by Annie Groves
Swinging round, she saw the young American reporter who was staying with Ian Simpson.
‘Hi there, remember me?’ he smiled.
‘Of course,’ Tilly responded promptly. ‘You’re Mr Simpson’s lodger, Drew Coleman.’
‘That’s right.
Dulcie, who had seen the good-looking young man stop Tilly, quickly and determinedly made her way over to them, interrupting Drew’s description of an article he had written for his home-town newspaper, to say archly, ‘I hope you’re going to introduce me, Tilly, and not keep this handsome man all to yourself.’
As she spoke Dulcie managed to position herself so that she was standing directly in front of Drew, whilst Tilly was now to one side of him. It wasn’t that she really wanted to oust Tilly from his attention; it was just that Dulcie couldn’t help herself when it came to claiming the limelight.
‘Dulcie, this is Drew Coleman,’ Tilly obligingly made the introduction. ‘He’s lodging with Ian. He’s a reporter and he’s American. Drew, this is Dulcie Simmonds. I told you about her when Ian Simpson introduced us.’
‘Of course. Delighted to meet you, Dulcie.’
‘That’s a fancy ring you’re wearing,’ Dulcie announced, never backward about coming forward when she wanted to know something.
‘It’s my graduation ring – from Harvard,’ Drew informed her with a smile. ‘It’s an American tradition for successful graduates to wear a ring from their college.’
‘So it doesn’t mean that you’re involved with a girl then?’ Dulcie probed.
‘No, it doesn’t, and I’m not.’
There was no reason for her to feel pleased that Drew wasn’t involved with anyone Tilly told herself, and yet she knew that she was.
Olive, who had been watching the trio, brought her conversation with Mrs Windle to an end and shepherded Agnes over to join them.
‘Mum, this is Drew Coleman,’ Tilly explained. ‘Remember I told you about him?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Olive smiled, extending her hand. ‘Olive Robbins. Welcome to Article Row, Drew.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Robbins.’ The young American smiled politely back.
‘Drew writes about the war for a newspaper in his home town in America, Mum,’ Tilly reminded her mother.
‘Well, you’ll certainly have had plenty to write about these last few days,’ Olive told him sadly.
‘Yes, ma’am. It surely takes some getting used to, seeing what’s happening to you folks over here. The folks back home don’t realise . . .’
‘Which is why reporters like you are doing such a good job on our behalf, in telling them,’ Olive praised him with a smile.
He seemed a very pleasant young man, – good-looking, certainly – but as a mother Olive looked well beyond a young man’s looks, and what she could see in the young American’s gaze and his manner went a long way to reassuring her about his character.
‘If you’re going to attend church here regularly then perhaps you’d like to join us for lunch afterwards one Sunday?’ she suggested, pleased when she saw how genuinely eager he was to accept her invitation.
‘Yes, ma’am, I sure would appreciate that.’
‘And we’ll have to take him dancing at the Hammersmith Palais once I’ve had my plaster cast removed, won’t we, Tilly?’ Dulcie put in, giving the young American a distinctly saucy smile, whilst Olive looked on ruefully, her opinion of him rising still further when he looked more abashed than entranced by Dulcie’s wiles. If anything, it was Tilly he seemed to admire, rather than Dulcie, Olive noticed, although that admiration was mannerly and respectful.
‘I hear that the dear King and Queen have flatly refused to leave the Palace, even though Mr Churchill has pleaded with them to do so,’ the vicar’s wife, an ardent royalist, told Olive as Olive gathered the girls together ready for the walk back to number 13. ‘So very brave and loyal of them.’
‘I dare say that they didn’t want the people of London to feel that they were being deserted,’ Olive answered her quietly, ‘especially when so many of them are having such a dreadful time.’
‘Oh, indeed, yes,’ Mrs Windle agreed. She had only to look at her husband’s congregation to know that, never mind what she’d seen at the rest centre.
‘Perhaps Ted would like to come and join us for Sunday lunch at the same time as Drew comes?’ Olive suggested to Agnes as the four of them made their way home together. Sally hadn’t joined them for church because she was on duty.
The wan smile Agnes gave her in return made Olive feel concerned, as did her low voice when she responded, ‘That’s ever so kind of you, but I don’t think he’ll be able to come. I reckon his mum wouldn’t like it if he wasn’t there on a Sunday to go to church with them.’ Agnes’s voice trembled slightly.
Now that Olive thought about it, Agnes had been very quiet since the bombing had started, but Olive had put that down to the natural dread and horror they were all feeling. Now, though, she wondered if something other than that was bothering her. Olive knew that there had been an upset between the young couple earlier in the year when Ted had backed off from their relationship, thinking he was doing the right thing for Agnes because he wouldn’t be in a position to marry her until his sisters had grown up, but that was all sorted out now, or so Olive had thought. Something was definitely bothering her young lodger, though, and she’d have to try to find out just what it was. Olive’s maternal heart was just as sensitive to hurt when she sensed it in the young lives of her lodgers as it was to any hurt in her daughter, and Agnes was an orphan, after all, and a gentle, vulnerable type of girl.
For her part Agnes felt thoroughly miserable. There was nothing she’d like more than for Ted to come and share their Sunday lunch, but she suspected that his mother wouldn’t approve. Because she loved him Agnes didn’t want to put Ted in any kind of difficult position. All she could do was hope that somehow Ted’s mother would get used to her being around and come to like her. Somehow.
‘We’d better not dawdle, you never know when there’s going to be another air raid,’ Olive told them all, increasing her pace.
‘The bombing can’t go on much longer, surely,’ Tilly protested optimistically. ‘The Germans can’t have many bombs left, having dropped so many on us.’
All of them automatically stopped walking to look up into the sky. The air still smelled of burning buildings – and of death and destruction.
‘In church this morning I couldn’t help thinking of all those people who couldn’t . . . who wouldn’t be there.’ Tilly almost choked on her last shakily whispered word.
Olive reached for her daughter’s hand, holding it tight. ‘We are here,’ she reminded her, but even as she spoke Olive wondered for how long those words would hold good.
At Barts Sally emerged from the over-crowded hospital chapel where she had gone during her dinner break, readjusting her cap as she did so. She had been lucky enough to manage to squeeze inside the tiny chapel itself. As always, since the war had started, it had been packed with those who, like her, had felt the need to draw close to a source of comfort that had sustained so many generations.
In the chapel’s dimly lit mustiness, its silence broken only by the odd cough, the sound of shoes on its stone floor and the occasional heart-rending scrape of a single limb or a crutch dragged against it, Sally had offered up her own heartfelt prayers for those close to her, including everyone at number 13 and, of course, George. It wasn’t, though, the sombre solemnity nor the timeless awareness of the fragility of human life that was causing her to frown now. She paused mid-step, for once oblivious to the busyness of the hospital all around her, as she remembered that moment in the chapel when, inside her head, she had had such a sharp mental vision of her father and Morag holding their child.
Chapter Seven
Sally was one of the first to admit, as the days grew shorter, that any hopes the country might have had back in September that the Germans had stopped bombing them were false. As the weeks went
by the Luftwaffe proved that they had plenty more bombs to drop on Britain’s town and cities. Many of the stores on Oxford Street had suffered bomb damage, including Selfridges, and its rooftop restaurant was now permanently closed. But no matter how many times German bombers returned to attack, Londoners refused to be daunted. The theatres were open, and so were the cinemas and dance halls. Londoners shrugged and said that if your name was on a bomb then it was on it, so you might just as well get on with your life as best you could.
And that was exactly what everyone was attempting to do, especially the women of London. From the office girls who picked their way to their places of work through the rubble of newly demolished buildings every morning, to the housewives who queued resolutely for the food to feed their families, they were determined not to let Hitler get the better of them.
‘At long last. I’ve bin waiting here for blumming ages,’ Dulcie greeted Sally from her bed in Out Patients, where she was waiting to have the plaster removed from her ankle.
Guessing that, despite the fact that she had pretended not to be concerned about the procedure, Dulcie was in reality rather apprehensive, Sally had offered to stay on at the hospital after her shift ended to remove Dulcie’s plaster cast for her.
Knowing Dulcie as she did, Sally didn’t take offence at her manner. It was just Dulcie being Dulcie, determined not to let the outside world see her as vulnerable.
‘Dr Tomkins will be seeing her next, and he’ll want that cast off ready for him to look at her ankle, so I’ll leave you to deal with her,’ the nurse who had been standing beside Dulcie’s bed told Sally with a cross look over her shoulder at Dulcie. ‘She’s done nothing but complain from the minute she arrived. She says she knows you . . .’
‘Yes, we lodge at the same house,’ Sally explained, rolling up her sleeves as the other nurse disappeared in the direction of patients several beds away, leaving Sally to slip protective cuffs over her rolled-up sleeves and then reach for a pair of plaster shears from the waiting trolley.
She could see the way in which Dulcie’s eyes widened when she saw the shears, and she wasn’t surprised. Most patients reacted in the same way.
‘It’s all right,’ she assured her friend. ‘You’ll be safe, just as long as you keep still, of course.’
‘What are they for?’ Dulcie demanded, ignoring Sally’s reassurance, her expression distinctly wary.
‘They’re for removing the plaster cast. We have to cut through it. It’s easier and faster than trying to soak it off. Now just lie still, Dulcie.’
‘Are you sure you’re qualified to do this?’ Dulcie asked her, sitting up and clutching the plaster cast on her ankle protectively with both hands. There was a noticeable quaver in the expression on Dulcie’s face, making Sally laugh, although she quickly straightened her face. As a nurse she knew how worrying and, indeed, frightening quite simple medical procedures could seem to patients who were not familiar with them. For that reason she did not tell Dulcie, as she could have done, that she had spent the last few hours in an operating theatre assisting a consultant surgeon in her capacity as a senior nurse and stand-in sister with several operations of great complexity, all dealing with injuries so severe that it had only been the dedication and the skill of the medical professionals working on them that had brought those patients through successfully.
Instead she teased Dulcie, ‘You’re not trying to tell me you want to keep it on, are you, after all the complaining you’ve done about it?’
‘Course I’m not,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘I just want to make sure that you know what you’re doing, that’s all.’
‘I do,’ Sally assured her, before adding in a deliberately kind voice, ‘but if you’d like me to ask Nurse Fletcher to come back instead . . .’
Dulcie shuddered. ‘What, that nurse with the thick ankles, who looked as though she’d be at home with a meat cleaver in her hands? No thanks.’
‘Just keep still then,’ Sally said briskly, putting her left hand on Dulcie’s leg and leaning over so that Dulcie couldn’t see what she was doing. ‘I’ll have this off in a couple of ticks, because if I don’t, and it’s still on when Dr Tomkins gets here, we’re both going to be in trouble.’
Swiftly and expertly Sally proceeded to cut through the plaster, within which Dulcie’s leg had shrunk a little, allowing good purchase for the plaster shears. Within a very short space of time indeed Sally had removed the cast, revealing Dulcie’s pale-fleshed and very slender-looking ankle to be revealed to the light of day for the first time in many weeks.
After a brief moment of relief, and something that for Dulcie could have been a look of gratitude, Sally could see that Dulcie was back on form again.
‘Now what?’ Dulcie demanded warily.
‘Now the doctor will come and look at your ankle to check that everything is as it should be,’ Sally answered her.
‘To make sure you’ve taken that cast off properly, you mean?’
‘No,’ Sally corrected her, ‘to make sure that the bone has set properly, ’cos if it hasn’t then you’ll have to have the ankle rebroken and set again.’
It was unkind of her to say that, Sally knew, but sometimes Dulcie needed a bit of firm handling and putting in her place, and this, in Sally’s opinion, was definitely one of those times.
Whilst Dulcie was grappling with this piece of information Sally took advantage of her uncharacteristic silence swiftly to remove the remainder of the plaster, unable to resist a grin of pure mischief when Dulcie realised too late that she had missed an opportunity to register her disapproval by giving a rather too belated ‘ouch’.
‘Ouch nothing,’ Sally laughed. ‘You never felt a thing.’
‘Yes I did,’ Dulcie protested,
Sally laughed again and warned her, ‘I’d save your ouches, if I were you, for when the doctor arrives.’
‘Why? What is he going to do? Will it hurt?’ Dulcie demanded, looking so genuinely apprehensive for the first time that Sally’s desire to tease her was banished by her training, and her natural instinct to protect her patients.
‘No, not at all,’ she reassured her. ‘Ah, here he is now.’
Unexpectedly Dulcie reached for her hand and held it tightly. Sally was used to patients needing this comfort and support, but she wasn’t used to seeing such vulnerability in Dulcie. It touched her heart in a way that she hadn’t expected. She gave Dulcie’s tense fingers a reciprocal squeeze and assured her, ‘Honestly, there’s nothing for you to worry about.’
No, it was the young house doctor attending to Dulcie who needed to worry, Sally thought ruefully a couple of minutes later as she watched the effect of Dulcie’s smiles and pouts as she tossed her blond hair and batted her mascared lashes in the doctor’s direction. No wonder he seemed all fingers and thumbs. But Sally gave Dulcie a cool look that warned her that she was going too far, when Dulcie told him admiringly, ‘Oooh, you’ve got ever such nice warm hands. Not like Sally’s, but then of course she’s only a nurse.’
The young doctor was putty in Dulcie’s skilled hands, Sally could see, his face so flushed that she was tempted to suggest she should take his temperature. Dulcie, of course, was thoroughly enjoying herself, wringing out every last drop of drama from having her ankle checked.
And then, when he was very gently rotating her ankle, she asked him if he thought it was true that girls with slender ankles made the best dance partners because they were so light on their feet.
A more experienced and world-weary medic such as George would have put Dulcie in her place very quickly and politely, but this doctor was new to Barts and a bit of an innocent abroad, Sally suspected. Dulcie’s outrageous flirting was certainly flustering him. She had got him in such a hot and bothered state that Sally suspected that he was the one who needed a cool soothing hand on his brow, not Dulcie.
Deeming it might be time to bring an end to Dulcie’s games and relieve the young doctor’s embarrassment, Sally stepped in to say calmly, ‘I think Dulcie is worried
about her ankles, Doctor, because she’s been warned that she could end up with them really swollen with rheumatism if she doesn’t take care, and then she won’t be able to dance at all. She’ll have to sit out with the old maids and watch.’
It was only her own strict standards of professionalism that stopped her laughing out loud at the look on Dulcie’s face, Sally acknowledged, firmly controlling her amusement as Dulcie, obviously struggling between maintaining the sweet but helpless pose she had adopted for the doctor’s benefit, and telling Sally exactly what she thought of being linked in any kind of way with anyone who was forced to sit out and watch others dancing, was rendered speechless, her face flushed with sheer frustration.
Happily, before the young doctor could be tormented any further, Dulcie was given the all clear. She did, however, manage a final triumphant look at Sally as she got up off the bed. Rearranging her skirt with a flourish that drew attention to her slim legs, as she stepped into her shoes and then pulled on her coat, her parting words to Sally were an ungrateful, ‘You want to be careful with them scissors. It was only thanks to me keeping still that you didn’t nick me with them, if you ask me.’
Sally managed to stop herself from retaliating with a very firm, ‘It was only thanks to my training that I wasn’t tempted to do just that.’
But despite all that had happened, Sally was willing to admit to herself that Dulcie had that way about her that made Sally smile, even whilst she was being her most irritating. Dulcie was a character and a one-off, there was no doubt about that. Her outer shell of tough self-interest shielded and hid a heart that was fiercely loyal to those Dulcie considered to be her friends, and Sally knew how much all the inhabitants of number 13 meant to Dulcie, just as they did to her. There, the house filled with Olive’s kindness and love, they had all found a balm that soothed the pain they had suffered from something that had previously either been missing or lost from their lives, Sally acknowledged. Today, though, she didn’t want to dwell on such matters. It simply did not do, in her opinion, to overindulge one’s emotions. It led to them becoming too demanding and troublesome. Far better instead to focus on the practicalities of life, Sally told herself when she too left the hospital in Dulcie’s wake.