by Cathy Kelly
They all knew that Lady Irene was high in the instep and had been brought up with a fleet of servants, far more than she had now. There had been French chefs and an Italian lady’s maid in her home in Kildare, not to mention two thousand acres of prime farmland, and an Italianate garden that lay spread in front of a vast Georgian mansion. All of which added up to the fact that she wasn’t used to being thwarted by a mere member of her staff.
‘I am surprised that you wish to leave,’ Lady Irene had added in her lethally soft voice, the pale patrician face showing an unaccustomed flush of red. Under the dusting of powder, the harsh smoker’s lines around her tight mouth were like angry furrows.
‘I thought you were happy here.’
‘I am, your ladyship,’ said Lily evenly. She’d learned to speak in calm measured tones when she’d been drafted in to replace Ryan. Her mistress was mercurial and her mood could change in an instant. Her daughter, Isabelle, was exactly the same. Luckily, Isabelle was rarely home. She’d been schooled abroad, had gone to finishing school in Switzerland, and was now touring the Italian lakes with some cousins. The war was only four months old and neither the Major nor Lady Irene felt it was anything to worry about. Nobody thought it unsafe for Isabelle to be careering around Italy in a Hispano-Suiza with chums like Monty Fitzgerald and Claire Smythe-Ford. The unspoken message, one Lily heard loud and clear, was that money and class would see a girl like Isabelle Lochraven out of any difficulties.
‘Why leave then?’
So many answers ran through Lily’s head: because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life catering to your whims like my poor mother, was foremost. She suspected that Lady Irene knew this. It was a conversation Lily didn’t want to have.
‘It’s been my dream to be a nurse since I was a child,’ Lily said, truthfully.
‘Which doctor did you say you were going to work for?’ Lady Irene pressed.
They were in the small sitting room beside her ladyship’s bedroom. It was Lily’s favourite room in the house. Her own home was a comfortable cottage with sturdy, much-loved furniture, and Rathnaree was very much a country house without frills and furbelows, but the small sitting room was the one room in the house that had been decorated to reflect Lady Irene’s taste and it was a little oasis of femininity. The high windows were swathed in silk curtains decorated with pale pink and blue flowers; the heavy old fireplace had been replaced with a marble one where Roman nymphs frolicked with fauns, and the furniture was delicate and gilded.
‘Dr Rafferty,’ replied Lily.
‘Oh, I don’t know him.’
The Lochraven family didn’t bestow their custom on the local Tamarin GP. When the need arose, a doctor was driven from Waterford city.
‘You must do as you wish, Lily,’ Lady Irene said, signalling that the interview was over.
Lily escaped gratefully. She disliked Lady Irene so much and lately she found it harder and harder to hide her dislike.
Lily wasn’t sure when she’d lost respect for her employer: possibly round the time she was fourteen and her mother had fallen from her bike cycling home from Rathnaree late one night after having waited until two in the morning for the last of the dinner-party guests to go home.
The next morning, she’d been back at work at seven as usual, black and blue with bruises, and stiff from her fall. Lady Irene had mentioned finding some arnica for her – she’d never found it – and in the same breath had told Lily’s mother about an impromptu shooting party the Major was having that day.
‘Only seven guns, Mrs Kennedy, nothing too much really.’
Lady Irene called Lily’s mother Mrs Kennedy, as if respect was all about the correct titles and nothing to do with actually caring for the person.
She cared for no one. She didn’t even care for her precious belongings – her clothes were left strewn on the floor as she stepped out of them. Irene’s clothes were exquisite – undergarments of crêpe de Chine and finest silk, in peachy coral shades that flattered the skin, never the heavy woollen vests and vast interlocked gusset things the Kennedy women wore, greyed from washing, harsh against the skin, unflattering as could be.
If she ever had any money in her life, Lily swore she too would have silken petticoats and négligés that swept the floor carelessly. And if she ever had money, she’d have someone to help her around the house, but she would treat that person with genuine respect. Irene Lochraven, Lily felt grimly, firmly believed that birth had made her better than Mary Kennedy.
Unfortunately, Lily’s mum believed that too. Why couldn’t she see that the only thing separating the Lochravens and the Kennedys was money, nothing more?
‘You’ll write, won’t you?’ her mother asked now, sipping her tea quickly, the way she did everything.
‘Of course I’ll write, Mam,’ Lily said. ‘Just ‘cos Tommy’s a hopeless letter writer, doesn’t mean I will be. I’ll tell you everything.’
‘I’ll miss you,’ her mother added. ‘I’ll pray for you.’
‘I’ll pray for you too, Mam,’ Lily said.
She felt guilty to be going, but excited too. When it became plain that the war was far from the little blip the Lochravens had insisted it was, she and Dr Rafferty had talked about the opportunities for nursing in London. When Tommy had signed up, it had spurred Lily on. There was a whole world out there waiting to be discovered, and she was eager to be a part of it.
Two days later, Lily sat on the edge of the hard bed and patted the smooth coverlet washed to pansy softness. She was relieved that she only had to share a room in the nurses’ home with two other students. The formal letter from the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead had included few details of the residential arrangements, other than listing their new address: the scarily double-barrelled Langton-Riddell Nurses’ Home.
On the ferry to Holyhead, Lily had taken out the letter and smoothed it flat on her lap, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Yet when she’d reached London, she’d known she was.
It was her third city in as many days: Waterford, Dublin and now London, and instead of feeling scared in the crowded streets so unlike the rolling hills of Tamarin, she felt alive, excited, happy.
How could she have been scared? She loved this: all the people, the busy streets, cars and trams racing past, and vast elegant buildings that made Rathnaree look like a hovel.
Now that she was in the nurses’ home, Lily was glad to see that her visions of dormitories with trainee nurses squashed together were wrong. It was a relief to find this lovely albeit tiny room in the eaves. So far, only one of her two roommates had arrived, a woman who was probably only the same age, twenty-one, yet looked a lot more sophisticated – and a lot less impressed with their quarters.
The room had all that Lily needed: heavy curtains for warmth, a wash stand with floral bowl and matching jug, a rather elderly chest of drawers with a mottled mirror on top that looked quite serviceable as a dressing table, and beside each of the three iron-framed beds with their neat covers was a small stool, hastily conscripted into use as a night table. On either side of the door were nails for clothes to be hung on.
Lily had slept in much worse.
But the Honourable Diana Belton, who was now looking around her with something akin to shock, clearly hadn’t.
Vivi, who was impulsive and always rushing in, would have fussed over Diana, asking her if she was all right. And once, Lily would have too. But today she held back.
She’d grown up beside a big house, had learned at her mother’s knee that the people in big houses were different.
‘Special,’ her mother would say when she sat wearing her eyes out mending a frippery of lace for Lady Irene. ‘Isn’t this beautiful, Lily? Feel it – wouldn’t it make you feel like a princess to wear it?’
Why did money and land and silken lace make them different? Lily wanted to know. Weren’t they all the same, all God’s people?
Here, in London, she wasn’t Tom and Mary Kennedy’s daughter, who had made a very good l
ady’s maid. Here, she was the same as the Honourable Diana: a trainee nurse. She had no plans to strike up a conversation or to apologise for their quarters to this girl in her tweed suit, necklace of pearls, and fur collar. The Honourable Diana might very well flick back her improbably blonde hair and snub Lily: snubbing her inferiors was no doubt something she’d a lifetime’s experience of.
Diana had remained coolly silent when the trainees had been welcomed by the stern Sister Jones.
‘Up at six, breakfast at twenty past and on the wards at seven,’ Sister Jones had read out, in her cool voice. ‘There will be lectures in the preliminary training school in the basement here and you will be issued with your timetables for those tomorrow. For the first two months, you will work until eight at night with one day off every fortnight. Students are expected to be in the home by ten, when the doors will be locked. Late passes may be given at Matron’s discretion, but only for special occasions: you will then be permitted to stay out until eleven. There are to be no visitors. Understood?’
‘Yes, Sister,’ everyone had murmured.
Then the room assignments had been read out. Lily and Diana had climbed the stairs with their bags in silence, and Diana hadn’t spoken a word since.
She could suit herself, Lily thought irritably.
She got to her feet and took off the very plain worsted wool coat that had never clung to her figure the way Diana’s suit did to hers, even when it was new. And it was far from new now. Lily had bought it three years ago from Quilian’s Drapers in Tamarin, which in itself had felt like an act of independence, because for years she’d bought her clothes under her mother’s supervision in McGarry’s Drapery. She’d felt pleased every time she saw the coat, pleased at that symbol of adulthood, and satisfied with her first purchase, chosen by herself and paid for with her own money. But now, faced with the glamorous Diana in marvellously cut tweed, she felt lumpen and ugly in it.
She hung her coat up and began to unpack her small cardboard suitcase.
When Diana spoke in a soft, hesitant voice, Lily was so surprised that she actually jumped.
‘I’m Diana Belton. Awfully sorry, we weren’t properly introduced earlier. You must think me a complete boor, but I feel terribly out of my depth here.’
Diana formally held out her hand, still in its suede glove.
‘Lily Kennedy,’ said Lily, proffering her own hand stiffly.
‘You’re from Ireland! Oh, I love Ireland, wonderful hunting. Do you hunt?’
‘No,’ said Lily evenly.
‘No, sorry, no, of course,’ muttered Diana.
‘Why “of course”?’ demanded Lily. ‘Why shouldn’t I hunt?’ She’d been on Lady Irene’s hunter once, a huge roan named Abu Simbel. She’d only ridden him round the yard, and she’d been scared stiff the whole time. Lord knew how people raced over hedges and ditches on horses, galloping wildly after some poor fox. It was beyond her.
‘I’ve offended you – I am so sorry.’ Diana clapped her hands to her perfectly red mouth. ‘I’m so frightfully sorry.’
And she started to cry. ‘I have to make a success of this. My father says I’m behaving like a silly child and he’s very angry with me. Can’t understand why I didn’t stay at home and go into the Auxiliary Territorial Service, says he’s going to cut my allowance and, oh, all sorts of ghastly things, so I have to do this. I have to stick at it. This is what I want, to do something with my life.’
Lily sat down beside Diana. They were almost the same size, she realised. Diana had narrow hips, long legs and a considerable bosom, as she did. She’d got Diana all wrong, she realised now. That cool poise had hidden terrible nerves.
‘My father didn’t want me to come either,’ Lily offered. ‘Wants to know why I’m going off to nurse people in a war he says shouldn’t have happened in the first place. He’s not keen on war: we’ve had a fair bit of it at home. But this is the only way I’d be able to train as a nurse properly, and I wanted to do something too.’
‘Goodness, Daddy thinks war is the only answer,’ said Diana. ‘He’s simply furious his gammy leg prevented him from rejoining his old regiment. He’s stuck with the Home Guard. He doesn’t believe I’ll be any good at nursing. He won’t disinherit me, though – nothing to leave.’
Suddenly they both began to laugh, and Diana was wiping tears away with a silk handkerchief.
‘There’s nothing for me to inherit, either,’ Lily said.
The door opened and a small, freckled face with a mop of fair curls peeped round.
‘Am I in the right place?’ she asked in a strong Cockney accent.
‘This is room fifteen,’ Lily replied.
‘That’s me then,’ said the girl, and came into the room properly, dragging a suitcase that looked bigger than she was. She was tiny, like an older version of Shirley Temple with those curls, but her laughing, cat-shaped eyes made her appear a little more grown up.
‘Maisie Higgins,’ she said. ‘Lawks, crying already!’ She stared at Diana’s tear-stained cheeks. ‘I heard the matron was a bit of a Tartar, but I didn’t think she’d be cracking the whip already.’
The first weeks in the grand old hospital on Gray’s Inn Road were hard and exhausting. Lily and Maisie at least were used to getting up early – Maisie had been an apprentice in a hairdressers’ – but Diana found it a nightmare. Food in the home was good, despite rationing. But the hardest part was getting used to dealing with actual patients. Anyone thinking there would be a lot of theory and lessons before they worked on the wards had been in for a shock.
Despite being students, they were thrown in at the deep end.
‘This is wartime,’ said one of their nursing tutors that first day as she led them from ward to ward, letting them see the size of the great hospital. ‘Sad to say, but it’s a great time to learn because you’ll see things that you’ve never seen before. A quarter of last year’s intake have dropped out, didn’t have the stomach for it. So, ladies, it’s up to you.’
One of their number vomited at the sight of a burn victim having his dressings changed. Lily felt like joining her. But she forced herself to stand up straight and proud at the bedside. If she was to do this job properly, she’d have to learn to deal with worse sights. She would not be dropping out.
‘You all right?’ she whispered to Diana, who was looking very green under her starched nurse’s cap.
‘Not really,’ Diana murmured, wobbling on her feet.
‘Think how hard it’ll be for the poor man if we all run like headless chickens,’ Lily said, her eyes still on the patient’s face, taking in the terrible charred edges of the burns and the raw pink skin underneath.
‘Righto,’ gulped Diana. ‘I understand.’ She smiled at the man.
‘Well done, Nurse Belton,’ said the tutor. ‘Thought we’d lost you for a moment there.’
‘Not a chance,’ said Diana, squeezing Lily’s hand tightly.
Lily was surprised and pleased to discover that there were women medical students at the Royal Free.
‘Wonder if they’re like us and get the dirtiest jobs?’ Maisie said thoughtfully.
‘Not bloody likely,’ said another of the trainees.
The student nurses undoubtedly got all the worst jobs on the wards, mainly bed-pan duty and sponge-bathing patients. One of the more sadistic ward sisters took an instant dislike to Diana and gave her all the most horrible jobs, including reapplying a dressing to a wounded man’s groin area.
Diana nearly died of embarrassment, she told the other student nurses that evening in the home’s tiny common room.
‘I don’t know which of us went pinker,’ Diana sighed, ‘him or me. Poor chap.’
‘Poor chap!’ parroted Cheryl, a tough girl from Walthamstow who never missed the opportunity to tease Diana over her cut-glass accent. ‘Bloody toff,’ said Cheryl. ‘Who’s she think she is – Lady Muck? She should have stayed at home with the butler. We don’t want her sort here.’
It had been another in a
series of long days and Lily was dead on her feet. But even so, she could recognise that something needed to be done.
Easing her tired body out of her chair, Lily stood up and put her hands on her hips. ‘You’ve an awful mouth on you, Cheryl,’ she said coldly. ‘Diana doesn’t look down on you, so you ought to stop looking down on her.’
This stopped Cheryl in her tracks. ‘Me look down on her?’
‘Do you look down on me, too?’ Lily went on. ‘Am I a big thick Irishwoman when I’m not here to hear it?’
‘No,’ shot back Cheryl. ‘You’re different…’
‘We’re all different,’ Lily said sharply. ‘It’s high time you got used to it.’
‘Or else?’ Cheryl’s pointed face hardened.
Lily drew herself up to her full imposing height. ‘I was raised right beside a farm. My father’s a blacksmith and my mother’s in service, and I can launder a lady’s camis as handily as help shoe a horse. There were lots of knocks in my life before I came here and I’m not putting up with any more from the likes of you, madam. I don’t believe in raising my fist to anyone, but if I did, I’d knock you from here to kingdom come and you wouldn’t get up in a hurry, I can tell you. So leave Diana alone.’
‘The wild Irish girl!!’ cheered someone.
‘Fine,’ snapped Cheryl and left the room in a huff.
‘Thank you so much,’ Diana said, grabbing Lily’s arm. ‘That’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’
She had tears in her eyes. Lily realised that at some point she’d have to explain to Diana that, when she was feeling vulnerable, she adopted an icy demeanour that gave entirely the wrong impression.
‘Think us three ought to stick together,’ added Maisie. ‘Lily can handle all the trouble, Diana can get us into the posh restaurants, and I can do our hair. What do you say, girls?’
The three of them looked at each other and grinned.