A Daughter's Duty

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Brian! Are you all right? I was so worried,’ she cried.

  ‘Of course I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Get off me, Marina, you’ll be filthy.’ He looked sideways at the other miner who was all grinning interest. Brian was embarrassed that one of his new workmates should see the fuss his wife was making. Newly married men had enough ragging to put up with in the pit without Marina giving cause for more.

  He was blushing, she realised, though it was difficult to see through the coal dust on his face. ‘But are you sure you’re not badly hurt?’ she asked anxiously, though she stood back from him and brushed ineffectively at the marks on her coat.

  ‘No, I’m fine. Did Jeff not tell you?’ He looked accusingly at his friend who shrugged and glanced at Marina. Women! his glance said eloquently. ‘I’m just waiting for the doctor to look at my X-ray, then we can be off. Just a few stitches in my head, that’s all I’ve got. If I’d ducked a bit sharper the blooming stone would have missed me altogether.’

  ‘Too slow to catch cold,’ Jeff commented, and turned to the miner with his arm in a sling. ‘How about you, Bert? Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘No, thanks, lad. Broke me wrist,’ he replied. ‘I have to wait for the plasterman, they’ve called him in.’ He gazed at the sling. ‘Flaming nuisance it is, I was going to have the garden dug over this weekend, give the soil a chance to break up before the winter.’ Bert was a champion gardener, Jeff remembered; he had an allotment at the other end of the colliery. He’d won first prize at the leek show at the Club a few weeks ago: twenty pounds and a chiming clock.

  ‘Never mind, you’ll get a few weeks off now while that mends,’ Jeff said by way of consolation, but Bert looked anything but consoled. He grunted and pulled a face. Jeff remembered then that Bert’s missus was notorious in the colliery for being a nag, perhaps one of the reasons he spent so much time on his allotment.

  ‘Brian Wearmouth?’ A nurse had appeared at a door to one side and Brian started to get to his feet. She saw him and came over to them. ‘Your X-ray was clear, Mr Wearmouth.’ She smiled brightly. ‘You must have a hard head, that’s all. Now you can go, but first of all take this to the office over there, you’ll get a note for your doctor. And come back in ten days to have the stitches out.’ She nodded and went over to Bert, the last customer of the day by the look of things.

  ‘Thank the Lord it’s nothing worse,’ Marina said to Brian as the three of them trooped over to the window of the office. Two doctors were in there talking and a man was sitting at the desk before the window, putting a letter in an envelope and sealing it up.

  ‘Won’t be a minute, Mr Wearmouth,’ he said, then his attention was distracted as another doctor came into the office and began to talk to him. Jeff heard something one of the doctors said, something about Rose Sharpe. He could have sworn the man said Rose Sharpe …

  ‘Rose?’ he said aloud, leaning into the window. The two men in white coats looked up, startled, the older man frowning irritably.

  ‘Pardon me?’ he said haughtily.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you mentioned the name of a friend of ours.’

  ‘This a private conversation,’ said the doctor and turned his back, but by now the younger one was only half attending to what he was saying. He stood gazing after the two miners and the girl, obviously the wife of the one who had been hurt. They were going out of the door.

  Perhaps they had been talking about the same Rose Sharpe, thought Bob, and as soon as he could he broke off the conversation with a hurried apology and went after them. They must have gone for the bus, he reckoned, all three wouldn’t be allowed in the NCB ambulance. He ran down to the gates but the bus stop was empty. There was a tooting behind him and he stood aside automatically as a car went out of the grounds. He didn’t notice the occupants; for some reason it didn’t occur to him that they might be in a car. Oh, well, it probably wasn’t even the same Rose they seemed to know.

  Jeff parked the car outside the house and Marina and Brian went inside, Brian looking pale and tired now under the layer of coal dust. He was glad to go upstairs and lie in the steaming hot bath which Marina ran for him in the newly installed bathroom which had been taken off the spare bedroom.

  She warmed up the liver and onions and sliced fresh bread she had bought on her way home from work. Ages ago now, it seemed. Both she and Jeff were quiet as they ate, Marina because of the events of the evening. She couldn’t help thinking of what could have happened. Only a fraction of an inch and Brian would have been dead or at least badly injured, despite his miner’s helmet. She shivered and put down her knife and fork, suddenly not hungry any more.

  Jeff, though concerned for his friend, was thinking of other things. He wished he had kept quiet and listened to what the doctors were saying about Rose. It wasn’t so common a name that there could be two of them, was it? Was she in Hartlepool? Was she ill or hurt, was that why the doctors were discussing her? He resolved to go there the following Saturday and look around a bit. Maybe, just maybe – and he knew it was a chance in a million for the twin towns of West Hartlepool and Hartlepool must hold thousands of people – he might find her. And he could always go to the hospital, keep a lookout for that young doctor. He might know where Rose was. For Jeff felt in his bones that she was near, certainly not as far away as London.

  Brian came down, his face now almost as white as the bandage round his forehead apart from an angry red graze on one cheek. Marina fussed around him, bringing him his dinner which had been keeping hot in the oven. But he ate little and after a while went up to bed, saying he had a headache.

  ‘Not surprising if you persist in standing under falling stones,’ joked Jeff. He was grinning but his eyes showed his sympathy.

  ‘I won’t be long coming up,’ Marina promised. ‘I’ll just clear this lot away and set the breakfast things.’ She bustled about the kitchen, her expression thoughtful. It had jolted her all right, the accident. What must it be like for women who had their men killed in the pit? She thought of the disasters she had been told about, so many in the past. But surely it was different now? The mines were nationalised, there were proper safety measures, of course there were. Yet a fragment of an old song, a lament, ran through her head as she dipped the plates in soapy water and rubbed at them with the dish cloth.

  Let us think of Mrs Burnett,

  Once had sons but now has none,

  In the Trimdon Grange explosion

  Joseph, George and James are gone.

  Trimdon Grange. That wasn’t so far away from here, was it? Fire damp it was that had ignited and killed so many men and boys. Marina shook herself mentally. It had been long ago, she was becoming morbid. She rinsed the plates and put them in the rack above the gas stove. By, it was nice having all these new conveniences. She didn’t know how she could go out to work if she didn’t have them.

  ‘Jeff, is there fire damp in the pit here?’

  She had not intended to ask the question, it just seemed to pop out, as it were, surprising her as much as it did Jeff. He had been staring into the fire, feet stretched out to the blaze.

  ‘Fire damp?’ he asked. ‘The gas, do you mean?’ He looked up, thoughts obviously still far away. She nodded.

  ‘Well … we always have to be on the watch, you know, that’s why the rules are so tough. No smoking down the mine, you know that. “Contraband” they call it.’ He looked at her properly, realising she was really bothered. ‘Hey now, what’s up? Why are you asking questions like that?’ But he knew. The poor lass had got a shock tonight, the dangers of the pit brought home to her.

  ‘Oh, I just thought …’ said Marina vaguely.

  Jeff sat up straight. ‘Now look, I told you, the safety men look after everything. There’s no need for you to worry your head. Come on now, get off to bed. A night’s sleep will do you the world of good.’

  He had been going to ask her if she’d taken notice of what those two doctors had been talking about, but tonight was not the time. She was too upscut
tled by what had happened to Brian. Or what had almost happened to Brian. It could have been so much worse.

  ‘Goodnight then, Jeff. Thanks for taking me in to the hospital.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he echoed.

  Upstairs she undressed in the dark so as not to disturb Brian then slipped into bed beside him. Marina lay quietly on her back for a moment or two then automatically turned and put her arms around him, lying close, drawing up her legs to fit the curve of his, resting her head against the hollow between his shoulder blades. He moved a little, settled himself more comfortably against her, took her hand in his and held it to his chest yet didn’t seem to wake.

  Marina’s thoughts ran back over the last few weeks. Their honeymoon in Scarborough … the first night she had been so scared of. What a fool she had been! she thought, smiling to herself. Brian had noticed nothing, she was sure of it. That story about a man knowing if a girl was experienced was just an old wives’ tale, it must be. And he was a good lover, a gentle man, careful to please her, anxious that she should be satisfied. Oh, yes, indeed he was. Warmth spread in the pit of her stomach as she thought of it.

  They had lain in bed in the tiny room of their boarding house – obviously originally one large bedroom now partitioned into two for one wall was flimsy and thin. She had been worried they would make too much noise and whoever was next door would hear it all. But none of that mattered really. All that did was that Brian loved her and she loved him and their love was growing every day.

  Soon they would have their own house, she thought drowsily. She was saving every penny of her own salary for a deposit on a house. They had their eyes on a semi-detached on the outskirts of Easington village, still close enough to the colliery for Brian to get to work without too much trouble.

  Her thoughts drifted, soothed by the warmth of the bed and the proximity of her man. Before she slept she murmured a prayer for Rose as she did every night. That she should be kept safe, that Rose’s father should get his comeuppance, that … what was that the doctor had said tonight? It was on the edge of her consciousness, something about Rose … But Marina was asleep before the memory came back properly to her.

  ‘I’ll ring and tell Mr Brown I can’t go in today,’ she said to Brian next morning. ‘He’ll understand, of course he will. I’ll tell him you’ve had an accident and …’

  ‘No, you don’t have to stay at home for me. There’s nothing at all the matter with me now. I haven’t even got a headache,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Tell you the truth, I’ll just wander away down to Bert’s allotment for a chinwag. We’ll both be glad to have a bit of time away from the women.’ He ducked as she aimed a blow at him then winced as the movement gave him a twinge of pain. The bandage was off now, the doctor having told him to leave the stitches open to the air. There was going to be a scar across his forehead, Marina thought. Thank God there was nothing worse than that.

  ‘Sure?’ she queried, still anxious.

  ‘Oh, go on. Jeff will be in this afternoon, won’t he? He’ll keep me company.’

  On the bus in to Durham, thoughts of Rose kept coming back to Marina. She couldn’t get her friend out of her mind. It hadn’t been like that all the time since Rose had disappeared, especially since her own marriage with so much else to think about. Was something wrong? Was Rose in trouble? Perhaps she wasn’t in London at all, perhaps she was somewhere near. That doctor last night, had he been talking about her friend?

  Marina shook herself mentally as she descended from the bus in the market place at Durham and walked briskly down over the bridge to Old Elvet. She was being silly. She remembered her gran going on like this. She’d had a bit of a name for the second sight, always knew when anyone was ill or in trouble. Or at least she’d insisted that she did; Marina was always slightly sceptical. Deliberately she turned her mind to other things. Shivering, she huddled her chin into her collar, there was a sharp wind blowing up the Wear. It was almost Christmas, she thought, looking in a shop window as she passed. A girl was decorating a tree with shiny baubles and coloured lights. Something to look forward to, her first married Christmas. Next year they could be in their own home. Not that it was bad living with Jeff, he was a sensitive soul and tried to give them the privacy they needed. She would buy him a nice present, she decided, talk it over with Brian first to see what he might want.

  It made no difference how she tried to keep her mind on other things, though. Thoughts of Rose persisted all through the day.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Rose lay against the pillows in the hospital bed, her face almost as white as the linen. She was wearing an oxygen mask, she knew. In her time at the hospital she had come to recognise a lot of the equipment. Her chest hurt. In fact, she was sure there must be a knife cutting into her side. She tried to move out of its way, but that only made the pain worse, much worse. She was desperately hot and tried to push back the bedclothes, let some air get to her fevered skin.

  This is a dream, she told herself. In a minute I’ll wake up and everything will be all right. She remembered the beach at Crimdon, how cold it had been, how icy the sea water when the waves washed over her feet and legs. She longed to feel the waves again, hear Jeff whisper to her … I’m in a caravan, she told herself, lying on the floor and it’s hard as rocks. I’m hot because the sun is shining in through the roof light. I must stir myself, I must. I have to get out of here before someone finds me. By a tremendous effort of will she opened her eyes fully, forced herself awake.

  She was wrong about the caravan, right about the oxygen mask. The sun was coming through a window opposite, beaming across the floor of the ward and landing on her bed. A hospital bed, hard and unyielding though the pillows were soft.

  Oh, God, here I am again, she thought despairingly. Back in the Cameron. This time she was on a medical ward. Sister Macpherson was coming towards her, and she was on the medical side, Rose was sure of it.

  ‘Oh, good, you’re awake,’ Sister remarked and smiled her professional smile. With cool, capable hands she removed the oxygen mask and turned off the cylinder, wheeling it away into a corner. Rose breathed a sigh of relief. She had felt the mask was choking her though she knew it couldn’t possibly be.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Sister Macpherson. ‘Welcome back.’ She smiled at Rose, watched her chest for a moment or two, checking on her breathing.

  ‘How … how did I get here?’ she managed to croak.

  ‘By ambulance,’ replied Sister Macpherson. ‘I understand the caretaker at Crimdon Dene caravan site found you. And lucky for you he did! If you went any longer without treatment you could have been a goner. Pneumonia, my girl. You ought to be taking better care of yourself, you know. As it is, you can thank your lucky stars for penicillin.’ She stuck a thermometer in Rose’s mouth and placed cool fingers on her pulse.

  ‘What day is it?’ Rose asked when Sister had removed the thermometer and written something down on the chart on the end of Rose’s bed.

  ‘Tuesday. You’ve been here four days.’ Sister called to a junior nurse walking by and together they lifted Rose gently forward, shook up her pillows and laid her back. Expertly they stripped the bed, rolling Rose about as though she were a parcel. They pulled the draw sheet through so that she was lying on a cool part. The bed was made up in double quick time and then Sister was on her way. ‘Doctor’s round in half an hour,’ she said over her shoulder.

  Rose felt as though a hurricane had gone through the ward; she was exhausted. She closed her eyes, hearing the distant voices of the patients and nurses, the rattle of cups on a tea trolley, the everyday sounds of a full ward. How stupid she’d been, going down on to the beach like that. See where it had got her. But she had felt close to Jeff there, beside the waves of the North Sea, and it had been so sweet. Too fanciful, that was what she was. Jeff wasn’t at Crimdon, not unless he was working hundreds of feet below the North Sea waves. Was Crimdon close enough to Easington for that? No, of course not.

  Her meandering thoughts wer
e interrupted by a familiar voice.

  ‘Here we are again then, Rose Sharpe.’

  Rose opened her eyes. Bob Morris was standing there, looking grim. ‘What did you think you were doing, girl?’

  She looked at him, weak tears pricking her eyelids. He had been her only friend since she came to Hartlepool, for that last afternoon in the sewing room had shown her that she had no friends there. A tear squeezed out of the corner of her eye and she dashed it away angrily.

  ‘Come on now, none of that,’ he said, his voice softening. He went over to the screens at the end of the ward and pulled a couple over, placing them round the bed. Sister appeared, popping her head through the screens, looking disapproving.

  ‘Can I help you, Dr Morris?’

  He smiled apologetically. After all, he was technically a visitor to the ward and should have asked her permission, but she had been out of sight when he came in and he had been so relieved to see Rose awake.

  ‘No, thank you, I’m not examining the patient, I can manage on my own,’ he replied smoothly, and Sister ducked out of sight again.

  ‘Did something happen, something to make you take off like that?’ he asked. ‘You might as well tell me, Rose.’

  ‘Lily,’ she protested but Bob shook his head irritably.

  ‘We’ll have no more playing silly buggers, Rose. That’s your name, there’s not a thing wrong with your memory.’

  ‘Are you doctor on this ward?’ she asked. That was something else she’d learned since working in a hospital, that doctors had their own areas.

  ‘No, you know that,’ he replied. ‘I just came in to see how you were. What did you think you were doing, out at Crimdon that night? I came to pick you up, you know, take you out to supper, and when the landlady said you hadn’t been home, well …’