Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that,’ Adele said. ‘Please don’t ask me questions as I can’t answer them. I just have to go.’

  ‘Has this got anything to do with the man who called to see you yesterday?’

  Adele’s heart sank. Matron always knew everything that happened in both the hospital and the nurses’ home, but she’d hoped that visit wouldn’t have been noted.

  ‘Yes, but I can’t say anything more,’ she said. ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘Talbot, you have the makings of an excellent nurse, and I know you love it. I would hate to see you throw that away after nearly two years’ training.’

  ‘I don’t want to stop nursing,’ Adele said. ‘I just can’t do it here any more. Would it be possible for me to be transferred to another hospital?’

  Matron frowned and peered at Adele over her glasses. ‘That might be possible, but I couldn’t arrange it without knowing the reason behind it. I can see you are very troubled, and I don’t believe you are the kind of girl to get into anything criminal. So confide in me, Talbot, it will not go beyond this room.’

  Adele knew Matron to be an honourable woman. She might be stern and very hard on nurses who she felt let the nursing profession down, but she was fair-minded and often surprisingly kind. Without her help, Adele knew she wouldn’t stand a chance of finishing her training in another hospital. Perhaps she had to tell her the truth.

  ‘The man who came yesterday told me he was my father,’ she said. ‘He’s also the father of Michael, the airman I am engaged to.’

  Even as she said it, Adele still couldn’t really believe something like this could happen to her. Even Matron looked thunderstruck.

  Adele explained the bare bones of how this had come about, and said that of course she had to stop seeing Michael. She began to cry at that point and Matron came round her desk and patted her shoulder.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘That is an impossible situation to be in. I take it you are afraid that as Michael knows nothing of it he will keep coming here to see you?’

  Adele nodded. ‘I can’t see him, I’d end up telling him and so it’s best for everyone that I just disappear.’

  Matron sat down at her desk again. She didn’t speak for a while and appeared deep in thought.

  ‘It would be very cruel to drop the young man without any explanation,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘And I don’t agree with his father’s opinion that it would be worse for him if he knew the truth. And what about your grandmother? Were you intending to light off without telling her where you are too?’

  ‘I would have to for a while,’ Adele said, wringing her hands together. ‘She’s the first person Michael would go to once he found I’d gone from here.’

  ‘Adele, none of this is your fault,’ Matron said, the use of the Christian name indicating she was entirely sympathetic. ‘I am appalled that Michael’s father should make you and those you love suffer so grievously while he gets off scot-free.’

  ‘But it would hurt so many more people if the truth came out,’ Adele insisted. ‘Michael’s mother, his brother and sister. And what would people say about me and my mother? It really is better if no one knows. I’ve thought about it all night and I know I’m right.’

  ‘But your grandmother will be so worried about you. Don’t put her through that agony,’ Matron said.

  ‘I can write a letter to her,’ Adele said desperately. ‘Say I’ve had second thoughts about Michael and I’ve gone away until he gets over it. I can keep sending her notes so she knows I’m all right.’

  ‘Will Michael get a letter too?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll say that I’ve realized he wasn’t right for me.’

  Matron sighed deeply and shook her head despairingly. ‘It seems all wrong to me,’ she said. ‘But I can see that it wouldn’t be practical to continue in this hospital under the circumstances. I do have a very good friend who is Matron at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, she is desperate for good nurses too. I could telephone her and see if she’ll have you.’

  ‘Oh thank you, Matron,’ Adele said gratefully, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘But you won’t tell her all this, will you?’

  ‘Of course not, we are good enough friends for her to trust my judgement without explanations. Go back to your room now, I’ll come and see you later once I’ve spoken to her.’

  ‘I need to go today,’ Adele said, sniffing back her tears.

  Matron nodded. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll get someone to bring up some breakfast to your room. You must eat, even if you don’t feel like it.’

  At three that same afternoon Adele left the nurses’ home with her suitcase and headed for Hastings station. Matron had fixed it with the London Hospital, and she had also promised that if Michael telephoned or called she would speak to him personally and say that Adele had left for personal reasons. The other nurses would be told the same story.

  Adele had written to both Michael and her grandmother and she dropped the two letters in the first post box she came to. They were so difficult to write – she knew she couldn’t allow them to think she was distraught, but neither could she sound uncaring about their feelings. To Michael she could only say that she had made a mistake, that she realized he wasn’t right for her, or she for him. That she was going to another town to live and work, and that he must forget her.

  She said much the same about Michael to her grandmother, but explained how she couldn’t reveal where she was going until he had stopped trying to find her. She implored her not to worry, and that she would send other notes so she would know she was safe. She told her she loved her, and that all her best memories were of living with her on the marsh. Finally she said Honour mustn’t think that this was history repeating itself, she was not like Rose and she’d be in touch soon.

  As the train chugged out of the station Adele’s eyes brimmed with tears again as she remembered the last time she had travelled to London. She had been so happy and excited that day, hardly able to sit still with it. But there would be no Michael to meet her at Charing Cross this time, no warm hug to greet her, no words of love. Her engagement ring was still on the chain around her neck, for it was against the hospital rules to wear a ring on duty. She knew she ought to have sent it back to him, but she needed the small comfort of it lying there warm between her breasts.

  She was glad she was going somewhere horrible and overcrowded like Whitechapel. She believed that without the salt-tinged wind coming off the sea, no wide open spaces, grass, flowers and trees, she could forget.

  Later she saw a plane in the sky. The pilot was practising acrobatics. He looped the loop, then swept down low and rose up again steeply. She saw the black and white under the wings and knew it was a Spitfire. It could well be Michael or someone else from his squadron, and she offered up a little prayer that he would forget her quickly, and that he’d stay safe when war came.

  The only prayer she said for herself was to ask that she’d be a good nurse. She didn’t believe she deserved happiness, or even safety.

  Chapter Nineteen

  September 1939

  ‘Come and look at these little lambs being evacuated!’ Staff Nurse Wilkins exclaimed from her position at the window of Women’s Surgical. ‘Some of them are so tiny.’

  Adele and Joan Marlin joined Wilkins at the window, to see a long crocodile of children trudging along Whitechapel Road towards the station. Each one was carrying either a small case or bundle in their hands and a gas mask box slung across their chests. They all had a large label pinned to them, presumably marked with their name and age, and they were being shepherded by around half a dozen women who were most likely teachers.

  ‘Poor loves, leaving their mums,’ Joan said with an emotional break in her voice. ‘Our Mickey and Janet are going today too. Mum was in a terrible state last night. She don’t believe other people can be kind to kids who aren’t their own.’

  ‘It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to some of them,’ Adele
said thoughtfully, remembering how it was for her when she got to her grandmother’s. ‘They’ll be safe from any bombs and see a new way of life, find out about nature, birds, cows and sheep. And people can be really kind to kids in emergencies.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse than coming face to face with a cow,’ Joan said with a sniff. She was a gregarious redhead from Bow, with freckles across her nose. The daughter of a docker and the eldest of seven children, she had become Adele’s closest friend since coming to Whitechapel. Without Joan’s ribald sense of humour, kind heart and jollity, Adele knew she couldn’t have coped with the harshness of East End life.

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible that we’re about to go to war,’ Staff Nurse Wilkins said, looking up at the cloudless sky. ‘I mean, the sun’s shining, everyone’s carrying on working, getting on buses and trains, even those kids think they’re off on a big adventure. I keep expecting that it’s all a mistake, that a week from now we’ll see them take all those wretched sandbags away, tear down the blackouts and pull the strips off the windows. I really can’t believe all our men are standing ready to kill people.’

  Wilkins was very fond of questioning the meaning of life. She was twenty-five, skinny, mousy-haired and plain as a pike-staff, but a dedicated nurse and deeply religious. As a staff nurse she didn’t have to live in the nurses’ home, and a couple of months earlier she had taken Adele home with her for supper. As the senior nurse was so well spoken and educated Adele had expected her home to be a nice one. It had been something of a shock to be taken into a tiny, decaying terraced house in Bethnal Green. It was scrupulously clean, but devoid of any comforts. No rugs on the floor, only shabby oil cloth, no pictures, ornaments or even a wireless. A table and chairs, a sideboard, and beds upstairs, that was all. And the grace they said before a meagre supper of cold meat and potatoes lasted what seemed like ten minutes. Wilkins’ parents and the two other daughters who still lived at home were all Evangelists, and they’d wasted no time in trying to get Adele to join them in what Joan laughingly called ‘Holy Rollering’.

  Adele’s first impression of the East End had been complete horror. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen the effects of poverty and unemployment, for parts of Hastings and Rye too were little more than slums. At worst she had expected it to be how she remembered Euston and King’s Cross.

  But the East End made King’s Cross seem like paradise. Street after street of mean little houses, and a casual glance through open doors or broken windows revealed that the inhabitants owned little more than they stood up in. Ragged children with pinched, pale faces played listlessly in filthy alleys. Women with gaunt faces and hollow eyes, often with a baby in their arms, scoured the gutters as the markets closed for anything edible. Adele saw drunks and prostitutes, old soldiers with missing limbs, beggars and cripples sleeping wherever they could find a little shelter. And everywhere stank, a potent mixture of human and animal waste, rot, unwashed bodies and stale beer.

  Day after day in the hospital she saw the end results of slum living. Severely malnourished children, women worn out with child-bearing, hideous wounds from drunken fights, lice, tuberculosis, rickets, and all manner of other complaints caused by poor diet, overcrowding and lack of basic hygiene.

  Yet she soon came to see that however deprived these people were, they had spirit. They helped one another, were generous with what little they had, laughed at adversity, and they were colourful even if their surroundings were so dismal.

  The pain of losing Michael was still almost as sharp as when she left Hastings, but Adele didn’t think she could wallow in self-pity when all around her were such poverty and need. It was difficult not to laugh along with people who were so unfailingly optimistic and jolly. Everyone knew that London would be Germany’s main target for bombs when the war began, yet there was no panic, no desperate fleeing the city.

  When thoughts of Michael threatened to engulf her, Adele would look at the old man who stood outside the main door of the hospital selling newspapers. He was twisted and bent with rheumatism, clearly in pain, but he greeted everyone jovially and stood out there in all weathers, always with a smile on his face.

  She vowed to be like him. No one liked a misery, and she knew now that most people had some problem in their lives. So she forced herself to smile, talked to people and found that it eventually became second nature. If she cried herself to sleep most nights, nobody but she knew.

  It might not have been so bad if she’d only known how Michael and her grandmother had reacted to those letters she sent them. She had imagined all kinds of terrible things, like Michael not coming out of a dive in his plane purposely, or her grandmother slipping into the river and drowning. She went on sending a little card to her grandmother every week, always walking miles from Whitechapel to post it, so the postmark wouldn’t give away where she was. Yet for all she knew, those cards could be piled up inside the door of Curlew Cottage, unseen and unread.

  But then on her twentieth birthday in July she got a card from her grandmother. She couldn’t believe it when she saw the familiar handwriting. How on earth had a woman who never went further than Rye found out where she was?

  ‘I took the bus into Hastings and went to the Buchanan and demanded that the Matron told me where you’d gone. I always felt she’d had a hand in it,’ Honour wrote in the accompanying letter.

  She plays her cards close to her chest that one! But I eventually convinced her that I didn’t want to know the reasons why, only an address. I will not of course pass it on to Michael should he call again. The poor boy came many times in the first few weeks, he flew over the cottage dozens of times too, always dipping his wing so I knew it was him. But I don’t think he will call again now. He might not be over it, and as deeply puzzled as I am, but he has great dignity.

  I thought you were cruel at first, but as spring came and I remembered special times here with you, I came to thinking that you have no cruelty in your nature. Maybe one day you’ll be able to tell me about it. But I won’t press you, I have secrets enough of my own I wouldn’t share. And in my heart I know you didn’t do it selfishly and must have had good reason.

  I am very relieved that you stayed in nursing, for you were born for it. Write to me now, let me know my brave and caring granddaughter is, if not happy, making a new life for herself.

  As for me, I’m well enough for an old biddy of sixty. I’ve got a dog now, an ugly-looking brute I call Towzer. Someone abandoned him, but he knew the right door to come and whine at. He’s a good boy, doesn’t try to get at the chickens or rabbits, and he’s company. I’ve even got him to do a few tricks, but you will see those when you come home again.

  We cannot fool ourselves that the war will be averted now. I won’t ask that you move to a hospital in a safer place, a nurse must be where she is most needed. But don’t take risks, my girl, and keep letters coming. This will always be your home and safe haven.

  My love,

  Granny

  Adele marvelled at the cheerful and uncritical letter and cried over it too for she missed her grandmother so much and couldn’t bear the thought of the torment she must have put her through. Yet more importantly, it gave her renewed strength. If a sixty-year-old woman without a soul in the world to turn to when she was hurting could not only survive, but show unfaltering love, then a girl with youth and good health on her side should be able to put this behind her.

  ‘They’ve just painted a white cross on the bleedin’ roof,’ Joan informed Adele a little later that morning as they scrubbed down the two empty beds ready for new patients. ‘Don’t tell Staff or she’ll be thinking this place is being turned into a church and she’ll have us down on our prayer bones.’

  Adele laughed. Joan was always making jokes about Staff Nurse Wilkins’ religious fervour. ‘Let’s hope the German pilots don’t think it’s a runway and try to land on it!’ she retorted. Yet as the words came out of her mouth, so an image of Michael shot into her mind. Last Christmas Eve when he came
to the nurses’ home in Hastings, he’d been wearing a sheepskin-lined leather flying jacket. He said all the fighter boys wore them, they not only kept them warm, but they felt they would be better protection if they were shot down by enemy fire. That hadn’t meant that much to her then, but it did now. Once the war began he’d be up in the sky trying to shoot down German planes, but they might very well get him first.

  All at once she felt sick and had to run to the lavatory. She only just got there in time.

  ‘What’s up?’ Joan said from behind her. ‘You were right as ninepence a minute ago. Want me to call Sister?’

  ‘No, don’t,’ Adele said weakly. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. Just go back on the ward and cover for me.’

  She pulled herself together and went back to work. She felt Joan looking at her sharply every now and then, but with twenty-four patients on the ward there was no opportunity for conversation.

  At six o’clock, however, when the night shift came on duty and Adele and Joan went back to the nurses’ home, Joan questioned her friend. ‘What was up today?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Adele said. ‘I expect it was just something I ate which didn’t agree with me.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d reckon you were up the spout,’ Joan said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Adele said.

  ‘I know something’s wrong,’ Joan said. ‘You often go all quiet and broody. It’s a bloke, ain’t it?’

  Adele gave a noncommittal shrug.

  ‘I’m not daft,’ Joan said. ‘You got transferred ’ere from the coast. No one does that without some bloody good reason.’

  Adele knew the other girl well enough to know she wouldn’t give up easily.

  ‘All right, it was a man, and talking about planes made me sick because he’s a fighter pilot. But please don’t ask me anything else, I came here to forget him.’

  ‘Fair do’s,’ Joan said. ‘But if you ever want to spill the beans, I’ll be ready wif me lug-holes pinned back.’