Authors: Maggie Ford
She was slowly coming to know the dilemma that had faced Matthew, but it was her mother who solved her problem, quite by chance.
‘I wish you didn’t have to work in the City,’ she said towards the end of May. ‘What if they do start bombing London?’
The papers had reported an air raid on industrial Middlesborough and earlier that month bombs had been dropped near Canterbury, without casualties, but too near for comfort; she was alarmed for her daughter’s safety.
‘Perhaps you could find yourself something local, away from the City.’
Something local? And be even more at her mother’s beck and call? Again came that desire to escape.
‘I really should be thinking of doing something towards helping the war effort,’ she ventured, immediately crushed by the alarm on her mother’s face.
‘You mean war work? Oh, no, dear, you couldn’t go working in a
factory.
Not a nicely brought up young girl like you.’
‘Lots of
nicely
brought up young girls are doing heavy, dirty jobs. I don’t see why I should be any different.’
She thought again of Matthew, her heart going out to him for that time of his dilemma. But again it was her mother, mind working on possible ways to have her daughter closer to home, who came to the rescue.
‘I was wondering, dear. Perhaps you’re right about helping with the war effort. What if you applied for a job in some local hospital? They are crying out for help. There’s the chest hospital just the other side of the park. All in the open air. You could go along there and make enquiries.’
With mixed feelings, just to appease her mother, Jenny went along to ‘make enquiries’. It was even nearer home but at least she’d be meeting people, new people, instead of the same old faces in the same old stuffy Leadenhall Street office. It would be nice to get out of it and into someone else’s world for a while. She had little idea how one went about applying for jobs in hospitals but assumed it to be much the same as anywhere else. The middle-aged, prim-faced woman who had probably never seen any other application to her shiny well-scrubbed cheeks than soap, looked up at Jenny from her desk, her gaze full of disparagement.
‘I am afraid there are no places at the moment for untrained girls. If you care to register in the proper manner you can go to a training hospital if you seriously wish to become a nurse.’
She hadn’t for a second thought of becoming a nurse. All she’d come for was a job nearer home. The woman seemed to glare at her.
‘If you are looking for romance and excitement, young lady, you will be sadly disillusioned. This is a
demanding
profession, physically, mentally, suited only for the most dedicated women and entailing sheer hard slog and long hours for precious little reward other than the satisfaction of seeing a patient recover under quiet, efficient, selfless nursing.’
‘That’s all the reward one needs,’ Jenny said without thinking, carried along on the woman’s zeal. She saw the thin lips compress at her audacity in adding her opinion.
‘All too often it is not. After giving oneself until one is drained utterly, and then to be required to do extra duty, one begins to wonder. Such doubts can often form in the mind of a nurse pushed beyond endurance when she grows weary. It is those who find that little extra strength to push aside such doubts who make true nurses. I regret they are all too few.’
Rather than risk another comment that would most certainly be ripe for criticism by the look of this woman, Jenny held her tongue, not sure if she actually wanted all this. Yet she felt herself already being absorbed, the idea of hard unrewarding work an answer, even preferable to the boring, barren futility that had lately become her life.
Refusing to give herself time to think, she filled in the application form under the stern, sceptical eye of her interviewer, if only to show her that she wasn’t afraid of hard work.
It was not long after, wondering just what she had got herself into, that she was bidding goodbye to a tearful parent to commence training at a hospital in the heart of Hampshire. She had escaped.
‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this.’
The fair-haired girl’s plaintive sigh reached Jenny from the other side of the bed as they removed the soiled bottom sheet from underneath an incontinent elderly patient.
Trying to ignore the smell wafting up from the stained sheet, Jenny smiled across at her fellow student nurse. ‘We were told to expect this, you know.’
‘One thing bein’ told what to expect, another ’aving it right up your nose. I think I’d sooner ’ave joined the WAACs than this.’
‘What, with bombs dropping all over the place around London?’ The girl was a Londoner and had been glad to be here in Hampshire. ‘Sooner or later London will become a target and you could be stuck with a searchlight unit. That’s what they go for first, you know, searchlights. I would sooner be here and safe, with all the slops and bedpans, for all the hard work we have to do.’
All too soon after being sent to Hampshire, Jenny had discovered what real mental exhaustion was as she strove to absorb what the demonstrators and lecturers were telling her. Her ankles had ached from endless bed-making, scrubbing miles of floors, interminable polishing of bed springs and scouring what seemed like millions of metal bedpans until they shone again after being emptied down the sluice.
But for all the headaches: trying to cram six months’ training into six weeks, a wartime necessity; the drudgery, being saddled with the distasteful chores second-year nurses passed on to student nurses; all the cleaning up of incontinent patients, emptying slops and bedpans, mopping soiled floors, she had discovered that caring for those unable to care for themselves had its rewards. She really did feel she was doing something worthwhile at last. Often Jenny could hardly believe it was really she who now trod the wards in the uniform of a nurse – not that the uniform enhanced her appearance.
In lisle stockings and flat leather lace-ups, a white apron so starched that it practically stood up by itself, and indeed stood out from the blue striped dress like a bell-tent, she spent hours before a mirror battling with the piece of snow-white material that would eventually form her cap – at least once she had mastered the technique of folding it correctly so that the pinched pleats lay flat enough not to flap about over the crown of her head like some wayward seagull.
Like a true nurse she worked hard to aspire to the art of moving swiftly yet quietly, but with all that quantity of starch, quietly was virtually an impossibility. Her starched uniform heralded her approach with all the subtlety of an oncoming express train.
There was scant opportunity for going home. In this she felt a little guilty. Poor Mumsy, all alone because she had been selfish enough to want to get away. Well she
had
got away, and she
would
have gone home, but a train packed to suffocation with servicemen and women could take three times as long as in peacetime, incessantly stopping and starting and then crawling along between times. Too much of a chunk out of one’s day off. Such a thing as a whole weekend off hardly existed. And after working twelve hours at a stretch, she was only too glad to ‘live in’, falling into bed utterly exhausted to sleep away her day off.
With the beautiful early summer of 1940 she spent many a free day in the corner of some field with a friend or two, dozing in the hot sunshine pouring from a cloudless sky, only too glad to think about absolutely nothing, least of all guilt at not going to see Mumsy.
That year she got home twice, the first occasion in August, the second occasion in the autumn when she ran into Matthew Ward on his way back to his unit after a week’s leave. She was amazed at the change in him. In one short year he had become more broad-shouldered, more steady-eyed. He looked taller, older, yet the ring of devilment still echoed in his voice as he greeted her.
‘Ye gods! Jenny! And every inch a nurse. You look a picture.’
‘So do you,’ she returned lightly. She wasn’t about to upbraid him for not ever writing to her again. The feeling she’d long thought dead now rose again like a bird as she regarded him.
His uniform, although still the rough khaki of rank-and-file, gave him a debonair appearance, and on his sleeve he bore the twin stripes of a corporal. He was making it there, Jenny thought with a small leap of pride in her heart for him, his own way.
‘Not yet an officer, I see,’ she said with a brave attempt at flippancy and he gave her a grin, crooked and rueful.
‘My CO suggested I put in for it. Went up before the Selection Board but got cheesed off with the stupid questions they asked. Afraid I got a bit bolshie with some silly arse of a psychiatrist there and they chucked me out. Not literally, but well, turned me down – at least for the time being.’
As he chatted, Jenny couldn’t help but notice how some of the edges of that ‘college-boy’ accent had blunted. Listening to him now, each word had a rough-and-ready tinge to it. Oddly enough, it rounded off this new Matthew to perfection – a man of action, certain of himself, a man able to fight his own fights without help from anyone. She wondered as he went on talking how his mother viewed this new person. Did it pull at her heartstrings for the boy he had once been? It didn’t pull at her own, that was certain, except to make her heart swell with pride and love for this man who stood chatting lightly, without a care in the world because he had been able to surmount each obstacle as it had come his way.
‘I expect the Selection Board will have another bash at me before long,’ he was saying. ‘The CO was damned disappointed, though God knows why. Me – I’m not sure I want to bother now. I’ve got a great crowd of mates and just now we’re too busy playing soldiers on some godforsaken Yorkshire moor for me to worry just yet about trying to become an officer.’
‘What do you do?’ she asked.
For an answer he placed a finger against his lips in a playful gesture. ‘Careless talk costs lives. Really, we just muck about out in the field with walkie-talkies, practise radio relay, get wet and tired and lost. Usually end up in the right place, eventually, then all go back to the schoolroom to learn where we went wrong. Then we all go off to the pub and forget it. It really is a load of old bull. I don’t think any of us bother to take it in except enough to keep our sergeant happy. Don’t know as I want to start seriously studying again just to be an officer. Had enough of that at college.’
He paused to regard her closely. ‘But what about you? I bet you do enough of it. A nurse, eh? Always thought you were cut out to be something like that. I think that’s why I admired you so much, Jenny. Got anyone in tow yet? Some handsome young doctor?’ There was a look in his eye that made a spark of hope leap inside her.
‘No one at the moment,’ she said, smiling, then she said something utterly stupid before she could stop herself. ‘I don’t have the time.’
‘Me too.’ He gave a low chuckle. Had she disappointed him? ‘Having too good a war to get roped in. Women tell you too much what and what not to do. I’m free for the time being. But you never know, do you?’
He broke off and on a sudden thought crooked his arm and tugged back the sleeve of his overcoat to glance down at his wristwatch, the gold one which he had told her last year had been given him by his father’s sister for his twenty-first. ‘Ye gods! Got to go, Jenny. If I miss my connection I’ll get put on a charge for being late. Cheerio then. And take care of yourself.’
‘You too.’ Dismally, she was aware she had blown the one chance she might have had of his asking her for a date, or even if he could write to her. On sheer impulse born out of desperation she leaned forward and laid a kiss full on his lips. Expecting him to pull away she was surprised by his arm coming around her, the kiss being held, and it was she who broke away in a fluster, taken off guard by the strength of his lips on hers, there in the street.
‘Like you said,’ she burst out idiotically, ‘you’ll be late.’
He nodded, seeming to gather his wits. ‘Yes, I will. I’ll write to you, Jenny.’
He seemed so tremendously happy as he went on his way. Rosy from his promise, the pressure of his lips still felt on hers while her own foolish confusion mocked her, she watched him go, shouldering his small pack, his step jaunty. War hadn’t touched him at all. The terrible events of Dunkirk, of desperate men with their backs to the sea until the armada of small boats had come to their rescue, had passed him by. If anything, she had seen more of conflict than he.
A fleeting vision of her part in it passed through her mind, days and weeks compressed into seconds as she watched Matthew’s departing figure. A once-quiet, smoothly running hospital suddenly filled with a consignment of casualties from those beaches. A first-year student nurse thrown into the deep end trying to cope with a picture of defeat, the exhausted, the filthy, the torn bodies, her first-ever experience of war at its most vicious, all the worse because her life as a student nurse only the previous day had been so sedate.
Surrounded by that upheaval, she had cooked porridge, cut mounds of bread and butter, helped undress those who passed out into sleep the moment they were left alone, sometimes just where they stood. She had washed the wounded, tried not to weep over the dying or turn away as gangrenous or maggot-infested wounds were uncovered, and had wished to God she had been qualified to do more than just assist and cut bread while those skilled medical teams operated on the suffering. And the June sun had shone on.
She saw Matthew turn, throw her a careless wave. She waved back, smiled. No ghosts of dead and dying comrades, no splattered bodies and shattered limbs haunted his vision. He had continued, as he’d said, to play at soldiers in the safe environs of a Yorkshire moor. Pray God, Jenny thought as she waved, heartened by his promise to write to her, there would never be need for it to be otherwise.
For a week as he took orders, drilled, cleaned his equipment and uniform free of moorland mud and grass knowing that next day they’d need cleaning all over again, Matthew thought of Jenny Ross and the kiss she had given him. No mere friendly one. He’d always had a sneaking suspicion that underneath that touch-me-not exterior she’d always presented, she had been in love with him. That kiss had proved it, but even then she had broken away before it had had a chance to develop, becoming all formal again, telling him he’d be late back.