A Mother's Gift (35 page)

Tears pricked the back of her eyes again and angrily she fought them back. For a moment she could not reply.

‘Thanks for that, Willie.’ She stared along the line to where it curved round towards Eden Hope and gave an involuntary sniff.

Willie looked away before saying, ‘I walk this way home sometimes. I’m at Eden Hope now, not Winton. It’s not far though and it’s nice to be out in the fresh air after the pit. I like fore shift, it gives me all of the afternoon.’

He picked a blade of grass and put it between his teeth, chewing on the end absently. ‘That bloke, you know, the toff, Richards is he called?’

Kate looked at him inquiringly. ‘Yes?’

‘He came to our house, you know, looking for someone who belonged to you. He said you were in a coma. He was right bothered about you.’ Willie paused and took the grass from his mouth and threw it away. He cleared his throat. ‘I should have stood up to June and gone with him, I was sorry I didn’t. June is so bitter though, I usually do what she says for the sake of peace. But I should have gone that day. Instead I sent him to our Ethel’s.’

‘It’s all right Willie, I understand. Anyway it worked out all right, didn’t it? Ethel came. And I’m fine now, aren’t I?’

‘Aye.’

He rose to his feet and held out a hand to Kate. ‘Howay, we can walk along together. June will have me dinner ready.’

They walked along the line, Kate having to stretch her legs to go from one sleeper to the next. Strangely, she felt her mood lifting as she followed Willie until they came to where the line entered the pit yard at Winton. It was just a few yards from there to the colliery rows.

‘Come and see us when you’re settled,’ said Willie. ‘An’ look lass,’ he went on, moving close to her and
bending
his head, ‘don’t hold the grieving in. Best let it out. You’ll get over it better you know.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, Willie,’ she said.

‘Aye you will. An’ then you’ll just have the good memories,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll be seeing you then.’ Touching his cap he strode off towards the pre-fabs just past the rows.

It was too late to go and see Ethel, Kate reckoned and besides, there was work to do at the house. She couldn’t leave it all to poor old Dorothy. She set off briskly up the road to Four Winds. Dear Willie. It warmed her frozen heart a little to think of him and how waves of sympathy had flowed from him. She wasn’t too sure about going to see him and June at home though. June had been so bitter towards her when Billy died, almost as if the disaster had been all her fault. Still, maybe she would change.

‘It’s not the same as living in West Row,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t fit in any more.’ It was a bright November day and she and Dorothy were sitting in the sitting-room at Four Winds. In spite of the sun, the wind was loud in the chimneys and they were glad of the blazing coal fire in the hearth. The room was small but the windows overlooked all of Winton, the old village, the colliery and the colliery yard and pithead. Kate could almost see the winding wheel turning as the back shift men were brought to the surface or at least she thought she could. What she did see were the tiny figures spilling out and moving down the yard and on to the road that led to the colliery village.

Dorothy, sitting on the opposite side of the hearth, with
some
sewing on her lap and the workbasket on the small table at her side, looked up impatiently.

‘Oh, Kate, don’t be so daft, how could it be? You of all people should know you can never go back.’ She held up a needle and tried to thread it with black cotton and failed. ‘Oh, here,’ she said. ‘Thread this needle for me will you? I swear my eyes are getting worse.’

Kate took the needle and threaded it and handed it back. ‘You should go to the opticians in Bishop,’ she said absently. ‘I don’t want to go back,’ she went on. ‘But I thought I could make friends again among the people I know.’

‘Aye, well, if you thought that you should have gone into one of them pre-fabs or mebbe one of the old pit houses. This one’s over grand for them.’

Since they had come to live in Four Winds, Dorothy was much more a companion rather than a servant and she spoke as such. Now she looked round the room, newly decorated with pale flowered wallpaper that had only just ‘started to come into the shops. The furniture had come from Fern Moor Cottage and was good quality and comfortable. Even though Kate had wanted to leave everything behind it wasn’t so easy to buy good stuff new as it all went for export to pay off the National Debt. She hated the plainness of the ‘utility’ which was all that could be bought during the war and even now when the war had been over for almost six years.

‘I wouldn’t get one, you know that,’ said Kate. ‘Anyway, I like this house.’

‘There you are then,’ said Dorothy obscurely. She
rolled
up the skirt she had been repairing and stuffed it in the basket. ‘I’ll go and make the tea, then, shall I?’

Kate sat on, watching the rows below her. There weren’t many people about though, no doubt they too were having their tea. She sighed restlessly and got to her feet. She was thirty-seven years old, going on thirty-eight. That wasn’t old, was it? She felt as though she was in limbo, waiting here until she died. Like those widows and spinsters left over from the First World War because their men had all been killed at the Front and there was a dire shortage of others.

Robert wanted her to take more interest in the works, she knew that. But she couldn’t, oh no she couldn’t. What she wanted to do was nurse but she had broken her training and would never get back in now. She was too old; she knew that. At thirty-seven she was on the scrapheap.

Dorothy came in with the tea tray but she didn’t look round; she was off in a brown study of her own.

‘Move the basket so I can put the tray down, please, Kate,’ said Dorothy evenly. ‘Or I will likely drop the darn thing.’

‘Sorry.’ Kate moved the workbasket to the floor and took the tray and put it on the small table.

‘I was thinking, why don’t you make an appointment with the matron at the hospital? She’ll likely give you a job. I did hear talk that they were starting a nurse’s training school there.’

‘Funny, I was just thinking of that. But I think I’m too old,’ said Kate.

‘Oh, rubbish! Anyway, you’ll never know if you don’t ask,’ said Dorothy as she poured out the tea.

‘I might try,’ said Kate though in her heart she thought it was useless. She felt useless herself, sitting up here with nothing to do but watch other people working. Tomorrow though, she would start work in the garden. She had hired a retired miner to work in it three mornings a week and he was good at his job. But she could help, prune the roses maybe, tidy up the greenhouse-cum-conservatory at the side of the house.

‘If you go and see about it I’ll go and see the optician,’ said Dorothy, though she hated the idea of wearing glasses and had resisted it so far.

‘We’ll see.’

‘Are you not satisfied wi’ me work then, Missus?’ Tommy Dacre asked gruffly. It was the following day and he had planned to turn over the vegetable patch so when the hard frosts came they would break down the soil, make it pliable. But neither the spade nor the gripe was hanging in their proper place in the shed. And when he went to investigate there was the missus going at the part he had set aside for growing leeks that could be shown in the leek show at the club in Winton. It was annoying, not to say downright maddening.

‘O’ course, it’s your garden,’ he conceded. ‘You can do what you like wi’ it.’ He glared disapprovingly at the gripe, which was lying on the side, bending over a winter cabbage.

‘Oh no, Tommy, I’m well pleased with your work,’
said
Kate, standing up and putting up a gloved hand to push her hair back from her forehead and leaving a smear of soil in the process.

‘Well then,’ he said and bent to pick up the gripe. ‘Mebbe you’ll be leaving us to get on wi’ it.’

Kate retired into the house defeated. She had forgotten the fierce pride most of the miners took in their gardens and the gardens of the Aged Miners’ Homes where Tommy lived were minuscule.

‘Dorothy,’ she said after she had washed her hands and face and applied a little lipstick and face powder. ‘Dorothy, I’m going to ring Matron now. So you can start to get used to wearing glasses.’

Both of them had an appointment for the following afternoon. Kate dropped Dorothy off at the optician’s and drove on up to Cockton Hill to the hospital and parked in front of Block 1 where Matron had her office. Her heart thumped out of all proportion as she went in and along the corridor until she was outside the right door. She took a moment to compose her feelings before knocking and responding to the call to go in.

Matron Dobson was a small, dumpy woman with her hair entirely covered by the large, stiffly starched cap she wore. She gazed over half-moon spectacles at Kate, giving her the impression that the woman had read her character entirely in that one searching look. Then she rose from her chair behind the desk and held out her hand.

‘Good afternoon,’ she boomed. ‘I understand you wish to join our nursing school.’

‘Yes please, Matron,’ said Kate.

Matron ruffled through some papers. ‘You are how old?’ she asked and Kate’s heart sank.

‘Thirty-seven,’ she admitted. What a waste of time it had been coming, she thought.

‘But you have some experience,’ said Matron.

Eagerly, Kate told her of her time at the South-East Durham General and the short time as an auxiliary and then as an assistant nurse at the cottage hospital. It didn’t seem to add up to much she thought as she watched Matron jot something down on the page befores her. Matron didn’t seem to think so either judging by the expression on her face.

There were several more questions about her background, why she had chosen to come back to Bishop Auckland to live, had she any family responsibilities that could affect her work in any way.

‘None,’ said Kate and a shaft of the old familiar pain ran through her unexpectedly.

Matron looked down at her notes and came to a decision. ‘Very well, you are accepted as a student nurse in our training school. I’m afraid you will have to start from the beginning again. The school begins next year, in the month of February.’

‘I … I’d hoped to start sooner,’ Kate faltered. She had somehow thought she would be able to start next week, not next year. The disappointment was crushing.

‘Well, you can. The time until then can be useful to you,’ Matron went on, ‘I would like you to start work as an auxiliary nurse on the wards. I don’t need to tell you what that entails, do I?’

‘No Matron,’ said Kate. It entailed doing most of the humdrum jobs on the ward, helping with the cleaning, doing bedpan rounds, clearing dirty dressing trolleys and a hundred and one other jobs. But she would be getting back into the right atmosphere and picking up tips from the rest of the staff, getting used to the ways of the wards again.

‘Thank you, Matron,’ said Kate. She’d got the job!

‘Report here at seven-thirty Sunday morning,’ said Matron, nodding her head in dismissal.

‘IT’S A PITY
they didn’t both die,’ Bertie muttered under his breath. He was standing by the window in Hamilton Hall, staring out at the dark, a few feet away from where his mother, Maisie and Robert sat round the table. Dinner was almost over but they lingered over fruit. ‘I should have made sure of them both.’

‘What did you say, Bertram?’ Robert asked, pausing in the middle of peeling an apple to give his brother a hard stare. Mary Anne had just been asking Robert if he knew how Kate was, saying she hadn’t heard from her in a while.

‘Nothing,’ said Bertram, ‘I wasn’t speaking to you.’ He took a long swig of brandy and went to the sideboard to fill his glass. He was like a bomb waiting to go off, he was in such a bad mood.

‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Bertie?’ Mary Anne asked gently. Bertram had been out all day, drinking in the clubs in the town with his friends no doubt. Oh, he was a wild one. It was hard to control him even though he
was
still a boy legally speaking. Robert tried, bless him, but of course he was not Bertie’s father. He needed a firmer hand than hers, she knew well.

There was that trouble at university, trouble she had never got to the bottom of, and now he seemed to run wild for most of the time. Of course, the poor boy had lost his father and then the existence of Georgina had been a terrible shock to him. Maybe he would settle down soon, she hoped so.

‘It didn’t sound like nothing to me,’ said Robert but he went back to peeling his apple, stopping again as Bertram lost his temper.

‘Oh, get off my back!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Both of you, leave me alone!’ He turned to his mother. ‘I’ll drink whatever I damn well please and there’s nothing you can do about it!’

Mary Anne shrank back in her chair and Robert put out a hand across the table and gripped hers. It was trembling and his own temper rose. She looked just as she had used to do when his stepfather shouted at her, which had been far too often. In fact, Bertram sounded like his father had then.

‘Bertram, you will come here and apologise to your mother,’ he said, his voice quiet but steely.

‘Why the hell should I?’ Bertram demanded. He took another drink and turned on his stepbrother, staggering slightly and waving his glass about so that brandy slopped on to the carpet.