Bittersweet Read online

And off she went, through the locked hall door.

  “Well, starve the lizards!” said Kitty feebly.

  “Pretty austere,” said Tufts, sighing. They were standing in the kitchen, a small apartment serviced by a gas stove but nothing else labour-saving.

  Grace was priming herself for a bout of tears, gazing wet-eyed at the small wooden table and four hard wooden chairs around it. “I don’t believe it!” she whimpered. “No common room except four hard chairs in a kitchen!”

  “If you cry, Grace, I’ll personally feed you to the dogs,” said Tufts, running a gloved fingertip along the top margin of the stove. She grimaced. “I could forgive the lack of a new coat of paint, but no one has cleaned our quarters properly.”

  “Then that’s our first job,” said Edda, sounding remarkably happy. “Just think, girls! They don’t want us here.”

  Three pairs of eyes flew to Kitty, the fragile one — how would she take this news she had to know, and the sooner the better?

  “Bugger the lot of them, then!” Kitty said in a strong voice. “I’m darned if a Latimer is going to be beaten by a parcel of over-complacent female dogs!”

  “Bitches, you mean,” said Edda.

  Kitty giggled. “What they don’t know is that they’re in the amateur league when it comes to bitches. We’ve had a lifetime of Mama, who could teach Matron lessons in bitchery.”

  Tears dried, Grace stared at Kitty in wonder. “You’re not down in the dumps?” she asked.

  “Not so far,” Kitty said, grinning. “I’m too dazzled at the thought that I’m finally leading a life of my own.”

  “What do you think of Matron, Edda?” Tufts asked.

  Grace answered. “A battleship in full sail, so she’s accustomed to firing salvos at things so far away she can’t even see them on the horizon.”

  “I’d rather say that to her, we mean extra work” from Tufts. “According to Mrs. Enid Treadby, Matron took this job to round off her career in a place where she could afford to retire.”

  “Why save that gem to tell us now?” Edda asked. “It’s vital information, Tufts!”

  “I never think of repeating gossip — I can’t help it, Eds, honestly! You know that.”

  “Yes, I do, and I’m sorry for flying at you — Grace, stop bawling like a motherless calf!”

  “Matron is a detestable woman, and so is Sister Bainbridge,” Grace said through sobs, tears running down her face. “Oh, why didn’t Daddy send us to a Sydney hospital to train?”

  “Because in Corunda Daddy is someone important, so he can keep an eye on us,” Tufts said. “Sore bums from hard chairs, girls, and no common room. I wonder if there’s a hot water heater hiding anywhere? This is a hospital, after all.”

  “No hot water in this kitchen,” said Edda, grimacing.

  Kitty came out of the bedroom she was to share with Tufts, holding up a green-and-white-striped object so starched that it resembled a sheet of cardboard. Clenching her right fist, she began to punch its two layers apart. A laugh escaped. “This is as bad as punching the hide off a slaughtered lamb.” Putting the dress down, she produced a sheet of white cardboard. “I think when this is punched apart it will be the apron.” She laid into it with her fist. “Oh, look! It must wrap right around and over the uniform — only the sleeves will show. But I realise why our stockings are homely, knitted black wool.”

  In the midst of repairing her lipstick and powder, Grace looked up. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Oh, Grace, don’t be so thick! Why do you think Matron delivered us that sermon on nuns and chastity and prostitutes? She was really saying that for the next three years we have no sex, even if statistically we are female. No flirting with any of the doctors, Grace, whatever else you do. Matron Newdigate would forgive your killing a patient far ahead of your conducting yourself like a whore. That’s why we’re going to be wearing ugly uniforms and thick, knitted black stockings. I’d be willing to bet that no touch of lipstick or powder will be allowed either.”

  “Cry again, Grace, and you’re dead!” Edda snapped.

  “I want to go home!”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “I loathe cleaning up messes.” Then Grace brightened. “Still, by the time I’m twenty-one I’ll be registered, and able to do all sorts of things without permission. Such as marry whoever I want, and vote in the elections.”

  “I suspect the hardest thing we’ll have to do is learn to get along with the other nurses,” Edda said thoughtfully. “I mean, who are they? None of us has ever been in hospital, nor do our parents mix with hospital people. I found Matron’s instructions to tone ourselves down ominous. I inferred that she meant we are a distinct cut above the other nurses socially and educationally. The last thing in the world we’ve ever been is snobby — Daddy would be appalled, especially with Mama as an example.” She sighed. “But unfortunately people tend to judge books by their covers.”

  Tufts aired her knowledge of local facts yet again. “The nurses are all from the West End, and rough as bags,” she said.

  “Well, we start by removing phrases like ‘rough as bags’ from our speech,” said Edda — oh, Tufts could be exasperating! The trouble was that she wasn’t a talker, so none of the others expected her silence to conceal information.

  “I always thought using a dinner napkin added dreadfully to the laundry,” Kitty said cheerfully. “I mean, you can wipe your mouth with your hand, and if your nose is runny, you have your sleeve to wipe it on.”

  “Very true,” said Edda gravely. “We’d better get in training to wipe mouths and noses as well as wounds, for I very much doubt there will be dinner napkins. Men’s handkerchiefs too, girls. No wisp of lace.” She huffed. “Fool things anyway, women’s hankies.”

  Kitty cleared her throat loudly. “I know I get down in the dumps, girls, but I’m not a coward. No amount of West End nastiness is going to defeat me. Nursing doesn’t attract me the way it does you, Edda, because for you it’s the next-best thing to Medicine. But I think I can grow to love it.”

  “Good girl, Kitty!” Edda cried, applauding the little speech. In front of her very eyes Kitty was unloading the cargo of childhood. She’s going to get properly better, thought Edda, I know it in my bones. So frank about Maude, so aware of the dangers lurking anywhere in Maude’s vicinity. After Maude, West Enders were nothings.

  “I’m long past my grief at not being able to do Medicine,” Edda said now to Kitty, worried that her plight was being exaggerated in Kitty’s mind. “Nursing is more sensible, and our new-style training means we won’t be ignoramuses who know how to bandage, but not why. Think of me as an old war horse — the slightest whiff of ether has me whinnying and stamping the ground. In a hospital I’m alive!”

  “Speaking of whinnying and stamping the ground, does Jack Thurlow know you’re going nursing?” Tufts asked slyly.

  The shaft went wide; Edda grinned. “Of course he does. And his heart isn’t broken any more than mine is. The hardest part will be keeping Fatima exercised up to Jack’s expectations. I daresay I’ll be riding more on my own in future.”

  “If you still had Thumbelina, it would be easier,” said Grace. “Daddy wouldn’t be under an obligation to Jack Thurlow, who doesn’t even come to church.”

  Kitty leaped in ahead of the storm clouds gathering on Edda’s face. “Shut up, Grace, that’s not up for discussion! My perpetual question, Eds, is why you like riding?”

  “When I’m on top of a horse’s back, I’m a minimum of five feet clear of the ground,” Edda said, her voice serious. “To me, that’s all the thrill of riding. Being taller than a man.”

  “I wish I were tall!” Kitty said with a sigh.

  The hall door rattled, flew open. Sister Bainbridge stood and glared at her charges in outrage.

  “What is the meaning of this, nurses? You haven’t even begun to unpack your suitcases!”

  4

  Corunda Base Hospital was the largest rural hospital in New South Wales, havi
ng 160 beds in its general section, eighty beds in its mental asylum, and thirty beds in a convalescent/aged home out Doobar way, where the air and the elevation were felt more beneficial. Unlike the sandstone magnificence of some other hospitals, its appearance charmed no one, for it looked like army barracks. Built of wood atop limestone piers and foundations, it was a series of long rectangular structures saved from being called sheds by the presence of a broad, covered verandah down either long side. Men’s One and Two were double-length, as were Women’s One and Two; Children’s, Out-patients, X-ray-cum-Pathology, the Operating Theatre, Kitchens and Stores were single in size, while Administration, fronting onto Victoria Street, rejoiced in a building made entirely from limestone blocks. The amount of land was acres in extent, and dotted with out-buildings that ranged from Matron’s storybook cottage to houses put up for the duration of the Great War, when it had also been an army hospital. One overall fact made the site workable: down to the last square foot of the last acre, it was level. And this in turn had led to the struts and strands that linked the buildings together like the Brooklyn Bridge or a spider’s web — roofed walkways that everybody called ramps. Most ramps held some protection from the elements beyond roofing in the form of four-foot-high sides, though the last two hundred yards to the Latimer house consisted only of a floor and a roof. Where Men’s straddled the ramp to either side, it had been completely enclosed to form a waiting room; Women’s had been similarly dealt with. Those who waited to visit children used Men’s or Women’s. Midwifery was lucky; it was inside the administration building, as were the Casualty station and a small operating theatre.

  The shocks fell thick and fast upon the Latimer girls, though if Matron’s reading of their characters had been aright, not one of them would have lasted longer than that first day at Corunda Base. They had been carefully brought up as ladies and had never wanted for a material thing, but Gertrude Newdigate’s youth had passed beyond her recollection, and she had forgotten to take strength of purpose and character into account at all.

  The first and greatest shock was not personal; it was the realisation that a hospital was a place to which you, a patient, were admitted in order to die. Fully one-third of the patients left a hospital through its morgue, and a second third returned home to die. A statistic given to them by a doleful hospital porter named Harry, who thus became a teaching authority for the four new nurses weeks before they met their instructor, Dr. Liam Finucan.

  “It’s in the patient’s eyes!” cried Tufts, horrified. “I feel more a minister to death than a healer — how can the other nurses be so cheerful?”

  “They’re inured and resigned,” said Grace, stemming tears.

  “Rubbish,” Kitty said. “They’re experienced, they know the best way to treat death is to persuade the patients that they are not going to die. I watch them, I don’t care how nasty they are to me. How they treat us isn’t important. Watch them!”

  “Kitty’s right,” Edda said, her indignation saved for things like cut-up newspapers for toilet paper and towels too worn to dry wet skin — weren’t hospitals properly funded? “Grace, you’ve already exhausted today’s allowance of tears — don’t dare cry!”

  “That Nurse Wilson slopped a bowl of vomit on me!”

  “You copped the vomit because you let Nurse Wilson see how revolted you were by it. Govern your disgust, and it won’t happen.”

  “I want to go home!”

  “That’s not on the cards, Miss Piglet,” said Edda, hiding her sympathy. “Now go and change your apron before the vomit soaks into your dress. Pew! You do stink!”

  Yet somehow their first week passed; at the end of it they could clothe themselves faultlessly in their starched “cardboard”, even fold the absurdly complex pleated parts of their caps that looked like a pair of wings. The other nurses wore more sensible uniforms and aprons, including short sleeves, while the Latimers, as new-style trainees, were done up in more wrapping than parcels.

  The food, they discovered, was appalling for patients and staff alike, but they worked so hard that they ate everything from watery cabbage to lumpy gravy swimming in fat; the kitchen in their quarters, Sister Bainbridge informed them, was for making cups of tea, coffee or cocoa.

  “Nothing else, even toast,” said she, looming.

  The Rector had sheltered his girls from the more horrible and sordid aspects of his religious calling, and excluded the words incest, syphilis and perversion from their vocabulary. Due to climate and no refrigeration, the dead were buried in a closed coffin within twenty-four hours. So when, on their second morning, Sister Bainbridge showed them how to lay out a corpse, it was the first time they had seen or touched a dead body.

  “A syphilitic who raped his sister,” Bainbridge said, joking.

  Their response to this explanation was a blank look.

  “Keep your pride!” said Edda in a furious whisper as soon as Bainbridge moved away, laughing at their ignorance. “Remember that we are Latimers. What upsets us today will be old hat tomorrow — don’t let them beat us! No tears, and no down in the dumps.”

  They were perpetually tired in a way entirely new and very hard to bear; their feet ached, their backs ached, their joints ached. Everything taught to them by dainty Maude had to be abandoned; there was neither room nor time for daintiness in Corunda Base, whose superintendent was an arch-miser unwilling to pander to the needs of any and all entities save money, to which he was fused like a leech to a piece of vein-riddled flesh.

  April, May and June vanished in a thick fog of exhaustion that actually worked in the hospital’s favour. Not even Grace had the energy to think of quitting; the very notion of creating such a fuss reared as high as Everest, unattainable. They just endured.

  Edda held them together, convinced in her soul that things were bound to change, as things did from sheer familiarity. Perhaps the only thing that kept them quietly resigned was the one thing they would lose if they returned to the Rectory: heated rooms. With winter upon them, it was so beautiful to live in warmth, no matter how enormous the indignities and insults of their nursing life might be. And, Edda was sure, once they proved themselves to the cruel women who ruled them, the rewards would come: like chairs with soft seats, the chance to make toasted sandwiches, a little kindness. For at the end of their first three months tuition would begin, they would be called upon to do something with their brains as well as their hands and voices. April, May and June had seen them no different from the West Enders.

  Their tutor was Dr. Liam Finucan, the staff pathologist (and also Chief Coroner of the Shire & City of Corunda). He had agreed to take on tutorial duty for two reasons: the first, that he regarded nursing brain-power as wasted; and the second, that he had noted the quality of the four new-style trainees as they were shuttled around the hospital on some kind of speedy orientation program.

  A Protestant Ulsterman, Liam Finucan had taken his medical degree at St. Bartholomew’s in London when Matron Gertrude Newdigate was there, so they were old acquaintances; his love for pathology had led him to the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and his qualifications were such that he could have headed the pathology department of any hospital in Sydney or Melbourne. That he had chosen a minor post at Corunda Base was due to his wife, Eris, a Corunda girl he met and married in London. In 1926, when the Latimer girls commenced nursing, he had been in Corunda for fifteen years.

  Typical of many pathologists, he was quiet and shy, owned no bedside manner, and found the dead more interesting than the living. However, by the middle of July, after two weeks of instructing the new nursing trainees, Liam Finucan developed a side to his personality hitherto undetected by anyone who knew him, and that included himself. Out of a mental stables came a war horse, and out of a cobwebbed cupboard came a suit of armour; mounting the one and donning the other, Liam tilted his lance and rode off to make war. His quarry wasn’t that miserable skinflint Dr. Frank Campbell; it was Matron Newdigate.

  “You’ve given these four girls absolutel
y no kind of help or support, Gertie, and it has to stop,” Liam said, his softly lilting voice steely, foreign. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! When one of the old-style nurses starts here, she’s taken into the West End fold, overwhelmed with advice and many kindnesses. Whereas these four young women have no one to turn to at all. I don’t care how new you were to your own job when they started, you had a duty to them that you shamelessly ignored because their presence upset the West End majority. D’you think I’ve forgotten how much you grizzled to me during your first week at the thought that you were going to be lumbered with the new trainees after all? Here it is, the middle of July, and you’ve acted as if they don’t exist. You saddled them with a quarter of a dilapidated house, gave that fat and lazy crawler Marje Bainbridge charge of them, and rewarded her with half of the same house!” His eyes had gone the same dark grey as a stormy sea, and pinned her contemptuously.

  “Your new-style trainees are even more tired than they should be,” he went on. “Their accommodation is pure Frank Campbell — hard chairs and two-foot-three beds, a kitchen they’re forbidden to use. By the sheerest accident their house is on the steam line, so at least they’ve been warm, but they have to chop wood and feed it to their boiler to have hot water, and that’s unconscionable! Hear me? Criminal! In spite of their privileges they’ve been brought up to think of themselves with humility — it’s just your good luck that their mother is a selfish bitch.”

  He leaned forward to put the palms of his hands flat on her immaculate desk, and glared at her. “I’m off to see Frank Campbell next, but I’m warning you, Gertie, that I expect your wholehearted support in this. Since the girls are required to live in, they will each have a bedroom. You will provide a common room with easy chairs, and desks and bookshelves for studying. The kitchen will be at their command for light meals as well as liquids, and see they have an ice chest before spring. Get off your pampered bottom and see to their welfare! Use Marje Bainbridge as a chaperone, by all means, but not in the lap of luxury. I hear that there will be money to build a new home for nurses, but until it’s finished, I want my trainees adequately accommodated.”