by Annie Groves
They got into the office fairly easily. Of course they knew they’d be for the high jump if they got caught, but it was worth the risk for a pal. While Bunny kept watch, Bill riffled the patients’ notes and then bingo, he’d found something.
Sally Burndell was discharged later that day. Her parents came to take her home and Connie made a point of asking if she could visit her. She went in her next off duty, taking a couple of apples with her. Sally was in her bedroom and her mum had lit a fire in the grate. She had dark circles under her eyes and as Connie came into the room, she pulled herself into a sitting position. Connie helped her put a bed jacket around her shoulders and they made small talk until finally Connie had to say something.
‘Why did you do it, Sally?’
‘I told you,’ said Sally. ‘It really was an accident this time.’
‘I didn’t even know about the last time,’ cried Connie.
Sally’s eyes filled immediately. Connie leaned forward and squeezed her hands. ‘Tell me. You can trust me. I can keep a confidence.’
‘In the end, they got me down,’ she said brokenly.
‘What got you down? I don’t understand.’
‘The letters,’ said Sally. She leaned over and, opening a drawer in the dresser beside the bed, she took out a couple of envelopes. ‘Mum burned the others,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t know I’ve still got these.’
Connie opened one already torn envelope. ‘Some go with one man but a whore like you would entertain a football team. What will your boyfriend say?’ The other contained a picture of a delicious looking apple tart cut from a magazine. Someone had scribbled, ‘I’m still watching you, tart’ across the top.
‘This is awful,’ said Connie. ‘Have you told the police?’
Sally shook her head. ‘At first I thought it was someone’s idea of a sick joke,’ she said, ‘but now I think whoever sent these has been writing to my college and to Terry. He stopped answering my letters ages ago. I didn’t do anything wrong, Connie.’
‘I know,’ Connie soothed. ‘You must show this to the police.’
‘I can’t,’ said Sally. ‘If I do, they’ll think I intended to kill myself and I’ll end up in prison. I know I was being dramatic but you see I tried to hang myself about a year ago.’
Connie was appalled. ‘Oh, Sally …’
‘I know,’ Sally said dejectedly. ‘I just felt so miserable. I made a complete mess of it anyway. I tried to do it on the clothes pulley but of course as soon as my whole weight was on it, the screws came away from the ceiling. I knocked myself silly and then Mum found me.’
‘Thank God she did,’ Connie gasped.
There was a footfall outside the door. Sally said ‘Shh,’ and quickly shoved the letters under the eiderdown as Mrs Burndell brought them some tea.
‘I’ve just been telling Sally that as soon as she’s better,’ Connie said brightly, ‘we’ll be off to the Assembly Hall dance again.’
‘That’ll be nice, dear,’ said Mrs Burndell. ‘It’ll do her good to get out and about again.’
Kez decided to move her pitch. She had been selling holly wreaths by the market cross in the middle of Chichester. Made from Caen stone, the octagon structure was built four hundred years before at the junction of four roads and in plain sight of the cathedral. It was still doing what it was intended for, namely to provide shelter for poorer people as they sold their wares. Had she bothered to read the inscription above her head, which thanks to Connie’s help she was now well able to do, Kez would have seen that it was put up by Edward Story 1477–1503, who was at one time bishop of Chichester.
Kez and her family had been in the area for about a fortnight. They’d camped near Slinden where she had trudged through the woods to find holly and mistletoe. The holly she’d made into wreaths and the mistletoe into bunches. They had sold like hot cakes and she only had six wreaths left but by now the crowds of Christmas shoppers were beginning to thin out. Simeon wouldn’t be bringing the trailer back to pick her up until six so there was still time to try and sell them.
By now, people were heading back towards the station so Kez gambled that if she sat by the entrance, a few might buy a last minute holly wreath once they were sure they still had plenty of time to catch the train. She had just put the few she had left in her basket, when someone in a tearing hurry bumped into her and everything fell back onto the cobbles. The person who had done it was full of apologies but didn’t stop to help. One wreath went into the road and a passing car ran over it. When she picked it up, it wasn’t too badly damaged so Kez sat on the stone bench inside the cross to repair it.
A man and woman were arguing behind a pillar on the other side of the building. She could see them but it was obvious they didn’t know she was there.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ the man said angrily. He began tapping his cigarette on its case and Kez froze. No, it couldn’t be … could it?
‘Oh, I think it was,’ the woman snapped. ‘Even on our wedding day, you couldn’t take your filthy eyes off her.’ She threw back her head and laughed sardonically. ‘Dear God in heaven, what a fool I’ve been.’
‘Eleanor,’ the man said, trying to placate her. He put the case in his pocket and put out his hand.
‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried. ‘Admit it. You only wanted me to get your hands on my Rosemary, didn’t you?’
‘How can you even think such a thing?’
‘That’s what you were doing the day I came home early, wasn’t it?’ the woman insisted.
Kez stood to leave. Her stomach churned and she felt sick.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ The man was getting annoyed.
‘They tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen,’ the woman snarled. ‘Well, you won’t get away with this, Stan. I’m going to the police.’
‘No one will believe you,’ he said coldly and behind them Kez was struggling to breathe normally. Her heart was pounding and she was shaking.
She shoved the repaired wreath into her basket and stepped away. There was a bus coming so she was forced to wait until it passed. Kez didn’t intend to look back but her eye was drawn to him. And that’s when she saw what happened next. Stan made what looked like a grab at the woman. A grab and then a push. The woman flung her arms into the air and fell into the road. The next few seconds were horrific. First a squeal of brakes and then a sickening thud. Kez was rooted to the spot, her heart pounding, her mouth dry and gaping. People came running from all directions but from where she stood, Kez could already see that it was far too late.
The bus driver climbed ashen-faced out of his cab. ‘What did she do that for? She jumped right out in front of me. I didn’t stand a chance. Is she all right?’
‘She’s dead,’ said a voice, and the driver staggered backwards holding his head and dislodging his cap to the back of his head. Someone caught him and made him sit down inside the market cross. The poor man was shaking his head and he’d begun to cry. ‘Oh God, Oh God, why did she do it?’ he wept. ‘One minute she was on the pavement and the next she was under me wheels.’
Kez glanced at the man who had been with her. Stan was staring down at the woman’s lifeless body, partially hidden under the wheel of the bus. He held his gloved hand to his mouth. Someone in the crowd turned towards him. ‘Was she with you?’
He nodded. ‘She’s my wife.’
Immediately the crowd turned its attention towards him, each person doing his or her best to comfort a man who had just seen his wife die. Kez could hear the whispers all around her. ‘He’s in shock.’ ‘Someone get a doctor.’ ‘What a dreadful thing to happen.’ ‘And on Christmas Eve too.’
Kez turned away. She had no stomach to sell holly wreaths now. No one would want them anyway. Christmas was spoiled. She’d never be able to get the image of that poor woman out of her mind. She wouldn’t forget the woman’s husband either. Even though she hadn’t seen him since she was a little girl, she’d recognised him at once. He wouldn’t have known her of course. She
was all grown up now. A married woman too. She hurried away, only glancing back the once. That’s when she noticed that the gloved hand Stan kept so close to his mouth hid a small smile on his lips.
Eleven
That second winter of her training, beginning on 21 January 1947, the weather deteriorated. Outside the relative warmth of the hospital wards, the country was at a virtual standstill. The bitingly cold winds which came to the south moved up country and brought blizzard conditions which in turn caused huge snow drifts. In the chaos which followed, schools were closed and because it was impossible to get around, just about every business in the country was hit hard. It seemed that every news bulletin on the radio was even gloomier than the last. Old people, particularly those living alone, died of hypothermia in their own homes. Livestock had been found frozen to death in the fields, wild birds and animals fell to the ground and starved to death.
Connie had nearly always gone home on her day off. She enjoyed helping around the house and looking after Mandy while her mother and Clifford went out for the afternoon. Sometimes she would have a lazy day and lie in bed until mid-morning (much to Ga’s disgust) and then take Pip for a long walk up to Highdown Hill. It was lovely up there and if she was well wrapped up, Connie didn’t mind the cold winds. As the relationship between Clifford and Ga had soured and following her own disagreement with Ga, going home wasn’t nearly as pleasant. Her great aunt was still a bit frosty towards her but Connie pretended not to notice. Kez was still on the road but Connie did manage a couple of Saturday dances at the Assembly Hall with Jane Jackson when she had the night off duty. Sally Burndell was still convalescing with her aunt in Hampshire. Connie enjoyed herself at the dances even though she didn’t meet anybody special but she loved the twinkling globe and the swishing of the dance dresses. Whenever someone asked her to dance, as she walked onto the dance floor, Connie was whisked away on a dreamy cloud of romance, usually until the man in question opened his mouth.
Once the snow came, she had made no attempt to brave the bus journey to Goring. She knew her mother would understand why. Even if she had found a bus going that way, there was no guarantee she would be able to get back to the hospital. Several nurses were stuck at home, unable to get back and three of her set had heavy colds, making the wards very short of staff. The intake was already down to twelve, seven of the girls already having decided that nursing wasn’t for them, or they wanted to get married and stop working altogether.
By February, with the weather conditions terrible the hospital was bulging was at the seams, mostly with people breaking legs, hips and arms, all with complications, after falling in the icy conditions. When a serious road accident added to the problem and five people were admitted in one night, extra beds had been put down the middle of the wards. After that, everyone had their fingers crossed that the stores wouldn’t run out of beds, or the wards run out of space.
With such awful conditions outside, Connie was surprised to find three letters in her pigeonhole in the foyer of the nurses’ home. She couldn’t imagine how the GPO managed to deliver any letters at all! As she sat on the stair to read them, Connie heard a low rumble in the distance. She frowned. Not thunder, surely? It was far too cold and yet it had been a very distinct sound. Perhaps it was a movement of snow somewhere, maybe falling off the roof. She drew her nurse’s cloak around her body and sighed. What next?
Someone came down the stairs and she had to move over to let them pass.
‘Off out?’ she said to the girl.
‘Going to phone my mother if I can,’ came the reply. ‘I haven’t heard from her for a week.’
Connie sympathised. Finding out what was happening at home was difficult. The Dixons weren’t on the telephone at Belvedere Nurseries but in the case of a real emergency Connie knew she could always make a call to the Frenchie and he would pass any message on. Connie hadn’t heard from her family for a couple of weeks either. She’d written herself but she had no real hope of her letters getting through. There were power cuts, with domestic electricity reduced to nineteen hours per day and industrial supplies were cut completely. Radio broadcasts were reduced, and television, only owned by the wealthy few anyway, was suspended altogether. Even the newspapers were a lot smaller in size. To add insult to injury, the country faced another food shortage because the vegetables were impossible to get out of the ground.
Connie shivered. The treacherous road conditions not only prevented food supplies getting through, but also much needed coal. Stocks had been low since the end of the war but now there was a chronic shortage. Even though the authorities used some of the remaining German POWs still in the country to shift the snow on the railways by hand, the coal stored at railway depots was frozen to the ground and impossible to move anyway. When coal supplies did get through, naturally the Hospital Committee put the patients first. That meant there was precious little left for the nurses’ home. Someone had put a blackout curtain over the back of the door in the staff sitting room and they were still at the windows of the room, but even so, the fire in the grate struggled to bring the temperature anything close to cosy. The radiators were switched off in the bedrooms which meant that Connie and the other girls woke up to frost on the inside of the windows and icicles, some as long as three inches or more, hanging on the outside. She already had three blankets and sometimes she had to throw her winter coat over the bed to keep warm. She hated getting up in the morning. Her bed felt warm and cosy and it took every ounce of courage to throw back the covers and wash and dress in such freezing temperatures. It was hardly surprising. Snow had fallen on twenty-six consecutive days and as the temperatures plummeted, Worthing managed to get in the record books with 23 degrees of frost with the sea frozen too!
She was surprised to see that one of her letters was from Ga. It was dated a week ago … a week to get from Goring to Worthing, a distance of about four miles.
‘Your mother had blisters on her hands, even though she’d worn thick gloves when she and Clifford tried to lift some turnips,’ she wrote. In view of the way Ga behaved when she was at home, Connie was surprised that the letter was both friendly and chatty. ‘Clifford says it will take a pneumatic drill to get them up.’
Connie shook her head despairingly. If they couldn’t get the food out of the ground, they couldn’t eat. They couldn’t sell anything either. Whatever were they going to do?
The lack of everything from food to fuel made everyone so depressed it came as little surprise to hear that Manny Shinwell, the Minister for Fuel and Power, the man who had allowed the stockpile of coal to dwindle to only four weeks’ supply at the beginning of winter, had received death threats and had to be put under police guard.
Did Mum and Clifford have enough coal?
‘Of course,’ Ga went on, ‘if we had some young blood, a stronger person to help us, perhaps we could manage to get something out of the ground, but Clifford does the best he can.’
At this point, Connie was tempted to screw the letter into a ball and chuck it into a bin. Why couldn’t the woman let it drop? She’d been nursing for fifteen months now and still Ga was doing her best to make her give it up and come home. Taking a deep breath to calm her nerves, Connie began again.
‘Mandy is off school,’ Ga’s letter continued, ‘because there’s no heating. Clifford’s friend, the Frenchie, has been helping people out with logs but he’s given that much away, I don’t think he can do it much longer.’
Connie shook away the memory of the Frenchie and yet, she was glad he was keeping an eye on everyone in the village.
‘Take care of yourself,’ Ga said on the last page. ‘As soon as you can, let us know how you are.’
With that last statement, it sounded as if she was mellowing at last and surprisingly Connie was left with a twinge of guilt. Of course, she’d thought about her family every day, but what with her studies and the crisis which seemed to go on and on, the thought of struggling to the postbox again with a letter which might never get there, was too mu
ch. Connie decided there and then, that even if it took hours and hours, she would try to get home on her next day off.
There was a PS. ‘You mustn’t go worrying about us,’ Ga wrote. ‘We’re all alright. Everyone is well. We have plenty of logs if the coal runs out and your mother has a good store cupboard so we won’t starve.’
Connie smiled. That was a relief anyway. She folded the letter only to find another postscript. ‘I put my teeth in the glass by my bed and when I woke up in the morning, they were frozen solid.’
Connie chuckled. Perhaps Ga had forgiven her at last.
The second letter was in one of Ga’s special envelopes. Connie knew the old lady only used her best writing paper occasionally and only for important letters which was why she was so surprised to see it. Why not put the letter in with the one she’d just read? She tore open the envelope and gasped. It contained what looked like a newspaper cutting. Connie spread it out and the fury rose in her chest. The cutting had come from Tit-Bits and was about a female dancer whose body was covered in tattoos. At the top of the page, Ga had printed the words Like Gertrude? Damn Ga and her nasty insinuations. She hadn’t changed one bit.
The wartime spirit hadn’t died. People did their best to help each other so Clifford and the Frenchie were not unique. As the weather conditions grew worse, neighbours banded together, sharing their meagre supplies whenever they could. Most people could only afford to heat one room in their house anyway so the whole of family life was reduced to that. The blackout curtains came in useful again. If they weren’t at the doors or windows, they were sewn together and used as draught excluders. The power cuts compounded everything. The Frenchie and Clifford took what extra candles they could find to the old, the sick or the frail who couldn’t get out themselves. Of course, they couldn’t help everybody and Aggie’s nose was out of joint when the Frenchie refused her some logs even though he had pointed out that she had the best part of ½ cwt. of coal in her bunker while other people had nothing at all. She eventually accepted the decision with tight-lipped resignation and the Frenchie kissed her on both cheeks.
