Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  That Sunday he went dutifully to see Susan’s family. Susan had already broken the news and her mother, fair, full-bosomed and not a bit like her trim daughter, planted a kiss on his cheek in a cloud of Evening in Paris perfume.

  ‘She’s right about you being so good-looking, love, ain’t she, Dad?’

  ‘She’s right, yeah,’ echoed Mr Hopkins.

  Susan’s two sisters sat on the arms of the settee, the air around them redolent of peardrops from nail varnish being applied as they both regarded Matthew with mute envy of their sister.

  Two of her brothers were in the street, the youngest sprawled on a mat in front of an empty firegrate torturing a clockwork train with a screwdriver.

  The place smelled of Sunday midday dinner and Matthew was glad he hadn’t been invited to eat with them; the lingering odour of overboiled cabbage almost overwhelmed him so that it was difficult to draw a breath without feeling nauseated. Susan, sweet and fastidious Susan, deserved better than this. He would give it to her as soon as this war was over and they could find a place together. Meantime, as soon as they were married she might go to his parents and live in a far more wholesome atmosphere.

  Mr Hopkins, a small man who looked as if he had once been handsome, lounged in an armchair rolling a cigarette which he lit. The match was dropped in the empty grate, the matchbox replaced on an already cluttered mantelpiece. ‘Wondered who she’d end up with,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’m very glad she’s found herself a nice lad,’ said Mrs Hopkins, handing Matthew a cup of tea while Susan, sitting beside him on the edge of the settee, smiled with satisfaction and cuddled nearer to him. Her teacup was on the floor at her feet, the liquid in it strong and muddy, as was his. He took a sip, tried not to grimace and put it down beside hers. Behind him a mound of well-thumbed magazines kept sliding forward, making his seat uncomfortable.

  ‘When you planning to marry then?’ Mr Hopkins asked.

  Matthew glanced at Susan, saw her eyes, those deep blue eyes, full of trust. ‘As soon as possible,’ he answered.

  Mr Hopkins coughed, a moist rumbling cough, and flicked the wet butt of his cigarette into the grate. ‘Up the spout is she, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Matthew queried at once, hardly believing what he heard and appalled.

  ‘Pregnant is she?’

  Susan’s two sisters giggled. The boy on the mat looked up, mildly interested. Mrs Hopkins gave a small embarrassed tut.

  ‘No, Mr Hopkins, she isn’t,’ Matthew said tersely, wanting to be out of here as soon as he possibly could. Love Susan as he now did, beyond measure, he did not want to set foot in her parents’ house ever again. This man repelled him. But that Susan was small like her father, it seemed incredible that he was indeed her father. With no way to explain to him, a man who confused love with lust, his feelings for his daughter, he said instead, ‘If I’m posted before we can be married, there might not be another chance for a long time.’

  Mrs Hopkins was giving him a scrutinising look. She had quite large breasts. They strained at her sturdy white brassiere, the top of which was visible above a blue organdie blouse. Matthew looked quickly away, thinking of Susan’s small firm breasts. He longed to be out of here, to be alone with her.

  Mrs Hopkins was appraising him slowly. ‘I must say, though, it fair took us all by surprise, our Sue telling us last night as you’d asked her to marry you. Came as a bit of a shock, like. No wonder we thought you and her had been up to a few tricks.’ She gave a tinkling laugh at his look. ‘Come on, love. We’ve all done it. But whether she is or she ain’t, I’m glad you’re serious about her. And if it’s all right with her, then it’s all right with us.’

  The china-blue eyes followed him slowly as somehow he got to his feet, his hand seeking Susan’s and holding it firmly. ‘I’ll have to be going now, Mrs Hopkins.’

  She looked surprised. ‘You ain’t drunk your tea yet.’

  ‘No, I’ve got to get back to camp. And Susan and I, well we …’

  She giggled at his awkward pause, her tone full of feminine wisdom. ‘Of course. You two want a bit of time alone – to say goodbye, proper like.’ She came over and took his hand in her soft one. ‘Now you come and see us again as soon as you can. You’re always welcome. I’m glad for you both. I know how hard it is for people in love to wait, but meeting you, I know you’ll take care of her no matter what you two get up to. I reckon our Sue’s a lucky girl and at least you’ve asked to marry her. So we can look forward to you both setting a proper date, eh? And soon, eh?’

  ‘Well, as soon as the Army lets us.’ He looked at Susan and saw her eyes shining. ‘I don’t know when that will be, but I’ll try to get something sorted out. It will probably have to be at short notice, knowing the way they work – probably end up in a registry office. The Army doesn’t give weddings top priority for leave.’

  Again he looked at Susan, expecting to see disappointment in her face at the possible lack of a wedding without the trimmings, but her eyes were still glowing.

  Chapter 9

  The Blitz was over. The evening following that Saturday the tenth of May, the worst night of any that the enemy had dished out, people went to their places of safety as usual, nurses stood on alert to receive yet another influx of casualties as usual, but the bombers didn’t come.

  ‘I wonder what’s wrong?’ Jenny’s question echoed that of many, almost as though they had been robbed of something. Quite silly really. But O’Brien, jolly as always, had an answer.

  ‘Ah well, isn’t it Sunday, an’ all? And isn’t it about time they’d be thinkin’ of havin’ a day of rest? Holy Mother o’ God, I expect they need it.’

  ‘If they don’t, then we do,’ Jenny said with just a twitch of a smile. ‘But I don’t think Hitler believes in Sundays or God.’

  Like everyone else she was holding her breath. Come Monday, after lulling poor battered Londoners into a false sense of security, they’d be back again – part of Hitler’s plan to demoralise them further, it had to be – and she would again form part of a team trying to patch up a new intake of victims. But after a fortnight and everything still quiet, Jenny felt she could at last let out her breath. She was also given her first full weekend off in months.

  ‘Now you’ll have the whole weekend with your mother,’ O’Brien said, a wistful lilt in her tone that there was no chance of her getting home to see her family, way off in Northern Ireland. She’d have been appalled to know that the prospect of spending the weekend with her own mother didn’t fill Jenny with as much joy as she supposed.

  All she wanted was to relax a little. Being with her mother, telling her how lonely she felt, was only swapping one tension for another. Of course it was uncharitable to think like that, but now that the worst of the air raids seemed to be over she felt she would have liked to spend this first weekend off in the company of the friends she had made. She needed a bit of fun, a bit of freedom, for who knew what lay around the corner?

  The city’s ruins had still continued to smoke ten days after the Blitz ended. Victims were still being dug out of the rubble, domestic services were still not working properly, thousands of families remained without homes, and streets still stayed blocked; sometimes a street had to be cordoned off where an unexploded bomb was being defused.

  But slowly the intake of casualties was diminishing and this past fortnight had given Jenny a taste for a new freedom that had begun to be felt by her and her colleagues, a sense of adventure as after a night out she and a few others would clamber back into the nurses’ home via a window surreptitiously left unlocked. The hospital’s notion of keeping an eye on its vulnerable young nurses meant proper curfew being kept, with doors locked at ten thirty prompt. Anyone returning later than that must get past the superintendent’s office, and if she didn’t have an official pass, issued to very few for special circumstances only, a visit to Matron the next morning would ensue – a fate usually worse than death. But rules were made to be flouted. After months of air raids with
hardly a moment for herself except to flop down exhausted on a makeshift bed in the safer basement after duty, Jenny felt happy to flout them with the rest.

  ‘No, not this weekend,’ she told O’Brien as they ate after-duty Bovril sandwiches in O’Brien’s room. ‘My mother’s not expecting me. A few of us are going to a dance at the Palais in Hammersmith. I don’t want to miss it.’

  O’Brien stopped halfway to taking a bite from her sandwich. ‘But I heard you once say you were not much of a dancer, did I not?’

  ‘I’m not. But I’d still like to go. Be nice to let my hair down for once. Why don’t you come too?’

  ‘Me? Bejesus, I’d be no good. I’ve two left feet, so I have.’

  ‘Me too. But it’ll get us out of ourselves for a while. We’ll keep each other company.’ She wouldn’t feel so out of it with O’Brien as her life raft, someone to talk to while the others were whirled off in the arms of those who picked them for partners.

  It was with amazement that Jenny found herself among the chosen at the very first dance, a waltz, something she could do fairly well without falling over her or her partner’s feet. She was in fact asked to dance several times and discovered she wasn’t half as left-footed as she had once thought herself, so long as she concentrated on what her partner was doing, and so long as it was a waltz or a not-too-fast quickstep. She felt guilty leaving O’Brien, glad to sit out the more difficult dances, the foxtrots, the tangos and the seductive rumbas. O’Brien seemed quite content just to sit and watch, even pushing Jenny to dance with anyone who came up to them.

  ‘I was niver a one for this,’ she said brightly, her ready smile hardly leaving her round face. ‘Now a good jig is more in my line, so it is.’

  But as the evening wore on, she began to fidget and look at the clock high on the white and gold wall above the band.

  ‘If we don’t leave soon, Ross, we’ll be back too late to get in properly and have to creep past the superintendent’s office, so we will, and if we’re caught it will be Matron’s office in the morning.’

  Jenny laughed. ‘That’s all solved. Bennett left a lavatory window open and a dustbin underneath.’

  ‘And what if someone closes it?’

  ‘They won’t. She’s given instruction to one of the night staff to keep an eye on it. But it’s still early yet.’

  Someone coming towards her with a purposeful expression which she was coming to recognise as an invitation – and the dance was a waltz, thank God – stopped her from saying any more. Not only that but she thought she recognised him as one of the young junior doctors from the London. He held his hand out to her and nodded enquiringly.

  Whisked away, her feet by now adjusting to one or two of the more intricate waltz steps, she was unsurprised but highly delighted when he said, ‘I know your face.’

  She leaned back from him to study him. ‘I’m a nurse.’ The floral dress she wore would not have betrayed her. ‘I work at the London.’

  ‘I thought I’d seen you somewhere. That’s where I work.’

  ‘Oh.’ She felt him swing her and concentrated on matching the step and not squashing his toe in the process.

  ‘I’m on Dr Farnborough’s team. A junior doctor so far. But I hope to qualify next year. My father’s a GP. In Bristol. I’m Ronald Whittaker.’

  ‘Jenny Ross,’ she reciprocated. ‘I’m just a nurse. Studying hard.’

  He chuckled as he swung her into a turn. ‘Don’t ever say just a nurse. You lot have been worth your weight in gold these last months of the Blitz. Couldn’t have managed without a single one of you.’

  ‘Not the mess I’ve been getting into during the worst of it,’ she said with a small self-deprecating laugh. ‘Dropping basins of water all over the place … Oops! Sorry.’ She’d caught his toe, breaking his turn but he hardly noted it. He was staring at her, slowing his steps down more to a walk.

  ‘I know you,’ he burst out in revelation. ‘Yes. During an air raid. In the basement.’

  The basements had doubled as operating theatres and casualty. And now she definitely recognised him too, and the recollection made her blush. He had been assisting in stemming a haemorrhage. She had knocked into him as she hurried past with a basin of disinfection solution. The liquid had tipped all over the floor so that she had been obliged to mop it all up, getting in the way while all around people cried out for relief from their pain. Later he had come over to ask how she was. All that had been going on around them and he had asked how she was.

  By the end of the waltz, to her astonishment, he was asking her if he could see her again. ‘I know we work in the same hospital, but I would like to see you on a social basis. Perhaps we could go across the road to the pub for a drink, when we’re both off duty.’

  Before she could stop herself, she said, ‘I’d like that.’ Seconds later that last kiss Matthew had given her flashed through her mind, a kiss that meant so much at the time. But that was it – at the time. Time had gone on. Their ways, which she’d thought might hold promise, had taken their own turnings and she’d vowed to get on with her own life. Maybe this man was her new life, her future. Matthew certainly wasn’t. He was the past.

  She found she and Ronald had something in common. He knew the Basingstoke teaching hospital where she had been. He had left just before her arrival. It seemed such a coincidence and only natural they should make a second date as soon as their off duty hours again matched. And when on their third date he told her he thought she was quite lovely, the understatement carrying a depth of honesty, she felt uplifted and indeed felt lovely for the first time ever. Even so, old habits tended to die hard; his admiration of her made her scoff.

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course I’m not. I wish I’d been born dark-haired.’

  ‘You’ve got gorgeous hair, Jenny.’

  They sat in darkness on one of the few market stalls operating in wartime, manned by older men and some women holding the fort for their own menfolk away at the war. Whitechapel’s street market, a thriving place before the war, had become sparse, the variety of goods narrowed down to vegetables, second-hand clothing, bike parts, and so on. Perched on the empty stall between a skeleton of rusting tubular uprights, breathing in the dank odour of cabbage leaves trodden underfoot earlier and the sweet waft of beer from the pub they’d just left, he couldn’t see her in the blackout, nor she him, but his hand moved up and in the inky blackness felt its way across her short curls. ‘I do so love touching your hair, Jenny.’ He leaned forward, gave her a kiss. ‘I know this sounds sudden, but, Jenny, I love you.’

  For a moment she was quiet, then she said softly, ‘We’ve only seen each other three times. You can’t. It’s too early.’

  ‘It’s never too early, darling. I am, I’m in love with you.’ He kissed her again, gently, and all she could do was kiss him back, telling herself that Matthew was another world, a closed chapter. She felt a little sad, but this was her life. And she had to take it with both hands.

  Sitting in the sunshine of her tiny back garden, overlooked by all the other houses around that were beginning to cast lengthening shadows across it, Jenny let her mind move gently over that third date. It had been far too early for him to start professing love. Had she felt the same it would have been fine, but she hadn’t. Nice as he was, she became angry with herself that even as he kissed her, Matthew with his quirky smile had floated into her head, making her merely suffer the kiss, thus allowing some past infatuation to spoil what could become something worthwhile.

  She found herself telling Ronald that this weekend she had to spend some time with her mother. After all, duty came first. But was it really that there might be a slim chance of bumping into Matthew or at least finding out how he was? She needed time to think – about Ronald, about her life, to shake off this silly longing and grow up. Ronald was a nice person but it was early days yet. A day or two away from him might clear her head and let her see things as they stood. Too easy to end up an old maid in crying after something that couldn’
t be had when what could be had was maybe staring her right in the face.

  ‘Jenny, dear, come in and have your tea.’ Her mother, calling to her, interrupted her reverie.

  ‘I thought we could take a little stroll in the park afterwards,’ Mrs Ross continued as they sat together in the small dining room with the sun pouring in through the window. ‘It’s a lovely afternoon and I don’t usually care for going for walks on my own. But now you’re here it would be nice for us. They don’t give you half enough time off at that hospital.’

  Jenny held back a sigh of protest. She didn’t want to stroll anywhere. It had been peaceful just sitting in the back garden relaxing in the gentle curve of the deckchair. So long since she’d been able to relax. Resigned, she went to gather up a cardigan.

  ‘No one would dream there was a war on,’ her mother murmured as they passed the noisy Victorian drinking fountain with its usual cluster of children around it denying visitors a chance of peace or a sip of water.

  ‘Let’s take a walk over to the other end,’ Mrs Ross suggested with a grimace towards the raucous, scruffy children. ‘It’s quieter over there. I like the grottos and rockeries with all the rhododendrons. They should be in bloom.’

  It was a long walk; the park was vast. Jenny let her mother chatter on as they wandered past the wide lake with its twin islands designed as sanctuary for water fowl. There was another lake, an ornamental pond near the main entrance with fish and water lilies. But it was all beginning to look a little sad. Parts of the park had been turned over to allotments rented by local men too old to be called up. Jenny could see some of them hoeing around their spring cabbage, lettuce, onions, carrots, stringing up runner beans, all bent on their work, everything else around them going unnoticed. Men who no doubt had once only ever got their hands in the soil for a hobby, now dug like navvies. Tomorrow, Sunday, they would be at it again, bending their backs and trundling their wheelbarrows home laden with tools or green produce to help supplement the family rations for another week. People who had any sort of garden or back yard now kept chickens for their eggs and flesh – another boost to a larder slimmed by rationing.