Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  He broke off. ‘Oh, God, I feel sick.’

  In sudden urgency, he leaned towards the kerb and retched quietly.

  ‘You see, Mumsy?’ Jenny cried first thing next morning at breakfast after relating Matthew’s explanation for not apparently leaping headlong into the forces, her faith in his intentions now unshakeable. ‘He isn’t a coward. He simply wants to do things his way.’

  Mrs Ross’s smile was one of sad experience. ‘Doing things his way could be biting off more than he can chew. He’s always been used to the soft life by all accounts. He’ll be in for a shock, I should imagine.’

  ‘So will a lot of men,’ Jenny said firmly. ‘They’ll have to get used to it. I can’t see why he should be any different. He’ll learn to adapt, like most people do when there’s no going back. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a side of Matthew no one ever saw before.’

  ‘Well, we shall see, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, we shall,’ Jenny stated with conviction, rising from the breakfast table to start clearing away, confident in the eventual fulfilment of her conviction. She didn’t have to wait for long.

  Two weeks prior to Christmas, the autumn having been so uneventful it hardly seemed they were having a war at all – people were calling it the phoney war, the funny war, even the bore war, and some evacuees were even returning home – Jenny opened the door to a knock. There he stood, one leather-gloved hand clutching a small suitcase, his overcoat collar turned up against the chill wind, the well-cut suit beneath soon to be exchanged for the rough khaki of a private in the Royal Corps of Signals. His smile was wide, his long narrow eyes bright. He looked as though he had been given a birthday present.

  ‘Thought I’d pop over to say cheerio.’

  Not knowing what to say, all she said was, ‘Come in out of the cold for a second,’ and all but dragged him across the doorstep as her mother came from the living room to wish him well and invite him to come and sit by the fire for a moment.

  ‘It’s warm in there, Matthew. There’s such a draught from the door.’

  ‘No thanks, Mrs Ross,’ he said as Jenny dutifully closed the door a little. ‘Got a train to catch. Just thought I’d say a quick goodbye to Jen … Jenny.’

  Despite the miserable feeling inside her at Matthew’s going, Jenny couldn’t help but smile at the hasty correction before her mother as the woman melted discreetly back into the living room, leaving the pair of them to say their goodbyes. She wondered if her mother suspected the feelings she had for Matthew. If she did, she had never betrayed it.

  Alone with him, she still couldn’t come up with anything wise or clever to say.

  ‘So you’re off then.’ It was the only thing she could find, obvious, inane, feeble, betraying nothing of the desolation churning in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope you get by all right.’

  ‘I hope so too.’

  ‘Nice of you to come over to say goodbye.’

  At this he gave her one of those searching looks that never failed to set her heart racing with useless hope. ‘Well, I would, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … it’s you. My best friend.’

  It wrung her heart. She would always be his best friend, no more than that. That was obvious now.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Matthew,’ was all she could find to say, a catch in her throat that she hadn’t wanted to be there, to her annoyance quite audible.

  On impulse she reached up and touched his smooth cheek, then with the same spontaneity, leaned forward and planted a kiss where her hand had momentarily touched. The flesh felt cold from the biting wind outside but the spicy fragrance of his skin warmly filled her nostrils. She stood back, alarmed by her own temerity. For fear of ridicule she had never before dared kiss him. What would he think now?

  ‘Take care of yourself, won’t you?’ she heard herself say.

  His smile was not at all taunting. ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  Some of her composure returned. ‘I’m glad you got your own way in the end.’

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ he laughed, the laugh light and confident in a way she’d never heard before; before it had always been touched by a tinge of defiance. ‘It’s up to me now to prove myself right. Anyway, if I don’t swim, I can only sink.’

  The old defiance coming back, the caustic quip.

  ‘Don’t say that.’ She experienced a shudder of sudden apprehension, a premonition, dread, so light that it went as quickly as it had come. His was a charmed life, bright with promise. He’d be all right. People like him always were. He had to be.

  The easy expression had faded to be replaced by a thoughtful, almost affectionate regard. ‘I’d like to thank you, Jenny, for making up my mind for me – the night we had that dinner together.’

  Her face grew hot. ‘I did nothing …’

  ‘You listened. It was enough.’

  She was startled by his arm coming around her waist, pulling her gently towards him; then he kissed her full on the mouth. It was a long lingering kiss, revealing the passionate core of him that she had always imagined yet thought she would never be invited to probe. Even now she knew it came purely from regret at leaving a dear friend, or perhaps from his trepidation at the unknown into which he was about to step, but no more than that.

  Curiously dizzy, she felt herself put gently from him. When she spoke she was annoyed to find that her voice shook. ‘Lots of luck, Matthew.’

  ‘You too, Jenny. I’ll write, let you know where I am. Although God knows where I … where any of us will end up. But things will never be the same again.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she replied lamely, her shaken nerves calming at last.

  For a moment he looked searchingly at her. Then he held out his hand, unaware of anything behind her candid grey-green eyes but what she knew she dared convey – a friendly regret of his going. Yet, oh, how she wished it possible to show him how she truly felt as she took the offered hand, the cool slim fingers closing over hers in a firm and steady grip that had the essence of real friendship in it. How she wished it was love rather than friendship, but she wasn’t prepared to fool herself.

  ‘I don’t know when our paths will cross again,’ he said, his tone low and full, ‘if they ever do. But whatever happens, Jenny, I want you to know that you’ll always be one of my nicer memories.’

  ‘Perhaps we could keep in touch,’ she said quickly and he smiled, almost gratefully.

  ‘Perhaps we will. I’ll try and write to you, Jenny. Look after yourself.’

  Then he was gone, out of the door and down the steps to the street, turning towards Cambridge Heath Road and the nearest bus stop, moving on swiftly with that fast springy step of his.

  The fierce wind battered at his trilby on which one hand was keeping a tight hold. Perhaps that was why he didn’t turn and wave, she thought as she stood watching him going out of her life.

  Whether his own family had stood at their door to see him go on his way, she had no idea. Her eyes had become too misted to see that far, which she blamed on tears caused by the bitter wind. She couldn’t recall when she had cried last, apart from when her father had died, of course. She wasn’t really crying now, except that the wind touched a little colder against a small part of her cheek where a rivulet had begun to trickle down as finally she turned and came back into the house.

  Chapter 4

  A few weeks later, as promised, came a letter from Matthew, from Catterick in Yorkshire, full of his traumatic introduction to the regimental sergeant major, to his platoon sergeant, to square bashing and to evil food and hard beds.

  Slowly getting to be a proper soldier – in hot water all the time. Uniform fits where it touches. The chaps in my hut took the mickey out of my accent at first. I never knew I had one. Said I sounded a bloody snob (their words) and damned arrogant, which I didn’t like that much. They started to call me College Boy, but after I had a set-to with one of them and duffed him up, and got seven
days C.B. – not College Boy, but Confined to Barracks, they have started calling me Matt and sometimes Wardy after my surname because there’s another Matthew in the platoon. So I suppose being called that must stand for something. They’re not a bad bunch once you get to know them. I still can’t get used to being bawled at …

  There were two pages of cheerful grousing. He seemed quite genuinely happy, a vastly different man to the one who had said goodbye to her that day. If anything, he seemed happier than he had been in his carefree days before war had broken out, despite the restrictions of army life. Jenny could only think poetically of a bird released.

  He had concluded his letter by writing that he was off down the local with a few mates for a couple of jars.

  Jenny wrote back, heartened by his writing to her, but he did not reply. In his usual careless fashion he had written as promised and had already forgotten her. She could imagine him skipping through her reply, thinking he’d answer it when he had the time, but with his thoughts on other things he had probably put it away and lost track of it, his promise pushed further back into the corner of his mind, eventually to die altogether.

  Taking what struck her as an obvious hint, she didn’t write again, so that the only news she gleaned of him was what filtered through from his mother to others and thence now and again to her mother.

  The only one left at home out of the old crowd she’d once gone about with, Jenny began to experience a very real dread of being tied to her home forever, staying in night after night after work, keeping her mother company through the long dreary winter days stretching ahead.

  Her whole life had become dreary. Coming home on slow buses in the blue glow that enabled the conductor to see the coins he was given, masked headlamps just penetrating a stygian winter evening although street lamps gave out a tiny downward pinprick of light with the slight relaxing of blackout regulations now that no air raids seemed forthcoming, all made for a miserable existence. There was no point her going out for an evening. The West End was no longer lit up like a Christmas tree. And although cinemas, theatres, dance halls and restaurants had all reopened, football stadiums following suit, what fun could be had going anywhere alone?

  Even Matthew’s sister had gone away to stay with relatives in Surrey. True, Jenny was again helping run the Girl Guides, the vicar of St John’s having restarted all its groups, but it wasn’t the same any more. There now seemed just her and Mumsy, the two of them even spending their Christmas alone.

  She nurtured wild thoughts of joining one of the women’s services – anything to escape this purposeless role of companion to a parent who was prone to seeing herself as already approaching old age. Sympathise with her as she did, Jenny longed for something to give her life meaning, to be somewhere where she didn’t have to make understanding noises or give her mother comforting pats on the hand. It was unkind to think like that but she couldn’t help it. Everyone was off somewhere. She alone was stuck at home. But when it came down to brass tacks, how could she be so cruel as to desert Mumsy who’d always had a need to lean on her as she had leaned on her husband? Yet were circumstances to call on her to stand on her own two feet Mumsy might surprise everyone by coping admirably, as people often do when forced to battle on alone.

  She was slowly coming to know the dilemma that had faced Matthew, but it was her mother who solved her problem, quite by chance.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to work in the City,’ she said towards the end of May. ‘What if they do start bombing London?’

  The papers had reported an air raid on industrial Middlesborough and earlier that month bombs had been dropped near Canterbury, without casualties, but too near for comfort; she was alarmed for her daughter’s safety.

  ‘Perhaps you could find yourself something local, away from the City.’

  Something local? And be even more at her mother’s beck and call? Again came that desire to escape.

  ‘I really should be thinking of doing something towards helping the war effort,’ she ventured, immediately crushed by the alarm on her mother’s face.

  ‘You mean war work? Oh, no, dear, you couldn’t go working in a factory. Not a nicely brought up young girl like you.’

  ‘Lots of nicely brought up young girls are doing heavy, dirty jobs. I don’t see why I should be any different.’

  She thought again of Matthew, her heart going out to him for that time of his dilemma. But again it was her mother, mind working on possible ways to have her daughter closer to home, who came to the rescue.

  ‘I was wondering, dear. Perhaps you’re right about helping with the war effort. What if you applied for a job in some local hospital? They are crying out for help. There’s the chest hospital just the other side of the park. All in the open air. You could go along there and make enquiries.’

  With mixed feelings, just to appease her mother, Jenny went along to ‘make enquiries’. It was even nearer home but at least she’d be meeting people, new people, instead of the same old faces in the same old stuffy Leadenhall Street office. It would be nice to get out of it and into someone else’s world for a while. She had little idea how one went about applying for jobs in hospitals but assumed it to be much the same as anywhere else. The middle-aged, prim-faced woman who had probably never seen any other application to her shiny well-scrubbed cheeks than soap, looked up at Jenny from her desk, her gaze full of disparagement.

  ‘I am afraid there are no places at the moment for untrained girls. If you care to register in the proper manner you can go to a training hospital if you seriously wish to become a nurse.’

  She hadn’t for a second thought of becoming a nurse. All she’d come for was a job nearer home. The woman seemed to glare at her.

  ‘If you are looking for romance and excitement, young lady, you will be sadly disillusioned. This is a demanding profession, physically, mentally, suited only for the most dedicated women and entailing sheer hard slog and long hours for precious little reward other than the satisfaction of seeing a patient recover under quiet, efficient, selfless nursing.’

  ‘That’s all the reward one needs,’ Jenny said without thinking, carried along on the woman’s zeal. She saw the thin lips compress at her audacity in adding her opinion.

  ‘All too often it is not. After giving oneself until one is drained utterly, and then to be required to do extra duty, one begins to wonder. Such doubts can often form in the mind of a nurse pushed beyond endurance when she grows weary. It is those who find that little extra strength to push aside such doubts who make true nurses. I regret they are all too few.’

  Rather than risk another comment that would most certainly be ripe for criticism by the look of this woman, Jenny held her tongue, not sure if she actually wanted all this. Yet she felt herself already being absorbed, the idea of hard unrewarding work an answer, even preferable to the boring, barren futility that had lately become her life.

  Refusing to give herself time to think, she filled in the application form under the stern, sceptical eye of her interviewer, if only to show her that she wasn’t afraid of hard work.

  It was not long after, wondering just what she had got herself into, that she was bidding goodbye to a tearful parent to commence training at a hospital in the heart of Hampshire. She had escaped.

  ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this.’

  The fair-haired girl’s plaintive sigh reached Jenny from the other side of the bed as they removed the soiled bottom sheet from underneath an incontinent elderly patient.

  Trying to ignore the smell wafting up from the stained sheet, Jenny smiled across at her fellow student nurse. ‘We were told to expect this, you know.’

  ‘One thing bein’ told what to expect, another ’aving it right up your nose. I think I’d sooner ’ave joined the WAACs than this.’

  ‘What, with bombs dropping all over the place around London?’ The girl was a Londoner and had been glad to be here in Hampshire. ‘Sooner or later London will become a target and you could be stuck with a se
archlight unit. That’s what they go for first, you know, searchlights. I would sooner be here and safe, with all the slops and bedpans, for all the hard work we have to do.’

  All too soon after being sent to Hampshire, Jenny had discovered what real mental exhaustion was as she strove to absorb what the demonstrators and lecturers were telling her. Her ankles had ached from endless bed-making, scrubbing miles of floors, interminable polishing of bed springs and scouring what seemed like millions of metal bedpans until they shone again after being emptied down the sluice.

  But for all the headaches: trying to cram six months’ training into six weeks, a wartime necessity; the drudgery, being saddled with the distasteful chores second-year nurses passed on to student nurses; all the cleaning up of incontinent patients, emptying slops and bedpans, mopping soiled floors, she had discovered that caring for those unable to care for themselves had its rewards. She really did feel she was doing something worthwhile at last. Often Jenny could hardly believe it was really she who now trod the wards in the uniform of a nurse – not that the uniform enhanced her appearance.

  In lisle stockings and flat leather lace-ups, a white apron so starched that it practically stood up by itself, and indeed stood out from the blue striped dress like a bell-tent, she spent hours before a mirror battling with the piece of snow-white material that would eventually form her cap – at least once she had mastered the technique of folding it correctly so that the pinched pleats lay flat enough not to flap about over the crown of her head like some wayward seagull.

  Like a true nurse she worked hard to aspire to the art of moving swiftly yet quietly, but with all that quantity of starch, quietly was virtually an impossibility. Her starched uniform heralded her approach with all the subtlety of an oncoming express train.

  There was scant opportunity for going home. In this she felt a little guilty. Poor Mumsy, all alone because she had been selfish enough to want to get away. Well she had got away, and she would have gone home, but a train packed to suffocation with servicemen and women could take three times as long as in peacetime, incessantly stopping and starting and then crawling along between times. Too much of a chunk out of one’s day off. Such a thing as a whole weekend off hardly existed. And after working twelve hours at a stretch, she was only too glad to ‘live in’, falling into bed utterly exhausted to sleep away her day off.