After the Storm (40 page)

He sighed and put his beer down, moving past Tom to the bread-tin, bringing out a loaf and some cheese from the dresser.

‘Have a Scotch,’ he said to Tom, hoping that he would not ask but knowing that he would.

‘No thanks, I never touch it,’ replied Tom. ‘Tell me about me da.’ His face was serious, his eyes steady.

‘Have some cheese.’ Bob cut some bread and passed it over
on the point of the knife. He moved a plate to the lad and some cheese. ‘Tell me, when are you going to start your painting again?’

But Tom did not eat his cheese, did not answer Bob, so, in the end, the older man sat back in his chair and told Tom about his da. About his life as a pitman, about his marrers who had been with him until his death. Tom sat quietly while the fire dwindled and the kettle puffed its lid gently up and down. Silence fell between the men and Tom thought of his mother and knew that he would never tell her that Barney had not seen the sky when he died.

The hours passed as they sat at the table, the older man and the young one talking of Barney, of Betsy, Annie and Grace. Of Don and Albert, of the pits and what could be done. Bob had known Davy, known his thoughts and he grew now to know Tom’s.

Tom heaped his bread with cheese as early morning came; some crumbled and fell and he picked each bit up, pressing it against his finger then sucking. It was a sharp salty taste and went well with the beer, and then the tea which they made an hour later. His muscles felt loose and he was leaning easily back in his chair. He must remember to tell Don how God had been made man; he would appreciate that, would that canny lad.

It was three when he reached for his jacket and shrugged himself into it. The next day he’d be for it with Grace; she’d be cold at his hangover when he came into the library after the shift to read up on Van Gogh.

‘It’s his colour, his fragmented impressionism,’ he explained to Bob as he left his house. ‘That’s what I like. The life in his brushwork.’ And Bob told him that he should not be wielding a putter’s shovel alongside a palette knife.

‘Grace says that he paints as though he has one of her migraines,’ replied Tom as he waved to Bob from the street. ‘I’ve got to stay in the pits. It’s just something I’ve got to do for now but me mam’s sorting out a studio so that’s going to make it grand.’

As he walked back through the streets to May’s, Tom pulled his jacket round him and shivered but it was not the cold, it was the thought of the black pit waiting for him.

Betsy lay beside Joe in the double bed that she had shared with
Archie. She was naked beside him, his hand lay on her breast, it felt cold and damp. She could still feel his weight on her as he had thrust his body into hers, kissed her with thin lips, his breath on her face, his tongue probing her mouth. She had closed her eyes and thought of her clean white room above, her patchwork quilt which would be too small for this bed and about her son who needed a studio; which he would now have.

Annie was relieved that Sarah was coming with her to Newcastle Hospital for her first day. They drove in on roads lined with fields and copses which slowly merged into the spacious houses of the suburbs and then into streets lined with terraces clenched tight against clumps of factories which belched black smoke. Gulls wheeled over the hospital as they approached, flying in from the docks. The sky was lighter over there, as it always was by the sea, Annie thought, remembering the call of the gulls and the cold of the sea as it had dragged the sand from beneath her feet.

Sarah stopped the car at the entrance to the tall redbrick building. A statue of Queen Victoria looked over them to the town and the bedding plants had been cleared from around the plinth as it was September.

‘So,’ said Sarah as the engine jumped, then died. ‘So one day they will put up a plaque saying that on September 1932 at two-thirty in the afternoon Nurse Manon began her career.’ She laughed and laid her leather-gloved hand on Annie’s arm.

Annie sat back, feeling the leather-seamed seat, seeing the dark brown wood of the dashboard, the pot-pourri that hung in muslin from a knob and which Sarah said would trick you into thinking the Morris was a new car with new smells. She remembered picking the oily lavender and the rose petals which they had then dried, together with the herbs.

‘You’ll feed the hens then, Sarah?’

‘Of course,’ Sarah nodded. ‘And sell the eggs, taking the money towards Don. But I’d far rather send it to you, my dear. Remember that you get no pay for the first quarter and then it’s only thirty shillings a month.’ She was pulling her gloves from her hands, finger by finger.

‘I’m fine. I’ve saved enough from the job and the patients’ collection means that I can manage.’

‘Come on, then,’ urged Sarah.

The side entrance, where they had been instructed to assemble was signposted and Sarah’s footsteps were brisk as they walked quickly past the trimmed lawns, down the path alongside the long-windowed building until they were there. The door was closed and Annie felt the same trembling, the same tightness in her stomach that had come on her first day of school. She looked at Sarah.

‘Does this remind you of something?’ Their eyes met and they smiled. But it was not the same, Annie knew. Today she was to begin her freedom.

‘I’ll be home on my first day off then, Sarah, if that’s all right.’ She leant forward and kissed her and Sarah’s hand came up to her shoulder and held her close for just a moment and then she was gone.

Inside, the hall was lined with white tiles and there was a smell of disinfectant. Eight girls sat on a bench in the corridor and there was space for two more. Annie sat down and smiled at the girl next to her.

‘I’m Annie Manon,’ she said. ‘From Wassingham.’

The girl, who was sallow-skinned and thin, returned her smile. ‘I’m Julie Briggs from Whitley Bay and I’m scared to death.’

The girls laughed, all along the line, and leaned forward; words came slowly and then laughter joined them. Julie was 18 too, she told Annie, and had come over by train. She was the last of her family to leave home and the only girl. Her brothers were fishermen and married.

Sarah pulled on her gloves as she walked back to the car, skirting the lawns she did not really see and people who nodded and she did not acknowledge. The drive home seemed too quiet and too long whereas the three years with Annie had disappeared with a speed she would not have thought possible. She would not cry, could not cry while she was driving, but the loss of the child who had filled her life would always be hard to bear, too hard to speak of, even to Val. She wondered how she would fill her evenings, her weekends until that day off, the day Annie came home.

There would be no more hot cocoa at the end of each day with Annie, no more of her friends home for tea. Would Tom still come with Grace, or Don, now that Annie was not here?

She put the car into third gear to take the corner which led out from Newcastle. Her ward, her child was free now and she must be on her guard never to restrict that freedom.

Julie and Annie shared a room in the nurses’ home and they prodded the beds and felt the stiffness of the blankets, then walked down green-painted corridors and stairs until they found Sister Tutor as they had been instructed. She was in a dark navy uniform and cap and wore a frown which looked as though it was never wiped away.

They wrote for the next two hours in a classroom cramped with desks and other girls until Annie’s hand and mind were as jumbled as the room. There was an overwhelming smell of beeswax and the desks were sticky with it and a blackness formed on her cardigan.

The next day they were issued with pale blue uniforms and starched aprons and caps which crackled when they walked, but she did not glide as Sister Maria had done. Her heavy black shoes felt like boats and her feet at the end of that day were swollen and throbbing. Together she and Julie dabbed methylated spirits and talcum powder over the toes, the feet and up to the ankles before they crawled into bed, unaware of the heavy blankets, unaware of anything but the white-tiled corridors, the rows of beds, the sisters and nurses, the doctors and students, the dining hall, the mortuary, the Children’s Ward. Unaware of anything until the call at five-thirty the next day.

For six weeks, they wrote and watched and listened in the classroom but did not see the wards again. Annie wondered if she would die of cold in her short-sleeved uniform, but each morning she hugged to herself the thought of the future, of the present, of her freedom.

She learned of leeches and smiled to think that Don could have used them after his discussion with Tom over the interest rates. Sister Tutor asked her to share her joke with the others and when she could not, she had to write out the lesson twice.

She learned about enemas, bedsores; about dangerous drugs which must always be locked. Suddenly through the open
window the sound of the gulls seemed much louder and the whistle of the butcher’s boy, the grinding of gears as a lorry struggled up the hill past the hospital. So simple really, she thought, a pin anchoring a few keys in a nurse’s pocket could have saved a woman’s life, not any woman but my mother. She had to copy up the notes she missed during that lecture from Julie that night.

They had no days off for those first six weeks or for the next four when they were on the wards at last.

The wards were large and white and smelled of disinfectant. Her feet swelled every night and did not go down by the next morning. She was in casualty when twelve miners came in and the enamel bowl shook in her hands as she washed and washed until the blackness was gone, leaving white flesh and red eyes.

She could see the blood then, but Sister drove her on to the next for washing and she smiled and talked soft words and pushed the thought to the back of her head that this could be Tom; this could be Tom. And so on to the next and the next and the next. Her apron was black and her hands too and later she scrubbed until they were red raw, until the smell of the coal and the sight of it was gone. But she could still smell it, see it as she cut clothes from a child who had hurt his arm, still smell it above the vegetable soup she served for lunch and that night she dreamed of dark tight streets, of pitwheels and slag-heaps, of allotments, of a shop, of a room with a snake which writhed and vomited gas. When she woke, in that moment before Julie’s breathing was heard and the day had really begun, she knew that memory was still hers, that hate still remained. She was tired all that day and made sure that the black box in her mind was pushed tightly shut.

The week before her first day off she was moved to the Women’s Ward. At six-thirty she took tea round, at seven she bathed and washed and combed hair. At eight she made beds, folding corners and putting on clean pillowcases with their openings away from the door. At nine she had a cup of tea and poured one in the small kitchen off the corridor for Julie who was on Men’s further down.

‘Guess,’ Julie said, as she walked in, her hands behind her back. ‘Guess what I have here.’ Her eyes were dark with bags beneath and Annie knew that hers were the same.

Annie sat back in her chair, her legs up on the table, her ears
pricked for Sister. ‘Guess you’re an idiot. Come and have some tea, we’ve only another seven minutes.’ She checked the time against the watch that Sarah had given her when she was accepted for training by the hospital. ‘Another eight minutes,’ she corrected.

Then she saw the crumpled letter that Julie brought from behind her back but dropped and they watched as it floated to the ground, blue against the white of the tiles and the green of the linoleum.

It was from Georgie. Annie knew before she saw the writing, before she held it in her hands and saw the creases and stains from miles of travel. She tore at the envelope, ripping it open.

‘Where did you get it?’ she asked, not listening as Julie told her Sarah had brought it into the hall porter.

She searched now for his words of love.

June 1932

My dearest darling love,

You will be 18 by the, time you read this and probably bossing everyone around in the hospital but I want you to know that I don’t miss you any less with time, I just love you more and more. It is deeper and tucked down inside me but I am still seeing everything new here with your eyes as well as me own. I wonder, I do, if you would like the mountains which sometimes I can see as clear as day but which can get hidden by the thick clouds that clump together all of a sudden, here in the Himalayas.

How are you, my bonny lass, my darling girl? How are your feet? Tom says you soak them in vinegar like the miners do. He says it’s a voluntary hospital supported by contributions from the miners mostly; have you had any in yet? If you have, try not to worry about Tom. Push it away, it can’t happen, you love him too much.

It’s hot here, the rains haven’t come yet so it is a wet heat and I’m drinking lime juice until it comes out of me ear holes.

We’ve been down to the plains to Lahore which is
in a right mess. There’s been a lot of fighting between the Muslims and the Sikhs and we’re supposed to stand in the middle and calm it down, which I suppose is what we did. It’s all a bit difficult, you know, here with the Indians. They want their freedom from us, (and I can’t say I blame them) and I reckon there’s going to be some fighting before too long; against us and one another. Anyway, I got me corporal’s stripe out of it all, so now I’m waiting for me sergeant’s but that could take a while.

Will you wait, my love? I don’t mean miss out on things, just want me when I come, because I will come but it is all taking so long and I worry that you’ll get tired and find someone else; a permanent someone else.

You would like it here today, my love. The geese and ducks have just flown over, heading for the water on the plains, and the bullock carts have been plodding by the station all day, but they always do. We have musk-roses which are white with a scent that your Sarah could put in her pot-pourri and make the Morris smell as sweet as a baby’s bum. The whitebeams are trees which I really like. They are everywhere and have huge leaves which are dark green above and furry white below. There’s a bitty fruit which changes to English autumn colours and the birds make right little pigs of themselves.