Annie Groves - Women on the Home Front - Family Saga 4-Book Collection

Tilly knew she would never forget how hard her mother had worked to get the money together for her secretarial school lessons, taking in laundry and sometimes even cleaning rooms at the nearby Inns of Court.

Tilly was proud of her mother and she knew that her mother was proud of her. Having pride in yourself and your work was something her mother had taught her from an early age. Tilly and her mother were much closer than many of the girls she had been at school with were to their mothers, but then those girls had had siblings, and . . . and fathers. Tilly caught her breath. She had never known her own father, just as she had never known what it was to be part of a large family.

The hall was busy with comings and goings, nurses in their crisp uniforms walking at that swift pace that nurses had, that was almost as fast as running but without actually doing so, porters pushing patients in wheelchairs, doctors, white coats flapping, heads down, one hand clasping papers, stethoscopes round their necks, Consultants, in their smart suits and their bow ties, and, of course, the patients themselves.

All sorts came to St Barts to be treated, from the poorest to the wealthiest, and Tilly’s heart swelled with joy at being part of such a wonderful organisation, with its proud history of caring for those in need.

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.