Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  She was back within seconds with a shopping bag holding a towel, flannel and soap, hairbrush, a change of nightie, and over her arm, Susan’s coat and a scarf, and a pair of shoes dangling from her fingers.

  ‘Can yer put yer coat and shoes on yerself?’ she queried anxiously. ‘I’ve got ter get meself dressed. D’yer think yer can walk? We’ve got ter get yer to the ’orspital. It’s only half a mile darn the Mile End. Yer’ve only just started. Yer’ll be able to make it if we walk slow.’ To which Susan let out another gasp at a fresh small onslaught of pain.

  Lights were on all over the house; the boys wandered out of their bedroom asking, ‘What the ’eck’s up?’ before being told by Emma to go back to bed – it wasn’t none of their business.

  There came a loud hammering and knocking on the street door, a harsh voice shouted: ‘What th’ell are you lot up ter? Yer showin’ a bloody great light – like a bloody searchlight art ’ere.’

  ‘Oh, Gawd, the blackout!’ Emma rushed in panic to the window to find one corner of the blackout frame leaning inward towards the room, not having been put up properly. Only then did she run to the door, flicking off lights as she went, leaving Susan in pitch-darkness.

  Her voice was breathless at the street door. ‘Gawd, I’m sorry. We’ve got an emergency ’ere. Me lodger, she’s only young, ’er ’usband’s overseas, an’ she’s just started ’er labour pains. I’ve got ter get ’er to the ’orspital.’

  ‘Can’t yer get an ambulance?’

  ‘It’s only ’alf a mile ter the London.’

  ‘Yer can’t ask ’er ter walk ’alf a mile, not in labour.’

  In pitch-dark, Susan felt the pain returning. In panic she cried out. From the door, the voices grew more animated. ‘Can’t she ’ave it ’ere, in the ’ouse, save walking all that way in ’er condition at one in the mornin’?’

  ‘It’s ’er first. She ought ter be in ’orspital. I told ’er ’usband’s people I’d look after ’er. I can’t be responsible for anyfink goin’ wrong.’

  ‘Well, she can’t walk. Tell yer what. I’ve got a bike. We could put ’er on that and wheel ’er. Save ’er walkin’. It’s got a wide saddle. And paddin’ as well. I got piles an’ I ’ave ter ’ave a wide saddle wiv a lot of paddin’ on it.’

  Sitting in the dark listening, Susan wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry as the present bout of pain began to fade a little.

  The baby, a girl, arrived the next day around three in the afternoon. ‘Quick for the first,’ a nurse told her, but it had seemed like eternity to her as she writhed in terror and pain, a young mother not knowing what was expected of her, what to expect. Throughout she had been alternately encouraged and scolded, assured that it wouldn’t be long now, that she was doing wonderfully, then in the next breath upbraided for making a fuss, getting into a needless panic, yelling when there was no need, not co-operating. And when during easier moments she wept for Matthew, she was told she must be brave for him, that he, a stalwart fighting for his country, wouldn’t want to see her less brave, breaking down like this.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell them he’d been reported missing. Though his family hung on to the hope of his having been captured, she knew deep inside her that he was dead, that she’d never see him again and would have to bring up his child alone.

  Chapter 19

  Jenny stood by Susan’s bedside. Susan’s in-laws had just left and her parents, who had further to come, had yet to see her.

  Jenny herself had heard of the birth of Susan’s baby by chance, being told at teatime by one of the nurses, creased up with laughter, of a woman in labour having arrived at maternity around one thirty in the morning on a bike. ‘What people don’t do in wartime,’ the nurse had giggled over her bread and jam sandwich.

  ‘You mean she rode herself here on a bike?’ Jenny had joined in the general laughter. Odd things happened in hospitals, but that one had taken the biscuit.

  ‘Well, not exactly rode herself. An air-raid warden was pushing her. And her landlady apparently kept helping her off every time she got one of her pains. They had the saddle all padded.’ This last brought a fresh gale of laughter.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Jenny had said over the laughter. ‘Where were her parents then?’

  ‘She said they lived in Birmingham. She’d walked out on her in-laws or something and lives about half a mile from here. Seems it was easier to get here on a bike than having to walk. I ask you! Can you just see it – some old air-raid warden wheeling a pregnant woman on a bike all the way to the hospital, her hopping on and off every so often? It must’ve looked a sight. Lucky for her it wasn’t midday. Honestly, some people!’

  But Jenny had no longer been laughing. Now she stood looking down at the girl’s face, pale from the hard work of bringing a baby into the world, looking wan and down in the mouth when she should have been glowing with pride at her achievement.

  ‘Have you seen the baby, Susan?’ she asked for something to say after having enquired how she was, a question which had been met by a tear being squeezed from between the closed eyelids.

  ‘What did you think of her?’ she pressed as Susan merely nodded without speaking.

  ‘I’m too worn out to think anything. Except that Matthew’s not here and I’m all on my own. I’ll never see him again, and no one cares.’

  ‘Of course they care. His parents care. And your family – they care.’

  And Matthew, he’d be over the moon with joy and pride if he was here to know about his baby daughter. But there was no way he could know, no way he could be told, could be contacted. Her mother had relayed what little news she happened to glean from his parents, which was hardly anything. And having for a while lost the run of Susan, all she knew of Matthew was of the ongoing but vain efforts of the Red Cross still to trace him, one way or the other. Wonderful people, but as far as she knew they’d hit a complete blank.

  Gazing down at the despairing Susan, Jenny bit her lip, refusing to believe Matthew could be dead. Somewhere he had to be alive. She clung to that hope with all her heart, and inside that heart those feelings she had always had for him beat as strongly as ever.

  She had tried to put it away from her, had assumed she had at last conquered it when she had written to Ronald Whittaker, finally confronting the stupidity in letting such a chance go of getting Matthew out of her system once and for all by marrying Ronald as he’d once asked. His parents had replied for him, saying they were sending her letter on to him, that against their wishes he hadn’t gone into practice with his father but instead had joined the Army Medical Corps. Slightly dismayed, she had got in touch with him at the address they’d given. Ronald’s reply had been kind and friendly but said that he had met a girl to whom he’d be getting engaged on his next leave; that he was sorry Jenny hadn’t written earlier because they’d got on well together but it wouldn’t be right for him to drop the girl he now loved for the one he had thought at the time he loved. He’d always remember her with affection and hoped that it wouldn’t be too long before she too found herself someone to settle down with. She had felt hurt, angry with herself and very aware that her only avenue of escape from the love inside her for Matthew had been cut off.

  It made her furious that Susan could lie here lamenting her lot and assuming her husband dead when she should at least be fighting to fill herself with optimism that he would eventually come back to her. She didn’t even seem interested in her baby as a mother would normally be.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ Jenny asked and received an apathetic shrug.

  ‘I don’t really know. I’ve not really thought about it.’

  ‘Then don’t you think you should? What do Matthew’s parents say?’

  ‘They suggested a few names.’

  ‘And?’

  Another shrug. ‘I can’t seem to like any of them. I got confused and said I’d think about it. Mrs Ward said don’t take too long about it.’

  ‘You’ll have to come up with somet
hing.’ Jenny herself thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘How about Mattie?’

  ‘Mattie?’

  Yes, it was a lame sort of name and sounded even more so on Susan’s amazed lips. ‘It’s short for Matilda.’ Matthew had always loved shortening names. ‘… Hi there, Jenny …’

  Jenny swallowed back the sentimental restriction of her throat. ‘Matilda is the feminine of Matthew. It would remind you of him, and … when he comes home.’ He would come home. ‘When he comes home he’ll know you were thinking of him. Make it Mattie, Susan. It sounds better.’

  She spoke positively. Susan was by nature a malleable person and she was at her most malleable now. ‘Well, I hadn’t got any name ready for her. I suppose it’s as good as any.’

  She couldn’t care less, Jenny thought angrily, but she smiled. ‘I had better go or I’ll get into trouble,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m supposed to be on duty. Another nurse is covering for me, so I could only have a few minutes. I’m glad you’re okay and I’m glad the baby, Mattie, is okay. She’ll be something for you to cling to until Matthew comes home.’

  Giving Susan no opportunity to argue with that, she turned smartly on her heel and with a quick wave went back to work.

  Sitting by the lounge window for a better light by which to see her knitting pattern, Lilian Ward glanced out at the dull November weather, her fingers still busy with the clicking needles. She had no real need to look at them; the pattern itself had become partially imprinted on her brain so often had she used it to knit the exquisite little dresses for Matilda. The weather was getting colder. Wool was hard to come by, so second-hand woollen garments were usually found in jumble sales, unravelled and re-knitted, but the child needed some warm clothing. Left to Susan, she’d have nothing warm to wear. It seemed to Lilian the mother had no interest whatsoever in Matilda. She insisted the child’s name be spoken in full. None of this silly Mattie business. But in truth the shortened name reminded her too much of Matthew. Where was he?

  Nothing, absolutely nothing. The Red Cross were even mentioning the dread word. But she wouldn’t have it that Matthew was dead. He was somewhere. He had to be. Why couldn’t they find him? Not trying, too many other missing servicemen to trace. But her son was as important as they. Meanwhile this war was dragging on. So what if on the fourth of this month came the long-awaited tidings that German forces were at last in full retreat in Egypt, the wireless announcer hardly hiding his excitement? So what if the Allies had landed in Algeria? So what if the church bells had rung across the whole country to mark Montgomery’s victory? One or two swallows didn’t make a summer. Meanwhile Matthew continued to be missing. His daughter was going to grow up not knowing him. Susan, his wife, was gadding about as though she hadn’t a care in the world, leaving Matilda in the dubious if willing care of her landlady, just as if her husband, missing or dead, meant nothing to her. No sighing after him or, Lilian was certain, tears, except, when she and Leonard went to see her – then she’d weep buckets. Lilian’s needles clicked angrily in the dull November daylight.

  Crumpling the brief letter into a ball, Susan threw it across the kitchen.

  ‘She never gives up, does she? Says she’s got another cardigan for Mattie. I don’t want her making clothes for my child. Anyone’d think I can’t dress her myself. She looks all right, don’t she, in what I put her in?’

  Carving hunks of bread for when the boys trooped in from school for their midday break in half an hour, Emma looked up from the kitchen table. ‘She means well, Sue. She knitted you both lovely Christmas presents.’

  ‘Means well? She always means well. It’s the way she goes about meaning well that gets my goat. Treating me as though I’ve not got a clue on how to bring up a baby. I know she doesn’t approve of me going out every once in a while. That’s all it is, once in a while. I’m not gadding about with soldiers. I just need a break now and then.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Emma continued spreading the doorsteps with the thinnest scrape of margarine, her family’s rations dwindling towards the end of this week’s allowance. She put a small smear of plum jam on them and pressed the slices together, the resulting sandwiches almost too wide for any child’s mouth.

  ‘The way she talks,’ Susan went on, ‘you’d think I was on the streets. I like going dancing with Edie. And we know how to behave ourselves.’

  In September, for a bit of extra money, she’d started a part-time job in the Whitechapel High Street near Aldgate East station in the stockroom of a wholesalers of men’s underwear and hosiery, Fishman & Sob. The owner’s son had been called up. Edie Barrows, who worked with her, also had a husband in the forces, and like herself needed to get out now and again and see a bit of life rather than be stuck at home – it was easier for her, having no children. There was no harm in it, the way Mrs Ward intimated.

  ‘Neither of us are going to go off the rails, both married. We just need a break now and again, that’s all,’ Susan repeated.

  ‘’Course yer do,’ Emma murmured. ‘Do yer want jam or a bit of yer cheese ration in this sandwich?’

  ‘Jam’ll do.’

  She began mixing Mattie’s bottle with dried baby milk and a tiny drop of cod-liver oil. Her own milk had dried up earlier. Susan wasn’t sorry. Though making bottles was a chore, she wasn’t confined to the house or to rushing back home having to breastfeed at inconvenient hours.

  She set the bottle in a saucepan of cold water to cool for when Mattie woke up. ‘I think I do all right with Mattie’s clothes. That exchange shop’s a real godsend.’

  In the Mile End Road near the old Empire Music Hall, a small derelict shop had been set up with a system whereby mothers could barter clothing their toddlers had outgrown for larger clothes. It saved on clothing coupons and it was cheap. Mattie looked a treat in some of the baby clothes Susan had managed to find.

  ‘Trouble is, she inspects everything I buy for Mattie, as if I’m putting her into something lice-infested. The way she purses her lips if Mattie looks the least bit messy! You can’t keep babies clean all the time. She’s bound to sick up a bit of food on her clothes, and she always manages to come in when Mattie’s messy, never when she’s clean. I’m sure she times it.’

  Emma laughed and glanced at the battered alarm clock on one of the kitchen shelves. Twelve thirty. The boys’d be home any minute, all three of them bursting into the house as ravenous as if they hadn’t eaten for a week.

  ‘Wait till she starts feeding ’erself, then yer’ll know what messy is.’

  When the post fell lightly through the letter box, Lilian was neatly folding the finished baby dress, ready to take with her tomorrow morning. It looked pretty; the pink and white wool she’d picked up from the WI skeined and washed, almost new. Susan should be pleased, though Lilian could bet she wouldn’t show it if she could help, merely look askance at it as though she, Lilian, were interfering. How could she be interfering, the child’s own grandmother? More than them up in Birmingham ever bothered themselves – she allowed herself that little grammatical lapse in referring to Susan’s people who as far as she knew hardly ever came down to see their daughter, much less sent her presents of clothing. Out of sight out of mind. They probably wrote now and again and thought that good enough.

  At the sound of the post, she left the dress on the round occasional table in the bay window and hurried into the hall to see what had arrived. Always in the back of her mind was that one day the post would contain a letter from the Red Cross or some other authority to say her son had been traced. At the same time there lingered that fear of being informed of his confirmed death, so that she never approached the envelopes lying in the wire cage attached below the letter box without pausing, to carry on more slowly in trepidation at what might be there.

  This procedure she followed now. Pray God there was no bad news, bills excluded of course. But what was bad news and what was good if it concerned Matthew? Was missing good news? But surely better than that dread which invariably throbbed in her mi
nd. Whatever it was, it had to be faced.

  There were several letters, most of them bills and invoices concerning Leonard’s business, two private letters, both face down. What would they contain? One had an official look to it. It was that one which she swept up almost in a single movement, knowing even before she turned it over that it bore the small red cross on it.

  Feverishly she ripped open the envelope. Her heart thumping heavily, she pulled out the single sheet of limp recycled note-paper and unfolded it swiftly, hardly daring to breathe, hardly daring to let her eyes scan what it had to say. It took only the first two lines to send a sensation of debility spreading through her limbs so that she had to clutch at the newel post to keep her from falling. The waiting was at an end. At last they knew.

  Tears she had kept unshed all this time started to flow and she didn’t try to prevent them as she sank down on the stairs and, all alone in the house, gave herself up to weeping, the letter crumpled in her hand. Slowly, though, she gathered her thoughts. She must let Leonard know. Her hand automatically reached for the telephone on the hall stand, she dialled the operator, gave her the number of Leonard’s shop and waited. It seemed to take forever before his receiver was lifted, but she felt too drained to think in the interval. Her brain seemed quite dead. She actually gave a small start as Leonard’s voice sounded close to her ear.

  ‘Hello? Ward’s Electrical Shop.’

  ‘Leonard! We’ve heard. We’ve heard from the International Red Cross – a letter – this morning. Leonard – they’ve found him. He’s a prisoner of war. That’s all they know. But, Leonard, he’s alive. Our Matthew’s alive.’

  There was a second or two’s silence, then his voice came, trembling, just as hers had. ‘I’m coming home. I’m closing up and coming home.’

  ‘But your customers. You can’t …’ It sounded quite inane. News of Matthew traced and she was worrying about customers?

  ‘Sod the customers!’ He never swore in her hearing. She wouldn’t have it. But today she forgave him.