Annie Groves - The District Nurses of Victory Walk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © Annie Groves 2018

Cover design by Holly Macdonald©HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph©Jonathan Ring (models); Trevillion Images (background)

Annie Groves asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008272210

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008272227

Version: 2019-03-27

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Keep Reading …

About Annie Groves

Also by Annie Groves

About the Publisher

Many thanks to the redoubtable Teresa Chris, and for the invaluable encouragement and support from editor Kate Bradley and copy editor Pen Isaac. Also to the staff of the Queen’s Nursing Institute, especially Matthew Bradby and Christine Widdowson.

June 1939

‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ asked Edith, putting her hand to her head as the early summer breeze threatened to blow her nurse’s hat into the dusty road. ‘Wasn’t it meant to be five minutes from the bus stop? I bet we’ve walked for longer than that. My feet are killing me.’

Alice checked the piece of paper again. ‘I can’t see where we could have gone wrong. Anyway, Edie, we haven’t been walking for more than a few minutes. Don’t take on so.’ She looked down at her colleague with good humour – Edith barely reached her shoulder. ‘Let’s go to the next corner and see if we can spot it from there. If we see anyone we can ask.’

Edith grimaced but, left with little choice, gamely picked up her case once more and followed Alice, whose longer stride meant she was always slightly ahead. In her other hand she carried her precious nurse’s bag. The rows of terraced houses they passed all looked the same, three storeys high if you counted the big basements, with bay windows and steep stone steps, but narrow-fronted, built to fit a lot of people into a small space. They didn’t have much in the way of front gardens, just an area where you could leave dustbins or reach the basement door. Still, Edith told herself, it wasn’t as grim as the street she had grown up in, on the other side of the river in south London. This was bright in comparison. It wouldn’t be too bad at all.

Alice came to a sudden halt and Edith nearly smacked into her. The taller young woman pointed at a street sign. ‘There we are. Victory Walk.’

Edith looked up, pushing one of her stray dark curls out of her eyes. Try as she might they would never do as she wanted, and she’d been in trouble with her previous matron because of that – and for numerous other reasons as well. ‘So it is. Victory Walk. Suppose it was named after we won the Great War, though I bet the houses were built ages before that. Are we at this end?’

Alice looked at the houses on the corners. ‘No, I don’t think so. They said it was a bigger house and we’d know it straight away. Must be further along.’

Edith groaned as her shoulder protested at the weight of her case.

Alice smiled in sympathy. ‘Buck up, Edie. Not far now.’

‘Easy for you to say, with your long legs,’ Edith grumbled, but picked up her case once more. ‘I’m sure it’s further than five minutes …’

‘It won’t be. Not when we aren’t carrying these great lumbering things,’ Alice pointed out. ‘We’ll be on and off those buses in a jiffy. You can get to the West End as quickly as you like on your days off.’ She paused as they got to the other end of the short road. ‘Here we are. They were right, there’s no mistaking it.’

Both young women set down their cases and nurses’ bags and stood to take in the first sight of what would be their new home, and also the base for their work. It was in the style of the rest of the street but felt grander, being double-fronted, standing a little taller than the buildings around it, and there were attic windows too. The sign above the immaculate front door left no room for doubt that they’d found what they were looking for: ‘North Hackney Queen’s Nurses Association’. This was why they’d taken the bus to the east side of the city, and then up Kingsland Road, with its busy mix of shops, cafés, factories and cinemas. This is where they would live for the foreseeable future and from where they would go out into the local community as district nurses. Alice found she was tracing with her forefinger the shape of the Queen’s Nurse badge that she wore on a cord around her neck.

For a moment her nerve failed her. Would she be good enough? Would she live up to the trust of her tutors and the expectations of her patients? She’d trained for years, first as a general nurse in a hospital, then on the specialist course to become a district nurse, but there had always been someone else there to guide her. Now she would be out there, on the district as it was called, on her own, in her patients’ houses rather than on wards, relying on her own skill and judgement to cope with whatever was thrown at her. Would she be able to do it?

Edith, who often relied on her friend to take the lead, now stepped forward. ‘Come on then. Let’s see what this place is like on the inside. Hope we get rooms on the top storey.’ She glanced up at Alice. ‘We’ll be all right, just you see.’

‘Of course we will.’ Alice gave herself a mental shake. ‘They wouldn’t have passed us otherwise.’ And with that she picked up her heavy case for what she hoped would be the last time for a very long while, strode up the steps and rapped sharply on the glossy navy paint of the door.