Fiona hurried along the corridor to her office, as fast as she could without actually running. There seemed to be more and more to do these days. Constant committee meetings of various kinds demanded her presence. Rotas always needed changing, and the two new recruits to the district required supervising until they had settled in. Two nurses had moved out – one to get married, and one to join up as an army nurse and work in France. Primrose and Belinda had joined the North Hackney nurses’ home at New Year, fresh from their Queen’s Nurse training. She was tempted to delegate keeping an eye on them to Gwen, but was aware that maybe understanding the young wasn’t her deputy’s strongest suit. Gwen had instantly decided the pair were flighty and made no secret of it.
Fiona sighed. In addition to all that, it was colder than she could ever recall in London, as bad as her native Scotland. The Thames had frozen over. It had played havoc with travel arrangements. She would have to sanction extra money towards fuel; she couldn’t have her nurses getting cold on top of everything else they endured, mostly without complaint.
‘Well, at least it will keep transmission of infection down,’ she muttered as she reached her office door. She paused as she could hear the sound of someone singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ from inside. She smiled and reprimanded herself for being so gloomy. There was always something to be grateful for, and Gladys finding her voice was one.
She opened the door and the singing abruptly ended. ‘No, carry on, carry on,’ Fiona said hastily. ‘Don’t let me stop you. It cheers me up to hear you, Gladys.’
Gladys, who had been cleaning the bookshelves, beamed. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ She bobbed a little curtsey and Fiona frowned.
‘No need for that, my dear. But as you’ve stopped, tell me, when is Alice Lake due back, do you know?’
Gladys nodded. ‘She went to visit her folks, ma’am, and they’re up in Liverpool, it’s ever so far. Then she had to call us on the telephone to say the trains weren’t running because of the weather and she’ll be back tomorrow instead.’
Fiona nodded. She had feared as much. ‘That’s a shame, but nothing to be done about it. We’ll just have to manage without her.’
Gladys rolled up her duster in her hand. ‘Miss Edith said she’d help me with my reading later.’
‘That’s kind of her,’ said Fiona. ‘You’re coming along nicely, Gladys. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You work a full day here and then you study all evening. Well done.’ She paused. ‘Actually, can you ask Edith to come up here, if she’s downstairs? Her shift should be over by now. Mary, too, if you see her. They haven’t done anything wrong, I just need to ask them a favour.’
Gladys bobbed again, pink with delight at the praise. ‘Of course, ma’am.’
Mary shook her hair and sighed. ‘What do you make of that, then?’
Edith shrugged as she took down the cocoa powder from the top shelf. ‘Suppose we’d better have this without sugar.’ She pulled a face. ‘It’s not so bad, is it? Just keeping an eye on the new nurses while they settle in? I think Fiona didn’t want to seem heavy-handed and that’s why she didn’t ask Gwen. She thought it would be better coming from us as we’re at the same level as they are.’
Mary passed her two cups. ‘Must we really do without sugar? I can’t get used to it. Perhaps Charles can get hold of some. Or what about Harry’s friends? Doesn’t Billy work down at the docks? I bet he could manage it.’
‘Mary!’ exclaimed Edith, shocked. ‘You can’t do that. That’s illegal. You’d get Charles in awful trouble. I can’t ask Billy, he’d lose his job.’
Mary’s face twisted. ‘I know, I know, but cocoa without sugar! It’s too bad. It tastes like mud.’
Edith frowned. ‘Well, do you want it or not? I’ll have yours if you don’t.’ Sometimes Mary exasperated her – the young woman had obviously never gone without and wasn’t used to making any kind of compromise. Edith could easily remember times when any cocoa at all, made just with water and very weak, would have been a great treat.
‘Oh, go on, then.’ Mary gave way without too much of a struggle. ‘You didn’t answer my question properly. What do you think we’re meant to do? We won’t go on visits with them, will we?’
Edith carefully spooned an equal amount of powder into the two cups. ‘No, Primrose and Belinda are qualified Queen’s Nurses, they don’t want us breathing down their necks. We’ll just be here to advise them a bit from our experience of the district. Neither of them comes from round here so it’ll take a while before they know their way about. Look at me, I’m a Londoner, but it still took me ages.’ She added a little water, made a paste and then topped it up with hot water and a dash of milk. ‘Here you are.’
Mary accepted it and managed to take a sip without pulling a face. She didn’t mean to offend her friend by implying she wasn’t grateful, and it was better than nothing. ‘Anyway they’ll probably be all right, won’t they? They most likely won’t need us to do anything other than show them where to park their bikes.’
It turned out they needed a little more than that. Their first few cases weren’t too bad, or at least nothing beyond what they’d come across in their training, and if they were taken aback by the conditions in which some of their patients lived, they didn’t say. So it was a shock for them to hear what Alice had had to deal with on the day after she got back, frazzled by the travel delays and hoping for a straightforward round to welcome her back. It wasn’t to be.
Alice had set out on what sounded as if it would be a routine visit to a family living in a cramped house a few streets away, off Cricketfield Road. She had known there was a pregnant young woman in the household, but not when she was due to give birth; the call had originally been to visit the grandmother and change a dressing on her injured leg. The old woman was sitting huddled by the meagre fire in the kitchen and complaining about all and sundry. Nothing was right for her. Then she started on about her granddaughter. ‘She’s no better than she should be, that one,’ she spat, as Alice tried to calm her so that the bandage could be fastened properly.
Alice tried to ignore the vicious comments; it wasn’t her business to become involved in family squabbles. She was keen to leave the house as soon as possible. It had smelt badly of damp, and the fire, such as it was, wasn’t drawing properly. So the room was smoky, with every surface grubby with soot and dust. She knew it was her duty to give general advice about hygiene as well as treating a specific condition, but had the distinct feeling her words would fall on deaf ears here.
It wasn’t until the old woman paused to catch her breath that Alice became aware of a thin wailing from upstairs. It sounded frail and desperate all at the same time. The old woman dismissed it when asked what it was, but something told her she should investigate and, despite the grandmother’s protests, she made her way upstairs, with dread in her heart even as she attempted to keep her cool and cheerful professional demeanour.
The scene she discovered was the saddest she’d experienced in her whole career. A very young girl lay on the bed, white-faced and sweating, panting for breath, and in her arms lay a baby so pale it was almost blue. The room was freezing, the grate empty, and the bed had only a pitifully thin blanket over it, so it was no good for warmth at all.
Before Alice could even properly establish what was going on, the baby’s feeble cries petered out. She immediately went into the routine that had been so well instilled into them during training that it was almost automatic, going through every effort to resuscitate the tiny child, but it was no use. It had been too weak to begin with.
She felt painfully inadequate as she was forced to answer the unspoken question in the young girl’s eyes. The child was dead and there was nothing to be done to save it. Alice belatedly checked: a little boy, its life over before it had really begun. It was no more than a couple of weeks old.
Slowly she drew the full story from the girl, who claimed she was seventeen, although Alice doubted it.
‘Back last spring, I met this lad who’d come to the area looking for work,’ the girl said in a near-whisper. ‘He got himself taken on in the gas-mask factory and found lodgings nearby. At first he was nice, bought me bars of chocolate, even got me a bunch of flowers once. Nobody ever done that before. That was the evening he took me down Hackney Downs, and I know it was wrong what we done, but he was so kind and said he loved me and if I loved him back then I’d let him … you know.’ She paused to gasp for breath, her forehead glistening with sweat. ‘It took me ages to realise I hadn’t had me monthlies, but he’d sworn it would all be all right and he’d make an honest woman of me, so I wasn’t that worried. I believed him. More fool me.’
Alice could have guessed what was coming next.
‘The moment war was declared he disappeared. Haven’t heard a dicky bird from him since. I tried to hide me bump, that’s when I couldn’t get rid of it drinking gin and having a boiling hot bath, but after a while it was no good. Gran was furious and said I had to stay indoors or the family would be shamed. I didn’t have no choice so I agreed, still thinking he might send word, but he didn’t.
‘Just after New Year I caught that flu what was going around and couldn’t shake it off. Nobody would call a doctor for me. Even when one come to see Gran, they made me stay upstairs. Anyway, there is no hiding it and now it’s too late.’
Alice’s heart had ached for the girl. If only she had known, there were places she could have gone to have her baby, whether she was married or not. The Mother’s Hospital would have taken her, but the girl hadn’t heard of the place, even though it was nearby.
Alice thought the situation couldn’t have been more grim, but she was wrong. When the girl’s father had turned up, things had gone from bad to worse, as he was drunk.
‘You get out of here now,’ he’d snarled, his face close to Alice’s, his breath reeking of cheap spirits. ‘This is my house and I say what goes. We don’t need the likes of you do-gooders stickin’ yer oar in.’ For a moment Alice thought he was going to hit her, but she had stood her ground.
‘I’ve been called in here to treat your mother’s injury, and once a nurse is invited into a house it is her duty to help the family where appropriate,’ she insisted. ‘I can’t just ignore your daughter and the death of her baby.’
‘Course you can, it’s no more than either of them deserve,’ the man scoffed. ‘We’ll get rid of it and say no more about it. You ain’t seen nothing.’
Alice knew she risked making him angrier but she couldn’t agree. ‘I’m afraid that just won’t do,’ she told him.
Again, she thought he might hit her as he stood swaying in front of her, but then with a grunt he turned, walking out of the half-rotten front door and slamming it behind him. She allowed herself a moment’s pause, doing her best not to shake now the immediate danger had passed. Then she picked up her bag, knowing she would have to begin the sad procedures to notify the authorities of an infant death.
‘It wasn’t that so much that upset me,’ Alice said, once she had eventually made it back to Victory Walk and given in to the urgent need to tell the others about the afternoon she’d just had. ‘It was the look on the girl’s face when she realised the baby had died. I’ll never forget it. I know lots of people will say it was for the best, that it never stood a chance, but if they’d seen her face …’
Primrose and Belinda listened to the whole desperate tale with expressions of increasing horror. ‘How do you manage to do it?’ Primrose breathed. ‘I’d have run away. I don’t think I could stand it.’
Edith nodded and gently touched her shoulder. ‘I know what you mean, but when it comes to the point, you wouldn’t. It can be shocking at first, that young girls have babies out of wedlock like that, and some people would probably say the same thing – the baby is better off dead and the mother can get on with her life. It’s not that simple when you see it first-hand, though. It’s a tragedy, no matter where it happens – and all the more so when you realise it needn’t have happened at all.’
Primrose nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Thank you, Alice. For telling us, I mean.’
Alice sighed. ‘Well, thanks for listening. It helped to tell someone. That poor, poor girl.’
Belinda rose. ‘It’s late, Primrose. We should turn in. Another day’s shift beckons.’
Primrose exhaled deeply. ‘And you have to go back there and see to that horrid old woman’s bandage. She doesn’t deserve it, I wish she’d just rot away for being so cruel.’
Edith cocked her head at her new colleague. ‘You don’t mean that, really.’
Alice got up as well. ‘The thing is, she’s had a tough life – anyone can see that. I’ll sort her out tomorrow and I’ll see to the girl’s flu too, not that she’ll care after what’s happened.’
‘But you can make her comfortable,’ Edith pointed out.
‘Yes, I’ll do my best.’ Alice managed a smile. ‘Thanks again for listening, for understanding. Hope I haven’t put you off. It’s not always like that.’ She turned and headed for the door.
Edith watched as the two new nurses followed her, knowing how hard it would have been for them to realise that next time it might be them dealing with such a situation. But it was a lesson well learned. It didn’t help to sugar-coat what they would be up against. Perhaps they thought that, having completed their training, that was the hardest bit over and done with. The truth was, it was only just beginning.