The Children of Lovely Lane

by Nadine Dorries

  Miss Van Gilder’s brow furrowed, her eyebrows met in the middle. ‘Well, in my opinion, if an interview lasts for longer than an hour, someone is talking far too much, and I assume that must be your Sister Haycock.’ She laid down her cup and saucer on the chair next to her, stood upright, smoothed down the front of her coat and without another word marched towards the ladies.

  Without knowing it, Miss Van Gilder had just made her first big mistake. She had wrongly assumed that in the general scheme of things and, more specifically, in the hierarchal structure of St Angelus, Elsie was a nobody. That, as a mere tea lady, a domestic who fetched and carried, Elsie O’Brien could be treated as rudely as she wished and that whatever was said to her, a woman of so little consequence, would have no repercussions.

  Miss Van Gilder had no idea that, when it came to the running of the hospital, the domestics at St Angelus held most of the power and they used it well. Between them all – Biddy, Branna, Elsie, Dessie the head porter and Madge on the switchboard – nothing went on in St Angelus that they didn’t know about, make happen or mend. Elsie’s gathering of information about who was to be the new assistant to Matron was a crucial element in this process of power and control.

  What a nosey individual, thought Miss Van Gilder as she looked back over her shoulder and watched Elsie retreating down the corridor. She could hardly believe the woman was being so familiar and she gave an involuntary shudder as she walked. Having trained in the 1920s, she was used to hospital staff knowing their place. It was a place that was very lowly in the scheme of things. Their role was to be invisible; it was, if it couldn’t be helped, to be seen but, like children, to never, ever be heard.

  I hope one of the assistant matron’s jobs will include the supervision and appointment of domestics, she thought to herself as she inspected the clean towel Elsie had laid out especially for her with a fresh shaving of soap sitting on top. This one will have to go, for a start.

  As the lavatory door closed, Elsie doubled back. Miss Van Gilder had left her handbag under her chair. Elsie knew it was her only chance. It was now or never. If she didn’t do this, she would know nothing, but if she did, it could provide her with information that the others would thank her for. Elsie could sense trouble. She needed the lavvy again. There was danger in the air. ‘Do it,’ she whispered to herself as she began to retrace her footsteps. ‘Go on, do it.’ She moved like a snake and then, realizing she was too slow, trotted back towards the seat.

  Crossing herself as she stooped forwards, Elsie slipped the bag out from under the chair and in a flash unclipped the clasp. The two halves of the bag parted to reveal very little and Elsie’s heart sank. A purse, a comb and a sheaf of papers. She glanced nervously towards the lavatory door. She would hear the chain flush before Miss Bone Grinder came out. In the small pocket on the side of the bag, she spotted a train ticket and, lifting it out, noticed it was a one-way ticket from Bournemouth. She peered in the pocket for the return half, but there was nothing. She wanted to remove one of the sheets of paper, but it was too late. She heard the toilet flush and swiftly snapped the clasp shut and returned the bag to the place where Miss Van Gilder had left it, tucked away under the seat.

  Ten minutes later, entirely unaware, Miss Van Gilder placed the now empty national-issue cup and saucer down on the wooden chair next to her. Even though she would never admit it, she’d thought the tea had tasted delicious. She glanced appreciatively at the toffee-brown sludge of melted sugar granules clinging to the sides and for a brief second she felt lifted. Maybe she should start to take sugar in her tea, now that hospital rationing was ending. But no sooner had the thought entered her mind than she dismissed it and mentally shook herself back into grumpiness. The sugar slid down the sides of the cup into a despondent puddle.

  As if on cue, she heard the now familiar sound of Elsie’s footsteps as she came round the corner to collect the cup. The laughter in the boardroom had faded and the voices had lowered to a murmur; the interview was coming to an end.

  The sound of a different, scurrying, pair of footsteps filled the vast corridor as a lone probationer nurse, red-faced and anxious, made her way towards the boardroom doors.

  A look of alarm crossed Elsie’s face as she stepped forward to stop her. ‘Where are you off to?’ she asked as she put her hand out to halt the nurse. Elsie recognized her. She’d been in the most recent group at the preliminary training school, or PTS, as it was commonly known.

  ‘Where are you off to, Nurse Moran?’ Elsie repeated. She prided herself on knowing the name of every nurse in the hospital. It wasn’t difficult. Once the probationers had passed their PTS, the names came to Matron’s office to be allocated to the wards. Matron had had Dessie fix a huge blackboard on her office wall, on which she wrote the nurses’ names as she moved them around the hospital, like pieces on a chessboard. Elsie thought Matron secretly imagined herself as a Wren in the War Office as she moved her troops around St Angelus.

  ‘Sister told me to take this to the path lab,’ Nurse Moran said, taking a glass sample-jar from underneath its brown-paper sheath.

  Elsie gasped in disgust. ‘Put it away, we don’t want that up here,’ she hissed. The jar was filled with what was obviously urine.

  ‘But I can’t find the path lab anywhere. Dr Davenport told me it was up the stairs and in through the big wooden doors.’

  ‘Did he now?’ said Elsie, thinking to herself that she would kill that man. She had told him herself earlier that morning that the interviews were taking place. She could picture him at that very moment, walking down the main corridor to the theatre where she knew he was operating this afternoon, giggling to himself. ‘You take no notice of that wicked man,’ she said. ‘Jesus, the path lab isn’t even in the main building. It’s outside. Go through the courtyard, past the porter’s lodge and then past the oxygen store. It’s the wooden hut next to the mortuary.’

  Nurse Moran looked as though she was about to burst into tears.

  ‘Go on, hurry,’ said Elsie impatiently as she turned her around and pointed her in the direction of the stairs. ‘Sister Haycock will be out here in two seconds.’

  The probationer’s eyes widened and Elsie thought she might be about to cry.

  ‘Go on, shoo now and you’ll be fine. She will never know.’

  In a pink flash, the probationer was gone.

  Miss Van Gilder made to speak, but she never got her chance as the large wooden doors to the boardroom were suddenly flung open.

  Out walked Emily Haycock, smiling warmly, chattering in whispers to the candidate she was accompanying into the corridor. Her small kitten heels clipped a tattoo on the wooden floor. The woman she was escorting was smart and young-looking. Her head was bent towards Sister Haycock’s and she was listening intently to what she had to say. Both were smiling.

  Well, she looks far too young, thought Miss Van Gilder. And no self-respecting ward sister wanting to become an assistant matron would wear bright yellow. Women wear that colour for one reason only: to be noticed. It’s a husband she’s after, and she’s not the first. She coughed pointedly to attract Sister Haycock’s attention. It’s time this Sister Haycock noticed me and stopped chatting to that rain-beaten daffodil, she thought.

  Emily raised her head and smiled in acknowledgement. The sound of a giggle filled the air and Miss Van Gilder felt her temper rising. She took a deep breath, swallowed and then fixed her face, ready.

  ‘Miss Ava Van Gilder, hello. How are you? I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,’ Emily said as she walked over on her clippety kitten heels and held out her hand.

  Miss Van Gilder stood up. Her back was ramrod straight, her handbag was clasped to her front and her hat did not so much as tremble a greeting. ‘It is not Ava as in Gardner but Ava as in Arva,’ she said as she proffered her hand.

  She may have been short, with a small, wiry frame, but once met, no one ever underestimated Miss Van Gilder. The sharp, no-nonsense glint in her steel-grey eyes, the strength of her hand
shake and the timbre of her voice immediately disabused anyone of the notion that here was a caring and kindly woman.

  Emily almost took a step back as Miss Van Gilder thrust out her hand and left it there, rigid and waiting. Goosebumps covered Emily’s arms in response. Up until this moment she’d thought she’d got clean away with having selected candidates for interview on the basis of how nice their name sounded. It had worked astonishingly well. All five interviewed so far had been women with a modern approach and she could imagine any one of them taking the post. Now, though, it looked as if it was all about to go horribly wrong. She instinctively knew that this one was going to be trouble.

  She blinked rapidly as the owner of the cold-as-a-wet-fish but firm-as-a-vice hand pumped her own arm up and down like the handle on a village-green pump.

  ‘But I much prefer Miss Van Gilder at all times, if you don’t mind,’ the woman said. And then, as an afterthought, as though she’d remembered she was being interviewed, she added an awkward, ‘Thank you very much.’

  Emily felt herself recoil. If there was any way she could have prevented this woman from entering the boardroom, she would have done so. She momentarily considered fainting, as her mind frantically scrabbled for a way out of what she knew was about to become a treacherous situation. In a flash, she saw the small but significant achievements she had made since she had been in place slipping away.

  Emily had tried her very best to drag St Angelus out of its entrenched, pre-war, 1930s’ modes of behaviour, and that included everyone becoming a little less formal with each other. It was her dream to remove the ban on married nurses being able to continue working and she wanted the right assistant matron to be appointed, someone who would be on her side and would work on Matron to help achieve that objective. Matron was stuck in her ways and totally opposed. Emily needed an ally. A pincer movement was what was required. To convince Matron, or, if she resisted, simply to outvote her.

  She desperately wanted an assistant matron who was forward-looking and modern. Someone who shared her goals. She had to ensure that the assistant matron’s vote was one she could count on, as she would become a key member of the hospital management board. Not for a second did Miss Van Gilder look as though she fitted that bill and Emily heard her heart land on the parquet floor.

  ‘Yes, quite, of course,’ said Emily. ‘We never use Christian names in the confines of the hospital, as you know. It’s just that amongst senior staff, we occasionally do...’

  Her words tailed off as she took in the almost raven-black hair, the fierce-looking glasses, the pinched lips, slightly hooked nose and pale eyes. The darkness of Miss Van Gilder’s hair was in stark contrast to the paleness of her skin; she looked like a woman who had never met the sun.

  A hard, expressionless gaze met her words and Emily felt as though she was shrinking before Miss Van Gilder’s eyes. This woman is supposed to be forty-five, she thought, but she looks sixty if she’s a day.

  The previous applicant had been forty. She was smart and modern in her manner. Emily had taken to her right away and had even thought that this was a woman she could be friends with. She had admired her very fashionable dress-coat and had felt rather self-conscious in her own chocolate-brown twinset. If there were two things Emily needed more than anything, they were a single friend of her own age and some new clothes. Women who were dedicated to nursing became lonely spinsters in later life. Emily had seen it happen so many times and it was a future she dreaded. She knew she had to fight against it happening to her, but time was not on her side.

  *

  ‘Well, I don’t think there is any doubt at all who the most appropriate candidate is,’ said Matron at the end of the day, once Miss Van Gilder had left and Elsie had brought in the tea urn and sandwiches for the board members.

  God, no, thought Emily. Not Miss Van Gilder. Please God, no.

  ‘Do you have any questions for Miss Van Gilder?’ Dr Gaskell had asked during the interview. His expression had been inscrutable and he had refused to catch Emily’s eye beyond the one glance that so clearly said, Emily, what have you done?

  ‘Yes, please, Dr Gaskell,’ said Matron, whose face had lit up when Miss Van Gilder had entered the room.

  Emily was almost in despair. They had taken it in turns to lead the questioning of the candidates. Her own free run had been with the previous applicant; she’d been so desperate for the board to like the woman in yellow that she had asked too many questions and taken too long.

  ‘What would be your approach to redressing the shortfall of nursing-staff applications we have experienced of late?’ said Matron, leaning forward across her foolscap pad and holding her pencil as though ready to record every word Miss Van Gilder uttered. ‘As you may know, the number of patients St Angelus treats is growing every day. The Liverpool District Hospitals Board has plans to build a new theatre suite and several new wards. Casualty now treats over thirty people a day. We are one of the busiest hospitals in the north-west.’

  Miss Van Gilder didn’t waste a second. ‘There is no nursing cadet force at St Angelus, which is unusual, if you don’t mind my saying. In Manchester, the hospitals have a full contingent. I believe St Angelus has relied too heavily on its reputation as a centre of learning for the treatment of TB.’

  Dr Gaskell rose to his full height in his chair and shuffled the papers in front of him impatiently. As the regional clinical lead in TB, he was far from impressed. His manner said quite clearly that he wanted this interview to be over as soon as possible. In contrast, the representatives from the LDHB appeared to be lapping up her every word.

  ‘We must search far and wide to recruit young girls into a cadet force as soon as they are ready to leave school,’ continued Miss Van Gilder. ‘When they reach seventeen, they can then begin full nurse training without the barriers new nurses often experience when commencing work in a hospital and meeting patients for the first time. They will be fully prepared for nursing and ill prepared for anything else. This is the only way we can ward off the modern-day notion that a man can do a woman’s job. I am not a fan of male nurses. Never have been.’

  Dr Gaskell raised an eyebrow. A normally wise and gentle man, he found Miss Van Gilder more irritating than almost anyone else he could remember having encountered. It was he who’d instigated the employment at St Angelus of former members of the forces’ medical corps, encouraging them to take up roles in the hospital as part of their rehabilitation, and he hoped to employ many more, even though he’d met with strong disapproval from both Matron and Sister Antrobus. St Angelus had been the first to appoint male nurses from the post-war influx of 1952, and they were now becoming commonplace in every hospital across the country. However, he did not say this, just stared down at his papers.

  Miss Van Gilder continued apace. ‘I’m sure such men had their place during the war, out in the field hospitals, but not in a modern post-war British hospital. No, indeed, no place here.’

  Matron beamed. The two charge nurses on the male surgical ward were the bane of her life. They were informal, disorganized, disobedient and far too loud. As far as she was concerned, taking them on had been the biggest mistake the board had ever made. But she had no choice. Every day she felt less and less in control of her own hospital as the new NHS flexed its muscles. She could not have agreed more with Miss Van Gilder. She liked this woman.

  ‘I just have one more question, if you don’t mind, Dr Gaskell?’ Matron looked at Dr Gaskell and smiled.

  He shifted in his chair and looked uncomfortable. ‘Of course, but we must wind up soon, it is almost five o’clock,’ he said with uncustomary impatience.

  Matron knew Dr Gaskell was hurrying her, but she would not be rushed. ‘There is a great deal of flippant and in my opinion silly talk about removing the ban on married nurses being able to continue working. How do you feel about this particular issue?’

  Emily wasn’t sure if Matron was even aware of it, but the manner in which she had phrased the question left no one in any
doubt about what her own feelings were.

  Once again, Miss Van Gilder dived in without hesitation. ‘I could not imagine anything worse than a married woman nursing a poorly patient. Women who are married have homes and husbands to look after. They become pregnant. They would be tired before they even began a day of work. Nursing is a physical job. It requires every ounce of a girl’s strength. After a day on the wards, she has none to spare and, frankly, I do believe there is something very distasteful and inappropriate in the idea that a woman in full possession of carnal knowledge should be tending to male patients. Not something the patients would be comfortable with, I am sure.’

  Matron nodded approvingly.

  Emily knew exactly what Miss Arva-not-Ava Van Gilder meant. Married women had sex. That was what Miss Van Gilder did not want to come into contact with. Women who had sex, who reminded her that she didn’t.

  Emily’s only hope was that Miss Van Gilder was more than a world apart from the legendary Sister April, both in appearance and manner, and that this would be enough to put Matron off. Even though she’d left St Angelus way back in 1941, four years before Emily had arrived, Assistant Matron Sister April continued to be a familiar name at the hospital. She had a reputation for having been both kindly and modern, and everyone knew that Matron had had a soft spot for her. The whispers were that Sister April’s departure had broken Matron’s heart. Emily feared they were right. She sometimes wondered if the reason Sister April had left St Angelus was because she wanted to save her good friend Matron from any further heartache. But whatever the truth of it, Emily thought, Matron surely wouldn’t want Miss Van Gilder in Sister April’s place.

  Elsie dusted the side table that held the sandwiches and tea urn. She couldn’t possibly leave the room until she knew who the successful candidate was. She stole a glance over her shoulder. They were deliberating for far longer than she’d thought they would. She would need to find a way to prolong her cleaning-up process.