by Daisy Styles
Gladys couldn’t argue with how demanding not to mention exhausting Kit’s day was, but nevertheless she couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘It would have been nice for Edna,’ she said wistfully.
Kit nodded as she cuddled Billy on her knee. ‘That’s what motivated me in the first place,’ she said as she nuzzled her little boy’s cheek. ‘The thought that a child of mine was somewhere out there and I couldn’t reach them would drive me mad.’ She smiled up at Gladys as she added, ‘Remember how hard Ian and I worked on tracking down Billy after he’d been smuggled out of the convent?’
‘I remember seeing your face when you came back from Ireland without Billy,’ Gladys replied. ‘I thought you’d never get over the disappointment.’
‘I swear I wouldn’t have – that’s what makes my heart ache for Edna. She’s had no contact with her child, now a woman, since she gave birth to her. They could pass in the street and they wouldn’t even know each other,’ she said with a heavy sigh.
When the bus lumbered to a halt at the Phoenix, the girls went their separate ways: Kit to the nursery, which had recently reopened, and then on to the factory, where she would clock on for her afternoon shift in the filling shed. After getting a good-luck hug from Kit, Gladys made her way to the cowshed, where she anxiously prepared for her first day at the Phoenix Infirmary.
The following morning Gladys reported for duty at 7 a.m.; she was met by her assigned nurse, who briskly issued the new trainee with a uniform.
‘I’m Sister Atkins,’ she barked. ‘Don’t leave my sight.’
Gladys fastened the buttons on the simple white dress, which had a starched collar and cuffs, then she bundled her thick brunette hair under the starched white cap, which she pinned firmly on to her head with hair grips. Gladys smiled as she recalled how taboo clips and grips were on the cordite line: one small metal clip could spark off an explosion. Luckily things were different in the hospital: otherwise, she’d have hair drifting out of her cap and would certainly get a ticking off from the strict ward sister.
‘Patients who work at the Phoenix site are admitted into the infirmary, where we treat them as best we can and assess their needs,’ Sister Atkins explained as she all but ran down the echoing corridor to the men’s ward. ‘Dr Grant assesses them, and if he’s happy that we can meet their nursing-care requirements, the patient is admitted. If, however,’ she said as she flung open the heavy double doors to the ward, ‘Dr Grant considers their requirements too sophisticated for us – we are after all a very small cottage hospital – then the patient will be transferred by ambulance to Manchester Royal.’
After tying clean aprons around their waists, they entered the ward, where Gladys was relieved to see there were only three patients: one man had his arm in a splint; another was linked up to an oxygen tank; and the third man was fast asleep. ‘On my morning round I take my patients’ pulse, temperature and blood pressure, and write a record on the clip chart hanging at the end of their bed. You’ll be doing that several times a day, Johnson, so watch and assist.’
Feeling she was all fingers and thumbs, Gladys took a thermometer from its container, then, as she shook it prior to popping it into her patient’s mouth, she had a sudden vivid memory of Myrtle, with her mouth wide open, patiently waiting for Gladys to take her temperature. ‘This is no different,’ Gladys reassured herself, and the thought gave her confidence; if what she’d done in the sanatorium was good enough for her dear dying friend, she hoped it would be good enough for the sick gentlemen in her care too. Boosted by the thought, Gladys watched the sister like a hawk; she was swift yet efficient, and she didn’t bark at her patients like she barked at the nurses. There was a tenderness in her movements that impressed Gladys, and she made a note to try to emulate that in her own work.
After being frog-marched to the women’s ward, where Gladys yet again assisted Sister Atkins in taking their pulse, blood pressure and temperature, she followed the sister into the sluice room, where together they emptied and sterilized bedpans. After this it was time to dispense the women’s medication, and before Gladys knew it dinner had arrived from the Phoenix canteen in great metal vats that kept the food relatively warm. After she and the sister had served dinner to their patients, they had to assist them to the toilet, then beds had to be remade, whilst some patients required bed baths before afternoon-visiting time. Sister was strict about the number of visitors: no more than two and no children. Whilst patients were busy with their visitors Gladys watched Sister restock the supply cupboard and reorder a long list of medication that would have to be signed off by Dr Grant.
By the end of her long, twelve-hour shift, Gladys’s hands were red raw with washing and scouring, but at least they weren’t bleeding, and she’d got through the day without doing anything too disastrous. After being on her feet virtually all day, Gladys was longing for a hot bath and several cups of tea. As she was soaking in the bath later that night, Rosa returned home and without any hesitation pulled up a chair beside the bathtub so she could hear all about Gladys’s first day as a nurse.
‘Exhausting, but I loved it,’ Gladys told her friend with a smile. ‘The only time I left my assigned nurse was to go to the toilet!’
‘I hope so too!’ Rosa chuckled. ‘Will you go to medical lectures?’ she asked.
‘Dr Grant told me that we can attend lectures only in our off-duty time.’
‘It very demanding work,’ Rosa said gravely.
‘No more than working on the cordite line, except nobody regularly gives birth on the cordite line,’ Gladys replied with a giggle.
At the end of the first week, Gladys had learnt a lot more about nursing than filling in charts and scouring bedpans; whilst shadowing Sister Atkins, she’d spent time with patients, comforting, supporting and reassuring them that they would get better and return home to their families, which is essentially all they yearned for. She’d learnt to sterilize wounds, change bandages, and remove a splint and plaster of Paris; she’d taken so many pulses, temperatures and blood pressures she was almost doing it in her sleep! Her back ached with stripping and remaking beds, and bundling up endless bags of laundry, but she was so happy to be busy and useful again. Under Sister’s beady-eyed guidance, she’d administered medication, and on her third day on the women’s ward she’d even helped deliver a baby! The mother was a woman whom Gladys recognized from her time in the filling shed; she’d gone into premature labour and had been rushed to the infirmary by Malc, who gratefully offloaded his patient to Gladys and Sister Atkins.
‘Bloody hell!’ he murmured to Gladys as he got the moaning young woman into a wheelchair. ‘I’d rather you than me, cock!’
To begin with, Gladys felt not unlike Malc, terrified. The woman’s pain seemed unbearable, but, after getting her into bed and closing the curtains around her, Gladys did everything Sister Atkins instructed and she watched her every experienced move. It was wonderful to see how the sister quickly calmed the patient, how she got her breathing under control and helped her through the worst of the contractions. When another patient called out for help, Sister Atkins looked Gladys firmly in the eye and said, ‘Over to you, Nurse Johnson: monitor her breathing exactly as you saw me do – I’ll be back.’ And with that she abruptly disappeared.
Left on her own for the first time since she’d started her training, Gladys felt panicked: why hadn’t Sister sent her to the other patient, who probably only wanted a drink of water? Why leave her with a woman just about to give birth? A hot hand gripping her own banished all further questions – she had to get on with the job!
‘I want to push,’ the woman moaned.
‘Good, that’s good,’ Gladys said in a voice that she didn’t even recognize as her own. Remembering what Sister had said to the patient only ten minutes earlier, she quickly added, ‘Try to hold on till the next contraction.’
As the poor woman wrestled with the urge to push, Sister Atkins came breezing back and quickly assessed the situation. ‘Well done, Nurse,’ she
said briskly.
‘NOW!’ cried the woman, and within a quarter of an hour her baby was born, and Sister Atkins was instructing Gladys on how to clean off the birth fluids and tie the umbilical cord. It was uplifting to hand the clean, swaddled baby to the mother, who clasped her new daughter to her breast. ‘Thank you, Nurse,’ she said with a grateful smile. ‘Can you believe this is my fourth?’ Gladys almost swayed with shock: heavens, if this was an experienced mother delivering her fourth child, how hard must it be for a new mother with her first baby?
By the end of the week, though weary and foot sore, Gladys could hardly believe how much she’d learnt by just shadowing Sister Atkins, who, as the week wore on, became less brusque with the new girl. She actually praised Gladys on her observation and the attention she gave to those in her care. ‘Emotional support and understanding are vital in the nursing profession; it’s our responsibility to make our patients as comfortable and relaxed as they can be in the circumstances.’
Patients’ smiles and kind, welcoming words when she walked into the wards made Gladys sure she was doing the right thing; she had so much to learn, but she was confident that she’d made the right decision; and, though her training was unquestionably going to be tough and challenging, she was certain that Trainee Nurse Gladys Johnson was exactly where she belonged.
18. ‘Women at War’ Exhibition
A few days before the opening of the exhibition in Salford, Rosa went along to the gallery with Malc and Edna, who had gone to the expense of having her drawings framed. Malc was now in the process of hanging them on the gallery wall alongside other artists’ work.
‘It’s fascinating to see pictures of so many different examples of women at work,’ said Edna as she carefully examined each of the exhibits in turn.
There were images of Land Girls: one hot and sweaty as she dug up potatoes in a ploughed field; another leading a huge, gentle cart-horse along a farm track of thick, churned-up mud. There were portraits of women driving Red Cross trucks, nurses on the front line, at the casualty-clearing stations, administering first aid; there were images of women on high scaffolding riveting together parts of planes, and girls in munitions factories building bombs and artillery. ‘None of them is as good as our Rosa’s drawings,’ Malc said in a very loud whisper, which the gallery owner couldn’t help but overhear.
‘Shssh!’ hissed Edna as she gave her fiancé a sharp dig in the ribs.
‘Well – it’s true!’ Malc said indignantly. ‘She’s the best of the lot.’
‘I know,’ Edna whispered a reply. ‘But we don’t have to broadcast it, do we?’
Rosa was particularly fascinated by a series of oil paintings titled ‘Ferry Girls’. ‘Who are these Ferry Girls?’ she asked her friends.
‘They’re lasses who transport planes from one airfield to another,’ Malc explained. ‘The RAF can’t spare their pilots for the job, so they brought in female pilots to fly replacement Spitfires, Hurricanes, Whitleys, Hawkers, or what have you, to airfields around the country.’
Rosa’s dark eyes widened. ‘Dio!’ she exclaimed. ‘They are brave women!’
‘Indeed they are. The RAF are going through fighter planes like I go through a bag of Edna’s chips!’ Malc joked. ‘I don’t know what they’d do without the Ferry Girls; it’s dangerous too – quite a few have been shot down by enemy fire.’
By this time Rosa was staring intently at the artist’s brushwork. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘Squadron Leader Roger Carrington.’ She read aloud the artist’s name in the corner of his paintings. ‘He’s very good,’ she said admiringly.
Malc, who was inordinately proud of their very own Phoenix artist, stalwartly repeated that her work was unquestionably the best, which made Rosa blush. ‘We all very different, Malc,’ she said modestly.
Before they headed back home, Rosa popped a letter in the post. ‘I invite my relatives in Manchester to my exhibition; I really want them to see my drawings,’ she told her friends, as they drove slowly home over the misty moors in Malc’s ancient Rover (fuelled, Edna was sure, with black-market petrol!).
‘I’ve never understood how you ever managed to make contact with them in the first place?’ Edna asked.
‘My relatives in England; they visit my family in Padova when I was young. Gabriel had address from my parents; he give to the people who smuggle me out of Germany.’ Rosa sighed heavily. ‘My brother think of everyone … except himself.’
‘He must love you very much, Rosa,’ Edna said softly.
‘He does!’ Rosa exclaimed emotionally. ‘More than his own life.’
Not wanting to upset Rosa by asking too many questions about her brother, Edna continued, ‘Your relatives must have got the surprise of their life when you turned up on their doorstep in Manchester?’
‘They are VERY surprised,’ Rosa replied. ‘But they took me in, just like other Jews took them in at start of the war. Manchester people, they are so kind to me,’ she said with a grateful smile.
‘Weren’t you frightened out of your wits when you arrived in England?’ Edna asked.
‘Not frightened – very sad,’ Rosa admitted. ‘I wanted to learn English – I wanted to give something – pay back with war work.’
‘So the Labour Exchange sent you to’t Phoenix to be a Bomb Girl,’ Malc chuckled.
‘I said to Mr Featherstonee, my English not so good. He say, “You don’t need English to build bombs, lass!” ’ Rosa said in a perfect imitation of the dour Northern factory boss.
Malc nodded. ‘Just a determination to bomb the buggery out of Germany!’
When Malc dropped her off outside the cowshed, Rosa thanked her friends for helping her.
‘Don’t fret,’ joked Malc. ‘We’ll take our commission fee when you’re rich and famous!’
In the end, Rosa went to the opening of the ‘Women at War’ exhibition on her own. All of her friends were working, even Edna (who was committed to driving her mobile chip shop to the Phoenix that night), so Rosa, with nervous butterflies fluttering in her tummy, took a bus into Salford, then walked in the pouring rain to the gallery, which was packed with eager visitors. Though it was wet and damp outside, it was warm and steamy inside the gallery, where people jostled against each other in order to view the exhibits. Breathing in, Rosa made her way slowly around the room, and was excited to hear comments about her own work.
‘Rosa Falco has a fine eye for detail,’ one man boomed as she slipped by.
‘And a delicate use of shading,’ the woman beside him observed. ‘Her depiction of the woman at work is quite profound,’ she added, as they moved on to the next painting, leaving Rosa standing before an image of Nora and Maggie she’d drawn only weeks ago. They were laughing, as usual, as if sharing a joke, their white overalls and turbans contrasting starkly with the darkness of the factory building and the metallic conveyor-belts that ran alongside them. Rosa smiled at the image of her friends, whom she’d sketched so quickly that they were hardly aware it had happened. When she’d shown them the drawing, done in dark pencil tones, Maggie had grimaced. ‘We look a bloody mess!’ she’d laughed. ‘You could have told us what you were up to, then we could at least have put on a bit of lipstick and rouge.’
‘That would spoil it!’ Rosa had cried. ‘I wanted you normal, as you are when you work.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t buy owt like that to hang up in my front room,’ Nora giggled. ‘It’s too realistic for my liking. Now, if it were flowers and little birdies, that’d be a whole different story.’
Rosa gave a groan as she shook her head. ‘Flowers and little birdies I do not do!’ she protested.
Suddenly there was a gap in the crowd around her and Rosa spotted her aunt and uncle admiring her paintings on the opposite wall. ‘ROSA!’ her aunt cried, as she rushed forward to embrace her niece. ‘Mia cara, you look wonderful,’ she exclaimed when she saw the physical change in the girl that had left Manchester as thin as a rake.
‘You have been eating well,
’ her uncle joked.
‘Yes, and the work too is good,’ Rosa replied as she embraced her uncle.
‘It must be,’ her uncle enthused. ‘Otherwise you could never have created such amazing images,’ he said, pointing to her drawings. ‘They are superb, Rosa!’.
‘You have great talent, child,’ her aunt added. ‘So like your dear mother; she would have been so proud to see your work exhibited.’
Rosa blinked away a tear and replied to her aunt in Italian. ‘Thank you. I owe so much to Mama, even though I used to protest at how strict she was and how she would never compromise with second best. She gave me the best training; I wish with all my heart I could tell her that now,’ she said with a wistful sigh.
‘Your work is a testament to your mother’s artistry and determination, Rosa,’ her aunt assured her, also reverting to their native language. ‘It’s a true gift that you can paint these brave women so intent on working for their country.’
Rosa smiled and nodded in agreement with her aunt. ‘They really are wonderful women. I don’t think I’ve ever met better.’
After they’d done the round of all the exhibits, Rosa accompanied her relatives outside, where they walked to the nearest public house. ‘Let’s have a little chat,’ her uncle suggested as he ordered whisky for them all. ‘So how are you, child?’ he asked Rosa as he passed round a small jug of hot water that his wife used to dilute the strong liquor.
Still speaking in Italian, Rosa replied, ‘I’m happy, Zio. I love the munitions factory; I have marvellous friends; and, now I’m drawing, life is better than I could ever have hoped for,’ she concluded with a smile, which quickly faded when she saw the look her aunt and uncle exchanged. ‘What is it?’ she asked sharply. ‘You have news of Gabriel?’
