that he must work in it, or at least near it. She shivered at the thought that it might have been him or Da brought home on a cart and was flooded with a profound sympathy for Dave Mitchell and his mother. When she and her mother paid their sympathy visit that evening, she saw a different Dave altogether from the one she knew. His blue eyes were red and his shoulders bowed with emotion as he sat in a corner, taking little notice of anything. Karen went up to him and put her hand on his arm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dave,’ she whispered. He looked down at her hand for a moment and covered it with his own but he did not speak and she could see he was too full of sorrow. Karen looked at his mother who was sitting by the table, already dressed in black. She was dry-eyed and her face seemed more angry than sorrowful to Karen. Her lips were clamped tightly together and her pale eyes full of ire. Karen breathed a sigh of relief when her mother deemed they had been there long enough and they went out into the fresh air of the street.

  The following week, Karen got her results and they were all she had hoped for. She had matriculated with credit in all subjects, even French. The first thing she did was to go into Bishop Auckland to Miss Nelson’s house, for it was still the summer holidays and the school was closed.

  ‘I did it! And all because of you. Oh, thank you, thank you,’ she cried as the teacher opened the door to her. Miss Nelson’s face creased into a wide smile of delight.

  ‘I knew you would,’ she said, though in truth she had been worrying about it all summer. They celebrated by going to the cafe in the Co-op store for tea and cream buns.

  ‘My treat,’ said Miss Nelson, ‘you are going to need all the money you can save. Probationer nurses are not well paid, as I have told you before.’

  ‘Do you think I will get into a training school now?’ asked Karen, suddenly doubtful, and Miss Nelson smiled.

  ‘I don’t see why not. You’ve earned a place, I would say.’

  Karen cut her cream bun in half and spread strawberry jam from a fancy glass dish on it. ‘Jam and cream an’ all,’ she said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just something my gran always says when we want something out of our reach. “You want your jam and cream an’ all”, she says.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ demanded Miss Nelson, and Karen went home light-hearted and full of anticipation of the future.

  ‘It’s because I come from a pit village,’ she said dismally. The euphoria of her examination results had soon fallen flat when she began to receive rejections from one hospital after another. She was sitting at the kitchen table one Wednesday afternoon. All the way home from work her heart beat painfully in her chest for she was waiting for a letter from Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary saying whether she had been accepted for training. She had played the game she and Joe had played years ago, adding up the numbers on her horse bus ticket and dividing them by the lucky number, seven. If the result was nothing remaining, then her wish would come true but if there was only one left over then it would not. But the total had divided evenly and when she saw the letter propped up on the sewing machine cover under the window she had been so sure it was good news.

  Da would think it served me right for being superstitious, she thought numbly, gazing at the curt message on the sheet of paper.

  ‘Well, what does it say?’ asked Mam eagerly, and Karen looked up.

  ‘I didn’t want to go as far as Newcastle anyroad,’ she said, throwing the letter down on the table.

  Karen had been trying for over a year to get into a nursing school and was running out of hospitals to try.

  ‘Look, pet,’ said Rachel, ‘I think you’ll just have to settle for something a bit lower. You know Oaklands said they would take you on as an assistant nurse. Why don’t you take that? You’d be able to get home, mebbe even live at home. I know we’ll be all right with our Kezia living up the street but it would be nice if you were close by, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t want to be an assistant nurse. That’s not what I’ve worked for all these years, and certainly not in a workhouse hospital. I want to be in a big hospital,’ Karen answered, close to tears. She clasped her hands tightly together, frustration and anger building up inside of her.

  ‘I know you’ve worked hard, and you’ve done real well, you have, Karen,’ said Rachel, her face twisting in sympathy with her daughter’s pain.

  ‘And I know why it is no one will take me,’ said Karen savagely. ‘It’s always the same when I go for the interviews. “And what does your father do, Miss Knight?” And when I tell them he’s a miner they look at me and down at my matriculation certificate as though they think it must be forged. They think pitmen are ignorant savages, that’s what it is.’

  Rachel was distressed. ‘Nay, lass, you’re wrong. I know some folk think like that but it’s the twentieth century now, things are different from the way they used to be.’ She clutched a hand to her chest and sat down quickly, a sweat breaking out on her pale face. Stricken, Karen rushed to her side, her own troubles forgotten.

  ‘Oh, Mam, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t upset you with my problems, none of this is your fault. Are you feeling badly? Shall I get you your pills? A glass of water? Howay, now, come and have a lie-down on your bed for a while.’ Karen put her arm round her mother’s thin shoulders, ready to help her into the front room, but Rachel shook her head.

  ‘No, I’ll be fine here, pet. I just felt unwell for a minute, I’m all right now. Just get some water, eh?’

  Karen ran into the pantry where the pail of water she had just brought in from the pump on the end of the row was kept. She poured a dippe
r of water into a glass and took it to her mother. While Rachel drank it, Karen watched her surreptitiously, alert to the danger of her mother slipping into a faint – something which happened too often lately. But no, Rachel’s faint colour was returning to her cheeks, she was looking better already.

  ‘Don’t mention this little bad spell to your father,’ she whispered urgently as they heard the click of the latch on the back yard gate. ‘It’s nothing, I’m feeling grand now.’

  Da and Joe came in from the pit and then Karen was busy for a while, filling the zinc bath for them and setting out their meal. Afterwards, when she had a little time to herself, she put on her old shawl and told them she was going for a walk.

  ‘Just to get a breath of air.’

  ‘Well, don’t be late, mind,’ said Da. ‘The nights are drawing in and I don’t want you wandering about the fields in the dark.’

  ‘I won’t, Da.’

  Karen walked to the end of the rows and on, past the colliery yard to the fields beyond, away from the stink of the coke works. Though it was a fine, sunny evening, September was already half over and at this end of the country, autumn was beginning to turn the leaves and a sharp breeze was blowing from the north. Karen wrapped her woollen shawl closer round her shoulders and walked on as the road turned into a rutted country lane. Idly, she looked into a farmyard and saw the farmer herding the last of his cows into the byre. She paused for a moment, the smell reminding her of Weardale and her grandmother’s small-holding on the moor. For a moment she felt a longing for the old place and Gran. But it was a working day tomorrow, she didn’t have the time for a visit to Low Rigg Farm.