The Children of Lovely Lane

by Nadine Dorries

  Beth Harper picked her way down the steps and was the first to reach Mrs Duffy. She grabbed her by the elbow as Pammy Tanner staggered down to grab the other side.

  ‘How in God’s name did you get all the way here?’ Pammy exclaimed. ‘Mrs Duffy, you want locking up! Do you not think we could survive on a piece of toast?’

  ‘What time did you leave home?’ This from Dana, who was by now rescuing the loaves of bread and shaking off the snow. Food was always the first consideration for Dana.

  Just as Dana spoke, Victoria Baker appeared. ‘Jake, will you pick up that bacon! Quick!’ she shouted. ‘There’s a dog behind you.’

  Jake clambered on to his knees and outstared a curious stray dog that was perched in mid stalk at the bottom of the steps. It had smelt the bacon, left wherever it had been sheltering and was now fixing an unwavering stare on the four-pound pack of rashers wrapped in greaseproof paper and lying on the ground.

  ‘Don’t you even think about it, big fella,’ whispered Jake as he edged slowly on all fours towards the packet. ‘Go on now, away with you! Don’t touch it.’ As Jake reached out and took the bacon, the dog sat down and wagged its tail, then leapt forward to lick Jake’s face.

  ‘Oh, would you look at him, he’s frozen!’ squealed Pammy. Mrs Duffy was now safely on the top step and Pammy picked her way towards the dog. She felt its neck for a collar.

  ‘Mrs Duffy, can we bring him in for a warm by the fire and a rasher? Please! Can we?’

  Dana, who had lived all her life alongside farm dogs, could not believe what Pammy was asking. ‘Saints above, my mammy would have a fit if I had ever brought one of the farm dogs into the kitchen. They lived on scraps, bones and pig feed, slept in the barn and grew well on it. Leave him, Pammy, he’s fine. I’ve seen him coming in and out of the park and at the bus stop, being given titbits by passengers as they get on and off the bus.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, but there are no buses or passengers today. And look at him, Dana, there’s not a scrap on him. That’s probably all he has to eat, the odd biscuit from people going in and out of the park.’

  The entrance to the St Angelus nurses’ home was situated directly opposite the entrance to Lovely Lane Park. Lovely Lane ran all the way up to the Dock Road. At one end of the lane were buildings that had once been the homes of sea merchants, and at the opposite end were the homes of the dockers. Between them sat the park. The two ends of Lovely Lane were worlds apart.

  Pammy knew she had a point and she played it well. There would be no one visiting the park today. The dog would surely go hungry if she didn’t intervene.

  Jake returned to the van and unloaded the next tray. ‘He looks half frozen, the poor scraggy thing,’ he said as he passed Pammy on the way up the steps. She was also half frozen, shivering on the steps in her short-sleeved pink cotton nurse’s uniform.

  Mrs Duffy was in the hallway and the girls heard her exclaim, ‘God in heaven, who lit the fire in the hall for me? I’ve been here twenty-five years and that has never happened before.’

  The nurses on day duty had also been taken by surprise when they’d walked into the kitchen to see Beth buttering a mountain of toast. ‘Only one and a half slices each, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Load up at break time when you get to the greasy spoon.’ They would have to walk the mile and a half to the hospital and work for a further three hours before it was time for the traditional milky coffee and hot buttered toast at break time and the mood in the house was not a happy one.

  ‘Please, Mrs Duffy,’ pleaded Pammy. ‘Matron has Blackie in a basket in her office, she won’t mind. Matron loves dogs, she does.’

  Mrs Duffy loved dogs too. Her job at the nurses’ home precluded her from ever owning one. She spent most of the day away from her own home, often returning only to sleep at night. The dog looked up at her and tipped his head winningly to the side. ‘Would you look at him!’ she exclaimed, already sounding like a woman on the verge of wavering. ‘He’s a big scruffy dirty grey thing. I’ve never seen a dog with such a coat. It looks like it’s made of steel wool and it’s all different lengths.’

  Pammy looked as though she would never step indoors again unless Mrs Duffy said yes. Her teeth began to chatter.

  ‘Ah, go on then, bring him in. But just for a warm, mind, and a rasher. After that, he’s back outdoors. Do you hear me? And no arguments.’

  Pammy grinned. ‘Come on in, big fella,’ she said to the dog. It needed no encouragement and bounded up the steps after her. ‘What shall we call him?’ she said to the others as she reached the top.

  A Scouser through and through, born and raised on the dockside streets, Pammy would have snuck the dog into her room if she’d needed to. Either that, or she would have taken him to her mam and dad’s. The Tanner brood would have loved him. There was no dog at home now, but over the years she’d brought back too many strays to mention. Liverpool was full of stray dogs wandering the streets and every dog they’d ever owned was one she had brought home on the end of a length of dirty string, having found it down by the docks.

  ‘Well, just looking at the state of him, maybe we should call him Scruff,’ said Dana.

  The dog stopped in its tracks. It had been following the pack of bacon, which had disappeared into the kitchen. It looked up at Dana with wounded eyes.

  ‘Wash your mouth out,’ said Pammy, offended. ‘Don’t you be listening to her, big fella.’ This comment was addressed to the dog.

  ‘Scamp is a good one,’ chirped Victoria, who had spent her life around dogs.

  Pammy looked pleased. ‘Yes, I like that. Scamp then, everyone, what do you say?’

  ‘I say it’s a waste of time naming a dog who is going to be here for no more than an hour,’ said Beth as she walked past with the second tray from the van, loaded with flour and Mrs Duffy’s remaining food order. ‘I’m going to help Mrs Duffy grill this bacon. We only have forty-five minutes, nurses, before we have to leave, and so do you, matey.’ This to the dog, who was quickly working out who its friends were.

  ‘Can you give me a lift in the kitchen, please, Victoria?’ Beth was an organizer, through and through. She had got herself off to a rocky start at Lovely Lane when she had appeared to prefer the company of Celia Forsyth, the least pleasant of all the student nurses, and the members of the knitting circle, who were firmly controlled by Celia and very much under her thumb.

  As Victoria and Beth walked into the kitchen, Pammy grabbed Jake by the sleeve and whispered, ‘How is Martha?’ She had nursed Martha on ward two when she’d lost her first baby and almost died in the process, thanks to a back-street abortionist. The whole affair had almost got Pammy sacked. She had got to know Martha very well.

  ‘She’s great, Nurse Tanner. Asks me every day have I seen you, like. She won’t be going back to work at St Angelus. She’s my wife now and I’m going to look after her and our baby good and proper.’

  ‘You can tell her I heard the consultant telling Sister Antrobus that he’s looking forward to delivering your baby himself. We all have to look after each other at St Angelus, don’t we, Jake?’

  Jake failed to answer, but the sober nod he gave Pammy made it clear that he would never talk about Martha’s days on ward two. Jake and Martha had a future to look forward to. Their baby was on its way. The past was in the past. He would never speak of it again and neither would Martha.

  Jake slid the final wooden tray back on to the runners and, lighting up a cigarette, jumped into the driver’s seat, slipped the van into gear and, with no sign of another vehicle on the roads, turned a perfect circle and headed back towards St Angelus. He spotted the dog in his rear-view mirror, running down the Lovely Lane steps and heading towards the park with the packet of bacon he had just delivered hanging from its mouth and Beth in hot pursuit. Jake began to laugh. Blowing out his smoke, he said out loud, ‘You look like trouble, you scraggy dog,’ and, dropping a gear, he made his way up the steep road to the rear gate of the hospital.

  9

&nbs
p; The overnight snow soon melted. Stan had been half right. The Gulf Stream had warmed Liverpool back into life before Mrs McGuffy, who had sat up half the night darning gloves in order that her children could spend more than five minutes outdoors at any one time, had finished. But the cold and the damp had taken their toll. And the smog, which had preceded the snow and lasted for three whole days and nights, had been filled with flecks of soot and wrought its own particular havoc. The wards in St Angelus had quickly filled with the weak and elderly.

  ‘Here’s my sputum pot, Nurse Harper. Will you take it for me?’ Mr Trimble called to Beth as she and the other nurses assembled by the long, polished, central ward table to await Sister’s arrival and find out who would be sent for the first coffee break.

  Backs and beds trolleys had been dismantled. The tubs of zinc and castor-oil cream, and the wads of gauze and surgical spirit, used for the treatment of bed sores, were neatly lined up, and the leftover sheets and draw sheets had been returned to the linen cupboard ready for the next round of bed-making. Dressings trolleys had been wiped down and sterilized with Dettol. Rubbish and dirty-laundry baskets had been left by the ward doors for the porter’s lads to collect, and from the dirty sluice room came the clatter and clang of the enamel bedpans as they were cleaned and placed on the hot pipes to dry.

  Beth had stopped for the first time that morning and was examining her own feet. Her black lisle stockings had got soaked all the way up to the middle of her calves as she’d walked through the wet slush from Lovely Lane to the hospital. Having finished the morning duties, she now saw that the dark black stain had faded and she could almost feel her toes again. She was ready for her coffee. It was always the same: following the morning bed round, she and the others felt slightly weak and sick. They needed sustenance after having lifted and shifted big dockers with muscles the size of a crane up and down and in and out of bed. Male medical was hard work and saw the end of many a nursing career with the near breaking of a slender seven-stone back.

  ‘Of, course, Mr Trimble.’ Beth walked swiftly across the ward to his bed with a bright smile.

  ‘Ah, you’re a good’un, Nurse Harper. The sight of it sitting on me locker makes the wife sick. She told me if it’s still there this afternoon when she visits, she’s not coming any more until I’m discharged. Got a bit of a sensitive stomach, she has. It makes her feel a bit queasy.’

  Mr Trimble’s expression was forlorn and anxious. Beth smiled as she attempted to reassure him. ‘Well, not everyone has stomachs of steel like we nurses do. We are immune to queasiness. We wouldn’t be able to do this job if we weren’t.’

  The new young Irish probationer, Bridget Moran, hurried to Beth’s side. ‘Nurse Harper, the man in bed sixteen wants to use the bedpan, but we’ve only just cleared them away and Sister said the next round would be at twelve now, before lunches.’

  Beth looked down the ward towards bed sixteen. The patient weighed at least fifteen stone. Nurse Moran looked as though she would struggle to come in at six and a half. ‘Well, if he’s desperate, he has to have one. And believe me, you’d rather he did than deal with the consequences.’

  Nurse Moran looked terrified. Beth smiled. Sister Crawford was in charge of ward seven. She had worked at St Angelus for all of her life. She was strict but fair and kind, and she was a sister most nurses looked forward to working with. Ward seven was one of the toughest wards in the hospital and Sister Crawford knew it. She also knew that happy nurses made a happy ward and that on a happy ward the bells rang less often and the patients recovered sooner. She was known as one of the nicer sisters and the only sister that Matron regarded as an equal. Yet the young probationer was terrified of her. God help her when she gets to meet Sister Antrobus on casualty, thought Beth.

  Bridget was the youngest of six sisters and the first to be accepted on to the State Registered Nurse training course at St Angelus. Her five older sisters were all State Enrolled and lived and worked in different parts of the country. Coming from Mayo in the west of Ireland, she was a beneficiary of Emily Haycock’s determination that no nurse would be discriminated against as a result of where she came from. If a young woman could pass the entrance exam and the interview process, if she could demonstrate both compassion and competence in equal measure, then as far as Sister Haycock was concerned, it was of no relevance where the potential nurse had been born and to whom. The memory of the way Mr Scriven had tried to block the appointment of Nurse Tanner just because she came from Arthur Street still stung. Emily was keen to avoid this ever happening again and wanted to introduce a policy of removing applicants’ addresses from the forms before they got as far as the board.

  Standing in front of Beth on her first day on the wards, Bridget was frozen with fear. She had worked so hard during the bedpan round that her scalp prickled. Her shoulder-length dark hair was tied back into a ponytail and her bright and watery pale blue eyes were filled with apprehension as she waited for Beth to reply.

  ‘Wheel a commode to him,’ said Beth. ‘He’s on bed rest, but he can manage the commode. He only came in last night and they have yet to decide what his problem is. Can you manage that on your own, do you think? It will be easy, just make sure you put one hand under his arm and guide him so that he doesn’t fall. He might be a bit giddy once he’s upright, if he hasn’t been on his feet for a while.’

  Bridget blinked. ‘A commode?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, you know what that is, don’t you, Nurse Moran?’

  This probationer reminded Beth of Dana, only with Dana there was someone driving when you looked into her eyes. This poor girl looked vacant and terrified. Beth had already heard that she was the cleverest girl in PTS on paper but that she had only just scraped through her practicals and that was thanks to all the help she’d got from Sister Ryan. Everyone knew that Sister Haycock was especially keen on the bright ones. She was always saying how the practical skills could be taught but that a probationer either came ready with intelligence or they didn’t. Looking at Nurse Moran now, Beth wasn’t so sure Sister Haycock had got that right.

  ‘Err, yes, I do know what a commode is, Nurse Harper. ’Tis that big heavy chair on wheels, is that right?’

  Beth almost laughed out loud. ‘Yes, it is. And if you lift up the wooden lid, there is a bedpan concealed underneath.’ She spoke slowly and carefully. It seemed as though Nurse Moran might have trouble understanding what she was saying.

  ‘Sure, and I sit him on the seat with the lid up?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Beth, becoming exasperated. ‘Because if you don’t, there will be one almighty mess to clear up and Sister Crawford will have you for her morning break.’

  Bridget looked as though she was about to burst into tears and scuttled away with a worried frown. Beth went from feeling irritated to feeling sorry for her. Though she was only in her second year, Beth’s PTS days already felt like light years ago. Those first three months had been the worst. On a first placement a probationer barely saw the outside of the sluice room and spent almost the entire time with bedpans – giving them out, clearing them away and scrubbing them up. All to be ready to start again two hours later.

  Beth watched Bridget as she headed back towards the sluice room, her head down, scurrying along, studying her shoes as she went. She probably feels very hard done by, thought Beth. I know I did.

  She turned her attention back to Mr Trimble. She had noticed his wife during visiting hours on a previous occasion and had watched as Mr Trimble had slipped his pot off the locker and placed it under his pale green counterpane. He was a recovering TB patient. After eighteen long months in isolation, he’d been transferred to the main medical ward following a series of consecutive TB-free sputum samples. As was the routine, he would have a sample a week taken until he was strong enough to return home. Although there was no longer any blood in his sputum, former TB patients were left with a persistent cough.

  ‘I will take this pot to the dirty sluice room for you and bring you back a clean one.
Then just before visiting, I can do the same and you can keep the clean pot under your covers, just in case you need it, until visiting is over. How is that for a plan?’

  Mr Trimble looked weak with relief. ‘Oh, thank you, Nurse Harper. I don’t like to make the wife feel ill when she comes. Before I came into the hospital, if I felt a bout of the coughing coming on, I would nip to the outhouse where she couldn’t hear me coughing up. I spent more time in the outhouse than I did indoors. She can’t help it. Makes her sick, it does.’

  ‘No wonder you’ve ended up with a nasty chest infection then, Mr Trimble. What with the smog and the damp and you living right on the river.’

  ‘I know, Nurse, I know. But what can I do?’

  ‘Nurse Harper.’ Sister Crawford was now out of her office and walking up the ward towards her. Beth could tell she was in the mood for giving orders. ‘Nurses!’ she said, louder than was usual, and clapped her hands together. ‘Right, we are fairly quiet on here today following our discharges yesterday, but tomorrow we have five admissions and four on the operating list, so let’s have a few hours’ scrubbing with our good friend Dettol. Diluted to ten parts of warm water, of course, will we now?’

  She surveyed her nurses with enthusiasm.

  ‘The domestics will see to the flowers and vases that have been left by the patients who’ve been discharged. They will clean the windowsills and wash down the lower paintwork on the walls, up to bed ten today. I will have two nurses on bed frames and lockers, two on the ward furniture and two making sure we have enough dressings sterilized in the drums ready for the post-ops tomorrow. Ah, Nurse Harper, I almost forgot.’ Sister Crawford extracted a small tube from her pocket and held it out to Beth. ‘Doctor has asked for a sample from Mr Trimble’s sputum to be taken down to the pathology lab for culture and analysis. Can you see to that for me? Label this tube and take it down yourself before you clean the pot out.’

  Beth took the glass tube from Sister. It was sealed with a rubber bung and had a blank label on the side. ‘Yes, Sister. Of course, Sister,’ she said.