In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  ‘It’s all right, Nurse. Don’t you worry about me.’ Mrs Rutherford took on the martyred air she was so adept at. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out. You come at half-past-eight as usual. I won’t keep you past ten.’

  Rose would find out tomorrow if her ploy would work.

  She enjoyed the long walk to Mrs Rutherford’s cottage at the roadside entrance to her son’s big farm. A widow, with no daughter-in-law to help her, Mrs Rutherford was lonely and in need of both social and physical aid. Rose didn’t mind listening then dismissed the chatter and let her mind wander freely on the walk home.

  Her new-found pleasure in walking for miles exploring the surrounding countryside had unleashed her creativity: she’d started writing poetry - bad poetry, she suspected, but poetry nevertheless.

  ‘The Mangakino softly slips between the silent stones …’ She whispered it to herself, emphasising the sibilants, smiling at the memory of the picnic she and George had at the stream surrounded by bush and birdsong.

  She was under no illusion about her poems. But there was something about the endless space after the city, the unbelievable greenness of the bush, the hills and pastures after living through dry summers on the Canterbury Plains and negotiating the narrow windy streets of Wellington. She didn’t remember ever being so contented since she’d passed her exams and become a fully qualified, fully employed registered nurse.

  Her marriage to George – a quiet affair at her family church St Mary’s, Merivale, with no bridal finery and no attendants because of wartime austerities – had meant an end to nursing, a decision that she embraced without question, while harbouring an unspoken desire to return.

  She had made no secret of her ambitions when she’d been going through her three-year training at Christchurch Public. All the other nurses were in awe of Matron but not Rose.

  ‘You’re too bold,’ her friend Joan told her. ‘You shouldn’t have buttonholed Matron like that in the corridor. You didn’t even have you hands behind your back.’

  ‘She’s not God, you know.’

  ‘She is around here!’ Joan tittered nervously.

  ‘Well somebody had to ask her. I’m not going to let injustice lie.’

  ‘She doesn’t even know who we are.’

  ‘She will one day.’ Rose folded her arms. ‘I’m going to work my way up the rungs on the nursing career ladder until I get to the top. One day, I’ll be Matron, you wait and see.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ Joan put her arm around Rose’s shoulder. ‘I thought you wanted to get married and have babies. You can’t do both.’

  ‘I’ll think of a way.’

  When George had finally been sent to New Caledonia with the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force to man the heavy artillery – his early enlistment long delayed after he was run over by a taxi on Lambton Quay, his broken leg refusing to mend for months – she’d been manpowered, first as the secretary to the Director of Maternal Welfare and then in charge of a ward in the Clearing Hospital on Aotea Quay. Once again, she could put on the uniform she loved: the uniform of a nurse. Once again, she could wear her hard-won red, white and blue Registered Nurse pin and perform the well-practiced tasks involved with caring for the sick and maimed. It had only been a few months since her marriage, a few short months of married life before George had been called up, meaning she’d hardly lost any time out of the nursing service; returning to it was like slipping on her soft pigskin gloves: comfortably familiar.

  For four years during the War, Rose had been seconded to various posts around Wellington, nursing both soldiers and civilians, who didn’t stop getting sick and injured just because there was a war on. But it was the Clearing Centre she never forgot. It was there that the soldiers were brought straight off the troop ships after suffering, sometimes for weeks at sea with only temporary relief and often indifferent treatment.

  The Clearing Centre was set up in a large, long white tent next to an empty warehouse on the quayside. Each time a ship docked, Rose and the other nurses would line up behind the medical officers and wait, suture trays and bandages at the ready, for the wounded to disembark. On crutches, on stretchers, sometimes walking unaided, they would arrive, overwhelming the hospital facilities, so that the gurneys would line up at the entrance, each containing a man who had once been whole, healthy, unencumbered by dressings, unbloodied by war and untroubled by the demons that seemed to haunt them night and day.

  After several months, Rose lost count of the number of ships docking, the men blurring into one another, their injuries and nightmares merging into an overriding, all-encompassing horror that she survived only by committing it to prayer nightly, waking up the next morning to face it all again.

  There was one soldier, however, who was harder to forget.

  Towards the end of a line of new arrivals, Rose pulled back the calico curtains around a cot and recoiled in shock.

  It wasn’t the extent of the man’s injuries – she’d seen much worse before. His eye had been blown out and shrapnel had embedded in his chest and upper arm. He’d been treated at a field hospital and made comfortable for the long voyage, but his dressings were badly overdue for replacement. She was busy assessing the bandages she would need to fetch for the doctor when she realised she knew him.

  ‘It’s Joe Doyle!’ She covered her mouth with her hand. It had just slipped out.

  Joe was her friend from school, from primer four. She and Joe used to play in the sandpit together, used to dig holes to Ireland and build igloos to hide from polar bears.

  The man opened his remaining eye and tried to pull his bruised mouth into a smile. ‘Rosie,’ he said in a whisper.

  Rose had been dreading this moment, of finding a familiar face in the next cot. But Joe’s face was barely familiar. It was so disfigured, he was hardly recognisable. If it hadn’t been for his bright red hair and stand-out freckles, she could easily have missed him, regarded him as just another soldier.

  He’d not stayed in the Clearing Centre long, only a few days, but while he was there, Rose spent as much time with him as she could, listening to his dreams of getting home to his mother and father in Christchurch, telling him he would be there soon. Of his war experiences, of how he came to be injured, he said nothing.

  Most of the injured troops had been shipped home from the front in North Africa where many had been since the start of the War. Few came from the Pacific, where George had been posted, which gave Rose comfort.

  Letters came from him sporadically – sometimes there would be several in a month, sometimes none. She had no idea exactly where he was when he wrote – all that information was top secret until the War was over and it was only after he returned she learned he’d been in New Caledonia. He came home once on leave – a tense and terrible time, knowing he had to return so soon – and it was another year before she saw him again, when he was invalided home in 1944.

  The War years were the only part of George’s life hidden from her. He refused to speak of it. He’d kept nothing from those years except a fine pencil drawing one of the men in his battalion had done of him – a remarkable likeness – and an official publication about the 2nd Expeditionary Force the army had sent him last year. Rose had never seen him open it and she didn’t like to read it without his permission.

  George refused to tell her what he was supposed to be recuperating from. He seemed perfectly fine, if a little quieter than before. The only indication there was anything wrong with him was his left leg, which was at least an inch shorter than his right one, a result of the complex fracture that had refused to heal for so long.

  She would never forget the evening, not long after the War had started, when Matron summonsed her to her office to tell her the news.

  ‘You’d better sit down, Nurse.’ Miss Widdowson looked her usual daunting self, unsmiling, unfailingly severe.

  Rose sat, wondering what it was she had done wrong.

  ‘I received a telephone call just now from the Matron of Wellington Hospital.�
�� She looked at Rose over the top of her glasses.

  Rose was perplexed. What did Wellington Hospital have to do with her nursing career? Was she to be offered a position there?

  ‘It seems that your fiancé, Mr George Stewart, has been admitted to hospital …’

  Rose gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘… with a fractured tibia and fibula after an encounter with a taxi on Lambton Quay. Matron said he is likely to be in traction for some time.’

  Rose could remember staring at the inkwell on Miss Widdowson’s desk, with two fountain pens plunged into matching glass jars beside it, arranged in a neat triangle at the edge of a pristine leather-bound blotter. She didn’t know what to say. If George was to be in hospital for some time, she would have to be with him. But she had only recently graduated; she wasn’t due for any leave for almost another year.

  But Matron astonished her, granted her leave of absence to go to Wellington and even asked her secretary to make a booking on the ferry for her.

  ‘You’ve always struck me as a nurse who knows her own mind. I wouldn’t want to hold you here against your will.’

  Rose had tried to thank her, but Matron wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘I know you’ll make up for it when you come back.’

  George’s fractures had taken so long to heal she’d arranged for him to return home to Christchurch with her and board with her parents while she helped him learn to walk again. Then it seemed as soon as he was mobile, he was sent off in a troop ship to the Pacific.

  Rose accepted his need to forget what had happened during the War and had instead made the most of the fact that, now he was home, their married life could at last truly begin.

  The Government had given them two railway passes to travel by train around the North Island together before the Medical Board recommended to the bank that George be ‘transferred to a country atmosphere’ to help him recuperate and Te Kuiti was the chosen location – six years ago last autumn.

  He’d seemed perfectly fine. That was, until the day when George was driving the bank manager’s car to the weekly agency day at Piopio, fifteen miles out of Te Kuiti. She’d often go along for the ride, sitting at the back of the tiny office knitting or reading while George conducted the bank’s business with the locals, many of them Maoris farming their own land in the surrounding district. George liked driving; she always felt safe when he was behind the wheel. But on this particular day, just as they were passing the turnoff to another highway, she noticed the car swerve suddenly towards the ditch. She looked across at George. His eyes were closed; he seemed to have fallen asleep. Quickly, she seized the steering wheel and turned the car back onto the road, jolting her husband awake again.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she exclaimed, frightened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rose, I don’t know what happened. I seemed to just nod off.’

  ‘While driving? In broad daylight? I don’t understand it. You had plenty of sleep last night. Is there something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  She resolved to learn to drive, just in case it occurred again.

  She’d blamed the War and subsequent dislocation on their inability to have a baby. But after they’d been settled in Te Kuiti for a few years, they both realised that something else must be wrong and had approached the Department seeking an adoption. The whole experience had been the ultimate test of their affection for each other. Rose still refused to give up hope of conceiving.

  Only last month they’d had another row about it. She’d let slip that it was the middle of her cycle, that it might be a good time to try. George had hit the roof.

  ‘By Christ, Rose,’ he’d shouted – George who hardly ever shouted, hardly ever swore – ‘how can you expect me to perform like a circus pony? When you say that, it just makes me go right off you.’

  She’d been so wound up she’d cried hot, angry tears, which had only made it worse.

  As a result, the time had eked away and another month was lost.

  She felt everyone was talking about their inability to conceive. That morning, long before the post had arrived, she’d run into Bea in town and the subject had come up – again.

  Like Rose, Bea was as yet childless, which gave them an added camaraderie, although Bea was several years younger and had not developed Rose’s quiet desperation. Their friend Sally occupied the third bank cottage in town, had a two-year-old son William and was seven months pregnant. She was finding the hot summer days hard-going.

  ‘I’m doing the shop for Sally today,’ Bea said as she and Rose met by chance outside the general store – not that running into people in a town as small as Te Kuiti was unusual. ‘She’s looking so tired, I took pity on her, and it’s no trouble.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. I should help too.’ Rose shifted her heavy basket laden with groceries into her other hand.

  ‘You do plenty, Rose. You’ve taken her so much baking. She told me she’s lucky to have friends like us. I said we were making the most of it while we could, before we’re burdened with babies too.’

  Rose laughed without enthusiasm. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I certainly hope it doesn’t happen too soon. Seeing Sally struggling like that, with William running rings around her and her too tired to stop him, I’m not looking forward to it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You know you’d love having children.’

  ‘Well, maybe a little. I keep expecting it to happen. Maybe …’ Bea stopped to let a noisy goods train trundle past on the Main Trunk Line across the main road. When the noise finally died down, she turned back to Rose and continued. ‘Do you think you’ll be in the family way soon?’

  Rose wished she could escape on the goods train. Anything rather than face such a question. What could she say?

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You’ve been waiting such a long time. I hope so too, for your sake.’

  Rose looked down at her low-heeled brogues and attempted a smile. ‘Thank you.’

  They walked along the pavement towards their homes, just a street apart.

  ‘I know, let’s treat ourselves,’ Bea said, taking her arm as they waited for a farm truck to pass before they crossed Carroll Street. ‘Let’s go back to Paton’s tea shop and share a piece of tea cake over a cuppa. I love going there.’

  It was tempting. It was over a week since she’d had the chance to have a gossip with Bea. ‘I’d love to, Bea. As long as you promise not to talk babies.’

  Bea had been as good as her word. The subject wasn’t mentioned once, not even when a large perambulator blocked the aisle in the tea shop while women gathered around to coo at the contents. But all the way home afterwards, Rose had been haunted by the sound of the baby’s cries – somehow they’d remained in her head, taunting her, reminding her she wasn’t like other women.

  ~ ~ ~

  All through the beef stew, and then the strawberry tart with fresh farm cream for George, she talked about the baby – what he or she would look like, would they be lucky enough to be given a baby with blue eyes like them, would she be dark or fair, would she be healthy in every way? In the end, they agreed, nothing mattered as much as the simple fact of having a baby at last.

  ‘What I really want is to be able to go out and buy what the baby will need,’ Rose said. ‘But everyone will start asking questions. They’ll want to know who I’m buying baby things for, since I clearly don’t need them for myself.’

  ‘But we can tell people, surely?’ George said.

  ‘I don’t think I can. People might laugh at me.’

  ‘You sound like your mother, worrying about what other people think.’

  ‘But it’s important. I don’t want to be gossiped about.’

  ‘Surely not the people here? They’re so kind.’

  ‘To your face, yes. But they talk behind your back. I can just imagine what they will say.’

  She recalled the time when Beatrice had suffered a miscarriage, ho
w other women looked at her in the street, as if she had done it deliberately. Bea had been almost as distraught about that as she’d been about losing the baby. The next time it happened when Rose was with her, she’d poked out her tongue at the offending old bats that had been staring. The two of them had giggled all the way home about such unladylike behaviour and she knew it had helped Bea feel a lot better.

  ‘Surely your friends Beatrice and Sally would stick up for you? They wouldn’t let people say anything bad.’

  ‘I just don’t think I can, George.’

  ‘But you can’t put it off forever. What about when the baby comes? You’ll have to have the baby’s things ready by then.’

  ‘I know. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I’ll start by making the baby’s room ready. The little room next to ours with the window over the back garden, that’s where we always thought our baby would go.’