London Belles

Оглавление

Annie Groves. London Belles

Contents

If you enjoyed London Belles, check out these other great Annie Groves titles

Отрывок из книги

ANNIE GROVES

London Belles

.....

Right now, though, instead of thinking about the past, she decided she should be thinking about the present and the future. She had been granted temporary accommodation in a nurses’ home close to the hospital, but as she was on only a short-term contract – she hadn’t decided yet whether or not she would stay in London – she needed to find lodgings reasonably close to the hospital. She was, though, Sally freely admitted, perhaps too particular about where she was prepared to live. In Liverpool she had lived at home as soon as her initial training had come to an end, and it would take somewhere very special indeed to come up to the high standards of cleanliness and comfort her mother had always maintained. A small spasm of pain tensed Sally’s body. Those at home in Liverpool who had known her as a happy, fun-loving, sociable girl who loved going dancing at Liverpool’s famous Grafton Ballroom, who was a keen tennis player and who had a wide circle of equally lively young friends of both sexes, would probably hardly recognise that Sally now in the withdrawn unhappy young woman she had become. Sometimes Sally barely recognised herself any more, she admitted, dragging her thoughts away from her own unhappiness to the miserable situation the country now faced.

In the event of the country going to war against Germany plans had already been made for most of the hospital staff and the patients to be moved out of London, partially for safety, and partially to make sure that there would be operating theatres and beds available for the injured should the city be bombed. Only a skeleton staff would remain here in London with Barts doctors and surgeons travelling between the evacuated patients in the country and the hospital here in the city. As a temporary member of Barts’ staff, Sally had volunteered to stay in London for the duration of her one-year contract. Right now she felt that she preferred the anonymity of working hard in a busy city where people came and went without their lives really touching, to making close friends.

.....