Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  The cricket field now had guns on it, multi-barrelled cannons that had made a terrible row during the Blitz. ‘I’ll be so glad to see the end of this terrible war,’ her mother was saying. ‘It would be so nice for you to go back to a nine to five thirty job and come home every night like you used to.’

  ‘It can’t last forever.’ She didn’t want to go back to some nine to five thirty job. Nursing, for all its restrictions, its rules and regulations, had given her in its own way a taste for freedom. She wanted more and by the time this war came to an end she hoped she would have moved on, living a life of her own. That could be a long way off; the war, the way it was going, seemed to have no end to it at all. Night bombing had ceased for the time being but that was no guarantee it wouldn’t start up again. Everyone, for all they had breathed a sigh of relief, was still on edge. The Germans had all of Europe; only this island was left, with just a strip of water between it and the enemy. German invasion was all the talk. Meanwhile British merchant ships were being sunk, every day another one, tightening rationing still more. Even clothing had now gone on ration. The loss of seamen’s lives meant it broke the heart to listen to the news. War in North Africa was now going badly, troops had been pulled out from Crete. No one knew what would come next. She could be thirty by the time it all ended.

  ‘I know it won’t last forever, dear,’ her mother was saying, clinging to her arm as though needing support. ‘It’s just becoming too much for me, for all of us. Look at the bread we eat. Grainy, grey stuff, going stale almost as soon as it’s cooled. Real white bread’s a thing of the past. By the way, the tiles on our roof have been mended, by quite an elderly man who came. The bombing did such a lot of damage.’

  ‘We’re lucky. People have had it really bad elsewhere.’ She thought of the injured brought into casualty, smothered in dust and grime and bits of brick, operated on hardly cleaned up. She thought of the gaping spaces left in blocks of tenements, just rubble now, still uncleared and beginning to settle and weather, greening with fast-growing weeds; places where people had once lived. All their possessions were now gone, perhaps they themselves were gone.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother agreed, sobered by much the same thoughts. ‘We have been lucky. The times I’ve put my hands together and …’

  A voice calling Jenny’s name cut her short. They turned to see a fair-haired girl pushing a pram in which a child around a year old sat. At her side was a fresh-faced young man sporting a pencil moustache and wearing an officer’s uniform. Instantly Jenny recognised them.

  ‘Eileen! Freddy!’ She grasped each in greeting as they came up to her. ‘How are you?’

  Eileen’s voice hadn’t changed, the same dreamy one she remembered. ‘I thought it was you, Jenny. I said to Freddy, “I’m sure that’s Jenny Ross,” didn’t I, Fred? How are you, Jenny. Are you still nursing?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jenny returned, formally now the surprise of seeing them had passed. ‘Yes. In London now. I’m home for the weekend.’

  They nodded without interest. ‘Freddy’s home on leave,’ Eileen said while he smiled rather superciliously. If Eileen hadn’t altered, he had, from the soft lovesick youth to a man with a bearing that suggested arrogant confidence.

  Jenny turned her attention to the little boy in the pram. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Simon. He’ll be a year old in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘He’s a handsome lad, Eileen.’ She cooed at him but the boy merely stared back, solemn round eyes regarding her with that peculiar stare most one-year-olds adopt, their trusting baby smiles long since used up. ‘You must be very proud of him.’

  Freddy nodded and looked pleased while Eileen bent forward over the top of the pram and touched her offspring’s fair head with a fond and possessive hand. But her face had clouded.

  ‘I wonder sometimes if this is a world we should be bringing children into, what with our boys bombing Germany, and the Italians on their side, and the fighting in North Africa, and with all this bombing. My mum and dad’s house got a direct hit you know. But they weren’t in it at the time.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ She didn’t fancy conversing about the Blitz. It was past.

  ‘And after all our RAF boys did last summer, fighting up there all alone in the air. You heard about poor Dennis Cox? Killed in his Spitfire.’

  Jenny had heard. She nodded solemnly.

  ‘Damned waste,’ Freddy said abruptly.

  ‘You used to be his girl at one time,’ Eileen said, looking pityingly at her. ‘It must have come as a terrible shock to you especially.’

  ‘It was never serious between us,’ Jenny said while her mother gave a sad sigh and murmured something about Dennis Cox being such a nice boy too. ‘We were just friends really.’

  ‘Even so …’ Eileen persisted lugubriously, making Jenny want to laugh. Like many who lead uneventful lives, which was how Eileen struck her, she seemed to need to feed, like a carrion crow, on the tragedy of others. ‘It doesn’t seem possible, though. Poor Dennis Cox – dead. It’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, terrible,’ Jenny echoed. So many people dead. So many lives spoiled by loss, by permanent injury, by sights they should never have seen. Men in battle, civilians who should never have been anywhere near a battle, children too young to be thrown into war, young people just leaving school with all their lives ahead of them, their eager lives consisting of but a few short years after all. They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old … Jenny felt tears prickle her nose and sniffed them back, probably sounding as though she was making light of Eileen’s pet word, terrible, for the tragedy that hung about so many people. But it was true: having seen so much, tended so many dying and torn bodies, she couldn’t find it in her to reserve sorrow for Dennis Cox alone.

  ‘But have you heard about Matthew Ward?’ Eileen had perked up.

  Jenny’s heart gave a sickening leap, fear for him pounding like a hammer in her throat. ‘What about him?’ It was all she could manage.

  ‘Got himself engaged. To a Birmingham girl. They’re getting married soon apparently. Now, he’s the last person I’d ever have imagined would settle down. I said to you, Fred, didn’t I? “He’ll end up a bachelor,” I said, didn’t I? And you said, “He’ll still be chasing skirts at forty.” You said, “Men like that who can get their pick of girls usually end up with no one. Far too choosy for their own good.” Do you remember saying that, Fred?’ And as he nodded, ‘So you could have knocked me over with a feather when his father told me in his shop the other day. I don’t think his parents are very keen. A girl from Birmingham. So far away, isn’t it? He sounded as though Matthew was really in earnest about her.’

  Jenny’s heart, still reeling from her initial fear, now felt as though it was plummeting slowly, a broken-winged bird, spiralling down and down. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, trying to sound unconcerned, but her voice trembled.

  ‘And so sudden,’ Eileen was saying blithely. ‘I wonder if he’s had to. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, you know. I bet his parents feel terrible.’

  In the lounge Lilian Ward glared at the letter which had arrived only moments ago.

  ‘How could he? He hardly knows the girl. He’s only just met her. And bringing her here this weekend. It gives me no time whatsoever to prepare and get some food in. I hope she’ll be bringing her ration book. I’m not in the mood to feed strangers. He has no consideration at all. Doesn’t even ask if I want to see this … whoever she is.’

  Leonard Ward watched her stalking back and forth between the leather three-piece suite and the coffee table where he sat with his breakfast cup of tea by the open bay window of the front lounge before leaving to open up his shop.

  In summer it was nice to sit a while here with the morning sunshine slanting in, warming his chest that played him up so in winter, the curtains moving gently in a breeze off the park that brought the sharp scent of cut grass. From here he had a fine vista of the park peeping between the large houses opposite. Even so he looked forward
to being in the shop to smoke his pipe. No Lilian there to frown and order him into the back garden. He’d have liked his pipe now, but he could hardly get up and walk out with her so furious about Matthew’s letter.

  ‘He’s already told us about her,’ he reminded gently.

  ‘Yes, absolute volumes in his last letter. Not one word asking how we are. Nothing but this … what’s her name?’ She consulted the letter again, then refrained from using it. ‘This … girl. Now he wants us to meet her. Says he’s serious about wanting to marry her. We’ll see about that.’

  ‘He’s over twenty-one, Lilian. Not much you can do about it.’

  She was not to be mollified. It would take quite a bit of patience and understanding, perhaps even firmness, to calm her down. She had always been a dominant person. Perhaps that was why he had married her, a woman who had known her own mind and stuck to it in an age when most women were mostly pliable, soft creatures looking to marriage and security. All that despite being in service when servants were expected to be servile.

  Leonard smiled. He could forgive her domineering nature, which concealed a good and caring heart. And at the moment that good and caring heart was being tested to the limit. When all was said and done, Matthew was at fault.

  ‘After all we have done for him,’ she continued, still pacing, her back stiff, her indignation solid enough to be cut with a knife. ‘This is how he rewards us, telling us he intends marrying some common thing from Birmingham, someone we don’t even know, and actually bringing her here for us to meet. No warning whatsoever.’

  Leonard allowed a little longer for effrontery to cool before getting up and saying he must be off before his customers began to wonder what had happened to him.

  Opening up, his first customer had been Eileen Perry who used to be giggly Eileen Wilcox. In just two years she had now become a plain, staid, contented housewife and mother. Her husband was in the forces, but a quartermaster or something that didn’t see combat, so she didn’t bear that strained expression many wives had with husbands fighting somewhere far away.

  Eileen had asked after Matthew and, glad of someone to talk to about it, he told her perhaps more than he should. Later he wondered if it had not been better kept to himself, for Eileen Perry loved a gossip and nothing displeased Lilian more than her private concerns being aired in public.

  Ah, well, the deed was done now, he thought as he served customers with torches and fuse wire and round two-pin plugs and took in the odd wireless for repair, and wondered what this girl, this Susan from Birmingham, would be like. Utterly beautiful, stunning, marvellous, Matthew’s earlier letter had gone on among many other things, all of which his mother had dismissed with several sharp and disparaging snorts of disgust.

  Chapter 10

  Susan stared at the large bay-windowed house as Matthew held open the gate for her. She’d seen such houses in the better parts of Birmingham but had never been in one.

  Ahead of her lay a wide gravel area bordered by small flower beds in full bloom, and shrubbery. The bay windows displayed white lace curtains, each so perfectly pleated that they resembled a regiment of soldiers. Susan saw a downstairs curtain twitch slightly and felt observed, rather like a fish in a glass tank. She shivered, hesitating in the gateway.

  ‘Oh Matthew, I hope they’ll like me.’

  She strove hard to say like, rather than loik; strove to keep her voice from shaking. She’d been practising for this day ever since he had said he was taking her to meet his parents, but it was no less harrowing for all that. But Matthew had told her time and time again that he adored what he called her singsong accent, so surely they would like it as well and thus her.

  ‘Of course they’ll like you,’ he laughed, taking her arm supportively as they went towards the door, a gesture for which she felt grateful. ‘They’ll fall in love with you at first sight, just as I did.’

  Reaching the porch he planted a small encouraging kiss on her cheek, but in the state she was beginning to get herself into at the daunting prospect ahead, its message was lost on her, for as though by a given signal she saw an indistinct wavering shape distorted by the fluted glass of the door appear behind it, the door opening almost immediately. A slim, tall, upright woman with vivid blue eyes stood there looking at the two of them. An angular face, still with traces of beauty, topped by short greying hair whose stiff waves looked as regimental as the pleated curtains that had twitched earlier turned now to her, its smile of welcome seemingly chiselled from granite.

  Matthew pushed Susan forward a fraction. ‘Mum, this is Susan.’

  Even in the midst of her fear of the brittle blue eyes, so different to Matthew’s soft brown ones, Susan wondered at his use of Mum rather than Mother. Mrs Ward looked as though she should be called ‘Mother’ or even Mater; certainly not Mum.

  The woman extended a hand in formal greeting rather in the manner of a pontiff suffering the touch of some unwashed layman. Obediently Susan took it, finding it stiff and cold. But with etiquette observed, Mrs Ward withdrew her hand and stepped back for them to enter.

  ‘Was it a decent journey, Matthew, dear?’ The voice was warm and took Susan completely by surprise. The woman was human after all. ‘I did begin to think you were just a little late.’

  ‘You know what travelling’s like these days, Mum,’ Matthew laughed easily and kissed her offered cheek.

  ‘I never travel far these days,’ she said as he put down his kit and Susan’s small, slightly battered weekend suitcase in the wood-floored hall, a hall of such width that Susan felt her whole family could have almost lived in it. She thought briefly of her own cluttered living room with its old furniture and with its everlasting noise of argument and laughter. About this place there was a silence that seemed almost tangible, as if a cold ghost lived there.

  ‘Dad home?’ Matthew queried easily as he and Susan followed his mother into the lounge. Susan wished she could feel as easy, but then, he would feel easy, wouldn’t he? This was his home.

  The lounge was huge. The furniture looked lost in it, sparsely and tastefully laid out; a parquet floor bordered a large beautifully patterned carpet that looked sort of Turkish. Through the bay window, the high summer sun cast a minimal vertical strip of gold on to one tiny area of the wood floor, missing the carpet completely, which Susan imagined would never be allowed to be touched and consequently faded by any lengthening shaft of autumn sunshine. Mrs Ward probably had one of those posh blinds that well-off people used to keep damaging sunlight out.

  ‘He’ll be home for lunch,’ his mother answered. ‘As usual. But of course he must go back afterwards to open up for the afternoon, Matthew, whether you’re here or not.’

  ‘So you’re the Susan we’ve heard so much about in Matthew’s letters. He certainly didn’t lie about you.’

  Mr Ward’s appearance prompted a surge of relief after an hour stiff and fraught with tension. She took to him the moment he came in at the back door to immediately shake her hand and utter his hearty comment before turning to his son to ask how long he would be home.

  ‘We go back Sunday night,’ Matthew supplied with a chuckle at the innocent, stock question asked nowadays of every serviceman home on leave.

  Mr Ward too gave a low chuckle not unlike his son’s, with a touch of mockery in it that could be taken the wrong way if one missed the whimsical gleam in his eyes. They were slightly lighter than his son’s, more hazel than brown; she could see who Matthew took after, glad that it wasn’t his mother. But if he’d taken after his mother, she knew she wouldn’t be here with him now.

  ‘Don’t give you long, do they? Well, we’ve got you for the weekend at least. We promise to send you back all nice and clean.’

  She had a feeling that as a young man Mr Ward might have possessed the same caustic humour as Matthew, but that it had mellowed or been mellowed by life. She wasn’t usually clever enough to see inside people, but he was so much like Matthew in looks and manner, she felt she could guess at the person he’d
once been because Matthew had been a bit like that when she’d first met him.

  It came to her that she still knew very little about Matthew as they sat down to a small but beautifully set-out cold lunch of salad and luncheon meat, all she supposed the Wards’ food ration would stretch to (dutifully she had handed over her ration book which Mrs Ward had not waved away). They were making conversation from which she began to feel excluded. At ease with his family, he was a stranger to her. Why had she consented to come here, when his way of life was so removed from hers? There came a dull feeling that once back in Birmingham, it would be the end of her and Matthew. She didn’t fit in here. She was yet to meet his sister. If she was anything like Mrs Ward …

  Susan felt most uncomfortable, smiling when she thought she ought to, answering the odd question put to her mostly by the friendly Mr Ward. The afternoon when he would disappear back to his shop loomed before her like a prison sentence. To sit looking at Mrs Ward’s chilly expression all afternoon was not to be contemplated. She dreaded the moments when Matthew, quite at home among his own, would blithely wander off on some pursuit and leave her alone with this woman.

  Mr Ward left, saying he would see her later that evening. Mrs Ward led them upstairs for Susan to put her case in the room allotted to her and freshen up. Freshen up sounded so posh.

  ‘The bathroom is there.’ She indicated a door at the end of a long landing which curved slightly at the end.

  Susan nodded wordlessly. She had never seen a bathroom. The sort of people she knew in Birmingham did not have them. At least this would be a small refuge for her where she could escape this woman’s penetrating eyes.

  The landing had six other doors. Six. Susan had never seen such a thing. Surely, other than the bathroom, the rest couldn’t be all bedrooms. Matthew said his was a four-bedroom house, so the one at the opposite end to the bathroom might be a cupboard.