by James Barlow
Chapter Three
Her decision seemed less inevitable as she stood on the railway platform at Bar Quay with her parents and Tom. Even with Peggy waiting at the other, unfamiliar end of the journey, Olwen’s eagerness faded and the decision seemed foolish, even wrong. She was trembling when her mother embraced her. The train was packed with khaki, kitbags, rifles and ruddy faces who stared at her in frank admiration. She recognized that it was a sad world, frantically busy with its own destruction; she had left peace behind: the train pulled away and Olwen watched the pier and the promenade recede. It was only a small town really – just a promenade, a pattern of a few score roads, some hotels, the pier and a military camp … The train thundered along the coast, passed the lighthouse in a flash and the hills in a few minutes. Olwen was on her way to become a nurse in a sanatorium …
It took Olwen a long time to become used to the city of Birlchester. She was only seventeen and had never before seen a big city. There was so much traffic, such a noise; there was one bus service that took over an hour to circle the outer suburbs. For months Peggy had to guide her about whenever they went outside the sanatorium. The atmosphere of Birlchester was hardly suitable for convalescence: dusty and airless, it swirled papers about in the feeble breezes of summer. The rain became filth at a touch. All the buildings were dirty outside and a struggle to keep clean inside. Dead cats and dogs lay in the gutters, killed by the dozen each day. Some suburbs were devoted entirely to gas works. Smelling of gas, they were surrounded by railway yards, cranes, coal, dirty houses and, above all, dominating the horizon and destroying it, the skeletons of framework which held the huge cylinders, looking like the structure of a defeated, crashed squadron of dirigibles. The people looked pale and ill. They moved about in huge, alarming crowds, not knowing of their own illness. She understood now the sudden, appalling emotion that had perturbed Joe that afternoon on the bill. When Olwen went to church she found it empty; not believing what she saw, she went to another, then another, but found them all the same: a small choir, a few old ladies and gentlemen, and long rows of empty seats. England seemed very much a foreign country. She wrote home, telling them all about it. On her leaves she was welcomed with love to tell it all again; it was more astonishing than the war …
The nurses were older than Olwen, but no one seemed to take notice of ages, only of ranks; it was like being in an army. The matron was a small, kindly woman who treated Olwen with kindness whenever she encountered her. There were several sisters, a surprising number of them from Wales and even speaking Welsh. They were strict, but it was no worse than school. The hours were longer, but there was normally one long break during the day. At first the behaviour of the English and Irish nurses seemed dreadful. They would smoke at the slightest opportunity, their language was appalling, and their talk about patients unbelievably callous. They yawned and spat and talked about sex. At the staff dances and parties they seemed to drink quite heavily and kiss anyone. On Sundays only the Catholics would go to church. If the others were off duty they would miss breakfast and stay in bed until twelve. But after the first shock of it Olwen realized that their behaviour was not as bad as it seemed. None of them took advantage of the nearness of male patients. If they went out drinking, they at least did it together and came back together. If they swore and quarrelled, it was because they were really exhausted, and for the same reason they ate ravenously. (The English ate such terrible food: no wonder they were ill: chips and sausages, cod, macaroni, and beef as tough as leather.) In about a year Olwen’s behaviour became something similar, except that she continued to go to church. A cigarette after a long spell of duty was a sort of ritual; she could not avoid it and eventually enjoyed it. Fish and chips in a café, followed by a cinema visit and a drink in a pub, made a change from the institutional life they all led.
Olwen had never been to work before and did not protest at having to scrub floors and empty cans of sputum and blood. There were a number of operations, but not so much of the blood and mess of an ordinary hospital. Most of the patients had their lungs collapsed by air through a needle. It was months before Olwen saw anyone have a surgical operation. When she did she found the spectacle extremely brutal: the hours-long struggle of the sweating surgeon, as he cut ribs away, as terrible to witness as the patient himself. Olwen did not faint, but at the end went away to be sick. Routine work was more pleasant: temperature-taking, bed-making, preparing foods and assisting in the medical blocks. The patients had a habit of doing the things that they shouldn’t. All of them had been cajoled into coming into the sanatorium for a rest. Having arrived, every single one of them would have hallucinatory moods when he decided he was cured; they didn’t appreciate the long time a lung takes to heal; after the first cough and terror had worn off, they would claim they were being held as prisoners to keep the staff in employment. It was one of the nurses’ jobs to persuade them to stay, and while they were staying, to co-operate.
Olwen Hughes was now in the same city as the man who called himself Harrison, but it was unlikely that they would have met if Olwen had not encountered, first Stephen Taylor and, later, Mrs Dawson. If she had met Mrs Dawson before she met Taylor she would not have seen Harrison, but unfortunately it occurred the other way round.
She had been at the sanatorium about four years when Taylor arrived as a patient. He came one Monday afternoon with two other men at a time when Olwen was on day duty on a male block of the hospital. Patients always arrived on a Monday; the beds had to be emptied, one way or the other, on the previous Friday; the rooms were sterilized, and by Monday afternoon the lockers, beds and linen would be available.
The three new patients, nervous and made slightly out of breath by the weight of cases and bags, had been directed along stone corridors to the duty room in which Olwen was preparing tea trays.
‘Sit down, please,’ she said.
The three men sat on hard chairs while Olwen wrote down their names. When she considered their pulses would be as near normal as possible, she held each of three wrists in turn and afterwards took temperatures. The men were then weighed. Taylor was slightly over nine stone and had a frame which indicated that he should have been two stone heavier. The weighing completed, Olwen smiled and said, ‘I’ll show you to your chalets. When the bell rings at half past four, Mr Smith and Mr Wilde will follow the other men down to tea. Mr Taylor, you’ll have your tea in bed.’
‘Why?’
The tone was rude and Olwen looked quickly at the white face, the cheap clothes and haircut. Taylor was about twenty-seven years old, and beneath the taut pallor of illness had a good face.
‘It’s the regulation,’ she said. ‘You have a slight temperature.’
‘Bloody silly if you ask me,’ Taylor said.
*
I didn’t ask you,’ Olwen said. ‘And it’s another requirement of the hospital that patients do not use bad language – in front of the staff, anyway,’ she concluded, her smile still there.
She could see that for some reason he was absolutely furious, his pallor glowing into a deep pink. ‘I didn’t ask for a stuck-up tart for a nurse either,’ he said.
‘If you’ll follow me, ‘I’ll show you where to go,’ said Olwen, addressing all three. She was angry, but let her anger pass. He was ill; he would learn and adjust himself; if he wouldn’t, he would die; she willingly accepted a little of his unhappiness. Although he protested slightly, she made certain that it was his case she carried; it was a small demonstration that as far as she was concerned he was part of her work and she would not be altered by words. Nevertheless, when another nurse took over at five-thirty and asked about the new patients, Olwen, answering, said, ‘All right. The one in seventeen is bad-tempered.’
He certainly seemed bad-tempered. She was making his bed next morning when a doctor came round with a sister, making the usual morning visit to all the bed patients. The doctor was young and determinedly c
heerful. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re Taylor, are you? How are you?’
‘How the hell do I know?’ the patient said. ‘Aren’t you the doctor?’
The sister was so near to having palpitations that Olwen turned away to hide a smile. The doctor said, ‘I don’t know yet. You’ll be examined in half an hour.’
When he and the sister had left, Olwen said, ‘You shouldn’t talk like that. You know what he meant. He’s a good doctor and you may be glad of it.’
Taylor said in an even tone, ‘I didn’t ask to come here. They made me. I can get rid of this lot without a pack of nurses and doctors. I’m not scared of anything.’
Olwen paused before leaving. ‘Nobody said you were. Nobody’s scared of you either.’
She had no occasion to think of him until a week later, when shortly before supper a male patient approached her. ‘You know that soldier in 17?’
‘I didn’t know he was a soldier.’
‘He isn’t now,’ the patient said. ‘Anyway, he’s shut himself in. Someone said he was crying.’
Olwen had become a little hardened to patients’ behaviour; she had to in order to survive herself ; but she was startled now and even trembled slightly. ‘Crying?’ she said, and gave a brief laugh. ‘I don’t believe it. That one’s made of cement.’
She had been strolling about, talking to the bed patients and those others who were sitting about in long wicker chairs. Very few of the male patients had ever attempted to take advantage of this or any other association with the nurses. Sometimes men tried to kiss Olwen in the duty room; a few had suggested walks to the bushier parts of the grounds after dark; one or two had tried to feel her legs as she stood on a chair reaching for jars of medicine. But in the face of her cheerful refusals they soon desisted and Olwen was never frightened by this or by impertinence. Being in an institution where interruption was always likely gave her comparative safety. She talked now to several patients, and when she approached Taylor’s chalet, along the stone corridors outside it, above lawns, a rockery and more distant pine trees, she found the windows closed and the curtains drawn. Olwen went to the other side and entered from the inside corridor without knocking.
In the artificial gloom it was some time before she saw Taylor. He was lying on his side, facing away from Olwen and the remainder of his room towards the wall by his bed.
Olwen said, ‘Have you got a headache?’
Taylor seemed surprised by her presence, despite the noise of her entry. There was a pause and then he said, ‘No.’
‘You should leave the windows open, you know.’
‘I just wanted to be alone.’
‘But you are alone in here.’
‘I mean really alone where I can do my own thinking; where none of these b—-s can come in and do it for me.’ His voice became derisive. ‘Billiards. The hospital committee. I’m the men’s captain – you can rely on me. Are you dead yet? Give three reasons to convince us that you’re not. Would you like to read an improving book about an artist and his mistress? You can have free soap and writing paper ‘cause you’re ex-Service. A penny a day and you can have tea after we’ve taken your early-morning temperature. Not before, of course, because your temperature would read at 175 degrees Fahrenheit, and that would mislead the nurses, who know it’s impossible to survive under such conditions. They might have to bury you, and then you’d have died with dignity, which is the last thing they want.’ He paused, badly out of breath. ‘Sometimes they’re not real.’
Blushing in the darkness of his room because she’d never spoken such words before, Olwen said, ‘Surely that’s the reason for their existence – to lessen the reality. Can you meet reality all the time face to face?’
He was surprised by her words into a long silence. When he spoke again it was without the rancid flavour. ‘You’re a nice person, nurse,’ he said. ‘But listen. Just before we went to Poland the Flying Fortresses came over. On their way to Marienburg, I think. It was the first time we’d seen anything since 1940, although we’d heard them at night. We couldn’t believe it. They made a noise like the end of the world. We knew then that we were going to win. The blokes all came out to cheer and the Jerries were furious. We took no notice – so they shot a few. They shot my mate Bert, who’d been with me for three years. They got a Fort down and they shot them too … That is reality, not messing about with semolina pudding and blood tests.’
The quiet, offhand tone conveyed the picture better than gesticulations and hysterics could have done. Olwen felt inclined to say something trite or stupid – ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘It must have been awful.’ But instead she said calmly, ‘That was real enough, but it belongs to the 1940s, not to this year. Reality for you, Mr Taylor, is to eat a lot of food, rest with calmness and open the windows.’
‘That’s only for survival.’
‘Don’t you want to survive?’
‘Yes, but all that stuff –’
‘One thing at a time,’ said Olwen. ‘This disease is supposed to give a lunatic elation.’ She laughed. ‘You had to be different even in that.’ She drew the curtains back and opened the windows. ‘Just because you had a tough time in the Army doesn’t make you any better than those factory lads out there.’
He laughed outright and she felt extremely pleased, as if it was a personal victory over pain. ‘You’re a hell of a funny nurse,’ Taylor said. ‘You think I’m a dead loss, but you’re going to cure me because I’m on your conscience.’
‘What do you want for supper?’ Olwen asked.
‘I don’t feel hungry.’
‘Would you like a drink of beer?’
‘What are you trying to do now? Kill me?’
‘We have a bottle left over from a party. I could put it in a beaker and pretend it’s tea if Sister comes.’
‘Isn’t beer forbidden?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why should you give me any?’
Olwen couldn’t answer that, because she wasn’t sure herself. It was some association of ideas. Joe had been a soldier, but had died: Taylor was one and might die. She would prevent it. He was depressed: she would cheer him up. ‘It might give you an appetite,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ said Taylor. ‘Bring on the beer.’
Three weeks later Olwen went on leave. When she returned from Wales to the sanatorium she brought some eggs. Half a dozen of these she took to Taylor. ‘Want some eggs?’ she asked nervously.
‘I haven’t seen you for a couple of weeks.’
‘I’ve been on holiday.’
‘I see. Had a good time?’
‘It was a change.’
‘How much are the eggs?’
‘You can have them.’
‘But why give them to me?’
‘Don’t you want them?’
‘It’s very nice of –’
‘Then have them,’ said Olwen, and left hurriedly.
A few days later he said to her, ‘You’ve got small hands, nurse. Look at mine.’
His hands were not much larger when they compared them. Taylor made no attempt to hold her hand, and Olwen wondered at his remarks. ‘I’m leaving next week,’ she said.
He seemed disturbed. ‘You can’t leave yet.’
‘Why can’t I leave?’
‘Where are you going?’
‘On the women’s section.’
‘You’re not leaving altogether?’
‘Oh, no. I’ll be back,’ Olwen said. ‘It’s only for six months.’
‘I’m hoping to be out of here in six months,’ Taylor said. ‘I’ll go mad if I’m not.’
Olwen had been on the women’s section a fortnight when Peggy brought her a brown-paper parcel. ‘What goes on between you and Taylor?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘He’s asked me to give you this.’
Inside the parcel Olwen found a pair of knitted gloves. They were in Fair Isle wool, the pattern was complicated and beautiful, and, of course, the fit was perfect. ‘How is he?’ she asked.
‘Two hours up and no temperature.’ Peggy snorted. ‘Just so long as you’ve been here.’
Olwen made a point of passing through the men’s section between two and four in the afternoon, between which hours she knew Taylor would be up. He was talking to a group of men; she knew he wouldn’t wish to be interrupted, and re-turned when he was back in bed eating his tea.
He was nervous. ‘Hello.’
‘You’ve been up,’ Olwen said. ‘I heard about it. I’m glad. Thank you for those gloves.’
‘Occupational therapy,’ he said with some of the bitterness. ‘You gave me the eggs.’
‘The gloves fit perfectly.’
‘So did the eggs.’ Taylor paused and then said, ‘It was really an apology. I was very rude to you when I came.’
‘Everybody is,’ Olwen said. ‘You should hear the women. It must be a symptom.’
He smiled at her. ‘Then I’m getting better.’
She saw him occasionally during the months she was on the women’s section. Always he said, ‘Hello,’ but never went further with any talk. When she returned to duty on the male section, Olwen found that he was still there; he was up for six hours each day and looked quite well.
Olwen was preparing tea-trays one afternoon when she found that her list included Taylor’s name. She carried his tea-tray and tried to be cheerful when she entered his chalet. ‘So you’re back in bed,’ she said. ‘Is the weather too cold for you?’