The man looked down at her and passed his tongue over his lips, then took her proffered hand. ‘You’ll be from the hospital,’ he said in an uncertain voice. ‘The wife could do without the added pressure,’ he added, when Alice confirmed her occupation. ‘We do what we can, but you can’t expect us to give what we don’t have.’
He followed her to the living room, but when his wife caught sight of him she shooed him away with her hand. ‘I thought you were at the market, George? Get going will yer, there’s things we need.’ Mr Redbourne pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one into his mouth using his teeth, then, without another word, slipped out of the house.
When the front door clicked to a close, Alice entered the room he had just vacated. The back parlour was a dark room with a single bed in the centre, the wooden base held up by a pile of bricks at each corner. There was a bite to the air, the room colder than the street outside. A dozen shirts hung from a rope stretched diagonally across it, one end caught between the slightly open window and the other wedged between the top of a Welsh dresser and the wall.
Alice closed the door and peered into the nearby kitchen. Through the small window at the end of the room, a partly stone-flagged backyard was visible, a patch of bare earth beyond. An old lean-to housing the lavatory blocked what little winter light there was from entering the kitchen. There was no sign of running water; most working-class families were still filling buckets from a pump at the end of their street. The approaching twilight bathed the small area in shadows, the air fermenting with the smell of old dinners. With so many people living in the house the room was likely a place of much activity but, aside from a few black beetles scurrying across the floor and over the draining board, the overriding air was one of long abandonment.
The feeling of bleakness prevailed as the almoner made her way up the stairs. The rising wind caused a stray branch to tap rhythmically at the panes of the landing window, almost as if in warning.
It was a degree or two warmer upstairs than the kitchen had been but Alice shivered nonetheless as she ventured into the first bedroom. Bare, chipped floorboards bowed towards the middle of the room, the undulating surface and the sour tinge in the air adding to the general sense of unease.
Nothing stood out as being out of place. The bed, presumably belonging to Mr and Mrs Redbourne, stood low to the floor. Covered with a tatty, slightly stained tufted counterpane, it sagged drunkenly, as if in sympathy with the floor. Droopy curtains hung half-closed at the windows and an old leather suitcase stood up on end in front of a dressing table of dark wood, perhaps as a makeshift stool.
Back in the hall, another staircase wound itself over the first, leading to the second floor. Notes in the file showed that Mrs Redbourne had been specifically questioned about the empty rooms upstairs by the Head Almoner, Bess Campbell, who suspected that they may have been sub-let. Mrs Redbourne claimed that the space was uninhabitable due to damp walls and unstable floorboards, but the almoners had visited families who had carved living spaces into stables and coal bunkers; a loft space, however unsafe, would have been appealing enough to command at least a few shillings in rent from a desperate family.
Foreign voices and a clattering of footsteps drifted down through the floorboards, followed by a loudly slammed door. The window in the hall rattled in protest. Alice turned and stared at the cracked ceiling before moving further along the hall to a much smaller room.
Here, the entire floor was hidden by a horsehair mattress and an assortment of fraying blankets and clothes. In the twenty-six years since the first almoner was appointed in 1895, much intelligence had been gathered about the sort of secrets that could lay buried within families. As seekers of truth, the almoners knew that sometimes the sinister could be masked by a cloak of ordinariness. It was one of the reasons they were told not to hurry their home inspections, but to take their time, so that the hidden might somehow reveal itself.
Alice stood quietly in the doorway, running her eyes around the room. It was only at the sound of purposeful strides on the stairs that she finally turned around.
The face of Mrs Redbourne’s eldest daughter rose over the top of the banisters. The rustle of linen as the hem of Charlotte’s skirt brushed the stair beneath her feet seemed to whisper something other than her arrival. In the light of the upstairs hall, the shadows under the girl’s eyes became apparent, her cheeks speckled with a deep scarlet flush.
The almoner didn’t say anything; probably hoping not to attract attention from other family members. Instead, she took a step closer to the young woman and gave a reassuring smile. In that fleeting moment, the teenager’s desperation became evident.
After a wild glance behind her, Charlotte bit her bottom lip and then opened her mouth to speak. When no words came, Alice frowned and whispered: ‘Charlotte, are you alright?’
‘F-fine,’ the teenager stammered, the word at odds with her countenance. ‘But I-I think you should know –’ She stopped, then burst into tears. Alice’s fingers curled towards her palms, as if trying to encourage her to speak. ‘W-what I mean is, I should have said something sooner, but it’s too late now and …’, she faltered, her choked whispers stilted by the click of a door latch above.
Alice looked up. A middle-aged bespectacled gentleman wearing a long overcoat descended the stairs, a scarf knotted under his bearded chin. Charlotte whirled around and then scurried away, her long skirt fanning out behind her.
‘Good day, Madam,’ the man said in a heavy accented voice. Alice nodded and waited in the hall as the man traced Charlotte’s footsteps downstairs. The almoner’s expression was serious. As soon as she had crossed the threshold of the Redbourne’s home, something had struck a false note.
By the time she left, she later recorded in her case notes, it appeared as if something truly disturbing were about to unfold.
Chapter Two
The out-patient department, which annually receives over 40,000 cases, is at present conducted in the basement, which is ill-lighted and insufficient in accommodation … The hospital is situated in one of the poorest and most crowded districts of London …
(The Illustrated London News, 1906)
It was still dark when Alice woke two days later, on Monday, 2 January. Three years into the future, in 1925, the live-in staff of the Royal Free would move to purpose-built accommodation on Cubitt Street. The bedrooms of the Alfred Langton Home for Nurses were clean and comfortable, according to the Nursing Mirror, each one having ‘a fitted-in wardrobe, dressing table and chest of drawers combined. Cold water laid on at the basin and a can for hot water, and a pretty rug by the bed … everything has been done for the convenience and comfort of the nurses’.
As things were, the nurses managed as best they could in the small draughty rooms of the Helena Building at the rear of the main hospital on Gray’s Inn Road, where the former barracks of the Light Horse Volunteers had once stood. Huddled beneath the bedclothes, they would summon up the willpower and then dash over to the sink, the flagstone floor chilling their feet.
Alice’s breath fogged the air as she dressed hurriedly in a high-necked white blouse, a grey woollen skirt that skimmed her ankles and a dark cloche hat pulled down low over her brow. After checking her appearance in the mirror she left her room and made for the main hospital, where the stairs leading to her basement office were located. Outside, a brisk wind propelled young nurses along as they ventured over to begin their shifts, their dresses billowing around their calves. The skirts of their predecessors a decade earlier, overlong on the orders of Matron so that ankles were not displayed when bending over to attend to patients, swept fallen leaves along the ground as they went.
Just before the heavy oak doors leading to the hospital, Alice turned at the sound of her name being called from further along the road, where a small gathering was beginning to disperse. In among the loosening clot of damp coats and umbrellas was hospital mortician Sidney Mullins. One of the tools of his trade – a sheet of thick white cot
ton – lay at his feet, a twisted leg creeping out at the side.
Sidney, a fifty-year-old Yorkshire man with a florid complexion and a bald crown, save for a few long hairs flapping across his forehead, often strayed to the almoners’ office for a sweet cup of tea and a reprieve from his uncommunicative companions in the mortuary. Standing outside a grand building of sandstone and arches of red brick, he beckoned Alice with a wave of his cap then stood back on the pavement, rubbing his chin and staring up at one of the towers looming above him.
Shouts of unseen children filled the air as Alice took slow steps towards her colleague. She dodged a teenager riding a bicycle at speed on the way, and a puddle thick with brown sludge. ‘What is it, Sidney?’ Her eyes fell to the bulky sheet between them, from which she kept a respectful distance away.
The mortician pulled a face. ‘Forty-summat gent fell from t’roof first thing this morning,’ he said, scratching his belly. A flock of black-gowned barristers swept past them, their destination perhaps their courtyard chambers, or one of the gentlemen’s clubs nearby that were popular retreats for upper-middle-class men.
‘Oh no, how terribly sad,’ Alice said.
‘A sorry situation, I’ll give you that,’ Sidney said in his broad country accent. He rubbed his pink head and frowned up at the building. ‘But I just can’t make head nor tail of it.’
Alice grimaced. ‘Desperate times for some, Sidney. It’s why we do what we do, isn’t it?’
The mortician pulled his cap back on and looked at her. ‘Aye, happen it is. But I still can’t work it out.’
‘What?’
‘Well, how can a person fall from all t’way up there and still manage to land in this sheet?’
Alice gave a slow blink and shook her head at him. ‘Sometimes, Sidney …’
He grinned. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that, lass. You’ve gotta laugh, or else t’pavements’d be full with all of us spread-eagled over them.’
Sidney recounted the exchange inside the basement half an hour later, Frank banging his barrelled chest and chuckling into his pipe nearby. The smell of smoke, damp wool and dusty shelves smouldered together in an atmosphere that would likely asphyxiate a twenty-first-century visitor, though none of its occupants seemed to mind the fug. ‘Never was a man more suited to his job than you, Sid,’ Frank said, gasping. ‘You were born for it, man. What do you say, Alex?’
Alexander Hargreaves, philanthropist, local magistrate and chief fundraiser for the hospital, was a tall, highly polished individual, from his Brilliantine-smoothed hair and immaculate tweed suit all the way down to his shiny shoes. A slim man in his late thirties, his well-groomed eyebrows arched over eyes of light grey. In the fashion of the day, an equally distinguished, narrow moustache framed his thin lips. There was a pause before he answered. ‘I prefer “Alexander”, as well you know, Frank,’ he said, without looking up from the file on his desk. ‘In point of fact,’ he added in a tone that was liquid and smooth after years of delivering speeches after dinner parties, ‘I don’t happen to think there’s anything remotely amusing about mocking the dead.’
The walls behind Alexander’s desk were lined with letters thanking him for his fundraising efforts, as well as certificates testifying to the considerable funds he had donated to various voluntary hospitals over the years. Framed monochrome photographs of himself posing beside the equipment he had managed to procure, developed in his own personal darkroom, were displayed alongside them.
Sidney’s podgy features crumpled in an expression of genuine hurt. Years in the mortuary had twisted his once gentle humour out of shape until it was dark, wry and, to some, wildly offensive, but his respect for the gate-keeping role he played between this life and the grave never wavered. ‘Right,’ he said a little forlornly, clapping his hands on his podgy knees. ‘I reckon I’d best get back to the knacker’s yard.’
Alexander’s nostrils flared. Frank arched his unkempt brows. ‘Come on, Alex, where’s your sense of humour?’
‘Lying dormant for the time being,’ came Alexander’s reply. ‘To re-emerge whenever someone manages to display some wit.’
Stocky office typist Winnie Bertram blew her nose into a hanky and tucked it back into the handbag that rarely left her lap. ‘God rest his soul,’ she said, her reedy, wavering voice momentarily cutting through the office banter.
Alexander glanced up from his work. ‘Are you coping, Winnie?’
Winnie adjusted the black silk shawl she was wearing around her shoulders, the one she had worn religiously since Queen Victoria had been interred next to Prince Albert in Windsor Great Park more than two decades earlier. ‘Not particularly, dear, no,’ she said, straightening her spectacles with a mottled hand.
Winnie could be relied upon to mourn every loss the hospital notched up, even if the first she had heard of the patient was after they’d departed. She too was in the ideal job in that regard, especially with Sidney keeping her abreast of every last gasp, choke and coronary going on above them.
‘You look tired,’ Alexander pressed gently. ‘Perhaps you should consider spending the day at home?’
Winnie patted down her short grey hair and gave Alexander a wan smile. ‘I’ve been tired since 1890, dear. Don’t worry about me, I’ll soldier on.’
Alice rolled her eyes. Witnessing the aftermath of war had left her with a sense of urgency to improve the lives of society’s most unfortunate, as well as a lack of patience for those with a tendency to complain about trifling issues.
She herself recognised her good fortune, having enjoyed a largely happy childhood. Quick intuition made her the ideal student and as she grew older, she delighted in the new opportunities becoming available to women. Influenced by her parents, who were both pacifists and active peace campaigners, Alice became aware of society’s ills at an early age. She and her elder brother, Frederick, sat quietly in the corner of the sofa during the meetings of the National Peace Council – a body coordinating smaller groups dedicated to furthering the cause of non-violent opposition across Britain – that took place in the living room of their Clapham home.
In later years Alice became brave enough to interject, shaping the skills of negotiation and the moral compass that were to guide her as she tended to wounded soldiers on the battlefield, the ear-splitting crack of shell-fire in the distance, plumes of gas looming high above her head.
‘But I don’t understand why they had to invade!’ thirteen-year-old Alice had burst out passionately, in response to an argument about the Austro-Hungarian annexing of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Her father glanced at her tenderly. ‘The Austrians are flexing their muscles, love. They want to ensure their empire is taken seriously. We’ll see where their flag-waving nationalism gets them soon enough, I suspect.’
‘War, in the Balkans and beyond, you mark my words,’ one of the men, a Quaker, answered hotly, causing a great deal of muttering and concern on the faces of those present.
A hiss of steam from the old boiler caught everyone’s attention. In the lull that followed, Alice asked Frank if he was ready to join her in outpatients. She was scheduled to spend the day conducting assessments on some of those waiting, all the while keeping an eye out for cases of fraud. It was an information-gathering exercise, and the ideal opportunity for Frank to gain a sense of her work.
‘I’ve decided to carry on with my review of the paperwork down here this morning, dear Alice,’ Frank said, checking his pocket watch and slipping it back into his waistcoat. ‘Besides, you females are so much better with the ailing than us men.’
‘But I have juggled everything around, as you asked me to. I haven’t been through the inpatients lists yet, and I need to organise wigs and prosthetics for several patients.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Frank said. There was a hopeful glance from Alice, before he continued. ‘It will still be here when you get back.’
‘That doesn’t sound particularly fair,’ Alexander offered from the other side of the room.
‘No,’ Alice said, turning to him. ‘But then some men believe a woman’s sole purpose is to bend to their every whim. In fact, I suspect that some would prefer it if we didn’t exist at all.’
‘Ha! Not true, if indeed the lady is referring to me,’ Frank said. He stuck out the tip of his tongue, removed a flake of tobacco and planted it back in his pipe. ‘I love the female of the species. Fascinating creatures.’
Alice grimaced, grabbed her notepad and pen, and left the office with a cold glance towards her colleague.
When the first almoner, Mary Stewart, took up her post at the Royal Free in 1895, for which she was paid a modest annual salary of £125, she was allocated a small corner of the outpatients’ department to work from. Visitors to her ‘office’ perched themselves on the edge of a radiator in the dark, airless space, a thin screen partitioning them from the view of the throng of patients waiting to be seen.
Six years later and a few miles away to the south, the first female almoner of St George’s Hospital, Edith Mudd, was to carry out her duties from a screened-off area in the recovery room next to the operating theatre. She got on with the job conscientiously, doing her best to concentrate despite the activity across the room as patients came round after anaesthesia. Since the almoners were used to moving around between London hospitals to cover each other’s shifts and gain wider experience, they quickly learned to adapt to unusual working environments; one of Edith Mudd’s successors at St George’s managed to run a fully functioning almoners’ office from one of the hospital’s bathrooms.
It was in a similarly small space known as the watching room that Alice seated herself in the outpatients department; somewhere from which she could keep an eye on the comings and goings with a degree of discretion. It was just before 9 a.m. but already there were few gaps on the wooden benches that were arranged in tight rows across the large atrium. Incessant rain pelted the small recessed windows of the double doors at the entrance to the building, the wind penetrating the gap beneath the doors with a ferocious whistle.
Letters from Alice Page 3