When the Lights Come on Again

by Maggie Craig

  He was a bit rumpled. A dark waistcoat swung open over a blue and white striped collarless shirt, unbuttoned at the neck and the cuffs. His dark hair was tousled. Another set of pictures entered Liz’s mind. They had no business being there either.

  ‘Scusi, Papa,’ Mario began. His long fingers went to his wrist, doing up his cuff buttons. Spotting that his father had customers, he switched seamlessly into English. ‘I should have been down to help you earlier, but I fell asleep.’

  ‘They work you too hard in that place,’ grumbled his father. Bustling about with napkins and cutlery, he paused long enough to make a very Italian gesture with his head which took in the hospital, the University and everything else down the road from his café.

  Mario had just registered who the customers were. He came forward, his hand outstretched.

  ‘Cordelia! How nice to see you! And Miss Brown, and Miss MacMillan too, of course.’ He shook hands enthusiastically with all three of them, leaving Liz till last. There was a mischievous gleam in his brown eyes as he lifted her hand - and kept hold of it rather longer than was strictly necessary. ‘Won’t you introduce me to the rest of your friends?’

  ‘Uh...’ said Liz.

  It was Cordelia who did the honours, faultlessly managing to remember the other three girls’ names.

  ‘You’re a medical student?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps we’ll meet on the wards sometime. I certainly hope so.’ He flashed her a smile. Like father, like son.

  Finishing a plate of delicious tomato soup some time later, Liz looked up. Aldo Rossi was in the kitchen doing the cooking, and Mario was attending to the serving of the meal. There didn’t seem to be a Mrs Rossi. Then she recalled that Mario had spoken of his mother in the past tense when he’d been talking to Conor Gallagher at the Red Cross exercise. Under cover of the general hubbub, she asked Cordelia.

  ‘Poor Mr Rossi’s been widowed twice,’ she told her quietly. ‘That’s Mario’s mother up there, next to the bust of Mussolini.’ She indicated a high shelf to the side of the door to the upstairs flat. It was too far away to see properly. All Liz could make out was that it was a formal portrait of a woman. As she studied it, a hand came over her shoulder. It was Mario, lifting her empty soup plate.

  ‘Oh! Thank you!’ Embarrassing somehow, to have him serving her. He had heard Cordelia’s reference to his father’s bust of Il Duce.

  ‘Embarrassing, isn’t it? Especially for a socialist like myself. Although,’ he said reflectively, stacking three soup plates together and transferring the spoons to the top one, ‘I suppose I was a little fascist once. When I went to school in Italy I could sing all the songs with the best of them.’

  ‘Why were you at school in Italy?’ asked Janet with unabashed curiosity.

  ‘Because my mother died when I was ten,’ he said matter-of-factly, smoothly and efficiently swapping soup plates for main courses. ‘My father couldn’t cope with building up the business and bringing my brother and me up as well. My mother’s family were willing to take me in, but not Carlo.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ asked Janet, looking shocked.

  ‘Carlo is Mario’s half-brother,’ Cordelia explained. “The son of Mr Rossi’s first wife.’ Glancing swiftly around to check that Aldo was still safely out of earshot in the kitchen, she went on: ‘All her other children died, didn’t they, Mario?’

  He nodded. ‘One in the influenza epidemic back in ’19, one of diphtheria and one of scarlet fever.’

  ‘Is that why you decided to become a doctor?’ asked another of the girls.

  ‘Probably,’ he said a little absently. His eyes were ranging over the two tables between which the girls had divided themselves. ‘Although I’m planning on becoming a surgeon rather than a physician. Hang on, you haven’t got salt.’ He went behind the counter and was back in a couple of strides. ‘Right, there you are.’

  Six sympathetic female faces were looking expectantly up at him.

  ‘Have I forgotten something else?’ he asked with a puzzled air.

  ‘Only the rest of your life story,’ said Cordelia. ‘D’you mind?’

  ‘Not at all, but don’t let your food get cold. Buon appetito, ladies.’

  ‘Grazie,’ said Cordelia in response, picking up her knife and fork.

  ‘Prego, signorina.’ Mario gave Cordelia a funny little bow and leaned back against the counter, watching them all eat. A large white apron tied around his waist, the sleeves of his striped shirt now rolled up, he looked as though he was enjoying the sight.

  ‘Well, then Carlo’s mother died, and a few years later my father met my mother. Her family disapproved of a good Irish girl marrying a struggling Italian immigrant. So we were sent to my grandparents in Italy when she died, because Carlo and I refused to be separated.’

  Cordelia shook her head. ‘How could your other grandparents have been so hard?’ She thought about it for a minute. ‘Prejudice, I suppose. It’s a terrible thing.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Mario lightly.

  ‘How long did you spend in Italy?’ asked Janet. Liz thought she was being extremely nosy. They all were, tiring questions at him like this, although he didn’t seem to mind. And Liz had to admit, if only to herself, that she wasn’t at all averse to listening to his answers.

  ‘Four years. I came back to Glasgow when I was fourteen.’

  “That must have been a bit of a shock to the system.’

  Mario shrugged. ‘Och, they stopped calling me a dirty wee Tally after I had worked out what my fists were for.’

  The other girls laughed, but Liz had caught the dryness in his tone.

  ‘And once I remembered how to speak English again I was able to give back as good as I got verbally as well.’ He laughed. ‘And tell them jokes, too. Always an excellent form of defence - and a lot less painful on the knuckles.’

  ‘You’re completely bilingual?’

  He struck a pose. ‘Trilingual, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Italian, English and...’ Janet stopped, her brow wrinkling in perplexity.

  ‘Glaswegian,’ supplied Liz. Her reward was an appreciative little smile.

  ‘What about your brother?’ asked another of the VADs.

  ‘He stayed out there, married a local girl.’ Mario straightened up from the casual slouch in which he’d been standing and walked round behind the counter, bending down to look for something underneath it.

  ‘They’ve just had a baby,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘I’ve got a photo here somewhere that Carlo sent me in his last letter.’ He found what he was looking for and came back out to the girls. Extracting the photograph from an envelope, he handed it first of all to Cordelia, who studied it and passed it round. ‘That’s Mariella,’ he said proudly. ‘Isn’t she the most beautiful wee thing you ever saw?’

  Any more of this and they’re all going to swoon, thought Liz, watching Janet and the others going all dewy-eyed over the picture of the baby and this evidence of Mario’s paternal streak.

  ‘You and your father must miss them,’ said Cordelia sympathetically.

  ‘Yes, but they’re going to come over once the baby’s old enough, eventually take over the cafe from Papa. Now, ladies,’ he said briskly. ‘Anyone for dessert?’

  ‘Wow!’ said Janet as the girls walked back across the road. ‘Is he spoken for, Miss Macmtyre? Do you know?’

  ‘You’re spoken for yourself, Janet,’ said Liz mildly.

  ‘I know, but I don’t like to think of a man like that going to waste,’ said Janet with a sly little sideways glance at Liz. Cordelia laughed.

  ‘No, he’s not spoken for.’

  ‘What about the girl he was with at the Empire Exhibition?’ asked Liz.

  ‘Didn’t last long,’ said Cordelia. ‘I don’t think it was very serious.’

  ‘Doesn’t it simply turn your insides to melted butter when he says something in Italian?’ said one of the other girls.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ agreed Janet in a dreamy vo
ice. ‘And see when he came downstairs all sleepy...’

  There was much more in the same vein, but Liz had stopped listening. She didn’t disagree with anything that had been said. Mario Rossi was a very attractive man.

  It wasn’t thoughts of the man which were filling her head at the moment, though. She was thinking about the little boy who’d lost his mother and whose grieving father had been forced to send him off to grandparents he’d probably never met before.

  At least he’d had his brother with him then. It sounded as if they were close. When he’d come back to Glasgow as a fourteen-year-old, he’d had to go through it all on his own. They stopped calling me a dirty wee Tally after I had worked out what my fists were for.

  And then he had stopped his tormentors by making them laugh. A lot less painful on the knuckles, he’d said. She was surprised how much it upset her to think of those beautiful hands - those surgeon’s hands - being scarred and bruised.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pay attention, Liz! Miss Maclntyre just asked you a question.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. What were you saying?’

  Janet and Cordelia gave each other a smile.

  Twenty

  ‘Look lively, MacMillan! You haven’t got all day! And when you’ve finished the floor, the patients’ lavatories need cleaning.’

  On her knees in the corridor which ran between the male and female surgical wards, a galvanized bucket of soapy water in front of her and an increasingly grimy floor cloth in her hand, Liz raised her head. Sister MacLean’s sensibly shod feet were already marching off in the direction of Male Surgical.

  Gone to torture some poor soul in there, no doubt. The deceptively soft-spoken nursing sister ruled the hospital community with a rod of iron. Even the medics and junior doctors were terrified of her: not to mention the VADs under her tutelage.

  Many of them had already gone off to postings in the military and naval hospitals which had been established throughout the country, gearing up to receive the casualties expected when hostilities finally broke out between Britain and Germany.

  That could only be a matter of time. The euphoria which had greeted the settlement at Munich hadn’t lasted long - a matter of weeks. The news of Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - had seen to that

  One Wednesday evening in early November 1938, synagogues and Jewish shops and businesses in every town and city in Germany had been systematically attacked by what Eddie called the bully-boys of the Nazi party. They had beaten up many Jewish people as well. Hundreds of them had died from the terrible injuries they had received.

  It was a chilling indication of the evil growing at the very heart of Europe, the brutal character of the regime which had taken over Germany, poisoning and distorting every aspect of that country’s life.

  Then, in March, the German Army had invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. When Britain and France did nothing in response there was a feeling that the country had been betrayed a second time. When it became obvious that Poland was the next place on Hitler’s shopping list, the two great European democracies took a stand. If Poland were attacked, they would come to her aid. The British government quickly introduced a limited conscription of its young men.

  As one of the VADs wryly put it, it was a bit like knowing that someone was about to slam a door. You knew it was coming and you knew you were going to jump when it did, but boy, did it stretch the nerves waiting for the bang!

  Having completed his apprenticeship at the sewing-machine factory, Janet Brown’s fiancé was called up almost immediately. In the same age group as him, Eddie was granted an extension to allow him to finish his degree.

  With her boyfriend away, Janet decided she would go off and do her bit too, volunteering to become a mobile VAD. Liz tried not to feel envious. Her father had refused point-blank to give his permission for her to do the same.

  With the other volunteers at the Infirmary, including Cordelia Maclntyre, who had chosen to stay at home, Liz found herself becoming a member of the newly formed Civil Nursing Reserve. Everyone expected air attacks to follow almost immediately after the outbreak of war. Fearing high levels of civilian casualties, the non-military hospitals were also preparing for the worst.

  Till that day came, Liz was convinced that Sister MacLean was going out of her way to make sure that the volunteers never got anywhere near real nursing duties. Scrub the floors, clean the toilets, make the tea, do the washing, fetch and carry for the proper nurses.

  ‘We’re skivvies,’ declaimed one of the girls with a dramatic flourish one day - safely out of earshot of Sister MacLean, of course. ‘Nothing but high-class skivvies.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said another cheerfully. ‘Some of us are low-class skivvies. Eh, MacMillan?’

  Liz gritted her teeth and stuck it out. There was no way she was going to complain about her lot at home and let her father or Eddie say I told you so. Only Helen knew how much time she was spending cleaning floors and toilets.

  But as the weeks and months went by, little chinks of light began to appear. One day she was allowed to feel a few pulses and take a few temperatures. On another a staff nurse supervised her as she administered eye drops. The patient, an elderly man in one of the medical wards, joked with her as she did it.

  ‘It’ ll be worth it if it means I can see a pretty little thing like you a bit better, Nurse!’

  Despite what Sister MacLean said, being addressed as Nurse gave Liz a real thrill. She was, quite happily, a ‘floater’, working in whichever part of the Infirmary she was most needed: sometimes on the wards, sometimes in Accident and Emergency or Outpatients.

  She’d been asked to make a commitment to do fourteen hours a week. She spread that over the weekend, plus two short sessions on weekday evenings.

  It was hard going at first. She was putting in a full week’s work at Murray’s as well. However, she was young and fit and doing something she enjoyed - and it had an unlooked-for bonus. The volunteers had been asked to be as flexible as possible. Could they be ready to stay on longer if the hospital was under pressure? Could they come in on a different day if there was an emergency?

  Liz found herself enjoying a freedom she’d never known before. It simply wasn’t always possible to say what time she’d get away from the hospital. That was something her father had to accept. The war might not have started yet, but Liz felt as though she’d already won a battle.

  Still on her knees on the floor of the corridor, Liz thought with grim determination that if she had to be a skivvy, she’d be the best one around. And after this, she had the toilets to clean. Oh, goody.

  ‘Say one for me while you’re down there, MacMillan,’ came an amused drawl.

  It was Adam Buchanan. Like Mario and the other senior medical students, he was beginning to spend more time on the wards, gaining practical experience.

  ‘What is it about this place that makes everyone in it think they’re a comedian?’

  ‘Who stole your scone?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Ming the Merciless,’ Liz retorted.

  Adam’s hazel eyes widened in delight. He and Liz shared a love of Flash Gordon films.

  ‘Ming the Merciless? Sister MacLean, you mean? The Florence Nightingale of the Inner Hebrides?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Liz, finishing her task and throwing the dirty cloth into the bucket with considerable relish. ‘I volunteered to nurse, not to scrub floors,’ she complained automatically. ‘Thanks,’ she said, as he extended a hand to help her up from her knees. Jings, they were sore. She gave them a rub with her free hand, Adam still being in possession of the other.

  ‘And you a Red Clydesider, too,’ he said lightly.

  ‘My hand?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Can I have it back?’

  ‘Oh! Sorry!’ He loosened his grip. Liz lifted her released hand and wiped her damp and sweaty forehead with the back of it.

  ‘What’s me being a Red Clydesider got to do with it?’

 
‘I thought you lefties were all about working together for the common good,’ he said teasingly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re too grand to scrub floors?’

  ‘Certainly not, but I’d like to learn some nursing too.’

  ‘Another complaint to Ming the Merciless then? Or perhaps the heid bummer?’ asked Adam, his mouth quirking with amusement.

  Such was Liz’s irreverent name for the Infirmary’s medical superintendent, a gentleman of immense dignity. Adam had loved another of her descriptions of the hospital hierarchy. She had described the superintendent and matron as God and the Archangel Gabriel. Agreeing with her, Adam had added that it would have been a brave man who would have said which was which.

  ‘Haven’t either of you young people got any work to do?’

  It was Sister MacLean, returning from her errand to Male Surgical.

  ‘We’d better get on with it, Flash,’ muttered Adam under his breath as Sister swept past them. He put on a middle-European accent. ‘I shall prepare zomezing in my laboratory to help us fight ze Martian forces. My God, zey have infiltrated ze hospital! Vun of them is advancing rapidly along ze corridor even as ve speak!’

  The maligned Sister MacLean, who never wasted a moment of any day, was already at the stairwell which marked the mid-point between the male and female wards.

  Liz laughed and sketched Adam a salute. ‘Very well, Dr Zharkov. Let us rendezvous later.’

  She meant at Aldo Rossi’s café. Conveniently near the hospital and the University, it was a favourite meeting place for students. Liz had discovered that Eddie knew it well. She teased him when he started appearing there on Saturday afternoons.

  ‘How kind of you to come and escort me home after my shift, brother dear.’

  In fact, it had proved to be an ideal place for him and Helen to meet after she finished her work on a Saturday, well away from the danger of either set of parents bumping into them. The café was particularly popular with medical students and nurses: patients too, sometimes. A week ago Liz and another girl, searching for a female post-operative patient, had found her in there. It wasn’t the first time such an incident had occurred.