by Sheila Burns
The Flying Nurse
Sheila Burns
Copyright © The Estate of Sheila Burns 2018
This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2018
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
www.wyndhambooks.com/sheila-burns
First published in Great Britain in 1967
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork: images © Irina Bg/Stanislava Karagyozova (Shutterstock) and izuske (istockphoto)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Preview: Wyndham Books
To
Mrs Dempster
bless her heart
Chapter One
When Mandy Thwaites knew that she had qualified, and actually saw her name up on the rather dingy notice board at St Jeremy’s Hospital, she thought that she would faint. It surely could not mean that it was done? Somehow she had come to a time in her life when she had thought that this was impossible. Now, when she had given up heart, here it was. She had passed!
‘I thought the viva had got me,’ she confessed to little Susan Giles, who had also thought that she had gone down but had just scraped through.
‘It was that awful psychologist with the nasty eyes,’ said Susan. ‘He looked like a python! I hated him.’
‘Psychologists are always the worst. They feel they know everything. Have to think that. I hated the cardiac beast. He was always popping up with some frightful question as if he knew you couldn’t answer it.’
That awful examination room lay behind them, for both girls had qualified. They were no longer student nurses, but had an established future ahead of them. The dreams of three slogging years had come true. What next? Staff nurse, sister? Theatre work, perhaps, and that was ever exciting. Or nursing abroad? Or on board ship, or to be a flying nurse?
‘I shall be a flying nurse,’ said Susan gleefully, ‘it’s what I have always meant to do, now for it.’
‘I’m afraid flying scares me stiff.’
‘Only because you’re silly. Think of the exciting people you’d meet. Think of the fun, and the places to see.’
‘I don’t suppose you see much so high up in the air.’ Mandy commented. ‘And I couldn’t conquer my fear so easily.’
‘Three trips, and they say all that disappears like snow in summer.’
‘Three trips and I might find myself in heaven or the other place,’ and the very light blue eyes laughed at it. No, she would not be a flying nurse.
‘Well, I shall be a flying nurse,’ said Susan.
She was the audacious kind, loving adventure and had gone from one affair to the next with the more amorous students. Sister had rated her, even Matron had had her on the mat. Mandy knew that it would be a joy to exchange scenes from white-coated students and housemen, to the navy blue of the men who flew. She realized that part of it would inspire Susan, but she herself would dread an accident.
‘I’ve got to think about it a lot,’ she said.
She had a special coffee to toast success, and sat back refreshed that the tiresome years of training were behind her. The night duty which drove you mad, lectures after, when all you wanted was to yawn yourself to sleep; Sister throwing her weight about, Matron who was kind and always just, but a body to be respected.
It’s over now, she thought.
It was her half-day and Mandy went out to celebrate. She did not know what she would do. It seemed to be quite idiotic to have looked forward to this great moment all this time, and now, when she knew the good news, there was no plan, nothing fixed, and no celebration in hand. It was also a bad time in the month for celebrations, for she was broke already. It would come now, she thought, and smoothed the very fair hair out of her very blue eyes.
It was spring, and that is ever inviting.
When you are twenty-one, have just managed to qualify, and it is also spring, the world is wonderful. She went out into the courtyard, at this hour of the day jammed with the consultants’ cars everywhere, and with patients’ relatives, coming and going all the time. She looked pale, she knew.
The flaxen softness of her hair was not something that a girl could buy in a bottle; it matched the light lashes which framed the sort of eyes that look like wild harebells, so Mother had once said. She was smally-made, petite perhaps, and this was a trial when it came to lifting very sick patients, but not a real handicap.
She could not remember the kindly rich father, who had died before she was five years old and probably had been bitterly disappointed that she was not a son. She had been the only child of a rich mother, who inherited everything. The big house in the Surrey countryside must have cost a fortune to keep up, but that had never worried her mother! Mother loved being ill. She wanted to be a thrilling invalid; she travelled gaily for her health, going on exotic holidays, and she never got ill when she was amusing herself because she was that sort of person. Mandy wished that her training at St Jeremy’s had not shown her how very little was the matter with her mother really.
She wished that they had seen eye to eye, but Mother wanted thrill, and Mandy had wanted to be a nurse. Mother had never encouraged this, but in the end had to sanction it, for Mandy had obstinacy which, according to Mother, had been her dead father’s trump card, too. Three years ago she had come to hospital for training. Maybe it had been hard going, but she had managed to stick it out, and had come through those wretched exams and was now trained. She could never have stood the horror of that exam again, with the sinking feeling in the tummy, and the anxiety of what-shall-I-do-if-I-want-to-be-sick?
‘Take a holiday,’ Sister had suggested.
Holidays and Mandy had never run closely together. She heard other people talk freely of them, but hers had always been spent with seedy relatives who did not really want her, save for a day trip to Cherbourg, which had not been a success for it was a very rough sea. She had capped that with a stolen weekend, staying in Antwerp with a fellow student. It had rained all day and most of the night, and she had come to the conclusion
that Antwerp was not really much.
Mandy would have adored travel to some Mediterranean beauty spot, where there were dark-eyed men with thick black hair, palm trees, and oranges in flower and fruit at one and the same moment.
I shall never go to those places, she thought.
In the courtyard she ran into Richard Tate. He was three years ahead of her here, and had done remarkably well. His father was a famous consultant in Harley Street and took a lively interest in his son’s career. Richard had qualified a year back and was now a promising young houseman. He had rumpled fair hair, and his eyes were worried as he wandered across the courtyard, hands stuck into the trouser pockets. He stopped when he saw her.
‘So I hear you’ve got it, Mandy! Congratulations.’
‘I have, may the gods be praised!’ and her blue eyes danced gaily. She could be proud of it.
‘I say, what are we doing to celebrate?’
‘It’s come the wrong week for me; I’m broke. I thought of a cup of tea with old Ma round the corner.’ It might not look like a celebration really, but after all, it was better than nothing.
‘We’ll go there together,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve got half an hour before Casualties, and must be in on time or I shall be the casualty of the evening.’
‘Here we go,’ she said, and laughed. ‘If only John Hare does not see us and reprove us.’
John Hare was the warden, and it was said that his shrewd eyes missed nothing, which was horribly true. He had a crude way of reproof, popular, but dreaded, she would have said.
‘He can’t say a thing for I’m off duty for the moment, and then it is none of his business what I do, or where I go!’ They walked out into the noisy street beyond, just as the ambulance with the bell clanging, swerved up the street and down to Casualties.
‘Never mind, I’ve missed that one,’ and he took her arm. ‘Come along, Sister.’
‘I’ll never be that.’
‘Yes you will, and a darned good Sister you will be! We’ve got half an hour; let’s get round to Ma and have a celebration, a poached egg or a Welsh rarebit, or something that is frivolous.’
‘Let’s,’ she agreed.
As they walked, Mandy knew that she could not have borne that exam again, the eternal hanging round to know whether you had done it or not, and Richard agreed. They went into old Ma’s basement. She was a dear old body, ever willing to help, and always interested in them. Once she used to lend money when they were broke, but had learnt better when a young student had flown off with not only what he owed her, but the café till to boot!
Ma had said that put paid to financial help, but she would always do what she could in other ways. She sympathized, and she condoled. She comforted the alarmed with pre-exam jitters, and reproved the slightly intoxicated with post-exam good spirits in them.
‘But no more lending,’ she said, and had stuck to that one. They went happily enough, for this was a happy occasion. Richard had suffered agonies when he had faced his exam, and she had tried to buoy him up. The other girls said that ‘there was something in their friendship’; there wasn’t really. They were just good friends, and Mandy was the sort of girl who appreciated a good friend, and clung closely to him. She had never had love affairs like almost every other student nurse in the hospital. She would not have confessed it for the world, but she clung to quite a different type of love story. She did not want to marry a doctor! She wanted, when she had qualified, and had gone as far as she could, to turn from medicine. If she could have been a doctor it would have been different, but she had not been able to be a doctor.
No brains, was what she always said.
She longed to travel but supposed that she would never do it. For, although her father had been extraordinarily wealthy, he had left everything to her mother, and Mother could be mean. Mother felt that a girl was only young once, and whilst young, had all those things which money cannot buy, beauty, good health, youth, the lot. She had not appreciated the fact that spending money was fun. Mandy had exactly a hundred a year of her own, and sometimes she wondered if her dead father would have appreciated his own mistakes when he saw how Mother spent a fortune.
She had married Cam Sykes, good-looking after a fashion, not fastidious about what he said, nor what he was. Nobody had ever discovered what his career actually was, for although he said he had been in the army, and got as far as brigadier but then got sick of the whole thing, he managed to go about a lot on something which he hinted as being ‘all under the hat’. Mandy had never felt sure about Cam, hated suspecting him, but there certainly was something that made him difficult to understand. One day I’ll know, she thought.
She and Richard Tate sat down at a corner table. Hot buttered toast, sandwiches, and plum cake, something to celebrate.
‘I can’t believe I’m through,’ Mandy said.
‘I felt that way when I got through,’ and Richard laughed. He was fair-haired with amused eyes which made a pleasant combination. Richard had a big kind heart. He had always, helped her, and was a reliable good pal, with the traits that she always found far better than flirtatiousness. ‘You’ll go on here?’ he asked her.
‘Matron said something about it, but I must have a holiday first. It was getting me down. Matron knew it, I’m sure, so I’ve got a whole month at home.’
‘But you’ll return here?’ For a moment their eyes met over a squat little brown teapot which had arrived on the table. Mandy cared for Richard, life could not be the same without him, and remotely perhaps, she loved him. She was not in love, she told herself, for deep down in her heart she realized that falling in love was different. How remarkable must Hong Kong be, with Kowloon across the water! Or Spain, with little orange trees fruiting in the garden; Hawaii, with the lilting music, and all those straw skirts bobbing about.
It’s a great big world and I want to see the lot, she told herself. ‘And what will you do, Richard, next I mean?’
‘My year’s up in September, then I shall be out on the big path to Harley Street, I suppose. I’ve made up my mind that it’s better to try for it; there is more money there, you know, and money does count.’
‘Matron says one should be wedded to the job, for richer or poorer, and it’s nearly always poorer.’
‘Not in Harley Street,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Only the rich ring those doorbells, and half of them have nothing the matter with them.’ Then tenderly, ‘How do you feel about going home for a whole month and being alone there with your mother? A month can be a very, very long time!’
So he knew!
Perhaps he always had done, for although Mandy tried to veil her private feelings from the world, somehow Richard had guessed; those merry eyes missed nothing. He watched her closely.
Mother had always disliked the idea of her one and only child going in for nursing, and when she was staying at home for this month would do everything in her power to persuade Mandy to give up the career. Mother doted on being ill herself, and resented the professionally-trained nurse who saw through her silly little symptoms and all those fusses. Though recently she admitted that Mother had changed quite a lot.
She had changed on that cruise out to Hawaii where she had met Cam Sykes. Cam was ten years her junior, audaciously good-looking, and arrogantly carefree. He could bullock his way through life with the chance joke, sometimes becoming slightly risqué, and not what one would have chosen, and the happy-go-lucky bad manners. Mandy had admitted to Richard, ‘I always feel that there is something cheap about Cam, something horrid, which is nasty of me, for he has tried to be kind to me!’ From the beginning Mandy had seen danger ahead, and was amazed that her mother had ever married him.
Maybe their elopement had made Mother feel young again, and she adored that. Maybe if Mother had been poor as a church mouse, it could not have happened. Perhaps when Mandy started to think about it a shade more clearly, she had realized that Mother would marry again if she got the chance, and Cam had represented that chance.
She
wished that she knew exactly what he did for a living, but he was abroad a great deal, actually in Malta at this present moment. When challenged he giggled, and had said that he was a commercial traveller in Christmas cards, and had thought this to be an enormous joke.
‘I have no real reason to hate Cam, yet somehow I do dislike him so very much,’ Mandy told Richard over the little brown teapot which had seen more work than you would have thought to be possible.
‘Maybe it is that instinctive self-protection which lives in all of us,’ Richard suggested.
‘Or nonsense, or jealousy, or something like that,’ and she laughed. ‘Anyway he and Mother are married now, and I have got to put up with it! He costs her quite a lot of money, I imagine, and is for ever borrowing. I sometimes wonder if he ever pays back. It is horrid, for I have the feeling that one of these days something awful will crop up.’
‘Why not leave that till the moment when it does crop up?’
‘Easier for men than women, I sometimes think. Women always brood on troubles coming.’
‘Marrying your mother should have made Cam comfortably off, and from what you tell me he has only to ask and he gets it. I should think that he has passed the danger point, so don’t meet trouble halfway.’
She nodded and poured out more tea. It was unbelievable that she had gone through the final exam, that now she could have a long rest and do nothing, and that she would escape the monotony of the wards, to go home. For ward life is monotonous, as she had found. One thinks of nurses going from one exciting case to the next, but that was not the way that she had found it. The only truly exciting cases had been in the operating theatre. That could have been sheer inspiration. But in action she had found too many appendixes, tonsils coming out (and, my goodness, what a mess they could make) whilst the really exciting ops seemed to steer clear of her.
‘And now what lies ahead?’ she asked.
‘It’s Harley Street for me, just like Dad always wanted.’
‘You always wanted that, too.’