by Pam Weaver
She kept drifting between pain and oblivion: floating away peacefully to another place and then being pulled back with the fierceness of the pain.
Then the voices became louder and more urgent, and she felt herself being moved quickly. Bright lights flashed overhead, wheels rattled loudly underneath her and doors slammed behind her. Almost as soon as the journey had started, so it stopped, and people she didn’t recognise grouped around her, touching her, pulling at her clothes. Then there was a pain in her hand, a mask over her face, and she was drifting away again. She just had time to wonder if she was dying, if that was it for her life – if that was all it had been about – before oblivion took her over and she succumbed to the anaesthetic.
‘Time to wake up now,’ a disembodied voice said. ‘Your operation is over and we need to see you awake.’
She tried to shake herself awake but it was hard.
‘Don’t move. You’ve got dressings on your chest and your arm is in plaster. Just open your eyes so we know you’re out of the anaesthetic and then you can go back to sleep.’
She forced her eyes open and focused on the nurse standing beside the bed.
‘What happened?’ The words came out slowly past her swollen tongue.
‘You’ve had surgery. The doctor will talk to you about it later once you’re transferred from post-op.’
As she watched the ramrod-straight back of the nurse walking away, the memory of some of it started to come back to her. It was all disjointed in her head: the sudden crippling pain in her ribs that made breathing agony; the feeling that her chest had exploded; tumbling down the stairs and cracking her head; crawling along the hall to the open front door and then out onto the path looking for help. And then she remembered the fear …
‘What happened to me?’ she whispered, her chest hurting with every breath. ‘Nurse? Nurse …?’
By then the nurse was tending to a patient across the other side of the post-operative ward. She looked over her shoulder. ‘Sshh, you’re in recovery,’ she said in a loud whisper. ‘Don’t disturb the other patients now. Go back to sleep and doctor will talk to you soon.’
‘Why am I here?’
‘You’ve had an operation. Stop shouting.’
‘Operation for what?’ Her voice was hoarse and her tongue felt as if it was filling her mouth so that she struggled to get the words out.
‘I told you, sshh. I really can’t tell you anything. Doctor has to talk to you and he will, later. He’s talking to your fiancé at the moment.’
‘To who?’ She tried to clear her head. There was an image she was trying to catch hold of but it wouldn’t stop long enough for her to focus on it.
‘I’m sorry but there are seriously ill patients over here I have to look after, so stop the talking and rest,’ the nurse snapped impatiently in a tone that proved tolerance obviously wasn’t her forte in the middle of a busy night shift.
She closed her eyes in despair and let her head fall back onto the skinny pillow that had been placed under her head, but even that hurt. She reached up and touched her face, then had another flash of recall. She struggled to sit up.
‘Someone tell me what’s happened. I can’t remember …’
‘Stop this, you’re disturbing everyone.’
Instead of the recall of events she was searching for, a wave of terror engulfed her and she started screaming, louder than she had ever screamed in her life, and the pain in her chest erupted.
‘Tell me, tell me what’s going on! I’m scared, I can’t remember …’
This frantic call for help was answered with a dose of sedative that took her away from it all again.
Two men stood facing each other in the corridor. The older was dressed in a green hospital gown and short rubber boots with a surgical mask hanging down around his neck; the younger was wearing dark brown casual slacks and an open-necked shirt, a tweed sports jacket slung from one finger over his shoulder.
‘Your fiancée has three broken ribs and one of these pierced her left lung. It was this that necessitated the emergency surgery. She’s going to be in a lot of pain for a while but we can explain the implications of that to her later when we talk about her other injuries.’
‘Will she be all right?’
‘Well, we hope so. It’s fair to say she could easily have died from the lung injury but we’ve done our best to put her back together,’ the doctor said, a hint of contempt in his voice. ‘At the moment she’s as well as can be expected. First the fall with its accompanying injuries, possibly concussion, a head wound, a fractured arm, assorted cuts and bruises, a punctured lung and then the emergency surgery …’ he stopped to take breath. ‘She’s been through a lot but she’s stable and will be taken up to the ward later. We’ve had to sedate her again, she’s so distressed by the, er, accident.’ He made firm eye contact with the younger man. ‘Tell me again how it happened?’
‘I told you,’ the man sighed as if this was really boring him, ‘I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there. No one was there. I arrived at the same time as the ambulance. I think a neighbour telephoned for it. He heard some sort of kerfuffle going on. Probably her falling down the stairs. She’s so clumsy with those big feet of hers …’ He smiled as he shrugged dismissively. ‘I don’t even know what she was doing there on her own, to be honest.’
‘I see. But we are very puzzled by the bruises on her neck.’
‘They’d be from when she fell down the stairs, wouldn’t they?’
‘It’s possible, but unlikely. Anyway, that’s not for me to decide. I just put her back together again.’
‘You’re absolutely right, doctor. That’s not for you to decide.’ The man held out his hand to indicate the end of the conversation.
‘I suggest you go home now,’ the doctor said. ‘You won’t be able to see your fiancée until tomorrow evening during visiting hours. Check at the reception desk for the hours. I don’t know which ward she’s going to be taken to. Will you be contacting her family?’
‘She doesn’t have any family.’
‘I see …’
The doctor’s tone was cold and he didn’t take the proffered hand. He simply turned sharply and walked back through the doors he’d emerged from a couple of minutes before.
A look of anger flashed across the other man’s face, and for a moment it looked as though he would follow the doctor, but instead he breathed deeply several times before turning round and heading down the corridor in the direction of the main exit. Once outside he sat on the wall, taking more deep breaths before lighting a cigarette and thinking about everything that had happened. He wanted to get it all straight in his head, just in case. After he’d ground the butt into the flowerbed he walked down the footpath and swung open the door to the phone box that stood at the main gate.
He fumbled in his pocket for coppers and then made his call. ‘Hello? It’s me. I know it’s late – or early, depending on how you look at it.’ As he spoke he checked his hair in the mirror that was fixed on the wall above the phone and then pulled a comb out of his back pocket. ‘I’ve had a strange old night but everything’s OK now and I’m dying for a decent cup of coffee … among other things!’
He smiled at himself in the mirror as he put the phone back into its cradle, then he flicked the comb through his hair, slipped on his jacket and pushed the door open. He held the door back for the elderly woman waiting patiently outside.
‘Thank you kindly young man,’ she said. ‘Have you just come out of the hospital?’
‘I have. My fiancée’s had an accident.’
‘Ooh dear, I hope she’s OK.’
‘Oh, nothing serious. Just a bit of a tumble and a few bruises. I’ve told her to lay off the gin in future.’ He grinned.
Shrugging his jacket straight, he pulled at his collar and walked away from the hospital where his fiancée lay battered and bruised.
Part One
One
Melton, Cambridgeshire, 1945
‘Here comes the train. Mumm
y, Mummy, I can hear it, I can hear it!’ As the small boy’s shriek pierced through the general chatter on the crowded railway platform the conversations started to fade away and the train appeared around the bend in the track lumbering noisily towards the station. Children jumped up and down excitedly at the sight and sound of the huge steam engine, and adults automatically reached down to pick up their bags and baggage.
Ruby Blakeley wasn’t feeling in the least bit excited as she pushed her own two small suitcases nearer the edge of the platform with her feet and then looked at the woman who was holding tightly onto her hand. She was feeling terrified.
‘It’s the train …’ the girl sighed sadly. The woman pulled the teenager in towards her and hugged her tightly.
‘Oh, Ruby, I’ve been dreading this moment. Uncle George and I are both going to miss you so much. I still can’t believe you’re leaving us.’
‘I’m going to miss you too, Aunty Babs. I don’t want to go back, but I have to. There’s no other way.’
‘I wish there was something we could do to persuade your family to let you stay. We’d love you to work in the surgery with us. We need the help, and you could send money to your mother and support her that way.’
Ruby let herself be hugged for a few seconds before blinking hard and pulling back. More than anything she wanted to turn round and go back to the comfortable, loving home she had become accustomed to over the past few years.
‘I know, but Mum said no. She said I have to go back. If I don’t go she’ll send Ray to collect me and you’ve seen what he’s like. I suppose it is hard for Mum. Ray said I have to go and help her, what with Dad not coming back and Nan being there and everything …’
‘Yes, dear, I know what Ray said, but having met him I think you and I both know he likes to exaggerate a little.’ The older woman went on quickly, ‘Listen to me, Ruby. I know you have to go but I want you to remember that we’re always here for you. Any time you need anything, or you just want to come and see us, we’ll send you the train fare,’ she took hold of the girl’s arm, ‘or if things change and you want to come back and live here again. We’ll keep your room, even if it’s just for a holiday with us. This will always be your home.’
‘Will you really? I’d like that,’ Ruby said with a hopeful smile.
‘Of course we will. Now don’t you forget to keep in touch. We both think of you as our daughter. I never expected that to happen the day we took you into our home, but now …’ Barbara Wheaton paused mid-sentence as her eyes welled up. She touched Ruby’s cheek with her gloved hand. ‘Now it’s as if you were always with us, part of our family.’
‘Thank you. I’ll write, I promise. I’m going to miss you both so much.’
‘And I’ll write. Now you’re sure you’ve got the paper on which Uncle George wrote everything down for you? We don’t want you to get lost in London, and you mind who you talk to on the train.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘I do wish you’d let us drive you back.’
‘I’ll be careful, I’ve got the paper in my bag and I’ll be fine. Mum is going to meet me at the bus stop when I get to Walthamstow.’
At fifteen Ruby was slender and coltishly leggy with green eyes and dark red curls not quite tucked away under the brim of a grey beret, which matched her knee-length tailored coat. Her ‘aunt’ was taller in her high heels, her hair pinned into an elegant chignon, and her face subtly made up, but the women were of similar colouring and bearing, and, standing side by side, they looked just like the mother and daughter Ruby had often wished they were. It had been nice to be the cosseted only child in a loving home instead of the ignored youngest in a crowded unhappy house, but now she had to go back to her family.
Amid billows of smoky steam the train bound for London lumbered to a standstill and, after one more hug, Ruby clambered aboard with her cases and sat down in a window seat. Forcing herself to be detached she smiled and waved through the steamed-up glass as the train started to chug forward while Babs Wheaton stood perfectly still on the narrow platform dabbing gently at her eyes with one hand and waving with the other.
Just outside the station Ruby could see Derek Yardley, the Wheatons’ driver, watching through the fence. As the train moved away she saw him raise a hand and wave. To all intents and purposes it was a friendly wave but she could see his stone-cold eyes staring directly at her. She hated him with a passion. He was the one person she certainly wouldn’t miss, and she knew without doubt that he was pleased to see the back of her, too.
Ruby remained dry-eyed and outwardly unemotional but inside she felt sick and angry at the thought both of what she was leaving behind and of what she was going back to.
It just wasn’t fair.
Five years previously, amid many tears and tantrums, the ten-year-old Ruby had fought desperately against being evacuated from her home and family in wartime East London to the safety of a sleepy village in the Cambridgeshire countryside. Just the thought of going had been terrifying to the young girl, who had never been away from home for even a night. But once she had adjusted to the change, she had settled in and her time with Babs and George Wheaton had turned into the happiest of her life. She had stayed on long after the other evacuees had returned home.
But now the war was over and, despite pleading for Ruby to be allowed to stay indefinitely, her host family had been told that their evacuee had to return to her real family.
Ruby’s eldest brother, Ray, had visited a few weeks previously and stated in no uncertain terms that it was way past time for the only daughter to do her bit for the cash-strapped family. Her mother wasn’t prepared to agree to her staying away any longer.
Leaning back in her seat, Ruby closed her eyes. She was dreading it.
After five years living with the very middle-class country GP and his wife, who had picked her randomly from the crocodile of scared evacuees transported to the village school playground, Ruby had changed dramatically. She had morphed from a frightened shadow of a child into a self-confident and popular young woman with a good brain and a quick wit, although there was still a certain stubbornness about her that could surface quickly if she was crossed.
She had also grown accustomed to being loved and cared for, even spoiled, by her childless host parents.
It was all so different from her other home, a small terraced house in Walthamstow where she had lived for the first ten years of her life; the home where she had been brought up, the youngest child with three brothers who had constantly overshadowed her early years with their boisterous masculinity and smothering overprotectiveness; the home where her bedroom was the tiny boxroom and her role was to be seen and not heard, especially by her father. Ruby thought that her mother probably loved her in her own way, but she didn’t have any time for her, and Ruby’s enduring memory of those first ten years was of constant loneliness and anxiety. She hadn’t actually been unhappy at the time because she didn’t know any different, but now she knew how childhood could and should be.
Sitting in the carriage, carefully avoiding any eye contact with the other passengers, Ruby could feel that the old anxiousness returning, but she resisted the urge to nibble around the edges of her nails as she had when she was a child.
There was something niggling her, a thought that she couldn’t quite get hold of. She could see how her mother would be run ragged and struggling to cope with a house full of adults, but she couldn’t understand why anyone in her position would fight to add an extra person into the mix, an extra mouth to feed. It simply didn’t make any sense.
When Ray had unexpectedly turned up on the doorstep a few weeks previously to order her home, Ruby had been mortified. The gawky schoolboy she remembered had turned into a sneering young man. Ray Blakeley had gone from rowdy boy to ill-mannered lout, the kind of person Babs and George had always encouraged her to avoid at all costs.
‘Ruby? There’s someone here to see you. I’ve sent him round to the front door,’ George had shouted through the hatch in the door that joined his
village surgery to the house.
Ruby had run down the stairs from her bedroom expecting to see one of her friends in the lobby, but instead there was a young man. She looked at him curiously for a moment and then realised.
‘Ray? What are you doing here?’ She couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice.
‘Now that’s not a nice way to talk to your big brother, is it, Rubes?’ he grinned. ‘No hello? No long time no see? No nothing at all?’ With both hands in his pockets he looked her up and down critically and shook his head. ‘I dunno, look at you done up like a dog’s dinner. Looks like I got here just in time before you get any more stupid ideas above your station. Mum told me you’re all la-di-dah now.’
‘I’ve just got back from the town; I was just going to get changed,’ she countered defensively.
‘Just got back from the town,’ he mimicked her voice and enunciation with a wide grin. ‘Just got back from the town. Posh talk there girl.’
As a bright scarlet blush crept up her face, Ruby could feel herself shrivelling inside, reverting back to the trampled-over child she had been before her evacuation. But then she noticed Babs standing in the kitchen doorway, observing quietly, and her confidence returned.
‘Aunty Babs, this is my oldest brother, Ray. He’s come to see me,’ Ruby said brightly, looking for a distraction.
Ray glanced dismissively at the woman before turning his attention back to Ruby.
‘Oh, no, you’ve got it wrong, Rubes. I haven’t come to see you, I’ve come to take you back home. Now.’
‘But I don’t want to go back.’ As soon as the words were out she realised she’d made a mistake. ‘I mean, I’m not ready. You can’t just turn up without warning and expect me to go with you. I’ve got school and all sorts of things …’
‘No choice there, Rubes darling. School’s done for you, and Mum wants you back home, what with the old man more than likely dead … please God.’ He paused and grinned before continuing, ‘But you know that. Enough mucking around – she’s writ often enough – so now she’s asked me to come and get you; drag you, if I have to. Time to stop being all duchesslike and get back to where you belong.’
