in front of them and resting a gloved hand on Ted’s knee. She was due to meet with Dr Peter Harland, the physician who had treated little Henry Redbourne’s bad chest, at the end of his shift. Their meeting had been arranged to exchange notes on other chest clinic patients, but the list of questions pinned to the front of the file in the almoners’ office reflected Alice’s hope of steering the conversation towards the Redbourne family.
The young woman, Charlotte, had said little during their welfare check on the family, but working closely with families had honed Alice’s intuition. Quickly, she had learned to distinguish between the troubles that blighted most families from time to time and those rising from something more sinister; it was a sort of occupational sixth sense.
‘We’re all at sixes and sevens at home, love. We’re alright here, if it’s all the same to you.’ Ted doffed his cloth cap, but anxiety lay beneath the civility. The skin on his face was chapped and his lips were pale and translucent, but his thin hair had been carefully combed and his clothes were clean and well pressed. Mrs Woods was similarly well groomed and yet, despite the rose water she was dabbing on her wrists and her well-scrubbed pink skin, a peculiar smell rose from beneath her clothes.
‘And you, Mrs Woods? How are you?’
‘Fine, duck. Lovely, thank you.’ Alice’s eyes lingered on the elderly woman, her brow furrowed. She had visited the couple at home months earlier after Ted’s treatment for a severe leg ulcer. With a single room in a three-storey boarding house, they were better off than some, but the mould on the walls and lack of running water meant that it was far from comfortable.
Alice sighed, glancing across the large atrium. Two doctors wearing white laboratory coats stood whispering near a set of fabric screens, nurses bustling past them into the anterooms. A few feet away, another nurse stood in front of a plump elderly woman, trying to help her onto her feet.
An unpleasant musty smell prevailed in the department, overlaid with a hint of carbolic soap; a consequence of every available space being filled with the poor. Numerous ill-clad elderly locals huddled together with threadbare blankets draped over their knees, several in the grip of severe coughing fits. It was likely that more than half of those filling the space weren’t interested in seeing a doctor. If there was a chill in the air it wasn’t unusual for the almoners to find the outpatients department thronging with people like Ted and Hetty, hopeful of passing the time in a place that was warmer and less dreary than their homes.
Alice reached into her handbag and pressed a coin into Ted’s frail hand. She had learned in training and keenly felt that it was her duty to remember the person behind the illness. She had been taught that there was little point in administering medicine to the sick only to discharge them back to a life of near destitution. Sometimes the smallest of interventions was all that was needed to relieve hardship and change lives.
‘I think perhaps –’ Alice began, but broke off at the sound of a shout. Several patients started and turned their heads towards a heavily pregnant woman who was standing by one of the curtained examination cubicles and yelling at a stocky man wearing labourer’s scruffs.
Angling herself sideways on so that she could reach him around her considerable bump, the woman landed a punch on the man’s chest and another on the side of his head. Spots of blood glistened from the resulting scratch on his cheek, and another just above his lip. ‘Will you leave off me, woman!’ the man yelled breathlessly, doing his best to dodge her blows while coughing explosively.
Alice gave Ted’s leg a quick pat and rose to her feet. She wove purposefully around the packed rows of wooden benches, the pregnant woman gesticulating and shouting as she made her way over. ‘I swear you’ve done it now, Jimmy!’ the woman screamed.
‘Excuse me,’ Alice said firmly, seizing the scruffy man’s arm. ‘Nurse,’ she called out, angling her head towards the treatment area. Several patients stared at the smartly dressed woman who had suddenly appeared, their mouths open in hushed, awed silence.
‘Sit down, please,’ she ordered the man, who was still coughing and frantically gasping for air. She motioned him away with a tiny flick of her head, her expression stern. Obediently, he backed away and collapsed onto a nearby seat.
A nurse emerged from one of the cubicles. Her eyes flicked from Alice to the pregnant woman, who was still trying to attack the heavy-set man, and then she hurried over to help. ‘Stay outta this, Miss,’ the expectant mother shouted to Alice. ‘Someone needs to sort ’im out, once and for all.’
‘No one is sorting anyone out, thank you,’ Alice said, her voice carrying across the hall. ‘I’ll deal with this.’
‘He’s a filthy lying hound!’ the woman yelled, spittle spilling out from the edges of her mouth.
‘Be that as it may, he’s now our patient,’ Alice returned, her voice low and steady. Behind her, the nurse handed the man, who was now coughing up blood, a handkerchief. ‘If you want to come back and see me later today, I’m happy to talk things through with you. But for now, please, I’d like you to leave.’
‘You’ll pay for this, Jimmy!’ the woman screamed over Alice’s shoulder, as the nurse led him away. ‘I hope you cough up your guts and strangle yourself with ’em,’ she added, before turning on her heel and waddling to the door.
Alice pulled down the cuffs of her blouse, straightened her hat and gave several still-gawping patients a reassuring smile. The almoner often needed to draw on every ounce of diplomacy she could muster to deal with the loud confrontations that sometimes broke out in the outpatients department.
The man was still coughing when Alice joined him in the watching room. ‘She’s agitated ’cos I’m not earning what I-I used to on account of this cough,’ he told Alice in a thick Irish accent. ‘And what with the baby soon to join us –’
Alice opened a new file and jotted down some notes while Jimmy spoke. A thirty-five-year-old labourer, Jimmy had sailed for England from Ireland a year earlier looking for work. He managed to find employment on the Wembley Park site, where work was under way preparing the ground for a new restaurant to be built near the planned new sports stadium, but had not yet managed to save enough to cover the cost of a deposit on his own lodgings.
Alice managed to elicit that he had spent most nights sleeping with three other workmen in a small shed on site, while his pregnant wife camped out on her parents’ sofa. Waking in the same damp clothes he had worked in the previous day, his health had worsened through the winter. ‘’Tis a fine place here though,’ Jimmy said, when Alice confirmed that his meagre earnings and imminent dependant qualified him for entirely free treatment at the hospital. ‘And you’re a fine woman, so you are,’ he gasped, after she told him that he’d been booked into the chest clinic. A deep hacking cough issued from his lungs. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes, watery with the strain of coughing, and said: ‘Too fine to be wasting your time helping a vagrant like me.’
As the almoner made her way back across the atrium, Hetty Woods nudged her husband with her elbow. When she neared, Ted signalled to her. ‘We was wondering, Miss Alice. Do you think you might have the opportunity to visit our daughter, Tilda? She’s expecting but her husband won’t let us near the place. He’s got some sort of hold over her, I think. We haven’t seen her for months. But my Hetty thinks that if anyone can sort them out, you can.’
Alice glanced over to the double doors, where another line of people were waiting to file inside. When temperatures plummeted, as they had in London in the last twenty-four hours, it was difficult to impose some order on the chaos reigning in outpatients. The doctors found the crowded conditions near impossible to work in, but the worsening storm
