Fourteen

London, autumn 1927

‘There’s a person waiting, Doctor, says his wife is bad and will you go to see her.’ Doreen, the efficient, middle-aged maid who had been acquired along with the surgery, appeared in the consulting room, her knobbly red hands folded against her generous waist.

‘What’s wrong with her, does he say?’ Alice was binding up the fingers of the last patient of the morning, a six-year-old boy who had shut his hand in a gate. ‘There, all finished.’ She smiled at the lad, whose face was still white from shock, his dark-lashed eyes swollen with crying. He nursed his hand and managed to smile back.

‘No, he doesn’t. He insists on speaking to you.’

‘Well, ask him to hang on,’ Alice sighed. ‘I’ll come in the shortest of moments. ‘There, Mrs Cooper,’ she said to the boy’s mother, who’d been anxiously watching. ‘Donald will be fine in a few days. He should keep the bandage clean and dry, but it’ll need changing so I’ll give you some spares. If the wound becomes red and painful, or he has a fever you must bring him back right away.’

‘I’m ever so obliged, Doctor. How much will it be? I’ll pay now as I don’t want my husband bothered. He got laid off from the brewery last week.’

‘Just give Doreen what you can manage, it hasn’t taken long. There now, I must go and see what this poor man wants.’

Alice and Barbara had established themselves in a rambling Victorian house off Streatham High Street on the edge of a new housing estate. It had seemed a good place for Alice to open a surgery, not least because there wasn’t a woman GP in the area. It was a reasonable journey, too, for Barbara, who worked regular hours as a pathologist in the laboratory of a central London hospital. Barbara had put the remaining money from her legacy into the house, while Alice borrowed a lump sum from her father, a debt she had every intention of honouring.

It had been hard at first, especially meeting the expense of setting up, but the early trickle of patients had swelled most promisingly. Now a year had passed and Alice was able to say proudly to her parents on the rare occasions that she saw them that she was rushed off her feet. Her father had responded with the generous birthday gift of a motor car. It was still simpler sometimes to walk, but overall the vehicle had transformed the speed at which she could do her rounds. Gwen had given her a copy of Mrs Beeton.

The gnarled old man in the waiting room stirred anxiously as she showed the Coopers out. She noticed with pity his fraying jacket, the shiny patches on his trousers, the deep-etched lines on his face. She hadn’t seen him before. She would have remembered those penetrating dark eyes and the broken nose that gave him the appearance of a bird of prey.

‘How can I help you, Mr . . . ?’

‘Jarman.’ He cleared his throat and continued in a phlegmy voice, ‘It’s the missus. I can’t wake her and she’s breathing funny. The neighbour come to sit with her, she said to fetch you. We’re only over in Melton Street.’

‘I’ll come and look at her,’ Alice said, not liking the sound of Mrs Jarman’s condition. She paused only to collect her medical bag from the consulting room and to call to Doreen. ‘Will you telephone Miss Briggs and advise her I’ll be late?’ before she followed the old man out into the wintry street.

The interest of Streatham for Alice was its social mix. There were the well-ordered families of office clerks on the new estate and pockets of gracious old terraced houses occupied for the most part by the well-to-do. Melton Street, most quickly reached by a walk across a pedestrian railway bridge, was at the lowest end of the scale, being hardly a street at all, but a grit path running between a line of formidable tenement blocks and the railway fence. The ground shook under their feet now as an engine chugged by. The frontages were blackened by decades of soot. Alice dreaded to think of the noxious particles the inhabitants breathed in and the consequences for their health. A handful of children dressed in ragged garments and playing with a skipping rope drew back to let them pass. Alice smiled at them, but felt their hungry eyes bore into her back.

‘Why aren’t they at school?’ she wondered aloud.

The old man shook his head, deep in his own thoughts. He walked stiffly and Alice had no trouble keeping up. Halfway along Melton Street he entered a narrow gap between buildings where no sunlight penetrated, and shoved open an ill-fitting door on the left that led into an echoing stairwell. There Alice followed him up several flights of steps. At the second floor landing he twisted the handle on one of a row of battered doors and admitted them to a shabby bedsitting room. It felt only a little warmer than outside and smelled of damp and sickness.

A bulky woman in a shapeless brown dress moved from her seat beside a rickety bed to reveal the frail figure of the invalid. Pale light from the window fell upon a still, pinched face, wrinkled and framed by wisps of grey hair. Mrs Jarman was so thin the line of her body barely troubled the motheaten blanket that covered her. Alice’s heart twisted.

‘How’s she been?’ the old man asked the large woman.

‘She ain’t moved since you bin gone,’ she replied, her plain face full of sympathy. ‘But she’s peaceful like.’

Mr Jarman bent over the figure on the bed. ‘Nelly, my dear, the lady doctor’s come now.’ He stroked her hair.

Alice opened her bag and took out her stethoscope. He peeled back the blanket and clasped his wife’s hand as Alice slid the bell of the instrument over the thin chest. She heard the skip and flutter of the old woman’s heart and saw how her ribs lifted and fell only faintly with her breath. After examining her further and finding her weak down one side of her body, Alice straightened. It was a moment before she spoke.

‘Mr Jarman, I’m afraid it’s not good news. Your wife has had a stroke, a bad one. It’s only a matter of time now.’

The old man sank down on the chair by the bed. ‘I thought it was something like that,’ he mumbled. ‘My poor Nelly.’ Again he bent over his wife. He cradled her face and kissed her forehead.

Alice turned to the large woman, who’d been waiting quietly in the background. ‘There’s not much I can do, except advise Mrs Jarman be kept comfortable. You’re a neighbour, aren’t you? Are you able to help?’

‘I’ll do my best, Doctor. My daughter come to you, that’s how I know about you. Janie Shaw, her baby had the croup.’

‘Oh, yes. How is the little one?’ She remembered it had been touch and go with the child, but she’d pulled through.

‘Running around and into everything. You’d never believe she’d been so poorly.’

They fell quiet again, both moved by the sight of the old man murmuring to his wife.

‘I’ll help ’im with her. I nursed my husband to the last, I know what to do. And Nelly’s been good to me.’

Alice glanced round the room, noting the few sticks of furniture, the single tap above a cracked sink, the lack of anywhere proper to cook or wash. Once it grew dark there would only be the candle on the table to light the room.

‘How will you manage the laundry?’ she enquired. ‘I could see if one of the hospitals will take her. She’d be well looked after—‘

‘She ain’t goin’ to no hospital,’ the old man said suddenly.

‘We’ll manage everything somehow, Doctor. Folks here rally round when there’s a need.’

Seeing that she was outnumbered and that Mrs Jarman’s carers were determined to keep her at home, Alice could do no more but promise to return the following day. She felt angry as she left the building, frustrated that people should still be living in these conditions. The little group of children had vanished, chased away, perhaps, by the biting wind that swooped down Melton Street. She consulted the rota of visits that Doreen had handed her and was soothed to see Miss Briggs’s name at the top. She always offered Alice a nice hot cup of tea and after the Jarmans, she felt the need of that. She hurried home across the railway to collect the car.

*

‘I thought you weren’t coming, Doctor.’ Edna Briggs smiled up at Alice from her chair by the fire in the cosy drawing room lined with books and carved wooden figures collected from her travels.

‘Of course I was. It was simply that I was held up. Perhaps your girl didn’t pass on the message. How are you today?’

‘Not so bad. If it weren’t for the dizziness and the headache I’d have nothing to complain about. But enough about me. You’ll have a cup of tea with me, won’t you?’

The next two hours passed quickly. After Miss Briggs she visited the Lambs in one of the houses on the new estate. Alice had helped Priscilla Lamb bring her first child – a little ewe Lamb, as she joked afterwards with Barbara – through a difficult birth three nights before. Mrs Lamb’s mother and sister were in attendance today, and she seemed calm and happy, and the baby girl thriving, so she moved quickly on to the next call to check on an eight-year-old boy who had developed a temperature after he’d had his tonsils removed. Seeing that the wound was healing, but that he was sniffing and sneezing, she concluded that he had simply caught a cold and advised his anxious mother to keep him in bed and feed him up. One of the big Victorian houses and a family of children with spots was next – an easily diagnosed outbreak of chickenpox – and she left feeling sorry for the put-upon nanny who was expected to manage them all.

The street lamps were lit by the time she left this household, and the bitter wind brought sleet, so she hurried home as quickly as she could. It upset her to see so much poverty and suffering on her rounds, but the thought of a piece of Doreen’s moist fruitcake before late afternoon surgery made her spirits rise.