The Angels of Lovely Lane (40 page)

‘Have you begun?’ she demanded of Staff Nurse, with not so much as a good morning. Her intimidating tone was far from unusual, but a waxen-looking Sister Antrobus, with fixed, bloodshot eyes and a spittle-streaked chin, was very unusual indeed.

Staff Nurse, who had only seconds before made herself very comfortable and whom Sister’s chair suited rather well, began to stammer.

‘Er, I was just about to start, Sister. You weren’t, er, here...’

Sister Antrobus didn’t seem to be listening. She appeared to be breathing deeply while noisily swallowing saliva and staring at the sunken inkwell carved into the desk. Her colour faded from a waxy tallow to a deathly grey before their eyes. They waited for her to continue speaking, to renew her tirade, but nothing happened. The office was silent, tense with anticipation as nurses exchanged fearful glances and wondered what would happen next. It was as though she had lost the will or the ability to continue.

It was the staff nurse who found the courage to break the silence with a slightly sharp ‘Sister, you don’t look at all well. Would you like me to take over for you? Maybe if you had a little lie down in the treatment room for half an hour or so you might feel somewhat improved?’

Pammy was aware that as she spoke Staff Nurse rose a couple of inches in the chair. She may have been feeling brave, but for the remaining nurses it was as though the air had suddenly left the room. Pammy could not quite believe that Staff Nurse had just said what she had. Some of the nurses half closed their eyes, as though to protect them against the explosion which was surely about to follow. Sister Antrobus appeared to be on the verge of recovering as she fixed her eye on the staff nurse and opened her mouth to speak. She placed her hand on the desk to steady herself.

‘Mr Scriven,’ she said and then nothing, as she leant forward and pressed down. She lifted her head with what appeared to be a great effort and began again.

‘Mr Scriven...’ Again, nothing. Everyone waited with bated breath for her to continue. Clasping her hand to her mouth she ran from the office and headed towards the sluice room.

Staff Nurse, who dreamt of one day ousting Sister Antrobus from her post and bagging the prize position on ward two, seized her opportunity.

‘Dearie me. Sister should obviously not have reported in this morning. I have no idea what is going on there, but continue we shall. We have poorly patients waiting.’

For a brief moment the air was filled with the shuffle and crackle of starched aprons as pens and notebooks were extracted from pockets, to a backdrop of violent retching from the sluice room. Then, suddenly, the telephone rang.

Staff Nurse listened carefully to the caller, asking the occasional question – ‘Is she bleeding? How is her blood pressure?’ – and then slowly replaced the receiver. ‘Well, today is just going to get worse,’ she said. ‘There is a young girl in Casualty. A botched abortion. Problem is, she is very pregnant. Twenty-eight weeks’ gestation, Casualty Sister said. Amazingly, she seems quite stable and is on her way down to us. Staff Nurse Bates, I would like you to take this case with the assistance of Nurse Tanner as I shall be busy running the ward. The patient will require special nursing until we know exactly where we are. The doctor on duty is coming down with her until they locate Mr Scriven. I’m sure we will all learn more when he arrives.

‘We have a new domestic arriving on the ward today to work with Branna. I will ask her to help in the sluice and assist with bedpans. None of us like these cases, but if the mother’s life is in danger we must do our best.

‘Staff Nurse Bates, you’ve dealt with cases like this before. Nurse Tanner, you can assist with the bathing and bedpans, as normal, until the patient arrives, and when she does Staff Nurse Bates will let you know. Right, let’s whip through the day report quickly; thankfully bed one will be the only unusual event of the day. Well, I suppose there are two, if we count Sister Antrobus.’

Pammy beamed with pride. She felt as though she had been singled out for special treatment and she loved working with Staff Nurse Bates. They had got on so well together the last time Pammy was on the ward. Sister Antrobus would have kept her on the bedpans all day long and never let her near assisting in a serious medical situation.

‘I suppose as abortion is illegal, we shall have to report it to the police,’ she said to Staff Nurse Bates as they hurried out of the office and into the linen room to grab the sheets for the cubicle bed.

‘Oh, God in heaven, no, Staff Nurse won’t, although if it were Sister Antrobus, she would and does. She can be such a bitch. No sympathy. Treats them like lepers, she does. The doctors usually send them to Maternity, to keep them out of Antrobus’s way. This must be someone who doesn’t realize that the poor girl will have been through enough already. It’s a real dilemma, to be honest. If we protect the girl, or the woman, by not informing the police what has happened, we are also protecting the abortionist. We rarely get to know what the back story is.’

Pammy loaded sheets on to the metal trolley as Staff Nurse Bates spoke. Her initial excitement at being given a patient to special had evaporated, to be replaced by fear of nursing the unknown.

‘We had one in last week,’ Staff Nurse Bates continued. ‘She was about ten weeks’ gestation. Died only a couple of hours after arriving on the ward. She had spent too long at home, terrified of being prosecuted. Tried to make herself better. By the time she got here, there was a pocket of infection in her perineum the size of a tennis ball. Mr Gaskell took her as his case; made an incision and inserted a drain to draw out the infection and give the antibiotics a fighting chance. He threw everything we had at her, but it was no use. The infection was everywhere, already in her blood. She was a widow, had three little ones, and died in her own mother’s arms. Mr Scriven ran a mile. Wouldn’t touch her. Thank God Mr Gaskell had started, at least someone tried to save her. Tragic case.’

‘That must have been awful. The poor kids.’ Pammy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Our Lorraine was born at twenty-eight weeks and runs circles round us all, and she lands the toughest punch.’

Lorraine’s birth was the one big family drama that her mother never mentioned, despite the fact that Lorraine was now a teenager and as fit as a fiddle: her arrival in an air raid shelter on the night of the worst dockland bombing of the war, which had destroyed half of George Street in a direct hit and killed so many people.

Pammy knew it had been hard on her mam in the early days because she herself had helped a great deal. Lorraine required feeding every hour and for her first week she had serious trouble breathing. The army of women who lived in their street had rallied round. Early births and poorly babies were not an unusual occurrence in an area of high poverty.

The women had arrived at the house, uninvited but expected, as soon as the word was out, and were welcomed by Maisie and her elderly mother. The years between had dimmed that time in Pammy’s memory, but she remembered the kettle boiling on the range all day long and all night too. She could recall neighbours arriving with a shovel of coke to keep the range going in one hand and a plate of food in the other. Doors and windows remained locked as the kitchen filled with steam. Lorraine had been almost too weak to suckle and so a midwife came out to the house and helped Maisie express her milk.

‘Mother of God, come into St Angelus, will you?’ the midwife had pleaded. ‘We can look after the baby for you.’ But Maisie wouldn’t budge.

The arrival of Lorraine hadn’t been the only calamity that had drawn on the resources of the women of Arthur Street. The strongest women Pammy had ever encountered. The bomb on George Street had pulled the community even closer together. Toddlers had been orphaned, adults widowed and children killed before they could even put on their shoes to run to the shelter. The birth of Lorraine on that dreadful night had seemed almost symbolic. She had arrived in the midst of chaos and reminded them all that there was hope. Pammy still shivered when she thought of those days. She remembered long, tearful faces, mounds of rubble and the clouds of dust that had hung over the streets for days. George Street remained almost unaltered from that day to this. It had been razed to the ground and still was nothing more than derelict land and piles of rubble.

She could also recall the nights of concern and anxiety. The times they scraped money together for the doctor. In the early days, her nana would knock on doors in the street to ask for help, and she never had to travel far. Everyone gave for the doctor to visit a poorly child. The coming of the NHS and free health care had been a blessing because often, while Lorraine grew, the doctor had to be called in the middle of the night. Lorraine got sicker than any other child on the street when she was younger. Often the doctor called in every day, a luxury they could never have afforded before the establishment of the NHS. However, Lorraine was a tough little fighter and she survived.

‘Was she a war baby?’ asked Staff Nurse Bates.

‘Yes, she came just as our streets took the worst bombing of the war. Trust our Lorraine. Always likes to make a fuss. Too close to the docks, we were. Me mam had her in the shelter, where she was stuck all night. I was only a kid at the time, but it was an awful night, that. Awful.’

‘Does she get her own way a lot, then?’ asked Staff Nurse Bates, smiling because she could see that Pammy obviously thought the world of Lorraine. ‘Your mam probably feels she’s very lucky to have her. Do you remember much about that night? Where were you?’

‘I can remember some of it, but I wasn’t with Mam, because I was at home with me nana when the siren went off. We ran down to the end of our street to the shelter that was nearest. Me mam was at the shop on the other end, nearer to the docks, so she was separated from us. I reckon that’s why our kid’s such a tough nut.’

‘Wow, that’s very dramatic,’ said Staff Nurse Bates. ‘Were there people with her?’

‘D’you know what, I don’t really know, but I s’pose there must have been.’ Pammy leant on the trolley with her elbows on the sheets as Staff Nurse Bates reached up to the top shelf for fresh pillows. ‘Me mam never talks about what actually happened and I don’t suppose I’ve ever asked. Not the kind of thing you talk about, is it? To be honest, you’d think the war had never even happened on our street. No one ever talks about it, despite the fact that everyone walks past the rubble to the docks and back.’

‘That’s not just on your street, Pammy. I think with the King dying and the new Queen, new beginnings and all that, no one wants to talk about the past.’

As Staff Nurse Bates balanced on a step and passed linen down to Pammy, Pammy remembered that her mother had carried Lorraine against her chest for months. Tucked inside her jumper and held up with a scarf. ‘It’s the closest I can get to popping her back in,’ her mother had explained, when a jealous Pammy had complained.

Pammy and Staff Nurse Bates parted ways, Pammy to head down the ward, Staff Nurse Bates into the cubicle to make it ready for their expected patient. Half an hour later, Pammy was at the ward door, holding a wheelchair and saying goodbye to Mrs Toft, who was in the process of being discharged.

‘How lovely that you are here on my last day, nurse.’ Mrs Toft beamed. ‘Almost a year of my life I’ve spent on this ward and you are one of the angels I will remember the best. I won’t forget your kindness. Or the other angels’.’

‘I won’t forget you either, Mrs Toft,’ said Pammy. ‘You were my very first bed bath and I think it’s lovely that I get to say goodbye to you. It may have taken a year, but just look at how well you have done. Now, let me check. You have got all your medication in that brown paper bag, haven’t you? Any worries, get your Tom to ring the ward office and we will explain everything to him.’

‘I have, nurse, everything. Staff Nurse brought them to my bed this morning and explained them. It’s only painkillers, you know. That and some vitamin drops. There’s nothing more medical science can do for me. It’s only thanks to all you lovely nurses and doctors and everyone that I am going home at all. It’s no surprise people call you angels.’

‘And you,’ said Pammy. ‘Half of it has been you, wanting to get better as much as you did. We couldn’t have done it without you.’

Mrs Toft took Pammy’s hand. ‘You won’t see me in here again, nurse,’ she said. ‘If the cancer comes back, I’m staying at home. I’m done with hospitals now. A year away from our Tom has been too much for me. We had enough of being apart during the war. Seven years he was away and he spent two of those in a hospital. Can you imagine that? Twice as long as I have been in here. Terrible that, all that time we’ve wasted. We want to be together now. Done with hospitals we are. To think, I used to never stop moaning about the old bugger. Life’s short, you know; it’s meant to be. You won’t see me back here.’

Pammy smiled and, bending down, gave Mrs Toft a big hug. ‘We don’t want to see you back in here, either,’ she said. ‘And it’s not coming back. It isn’t. I know you, you won’t let it. You’ve years ahead of you yet.’

She turned the wheelchair round and the ambulance driver took the handles from her. ‘I’ve been told I have to watch this one, nurse, is that right?’ he said to Pammy with a wink. ‘Dessie down in the porters’ lodge told me that she can get a bit fresh and eats ambulance drivers for breakfast, but not until she’s felt the size of their muscles first. She’s a bit fussy, I’ve heard.’

Mrs Toft laughed so hard, Pammy thought that if they weren’t careful she would be back in her bed sooner than they had anticipated.

‘Don’t worry about me though, nurse,’ he went on. ‘I’ve put a jumper on this morning, so she can’t get at the buttons on me shirt.’ Tears of laughter almost leapt from Mrs Toft’s eyes. Pammy thought they might need to give her oxygen if he carried on.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t be saying that if you saw the size of her Tom.’

Now the ambulance driver laughed and swept Mrs Toft and the wheelchair around and away down the long wooden corridor to home.

‘Bye then,’ shouted Pammy to the retreating raised hand.