Nurse Trent's Children

by Joyce Dingwell

  At length, on Elvira’s insistence, she got into bed. “I’m going to tuck you in. You’re little more than a girl yourself, and you a supervisor.”

  “I’m twenty-one, Elvira.” Cathy’s voice was sleepy. She was tired, she discovered.

  She had a dim memory of ministering hands adjusting a blanket, drawing over a mosquito net, then the next moment the room was in darkness and the footsteps were descending. But before they reached the last stair Cathy was asleep.

  She awoke to Elvira again, this time with an early pot of tea. Daylight was pushing through the chintz curtains. She could see pink morning clouds caught in the frame of the window like bright butterflies in a net.

  “Am I late, Elvira?”

  “Of course not. I’m an early riser. I always get up at daybreak. I’m fond of my cuppa, you see. All Australians are. As I brewed it I thought, ‘I wonder if Miss Trent is one of those people who are ready for a cuppa at any tick of the clock.’ ”

  “Miss Trent is, and Miss Trent’s name is Cathy.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t call you that.” Elvira shook a decisive head. “I tell you what, I’ll call you Aunty Cathy like the girls, though by age it is you who should be calling me grandmother.”

  “Oh, Elvira,” laughed Cathy. She leaned back against the pillows after the woman had gone and enjoyed the piping hot brew, watching the cloud butterflies and wondering what the day would hold.

  A quick shower—one thing, the hot water was really hot—a gay cotton dirndl and it was time to rouse the girls. She did not know whether Redgates did this with a gong or not, but Rita, opening an interested eye, told her to switch on the radio. “As soon as Peter Rabbit comes on the bubs wake up to listen, and we older ones get our wash first so we’ll be back for ‘Freda of the Fifth.’ ”

  Cathy nodded, paying mental homage to the powers of radio. She decided to write back to England about this easy solution to that hardest of a housemother’s tasks, the waking up of the charges.

  She inspected young necks, fingernails, backs of ears, and helped with ribbons, shoelaces and fastenings while Peter Rabbit kept the eighteen small fry quiet but wide eyed in their little cots.

  The “Freda of the Fifth” ousted Peter, and the eighteen were coaxed into their small print dresses, every dress a different pattern, their sandals buckled and a clean handkerchief pushed into each pocket. Just as she finished a bell clanged.

  “Brekker,” said Rita.

  “Who got it?” asked Gwen.

  “Elvira is back,” informed Cathy.

  She was rather abashed to hear, “Now we’ll have something proper to eat. Elvira will fix something.”

  So could I have fixed something if there had been anything to fix, she thought as she shepherded the children downstairs. I only hope they won't be disappointed when it's toast again.

  But it wasn’t toast again. It was cereal and milk, poached eggs, bread and jam. Cathy’s eyes widened and Elvira beamed, “I told you Dr. Jerry would get to work even before he took his hat off. A local woman was here when I came back from taking up your tea. She’ll stay till we’re fixed up.”

  “And the provisions?”

  “They were in a clothesbasket on the doorstep.”

  “And the jam,” rejoiced Gwen, “is strawberry. Now we needn’t raid any old cupboards.”

  Cathy supervised the meal, discouraging the too-lavish use of little fingers instead of knives and forks and insisting on the neat folding afterward of table napkins.

  “Do the bigger girls make their own beds?” she asked Elvira in a whisper.

  “Yes, and help the littleys with theirs. Then they tidy up, but usually it takes the housemother all the morning to do what they leave undone.”

  Cathy smiled. “It was like that in England. It must be universal. What about school?”

  “They are on holidays this week, which is a good thing really. It will give you time to settle down with them and time, too, to decide who is to go to which school.”

  “How old is the eldest here? My... our ... eldest, Janet, is fourteen.”

  “Rita is fifteen and a half. She’ll be found a position and suitable accommodation in another few months. Of course she will be hopping back here most weekends. They always do. There’s even a wing reserved for the old girls.”

  “What happens if a ward is...” Cathy hesitated for the right words, “if he or she is especially talented?”

  “You mean like Dr. Jerry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they stay on and are financed through their training. Is it like that in England?”

  “Yes.”

  The beds made, the bedrooms tidied, the towels hung up in rows, Cathy took the children out of doors. Most of the original residents were friendly now and eager to show the swimming pool, the playcourt and their individual gardens.

  The pool was a small one, shallow except for one end, where it would be waist-deep for the older girls. Cathy believed she would have no trouble coping with swimming drill. The play courts consisted of basketball at one end and a swing, slippery slide and seesaw at the other. The gardens, to her delight, were childishly higgledy-piggledly. Each girl had chosen her own design and selected her own plants.

  She left the children to their personal diversions and went slowly back to the house. “It seems a wise home,” she said, “in spite of Dr. Malcolm’s insinuations.”

  She saw that a car was pulled up in front of the entrance, and for a moment she knew a foolish impulse to turn back again. It was a green car—Then she saw it was not a big convertible and went in feeling rather annoyed with herself. Even if it was the doctor’s car she could not run away. There was no cause to. He was as indifferent to her as she was to him. Besides, she had to meet him sometimes. From Elvira’s account he was a fairly frequent visitor to Redgates. She turned into the hall.

  A substantial figure dressed in “best black” was bent over a cupboard. Elvira stood behind her and greeted Cathy with a significant wink and grimace. Cathy guessed at once that the woman must be the disliked Mrs. Jessopp.

  Mrs. Jessopp straightened, and Cathy introduced herself. “I am sorry we have to meet and part so quickly,” she said politely. She was anxious to avoid the scene she saw was imminent by the threatening light in Elvira’s black eyes.

  Elvira snorted and went out, and Mrs. Jessopp said ungraciously. “So you’re the next victim, are you?”

  “Oh, really, Mrs. Jessopp...”

  “I meant what I said. Fair horrors, these girls are. You’ll find out. Can’t think what they’re doing, either, sending a young housemother like you. How old are you? Twenty?”

  Cathy remembered in time there was no need for her to tell this woman anything. “I’ll manage,” she said a little stiffly, adding hurriedly as she glimpsed battle in Mrs. Jessopp’s eyes, as she had glimpsed it in Elvira’s, “Have you everything now?”

  “No, there’s a bottle of strawberry conserve, then there’s my little bag as well—I couldn’t find it yesterday.”

  Cathy ran upstairs and brought the bag down. “It was there all the time,” she lied blandly.

  “Humph,” was all Mrs. Jessopp said.

  “About the strawberry ... I’m afraid the girls used it when you went away so hurriedly yesterday.”

  That gave Mrs. Jessopp her opening and immediately she took it. “I should think I would go away in a hurry. Twenty more loaded on me on top of the other ten. I would be a fool. Anyway, apart from that, I wasn’t going to stay and pity the poor fool who stays. It’s not a well-run place. There’s no discipline. Those girls get away with anything. It’s a crying disgrace. Lazy little beggars they are, too, and all that crazy Elvira does is smile and bleat. ‘Poor innocent children.’ Innocent, is it? You should see the notes they get from the boys. Disgusting, I call it.”

  Cathy asked, “What sort of notes?”

  “Oh ... notes.” Mrs. Jessopp was intentionally vague.

  “What is in them?”

  “What sho
uldn’t be in them, that’s what.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Jessopp.”

  Mrs. Jessopp had the grace to blush guiltily. She also lacked the imagination to concoct at once a sufficiently “disgusting” note. “Oh, just ‘I love you’ and all that stuff. Some might say it’s only childish scrawl, but I maintain it’s downright suggestive. I don’t think it should be allowed.”

  To Mrs. Jessopp’s surprise Cathy said, “I think you have something there. It is early to start writing notes. But that’s the trouble with segregation.”

  “With what?”

  “Keeping them apart. They’re not growing up normally. They are not accepting each other normally. If they were under the same roof in small units they would be one family, not two sections of a foundation.”

  She was suddenly aware of Mrs. Jessopp’s wide and disapproving stare. “Now I know I did right in getting away,” that woman gasped in outrage. “Under the same roof indeed. I never heard of such a thing. Never mind about the strawberry conserve. I’m going this instant,” and with that Mrs. Jessopp swept indignantly out.

  Cathy watched her, feeling as genuinely shocked as Mrs. Jessopp was doing her best to evince she was herself.

  She heard the taxi depart and went kitchenward in search of Elvira.

  “Is she gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good job, too.” The black eyes looked at Cathy shrewdly. “Upset you, didn’t she? She’s always doing that. Sit down and have a drop of tea.”

  Tea fixed everything, according to Elvira. It did not fix Cathy, however. She looked down at her steaming cup with troubled eyes. When Mrs. Ferguson, the temporary cook, went down to the kitchen garden for vegetables for dinner, she unburdened herself to the hovering Elvira.

  “I didn’t think people could have such mean little minds, Elvira.”

  “You find mean little minds wherever you go. Who was it? Jessy?”

  “Yes. She didn’t agree with me that whole families, both boys and girls, should be housed together. I can’t blame her for differing. Opinions are everyone’s privilege. But it was the way she looked at it. So mean, narrow, cramped and suspicious.”

  Cathy stirred her tea in agitation. “I didn’t want to tread on her toes. Perhaps telling you what I believe in is treading on yours. But I feel sure your reasons for keeping the children apart would not be nasty, wicked and unfounded ones like Mrs. Jessopp’s.”

  Elvira said slowly, “You’re not treading on my toes. I was one of a big family, five boys, four girls. None of us would have been without the other for the world. No, Aunty Cathy, dear, you’re right, and there’s not one of us would deny that, unless it’s people like Mrs. Jessopp or ... or ... well, probably Miss Dubois...”

  “Who’s she?”

  “You’ll find out.” The black boot buttons almost snapped it as well as the lips said it. She explained no further. “Jessopp’s a bottle of vinegar, and the other...”

  A pause, then, “But do we let them get us down? Never. Oh, yes, Aunty Cathy, we most of us know it would be better your way, but remember, we haven’t gone half your distance yet, so you’ll just have to give us time. In a little while it will be all right. Keep that in your mind. Keep telling yourself ‘In a little while.’ ”

  The hot tea was doing its work. The kindly boot buttons were soothing her and the liquid voice was like a balm. Through the kitchen window clouds were caught again, this time like white, not pink, butterflies.

  It all took time, as Elvira said, as David Kennedy had earnestly told her. The aching wound that had been the loss of her mother and father had taken time to heal. The getting accustomed to a fresh position had taken time. Australia would take time.

  It was the same with this new branch of the foundation. It must take its time. Only yesterday she herself had said blandly to Dr. Malcolm, “A country must grow to a certain stage, not arrive there,” and already she was irritated because everything was not as she wished it. “In a little while,” she repeated aloud, and Elvira smiled delightedly.

  “In a little while, Aunty Cathy, dear. And now let me pour you another cup.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cathy had dreaded her period of settling down in Australia because she had anticipated the stark realization, really for the first time, of the loss of her parents and her long distance from home.

  When she had learned of the accident on that day of her finals at St. Cloud she had been dazed almost to numbness. Immediately had followed her assignment to Little Families, and the six weeks spent in training and preparing to leave the country had left her little time for grief. The five weeks on the Winona had been a mixed period of pleasure and anxiety. Certainly she had found no time for introspection. Christabel had seen to that.

  But now she was at journey’s end, and apart from the duties of housemother that after her strenuous St. Cloud regime promised to be fairly easy, she would have nothing to occupy her but her thoughts.

  That is what Cathy had anticipated. She soon learned otherwise.

  She learned that a housemother, unlike a trainee, unlike a guardian on a ship, is never away from work.

  Rita and Gwen and a score of others might be absent from nine to three, but their personalities and the problems arising from their personalities were as real and present to Cathy as family problems are real and present to any mother of a household.

  She found the work totally different from child nursing. She had loved tending sick little bodies in the children’s ward at St. Cloud, but the tending of minds as well she found infinitely more satisfying.

  At St. Cloud she had gone off duty with a sense of relaxation. Here one missed the relaxation because there was never a feeling of being right away from duty. However, there was a fulfillment she had not known before, not even in ministering to sick children, and instinctively Cathy sank herself deeper and deeper into her work. It was absorbing work. One did not hand the children over to another nurse at six o’clock; instead, one followed each day in the life of each child until the day grew into the next day and a week grew into a month. It was with a sense of surprise that Cathy realized one morning that she had been in Australia a month.

  The children were back at school. There had been a board meeting one afternoon that had decided where Cathy’s twenty were to be educated. Now the school bus took away six of them, six went to the local Burnley Hills school, six Cathy drove herself in the house truck to the Thornvale and Gulleybank schools, and the other two, Avery and Christabel, were tutored by Cathy during the day. They were old enough to absorb kindergarten, but the local nursery classes were overcrowded and the school age had been raised to several months more than either Avery or Christabel could claim.

  A blackboard and a sandpit took care of the babies while Cathy took care of stray buttons off school shirts and new elastic in navy shorts. The boys had not arrived yet, but the work on their building was nearly completed, so it would not be long before they were all together again. Cathy found herself looking forward to David Kennedy.

  She had received several letters from him. The letters were typical of David, bright, breezy, meeting difficulties as they occurred and overcoming them blithely. He was a very satisfactory person to know, she thought gratefully.

  She had been pleased when Mrs. Ferguson, who had come to cook temporarily, had decided to stay on. She was a good-natured woman with an understandingly light hand on spinach and turnips and an instinctive knowledge of the encouragement of an occasional frivolous dessert instead of prunes and blancmange. Elvira said Mrs. Jessopp had only served two dishes, stew and molasses pudding. Nourishing, perhaps, but not very exciting, and even little children must have heydays as well as schooldays.

  Rita was one of Cathy’s problems. She was now a woman, but just at the age when childhood still overlaps maturity. It left her bewildered and uncertain of herself, often irritable, occasionally rude. Cathy knew that in a year Rita would overcome all that.

  Denise was another worry. She was an intense sort o
f child, always fretting because of some imagined injustice. She was not a naughty little girl but an instinctively unhappy one. However perfect an institution may be, there is always a child who cannot live closely with other children. Denise would have been the unhappy one in an actual family. She was born to be the odd person out. The only solution would be to place her as an “only” with adoring parents where she would thrive until she married and became an “only” to some adoring husband. She could not cooperate with her own contemporary sex and never would. Cathy felt sorry for her and helpless when it came to a solution. Little Families did not adopt out their wards, so it seemed that Denise must stay on and suffer her “injustices.”

  Leila was not so involved. She was a giddy little soul too easily dazzled by a new face. Within minutes of her arrival Leila had made Cathy acutely aware of her feverish adoration. She had flamboyant taste verging on the showy and even vulgar. At present she was going through a passion for bright and shining things and had actually stolen, according to Elvira, Miss Dubois’s ring when she had taken it off to plant a tree in the avenue of remembrance. Elvira had told Cathy that Miss Dubois had made a horrible fuss that only Dr. Jerry, bless him, had been able to subdue. Miss Dubois, reported Elvira, was simply crazy for Dr. Jerry.

  Cathy had not yet met this Miss Dubois. She did not look forward to the quarterly meeting at which the patroness would certainly be in attendance. Meanwhile, she tried tactfully to encourage Leila into better taste by showing her her own modestly pretty lingerie—soft, simple garments that had sent Rita and Gwenda into squeals of joy—but all Leila had said was, “I like something shiny, Aunty Cathy, like satin.”

  “Things don’t have to be shiny to be good and pleasing, Leila.”