A NURSE'S COURAGE

Elizabeth Gill

First published in Great Britain in 2016 as Silver Street
This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Quercus Editions Limited
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Gill

The moral right of Elizabeth Gill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EBOOK ISBN 9781784292553

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Also by Elizabeth Gill

A Wartime Wish

Orphan Boy

A Miner's Daughter

The Landlord's Daughter

A Nurse's Courage

Ella's Choice

The Coal Miner's Wife

For Love and Pride

This story came out of the early life of my aunt, Janet Gill, who was a nurse in the Second World War, and came home to face the single life in Durham. I hold dear the little circle of gold on a man’s watch chain. All it says is ‘In memory of Johnny’.

Prologue

Johnny Fenwick. Iris would lie under the blackness of the Egyptian night and say his name beneath her breath. Somehow she thought if she could say it often enough she could make him real, make him hers once again. She could not bear the idea that he never would be hers. Around her wrist she wore the bracelet he had had fashioned for her from a watch chain. It was heavy because she had slim light wrists but for a watch chain she supposed it was thin and light. On it was the little gold disc which read ‘In memory of Johnny’. She would never take it off, nor cease to think about him.

It was time to leave this place and go home. The war was over. She had been at Dunkirk, then Egypt and finally back to France again for the end and she must go back to what she had before, to whatever was left in the little northern city which she had thought she loved so much. She dreaded it. Everything had changed, everywhere had altered and she knew enough of life now to understand that the reverberations of war fell even in Durham, where every family had lost somebody, the big munitions factory at Aycliffe had been a big women’s contribution to the war effort and every second person you saw was in uniform of some sort. It was finished, she could not believe it.

She had no heart to go home but there seemed nowhere else to go, nothing to do. Strange that the freedom should feel like a trap and Johnny would not be there.

She stood on King’s Cross station, remembering the time when she had come back from Dunkirk and seen him on the platform, and she could not help looking among the tall dark figures and imagining that he would emerge, that she would recognize him and every time she looked the man was shorter or taller, thinner or wider, did not have Johnny’s gait nor his hair colour, nor that indefinable something which made each person unique.

She knew that she would not see him again this side of whatever heaven there was. Yet she could not help but look endlessly into the crowd and wait and hope and imagine that he must be there somehow, some time, in some place where everybody met again.

King’s Cross was the loneliest place in the world, she thought, with lovers rushing into one another’s arms, families standing together, soldiers in groups, pigeons picking up crumbs from the ground, the odd sparrow lost. That was how she felt, alone and lost in this great booming space when everybody had somebody except the drunks.

One of them approached her, his breath stinking of sherry, his clothes shiny with use and grime and an Irish accent on his lips. He had piercing blue eyes for all they were glazed over and she wondered what dreadful things had befallen him so that he could no longer face his life sober and he begged her for a few coins with a sweet smile and told her she was the most beautiful woman on earth and she laughed and said, ‘You haven’t seen many then,’ and she reached into her pocket and gave them to him.

She didn’t care that he should spend it on drink, she hoped he would if he could not get by without it. Who could get by without something to help? Who could look into the light of day and not wish things otherwise? God damn it, she thought, angrily, it was hopeless.

You’re tired, she told herself, too tired and making too much of everything. You’ll be all right when you get home.

‘Got a light, love?’

She turned as the man behind her looked hopefully towards her. He was a soldier, not a drunk, not somebody desperate for anything except the sweet pull of a cigarette and he had the cigarette, he only needed a match. His eyes were the same blue as Johnny’s eyes had been but of course he was not Johnny.

As she hesitated he smiled at her. He was young. Was he going home to somebody he loved? She hoped so. He looked weary but he had made it through. She wanted to cheer.

‘No, no, I’m sorry. I wish I had.’

He looked surprised but offered her a cigarette which she took and then he moved off, cigarette between brown, stained fingers. She was now desperate herself for the cigarette and in turn asked another soldier, standing nearby, for a light and she stood there, taking the smoke into her lungs and was aware of letting go of her breath, relaxing finally as she waited.

The train was ready now and she made her way gratefully towards it, wanting nothing but to see familiar places, and her family, to see what there was to go forward to, what there was if anything left to go back to. It was a strange world without war, and rather frightening.

She could not think what she would do with the rest of her life but she felt – and it was trite she knew – that she owed it to all those people who had died to get on with it, to try to make something good from it.

The train was packed, there was nowhere to sit. In the end she stood her suitcase on end and perched on that while the rain settled in and the light faded.

The train made its comforting rhythmic noise northward, first Stevenage, then Peterborough and Doncaster, she knew it so well and she would have given a lot to be able to see the countryside. She almost fell asleep twice but was in danger of falling off her suitcase and so on to the floor.

York was difficult because she and Johnny had spent their last night in York. She breathed carefully as the train stopped. Although she wanted to get out and run up the platform, almost certain that he would be with her, she knew in her heart that he was not. She made herself stay on the train until thankfully it pulled away and she knew that it would not be long now, less than an hour until she got home. Eventually they pulled into Darlington station and there her courage once more came to her aid. Fifteen minutes.

Durham station was next and surely her brother, David, would have come to meet her and once she was home … it was all she could think about, being home, lying in a soft bed. Did she remember what a soft bed felt like?

She was not sure. She did not feel entitled to such things, she could not help the guilt she felt, that she was alive when so many had died, so many nurses had, doing brave things such as she thought she never could have, shielding their patients from bombs, from aircraft fire. So many of them would not come back. She was lucky. She didn’t feel lucky, the whole idea made her shiver.

When the train finally stopped at Durham everything seemed to be in darkness and she struggled with her luggage. Behind her back as she stood on the station somebody said her name and in some stupid wildness, hearing the sweet flat northern accent, she turned with the joy of Johnny’s name on her lips.

She was able to stay the noise before it left her, to halt her breath. The man behind her was her beloved brother and she felt the tears which she had held off for so long and she held them back now so that he should not feel uncomfortable or embarrassed.

‘David,’ she said, ‘how lovely to see you.’

It was not true. She couldn’t see him at all, she couldn’t see anything, not even her parents who had come forward to embrace her. The world was another place and she was like somebody from a different planet.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘you’re home now.’

It was not true of course, nothing was all right and never would be. And she would not forget the men she had nursed, those who had died, those who were so badly injured that their lives were changed, the friends who would not be coming home.

There was nothing left to come back to somehow. She was numb. She wished that she had never gone, that she could have been like so many women, married, had children, been stuck here with the domestic trivia, the day-to-day problems of putting food on the table and keeping things going.

She could have been safe in that stupid castle which Johnny called home. Why had things worked out like they did, why had she let life take her rather than she it, and then she thought, I did, I took charge and if it wasn’t what I wanted then at least I had my choice and if it was wrong then it was and I must take responsibility for that.

David drove the car through the familiar streets, down the winding bank which led from the station into North Road and then into the narrow streets of the city and she recognized them and she wound down the window to smell the river. The Wear smelled like nothing else, warm and muddy and of recent rain, and she remembered that from her window on a summer’s night she could hear it making its way to the sea or could she?

Did her memories play her false and was it just that she imagined she could hear the water make its gushing way past the cathedral and the castle and the loop around the city when the rains had been heavy and it was brown and white with froth? And in the summer when the river was low and it slid over the big flat green stones which had been there for so long could she hear it then, so soft in its journey to Sunderland?

The streets were small. She had forgotten how perfect the city was. The tall narrow buildings, the round polished cobbles shiny because it had just rained, the tiny windows, the Durham bays which were upstairs and somehow the downstairs rooms did not have them, they jutted strangely and beautifully, she thought.

The shops were closed, the pavements deserted, it was growing late. She had dreamed so many times of coming home and her heart twisted because just for once it was everything and more than she had thought it would be. She had travelled thousands of miles and experienced things which few women from Durham had known before and all she wanted now was some peace.

Finally David halted the car before the house and this was something else which she had dreamed of. Had her home always been so big, looked so welcoming? The solid square stone house where she had been born was as much as any woman could imagine.

The lights with the curtains drawn back, perhaps for her homecoming, spilled out cream on to the driveway. She had not seen it like that in years, before the blackout.

She had thought so many times that she would not come back here, that she would be killed and she would not feel the comfort of her parents’ bodies against her, her father smelling of tobacco and the foundry somehow, the dust and the grime, her mother of perfume and gin on her mouth as she kissed Iris once more.

It smelled like home, the wood smoke from the chimneys, the mint wet with dew beside the back wall, the lavender along the path which in August would brush its scent against her legs.

Going inside was so alien. Had this really been her home, the smell of polish, coffee, cake, good cooking – some kind of stew? Music was playing on the radiogram, her father’s favourite, Chopin’s nocturnes.

The rooms were softly lit against the shabby furniture, the old leather chairs with their all-compassing arms, the big fire in the old marble fireplace. Her mother gave her tea and scones, butter and raspberry jam.

Time had altered. That first evening crawled past, there was nobody to look after, no friends to talk to. She wanted to excuse herself and go to bed and yet her parents looked at her as though they were amazed she had come back to them, they could not quite believe it and she did not want to disillusion them with tears or sleep or resignation or dreadful stories and so there was nothing to say. All she had to do was get through the evening.

She had thought she wanted to unburden herself but she couldn’t. They would not understand how she felt, what she had seen, what she had endured and their lives were so different. Having wanted to be home so much she felt that she could not rest.

It was only later, when her parents went to bed and she and David were left, she curled up in the cushions of the sofa and he gave her a huge glass of whisky, that she felt her body relax.

‘What happened to Johnny?’ David said. ‘You never said.’

She did not tell him. She told him what she thought he could bear, what she knew he could stand. She did not tell him how afraid she had been, how she had contained her fears, taught, she knew now, by those impossible people at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in those far-off days of her training in Newcastle.

They had taught her endurance, how to survive, how to put the patient first, how to contain her own feelings endlessly, how to fight tiredness and despair. They had not taught her what to do when everything in her life seemed over. She would have to learn that for herself. She had a feeling that it would be just as difficult in its way as the war had been and she would have to do it alone.

Her bed, when she finally got there – she was hazy with drink – was too soft, too big. Her room was enormous. She threw back the curtains and there was the North Star. It made her weep such as it never had before. She could feel the tears running down her cold thin cheeks. She had not cried in France or in Egypt. There she could not let go. Now she had no reason to hold back any further.

How could it still be there after so many people had been injured and died, after men had lost their wives and children, their independence, their minds? How could it still go on? And she was so glad to see it. It was the star that she and David had watched from their bedroom window when they were children, when they walked up Silver Street towards home on frosty December nights and moonlight made the cobbles glisten like pearls, it was always there.

She loved Durham. Of all the places she had been she loved this one best. It was such a glorious tatty little town, with its magnificent buildings, dirty streets and winding grey river. She was finally pleased to be home. She swore she would never ever leave it again. The star on Silver Street shone and it was still hers. It always would be.

One

One of Iris’s favourite memories of childhood was herself and her young brother, David, lying in the big back bedroom at home watching the cars come down the hill in the darkness.

In her best dreams she and David were sitting there, nobody else anywhere around, the whole world packed up and gone away. He was a very little boy and she was his big sister and he was maybe four and she was maybe nine and the bed was feathers, soft and thick and it was enormous, even with two of them sitting there.

In the darkness when their parents had gone downstairs, in the quietness beyond the hills of Durham, there was nothing to see but the black sky and the lights of cars as they came over the top of the hill and were about to descend into the sleeping town, and they would sit there, propped with pillows and talk. She could not remember what they talked about; it was never of any consequence, it was always just that wonderful comfortable stuff people talked about when they knew one another well.

In later times of her life, when things got too bad, Iris imagined the nights of her childhood, the feeling secure which you never did again, knowing that her mother and father were sitting over the fire downstairs and there was nothing beyond the house which mattered, she imagined the quietness of the shops being shut and the people huddled in their houses against the cold northern wind and the rain. She kept the image close when there was nothing else to keep close in the cold desert nights with the sound of the hurt and the dying never far away. During those times, when she was not on duty, when she was trying to sleep, she imagined the life which they had led when she was a child and before everything had gone wrong.

David, from the beginning, was a nice little boy. She resented him terribly at times because she had been the first child and for some reason, because he was a boy, people were so very pleased when he was born and she was all set to hate him but he was difficult to hate. She would instigate plans and David would help her put them into action.

They led a free life. Even on Sundays when other children were dragged to Sunday school somehow they managed to get out of it and pull on old clothes and, as far as their parents were concerned, disappear for the entire day and nobody ever suggested to them that they should stay near or that they should not go to their favourite places.

They would walk miles to play on certain swings. They had an old tent which they would pitch as far from the house as they could and build a fire and take a milk pan which their mother had given them and cook on it various fruit and vegetables from the garden. Their favourite was rhubarb. They would camp out overnight there with friends and build a bonfire and cook potatoes in the embers. They would play soldiers or hide and seek on the railway and in the fields and on the pit-heaps which lay beyond the town. Many of the pits were closed or closing but there were lots of little pit villages for miles beyond the city.

Iris, David and their friends would play noisy games, screaming and shouting. From time to time people complained, so her mother said, that the Black children were running wild and shouldn’t they be controlled more. Iris was half convinced her mother made this up from a sense of mischief but if people did say they should be sitting in church learning about the parables (they had lots of books at home and Iris knew the parables almost by heart so she couldn’t see the sense to it anyway) then they were wise enough not to burden Iris and David about it.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that their grandfather had been a Methodist minister. Iris didn’t remember him well, just that he was very good at playing the piano and that he and her mother would talk about David’s future and wonder if he couldn’t make the Church part of his life.

She had the feeling as she grew older that they were humouring one another and no more, in the deluded way that people did, with the idea that it was something the other person really wanted. Whatever, David was never the kind of boy who would have been an asset to the Church.

What he really loved was the sea. It was hard work going anywhere near the coast with David because he could spend hours among the trawlers at Whitby and was always desperate to see how the ships were built on the Tyne. Her most enduring memory of him as a child was making harbours in the stream below the house by moving stones around, and building boats and sailing them and of her mother’s perpetual worry that he would fall in and drown.

When they went on holiday it was always to the seaside and if you weren’t careful you virtually lost David there for a week or a fortnight or however long it was because he was always on the beach watching people fish, or at the end of the pier catching small crabs, or taking a bucket to the rocks and putting hermit crabs inside so that he could watch them carrying their homes around for a while before kindly putting them back into the pool from where they had come.

She built sandcastles and she could remember him going down to the sea to fetch blue bucketfuls of water back for the moat. He was a tubby little boy with short legs and had sandy hair which blew in the breeze which inevitably got up either on the shore or off it this far north.

She would dress her sandcastles with flowers from the dunes, pink and blue, and David would dig the moat and fill it with water and when the tide came in they would watch the waves break upon their sandcastles and drag the sand back into the water with foam and bubbles. She loved the way that the tide went up and down twice a day and renewed the beach like an empty page so that you could begin again the next day.

They went looking for shells and she made trinket boxes and stuck on them her very best finds and sometimes there was sea coal on the shore and strange rocks like jewels and now and then jellyfish brought in on the last tide, see-through, with intricate purple middles like the tops of violet creams.

There were starfish in the pools and sea urchins, and people caught crabs and cooked them on Primus stoves, and winkles which you had to prise out of the shells with a pin.

As the children got older their father took them to the seaside almost every weekend in the summer where they hired a place at a little village in Northumberland called Alnmouth. Their three-storey house looked out over the estuary where the River Aln flowed into the sea. It was, Iris was convinced at the time, the prettiest village in the world, with little stone houses, a glorious beach, golf courses, sand dunes, pubs and winding roads.

Her father bought a small boat and after that it was very difficult to get David out of it and her mother was perpetually standing down on the water’s edge, worrying as fog came down in case they would be lost but she did not complain because they had to get Daddy away from work at weekends.

They had a steel foundry in Durham. As local businesses went it was quite a big affair and something went wrong almost every day and amazingly it was always something different, so her mother said.

David was the most important person in Iris’s life. They made plans together of how when they got older they would have a house of their own and she would make wonderful cakes for him.

He had, she thought, the most wide beautiful eyes in the whole world. They were the same colour as her own, the kind of green which was nature’s green like leaves on the trees, long grass in the orchard, the colour that says all the best things, emeralds, springtime, new hope. God’s own colour, her mother said. David had thick black lashes around his eyes.

Everybody liked him, he was so polite and quiet that sometimes she wished he would shout and throw his fists around like other boys did in the schoolyard but somehow David’s quiet perseverance stilled people, stopped them.

If that didn’t work he would leave the situation. It was not usually a retreat, it had too much dignity for that, rather as though he was bored with the situation and refused to continue or as if his time could be better spent on something more constructive.

When Iris was eleven she went to the girls’ grammar school in the town. The most significant event of their childhood happened that year. David was seven. She came home one afternoon from spending the day at Wharton Park, which was situated in the north end of the town with a view of the cathedral and enough room to play for hours, with some friends, to find a huge trunk open in David’s room and her mother seated by the window, sewing.

Iris gazed in at the door. It had been a long hot summer and she and David had enjoyed every day of it, weeks and weeks when they were free to picnic on the riverbanks, go boating and play games, lie under the trees in the garden and eat ice cream, drink lots of lemonade and on the odd rainy day they had retreated to the loft above the garage to read and tell stories.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

Her mother looked up.

‘I’m sewing name tapes into David’s socks,’ she said with a sigh, ‘and tedious work it is too.’

‘Why?’

‘For when he goes to London to school in September, of course.’

Iris stared. She did remember that David had had several days off going looking at schools he should go to later but he had been vague when she asked and she had somehow assumed that whatever school he went to it was not terribly important. David was at the nearest primary school.

‘He likes where he is.’

Her mother looked patiently at her.

‘I know he does, dear, but boys of his age they go away.’

‘Away where?’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Iris. Lots of your friends go to boarding school.’

‘You’re sending David to boarding school?’

Her mother stopped what she was doing and when she looked up her face was pale.

‘Nothing of the kind,’ she said, ‘he agreed to it.’

‘He’s seven,’ Iris pointed out.

‘Now that you’re here you can help with the name tapes.’

‘David can’t want to go.’

‘He wouldn’t want to be left out when all his friends do, would he?’

‘Why aren’t I there, then?’

‘I thought you were happy to go to the grammar school.’

‘I don’t remember being given the option.’

‘You didn’t want to, as I recall,’ her mother said.

She hadn’t, her mother was right, she had been horrified at the idea of leaving Durham to go and live at school when it was bad enough having to go during the day. Why on earth people would want to stay there for whole weeks at a time she could not imagine, and unlike David she was vocal enough to make her views felt.

Iris ran down the stairs and into the garden where David was sitting with a couple of friends in the big fir tree at the bottom in the shade because it was such a hot day.

She couldn’t talk to him in front of other small boys so she left it until later that evening and went into his bedroom when he came in from playing, he was dirty, tired, his lank hair hung over his eyes. His mother was running the bath.

‘Are you really going to boarding school?’ Iris said.

‘It’s not for ages yet.’

‘Three weeks.’

‘Is it?’ He said nothing more.

‘Do you want to go?’

David didn’t reply. He didn’t even look at her.

‘They’re sending you two hundred and fifty miles away. Was it one you liked?’

‘I didn’t like any of them,’ David said.

‘Did you say you liked it?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Aren’t you going to tell them you don’t want to go?’

He shrugged and his skinny shoulders seemed to droop.

‘Everybody goes,’ he said, and then his mother called,

‘David, your bath is ready. Hurry up before it gets cold.’

Iris wanted to ask him whether he had any idea what it would be like being so far from home for so long and on and off for years but she didn’t because David obviously felt that he had no power here, there was nothing he could do or he did not want to disappoint his parents.

He went off to have his bath and she went downstairs to where her father was sitting in the garden in a big chair.

‘You didn’t tell me David was going to boarding school,’ she said.

Her father gazed narrowly at her against the sunlight.

‘Nonsense, Iris, you knew about it months ago.’

‘David doesn’t want to go.’

Her father didn’t answer.

‘What am I supposed to do without him?’ Iris said.

He didn’t answer that either for a few moments and then he said,

‘All his friends are going.’

‘To the same school?’

Her father moved with impatience.

‘No, not the same school but something like. He wouldn’t want to be left out.’

After that the summer was spoiled. The pile of clothes on the floor in David’s room got smaller as the trunk filled. Every morning Iris woke up and thought it was a day nearer to David’s leaving and she dreaded it. She was at school on the morning that he left but she saw him before she went and he was all done up in his grey uniform with the purple and brown badge and his purple and brown tie. He looked so defenceless, so scared and Iris couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him.

The house was like a different place without him and her life changed so much. She had lots of friends but there was nobody to confide in as she had with David and because it was such a long way he did not come home until Christmas.

She ran into the house from school on the day that he was coming back to discover another small boy playing trains with him.

‘Hello, Iris.’ David barely looked at her. ‘This is Matthews. His parents are abroad so he’s staying with us for Christmas.’

Matthews concentrated on getting the blue train back on to its tracks and didn’t say anything.

That night Iris heard them talking and giggling in David’s room. She had never felt so left out. She hadn’t seen David since early September, he had not come home at half term, it was such a long way, her mother had explained, and he had gone to stay with their aunt and uncle who lived in London. Iris wanted to ask if her mother didn’t miss him but somehow she didn’t seem able. The following day she went into town with a friend from school, Janet Robson.

‘But they’re just little lads,’ Janet said. ‘Why would you want to spend your time with them?’

Things were never the same again. It was as though David disappeared into the crowd of small boys at his school and wasn’t special any more. She was too old to be with boys of that age and from then on to Iris there was always somebody between them, her friends, his.

The secrets they had had, the games they had played and how they would lie in the big bed in her room at night and watch the car lights coming down the hill … that was gone too. The precious years of childhood that she and David had had together were over.

David became taller, thinner, quieter. He never said anything about school, he never referred to it in the holidays and he had local friends that he went about with, lads he built bonfires with, had gangs, even fought from time to time in the streets of the city when he was thirteen and fourteen and there were always girls. Girls liked David.

Iris well remembered the day he was taller than her for the first time when he came home in the summer. After that he grew and she didn’t so that she had to look up at him always and he was no longer her little brother. By the time David was seventeen he was over six feet tall and she was five foot three and there was nothing left of their relationship. She thought it would never recover.

Her friends liked him but David never liked them and he didn’t like any of the boys she went out with so that they did not meet up socially and then suddenly it changed again, the summer that he was eighteen, when he left school and came home for the last time before university.