A Wartime Nurse

by Maggie Hope

  He stuck out his lower lip and bent his head over his plate. He mashed his beans with a fork and stirred them round and round. Theda could practically see his mind working. It was logical to him that if the other boy was bigger or there was more than one he had to use strategy. Despairingly, she picked up her cup and sipped her cooling tea, feeling inadequate. Was she bringing him up the wrong way altogether? Should she tell him what Mrs Carter had really said and what it meant?

  There were lots of children Richard’s age without fathers, a lot of men had been killed in the war. She had hoped that in a town like Durham where she was unknown, people would take it for granted that that was what had happened, his father had been a war casualty. How had that woman stumbled on the truth?

  Theda’s head throbbed. She leaned her elbow on the table and rested her forehead on her hand, closing her eyes. Questions buzzed around her tired brain. That was it, she was weary from lack of sleep. She had been called out in the middle of the night to a home delivery and the woman’s labour had been protracted, the baby had not arrived until shortly before she had to pick up Richard from school, hence the reason she had been late.

  That was the one fault with her job, though she loved it really. But every time she was called out of school hours she had to get Sheila from next door to look after Richard.

  ‘Are you sad, Mam?’ Richard had got down from his chair and was standing beside her; he slipped his hand into hers and leaned against her shoulder. ‘I won’t fight any more, Mam,’ he promised. ‘I don’t care if Billy never lets me join his gang. I wouldn’t join it anyway, they’re just silly babies.’

  Theda picked him up and sat him on her lap and hugged him. ‘I’m all right, pet, just tired, that’s all.’ She dropped a kiss on his fine brown hair, so different from the strong black hair of the Wearmouths.

  ‘Billy can’t even tie his own shoelaces,’ he confided, grinning. ‘He doesn’t know how to put the wireless on to the Home Service for Children’s Hour.’

  Theda smiled and set him down on his feet. ‘Well, if you want to listen to Children’s Hour you’d better go and put it on now. Go on, and not too loud, I want to be able to hear myself think.’

  ‘You can’t hear yourself think,’ he shouted incredulously. ‘Nobody can hear themselves think!’ But he went through to the sitting-room obediently and in a minute she heard the introductory music through the open doors. Thank goodness for Uncle Mac, honorary uncle to most of Britain’s children.

  It would be better when she had qualified as a Health Visitor. At least then she wouldn’t be called out during the night. She got to her feet and began to wash the dishes. There was the kitchen floor to wash too. By the time Children’s Hour was over, she had finished the kitchen and put Richard’s discarded clothes in to soak and laid out a clean set for tomorrow. As soon as he was asleep she intended to spend the rest of the evening studying. At least there were no births due for a couple of days.

  Later, with Richard in bed and the curtains drawn to keep out the late-summer sun, she sat on the couch in the sitting-room with her books spread around her. But she was finding it difficult to concentrate; she kept thinking of Richard and what Mrs Carter had obviously said. Smug, self-righteous cow!

  Theda’s mind flashed back to the one occasion she had taken Richard to Seaburn to meet the Sunday School trip from Winton Colliery. Her mother was travelling with them and she had thought it was a good chance to combine giving the child a day at the seaside and meeting up with Bea.

  They had taken deck chairs onto the sands and it was a beautiful day with the sea sparkling in the sun and the children running backwards and forwards to the water’s edge for tiny buckets of water to put in the moats round the sand castles they had made. A never-ending job really as the water soaked into the sand and the children had to go back for more. And Richard, who must have been three at the time, came back slopping his bucket so that there was only a table-spoonful in there and the women had laughed and he had flung down the bucket and howled his frustration.

  ‘Hush now,’ Bea had said to him, and handed him a lollipop. And as he stopped crying they could plainly hear the group of women behind them, talking.

  ‘You’d think she wouldn’t have the face to bring him here among decent folk,’ one was saying. Theda turned her head, disbelieving.

  ‘Aye, well, some folks has face for anything,’ replied a fat, middle-aged woman with her legs spread out in front of the deck chair so that half-lying back as she was, a great expanse of pink knickers was exposed to view.

  Bea jumped to her feet, fairly frothing at the mouth in temper. ‘Is that a fact, missus?’ she demanded. ‘An’ some folks dare show more than their faces—’

  ‘Mam, Mam, come away! They’re not worth talking to,’ said Theda, taking her mother’s arm.

  ‘Aye, you’re right. Howay, pet. We won’t stay where we’re not wanted.’ They had picked up the deck chairs and taken them further up the beach to howls of protest from Richard who, in picking up his bucket and spade, dropped his lollipop in the sand. Behind them, the two women flushed red and spluttered with indignation and muttered something about the Wearmouth lasses, both of them being no better than they should be. What about all those Canadians coming to the house during the war?

  The sun had gone down now and it was too dark to read in any case. Theda sighed and closed the book on her lap and went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. She remembered she had had no evening meal so rummaged in the cupboard and found a packet of mushroom soup. She mixed it with water and stood by the stove stirring the pan until the water boiled. It wasn’t very palatable but she ate it steadily, together with a slice of bread. She was just depressed because she was hungry, she told herself.

  Her thoughts wandered back to the time she had first left home and gone to Sunderland. What a nerve she had had, starting that course knowing she was already pregnant! But somehow she had finished the six months of the first part of midwifery and that had given her heart to go on later.

  Her thoughts sheared away from the memory of the mother and baby home she had entered in the autumn of 1945. Such a dismal place it had been, yet full of young girls and even some older women. Not all abandoned by their men; some were just unlucky to have them killed right at the tail end of the war.

  Most of them didn’t know what they were going to do afterwards but Theda had laid her plans. She would have her baby and have it adopted and get on with her life. Further training was her goal. She would reach the highest point in her chosen profession, oh, yes she would, she was determined. Anyway, a baby would have a better life with a married couple who could give it a stable family life.

  So there was no reason to distress Mam by telling her about the baby. It was best that she should never know about it. But that meant not going home at all after she had begun to show. The last time had been VE night, and Theda had gone home for the celebrations.

  There had been a street tea party with trestle tables laid end to end and every house had a Union Jack fluttering from a bedroom window, or if not red, white and blue bunting. Pianos had been dragged outside on to the pavement and everyone sang until they were hoarse. They danced the hoky-cokey and every other daft dance they could think of and in the evening there was an enormous bonfire up by the old claypit just outside Winton Colliery and everyone in the rows was there. They roasted potatoes and even some sausages they had cadged from the butcher.

  ‘Are you staying for the Victory dance on Saturday?’ Norma had asked her, and Theda had shaken her head.

  ‘Sorry, I have to be back on duty,’ she had replied. Privately, she thought she would never go to a dance in the church hall ever again, perhaps would never dance again. Look what it had got her into, she told herself grimly.

  ‘You’re putting a bit of weight on, Theda, maybe you could do with the exercise,’ Norma said, and laughed. But Theda couldn’t laugh. She knew she couldn’t come back, not until the baby was born at least.

  ‘I won’t
be back for a while, Mam,’ she told Bea as she hugged her mother goodbye. ‘I’m going to have to do a lot of studying on my days off for the next six months.’ She had to steel herself not to tighten her arms around Bea, not to burst out crying and tell her everything. But how could she put her mother through that? Already Bea had found out the real reason Clara had got married in such a hurry.

  She had gone to Darlington to see her younger daughter and found her hugely pregnant. ‘By, daughters can break your heart,’ Theda had heard her saying to Matt.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, woman? Our Clara’s respectably married,’ he had replied impatiently, but Bea had shaken her head and pressed her lips tightly together to stop herself from crying.

  He had muttered something incoherent and gone upstairs to bed, out of the way of foolish women.

  Theda wasn’t going to shame her mother a second time, that was something else she had determined, though it was hard in a strange town with no one to talk to except occasionally Nurse Jenkins, her one confidante. Laura Jenkins had come through to see her twice on her days off but then she had gone away to train for her SRN in Cardiff, where her husband had come from.

  Richard had been born on the first day of October when the leaves on the sycamore tree outside the delivery room had turned to copper and already some had fallen to the ground, presaging a long winter, the midwife had said cheerfully.

  ‘We’ll bind up your breasts to discourage the flow of milk,’ she had added. ‘In a few minutes, I’ll be back. I’ll taken baby along to the nursery first.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him yet,’ protested Theda. All she had seen was the piece of cotton sheeting in which he was wrapped, covered by a threadbare blanket.

  ‘Best you don’t,’ said the midwife calmly laying the baby in a cot and wheeling him to the door.

  ‘Bring him back here!’ shouted Theda, sitting up in bed, the after-birth tiredness dropping from her. She was ready to leap out of bed and seize the baby and keep him safe from all comers.

  ‘It’s for the best, Theda, really it is.’ The midwife sounded as though she had been through this argument thousands of times before, which she probably had.

  ‘Bring him here,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I haven’t signed any papers yet, remember. And I probably won’t. How do I know what sort of life he’ll have with strangers?’

  The midwife brought Matron and the doctor but Theda had made up her mind yet again and they brought her the tiny human being and she held him to her breast, and after that nothing they could say could make her give him up.

  Of course, it wasn’t the first time that had happened, so they were used to it. And in the mother and baby home they were allowed to stay for three months while the authorities tried to teach the girls how to look after the babies on their own and helped them get work afterwards. With Theda that wasn’t necessary. She told them plainly she could manage.

  It was Joss who found out where she was and what had happened to her. One day Theda had an interview for a job at a small cottage hospital for a Staff Nurse’s post. It was only until she got herself organised, she told herself. As soon as she had a little more money saved and could afford to pay for live-in help, she would take her second-part midwifery and be once more on her way up.

  ‘Are you sure you can do it, Miss Wearmouth?’ asked Matron, sounding very dubious. The woman peered at her over the application form and the references she had from Bishop Auckland and the Infirmary. Anyone would think that having a baby had made her half-witted, thought Theda. She felt like saying she could do the job standing on her head, having a baby had not made her lose her wits altogether.

  ‘Of course, Matron.’

  ‘Hmm. I can’t have a member of my staff taking time off from work because her child is teething or has a rash. I need someone reliable. Are you sure you can get adequate help?’

  ‘I am, Matron.’

  In the end Theda got the job, though she knew it was because she was the only applicant. The salary was far from generous, but if she was careful she could manage to pay Ruby, one of the girls she had met in the home, to look after Richard while she was at the hospital. Ruby was unique among the residents in that she had a small house of her own; her parents had been killed in the war and the house had been theirs. So she planned to run a child-minding service.

  Theda walked back to the home feeling happier than she had done for a long time. And there, in the entrance, was a tall soldier, standing with his back to the door and his hands on his hips. The home’s Matron was flustered, Theda could see. Her face was red and she tossed her head at the soldier.

  ‘I tell you, you can’t come in. I don’t care who you are. No male visitors allowed, can’t you read the notice?’ Matron had pointed to a large placard on the wall.

  ‘And I’m telling you, I’m coming in. So stand aside, woman, and let me past!’

  ‘Joss!’

  Theda forgot all about keeping her secret from the family; the rush of feeling that flooded through her was so elating that there was only a great thankfulness that he was here, home from Germany or wherever he had been. She flung her arms around him and hugged him, laughing and crying together. For the first time she realised how alone she had been without her family. Not just lonely, but alone, which was so much worse.

  ‘Well!’ said Matron from somewhere over his shoulder. ‘What do you think you are doing, Miss Wearmouth?’ But nothing she said mattered any more.

  ‘Right then, are you going to show me my nephew?’ asked Joss. ‘I’ve come all the way from Dover since yesterday morning, and I don’t mind telling you, you took some finding. So tell this woman who I am and let’s have no more aggravation, our Theda.’

  ‘Oh, Joss, Joss,’ she said helplessly. ‘By, I’m that glad to see you, you have no idea.’

  ‘Aye, well, it seems I’ve come home none too early neither, what with Mam and Dad in a lather worrying about you, and our Clara going off to Canada.’

  ‘You should have told me you were her brother,’ said Matron huffily. ‘Go on then, you can go up to the nursery for five minutes. But it’s strictly against the rules, mind.’

  Upstairs, a crowd of curious girls suddenly found it necessary to attend to their own babies in the nursery. They covertly eyed the handsome soldier as he stood for a minute over Richard in his cot.

  ‘Aye, well, our Theda,’ he said, ignoring the others, ‘you’d best get your things together an’ the bairn’s an’ all. You’re coming along o’ me. We’re going home.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  She had known it wouldn’t work as soon as she walked into the house carrying the baby, with Joss following behind with her case. Not that Mam or Da condemned her; she had steeled herself for what they would have to say but they had said nothing, at least nothing in criticism of her.

  ‘Our Theda!’ Bea cried, rising up from her chair by the range where she was knitting a Fair Isle sweater. Needles and wool went flying perilously near the fire as she stepped forward and hugged her daughter. She looked down at the baby, protesting loudly now he had been woken up, and smiled.

  ‘Aye, I wondered,’ she said.

  ‘This noisy little brat is Richard, Mam,’ Joss announced. ‘Two months old and with a voice enough to raise the dead.’

  ‘Stand out of the way, woman, let me have a look at him,’ ordered Matt. He lifted the baby from Theda’s arms and undid the shawl wrapped around him, holding him on one muscled arm and regarding him solemnly. Richard opened his eyes and his mouth ready to yell his protest even harder, and stopped, staring up at his grandfather. Matt put up a blue-scarred finger and the baby grasped it tightly.

  ‘A good, strong little babby,’ he observed. He looked up at Theda, his gaze keen. ‘Are you all right, lass?’

  ‘I am, Da,’ she answered.

  ‘Howay in then, let’s have the door shut. I don’t know what that draught’s going to do to my oven and I have some pies in.’

  Bea bustled about, taking the oven
cloth from the brass line above the range and opening the oven door to inspect the pies.

  ‘I’ll take these up then,’ said Joss, and picked up the cases again and headed for the stairs. Chuck had not yet risen from the table where he was sitting in his black, only his hands showing strangely white where he had washed them for his meal.

  ‘Hello, Chuck,’ said Theda.

  ‘Now then, our Theda,’ he said grimly, his gaze sliding over her. Rising to his feet, he walked past her, ignoring the baby. ‘I’ll have me bath in the room, Mam,’ he said to Bea. ‘Seeing as you’re so busy here.’

  Maybe he was just tired and impatient to get his bath and go to bed, Theda told herself. But he could at least have looked at his new nephew. She laid the baby on the sofa and put the kettle on the fire and made up a bottle of National Dried Milk for Richard’s feed.

  ‘You’re not feeding him yourself, then?’ asked Bea, watching her. ‘Eeh, I don’t think it’s natural to give a babby cows’ milk. Did you not have enough milk yourself, Theda?’

  ‘It’s ‘specially prepared, Mam. It’s perfectly all right, good nutritionally.’ Theda tested the temperature of the milk on her wrist and picked up the baby. He took the teat into his mouth and sucked noisily. ‘It was no good me starting him on the breast, Mam,’ she continued. ‘I’m going to have to go out to work.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ her father said sharply. ‘I don’t hold with a mother leaving a young baby. You can stay at home and help your mam, until the bairn’s a good bit older any-road. When he starts school then you can think about it.’

  Theda bent her head over the baby, fighting to stop the sharp retort that rose to her lips. Already the happiness she had felt at coming home, the gratitude at not being condemned for what had happened to her, was dissipating. Instead depression was rising in her. She had been independent too long to give it up easily now. But it was no use arguing with her father.

  Her silence was hardly noticed by the rest of the family for Joss was telling them about Germany – Cologne in particular.