The Healing Time

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Like that?’

  I looked down at myself.

  ‘This coat too tatty?’

  ‘Not only that, dear.’ She studied me. ‘Why not shove on some crafty warpaint and Helen’s Folly?’

  My mother-in-law was a smallish size fourteen and occasionally persuaded herself she was a twelve. Just before I sent the balloon up at Holtsmoor, she had given me an incredibly expensive black model suit that had been one of her mistaken buys. Both Helen and Ann preferred to see me in black. Ann genuinely thought black suited me and in this specific instance, I agreed. It was a dolly of a suit and all I had to do was put up the hem.

  ‘Ann, you must be joking! The full works for a trip to old Dawes’ classroom! Rubbish!’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. It’ll do your morale good and you should think of the Holtsmoor image. Your Miss Dawes has just given me a long spiel on how deeply respected is that name in Martha’s and how thrilled she is to find you taking such a responsible attitude to your professional life. Hadn’t you realised that as the one adult Holtsmoor you’re now Martha’s pin-up?’

  I smiled. ‘Frankly, no.’

  ‘I expect you’ve been too busy. Go on.’ She gave me an amiable shove. ‘I’ll get coffee whilst you’re getting tarted up.’

  I was about to object again, then thought what the hell and did as she said.

  David had come out for coffee. He exchanged his glasses for a better look, then walked all round me. ‘Helen’s?’ I nodded. He caught my eye and nodded back. ‘Old English tribal customs die very hard even in the second half of the twentieth century. But you look good, Pippa. What’ve you done with the Rolls?’

  ‘I thought I’d use the Mercedes this morning.’

  Ann said she’d known getting dressed up would cheer me up but what she didn’t follow was David’s bit about old English tribal customs!

  David didn’t attempt to explain and she didn’t expect him to. Once their relationship had puzzled me. They were so obviously contented with each other, and yet never appeared to make mental contact on planes I thought important. Later I realised their very close sexual contact was all Ann asked of married life and as much as David required from a wife. He was a man who enjoyed the solitude of his own thoughts and company, and would probably have settled as well for a house-keeper-cum-mistress. He was fond of Marcy and very good with her, but as he occasionally admitted, nothing would have appalled him more than a brood of his own infants. He and I got along nicely as we talked the same language, and there was just enough of Ann in me to raise between us the very faint spark essential if we were all to continue living together without boring each other to death. I liked him very much. Ann, I loved. True kindness, even if sometimes insensitive, is a lovable quality. Ann possessed it in abundance.

  Miss Dawes looked up as I knocked on her open doorway. ‘My dear Mrs Holtsmoor!’ She rose smiling. ‘How nice to see you looking so elegant and rested despite being at the end of your working week. Matron will be relieved to hear this since she’s been a trifle anxious the physical strain of night-duty might prove too much for you.’

  God bless Ann’s knack even if this angle had no more occurred to her than it had to me.

  After half an hour on nursing problems, she asked, ‘Now you’ve had time to form an opinion, how do you like working in William and Mary?’

  ‘Very much, thank you, Sister.’

  Joel aside, that was true of my ward life. I liked the patients and the very little I saw of Sister William and Mary and her day nurses. Parsons was a delightful junior and the junior registrars and housemen who visited the ward nightly were obliging young men invariably too rushed to do more than whisk in and out muttering thankfully for one quiet oasis in an otherwise hectic Wing. As it was a mixed ward our residents were surgical as well as medical, and most nights around 2 a.m. Mr Brown, the S.S.R., W., looked in and swallowing his waiting cup of tea at a gulp, standing, said, ‘Right! Thanks, Staff! ’Night,’ and very little else. I did not remember him and if he did me, he never gave any sign. He treated me like a handy bit of ward furniture, which I found restful.

  I had always preferred medical nursing and on average seventy-five per cent of our ward patients were medical. Of necessity, Joel’s rounds had to last longer than Mr Brown’s. They struck me as lasting an eternity and left me feeling beaten-up and abysmally ignorant. Though I had now caught up on some of the new right answers, night after night at least one of his questions caught me out. Inevitably, that taught me a lot of medicine. I was still uncertain whether Joel was so keen to advance my medical education for the sake of his ward, or because he enjoyed kicking me around. Having observed him to be as good at his job as was to be expected from his having been given it, the answer was probably for both reasons.

  Collecting up my latest stack of books now, it occurred to me that I owed nearly, if not all, the approval with which Miss Dawes was regarding me to two people with the same fundamental motive for disliking me. Helen might one day have forgiven me for marrying Marcus, had I borne him a son. Would that, I wondered, have been the final straw for Joel? Or had that snapped along with my fish-and-chips paper?

  That classroom was in one of the old blocks. I had come to it by way of the park and a side entrance. Miss Dawes had to see Matron shortly and said she would walk a little of the way with me. She chose to take the main ground-floor corridor connecting all the still standing blocks.

  The Wing had eased a little of the former congestion in that corridor, but there was still a constant stream going both ways. Porters trundled patients in beds or wheelchairs; nurses on-duty jog-trotted by on errands; nurses off-duty ambled along to or from the staff canteen or post bureau; relatives, visitors, up-patients holding yellow, red, or blue cards ‒ they were all still there. So were the students perched on the many windowsills or draped round the stone busts lining the corridor. There were more female students than in my time, and both sexes had much more hair and every other student lad had some form of beard. Apart from all that hair and the more colourful student clobber, time could have stood still. This really was stepping straight back into my own past, but as that period of the past had been consistently enjoyable I quite enjoyed the experience. Until Miss Dawes decided to turn it into a social occasion.

  She stopped a pair of very senior sisters. ‘I’m sure you’d like to meet Mrs Holtsmoor! Yes, indeed, Nurse Dexter ‒ our Dr Thomas’s only son ‒ yes, I thought you’d remember our Dr Thomas, Sister.’

  ‘Dear Dr Thomas,’ pronounced old Sister Charity.

  Now there was a great physician. And how well I recall his ward rounds when I was a junior probationer ‒ and we were junior pros and proud of it then! None of this student-nurse nonsense! So you have a daughter, young woman? I trust she has medical leanings?’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re not yet visible, Sister. She is only five.’

  From Sister Charity’s reproving glance I had failed in my maternal duty for not encouraging Marcy to cut her teeth on the end-piece of a stethoscope, or learn her letters from Gray’s Anatomy. Then she had a cheering thought. ‘I am convinced dear Dr Thomas would have been most gratified had he been spared to learn that his daughter-in-law is not wasting her training, unlike so many other young trained nurses. The wastage of our skilled young women to marriage is disgraceful!’

  Miss Dawes was more tolerant. ‘I doubt their husbands would agree with you, Sister.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of their husbands, Sister.’ Sister Charity sniffed. ‘I am thinking of this hospital!’

  Miss Dawes said she knew the welfare of St Martha’s would always be our first concern, and perhaps as she had to see Matron …

  I was looking at the floor and did not see the posse of white coats until it divided to let us through ‒ and my companion stopped again. ‘Good morning, Dr Ferguson!’

  The three men in dark suits in the middle of the posse stopped. The man in the centre was Dr Ferguson, the Dean. Once he stopped, the lot stopped. ‘Ah, Miss Dawes
‒ and Mrs Holtsmoor!’ He had been a guest at the massive reception Helen had given at Holtsmoor House when Marcus and I got back from honeymoon. We had both insisted on a quiet wedding. ‘Welcome back to St Martha’s.’ He introduced the two other dark suits. ‘Mr Billings, who has come to us recently from St Catherine’s, you may not know. You will, of course, well remember Dr Lawson from your training in his thoracic wards.’

  An orgy of handshaking broke out. The white coats waited in a circle round us and watched. One of the watchers was Joel. Whilst his colleagues were doing a fair job on my legs and vital statistics, he was costing my suit. From his expression, he’d got the sum right.

  Dr Lawson was a stout fiftyish man with a booming voice and good memory. ‘I’ve got it! Nurse Dexter, wasn’t it? You were acting-staff nurse in Luke Ward the winter we’d that bad flu epidemic. Two-thirds of the ward in tents ‒ you’ll remember, Kirby ‒ as you were ‒ you won’t as you were in Paediatrics then!’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’ Joel glanced from my suit to my face and smiled briefly. ‘The Wing foundations were laid that winter. Seven years back.’

  ‘One might say another world,’ put in Miss Dawes.

  The Dean said how right she was and though he was all for progress he couldn’t suppress a pang of nostalgia for the good-old days, though naturally he didn’t expect all these bright young men of medicine to agree. ‘Alack, duty calls! You will excuse us, ladies? Very nice to see you again, Mrs Holtsmoor ‒ I must get m’wife to get in touch and you must come and dine with us ‒ you’re living in London? Of course, of course, Matron explained ‒ most enterprising ‒ great pleasure ‒’ He bowed himself off. The posse, including Joel who caught my eye, bowed with him.

  ‘My dear, I’d forgotten the time! I shall be late for Matron ‒’ Miss Dawes fled murmuring to herself like the White Rabbit.

  I turned away quickly and thankfully and walked straight into a tall, trim girl in a junior sister’s uniform. ‘So sorry, Sister ‒’ I backed then gasped. ‘Liz! Liz Brecklehurst! I didn’t know you were still here!’

  We had been in the same set. It was not giving her any joy now. ‘I’ve had a month’s holiday. I’m only in uniform to report back. I’m on nights. Senior Assistant Night Super.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Her grey eyes were giving me such a cold shower I had to pack the enthusiasm into my voice. ‘You’ve done all right.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you’ve had it too rough yourself.’ She eyed my suit as Joel had done. ‘Pity about your husband, of course. But I suppose you’re over that now.’

  ‘Five years is a long time,’ was all I said.

  She had been a pretty plump blonde. Now she had fined down she was much better-looking in a cold, Nordic way. ‘Joel Kirby tells me you’re in William and Mary. How long’ll you be with us?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I expect you find it quite amusing to brush-up briefly on how the other half live. We’ll probably meet in the Wing at night ‒ if you last that long? Must go now. See you, Pippa.’

  Yes, Liz,’ I said, ‘you will.’

  Chapter Four

  RELEARNING THE JOB

  The temperature shot up that week-end and by mid-Sunday was in the sixties. Ann and I finished off the interior decorating upstairs, opened every window and door to get rid of the smell of paint, and joined Marcy and Dusty in the minute patch of rubble, sad docks, and faded grass at the back of the house. Marcy alone had the nerve to call this our garden. It was more like the bottom of a well, being entirely surrounded by the walls of the neighbouring houses and only getting the sun when directly overhead. But as it could only be entered through the door at the back of our hall, it was an invaluable asset to any household containing one small girl, one old dog, and both unaccustomed to London ways and London traffic.

  Ann had plans. ‘A paved patio with potted plants and dishy iron furniture. Perhaps a fig tree? Oh! Isn’t this bliss! Maybe we’ll go into summer without any spring?’

  David came out of the hall. ‘Too warm too early.’ His farming years had left their mark. ‘We’ll pay for it.’

  There was a smog that night. It cleared with daylight, then returned, but less thickly the following evening. The light hung in garish greenish circles round the neon street lights when I went on-duty and as I crossed the park visibility was down to a few feet. That didn’t bother me as I knew the route I wanted so well, but as the thickened air also muffled sound, the entwined couple on one of the wooden benches under a bare plane tree didn’t hear my steps until I was passing them. From the fleck of a white cap, one of the pair was a nurse (or sister?) in a long navy cloak. Whoever she was, she was breaking a stern hospital rule, but having broken that one myself on other benches on other long-gone dark nights, I walked on a little faster. I still heard the man’s whisper, ‘She see us?’ and the girl’s, ‘Thank God, just my Staff! She won’t shop us, if she did.’

  Sometime I must warn Parsons nothing travelled so clearly at night as a whisper, and particularly a female whisper. Should I also brush her up on the facts of life? Then I remembered her three months in gynae. After the number of back-street abortions she’d have seen carried in half-dead, she’d need no refresher.

  She caught me up a few yards from the Night Nurses’ Dining-room. ‘Hi, Staff! Good nights off?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. You?’

  We were always off together, which as Parsons freely admitted suited her as never before since she was now the only junior on days or nights to have every week-end free. The night staff’s off-duty had been revolutionised in my absence from nursing. Every ward in the hospital now had two regular sets of night nurses. The set working the four-night shift was regarded as the senior; the three nighters, the junior. On the latter’s fourth night they worked in any ward requiring extra help. The Martha’s term for these relief nurses was ‘jobbers’.

  Our opposite numbers in William and Mary were a Staff Nurse Watkins and a Nurse Adams. Watkins was a newly-appointed staff nurse and Adams in Parsons’ set. Consequently, I heard as much about what went on in our ward when Watkins was in charge as she undoubtedly heard about my tenure.

  Parsons said her nights off had been good fun, but poor old Willie-May seemed to have had a right grotty week-end. ‘Caro Adams says Watkins nearly did her nut.’

  ‘Why? We turned busy?’

  ‘God, no! But old Bitchy B’s back and was on for Night Super. Caro says when she wasn’t popping in to gripe, she was ringing up to do likewise. Watkins told Caro she was just as bad when she worked with her on days in Albert month before last. Watkins,’ she rattled on without giving me a chance to get in a word, ‘blames the S.M.R., W. She says she wishes to God he’d take more time off for his sex-life as this way it isn’t only Bitchy B who’s suffering. Maybe I should talk to Henry about it? Oh, Staff! Wait till you see my Henry! He is the most dashy dolly in Martha’s!’

  I was a little dazed and more fascinated than I cared to show. ‘Slowly, love, slowly. Let’s go backwards. Who’s Henry? I thought Nigel was your big kick Friday?’

  ‘That was Friday!’ Nigel was dismissed with the jerk of a thumb. ‘I met Henry at a party on Saturday night and we zoomed! But, zoomed. Staff, he fragments me! He’s Henry Kirby, the S.M.R., W.’s youngest brother. There’s another in between, but he’s not in medicine.’

  I had known and forgotten Joel had two younger brothers and parents. They used to live in York and he used to talk about them a lot as they were a very close-knit family. He had not mentioned them since my return. I wondered idly why not, then forgot that too as Parsons was talking again. ‘I wonder if he really wants to marry her? Watkins is sure he does, and she says old Bitchy B is too. She says every other sentence begins, “As Dr Kirby said to me …” ’

  ‘Parsons, hold on! Desist! Stop! There’s something I’ve to tell you before you drop enough bricks to bring down the Wing. That is, I’ve to tell you if we’re discussing Liz Brecklehurst?’

  ‘You know the ol
d ‒?’

  ‘Belt up, duckie, and listen! Liz Brecklehurst was in my set.’

  Her jaw dropped. ‘Oh my Gawd! I don’t believe it! Usually sets run in patterns and you’re so human whilst she’s ‒’ She slapped her mouth. ‘All right, Staff! I’ve got the message! Your set so I can’t make cracks, but can’t I just say there are times when my heart positively bleeds for our Dr K? When he’s not being a bastard he’s quite a dolly gent in his way and since I’ve met Henry ‒’

  ‘God’s gift to all women I’m sure, love, but if we don’t get in we’ll miss register. Come on.’

  Waiting to answer my name, I wondered how many, if any, of Parsons’ comments on Liz and Joel were based on truth. In their present jobs, since both were single, both were sitting ducks for grapevine speculations. Liz and Joel? Now there’s a thought I mused, and smiled nastily. The best of British to them and from where I now stood, both would need it.

  The Night Superintendent closed the register. ‘A few ward changes, Nurses … Nurse C. R. Jolly as extra night senior to William and Mary Ward.’ Parsons and I looked at each other across the large room and shrugged simultaneously.

  Nurse Jolly was in her fourth year. She had passed State and not yet taken Hospital Finals. She was a slight, pretty girl with very intelligent eyes. Though just back from nights off, she looked dog tired. She didn’t know why she was joining us, either.

  In the lift I asked if she had been long on nights.

  ‘My third week and all three jobbing. Without wishing to be rude, Staff, I’ll be glad to have my own ward.’