Secrets (41 page)

The only prayer she said for herself was to ask that she’d be a good nurse. She didn’t believe she deserved happiness, or even safety.

Chapter Nineteen

SEPTEMBER 1939

‘Come and look at these little lambs being evacuated!’ Staff Nurse Wilkins exclaimed from her position at the window of Women’s Surgical. ‘Some of them are so tiny.’

Adele and Joan Marlin joined Wilkins at the window, to see a long crocodile of children trudging along Whitechapel Road towards the station. Each one was carrying either a small case or bundle in their hands and a gas mask box slung across their chests. They all had a large label pinned to them, presumably marked with their name and age, and they were being shepherded by around half a dozen women who were most likely teachers.

‘Poor loves, leaving their mums,’ Joan said with an emotional break in her voice. ‘Our Mickey and Janet are going today too. Mum was in a terrible state last night. She don’t believe other people can be kind to kids who aren’t their own.’

‘It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to some of them,’ Adele said thoughtfully, remembering how it was for her when she got to her grandmother’s. ‘They’ll be safe from any bombs and see a new way of life, find out about nature, birds, cows and sheep. And people can be really kind to kids in emergencies.’

‘I can’t think of anything worse than coming face to face with a cow,’ Joan said with a sniff. She was a gregarious redhead from Bow, with freckles across her nose. The daughter of a docker and the eldest of seven children, she had become Adele’s closest friend since coming to Whitechapel. Without Joan’s ribald sense of humour, kind heart and jollity, Adele knew she couldn’t have coped with the harshness of East End life.

‘It doesn’t seem possible that we’re about to go to war,’ Staff Nurse Wilkins said, looking up at the cloudless sky. ‘I mean, the sun’s shining, everyone’s carrying on working, getting on buses and trains, even those kids think they’re off on a big adventure. I keep expecting that it’s all a mistake, that a week from now we’ll see them take all those wretched sandbags away, tear down the blackouts and pull the strips off the windows. I really can’t believe all our men are standing ready to kill people.’

Wilkins was very fond of questioning the meaning of life. She was twenty-five, skinny, mousy-haired and plain as a pike-staff, but a dedicated nurse and deeply religious. As a staff nurse she didn’t have to live in the nurses’ home, and a couple of months earlier she had taken Adele home with her for supper. As the senior nurse was so well spoken and educated Adele had expected her home to be a nice one. It had been something of a shock to be taken into a tiny, decaying terraced house in Bethnal Green. It was scrupulously clean, but devoid of any comforts. No rugs on the floor, only shabby oil cloth, no pictures, ornaments or even a wireless. A table and chairs, a sideboard, and beds upstairs, that was all. And the grace they said before a meagre supper of cold meat and potatoes lasted what seemed like ten minutes. Wilkins’ parents and the two other daughters who still lived at home were all Evangelists, and they’d wasted no time in trying to get Adele to join them in what Joan laughingly called ‘Holy Rollering’.

Adele’s first impression of the East End had been complete horror. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen the effects of poverty and unemployment, for parts of Hastings and Rye too were little more than slums. At worst she had expected it to be how she remembered Euston and King’s Cross.

But the East End made King’s Cross seem like paradise. Street after street of mean little houses, and a casual glance through open doors or broken windows revealed that the inhabitants owned little more than they stood up in. Ragged children with pinched, pale faces played listlessly in filthy alleys. Women with gaunt faces and hollow eyes, often with a baby in their arms, scoured the gutters as the markets closed for anything edible. Adele saw drunks and prostitutes, old soldiers with missing limbs, beggars and cripples sleeping wherever they could find a little shelter. And everywhere stank, a potent mixture of human and animal waste, rot, unwashed bodies and stale beer.

Day after day in the hospital she saw the end results of slum living. Severely malnourished children, women worn out with child-bearing, hideous wounds from drunken fights, lice, tuberculosis, rickets, and all manner of other complaints caused by poor diet, overcrowding and lack of basic hygiene.

Yet she soon came to see that however deprived these people were, they had spirit. They helped one another, were generous with what little they had, laughed at adversity, and they were colourful even if their surroundings were so dismal.

The pain of losing Michael was still almost as sharp as when she left Hastings, but Adele didn’t think she could wallow in self-pity when all around her were such poverty and need. It was difficult not to laugh along with people who were so unfailingly optimistic and jolly. Everyone knew that London would be Germany’s main target for bombs when the war began, yet there was no panic, no desperate fleeing the city.

When thoughts of Michael threatened to engulf her, Adele would look at the old man who stood outside the main door of the hospital selling newspapers. He was twisted and bent with rheumatism, clearly in pain, but he greeted everyone jovially and stood out there in all weathers, always with a smile on his face.

She vowed to be like him. No one liked a misery, and she knew now that most people had some problem in their lives. So she forced herself to smile, talked to people and found that it eventually became second nature. If she cried herself to sleep most nights, nobody but she knew.

It might not have been so bad if she’d only known how Michael and her grandmother had reacted to those letters she sent them. She had imagined all kinds of terrible things, like Michael not coming out of a dive in his plane purposely, or her grandmother slipping into the river and drowning. She went on sending a little card to her grandmother every week, always walking miles from Whitechapel to post it, so the postmark wouldn’t give away where she was. Yet for all she knew, those cards could be piled up inside the door of Curlew Cottage, unseen and unread.

But then on her twentieth birthday in July she got a card from her grandmother. She couldn’t believe it when she saw the familiar handwriting. How on earth had a woman who never went further than Rye found out where she was?

‘
I took the bus into Hastings and went to the Buchanan and demanded that the Matron told me where you’d gone. I always felt she’d had a hand in it
,’ Honour wrote in the accompanying letter.

She plays her cards close to her chest that one! But I eventually convinced her that I didn’t want to know the reasons why, only an address. I will not of course pass it on to Michael should he call again. The poor boy came many times in the first few weeks, he flew over the cottage dozens of times too, always dipping his wing so I knew it was him. But I don’t think he will call again now. He might not be over it, and as deeply puzzled as I am, but he has great dignity.

I thought you were cruel at first, but as spring came and I remembered special times here with you, I came to thinking that you have no cruelty in your nature. Maybe one day you’ll be able to tell me about it. But I won’t press you, I have secrets enough of my own I wouldn’t share. And in my heart I know you didn’t do it selfishly and must have had good reason.

I am very relieved that you stayed in nursing, for you were born for
it. Write to me now, let me know my brave and caring granddaughter is, if not happy, making a new life for herself.

As for me, I’m well enough for an old biddy of sixty. I’ve got a dog now, an ugly-looking brute I call Towzer. Someone abandoned him, but he knew the right door to come and whine at. He’s a good boy, doesn’t try to get at the chickens or rabbits, and he’s company. I’ve even got him to do a few tricks, but you will see those when you come home again.

We cannot fool ourselves that the war will be averted now. I won’t ask that you move to a hospital in a safer place, a nurse must be where she is most needed. But don’t take risks, my girl, and keep letters coming. This will always be your home and safe haven.

My love,

Granny

Adele marvelled at the cheerful and uncritical letter and cried over it too for she missed her grandmother so much and couldn’t bear the thought of the torment she must have put her through. Yet more importantly, it gave her renewed strength. If a sixty-year-old woman without a soul in the world to turn to when she was hurting could not only survive, but show unfaltering love, then a girl with youth and good health on her side should be able to put this behind her.

‘They’ve just painted a white cross on the bleedin’ roof,’ Joan informed Adele a little later that morning as they scrubbed down the two empty beds ready for new patients. ‘Don’t tell Staff or she’ll be thinking this place is being turned into a church and she’ll have us down on our prayer bones.’

Adele laughed. Joan was always making jokes about Staff Nurse Wilkins’ religious fervour. ‘Let’s hope the German pilots don’t think it’s a runway and try to land on it!’ she retorted. Yet as the words came out of her mouth, so an image of Michael shot into her mind. Last Christmas Eve when he came to the nurses’ home in Hastings, he’d been wearing a sheepskin-lined leather flying jacket. He said all the fighter boys wore them, they not only kept them warm, but they felt they would be better protection if they were shot down by enemy fire. That hadn’t meant that much to her then, but it did now. Once the war began he’d be up in the sky trying to shoot down German planes, but they might very well get him first.

All at once she felt sick and had to run to the lavatory. She only just got there in time.

‘What’s up?’ Joan said from behind her. ‘You were right as ninepence a minute ago. Want me to call Sister?’

‘No, don’t,’ Adele said weakly. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute. Just go back on the ward and cover for me.’

She pulled herself together and went back to work. She felt Joan looking at her sharply every now and then, but with twenty-four patients on the ward there was no opportunity for conversation.

At six o’clock, however, when the night shift came on duty and Adele and Joan went back to the nurses’ home, Joan questioned her friend. ‘What was up today?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ Adele said. ‘I expect it was just something I ate which didn’t agree with me.’

‘If I didn’t know you better I’d reckon you were up the spout,’ Joan said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Adele said.

‘I know something’s wrong,’ Joan said. ‘You often go all quiet and broody. It’s a bloke, ain’t it?’

Adele gave a noncommittal shrug.

‘I’m not daft,’ Joan said. ‘You got transferred ’ere from the coast. No one does that without some bloody good reason.’

Adele knew the other girl well enough to know she wouldn’t give up easily.

‘All right, it was a man, and talking about planes made me sick because he’s a fighter pilot. But please don’t ask me anything else, I came here to forget him.’

‘Fair do’s,’ Joan said. ‘But if you ever want to spill the beans, I’ll be ready wif me lug-holes pinned back.’

When the day nurses got into the dining room for their supper, they were greeted by one of the orderlies with the news that Germany had invaded Poland earlier that day. It had been on the six o’clock news, and the wireless was still on, with people discussing what this would mean to England.

The treaty for the mutual protection of England and Poland had been drawn up after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia six months earlier in March, and a month later all young men between twenty and twenty-two were called up for active service. Neville Chamberlain would attempt now to get an undertaking from Hitler that he would withdraw his troops from Poland, but if that failed, England was duty-bound to declare war on Germany.

That night Adele lay in bed listening to the other nurses calling goodnight to one another all down the corridor. She had one of the few single rooms. It was tiny, with no room for anything more than a narrow bed, a chest of drawers and a desk which doubled as a dressing-table, but she was grateful for the privacy it gave her.

Back in Hastings she had always liked the noise and bustle of the nurses’ home. She had never minded girls bursting into her room to chat, borrow things or share a joke. Yet she found it hard to cope with it here. She craved isolation and complete silence. She was irritated by the pettiness of the other nurses’ rows and squabbles. Sometimes she even resented attempts to befriend her. Joan was the only other girl she had any real time for.

Yet the noise didn’t bother her tonight. She felt soothed by the nurses’ voices in just the way she used to like hearing her grandmother raking the stove at night, or moving her chair.

Perhaps she was recovering?

To test herself, she put her hand up to where her engagement ring lay nestling between her breasts, and made herself think of Michael’s face the day he gave it to her. She could see him so clearly, his dark hair gleaming in the sunshine, the way the skin around his eyes crinkled a little as he smiled, and those dark blue eyes looking so intently at her.

No tears sprang to her eyes this time. Perhaps she had now cried them all. The sadness and the yearning for what she had once had was still there. She still had stabs of shame that she’d been to bed with her brother. Yet she felt more rational about it, after all they didn’t know they were related, and she had done the right thing in going away when she found out.

All at once she knew it was time to go home and see her grandmother again. She had three days owing to her, and tomorrow she would ask Matron when she could take them.