by Maureen Lee
In Liverpool, the autumn saw a rush of distinguished visitors who came to express their thanks to the city for the efforts being made to bring about victory and in appreciation of the suffering that had been endured.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid their third visit to the port, followed shortly afterwards by Winston Churchill who spoke to the dockers. The men, all left wing, wouldn’t have given a Conservative politician the time of day under normal circumstances, but circumstances were no longer normal. Left wing, right wing, everyone was now united against a common enemy. They cheered their Prime Minister and he took off his hat to them. ‘I see the spirit of an unconquered people,’ he told them.
Count John McCormack, the great Irish tenor, gave a concert to the workers at Gladstone Dock, and the American Ambassador to the British Isles, John Vinant, came personally to watch cargoes from his country being unloaded. America had not joined in the war officially, but they knew whose side they were on.
Kitty Quigley bade a cheerful ‘Good morning’ to the Wren on duty at the reception desk. The young woman smiled a tired greeting in return. She’d been on duty all night and still had two hours to go.
Kitty ran down into the basement, reported in to Nurse Bellamy, filled a bucket, collected a mop and carried them upstairs. Harriet Mansell and Lucy Peterson were already hard at work.
‘You’re early, Luce,’ she remarked. She noticed the girl was sporting a whopping black eye. ‘Don’t tell me your dad’s been at you again?’ she groaned.
Lucy’s dad turned violent when he was the worse for drink, which seemed to be most of the time. He lashed out at his three kids, as if it were their fault life hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped.
‘You should see what he did to our Hazel!’ Lucy said. ‘I had to take her to the ’ossy on Saturday night. Near broke her arm, he did, though she’s all right now.’
‘Something should be done about that man, Lucy,’ Harriet said grimly.
‘What?’ demanded Lucy. She’d lived with the violence her entire life and accepted it with surprising equanimity. Indeed, she always appeared happier than most people; a cheerful, outgoing girl whom only the most churlish person could dislike.
‘Tell the police, gang up on him. There’s three of you and only one of him.’
‘I couldn’t clat on me own dad, and I couldn’t hit him, either. He doesn’t mean any harm, Harriet, honest. He loves us in his own peculiar way.’
‘Huh!’ Harriet snorted.
They finished the corridor, emptied the bedpans and cleaned the sluice room. When she and Lucy entered the ward to clean, Kitty braced herself for the usual hearty greeting. She still felt slightly embarrassed, even after two weeks, by the eager vocal welcome bestowed on them each morning, though she had learnt to make a few comments back.
‘Get away with you!’ she joked, when one young sailor demanded to be kissed – ‘Me mam always kisses me in the morning.’
‘I’m not your mam, I’m your nurse.’
The young men regarded the auxiliaries as nurses every bit as much as they did the SRNs who’d spent years in training. They formed closer relationships with the women who cleaned their ward, checked their temperatures, made their beds, bathed them, fed them, tidied up their lockers when the MO’s inspection was due, and provided them with bedpans.
Kitty had thought she would die when she was first asked to take a bedpan to a young man with two broken arms.
‘Where do you want it?’ Her voice was so choked up at the back of her throat, it would scarcely come out.
‘Where do you think?’ he grinned. ‘Under me bum, of course.’
Kitty slid the bedpan under the sheet and tried not to look.
‘It might help if you pulled me pants down. I can’t do it with me feet, and as you can see, me arms aren’t exactly in good working order.’
Fitting the urine bottles was even worse. She was all thumbs and on the first occasion the patient grumbled, ‘Hurry up, nurse. I’m bloody busting here.’
‘I didn’t realise men were so hairy down there,’ she said to Lucy later.
There was another cubicle on Kitty’s side which had the curtains drawn that morning. When she reached it, she saw a man and woman sitting on each side of the bed in which a new patient lay, a young man as white as a ghost, breathing in a hoarse laborious way. Each time he let a breath out, he seemed to pause for a fearfully long time, and she saw the man and woman tense and glance at each other, before, suddenly, out came the breath and they relaxed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, ‘but I’ve got to clean the floor.’ It would be more than her life was worth to skip round it. Nurse Bellamy would skin her alive if she found out. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
‘I understand.’ The woman’s eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness. ‘I used to be a nurse myself.’ She patted the pale cheek of the young man. ‘Your dad and I won’t be a minute, son.’
Hospital regulations were rigid. The floors had to be cleaned, every single inch of them, no matter what obstacle might be in the way, such as very sick patients and grieving parents. Everything had to be done at a certain time in a certain way, and woe betide anyone, high or low, who broke the rules.
‘Some of them seem silly,’ Kitty complained to Harriet one day. ‘Like having to hang the towel dead centre on the rail of the locker before the MO does his rounds.’ The men’s slippers had to be placed neatly under the bed about fourteen inches from the wall. Kitty had been called to account for hanging a dressing gown up by the collar.
‘Hang it by the hook, nurse, the hook!’ she was sternly told.
‘The patients don’t realise, but they appreciate a sense of order,’ Harriet, who seemed to have an answer to everything, explained. ‘They’d be unhappy if the place was untidy, if they fell over slippers and couldn’t find their towel. Cleanliness really is next to godliness in a hospital, Kitty, which is why the floors have to be done each day. The medical staff are dealing with people’s lives, every action they take is of critical importance. It helps if an atmosphere of discipline is maintained throughout the entire hospital, from God and His Apostles right down to us serfs.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Kitty.
‘I am right, there’s no suppose about it.’
Perhaps she wouldn’t have felt like a serf if Harriet hadn’t mentioned it, but outside the wards and away from the men, the auxiliaries seemed to be at the beck and call of everyone, whether it be nurses, doctors or SBAs – sick bay attendants, mainly young men, who’d joined the Navy and had been allocated to sick bay duties because they’d done a Red Cross or St John’s Ambulance course. Some days, Kitty found herself growing dizzy, as she ran upstairs and downstairs, fetching and carrying and taking messages. People were mostly too busy to ask her name. If they did, it was Quigley they wanted, not Kitty, and even that they didn’t remember when next they wanted something done.
But whatever resentment Kitty might feel fled immediately she entered the wards, where she felt every bit as important and needed as the Chief Medical Officer himself as she mopped a patient’s brow or opened his letters for him. Sometimes she even read them aloud if the young man felt too tired.
She finished cleaning the cubicle. The man and woman were talking to Brendan, the Irish boy in the next bed.
‘It’s all done,’ she said and drew the cubicle curtains when they returned to their vigil at the bedside of their son.
Brendan was rather subdued that morning and didn’t burst into song immediately she began to clean around his bed. He jerked his head in the direction of the curtained cubicle and whispered, ‘He’s not going to make it, Kathleen. He’s already had the Last Rites.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Kitty whispered back.
‘Pneumonia.’
‘Poor lad.’
She felt subdued herself. If the young man died, it would be the first death she’d experienced since coming to work at the hospital. She forced herself to be cheerful w
hen she entered the cubicle where Martin McCabe lay encased in white bandages, still hanging grimly onto life.
‘Is that you, Kitty?’
‘Yes, luv, it’s me,’ she said tenderly, bending over the bed. Oh, if only she could touch him, stroke his hand, his cheek.
His next words made her shiver. ‘There’s someone dying, isn’t there?’ he said weakly.
‘I’m not sure,’ she stammered.
‘I’m sure. I can sense it.’
‘Y’shouldn’t think like that,’ she said uselessly.
‘It’s all I can do, isn’t it, think, till I die meself?’
‘Martin luv, don’t talk like that, either.’ Kitty tried to sound stern, but failed. She began to mop the floor around and underneath his bed. She was terrified Nurse Bellamy would find her talking to him again when she should be working.
‘Will you miss me?’
‘You know I will. I’ll miss you something terrible.’
‘You’re the only one.’
Kitty moved his locker. It was light compared to the other men’s. There were no books or magazines, no gifts from loving relatives or wives. One patient had even been sent his baby teddy bear by his anxious mother. Martin’s parents were both dead and he’d been raised in an orphanage. He hadn’t a single relative left in the world.
‘One’s enough to be missed by,’ Kitty chided. ‘Me dad’s the only one who’d miss me if I died.’
‘That’s not true. I missed you yesterday.’
‘It was Sunday, me day off.’
‘Have you finished, Kitty?’ Lucy called.
‘I’m just coming.’ She bent over Martin’s bed. ‘I’ll come and see you when I’ve finished work, as usual.’
‘Don’t forget.’
‘As if I would!’
Kitty was just leaving when one of the men called, ‘Nurse?’
‘What can I do for you, luv?’ she enquired, approaching his bed.
‘I thought you’d like this. I didn’t realise I had it until I looked through me wallet for something yesterday.’ He handed Kitty a small snapshot. ‘That’s Geordie on the right. We were both on the same ship together when we first joined up.’
Three young sailors leaned against the rail of the ship, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders, all grinning broadly and apparently without a care in the world. No matter how hard she tried, Kitty found it almost impossible to relate the happy smiling sailor with his round hat perched rakishly on the back of his curly head with the still, bandaged figure in the corner bed. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, but he wasn’t plain, either. Just an ordinary young man with indeterminate features, who, at the time the snapshot was taken, thought he had his whole life ahead of him.
‘What colour’s his hair?’ she asked.
‘Plain brown, a bit like yours. He was a nice lad, Geordie. A bit shy, that’s all.’
‘Can I keep this?’
‘You’re welcome to it, love.’
Kitty put the photo in her pocket. ‘I’ll treasure it,’ she said.
‘Kitty!’ Lucy called impatiently from the door.
They took the buckets and mops down to the basement, where they washed their hands and returned to the kitchen to distribute the breakfasts.
Clara Watkins, the fourth auxiliary, gave them a scathing look when they went in. ‘You two took your time, and there’s still no sign of Mansell.’
‘Well, if she didn’t have to clean the ward all on her own, she’d be done in half the time,’ Lucy countered scornfully.
Watkins, a gaunt, sandy-haired woman with pale eyes, had worked there the longest, which she seemed to think gave her some authority over the other three. Somehow, she managed to avoid the hardest and most unpleasant jobs, as well as disappearing frequently into the rest room for a ciggie which she rolled herself, cadging the tobacco off the patients who received a plentiful allowance from the Navy. Whether these facts were noticed or unnoticed by Staff Nurse Bellamy, the other women weren’t sure. They only knew that Watkins subjected the nurses, Bellamy in particular, to the most intense and embarrassing flattery that, for all their obvious intelligence, they fell for, ‘Hook, line and sinker,’ as Harriet put it. ‘It’s awfully difficult to resist a compliment.’
However she did it, whether by flattery or sheer cunning, plus an ability to turn a deaf ear when anything needed doing, Watkins got away with murder. Privately, when the four auxiliaries were in their own little room, she had nothing but contempt for the senior staff. ‘She’s a stupid ould cow, that Bellamy,’ she would say contemptuously, when only minutes before she’d been buttering the woman up so comprehensively, that anyone listening would have felt their flesh crawl.
‘Be careful what you say in front of Watkins,’ Lucy had warned Kitty on her first day. ‘If she can get you into trouble, she will. She thrives on trouble, that woman.’
‘Come on, get a move on,’ Watkins snapped. ‘Else the breakfasts’ll get cold.’
Lucy tossed her head derisively. While Harriet affected to ignore Watkins’s frequent jibes and heavy-handed hints that she wasn’t pulling her weight, Lucy was unable to resist responding in kind. ‘Don’t tell me what to do, Clara Watkins,’ she snorted. ‘There’s enough people already pissing me around, so I’m not prepared to be pissed around even further by another bloody auxiliary. Come on, Kitty.’
Kitty felt dead on her feet by the time her shift was finished at four o’clock, but she still went to see Martin McCabe as usual. She felt a terrible rush of sadness as she drew the curtain and sat on his bed, thinking about the happy young man in the snapshot in her pocket.
‘Kitty?’
‘I’m here, luv.’
‘I’ve been counting the seconds and the minutes waiting for you to come.’ The voice from behind the bandages was as heavy and slow as sludge.
‘Don’t tire yourself out, now, or you’ll get me into trouble.’
His next words took her by surprise. ‘I want you to get something from me locker.’
‘But your locker’s empty, luv.’
‘There’s something,’ he persisted. ‘Open it.’
Kitty pulled open the door of the rather battered little cupboard. All it contained was a brown envelope on the top shelf. She took it out. It seemed to contain official papers relating to his service in the Royal Navy.
‘Would you like me to read you something?’
‘No.’ His head moved and she realised he was becoming agitated. ‘The ring, me mother’s ring. It should be there.’
Kitty pulled the papers out and a thick black ring fell onto the bed. When she picked it up, she saw it was silver, heavily engraved, and in need of a good clean. ‘I’ve found it,’ she told him. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘That went with me to the orphanage after me mother died. It was her wedding ring. They couldn’t afford gold.’
‘Do you remember your mother, Martin?’
‘Hardly a bit. Try the ring on, Kitty. I used to wear it on me little finger.’
Feeling slightly uncomfortable, Kitty slid the ring onto the third finger of her right hand.
‘Does it fit?’
‘It’s a bit small.’
‘Have you tried both hands?’
The ring fitted the third finger on her left hand perfectly, though Kitty felt even more uncomfortable when she put it on. It didn’t seem right, wearing a dead woman’s wedding ring.
‘I want you to keep it,’ Martin whispered.
‘But, Martin, I couldn’t possibly …’ she began.
‘Please listen!’
Kitty fell silent, conscious of the frustration in the smothered voice. How galling it must be, to have unseen strangers attending to your every single bodily need! He was fed by tube and the food was removed by tube. All he could do was speak and then only in a laborious whisper, yet most people were too busy or too impatient to listen to what he had to say.
‘Go on, luv,’ she said gently.
‘I always thought I’d have
a wife and family one day,’ he said. ‘There was a girl once, but nothing came of it. I lie for hours, thinking there’s no-one to grieve when I go.’
Kitty opened her mouth to speak, to say she’d grieve, but thought better of it and let him continue uninterrupted.
‘It makes me feel as if me whole life’s been a waste of time, but if you take the ring, Kitty, keep it, be my girl for a little while, then you’ll never forget me, will you?’
She knew she had to take the ring. ‘I’ll be your girl, Martin,’ she vowed. She leant over and kissed the gap where his mouth was.
‘I felt that.’
‘I’ll have to go now, luv.’
Martin didn’t answer, and she realised after a while that he’d fallen asleep.
Chapter 6
The young man with pneumonia died during the night. His bed, stripped and re-made by the night staff, lay empty when the two auxiliaries entered the ward the next morning. The other patients were unusually buoyant, seemingly unaffected by the death of their comrade. Kitty was to discover this phenomenon always occurred when a young man died, as if the rest drowned their grief by celebrating their own good fortune in still being alive.
‘Are you wearing me ring?’ Martin breathed when Kitty entered his cubicle.
‘Of course I am. I’ll always wear it.’
‘Good.’
Later, as the Chief MO began his rounds, the four auxiliaries made a cup of tea and retired to their rest room for a welcome break. Lucy and her sister had been to the pictures to see Ginger Rogers in Fifth Avenue Girl the previous night. ‘It was worth standing in a queue for nearly an hour just to see the clothes she wore!’ she sighed blissfully. ‘We’re going to see Lady Hamilton on Saturday, with Vivien Leigh. Did you see her in Gone With the Wind?’ she asked Kitty.
‘Not yet,’ Kitty mumbled, too ashamed to admit she hadn’t managed to get to the pictures since the days of silent films, and had only vaguely heard of Ginger Rogers and Vivien Leigh.
‘I’ve already seen it twice, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Perhaps we could go one night, Kitty,’ Lucy suggested. ‘Saturday’d be best, when we don’t have to come to work next morning. It’s bound to be on somewhere in town.’
