really pretty duck-egg blue, which went with the kitchen’s cream walls, and the curtains of pale blue, apple green and white gingham. Ever so proud of her kitchen, she was. Her heart swelled with pride every time she walked into it. From the stone sink under the window she could look out into the garden – a long narrow strip, at the bottom of which was the blank brick wall that separated her garden from that of the house beyond. The floor of Olive’s kitchen was covered in a good practical mosaic-patterned linoleum that didn’t show the dirt. Not that there was any dirt on Olive’s kitchen floor – certainly not. She swept and washed it every single day. Very house proud, Olive was, putting her back into whatever task she took on. That was something that, like her domestic skills, she had learned from the grandmother, who had taken her in after her mother had died and her father had then disappeared from her life. Not been very lucky in their dads she and her Tilly hadn’t. But she’d been determined right from the start to make sure that her daughter had the very best mum she could possibly have and that she would grow up knowing how loved she was.
That was why, over the years, Olive had gently but determinedly turned down several men who had tried to court her, some perhaps for her own sake, but some, she suspected, because of what they had hoped she would bring them, be it a good housewife and a stepmother for their children or, in one or two cases, the hope of the inheritance she might one day get from her in-laws. Well, that day had now come and if there was one thing that Olive was determined on it was that she wasn’t going to have any man coming along and disrupting her routine or her life.
It was ten to five. Tilly would be home soon. Tonight, after they’d had their tea and listened to the news, they could sit down together and talk about her plan to let their spare bedrooms.
‘Come on, Tilly, it’s finishing time. Thank heavens. I’ve never known the Lady Almoner be as sharp as she was today. We’ve got more than enough work on our hands here without her giving us even more,’ Clara Smith grumbled as both girls pulled the covers onto their typewriters, the office clock having reached five o’clock.
Clara and Tilly were the most junior members of the Lady Almoner’s office staff, Clara being the previous ‘dog’s body’, as she referred to Tilly’s role, before Tilly herself had been taken on. Clara was just coming up for nineteen, whilst Tilly was just a few weeks short of her seventeenth birthday.
‘We can’t blame her for us having to type up all these new lists,’ Tilly pointed out patiently. ‘The Hospital will need them if there’s a war and patients have to be moved.’
‘A war. I’m sick and tired of all this talk about a war,’ Clara complained, ‘and all these things the Government keep making us do, like buying blackout material, having to have gas masks, putting up Anderson shelters, and the like. My dad’s only gone and joined the local ARP, and with all the drills we’re having to do here anyone would think we were at war already.’
‘I know,’ Tilly agreed, ‘but the Hospital hasn’t stopped making plans in case there is a war, no one has, and the Government has said that if Hitler invades Poland, they won’t stand for it.’
The girls looked at each other in bleak and sober silence, their shared apprehension showing in their tense expressions.
‘They’re still calling up the lads for that six months’ National Service training,’ Clara admitted reluctantly. ‘My Harry’s had his notification.’
In April the Government had passed a law to make it obligatory for all young men of twenty and twenty-one to undergo six months’ military training.
Clara tossed her head so determinedly that her carefully curled brown hair bounced.
‘Well, I know one thing,’ she announced. ‘If there is to be a war, my Harry better look smart and get an engagement ring on my finger before it starts. Him and me are going to the Hammersmith Palais tonight, seeing as it’s a Friday. Are you doing anything?’
Tilly shook her head. Her mother considered her too young to go out dancing at places like the Hammersmith Palais, which was where all the boys went to size up the girls.
Five minutes later, on her way down the staircase of St Barts’ main hall, Tilly paused as she always did, unable to stop herself from gazing in awe at the paintings. It had been Clara who had told her importantly during her first week at Barts that the Biblical murals had been painted by William Hogarth and were over a hundred and fifty years old. But that was nowhere near as old as the hospital itself. Barts had been the very first hospital to be established in London, though the original buildings had been replaced in the eighteenth century. Tilly marvelled to think how old the hospital was: hundreds of years. She had found the sheer size of the place a bit overwhelming at first, and feared getting lost whenever she was sent to one of the wards to get the details of a patient from the sister there, but she could find her way around with relative ease now.
Tilly felt that she was very lucky to be working at St Barts, which had a special place in the hearts of Londoners, and whose nurses liked to claim was London’s very best hospital. And to be working for the Lady Almoner too. There was never a day when Tilly didn’t think gratefully of her old headmistress, who had recommended her for the job, her being a second cousin or something of the Lady Almoner. Miss Moss, her headmistress, had come to number 13 Article Row herself to tell them about the job. Tilly’s eyes filled with tears now when she remembered the happiness and pride she had seen on her mother’s face when Miss Moss had told them that she considered Tilly to be the right kind of person for the job, because she had been a good hard-worker at school, clean and neat, with a sensible head on her shoulders, and Miss Moss knew that her mother had sent her off to learn shorthand and typing after she had left school instead of her having to get a job in a factory. Tilly hadn’t really known what a hospital Lady Almoner was but Miss Moss had explained that it was someone who was in charge of the social care of a hospital’s patients – everything from finding out who a patient’s relatives were, if they came into hospital because of an accident, to making arrangements for a patient to be looked after properly at home once they were discharged. From making up and sending out bills, to dealing with all those charities and insurance companies who provided funds for patients and their health care – running the Almoner’s office, Miss Moss had explained, involved an awful lot of administration work, the kind of work for which Tilly, with her shorthand and typing skills, would be ideally suited.
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
