The Angels of Lovely Lane

by Nadine Dorries

  Pammy dried her eyes for what seemed to be the twentieth time that day.

  ‘You should have heard how Sister Antrobus shouted at me when I went back into the ward to find out what Branna meant. Sister Haycock heard her and told me to sit on the visitors’ benches in the corridor outside while she went into the office to speak to Matron, and then when she came back out she said, “We have until tomorrow to make a case to keep you at St Angelus. I told them a decision made in the heat of the moment would not be wise and very unprofessional.” While she was talking to me we could hear Mr Scriven in the office complaining to Matron and Sister Antrobus. He’s a nasty piece of work, that man.’

  The girls listened attentively. Pammy didn’t mention the part about Sister Haycock telling her she needed a miracle to happen tonight. She couldn’t truly acknowledge to herself what a precarious situation she had landed herself in. It had all happened so quickly. She had allowed her emotions to get the better of her, and Pammy knew that was a recipe for disaster. Her friends hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen the look on Sister Antrobus’s or Mr Scriven’s face, or Matron’s for that matter. They hadn’t heard any of them shouting. The hopeful conclusion her friends had reached, that she would survive this, sounded empty and hollow to Pammy. If she had left her personal feelings to one side and acted in an entirely professional manner, she would not be facing the prospect of returning home, her dreams shattered.

  It was the midwife who had visited the house every day to attend to premature Lorraine who had inspired the young Pammy to become a nurse. Pammy wanted to be just like Nurse Heather, who had sucked out Lorraine’s airways with her little tube and massaged her back for over half an hour every morning, with the baby almost hanging upside down on her knee. She had weighed her, bathed her, and instructed family and friends how to manage until she returned the following morning. On the day she announced her visits would have to cease, when Lorraine was twice the size she had been at birth, she left Pammy a little card for when she arrived home from school. On the front was a sprig of pressed heather. The delicate paper-thin lilac and purple petals were almost transparent. Pammy thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. On the inside the midwife had written the words To Nurse Pammy. Thank you for being my little helper. I shall miss you. You were the best nurse I have ever worked with. Look after your little sister for me. I discharge her into your care. Nurse Heather.

  What had happened in the sluice room that evening could not have been further from the image of nursing that Pammy had carried with her since that day. Now she wondered to herself whether she really wanted to be a nurse any longer. Did she honestly want to work with the likes of Sister Antrobus and Mr Scriven, people who had denied a birth and a life?

  ‘If it had been a little girl and not a little boy, she may well have survived,’ said Beth matter-of-factly.

  ‘Why?’ asked Pammy, taking a fresh, dry handkerchief from Beth’s proffered hand. Pammy’s own was by now a soaking wet rag, beyond use.

  ‘No one really knows, it’s just that baby girls are much stronger than boys at the same stage of gestation and tend to survive more often. It’s a mystery, but that’s how it is. You will hardly find any premature baby boys that survive. It’s always the girls.’

  Pammy thought it was equally mysterious that Beth was being so understanding and kind. She had moved seamlessly from being a very definite fan of the ambitious and unpleasant Celia to a supportive member of their group.

  Mrs Duffy’s progress towards the sitting room could be heard long before she appeared. The wheels on her trolley squeaked and groaned under the weight of steaming copper jugs of milky drinks and home-made biscuits as she made her way from the kitchen to the sitting room.

  Emily had popped into the kitchen before she left to explain what had happened.

  ‘I think we all need an early night tonight, nurses, don’t you?’ Mrs Duffy said to the room in general as she handed Pammy her drink. Pammy looked up at her and, not daring to speak, simply nodded. She felt as though she had let Mrs Duffy down along with everyone else.

  ‘Things always look better in the morning, and goodness me, we all need that, don’t we? So, let’s be having you all up the stairs as soon as you’ve finished.’ Mrs Duffy was afraid that if she didn’t spur the nurses on they would sit there all night, chewing over a situation which not one of them could influence by anything she said or did. There was only one woman who could make a difference and she was already on the case. Sister Haycock was Pammy’s only hope.

  None of the girls would dream of arguing with Mrs Duffy, whose kindness and wisdom had inspired much respect from all of them except Celia, who fortunately was not around to inflame the situation. Half an hour later, everyone was tucked up in bed. Dana and Beth had run out of words of comfort, and had to agree with Mrs Duffy that waiting for the morning was now the only thing to be done.

  Pammy lay in her bed and stared at the moon and stars through her window, wondering what tomorrow would bring. Sister Haycock’s words rang in her ears. Matron’s word is law. She knew it might be the last night she would ever spend at Lovely Lane. She heard the thunder seconds before the flash of lightning illuminated the cosy room she had come to love. As a lonely tear ran down her cheek, Pammy said aloud, ‘This is it. You’ve done it now, soft girl.’

  She didn’t want to leave her friends, Lovely Lane, or her familiar room. She thought of Mrs Toft and of her appreciation and their laughter when she said goodbye. She remembered how Martha O’Brien’s face had been filled with gratitude when she had helped her through her pain by holding her hand. Helping people, being a good nurse – and despite her earlier doubts she knew she had been a good nurse – was the only thing she could be proud of and the only thing in the world that she knew she truly wanted. The sound of her sobs was drowned by the thunder which rattled at the windows.

  *

  Dana sat on the side of her bed and for the first time since that morning, reread the letter Beth had given her as they had walked in through the hospital gates. She was missing Victoria. She had no idea what to do, but she knew Victoria would know.

  ‘Heavens above, what a mess,’ she whispered as she read Teddy’s words yet again. He must have asked Celia to pass the note to me and she hid it in her room. Celia wasn’t even there to take to task. Dana stood and walked to her window to watch the storm. ‘You can’t hide for long, Celia,’ she said as she looked down at the rain bouncing off the cobbles on Lovely Lane. ‘You will be back.’

  Chapter twenty-seven

  The curtains had not been fully drawn in the cubicle and Martha could see outside into the hospital garden. The night sounds of the patients, the crepe-muffled footsteps of tiptoeing nurses and the distant murmur of the occasional porter’s voice provided her with distraction as sleep eluded her. The pains in her abdomen were sharp and stabbing and brought tears to her eyes, but it had been two hours since anyone had even popped a head round her door. The night sister didn’t think much of her, she could tell.

  ‘So you’re the one who is causing all the trouble,’ she had said, when she began her rounds earlier. ‘Maybe you should have thought of the consequences before you dropped your knickers, miss. You young girls from the dock road, you’re all the same.’

  She picked up the charts at the end of Martha’s bed and glanced down at them.

  ‘Have you been in here before?’ she snapped. ‘You look familiar.’ Martha was beyond being capable of a reply. There was no way she could speak, or even shake her head. She wanted her mother. She wanted Jake, but most of all she wanted the baby she knew had lived. She was on the edge of asking for Elsie, but she knew that if she did, Elsie might lose her job. This was all such a mess, and she had no idea how she had ended up here.

  She thought of the woman who had ‘helped’ her. Helped to near kill her, more like. She closed her eyes and drifted into an exhausted and fitful sleep, back into her nightmare day.

  *

  ‘I have half an
hour,’ the woman said as she spread old newspapers out over her kitchen table. ‘Get your knickers off and then get up on the table. Put your backside to the edge so I can put your knees up. How far gone are you?’

  It had taken Martha two weeks to find the name of an abortionist. In the end, she saw an advert in the paper from a woman offering herbal potions for a list of ailments, one of which was ladies’ stomach cramps.

  ‘Come back with five guineas,’ said the woman, ‘and then I’ll sort you out, dear. You won’t feel a thing. All over in a jiffy.’

  Martha had been saving for the wedding and had exactly five guineas in an envelope in her bottom drawer. She had saved the money by adding half a crown every week for months and topping it up with sixpence or a shilling whenever she could. She would have to find a way to lie to Jake. To say it had been stolen, or lost. She was hardly showing and had barely put on any weight, she had been so ill, but she knew exactly how far gone she was. He had only raped her the once. As the abortionist spoke to her, her fingers slipped to her protector. To the knife in her pocket.

  ‘I can’t do it ’ere,’ the woman said. ‘It’s illegal. I have to do it at your own place.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Martha. ‘My mam would find out.’

  Begrudgingly, the abortionist agreed to perform the abortion in her own kitchen. ‘I don’t like doing that, mind, although there are a few on Upper Parliament Street who practically run bloody clinics, women in and out all day. The police don’t bother us, not unless they want a bit of business.’ The woman cackled and Martha had no idea what she was talking about.

  She returned with the money the following day. The abortionist’s house revolted her. It smelt of stale cabbage and cats. She still had the blackout curtains up from the war and the sink was piled high with dirty dishes.

  ‘I’ll have you out of here in no time,’ the woman said, ‘and don’t you tell no one that you was ’ere, you got that?’

  Martha nodded and watched as the woman opened a cupboard and took out a piece of rubber tubing and a jug.

  ‘Take this first, girl,’ she said, handing Martha a drink. ‘Knock it back in one, go on. It makes me job easier.’

  Martha did as she was told. She wanted to be out of that kitchen even faster than the abortionist wanted her gone.

  She began to feel light-headed and dizzy. So light-headed she could no longer stand without swaying. ‘Whoops-a-daisy, there’s me lady,’ said the abortionist, grabbing her by the arm. ‘Up you get, come on, love. Shuffle yer bum to the edge, there’s a good girl. Feels lovely that, doesn’t it?’ She grinned toothlessly at Martha, who lay rigid with terror.

  ‘I like a bit of that meself now and then, but I can’t always get me hands on it you know.

  ‘Now, hold your knees against your chest, put your arms around them and put your hands together. There you go. Don’t let go now or you might knock me arm. You’ll feel a little sharp prick down there, and then I’m going to mix some carbolic with water and flush your womb out. You’re quite far gone. Too far for anything else. Just cross your fingers it works, queen, but I’m not promising anything ’ere.’ It occurred to Martha that she hadn’t said that before she took the five guineas.

  The woman lied. It was not a small prick. The tube felt like a searing hot knife as it was inserted through her hard-clamped cervix.

  ‘I’ve mixed more carbolic than usual with the water,’ said the woman. ‘You’re so far gone, you need it. Most of the women who come to me are only a couple of months gone. Get here a bit quicker next time.’

  Next time? Martha could not believe that this woman would think she would ever want to visit her dirty kitchen again.

  ‘Does the fella know?’ Martha’s mouth would not work. Whatever she had been given to swallow allowed her to hear, but not to speak. Her tongue felt thick and filled her mouth.

  The pain that followed was like nothing Martha had ever experienced in her life before and hoped she never would again. She felt something cold and liquid slip down between her buttocks and soak the newspapers. She was holding her knees against her chest for dear life, but the wooziness made it hard and she felt herself sway. ‘Keep bleedin’ still, I told you,’ the woman snapped, as Martha pulled her knees in tight.

  What followed was a pain in her abdomen so sharp that she thought she was surely about to die, and all she could think about was Jake and her mam. It felt to her as though the people she loved most now belonged to a different world that was as far away from the nightmare she was living as it was possible to be.

  Her first reaction was to convulse with the vomit that threatened to explode over the table.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ said the abortionist as she lifted her up into a sitting position. ‘It’s just a bit of shock. It always happens when you use the flushing method. Don’t know any woman it hasn’t happened to. What d’you think I put the old Echos on the table for? Don’t want me kitchen messed up. It will go in a minute.’

  It will, or I will, thought Martha, as she screamed with the pain. Her insides burnt with intense heat and, with a sense of horror, she watched as the blood ran down her legs. She tried to lift her head from vomiting, before everything around her turned black and she passed out.

  *

  Martha woke with a jolt. Her room was dark. Hours had passed. No nurse had checked on her. Her mouth was dry and thirsty, but when she reached for the jug on her bedside locker, it was empty. The sound of thunder and heavy rain filled the cubicle as she rested her head, too heavy to hold up, back on the pillow.

  She saw the grass outside the cubicle light up a luminous bright green in a flash of lightning. It occurred to her that Matron had seen her many times before, when she was little, as she had sat for hours on end on the hard-backed chair near the main entrance to the hospital while she waited for her mother to finish working. She was very lucky Matron hadn’t recognized her today. She had felt badly for the young Nurse Tanner when they had all turned on her in a fit of temper. Martha had heard them in the corridor, shouting.

  She had heard Nurse Tanner say, ‘He’s alive’, but when she asked Staff Nurse Bates only minutes later the staff nurse told her it wasn’t true. ‘No, I’m sorry, love, he was dead. But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? What we need to concentrate on now is getting you better. You have been through a tough ordeal, Miss Smith. I can’t imagine what it was like for you before you got to St Angelus.’

  Staff Nurse Bates had raised her eyebrows. Martha guessed she was hoping she would contradict the Miss Smith and confess her real name.

  ‘So, it was a boy?’ She was sure she had heard that too. ‘It was a boy?’ She had grabbed at Staff Nurse Bates’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Are you sure he’s not alive?’ she had asked, between sobs of grief. ‘It was a boy?’

  She had no idea why she had cried the way she had. She had tried to abort her baby. Taken great risks, used all her money, lied to Jake, made herself ill. She had had her insides burnt out, and yet through the pain she felt nothing but overwhelming sadness and grief.

  ‘I had no choice,’ she sobbed, as Staff Nurse Bates stroked her fringe back from her forehead. ‘I had no choice. I didn’t know what to do.’

  Staff Nurse Bates gave her a look of such deep sympathy and care that it actually made her feel worse. She would have preferred to be hated. For Staff Nurse Bates to have been rude to her, as the night sister had just been. That would have been so much easier. The kindness dissolved her and she was scared.

  ‘I had no choice,’ she sobbed to herself quietly again, while the thunder boomed outside her room. Jake would never have spoken to her or looked at her again, and would have married someone else. Her mam. God, her mam. The shame and disgrace. She would have had to leave her job and what a mess that would have put them both in. But it was the thought that she would lose Jake, that she would lose the boy she loved so much, that had driven her to do something that had almost killed her.

  At first, she thought the noise was the thund
er. The lights in the ward flickered and then they went off. Seconds later they came back on, but as the lightning struck they flickered again and the ward was plunged into darkness.

  ‘Don’t worry, ladies,’ she heard the night nurse say. ‘The generator will be on within five minutes. Happened all the time during the war.’

  But then she heard it again. It wasn’t thunder but the sound of boots, running down the main corridor. Pounding and urgent, getting closer and closer, and the pounding and urgency sent a chill down her spine and a shiver across her body. It was night. It was dark. The generator had not kicked in. It was Mr Scriven. He was coming back to hurt her. Or had he sent someone else? Were they coming to kill her? To silence her and to keep Scriven safe. She heard a match strike, saw the glow of a paraffin lamp through her window and let out a sob. They were almost upon her. The merciless, pounding, urgent boots. She froze as the object of her new terror was almost upon her, and screwed her eyes tight shut. Her hands flew instinctively to her abdomen before she remembered there was no baby there. No little life to protect. The ward doors burst open and she heard the unmistakable voice of Jake as he roared ‘MARTHA!’ at the top of his lungs.

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Sister Haycock walked through the main doors of St Angelus and headed for the stairs that led to the old sisters’ landing.

  She had been so distracted. Before she had said goodnight to Mrs Duffy, her mind had been racing. Trying to find a solution to a problem for which there seemed to be no answer. Pammy was in desperate trouble, but she now had at least one bullet to fire. Mr Scriven had injected a drug into the girl’s abdomen that the BNF said was for intramuscular and IV use only. She made a mental note to slip on to a ward and check a BNF for herself.

  Why had he done that? It was only a small bullet, but it opened up a line of questioning that might lead somewhere. Pammy said Staff Nurse Bates had only managed to keep one of the vials. She thought another drug had been used. What had that been?