Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection

As she passed under the main entrance to the hospital she hesitated and then turned back to look at the painted head of Henry the Eighth, before joining the teeming mass of Londoners homeward bound after their day’s work.

* * *

Tilly wasn’t the only one passing through Barts’ main hallway to pause and consider the history of the ancient building and all that it stood for.

Sally Johnson paused too, still acutely conscious of her new Barts uniform, with its distinctive high nurse’s hat. She still half expected to look down and see that she was wearing her old and dearly familiar Liverpool hospital uniform. She could feel forbidden tears pressing against her eyeballs, her eyes themselves gritty and tired, and not just from the long shift she had just worked. She missed Liverpool, her home city, so very much. She missed the smell of its salt air, the sound of its voices, the humour of its citizens, the familiarity of its places and faces . . . She felt . . . she felt like an outcast, alien, a person cut adrift from all that mattered most to her, but she had had no choice other than to leave. She couldn’t have stayed. Not after what had happened. Not after such a betrayal. The very thought of it caused her pain as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel felt, but without the comfort of anaesthetic. That it should have been her best friend who was responsible for her agony only made the pain harder to bear.

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.

It wasn’t easy, though, to think about making a new life and home for herself here in London when her heart yearned for Liverpool and her home. No, not her home any more. Her home, like her father, now belonged to someone else who had far stronger claim on them than she did, despite all the false protestations and pleas that had been made for her to stay.

Stay? When she had been so betrayed? Now she was going to cry . . .

She stared up at the Hogarth scenes as though in doing so she might be able to force back her emotions, oblivious to the fact that she herself was being watched until a quiet male voice beside her remarked, thoughtfully, ‘As a surgeon I can never pass this painting without reflecting on Hogarth’s skill in understanding the needs and desires of the human race.’

Sally whirled round, dumbstruck with chagrin at the familiar sound of the voice of one of the hospital’s most senior consultants, the world-famous plastic surgeon Sir Harold Delf Gillies. Sally recognised his voice so easily because only a matter of days ago she had been on theatre duty when the great man had operated for the benefit of his students on a young child with a hare lip. Now overcome with self-consciousness and the fact that so great a personage should deign to speak to her outside the operating theatre, she could only nod her head.

‘There is a great deal to be learned from history,’ Sir Harold continued. ‘It is said that when Hogarth learned that St Bartholomew’s Founders were going to engage an artist from overseas because they could not afford the fees of a British artist, he immediately offered to provide the hospital with two paintings free of cost, thus echoing the same charitable impulse that had led to the hospital coming into being in the first place, and possibly with the same practical eye for the future, knowing that just as the Founders’ charitable donations to the hospital would carry their names and their charity into the future, so his paintings would be here for us to see and marvel over. It is a foolish or perhaps overproud man – or woman – who does not sometimes reflect on how history will judge them.’

Knowing the pioneering work Sir Harold had undertaken, Sally could only swallow hard and nod again.

‘You have a natural bent for theatre work, Nurse, and I think the temperament for it.’

Sally was still trying to come to terms with the gift of his compliment several minutes after he had gone. Merely to have had the famous surgeon speak to her was more than any well-trained nurse ever expected, never mind being recognised by him and then praised for her ability.

It wasn’t so much Sir Harold’s praise that lingered on in her thoughts as she made her way to the nurses’ home where she was living, though, as much as his comment about how a person might be judged.

Did her father ever worry about how he might be judged? Did her ex-best friend?

‘Take in lodgers?’ Unwittingly repeating the words of their neighbour, Tilly stared at her mother in astonishment, over the deliciously scented and gently steaming serving of fish pie that Olive had just dished up for her.

Her mother was a wonderful cook, and even though they were C of E, not Catholic, they always had fish on Fridays. Fish pie with lovely creamy mash, parsley sauce and peas was one of Tilly’s favourite meals. Now, looking at her mother, her shiny almost black curls – which Tilly had inherited from her, along with her sea-green eyes and pale Celtic skin – caught back in a neat bun, a faint flush warming her skin, Tilly felt the urge to protest that she didn’t want them to have any lodgers, and that she had been looking forward to it just being the two of them after the long years of her mother nursing her in-laws.

But before she could do so her mother told her gently, as though she knew what she was feeling, ‘We have to, Tilly, love. Bills don’t pay themselves, you know, and without your granddad’s pension coming in, I’d have to go back to cleaning or taking in washing, and I reckon that I’d be better taking in lodgers than doing that.’

‘But it will mean you looking after them, Mum, just like you did with Gran and Granddad.’

Olive shook her head, dislodging a small curl from her bun, which she tucked back behind her ear. At thirty-five, her figure as neat as it had been the day she’d met Tilly’s father, she was glad that Tilly had inherited her own looks from the Irish side of her family, and her own trim figure with them. Though with that kind of beauty, Olive would never want Tilly to use her looks in the cheap kind of way that some young women did. A pretty face could bring trouble on a girl who didn’t stick to society’s rules. Even here, on respectable Article Row, there had been daughters who had been married with unseemly haste, and babies born ‘at seven months’ whilst weighing as much as any full-term infant. Not that Olive was in any hurry to see Tilly married. Her own experience as a young wife, a young mother and then a young widow meant she felt it was more important right now that Tilly was equipped with the means of earning her own living because you never knew what the future might hold. Of course, Olive would never share those views with anyone else. Good mothers were expected to want good marriages for their daughters, not financial independence.

‘No, what I’m thinking, Tilly, is advertising only for respectable female lodgers, young women who will keep their rooms tidy and look after them.’

‘But we’ve only got two spare bedrooms.’

‘And an extra bathroom – don’t forget about that. I know I said at the time that I couldn’t see why your grandfather wouldn’t have his bed moved downstairs to the front parlour, which would have been much easier for me, but now I think having that will help us to get the right kind of young women wanting those attic rooms.’

Olive went over to her daughter, smoothing her curls back off her face and dropping a kiss on her forehead as she told her, ‘You’ll see, it will all work out for the best.’

‘But what if there’s a war, Mum, and the lodgers and us get evacuated?’

Olive’s expression firmed. ‘No one’s going to evacuate me from this house, Tilly, I can tell you that, and we don’t know yet that there will be a war.’

‘But what if there is?’ Tilly persisted. ‘I’m not a child any more, Mum. I read the papers and listen to the news. There’s all that blackout material you bought for us to cover the windows with, and our gas masks. No one’s said anything about us handing them back, have they? And boys are still having to do their military training. Clara in the office said only tonight that her Harry is going to be starting his soon. I don’t want you worrying about things and not telling me, Mum. I want to share them with you.’

Olive smiled both sadly and proudly, as she stroked the silky darkness of her daughter’s hair.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘You aren’t a little girl, you’re a young woman, Tilly, and if there’s to be a war, then we’ll deal with whatever it brings us together.’

They smiled at one another, and then Olive added briskly, ‘Meanwhile, as soon as we’ve finished eating and washed up, you and me are going to sit down and write out an advertisement to let the attic rooms. I was thinking that if you could get permission to type it on your typewriter at work then it would look properly businesslike and attract the right kind of lodger. Now eat your fish pie before it goes cold.’

Later that evening, in her bedroom, cold-creaming her face before she went to bed, Olive paused. There would be those Olive knew who would disapprove of her plans and even be opposed to them. A small tremble, part apprehension and part determination, ran through her body. Her father-in-law had been fond of boasting that he had got this house at a good price because of its number – thirteen. Thirteen was lucky for some, he had often said, giving a wink as he added, ‘Especially for those who have the good sense to make their own luck.’

Now with the respectable silence of the Row settling round its inhabitants, Olive hoped desperately that it would be lucky for her as well in her new venture. Because if it wasn’t then she would face having to sell the house, and she and Tilly would have to take a step down in the world.

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