A Wartime Nurse

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Oh, Helmar,’ he greeted the German, and barely glanced at Theda. ‘We were just discussing the shoulder wound, Meier. I think we should withdraw the Sulphapyridine and try—’

  Theda heard no more as she left the office, closing the door behind her. She carried on with the work of the ward automatically, dishing up mince and cabbage and potatoes for Nurse Harris, a new auxiliary nurse, and Nurse Cullen to give out to the patients who, practically to a man, looked in horror at the grey meat and watery vegetables. Yet all the plates were cleared when they came back to the kitchen, she noticed. Food was food after all in this year of war, 1944.

  Laura Jenkins was coming off duty when Theda got to Block Five and waited while Theda delivered her comic book and had a few words with the children. Then they walked together to the dining-room.

  Over plates of mince and vegetables, exactly the same as those eaten by the prisoners earlier, Theda gave an account of her morning. Laura ate steadily saying nothing, until she put down her knife and fork and went to the counter to bring back two plates of rhubarb and custard.

  ‘Well,’ she said as she sat down again and picked up her spoon, ‘at least you have got over the first time. It will get easier, I’m sure.’ She pulled a face at the taste of the rhubarb, sweetened with saccharine and tasting like it, but carried on eating stolidly.

  ‘I’m all churned up though,’ said Theda, who was pushing her spoon round and round in the custard and eating little. ‘And I don’t see why I should feel in the wrong. Surely anyone would feel the same as I do in the circumstances?’

  ‘Aye, I can see you’re right upset,’ agreed Laura. ‘What I reckon is, you’re just going to have to get used to working there. What can’t be cured must be endured, as my old man used to say.’ She put down her spoon and gazed across the table at her friend. ‘Oh, look, I know how you feel, believe me I do. You’re still raw from losing Alan, I know that.’

  Theda stopped playing with her food and began eating stolidly, the stab of pain at the mention of Alan’s name fading slowly, robbing her of her appetite. But after all, she had to work the rest of the day and needed the energy. Laura was right of course, she knew it, and moaning about it wasn’t going to help. At least it was her day off tomorrow. She could go back to Winton Colliery tonight and forget about the hospital for a while.

  It was a dark and bitterly cold morning when Theda awoke in the bedroom she shared with Clara when she slept at home. She snuggled down under the bedclothes, leaving only the tip of her nose in the icy air. She heard voices downstairs as her sister came in from the factory, her mother’s greeting and Clara’s reply. Her father would still be at work, he didn’t usually get home from his night shift until almost midday, and Chuck was at the pit too.

  She could help her mother with the housework today, she thought. Clara would be in bed and they would have the house to themselves for most of the day. But not yet. It was so lovely to be able to stay in bed a little longer, snug under the blankets.

  Theda must have dozed off for the next thing she heard made her sit up, careless of the cold, and look across at the other bed. Clara was already there, she could see her from under the pile of blankets which was heaving slightly and hear what sounded very like sobs coming from underneath.

  ‘Clara?’

  The sounds stopped and the blankets became still but Clara did not answer. Grabbing her woollen dressing gown from where it lay at the bottom of her bed, Theda hurriedly pulled it on and went over to her sister. There was nothing to be seen but the top of her head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked softly, and Clara turned on her side, still keeping her face hidden.

  ‘Just the sniffles, let me sleep,’ she replied. ‘I have to go to work tonight, remember.’

  Theda stepped back. Maybe it was just a cold, though that wasn’t what it had sounded like to her. Still, if Clara didn’t want to talk . . . oh, maybe she did just need a good day’s sleep.

  ‘Has Clara got a cold, Mam?’ she asked later as she speared a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and held it to the bars of the fire.

  ‘A cold? No. At least, she seemed perfectly all right when she came in this morning,’ Bea answered. ‘Why? Does she look poorly to you?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing, I just thought – no, it wasn’t anything,’ said Theda. She took the toast off the fork and went to the table. There was some dripping Bea had made from beef fat that she had managed to get from the butcher and Theda spread some on the toast and bit into it before the dripping melted altogether. Sighing happily, she sat in her father’s chair before the fire and stretched her legs out along the steel fender towards the blaze, feeling the heat seep into her bones. The day was very dark and the main light in the room came from the fire, gas was too dear to light during the day. Bea could not get used to the idea that they were all working and bringing in money now, she was still careful with the gas.

  Toast and dripping eaten in the half-light – how it reminded Theda of family suppers before the war when they would sit around the range and Da would tell them stories because it was too dark to read. Thursdays mostly, the night before payday when there was no penny left to feed the gas meter.

  It was a black moonless night when Theda walked up the yard and to the end of the row to catch the bus back to the hospital. She had an extra few hours to work because of the number of nurses off sick.

  It had started to rain and wind was stirring the few remaining leaves in the gutter so that they eddied and swirled around her legs, making her shudder. She pressed the switch on her flashlight, creating a small pool of light around her feet as she turned the corner and set off across the small piece of waste ground to the road to Winton village. The buses to Winton Colliery stopped early and so she had an extra half-mile to walk to catch another.

  As she walked, Theda thought about Clara. Her sister had got up about six o’clock, looking puffy-eyed and pale, but then she often did when she had had insufficient sleep and no one else seemed to notice anything. Perhaps she had been wrong, it was all her imagination, Clara was just grumpy and tired from working night shift.

  It had been a relaxing day, in spite of her niggling worry about Clara. Theda had ironed the clothes her mother had washed the day before, standing at the kitchen table ironing her father’s shirts on an old blanket while Bea sat by the fire, leaning forward to the light as she sewed on buttons and darned and mended frayed patches. They had listened to Workers’ Playtime and laughed and chatted as they worked, Theda exchanging a cooling flat iron every now and then for a hot one from the bar, spitting and making it sizzle to make sure it was just the right temperature.

  Bea told her of the new scare story in the rows. Her neighbour, Mrs Coulson, had her daughter-in-law Renee staying there, a cockney girl who had married one of the Coulson boys in 1939 when he went to London in search of work. When her husband had gone into the army and the bombing started, the girl had fled up to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house with her young baby and stayed there, for her parents’ house in London had been bombed and she had nowhere to go back to. She swore she had heard a bloodcurdling scream and been followed in the dark one night as she took the short cut from the bus stop, and only escaped because she had run for her life.

  ‘But then,’ Bea had commented, ‘I suppose she’s always been used to living in a town. There’s likely a lot of things frighten her here. It was likely that fox that’s been about, I’ve heard it myself.’

  There was news from Germany too. Betty Young’s husband, Billy, who had been missing, presumed killed, had turned up in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  ‘An’ I only hope he is getting as good treatment as those ones in your hospital,’ Bea had said as she finished sewing on a button and bit through the thread. ‘There now, I’m about finished. We’ll have a cup of char, will we?’

  Theda smiled as she walked on down the road. Her mother picking up expressions from the wireless. But the smile disappeared as she heard the bus in the dis
tance. Goodness, she was going to miss it! She began to run and dropped her flashlight which promptly went out. Theda stumbled over the kerb in the blackness. Oh, where was it? She was torn between running for the bus and finding her flashlight – she would need it and they weren’t so easy to replace – when she heard a man’s footsteps. And suddenly she was nervous, remembering Renee Coulson’s tale; she began to run towards where she could see the outline of the first houses in Winton village and was just in time to see the lights of the bus as it rounded the corner and set off on its return journey to town.

  She bumped into the fence at the side of the path, catching her shoulder painfully, and moved out into the middle of the road, beginning to run headlong for the village as the footsteps grew louder. She had reached the houses, which were all dark and blacked out, and thought she would knock on a door anyway – surely the inhabitants would be inside on a night like this? – when she felt a hand on her arm and was pulled roughly back on to the path. She had opened her mouth to scream when he spoke.

  ‘Staff Nurse Wearmouth, isn’t it? What are you doing out here at this time of night?’

  Theda pulled herself away and closed her mouth before a scream escaped. ‘Major!’ she cried, her voice sharp with shock. ‘What do you think you’re doing, grabbing me like that? You frightened me half to death.’

  Major Collins laughed. ‘I was only trying to help. You seemed in danger of falling on the road. Due back at the hospital, are you?’

  Theda took time to catch her breath before replying. Across the road the front door of the Pit Laddie public house opened and a beam of light spilled across the road. As she gazed up at him she saw he was smiling, looking almost human. Why couldn’t he be like that in the hospital?

  ‘Close that door!’ roared someone from inside the pub. ‘Do you want me to be summonsed for showing a light?’

  ‘Sorry,’ replied the man who had come out, and hastily closed the door, cutting off the light. Now the major was just a dark shape beside Theda again.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I’ll have to walk now,’ she replied.

  ‘I can give you a lift, if you like? I was going back in any case. My car’s just around the corner.’

  Theda hesitated, tempted. If she walked back she would be late and Home Sister could be snotty about the rules. On the other hand, if she were seen getting out of Major Collins’s car, there could be more trouble. But she couldn’t really spend yet another night at home, the ward would be short-staffed. She would just have to swallow her resentment of him.

  ‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to accept a lift from me?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘Just, you must know what Home Sisters can be like. If she sees me getting out of your car at this time of night, she’ll think I’ve lost my virtue or something.’ As soon as she said the old-fashioned phrase, Theda felt embarrassed. He would think her a fool.

  ‘I’ll drop you off on the corner,’ he offered, and she realised he understood what she meant. Of course he would, he was used to hospital rules.

  ‘I would be glad of a lift,’ she admitted, and walked with him round the corner to a Hillman car and waited for him to open the door for her. Rain was falling heavily now and she was glad to get inside. The major soon had the car on the road and headed towards the town, blue shaded head-lamps lighting the road poorly and glinting eerily on puddles in the gutters. There was very little traffic; all was dark and silent except when they passed a pit head with the wheel whirring above and the twinkle of rights as the cage came to the surface and spilled out its load of miners with their lamps.

  Theda glanced sideways at her companion. All she could see was the outline of his face, darker than the night outside the car, and a faint flash as he sensed her eyes on him and looked down at her.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘what were you doing in Winton?’

  ‘I live there. At least, my family lives there. It was my afternoon off and I was visiting them.’

  ‘Oh? Then you will know my uncle, Mr Cornish? He’s the manager at Winton Colliery.’

  ‘Yes. Well, of course I know him. Everyone in a pit village knows the gaffer. But my father and brothers are just ordinary miners.’ Theda bit her lip, she hadn’t mean to sound as though she had an inferiority complex about it.

  He glanced at her again. ‘Does that matter? After all, I understand Uncle Tucker started as an ordinary miner. Worked his way up from the bottom, so it’s said.’

  Theda sighed. ‘Sorry. Of course it doesn’t matter, not nowadays, I was being silly. I’m tired and have to work four hours tonight and I’m on days tomorrow.’

  ‘Almost there.’

  The car was entering the town now and he turned into the road that ran along the side of the hutted wards, though nothing could be seen of them even in daylight for they were surrounded by a high wall surmounted by rows of barbed wire. He stopped the car before he got to the corner, about a hundred yards from the nurses’ home and the entrance to the hospital.

  Theda gathered up her flashlight and gas mask from her lap and turned to him. ‘Thank you for the lift, Major,’ she said. ‘I would have been late if I’d had to walk.’

  ‘Not at all, it was no trouble,’ he replied, almost as formally as she. ‘Best hurry in now, before Home Sister catches you.’ Theda got out of the car and hurried off down the road, looking back only the once as she turned for the gate of the home. The car was still there, headlights dimmed, but as she went up the path to the door she heard the engine rev up to go on.

  It was nice to think that he had watched over her until she was safely inside, she mused as she went up to her room and took off her wet coat. Not that there was anything to fear on the streets of Bishop Auckland, but still . . . it was nice. It reminded her of the way Alan . . . Good Lord! What on earth was she thinking? She certainly didn’t think of Major Collins in that way. Why, it was only three months since Alan was posted missing at Arnhem. The familiar ache started up as she thought of her dead fiance.

  Theda did her stint on the ward. It was quiet, only the occasional snore from the sleeping men, and some muttering when the porter came in to replenish the stoves and the clattering noise of the coke going in woke them. She busied herself refilling dressing drums for the autoclave.

  Dear Alan, she thought miserably, how I loved you. The misery she had felt when she learned of his death returned full force and was still with her when she slid between the icy sheets of her narrow bed in the nurses’ home. She cried into her pillow for a moment or two before looking for a handkerchief in the drawer of her bedside cabinet and blowing her nose.

  That’s enough, she told herself sternly. There’s work to be done tomorrow. Settling herself down once more, her body gradually warmed up and, against her expectations, she fell asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  The week before the Christmas of 1944 was a comparatively happy time at the hospital. There was a new mood of expectancy; everyone thought the war would be over soon, or at least the British did.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ said Tom, the guard on the gate to the POW section, as Theda showed her pass. ‘Hitler’s in for it now. Our lads will be in Berlin before the spring, you’ll see.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she replied. ‘I think we’ve all had enough of this war.’

  Even the prisoners were different, she thought as she walked down the ramp and into the ward. There was a much lighter atmosphere altogether as some of the men made wooden toys for the children’s ward and the singers among them, having formed a choir, were practising singing carols at the far end of the ward.

  One lot of prisoners from another ward, who were fit enough to be allowed out to work the regulation three hours on surrounding farms, had brought back bunches of holly and tree ivy and shared it out so that all the huts had greenery decorating the windows. Some was sent over to the civilian side too. Nurses were forever dodging bunches of mistletoe hung by enterprising Italians.

  ‘I’ll be glad when they all go
back to the camp,’ commented Nurse Harris. ‘They shouldn’t have been on this ward anyway – it’s surgical.’

  Nurse Harris was becoming quite knowledgeable about hospital ways. At the moment she was busy laying yet another dressing trolley with freshly sterilised instruments from the stainless steel boiler and flashed a cheerful smile at Theda as she said it.

  ‘You’re in a good mood this morning,’ commented Theda as she reached across the bench for the drum of dressings and swabs, freshly autoclaved overnight by the theatre porter. She smiled to herself. Nurse Harris spoke with such an air of knowing it all, considering the scant time she had been working in the hospital. The Italians were in the ward because the medical wards were overflowing with chest infections this winter. They were all convalescent and considered non-infectious.

  ‘My boyfriend has seven days’ leave over Christmas,’ explained Nurse Harris. ‘I had a letter this morning. Sister says I can have Christmas Eve and a half day on Boxing Day.’

  ‘Oh, that’s grand,’ Theda said warmly, and was genuinely pleased for her colleague despite a stab of envy and aching regret that it wasn’t Alan coming home. In case the other nurse had noticed anything, she turned away as she removed her cuffs and rolled up her sleeves before she scrubbed up.

  Nurse Harris’s sweetheart was a Durham Light Infantryman but since the Italian campaign when he had caught a lump of shrapnel in his shoulder he had been reduced from Al fitness category to C3. Consequently he was confined to home duties though stationed far from his home somewhere in the south. Theda knew him slightly; he had worked at Shildon Railway Shops, the same place as Alan before the war.

  ‘How are you today, Johann?’

  The young boy stared up at her and refrained from answering. One of those, she thought. Brought up in the Hitler Youth no doubt. She hadn’t been on the prisoner side very long but had soon learned to recognise them. The best thing to do was ignore their attitude; most of them softened after a while.