Читать книгу Christmas for the District Nurses - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 9

Mary stood in the doorway between the service room and the common room and clapped her hands loudly. ‘Excuse me!’ she shouted over the general hubbub of the nurses enjoying their Saturday morning leisure. Very few had had to work and they were making the most of a few hours with nothing more pressing to do than listen to the wireless or read the paper. ‘Gladys here has something to say.’ She turned to the smaller young woman behind her.

‘Er, yes.’ Gladys cleared her throat. Although she wasn’t as shy as when she’d first started working at Victory Walk, she hated speaking in public. She was grateful to Mary, who had no such qualms, for getting everyone’s attention. Mary didn’t flaunt her upbringing but her family’s money and connections meant that she had never lacked confidence. ‘The thing is, I need volunteers. For the victory garden. What with us having a few frosty nights, the parsnips are going to be ready, and I can’t get them all in on me own. So I’d be glad of a helping hand.’ She blushed furiously but held her nerve to the end of her sentence.

‘Any takers?’ Mary demanded brightly. ‘I’d do it myself but I’ve promised to sort out donations of clothes down at the church hall. Come on now, don’t be backward about coming forward. A lovely fresh morning like this, who’d want to be cooped up inside?’

One look at the faces turned towards her gave the answer – they all did.

‘Cos you’re getting parsnip soup this evening,’ Gladys explained, ‘only there won’t be no soup if there’s no parsnips.’

Belinda sighed dramatically. ‘Stands to reason. All right, I’ll do it. I’m not going on my own though.’ She looked meaningfully at the rest of them.

Bridget put down her newspaper, wrinkling her freckled nose, the crossword only half completed. ‘They’ve made that extra difficult this week,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘I’ll join you. Can’t deprive you brave girls of your soup, can I?’ After over a year in London, her Irish accent was as strong as ever.

This made Edith feel guilty. She wasn’t particularly fond of parsnip soup but it would be filling. ‘I’ll join you,’ she said. ‘And Alice will come too, won’t you, Al?’ Alice was absorbed in a long article in The Times and had barely registered what was going on.

‘Right, yes, of course,’ she said, hurriedly refolding it. ‘Why did you say that?’ she hissed at Edith as they made their way up to their attic rooms to change into their oldest clothes.

‘Because you always spend the weekend with your head in the paper or a book and exercise is good for you,’ Edith replied instantly. ‘Are you going to wear that green wool scarf, Al? Can I borrow it if not? I’ve gone and left mine at Dr Patcham’s surgery. I remember taking it off when I popped in yesterday and then I forgot it.’

‘We could go and collect it later,’ offered Alice. ‘I’ve got my blue one, I’ll wear that.’

‘Thanks.’ Edith disappeared into her small room.

Alice opened her own door and crossed to the small desk on the opposite side, under the dormer window that looked out over the Dalston rooftops. Gaps were visible in many of the terraces where houses had taken direct hits in the air raids, but Alice’s eyes were drawn to a creased and battered Christmas card which stood on her desk. The print of the robin was somewhat the worse for wear, but she didn’t mind in the least. It was nearly a month late, and must have taken a very indirect route, but finally she had confirmation that Joe was still alive – or at least he had been when he wrote the card.

She picked it up and read it again, smoothing the card as she did so. As well as the standard good wishes for Christmas and the coming year, he’d added, ‘I’m looking forward to rereading Lorna Doone.’ That had made her smile. She couldn’t imagine him reading it even once as it was so romantic, let alone twice. So he’d included that to tell her where he was. She knew the book was set on Exmoor, and thought it unlikely any naval ships would be based there – but, of course, it wasn’t far from Plymouth. That would be it.

Setting it down once more, she gave a deep sigh. First Scapa Flow, then Plymouth. Opposite ends of Britain and both cruelly far from Dalston. She knew it could have been much worse: naval vessels were now in North Africa, or India or the Far East. Yet Plymouth felt impossibly far away. ‘Stop it,’ she murmured. ‘You can write to him. He’s alive and well, that’s the main thing.’ She could not quite admit even to herself just how much she missed him, how worried she had been when Christmas came and went without a word.

‘Al, you in there? You ready yet?’ called Edith from the corridor. Hastily Alice grabbed her oldest jumper and began to change.

The victory garden had once been a pair of terraced houses two streets along from the nurses’ home, but they had been totally destroyed in a direct hit in a raid last spring. Rather than let the land go to waste, it had been turned into a plot for growing vegetables. All over London, green spaces were being dedicated to producing food for a nation under siege. Those who were lucky enough to have front or back gardens planted them up. Even the grounds of Buckingham Palace were being put to good use. Closer to home, vegetable plots were to be found in Victoria Park, and allotments were in demand all around the borough.

The hardest thing had been the digging down to find uncontaminated soil. The first few feet were likely to be toxic after the bombing, and so the nurses had set to with determined energy. Stan and Billy had been recruited to help. Harry had come to watch, on one of his few visits home, and had been amazed to find that Edith, with her tiny frame, had been able to wield a spade as well as the rest of them.

‘Hah, you think that just because I’m small that I’m delicate,’ she had laughed. ‘I tell you, riding around on that old boneshaker of a bike, you have to have muscles of steel. That, and lifting patients of all shapes and sizes. Don’t you forget it.’

Now Edith plunged ahead, climbing the slight mound that marked the boundary of the plot. Gladys was already there, a large trug at her feet. She had pitched up the sleeves of her shabby coat, and her hands were muddy. Bridget and Belinda had also arrived before them, and they were taking out trowels from a canvas bag. ‘Here, we saved a couple for you,’ Bridget called.

Alice didn’t mind digging out the vegetables. Her father had been proud of the vegetable plot in the back garden of her childhood home in Liverpool, and her mother would encourage the young Alice to help her pick blackcurrants, which she would then turn into delicious tarts, crumbles and jam. Her parents had written to tell her that they had got rid of the flower beds and planted vegetables and fruit there as well. They’d even started keeping chickens. Alice sighed as she thought of the luxury of fresh eggs for breakfast every day.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Edith.

Alice shook her head and laughed. ‘Just trying to imagine my parents and their chickens. They won’t like it if they make a mess of anything.’

‘I don’t think you can tell that to a chicken,’ Edith replied, pulling out her first parsnip. ‘Look at that, a real beauty. I do miss scrambled eggs though. Do you think we could build a henhouse in the yard, next to the bike rack?’

Bridget laughed. ‘They’d have to be miniature birds, wouldn’t they? I like a boiled egg for breakfast as much as the next person, but you’ll be hard pressed to get away with that.’

Edith frowned. ‘What about over at Jeeves Street? What do you reckon, Al?’

Alice shrugged. ‘I know it’s got a big yard, or small garden, whichever way you want to look at it, but lots of it is taken up with the Anderson shelter. Mattie’s already growing greens on the top of that, and potatoes in old dustbins. She even got radishes to grow on the windowsills last summer. Not sure where she’d fit the chickens.’

‘Ah well, just a thought.’ There was something in Edith’s tone that told them that she hadn’t given up on the idea just yet.

‘Nearly spring and then we can start sowing all sorts of things,’ Gladys said with enthusiasm. ‘I want to try carrots. Maybe some peas and beans too.’ She brushed the worst of the mud from another parsnip. ‘How are you getting along, Belinda?’

The tallest nurse straightened up, dashing her tight black curls from her eyes. ‘There are a few good ones over here. I’m trying not to get too filthy though. Got to look my best this evening.’ She gave them a bright smile.

‘Why, where are you going?’ Gladys always liked to hear about the nurses’ evenings out, as she never had any of her own, caught between the demands of her first-aid duties and the need to look after her siblings as Evelyn was still being difficult.

‘Dancing,’ said Belinda, turning on the spot in a twirl. ‘Peggy and Clarrie asked me to go with them. Any of you fancy coming along? The more the merrier.’

Alice and Edith automatically shook their heads, but Bridget looked interested. ‘I might do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what Ellen is doing.’ Ellen had come over from the same big Dublin teaching hospital, and they shared the two-room annexe to the nurses’ home. The home had been full but the superintendent, Fiona, had been eager to recruit more trained staff to her team. They had joined them when the war was already well underway. ‘Where were you thinking of?’

‘West End,’ said Belinda grandly. ‘We can get the bus. We’ll be there in no time at all. After the parsnip soup, of course, we wouldn’t want to miss that.’

‘Not after all this hard work.’ Bridget stood up and stretched. ‘Do you think we have enough yet, Gladys?’

Gladys looked around critically at the now-filled trug and the other bags the nurses had brought along. ‘Yes, that should do. Thank you, it would have taken me hours on my own.’

‘Hours you don’t have,’ Edith said under her breath. She had never known Gladys to have any time to herself and wondered if that would ever change.

‘We can go back and get cleaned up, then pop over to Dr Patcham’s,’ she said to Alice, who was shaking the worst of the earth from her hands. ‘Then I might write to Harry this afternoon.’

Alice nodded. ‘And I might write to Joe,’ she said quietly, unable to keep the delight from her voice.

‘Joe?’ Edith stopped in her tracks. ‘Joe? Have you finally heard from him?’ She was all but hopping on the spot.

‘Yes, at last.’ Alice gave a huge smile, allowing the strength of her feelings to shine through. ‘He’s safe; he’s probably based in Plymouth. He’s alive. I got a card this morning. He’s safe, Edie.’