The Nightingale Girls

by Donna Douglas

  The silence held until the last sister had left. Then there was a stampede of nurses towards the doors.

  Dora immediately began collecting up the dishes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lucy Lane said.

  ‘Tidying up – what does it look like?’ Dora scraped one of the plates and added it to the stack.

  The other girls looked at each other and giggled. Except for Katie O’Hara, who whispered kindly, ‘They have maids to clear the tables here.’

  Dora glanced around in confusion. Sure enough, women in overalls were gathering up the mugs and plates on to huge metal trays.

  Embarrassment washed over her. ‘I thought we had to do it ourselves,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Someone clearly isn’t used to having staff,’ she heard Lucy Lane say to another of the girls as they walked off.

  So what if I’m not? Dora wanted to shout after her. There was nothing wrong with getting your hands dirty.

  After supper, they made their way back to the nurses’ home. The timid girl, whose name was Jennifer Bradley, went straight up to her room. Dora was tempted to turn in too, but she forced herself to join the others in the living room. After all, they were going to be together day and night for the next three years, so she should make an effort to make friends. Even if things hadn’t got off to a promising start.

  The living room was big and high-ceilinged, with the kind of ornate plasterwork Dora had only ever seen in a church before, and a bay window shrouded in drab net curtains. Her mum would have those down and soaking in a bucket of Reckitt’s Blue in no time, she thought with a smile.

  The room was filled with a haphazard arrangement of sagging settees and chairs that had seen better days. On either side of the empty fireplace were shelves filled with a random selection of tattered old books and boardgames.

  ‘Ludo?’ Lucy Lane said incredulously, pulling a battered old box off the shelf. ‘Do they think we’re five years old?’

  Dora said nothing. After her embarrassment in the dining room, she didn’t want to admit that she often enjoyed playing boardgames with her sisters.

  There were a few older students already in the living room, listening to the wireless and laughing together in one corner. Dora and the other new students gathered in the opposite corner, where once again, Lucy held court.

  Dora wondered if any of the other girls were as bored listening to her as she was. But they all seemed very impressed, listening with rapt attention as Lane held forth in her clipped voice about everything, including the state of her room.

  ‘It’s just appalling,’ she declared. ‘It’s so cold, and the bed is like something you’d find in a prison. My mother would simply die if she knew about it.’

  Katie O’Hara caught Dora’s gaze across the room and rolled her eyes just a fraction towards the ceiling. Dora guessed she was one of the unfortunate ones sharing Lucy’s prison cell.

  ‘And it’s so small,’ Lucy went on. ‘Three people, sharing a room that tiny? It’s inhuman.’

  Dora thought about the old days in Griffin Street, when she had shared a big double bed with Josie and Bea, but said nothing.

  Then Lucy turned her attention to the other girls in their set. ‘Did you see that girl who was sitting across the table from me? The one with the glasses? What a funny little thing she was. Didn’t say a word all through supper.’

  ‘Probably because she couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’ Dora hadn’t realised she’d spoken aloud until she caught the venomous look Lucy gave her.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said in her clipped voice.

  The other girls were looking at Dora expectantly, so she felt she had to say something. ‘I don’t know what they taught you at that posh school of yours, but where I come from it’s not considered polite to talk about people behind their backs,’ she said bravely.

  Lucy’s simpering smile didn’t meet her eyes. ‘I’m sure I don’t need a lesson in manners.’ Especially not from the likes of you, her glacial look said.

  The other girls giggled, but Dora and Lucy regarded each other across the room. Dora had the bad feeling she’d made a nasty enemy.

  Opposite them, one of the older girls was twiddling the wireless knobs, trying to tune it in.

  ‘Wretched thing hasn’t worked properly since Gordon dropped it,’ she muttered.

  ‘Give up and put a record on instead,’ another suggested. They pulled a box out from behind the sofa and rifled through it while another wound up the gramophone. After much bickering, they finally decided on one. A moment later the crackly sounds of ‘You Are My Lucky Star’ filled the room. The girls all began twirling around the room with imaginary partners, laughing and swooning over Eddy Duchin.

  But the laughter stopped abruptly when Sister Sutton burst in and turned off the gramophone, scratching the needle carelessly across the record.

  ‘Lights out at ten,’ she reminded them briskly, as Sparky rushed around their feet, rounding them up. ‘You should be studying, not being frivolous. You have exams to pass, if you want to be nurses.’

  ‘Who says we want to be nurses any more?’ One of the girls, a slim blonde, made a face at the door as it closed, while another mournfully examined the record for scratches.

  ‘Look at it. It’s ruined. She did that deliberately.’

  One of the older girls caught up with Dora as they made their way up to their rooms.

  ‘I’m Amy Hollins,’ she introduced herself.

  ‘Dora Doyle.’

  ‘I suppose this must all seem very strange to you? I know I was scared at first. But you’ll get used to it.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Just stay on the right side of Sister Sutton, at least until you’ve got to know the ropes a bit better.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Dora smiled back uncertainly. It was a relief to meet a friendly face at last.

  As they headed towards the stairs, Amy said, ‘Who are you sharing with?’

  ‘Helen Tremayne and a girl called Benedict. I haven’t met her yet, but—’ Her voice trailed off as she saw Amy’s expression change. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘You’re sharing a room with Tremayne?’ Amy Hollins gave a hard laugh. ‘Good luck to you, then. You’ll need it.’

  Dora shrugged. ‘She seems all right.’

  ‘You reckon?’ Amy smirked. ‘Maybe you’ll change your mind when you’ve got to know her better.’ She leaned towards Dora confidingly. ‘A word of advice. Don’t trust her an inch.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’ll be watching you. And every word you tell her will get reported back to her mother. You do know Constance Tremayne is on the Board of Trustees, don’t you?’

  ‘The Board of what?’

  ‘Trustees. They’re the ones in charge of the hospital. That’s why Tremayne thinks she’s so much better than the rest of us. She’s always running to her, telling tales about the rest of us. She’ll stab you in the back as soon as look at you. Trust me, I know,’ Amy said. ‘Why do you think none of the other girls speak to her? If I were you, I’d steer clear of her.’

  Dora frowned, trying to take in what she was hearing. Helen was a bit quiet and stand-offish, but she didn’t strike Dora as the untrustworthy type.

  ‘I’ll choose my own mates, thanks very much,’ she said.

  Amy Hollins shrugged. ‘Please yourself. I’m only warning you, that’s all,’ she said huffily. ‘But you really don’t want it to get around to the others that you’re a friend of Helen Tremayne’s or they might start thinking you can’t be trusted either.’

  Back in the room, Helen was sitting up in bed, writing. She looked quite different in her flower-sprigged nightgown, her hair falling in a dark, silky curtain around her face.

  Dora stepped carefully over the tumble of sheets and blankets on the floor. ‘Still no sign of Benedict?’

  ‘She won’t get in until after lights out. She never does.’

  ‘Won’t Sister Sutton mind?’

  ‘Probably. But
she’ll have to catch her first.’

  She went back to her writing. Dora got changed quickly into her nightgown, shivering in the chill of the room. Back in Griffin Street there would be a fire blazing in her bedroom on a cold night like this.

  ‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a letter.’

  ‘To your boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘A friend, then?’

  ‘If you must know, I’m writing to my mother. And I want to finish it before lights out, so if you don’t mind?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Dora watched her scribbling, her hand moving quickly over the page. Amy Hollins’ words came back to her. Was she telling her mother about her new room-mate? Dora wondered.

  She slipped into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. The mattress was hard and lumpy, and the starched sheets felt cold and stiff against her skin. But it wasn’t just the bed that didn’t feel right. She missed brushing her teeth at the kitchen sink with Josie, whispering and laughing as they got ready for bed, with Bea hanging around, straining her ears to hear their secrets. She missed her mother singing Little Alfie to sleep. She even missed Nanna’s snoring.

  The only one she didn’t miss was Alf Doyle. She shivered under the sheets, relieved that for once she didn’t have to sleep with one eye open and a chair wedged up against the door. A few minutes later there was the sound of creaking floorboards from below them, and Sister Sutton’s voice rang out.

  ‘Ten o’clock. Lights out, Nurses.’

  Helen put away her letter and pattered across the room to turn off the lights, then hopped back into bed.

  ‘’Night,’ Dora said.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Within a few moments, soft breathing from the other side of the room told her Helen was fast asleep. Dora lay on her back, staring into the darkness. The silence seemed to close in on her.

  She had never been away from home before, not even for a single night. She felt a sudden, sharp pang of longing to see her mum again.

  But slowly, gradually, the weariness of the day took over. As she fell into a fitful sleep, Alf Doyle crept into her dreams just as he had on so many nights, his bulky body looming over her, big clumsy hands groping for her in the dark . . .

  She opened her eyes, saw the shadowy shape at the end of her bed, and let out a scream.

  Immediately a hand was clamped over her mouth, pinning her against the pillows.

  ‘Shut up, for God’s sake, before you bring everyone running!’ a female voice hissed.

  But there were already footsteps and voices in the corridor as the other girls gathered outside.

  ‘What’s going on?’ someone called out.

  ‘Nothing. Just the new girl having a nightmare.’ Helen’s voice was sleepy in the darkness.

  ‘It sounded like someone was being murdered,’ one of the students grumbled.

  ‘She will be murdered if she wakes me up again,’ muttered another.

  No one inside the room moved as the footsteps shuffled away. Then the weight rolled off Dora’s chest and sat up. In the gloom, she could just about make out a figure at the end of her bed.

  ‘That was a bit close for comfort,’ the other girl said, taking off her beret and fluffing up her hair.

  ‘I don’t know why you can’t just get in on time like everyone else,’ Helen grumbled, turning over and pulling the covers up around her ears.

  ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ The newcomer looked down at Dora. ‘Sorry, did I give you a frightful shock? You mustn’t mind me, I’m always doing it.’ She peeled off a glove and held out her hand. ‘How do you do, by the way? I’m Millie Benedict. We’re going to be sharing a room, won’t that be fun?’

  Chapter Six

  MILLIE BROKE INTO a brisk trot down the empty corridor. She knew she would be in trouble if she were caught running – nurses were allowed to run only in case of fire or haemorrhages – but she would be in worse trouble from Sister Parker if she were late on her first day back in preliminary training.

  The new students were already busy cleaning when she slipped in to the classroom. Every morning after breakfast and before they started lectures, the PTS students had to clean every inch of the classroom and practical area. They damp dusted, high dusted, cleaned out the cupboards, washed bedpans and bottles, and washed and powdered the rubber mackintosh sheets that were used to protect the mattresses on the wards.

  Millie tried to slink off to the sluice before she was seen, but naturally the eagle eye of Sister Parker, the Sister Tutor, sought her out straight away.

  ‘Oh, Benedict, it’s you again.’ Sister Parker may have seemed like a harmless old dear with her white hair, bright blue eyes behind round pebble spectacles and soft Scottish accent. But Millie knew from bitter experience that she had a sting like a scorpion. Her standards were extremely high, and she could reduce a pro to tears over a badly made bed. ‘I do hope your lack of punctuality this morning is not going to be a sign of things to come?’

  ‘No, Sister.’

  She could feel Sister Parker’s eyes on her, searching for faults. Finally, to Millie’s relief, she said, ‘Well, don’t just stand there looking decorative, girl. Those lockers need cleaning out.’

  Do they? Millie thought ten minutes later, as she got down on her hands and knees to scrub out the corners of a locker with Lysol and hot water. No one ever used the lockers in the practice area. It was set out like a ward, with beds, screens, trolleys and all the usual equipment, but no patient ever saw these things. And yet every morning they had to scrub every inch of them.

  Millie knew better than to ask why. Once, at the very beginning of her training, she had had the temerity to pose the question. She wished she hadn’t. Sister Parker had ranted for ten minutes about the importance of a regular hygiene routine – ‘Not just when you feel it warrants it, Benedict’ – and then made her copy out the whole lecture on basic asepsis, word for word. She had also made it very clear that a student nurse’s job was to answer questions, not ask them.

  Millie had never spoken up in class since.

  She sat back on her heels and examined the painful cracks between her fingers. The disinfectant made her chilblains sting so much she wanted to cry.

  At times like this, she wondered why she had ever given up her old life. As the only child of the 7th Earl of Rettingham, she was accustomed to a world of privilege and ease. She mixed in grand society and was waited on by a retinue of faithful servants. Before she came to the Nightingale, she had never had to cook, clean or even dress herself, since she had a lady’s maid to do it for her.

  She smiled to think what Polly, her maid, would make of her mistress now, on her hands and knees, scrubbing out cupboards. Even she had never had to face such drudgery – her most arduous trial was persuading Millie out of her riding clothes and into a dress occasionally.

  ‘Daydreaming again, Benedict?’ Sister Parker was standing behind her.

  ‘No, Sister.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Make sure you get into those corners.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’ Millie picked up her scrubbing brush again.

  And yet, hard as her new life was, she wouldn’t go back to her old one. She loved her father, and Billinghurst, and growing up in the Kent countryside. She would have loved nothing more than to become mistress of the house herself one day. But as she grew older, her grandmother had made it clear that her future lay elsewhere.

  ‘Billinghurst will never be yours,’ she had told Millie bluntly. ‘Under the terms of your great-grandfather’s will, the estate is entailed so that only a male heir can inherit.’

  Which meant that unless Millie married and had a son before her father died, her beloved Billinghurst and the thousands of acres of prime Kent farming land around it would pass to an obscure cousin in Northumberland.

  The Dowager Countess had put all her considerable energies into making certain such a disaster did not befall them. For the last two years, Millie had
been groomed and paraded like a show pony before any number of eligible men, culminating in the biggest horse market of them all – the Season.

  Millie had been looking forward to it. She loved parties and having fun, and hoped to make new friends. But the reality was very different; she had never known a more humiliating and tedious experience. Being chaperoned around endless dinners and dances, changing her clothes three times a day, making small talk with exactly the same people everywhere she went. And always under the critical eye of her grandmother, urging her to be more vivacious and charming to the biggest bores.

  And as for making friends . . . Millie had found most of the other girls to be even more tedious than the men. Far from having fun, they were constantly caught up in petty squabbles and bitter rivalries, all of them as desperate as their ambitious mothers to be seen in the right places and to snare the right husband. It was all too pointless for words.

  Millie had come out of the Season, not only unmarried and with no prospect of an engagement in sight, but with a conviction that she wanted to do something more worthwhile with her life than organising a household of servants and deciding what to wear for dinner.

  Her grandmother was appalled when she first suggested going into nursing.

  ‘And how do you propose to meet a suitable husband in a hospital?’ she had demanded.

  Thankfully, Millie’s doting father had overruled his mother’s objections. Although Millie suspected that both of them were expecting her to give up and come home as soon as she had her first taste of hard work.

  Which was why she was so determined to see it through. If only to prove to her grandmother that becoming a nurse wasn’t just another fad, like her ballet or tennis lessons.

  Once cleaning was over and all the mops, brooms and brushes had been put away, it was time for lectures in the classroom.

  Millie felt like an old hand as she joined the new students who had gathered in the cramped wooden desks, nervously fiddling with pencils and notebooks. She spotted her new room mate at the back of the class and went to sit next to her.

  ‘Hello again.’