at me as if they envisioned the double bed with a bus conductor’s bag on the end of it to collect the fees.
“A double bed?” asked David, paling.
“That’s right, a double bed.”
“Single girls sleep in single beds, Harriet.”
“Well, that is as may be, David,” I snapped, “but this single girl is going to sleep in a double bed!”
Mum leaped to her feet. “Boys, the dishes don’t wash themselves!” she chirped. “Granny, it’s time for 77 Sunset Strip.”
“Kooky, Kooky, lend me your comb!” carolled Granny, skipping up lightly. “Well, well, did you ever? Harriet’s moving out and I’ve got a room to myself! I think I’ll have a double bed, hee-hee!”
Dad and the Bros cleared the table in double-quick time, and left me alone with David.
“What brought this on?” he asked, tight-lipped.
“Lack of privacy.”
“You have something better than mere privacy, Harriet. You have a home and a family.”
I pounded my fist on the table. “Why are you such a myopic git, David? I share a room with Granny and Potty, and I have nowhere to spread my things without picking them up the minute I’ve finished with them! Whatever space I have here is also occupied by others. So now I’m going to luxuriate in my own space.”
“At Kings Cross.”
“Yes, at Kings bloody Cross! Where the rents are affordable.”
“In a lodging house run by a foreigner. A New Australian.”
That killed me, I laughed in his face. “Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, a foreigner? She’s an Aussie, with an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife!”
“That is an even greater indictment,” he said. “An Australian with a name that’s half Italian and half Jewish? At the very least, she married beneath her.”
“You bloody snob!” I gasped. “You bigoted git! What’s so posh about Australians? We all came out as bloody convicts! At least our New Australians have come out as free settlers!”
“With SS numbers tattooed in their armpits or tuberculosis or stinking of garlic!” he snarled. “And ‘free settlers’ is right—they all came out here for a mere ten-pound subsidised passage!”
That did it. I jumped up and started whacking him on both sides of his head right over his ears. Wham, wham, wham! “Piss off, David, just bloody piss off!” I yelled.
He pissed off, with a look in his eyes that said I was having one of Those Days, and he’d be back to try again.
So there you have it. I do like my family—they’re good scouts. But David is exactly what Pappy called him—a constipated Catholic schoolboy. Thank heavens I’m Church of England.
I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to sit and write this, but things are looking all right. I managed to talk Dad and the Bros out of inspecting my new premises (I went last Sunday to have a look, and they’re not fit yet for inspection), and I’m working like stink to get my things together for next Saturday’s move. Mum has been colossal. I’ve got heaps of china, cutlery, linen and cooking utensils, and Dad shoved a hundred pounds at me with a gruff explanation that he didn’t want me touching my savings for England to buy what by rights belonged in my Hope Chest anyway. Gavin presented me with a tool kit and a multimeter and Peter donated his “old” hi-fi, explaining that he needed a better one. Granny gave me a bottle of 4711 eau de Cologne and a set of doilies she’d crocheted for my Hope Chest.
There’s a sort of an archway between my bedroom and my living room in my new flat—no door—so I’m going to use some of Dad’s hundred quid to buy glass beads and make my own bead curtain. The ones you can buy are plastic, look awful and sound worse. I want something that chimes. Pink. I’m going to have a pink flat because it’s the one colour no one at Bronte will permit anywhere. And I like pink. It’s warm and feminine, and it cheers me up. Besides, I look good against it, which is more than I can say for yellow, blue, green and crimson. I’m too dark.
My flat is in the open air passage that goes down alongside Pappy’s room and leads to the laundry and the backyard. The rooms are big and have very high ceilings, but the fixings are pretty basic. There’s a kitchen area with a sink, an ancient gas stove and a fridge, and it’s impossible to make it look nice, so I rang Ginge the head porter at Ryde and asked him if he could find me an old hospital screen—no trouble, he said, then started moaning about how dull the place is since I left. What rubbish! One X-ray technician? The Ryde District Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital isn’t that small. Ginge was always one to exaggerate.
Matron came to visit X-ray yesterday. What a tartar she is! If the H.M.O. is God, Matron has equal rank with the Virgin Mary, and I think virginity is a prerequisite for the job, so it isn’t an invalid comparison. No man would ever get up the courage, it would take a dove flying in the window to quicken any matron. They’re always battleships in full sail, but I must say that the Queens Matron is a very trim craft. Only about thirty-five, tall, good figure, red-gold hair, aquamarine eyes, beautiful face. You can’t see much of the hair for the Egyptian headdress veil, of course, but the colour’s definitely not out of a dye bottle. Her eyes would freeze a tropical lagoon, though. Glacial. Arctic. Oooooo-aa!
I felt rather sorry for her, actually. She’s the Queen of Queens, so she can’t possibly be a woman too. If you want to slap a coat of paint on a wall or you stick up a poster to amuse the patients, Matron decides what colour the paint will be or if the poster can stay there. She wears a pair of white cotton gloves, and while she can’t do it in X-ray (strictly speaking, she’s the guest of Sister Agatha in X-ray), on all ground where nurses work or play she runs the tip of one finger along skirting boards, window ledges, you name it, and God help a ward sister whose premises produce the faintest tinge of grey on that white glove! She heads the domestic as well as the nursing staff, she ranks equally with the General Medical Superintendent, and she’s a member of the Hospital Board, which I have found out is chaired by Sir William Edgerton-Smythe, who just happens to be my dishy Mr. Duncan Forsythe’s uncle. The reason why he’s senior H.M.O. of Orthopaedics at his age becomes clearer. Unk must have been a great help. What a pity. I rather thought, looking at Mr. Forsythe, that he was the sort of man who doesn’t stoop to string-pulling Upstairs. Why do idols always turn out to have feet of clay?
Anyway, I was introduced to Matron, who shook my hand for the precise number of milliseconds courtesy and rank demand. Whereas when I met Sister Agatha, she stared straight through me, Matron held my eyes à la Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. It seems Matron came to discuss the purchase of one of those new rotating set-ups for X-ray theatres, but a tour of the whole place was obligatory.
Tonight’s wish: That I stop thinking of Forsythe the Crawler.
I’m
