A Wartime Nurse

by Maggie Hope

  Dr Strange was in the ward with Major Koestler when she got there. Sister was off duty and only Nurse Elliot was with the doctors so Theda put on her cap and apron and went up to them.

  ‘I’ll take over, Nurse,’ she said, and took the bundle of case notes from her colleague.

  ‘Morgen, Staff Nurse.’ Major Koestler beamed at her. ‘How nice to see you. And looking so beautiful too.’

  Dr Strange looked rather startled and gave them both a quick glance then coughed. ‘Er – I would like to examine this patient, Staff,’ he said.

  As she arranged the screens around the bed, Theda frowned. She could do without any man showing he was interested in her, let alone a German. Wasn’t the Major being a little too friendly? And in front of Dr Strange too. If he did it again she would have to choke him off and that would be a pain. Or perhaps she was reading too much into a friendly greeting? Goodness knows, German courtesy was different from English. But at least it wasn’t as heavy-handed as the Italian way.

  The ward round finished, and after a sojourn in Sister’s office, the doctors went away. Theda took off her cuffs and rolled up her sleeves and worked alongside the other nurses, making beds, giving bedbaths to the patients who were confined to bed, doing the thousand and one mundane tasks that made up the ward routine.

  At least she was free on Saturday, and could go to Clara’s wedding. For a minute there when she had gone into Matron’s office and asked for it, grovelled for it almost, she had thought she wasn’t going to get it. Now all she had to do was find something to wear and buy a wedding present. She would forego her lunch and go into town and try to find something. If she concentrated on each little task as she was doing it, she got through the day quite well.

  At five to two on Saturday afternoon, Theda went into the chapel with her mother, both of them only a little breathless after the mad rush to get the tables in the schoolroom set out with the spam sandwiches and ham and beetroot and fancy cakes they had had delivered from the Co-op bakery, and the three-tiered wedding cake, which Mrs Coulson had iced.

  It was only a single wedding cake really, the top two were made of cleverly disguised cardboard and hired from the Coop, but you could only tell if you looked very closely. And there had been extra food points issued for the wedding, though nothing like enough to cover all the goodies, and Bea had had no compunction about flitting about begging things from family and friends.

  ‘Mind, though I say it myself, it looks grand,’ she announced after she’d insisted on popping in to the schoolroom to check it all over, even though the groom and his friends were already in the chapel and the car had gone to pick up Clara and her father.

  Theda closed her eyes and tried to send up a prayer for Dean and Clara but somehow the Lord seemed particularly remote just then and she couldn’t believe He actually heard her. Well, look at the mess the world was in – surely He had enough to think about?

  She looked across the aisle to the bridegroom’s side. It was a bit sparse but there were two rows of Air Force blue with bright shiny buttons gleaming almost as much as the brilliantined heads above, uncovered as they were in this hallowed place. All alike, she mused, all in a row like toy soldiers.

  Then one turned and smiled at her and with a shock she realised it was the American she had nursed only a few weeks ago, one side of his face unnaturally smooth and shiny but not at all badly burned. She smiled back at him and he gave a tiny salute and then the minister was there and the organ was playing and the congregation was standing as Clara came down the aisle, looking amazingly beautiful in her creamy silk gown and her mother’s wedding veil.

  Amazing because only a couple of hours ago there had been hysterics in the front room of the house in West Row as one of the seams hastily sewn by the bride and her mother (most likely the bride) came apart and there had had to be some running repairs. Thank goodness the main seams had been sewn by machine before the last machine needle broke and put it out of action.

  ‘We are gathered here today—’ the minister began, and beside Theda, Bea shuffled up to allow room for Matt to come in to the pew after he had said ‘I do’ when asked who gave the bride away. The afternoon sun streamed through the plain side window of the chapel and lit up the couple standing so close together at the front, and for a moment Theda allowed her guard to drop and imagine what it might be like if it was herself standing there and a British Army officer’s uniform the groom was wearing. A slightly shorter groom with a bit of a limp. A man with cool grey eyes, which would light up when he looked down at her and said the vows . . . The daydream was cut short as the congregation stood to sing Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’.

  Afterwards there was the wedding tea in the Sunday Schoolroom with everyone bowing their heads as the minister said grace – and when they opened their eyes there was Joss.

  ‘Tra la!’ he cried, throwing his arms wide as though to embrace them all, and Bea jumped into them and he hugged her and swung her off her feet in the middle of the horse-shoe arrangement of tables and danced around with her which the minister didn’t even seem to mind at all, even though no dancing was allowed on the chapel premises.

  ‘How long do we have to put up with you this time?’ asked Chuck.

  ‘Now then, less of the impudence, young Charles,’ replied Joss, ‘or I’ll be having to put you on a charge. Anyroad, I have a whole week to mend your manners.’ He turned to Theda, who had jumped up from her seat to crowd round him along with the rest of the Wearmouths. ‘And how’s my best girl?’

  Love flooded through her as he smiled the well-remembered smile that crinkled up his eyes and tilted his head to one side. She glowed as she hugged him.

  ‘Lucky man,’ breathed the American, but no one heard him. Space was made at the top table for Joss and everyone ate what they wanted for a change. Even Renee’s lad Maurice was allowed to eat two fairy cakes before he had any bread and butter. And it was real butter. No one in the street had eaten their butter ration that week; they had all saved it for the wedding.

  They drank toasts to the bride and groom in blackberry cordial and ginger wine, though the Canadians brought out hip flasks of some sort of spirit. They were quickly persuaded to keep it until the evening celebration, however, and the minister pretended he had not seen it.

  Everyone walked back to the house together, apart from the bridal couple who drove back in the airman’s jeep, sitting so close together on the back seat they could have been Siamese twins. The walkers took the short cut through the fields, having to form a crocodile along the path that ran diagonally across what once was called the play field but now, when every spare piece of land was being used for growing crops, was just showing the green of young barley.

  ‘No one would believe that not a drop of alcohol has been drunk so far,’ observed Eugene Ridley. Somehow, as the wedding party thinned into twos to go across the field, it was he who had ended up walking with Theda.

  ‘That’s true, an’ all,’ she said. The airmen were singing at the tops of their voices something quite indistinguishable, and the home crowd, led by Joss and Chuck, were doing their level best to drown them out.

  ‘I wangled an invitation today. I wanted to see you again.’

  ‘Did you, Pilot Officer Ridley? Why was that?’ Theda’s mood had lightened these last few hours as she’d tried to put her own problems behind her and enjoy her sister’s wedding but now her spirits sank slightly.

  ‘Call me Gene, everybody calls me that. I wanted to see if you were as attractive as I remembered you.’ They were coming out of the field now and forming into groups and Violet and Renee and four Canadians were in a line across the road, dancing the palais glide to Violet’s high-pitched rendering of the ‘Lambeth Walk’.

  Gene put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Come and join in,’ he said.

  ‘Are you flirting with me?’ asked Theda lightly, and laughed, trying to extricate herself without giving offence. ‘No, come on, be a good boy. We want to g
et back before Clara and Dean go away, don’t we?’

  The newly-weds were going to stay in a hotel at Scotch Corner for two nights, before Clara had to go back to the munitions factory and Dean to his job on the base. And after that they would be separated until he managed to get them a place in Middleton St George.

  ‘OK,’ agreed Gene, but he looked sideways at her, his eyes questioning. He put a hand to his neck and pulled his scarf up around the worst of his scarring and Theda realised he thought she might be put off by it. So she smiled radiantly at him and he took hold of her hand and grinned back, reassured.

  The house was heaving with people, the big kitchen overflowing into the yard and the front room into the garden. Matt and Chuck had borrowed a piano from the Hugheses up the row and manhandled it into the front room and someone was already playing boogie-woogie on it.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Theda asked Gene. The blackberry cordial was out, this time topped up by rum, which Chuck had brought in from the club. Gene looked doubtfully at it. ‘A cup of coffee would be nice,’ he said.

  ‘Well, there’s only Camp,’ said Theda, wondering what he would make of the chicory-flavoured stuff, which was all Bea had been able to get at the Co-op. And he reached into his overcoat pocket and pulled out a packet wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘I forgot. I brought this as my contribution,’ he said.

  They were all drinking coffee, flavoured rather peculiarly with goat’s milk because Bea insisted on keeping the cow’s milk for the tea, when Dean and Clara came downstairs ready to go and Bea started to cry.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she sobbed, and flung her arms around Clara.

  ‘Oh, Mam! You’ll crease me dress. Behave! I’m not going to Canada for a while yet. I’ll be back to plague you next week.’ And Bea laughed and everyone gathered for the big send-off in the jeep, which was tied up with ribbon and had strings of old pit boots and tin cans tied on the back.

  It was quiet for a short while after they went. Everything seeming a bit flat. Then Nora came across to Theda, exhibiting a look of horrified disgust.

  ‘There’s an airman in the netty vomiting his head off,’ she said. ‘You’re the nurse – you see to him.’

  Theda groaned and got to her feet. ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Gene, rather unexpectedly. ‘Scam never could hold his liquor.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Matt commented. ‘I suppose goat’s milk and coffee and rum and blackberry cordial don’t mix over well.’

  The smell was overpowering in the ash closet at the end of the yard. Theda and Gene got Scam, the young rear gunner, out of there and into the fresh air. Too many people were using the outhouse, that was the trouble, thought Theda as they leaned him up against the wall and waited while his face took on a more normal hue. The ashes weren’t enough to quell the smell.

  Joss came out and leaned against the wall, offering cigarettes to the other two men and lighting a match, cupping it in his hands against the wind while they lit up. Superstitiously, he threw the match down and lit another for himself. Theda excused herself and went in to help her mother wash up the coffee cups and glasses.

  ‘It went well, I think, pet,’ Bea said complacently, and Theda agreed. It had gone well from her point of view too, she thought. There had been no time to mope.

  ‘I suppose we should be on our way – leave you good people to yourselves.’ Scam popped his head round the door. He looked a different man now: tall and gangly and healthy and clean-cut, though incredibly young. Surely he should be playing with a toy gun in his parents’ back yard rather than flying over Germany in the tail end of a plane, firing at enemy aircraft which tried to stop them dropping their bombs?

  Matt was behind him. ‘Nay, lad. The club will be open in half an hour – we’ll all go there. It’s a free and easy night tonight. We can take the women an’ all.’

  Bea demurred only as a matter of form and shortly they were all on their way back to Winton Village, going past the chapel to the Working Mens’ Club where there was no trouble signing in the Canadians at all. There were plenty of members prepared to swear they were their guests.

  ‘Friendly folks in your little town, ma’am,’ said Gene, taking Theda’s arm and leading her to a set after the secretary insisted on buying their drinks.

  ‘They’ve all heard about what Pilot Officer McMullen did,’ said Theda.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Gene’s grin slipped for a moment and he looked thoughtful. Theda knew he was thinking about his dead colleague. Pilot Officer McMullen had brought his damaged plane home from a mission over Germany on 13 January, then found he was not going to make it to the airfield. They were over Darlington and in imminent danger of coming down on the crowded terraced housing. And so he got his crew to bale out, lightening the load so that he could take the plane away from the town before it fell from the sky. And then he had been killed as it crashed in the open country beyond.

  ‘Something like you did when you came down on the Grammar School cricket field,’ said Theda.

  ‘No, nothing like it at all. We weren’t going to crash on the houses. I just didn’t know where we were.’

  ‘Well,’ said Theda, and smiled at him, ‘come on, let’s have a good time for a change. Forget the war for once.’

  The evening flew, the concert room getting hotter and hotter and the crowd getting noisier. ‘A bit of order, please!’ called the steward, as one after another got up to entertain the company. Joss sang ‘Just A-Wearyin’ for You’, reducing half the women to tears, and Matt sang ‘The New Jerusalem’, and everyone joined in songs from the present war and then songs from the Great War. No doubt some of them could go back to the Boer War but then it was time for Theda to go back to the hospital.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ said Gene, who had his own car with him.

  ‘You be careful, our Theda,’ said Joss. ‘You can’t trust these Yanks. You know what they say: overpaid, overfed, oversexed—’

  ‘An’ you watch your language, our Joss,’ said Bea, trying to look severe.

  ‘—and over here,’ he finished, unperturbed, and grinned amiably at Gene to show he meant no offence really.

  ‘I can catch a bus just outside,’ said Theda.

  ‘No, I insist, I’ll take you,’ said Gene. ‘I’m not drunk, honest.’ And neither he was, Theda knew. He had only had a couple of beers all day.

  They said their goodbyes and went outside to a chorus of catcalls and knowing looks from the company. ‘Go to it, Gene!’ the airmen called, and were still whistling as the door banged closed after them.

  There had been a snowfall while they were inside the club and the street was deserted and dark. Gene’s car was still parked outside the chapel and they walked up the street to it, the snow becoming thicker and faster even as they went. He held his greatcoat over her, shielding her from the worst of the storm, his arm around her holding her close against him.

  A man passed holding an umbrella coated with snow. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Nasty night, isn’t it?’ Then he stopped and stared at her. ‘Miss Wearmouth, isn’t it?’ he asked, and she saw it was the mine manager, Tucker Cornish.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Cornish,’ she murmured, keeping her head down, her heart dropping. The events of the day had kept her brooding thoughts of Ken away but seeing his uncle brought them back and it was like a blow. She was aware that he was standing watching as Gene opened the door for her and she got in.

  Gene had to clean the snow from the windscreen before they could go and when the engine started it shattered the deep, muffling silence. But the snow soon stopped and by the time they got to the hospital what was on the ground had turned to slush and the roads were becoming bare.

  ‘At least you’ll be able to get back to base,’ said Theda as she turned to thank Gene for the lift. All she wanted to do was get back to her own room, and to be by herself.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, not very interested because he was leaning towards her and, taking her by surprise, kissing her on the lips.
/>   ‘Please don’t,’ she said, her hand on the door handle.

  ‘Too soon? OK, I can wait. I’ll see you again?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’ Theda was miserably conscious that all day she had allowed him to think his attentions were welcome. ‘I have to go now, or I’ll be in trouble.’

  He got out and opened the car door for her. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Goodnight. Thank you for the ride.’ And she hurried away, not looking back until she got to the main door. Gene was still standing there, by the open car door. When he saw she was looking he waved and swung the door to and climbed back in at his own side. She watched as he did a three-point turn and headed back up the road.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with our Theda,’ Bea confided to Matt. ‘She’s living in a world of her own these days.’

  He looked up from his perusal of the Daily Herald. ‘Aye, she looks a bit pale. I thought she’d got over Alan when she started going out with that doctor. But it’s hard for the young ones nowadays, the men going off an’ all. It’s my belief she’s working too hard. Same as most of us till this war’s finished and done with.’ Matt yawned and scratched his head and stretched his bare feet along the fender towards the blazing fire. ‘I’m tired to death meself. By, that extra half hour on the end of a shift feels like half a day’

  ‘Best get up to bed then,’ said Bea. ‘Let me get on with the baking. I don’t get much help these days. When Theda does come home she spends half her time in the bedroom. I’ve seen the day she would come home and pitch in with the work almost before she’s got her coat off.’