A Mother's Gift (41 page)

‘Emm,’ Matron stuttered and for the first time in her life Kate saw Matron lost for words. She soon recovered, however.

‘Congratulations to you both,’ she said then looked to Kate. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean you will neglect your career, Staff Nurse. We will expect you to give your full attention to your work.’

‘Of course, Matron,’ said Kate. And Matron nodded and walked on along the road.

‘Let’s go back to Four Winds,’ said Kate.

Turn the page to read an extract from

A WARTIME NURSE

also available from Ebury Press

‘DON’T GO, JOSS
– please don’t go. I don’t want you to.’

Joss Wearmouth gazed solemnly at his sister, his eyes hopeless. ‘I know, I don’t want to go neither.’

They were sitting on a grassy bank speckled with wild strawberries and the tiny red fruit sparkled in the sun. A small, much-battered wicker basket which Theda had had as a child lay beside them, half-filled with strawberries. But now she had forgotten about the fruit altogether, for Joss had come down the garden path and out on to the bank beside the old waggon way and told her that he was ‘surplus to requirements’ at the pit.

‘Well, don’t go, you don’t have to. You’ll find a job here if you look hard enough, surely you will. There’s the Railway Waggon Works at Shildon and there’s Bishop … now there’s bound to be something at Bishop Auckland.’

Earnestly she looked up at him, her Joss, the one who always looked after her and never talked down to her the way the elder brothers of other girls did.

Joss picked a blade of grass and rubbed it between his fingers, staring into the distance over the old waggon way and grassed-over mound which was an old pit heap really. Over to the ruined buildings of Old Pit, their harshness softened by distance and sunlight.

‘You know we talked it all out yesterday, Theda. There is no other work,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll get no dole, not when I’m living at home – not when Da’s working anyroad. We should be thanking God his name didn’t come out of the hat again like it did at Wheatley Hill. At least he’s working.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘It’s no good, Theda. There’s you and Frank and Chuck and Clara to feed. You’re only fourteen, but you know how it is. No, I’m sixteen, big enough to fend for meself. I said I’d go in the army and that’s what I’m going to do.’

‘I could leave school, I’m nearly fifteen,’ she said. ‘I can, I don’t have to go till I’m sixteen just because it’s the Grammar School. Everybody else leaves school when they’re fourteen.’

Joss got to his feet and she scrambled up after him, looking into his face, her own so woebegone that he grinned and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘What, and waste that scholarship we’re all so proud of?’

‘You could have had a scholarship, Joss. If you had, you’d have had a posh job in an office by now,’ Theda countered. But she knew that Joss couldn’t have taken up a scholarship, not when it fell in the year the family had had to move to Winton Colliery. He was the eldest and when he was old enough to go down the pit his money
was
needed, that was how it always worked. And, anyway, Joss had wanted to go down the pit; that was what men did.

‘Aw, howay,’ he said now. ‘I’ll help you fill that doll’s basket and we’ll take it in to Mam and then go swimming in the reservoir. How’s that sound?’

‘I don’t know about the reservoir,’ said Theda doubt-fully, thinking about the amount of frogspawn there had been in the reservoir at Old Pit that spring. Not to mention what else might be lurking in the weeds that grew out ever further into the water from the bank!. ‘Can we not go down the wood and paddle in the Gaunless?’

Joss laughed. ‘Howay then.’

In the end, Frank and Chuck and little Clara trailed behind them down to the wood and the place where the bed of the Gaunless river was paved with large stones that didn’t hurt their feet when they paddled, and just along from the paving a deeper pool where Joss could swim. They had pop bottles of water and slices of bread and fish paste and some wild strawberries for after.

‘Keep an eye on the young ones, our Joss, and you an’ all, Theda,’ Mam had said. ‘I don’t know whether you should take them anyroad …’ But there were howls of protest and in the end they all went. Mam watched them go from the gate of the back yard and Theda could see that her eyes and nose were red as though she had been crying.

‘Are you sad, Mam?’ Theda had asked. ‘I wish Joss wasn’t going, don’t you? It’s not fair, you know – I bet the gaffer cheated when he drew Joss’s name out of the hat.’

‘No, pet, Tucker Cornish wouldn’t do that,’ said Mam. ‘No, I’m not sad, the army’ll be the making of Joss. I’m just getting a summer cold, I think.’

Mam needn’t have worried about the little ’uns. They never went near the deep pool, not even Frank. He was more interested in roaming through the wood than paddling in the stream anyway. So he wasn’t there when Joss suddenly disappeared under the water. Theda, her woollen knitted costume hanging from her skinny body, was treading water when it happened. She blinked and rubbed her eyes with one hand – where had he gone? Panic rose in her.

‘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 the men in your family will be all right, being down the pits? A reserved occupation, isn’t it?’