be coming to the church Christmas Dance. We’ve invited some of the Polish refugee families billeted locally to come along. It must be dreadful to be forced to flee one’s home and country.’
‘Terrible,’ Olive agreed, slipping away from Mrs Windle’s side as another parishioner claimed her attention. She went to have a word with Peggy Thomas, the local dressmaker, who lived a couple of streets away with her elderly mother.
She’d just finished making arrangements for Tilly, Agnes and herself to go round to be measured on Monday evening when Sergeant Dawson came up to her.
‘I’ve had a word with the vicar’s wife about the driving lessons.’
‘Yes, she told me. It really is very generous of you.’
‘I’m on nights this week so I thought we might make a start. Perhaps Thursday, if you can make it? Much easier for you both to learn in the daylight.’
‘Thursday?’
‘You’re too busy?’
‘No . . . not at all. It’s just, well, I’m a bit apprehensive about it, I suppose,’ Olive admitted with a small laugh.
‘There’s no need. You’ll be a natural, I reckon.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get back. Iris isn’t feeling too well at the moment.’ He paused and then added, ‘It’s the anniversary today, you see . . . of us losing our lad, and she still takes it hard. We’ll be going down to the cemetery later. She’d spend all day there if I’d let her.’
Olive gave him a sympathetic look. ‘I know how I felt when I lost Jim but losing a child must be so much worse.’ She glanced across at Tilly. ‘So very much worse.’
‘Iris still thinks that something could have been done – to save him, like.’ Archie Dawson shook his head. ‘I don’t. Poor lad, I reckon he was glad to go and be freed from his suffering. I used to lie in bed at night listening to him trying to breathe. Really struggled, he did, wheezing and coughing . . .’
Olive didn’t know what to say. Her throat felt choked with emotion. Had he been a woman she would have reached out and touched his arm but of course he wasn’t, so that was impossible. All she could bring herself to say was a quiet, ‘You must miss him dreadfully.’
‘I miss what he might have been if he’d not been born so poorly. There was many a time when I’d be sitting at his bedside lifting him up to get air in to his lungs as he struggled to breathe, when I wished it was me that was so poorly and not him. He was such a brave little lad. Never a word of complaint, except towards the end one night he said to me, “Do you think I will die soon, Dad, only it hurts so much to live, and I’m that tired.”’
Now the rules of convention had to be ignored as Olive gave in to her natural instincts and reached out to place her hand briefly and compassionately on Sergeant Dawson’s arm.
‘He’s better off where he is now,’ he told her simply, ‘but Iris can’t see that.’ He cleared his throat and then looked across to where Tilly and Agnes were talking with several other young members of the local St John Ambulance brigade.
‘Tilly’s growing up into a fine young woman. One minute they’re still at school and the next they’re all grown up.’
Grown up? The sergeant’s words jarred a little on her. Olive didn’t want to think of Tilly being grown up. Not with a war on and all the temptations and difficulties that could bring for a young woman. She’d seen what could happen for herself with the last war: girls caught up in the patriotism and urgency of the moment, getting involved with and then marrying young men who had gone away to war and then, if they were lucky, had come back, but not as the young men they had been. And that was just those young women who had been lucky. She wasn’t the only woman of her generation to end up widowed with a child to bring up. War gave young women freedoms they would not otherwise have been granted – she had seen that too – but those freedoms could exact a heavy price and she desperately wanted to keep Tilly safe from the pain she herself had known.
‘Young Agnes is lucky to have found a billet with you,’ the sergeant continued.
‘Well, I don’t know about that, Sergeant,’ Olive demurred. ‘I want to do my best for her, of course . . .’
‘Something’s troubling you?’
‘In a way,’ Olive admitted. ‘Agnes isn’t my daughter, of course, but I can’t help feeling some responsibility towards her. She’s become very friendly with a young man – Ted – she’s met through her work at Chancery Lane underground station. He’s a train driver. They’ve been meeting up at a café there. From Agnes’s side it’s all very innocent. So far as she’s concerned he’s simply teaching her the names of all the stations. He sounds respectable and well-meaning enough, but without knowing him or having met him . . .’ Olive paused, knowing from Sergeant Dawson’s expression that she didn’t need to explain her concern in more detail. ‘She’s very young for her age,’ she added, ‘having only ever known life inside the orphanage.’
‘Leave it to me, Mrs Robbins. Chancery Lane comes under our jurisdiction. It won’t be any problem for me to call round there and ask a few discreet questions about this young man. You don’t happen to have his surname, do you?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t, Sergeant, and you really mustn’t go to any trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble. I’ll have a walk round there during the week and see what I can find out. Meanwhile I’ll see you on Thursday afternoon for your first driving lesson. Ernie Lord says I can collect the van any time that suits me, so would half-past two on Thursday afternoon be all right for you?’
Olive nodded. Now that the driving lessons were actually going to take place she felt far more apprehensive about them than excited, dreading both making a fool of herself by not being able to learn, and wasting the sergeant’s time.
There was something about working nights that was intensely wearying, Sally thought as she suppressed a yawn. Maybe it was because the operations that took place on nights were emergencies, which meant that one was always somehow on the alert. Being on nights gave a person too much time to think because even on the ward, nights lacked the bustling busy routine of daytime shifts.
She had already been up to the ward to check on ‘her’ patients, and to make sure that they were recovering comfortably from their operations, talking quietly to the new junior nurse on the ward as she went with her from bed to bed.
‘What are you doing that for?’ the junior had asked her when Sally had leaned close to the bandaged stump of an arm that had had to be removed after being crushed when a barrel had fallen onto it from a brewery lorry.
‘I’m just checking to see how it smells,’ Sally had told her once they had moved away from the bed. ‘That’s something we can’t always do when the patient is awake in case it frightens them. Stumps that aren’t healing and are becoming infected smell of that infection,’ she had gone on to explain.
The junior nurse had shuddered and pulled a face. Sally suspected that she would be one of those who didn’t stick out her training.
‘Cocoa?’ Ward Sister offered. ‘I’m just about to make some.’
‘Yes, please,’ Sally replied.
On nights
