A Mother's Gift

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Joss? Joss?’ she cried and dived under, for a streak of red was bubbling through the water at the spot where he had been diving. Taking a deep breath, she ducked under again. The water was brown and peaty but still clear enough for her to see that the top half of Joss’s body was sticking out of a hole in the bed of the stream, his eyes wide open as he tried to move a rock that had rolled over, restricting the opening.

  ‘Frank! Frank!’ she screamed the moment her head was clear of the water, but there was no sign of Frank, only Chuck and Clara standing on the stones and staring at her.

  ‘Stay there!’ she shouted and swam to where she judged Joss to be before ducking under the water again. She heaved at the stone, adding her small strength to that of her brother, and for an eternity of perhaps two seconds she thought she couldn’t do it. And then it moved and Joss shot up through the water and he was there, above her, and they swam the two or three strokes it took to reach the bank.

  They hung on to the edge, gasping, until Joss summoned up enough strength to push Theda up on to the grass and then Frank was there, holding out a hand to his brother.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, as they rubbed themselves down with the towels Mam had put in the carrier bag along with their picnic. Theda went behind a bush and changed into her cotton dress while Joss told the tale, for she couldn’t bear to relive the horror of it. Then she bound up the graze on his leg with his hankie.

  ‘Theda saved my life,’ declared Joss, watching her.

  ‘Well, I would have done,’ said Frank, sulkily, mad that he had missed the excitement. And after a while they settled down and ate the sandwiches and drank the water out of the pop bottles and trooped away home for tea.

  ‘Don’t tell Mam or Da,’ Joss warned the little ones, but of course Clara couldn’t contain herself and the story came tumbling out as soon as she got in the door.

  ‘No more swimming in the beck,’ declared Mam. But Joss wasn’t likely to; he was going away, wasn’t he? thought Theda.

  That night, lying in the bed she shared with Clara, Theda had a serious talk with God. She always talked to God rather than prayed as it was uncomfortable kneeling on the bare floorboards by the bed. She was sure God didn’t mind her being comfortable when she spoke to Him. She told Him how lonely it would be without Joss and asked why they had been brought to Winton Colliery when there wasn’t enough work to keep them all? And she asked a special favour: could He please look after Joss for her when she was no longer able to keep an eye on him?

  It was 1938 by the time the pit started working full blast again. Matt Wearmouth, Theda’s father, came off the three-day week he had been working along with his mates and began working five and a half days and suddenly there was enough money in the house to feed the gas meter even on a Thursday night. The younger ones missed sitting in the firelight telling stories but Theda was glad because it meant she had more time to study for her School Certificate.

  She had cried the day she had had to leave school to take up a job behind the counter at the Co-op store because she was doing well, and if only she had had another six months she could have done it. But Frank had left school and had been working on the screens at the pit for only a few weeks when he was laid off and times were desperate.

  Theda had given up talking to God. There was Joss, thousands of miles away, in India of all places, with the army. And she hated her job at the Co-op; it was boring.

  ‘I’m going to be a nurse, Mam,’ she declared on the day she got the information on how to apply from Newcastle Hospital. ‘If I have to have my School Cert, I’ll work for it at night.’

  ‘Aye, well, pet,’ said Mam. ‘If determination means anything, you’ll make it.’

  A year later, Theda had the certificate in her hand and sent it off to Newcastle along with her completed application form and a reference from the manager of the Co-op, given a bit reluctantly, for Mr Hodges thought she didn’t apply herself sufficiently to her work. She was grateful that he gave it in the end, for she knew there was some truth in what he thought, but how can you apply yourself to tidying shelves and waiting while a customer decides between a tin of peas or a tin of beans? There was another reference from Miss Dart, the French mistress from school who had helped her out by giving her extra coaching.

  ‘I wouldn’t spend all my free time with my head buried in books,’ said Clara as she sat on the bed the day Theda packed her cardboard suitcase. Clara was fifteen and already a machinist in one of the new factories the other side of Bishop Auckland. Safely out of sight of her mother, she was trying the new lipstick she had bought out of the five shillings Mam gave her back from her pay. It was a bright cherry red and contrasted well with her dark eyes and black hair. She pouted her lips and blew herself a kiss in her compact mirror, well pleased with the result.

  ‘What do you think of that, our Theda?’ she asked.

  ‘A bit bright.’ She looked up from her consultation of the list that the hospital had sent her: two nightgowns, three pairs of knickers, three vests, three pairs of black stockings (lisle, no artificial silk), and two pairs of flat-heeled black shoes. She had had to save up for weeks to collect them, together with the list of textbooks.

  Clara pulled a face. ‘At least I won’t look a frump like you will in that lot. Anyroad, like I said, I think you’re mad to go in for nursing. Emptying bedpans all day long, that’s what you’ll be doing. Or cleaning up other people’s snotty noses. But don’t take any notice of me, I’m just your little sister. You think I know nothing.’ Clara jumped off the bed. ‘I’m away now, going into Bishop to the pictures.’

  ‘Better not let Mam see you with all that muck on your face,’ advised Theda. ‘You know she said you hadn’t to wear make-up until you were older.’

  Clara grinned and pulled her red beret over one eye, just like Marlene Dietrich. ‘I won’t,’ she said, and winked. Theda heard her tripping down the stairs and going straight out of the back door, calling goodbye to the family in general as she went.

  ‘Wait – Clara!’ her mother cried after her, but she was gone, escaping down the street to the bus stop.

  Theda hadn’t given much thought to what would happen when she began working as a probationer nurse. But though the work was hard – she fell into her bed at night exhausted and slept straight through until six o’clock, and every afternoon when she had a split day and two hours off she slept on her bed for the whole time – she liked it. The girls she was with were friendly and the patients were ordinary people, some of them from the mining villages around and some whose fathers and brothers were among the men laid off work at the shipyards along the Tyne.

  What she hadn’t bargained for was how homesick she would be. Though she was only thirty miles away, she couldn’t get home every time she had a day off as she didn’t have the fare.

  You’re eighteen years old now, she told herself. Don’t be a baby. How do you think Joss felt, going all those miles away?

  Gradually, her body adjusted to the hard, physical work and she learned to stay awake when she had to after night duty to attend a lecture. And by the time she finished her first year and was studying for her first exams, she was coming up to twenty-one and there was a war on.

  Of course, she’d known it might happen. She had been worried at the time of Munich, just like everyone else, and had felt a great sense of relief when Mr Chamberlain came home waving his piece of paper. But the war had crept up on her unawares, somehow. She had been sitting in her room with her books, as she so often was, for she had preliminary examinations coming up, when she heard the excited voices outside and went into the corridor to find out what was wrong. The door of the common room was open and some of the girls were clustered around the wireless in there.

  ‘… no such undertaking has been received.’ It was Mr Chamberlain’s voice coming over the air.

  ‘It’s started then,’ Nurse Lewis, one of the nurses in her year, said. ‘I have a brother in the Air Force, I hope he’s all right. I suppose t
he men in your family will be all right, being down the pits? A reserved occupation, isn’t it?’

  ‘My brother’s in the army,’ said Theda defensively and turned away. But for her the war was something that was happening in the background; apart from the normal stab of fear for her country, which she imagined everyone felt, she wasn’t worried for her family. Though Joss was a soldier he was far away, out of harm’s way, in the Far East and the war could be over before he came home. The hospital had been an enclosed world to her this last year or so; the patients came from the outside, it was true, but it was the world on the wards and in the nurses’ quarters that had been Theda’s reality.

  Then she went home one day to find that Frank had been called up.

  ‘But, Da,’ she protested, ‘Why? He was working again, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Aye. But if you’d been taking more notice of what was going on you’d have known he was in the territorials, had been for a few months. So he got his papers straight away.’

  ‘He’s just a bairn!’ her mother had burst out and Theda had felt exactly the same way. It didn’t seem right.

  Then there was Joss. There were no letters coming through from India but she discovered that some of his friends had landed from a troopship somewhere in the south of England. It was all very hush-hush and there was no information of more of his unit coming.

  ‘It’ll be because of the U-boats. They don’t want to let them buggers know where our troopships are,’ Matt had said, nodding his head sagely, and fear gripped her heart once again at the thought of a torpedo hitting a ship with Joss on board and him floating in the water trying to swim to safety. It reminded her of the day he’d got stuck in the pothole in the bed of the Gaunless, and she went off on her own down the garden to the strawberry beds and had a good cry. Then she wiped her eyes and went back to Newcastle as she was on duty that night.

  Sometimes she went out with the other nurses to the Brighton ballroom or the Majestic cinema; it occupied her mind and the town was full of soldiers and sailors who liked to dance. Sometimes she even met a boy and had a date but nothing ever came of it. No one ever quite measured up to Joss. She was gaining a reputation for being quiet and studious and not much interested in boys. She was studying when Nurse Lewis knocked on her door one evening.

  ‘Come in,’ called Theda, looking up from her work. Nurse Lewis popped her head round the door.

  ‘Mind, you’re a dark horse,’ she said. ‘Here, I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend, weren’t even interested?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Theda.

  ‘Then who’s this smashing fella waiting downstairs in the lobby? Tall, dark and handsome, with a gorgeous tan. A corporal, an’ all.’

  Theda hadn’t time to answer, she was pushing past Nurse Lewis and flying down the stairs, and there was Joss, home safe, and a great weight lifted from her shoulders. She flung her arms around him and he swung her off her feet and laughed exuberantly. It was the same old Joss, only older and with his skin tanned to mahogany and his body filled out to that of a man.

  ‘Steady on there, our Theda,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come all this way just to be knocked over by a slip of a lass like you.’

  They had a lovely time, dancing at the Oxford Galleries in the town, and she discovered that Joss was a great dancer, swooping around the floor with dash and verve. But, of course, he had to go back to his unit.

  ‘I have to catch the 11.10 train to King’s Cross,’ he said, and showed her his docket. ‘I only had forty-eight hours’ leave. But when Mam said she thought it was your afternoon off, I had to pop up and see you, hadn’t I?’

  ‘I’m so glad you did,’ said Theda, and behind her eyes the tears threatened. ‘I can’t come to the station with you, I have to be back at the hospital.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’ll be back. I can’t tell you where we’re going but if I see our Frank, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’

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  First published as ‘The Ironmaster’s Girl’ in 2002 by Piatkus Books

  This edition published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group Company

  Copyright © 2002 Una Horne writing as Maggie Hope

  Maggie Hope has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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  ISBN 9780091945213

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