The Nurses of Steeple Street

by Donna Douglas

  ‘Hello, pet,’ Bess greeted her. ‘I’ve come to see your mum.’

  ‘She’s asleep,’ the girl replied, not looking up. ‘Mrs Pilcher says she’s poorly, and I’m not to bother her till she wakes up.’

  ‘Mrs Pilcher?’ Agnes saw Bess stiffen, her hand on the doorlatch. ‘Has she been to see your mum, love?’

  The girl nodded, still poking at the crack. Inside the house, the baby’s cries grew more insistent. ‘She told me to wait out here. But our Ronnie’s been making such a racket.’ She looked up for the first time, gazing at them with round, solemn eyes in a grimy face. She was the grubbiest child Agnes had ever seen. ‘Shall I go and see to him? I didn’t like to disturb Mum, not after Mrs Pilcher told me not to.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me see to him, love?’ Bess replied. Her voice was bright, but Agnes could see her smile was stretched a little too wide. ‘You wait out here a bit longer, and I’ll make sure your brother’s all right.’

  ‘What about Mum? Mrs Pilcher said—’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she won’t mind. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. Now you be a good girl and wait out here.’

  The little girl stuck out her chin. ‘I am a good girl. Mrs Pilcher told me so. She gave me a toffee.’

  ‘That’s nice, love,’ Bess replied absently, her hand already lifting the latch. The door stuck, and she leaned her shoulder against it to shift it open. ‘Give us a hand’ she hissed to Agnes, who quickly stepped forward to help. They pushed hard until the door finally gave.

  Inside the cottage was in darkness, all the curtains pulled closed. Even though it was a warm September afternoon, a fire blazed in the grate. Agnes was nearly knocked sideways by the sweltering heat, as well as the sickening stench of decay, sour sweat and general filth. She put her hand over her mouth quickly as she felt the bile rising in her throat.

  A screaming toddler waddled towards them out of the gloom, naked but for a grey, sodden nappy hanging low between his legs. He stretched out his arms imploringly to Agnes, his tearful face contorted.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Can’t you see the poor mite wants to be picked up?’ Bess said.

  Agnes reached down reluctantly and scooped him up, holding him at arm’s length. The reek of ammonia from his urine-soaked nappy made her eyes water.

  ‘What shall I do with him?’ she asked through clenched lips.

  ‘Use your common sense, girl,’ Bess snapped, dumping her bag on the kitchen table. There was a strained edge to her voice that Agnes hadn’t heard before. ‘Now, let’s get these curtains open, so we can see what we’re doing.’

  Bess pulled back the thin curtains, but scant light came through the grimy glass. ‘Maisie?’ she called out. ‘Are you about, love?’

  Agnes looked around. The single room seemed to be a kitchen and living room combined. A heavy black cooking range was built around the fire, with a stone sink on the opposite wall, under the window. A scrubbed table and chairs and a small, threadbare armchair filled the rest of the room. A door on the other side led to what Agnes guessed must be the bedroom.

  ‘Who’s Mrs Pilcher?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Bess said grimly. ‘But if she’s been sniffing around … Maisie?’ she called out again. ‘It’s the district nurse, pet. Just come to make sure you’re all right.’

  She headed for the bedroom door, leaving Agnes still dangling the baby at arm’s length. At least he’d stopped crying for the moment, and was staring at her with wide, wet eyes full of curiosity. Twin trickles of mucous ran from his tiny button nose.

  She was looking around for somewhere to settle him when Bess reappeared, her face white.

  ‘Miss Sheridan?’ Agnes took one look at the Assistant Superintendent’s expression and quickly dumped the baby on the rag rug in front of the fire. Ignoring his screams of outrage, she hurried towards the bedroom.

  ‘No, don’t go in—’ Bess tried to block her way but the metallic stench of blood had already filled Agnes’ nose and throat. Over Bess’ shoulder she saw a young woman lying on the bed, livid white against a tangle of blood-soaked sheets. Agnes reeled back, putting her hand up as if to ward off the dreadful sight.

  ‘You asked about Mrs Pilcher.’ Bess’ voice was low and matter-of-fact. ‘Well, this is her handiwork.’

  ‘Is … is she …?’

  ‘She’s dead, poor lass.’ Bess shook her head. ‘You’d best go and fetch the doctor,’ she said. ‘The surgery is on Vicar Lane, just down from the District House. Go by Templar Street, it’ll be quicker … Miss Sheridan? Agnes? Are you listening?’

  Bess’ voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. Tiny black dots danced before Agnes’ eyes. She clutched at the doorframe for support as she felt her knees buckle beneath her. She closed her eyes, but all she could see was the woman’s glazed, dead stare.

  A pair of hands closed firmly on her shoulders, propelling her away from the scene. Agnes tried to take a step but her legs wouldn’t hold her. The last thing she heard was Bess Bradshaw saying her name as she slithered gracefully to the floor.

  She opened her eyes a moment later, to find herself slumped in the threadbare armchair with the Assistant Superintendent leaning over her, wafting a bottle of sal volatile under her nose. Bess Bradshaw’s beady eyes were mocking.

  ‘Do you still think you can cope with anything, Miss Sheridan?’ she asked.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I’m sorry you had such an unsettling experience on your first day, Miss Sheridan.’

  The Superintendent, Miss Gale, was at least more sympathetic than her assistant when Agnes met her on their return to the district nurses’ house.

  In fact, Susan Gale couldn’t have been more different from Bess Bradshaw. She was in her fifties, and as delicate and fine-boned as the Assistant Superintendent was broad. She reminded Agnes of a little bird, perched behind her desk, with her bright dark eyes and beaked nose.

  Agnes approved of her instantly. Miss Gale was neat and orderly, exactly the kind of nurse Agnes was used to, unlike rough and ready Bess.

  Hot colour flooded Agnes’ face at the memory of Bess waving a bottle of sal volatile under her nose.

  ‘Call yourself a nurse?’ she’d mocked. ‘Much use you’re going to be, if you keep fainting at the sight of blood!’

  But Agnes couldn’t help it. Even now, she could feel the oppressive heat of that room, and the smell so thick she could almost taste it on the back of her throat. And all the time the desperate, relentless wail of a motherless baby coming from the other room …

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Agnes snapped back to reality at the sound of Miss Gale’s voice, ‘this is the sort of thing you should expect as a district nurse. You must be prepared for anything.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Gale,’ Agnes murmured. ‘I will be, I assure you.’

  The Superintendent looked at her shrewdly from across the desk. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘At any rate, you’ll have a month to make up your mind whether or not you are suited to district nursing. You will be on an initial four weeks’ probation period, during which time you will undertake a period of study, as well as accompanying one of our experienced district nurses on her rounds. Should you pass the probation period, you will spend a further five months going out on the district on your own, with only occasional supervision. Do you think you will be able to manage that?’

  Agnes pressed her lips together. Of course she could manage! At the Nightingale, she had been trained to deal with all kinds of emergencies. Today had just been a shock to her, that was all.

  But she was careful not to let her feelings show in front of the Superintendent. She had already offended Bess Brad-shaw with one careless remark. ‘I’m sure I’ll learn a great deal, Miss Gale,’ Agnes said humbly.

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ The Superintendent smiled at her. ‘Now, go up to your room and unpack. I’m sure you’d like to refresh yourself after your long day. Tea is at five o’clock. We gather together in the dining room, so you�
��ll be able to meet the other nurses then. Dottie?’ she called out.

  The door opened and there was the scrawny little maid who had given Agnes such a peculiar welcome earlier. Never had anyone lived up to their name so well, Agnes thought. She did look decidedly dotty, with her starched cap perched lopsided on her colourless flat hair. The apron she wore seemed to engulf her, skimming her ankles, the ties wrapped at least twice around her narrow waist.

  ‘Ah, Dottie. This is Miss Sheridan, who will be joining us. She will be in room three, with Polly Malone. You remember, I asked you to put her suitcase up there earlier? Will you show her the way, please?’

  Dottie kept shooting Agnes sideways glances as she led the way up the stairs. But Agnes was too busy listening to Bess Bradshaw’s voice coming from the common room below her.

  ‘Went as white as a sheet, she did,’ she was saying. ‘Honestly, you’ve never seen anything like it. Next thing she’s fainted dead away.’

  ‘You can’t blame her,’ another woman’s voice said. ‘I don’t know how I would have managed if I’d been faced with something like that, especially on my first day. I hope you didn’t frighten her off.’

  ‘Happen I did,’ Bess said.

  ‘Oh, don’t say that! We need more girls in district nursing. Miss Gale will have a fit if you scare this one away. Especially as her mother is a friend of hers.’

  ‘I don’t know if we need girls like her,’ Bess Bradshaw said. ‘Between you and me, I don’t think she’s got the heart for this kind of work. If I know anything, she’ll be gone by the end of the month.’

  That’s where you’re wrong, Agnes thought. She couldn’t leave, no matter how much she might want to. She had nowhere else to go.

  Dottie led her along the landing and opened the door to a bedroom. It was large and sunny, decorated with flower-sprigged wallpaper. The window had a view over a large back garden with a riot of shrubs, trees and slightly overgrown grass.

  There were single beds on opposite sides of the room, one chest of drawers and two bedside cabinets.

  ‘You’ll sleep there.’ Dottie pointed to the bed on the side farthest from the window. Having imparted this information, she turned and abruptly left, slamming the door behind her.

  What an odd girl, Agnes thought as she listened to the maid thumping down the stairs.

  But at least the room was pleasant, she thought as she lifted her suitcase on to the bed. Her bedroom at St Jude’s in Manchester had been scarcely more than a cell, with a horsehair mattress, thin grey blankets, and walls decorated with a large wooden cross and framed Bible quotations worked in needlepoint, reminding them all that they were sinners in God’s eyes.

  She shuddered at the memory. She hadn’t been sorry to leave that place, any more than Matron had been sorry to see her go.

  Agnes set about unpacking her suitcase. It was difficult to find space, since her room mate’s belongings seemed to be everywhere. A silver-backed brush and mirror, hair curlers, a bottle of scent and various items of make-up littered the top of the chest of drawers, along with a couple of textbooks and a copy of Picturegoer magazine. There was a lipstick and a powder compact on the bedside cupboard, next to a framed photograph of a handsome, grinning young man.

  It was lucky she hadn’t brought much with her, Agnes thought as she cleared a small space in the wardrobe for her few items of clothing. She had left most of her belongings behind at St Jude’s, along with her old life.

  But she hadn’t left her photographs behind, and she was thankful for that as she took out her favourite and gazed at it, losing herself for a moment in the warm memory.

  It had been taken when she was ten years old. There were her parents, and her sister Vanessa, just fifteen and already blooming into a beautiful young woman. As usual, her sister was at their mother’s side, both of them slim, fair and elegant, like two peas in a pod. Agnes was more like her father, with her chestnut hair and bright brown eyes. He stood with one arm around her shoulders, smiling into the camera. Dr Charles Sheridan, respected GP. Handsome and confident, he had always been Agnes’ hero.

  And there, in the middle of them all, was her darling brother Peter. Seventeen years old, posing with his cricket bat as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Who could ever have imagined that two years later the Great War would take him away from them? Or that the same war would destroy her father’s indomitable spirit, so that even now, seven years after the Armistice, he was still haunted by dreadful nightmares?

  Poor Daddy, Agnes thought. She loved her father, doted on him as much as Vanessa did their mother. After Peter was killed, Agnes had done her best to make up for the loss of her brother. She had been son and daughter to her father. Always a tomboy, she had thrown herself into her brother’s favourite pursuits, playing cricket and fishing in the lake for hours to keep her father company. She had even tried to fulfil his ambition for Peter by becoming a doctor. Her mother would never have allowed Agnes to study medicine, of course, but nursing was the next best thing.

  Charles Sheridan had been so proud of her when she’d qualified. She could remember the day she’d collected her medal, seeing his beaming face in the crowd. He smiled so seldom, it had warmed her heart to see it. She was the best student in her year, and she’d done it for him, to make him proud.

  Agnes put up her hand, as if she could feel his arm slipping from around her shoulders. She desperately wanted to grab it back, to feel the protective weight of it one last time, reassuring her that all would be well. But it was gone, and she knew it would be a long time before she felt that reassurance again.

  She finished unpacking, and then quickly wrote a note to her mother, letting her know she had arrived safely. She wasn’t sure if she would read it, but it comforted Agnes to write it anyway.

  As she pulled the last envelope out of her notecase, another photograph fell out and fluttered to the ground. Agnes bent to pick it up without thinking, and a tremor of shock ran through her at the unexpected sight of herself holding hands with Daniel.

  She must have taken it with her when she went to St Jude’s, she thought. Or perhaps she had slipped it into her notecase the day she had written to him to end their engagement. It seemed strange to think that he had been with her for the past six months and she hadn’t even known.

  Perhaps it was better that way, she thought. Otherwise she might have weakened towards him. There were so many times over the past few months when she had longed to see his face and hear his voice again. It was difficult to stay strong when she was so dreadfully unhappy.

  Agnes stuffed the photograph into her bedside drawer and slammed it shut. She knew she should throw it away, but even now she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  She retrieved her toiletries bag, changed into her dressing gown and went off to the bathroom to wash off the stink of Quarry Hill, which still hung about her in a sour cloud. She would have to burn her clothes, she thought. She didn’t think she could bear to wear them again, no matter how well they were washed.

  The bathroom was large and she filled the tub up to the brim with water, adding a handful of Epsom salts she found on the shelf. Then she undressed and got into the bath, enjoying the luxurious feel of the warm water soothing her travel-weary limbs.

  As she lay in there, in the distance she heard the front door opening and the sound of voices in the hall below. The first of the district nurses must be returning from their duties, she thought. Agnes wondered briefly about getting out of the bath and going downstairs, but couldn’t bring herself to leave the warm, enveloping embrace of the water. She felt safe there. While she was lying there, with the water lapping around her chin and ears, no one could reach her or hurt her. She could put off facing the world. And besides, she was so tired, her heavy eyelids didn’t seem to want to open …

  A sharp knock on the door jolted her awake. On the other side of the door a cross voice said, ‘I say, are you going to be all day?’

  Agnes jerked upright, water splashing over the side
s of the tub on to the linoleum floor. ‘Hello?’ she called out, startled.

  ‘Are you coming out?’ the cross voice demanded. ‘Only it’s nearly teatime and other people need to use the bathroom, you know.’

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry.’ Agnes quickly got out of the bath and pulled her dressing gown around herself. She opened the door, to be greeted by a young woman of about her own age. She was small and plain, with muddy brown hair and snapping grey eyes under heavy brows.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Agnes repeated, still fumbling with the ties of her dressing gown. ‘I didn’t realise I’d been in the bath so long. I – I must have fallen asleep …’

  ‘I hope you haven’t used all the hot water?’ the girl said, brushing past her. ‘Oh, I see you have. And what’s all this mess?’ She looked accusingly at the puddles of water on the floor.

  ‘I’ll clean it up—’ Agnes started to say, but the girl waved her away.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Just go away, will you? I barely have enough time as it is.’

  She slammed the door in Agnes’ face, leaving her standing on the landing, staring in dismay.

  Shaken, she returned to her room, and changed quickly into the uniform that had been provided for her. The plain blue dress was similar to the one she had worn at the Nightingale, but it had been so long since she’d worn it, everything seemed unfamiliar to her.

  She was still fumbling with the studs on her starched collar when the door flew open and another young woman came in, pulling off her hat.

  She stopped short when she saw Agnes. ‘Oh, hello,’ she greeted her. ‘You must be my new room mate?’

  Agnes nodded. ‘I’m Agnes Sheridan.’ She looked around. ‘I hope you don’t mind, I had to move a few of your things to make room for mine …’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. I would have moved them myself if I’d known you were coming today.’ The newcomer picked up an armful of belongings and tipped them into her bedside drawer. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very tidy at the best of times, and I’ve got even worse since the last girl left.’ She looked to be in her mid-twenties, perhaps a couple of years older than Agnes, tall and slender with fashionably shingled blonde hair framing a delicate, pretty face. Her accent was gentle, but unmistakably local. ‘I’m Polly, by the way. Polly Malone. Have you been here long?’