a nun?’
‘Why are you staring at me?’
‘I’m not staring, Millicent.’
‘Your eyes look like fire.’
‘It is the light of the sun setting. It shines through the window at this time of day.’
A curious auditory illusion of this area was the apparent sound of waves breaking against the shore, accompanied by the crash of crumbling cliffs. Everyone recognised the noise and justifiably explained it as the roadworks for the new motorway. But Millicent knew better. She believed it to be another beach and shoreline just beneath the surface of the earth. They would find the stairway when they were older.
Millicent often held such conversations with Montmorency in the privacy of the garden shed. Unfortunately they were both quarrelsome by nature, and there were occasions when she would snatch up the dog and hurl it to the other side of the hut before breaking down in tearful apologies. Sometimes she would sing to him, cradling him in her arms. Sometimes she would lay him down to sleep, a small cloth over him as a blanket.
There was a call from the house. ‘Milly!’ It was her grandmother. ‘Supper’s ready. It’s your favourite!’
‘What is your favourite?’ Montmorency asked her.
‘Anything they don’t have to touch.’
She had two more terms at school, and was intent on making her plans for the future with Montmorency. They whispered together.
Weeks passed and Millicent’s frustration grew. On Thursday nights her grandmother would prepare a batch of chips in a frying pan greased with fat. The fat would then be allowed to cool overnight to make dripping. Millicent knew well enough when her mother and grandmother had fallen asleep; she was familiar with the rhythm of their breathing and snoring that could be heard through the paper-thin walls of the little house. She waited until she could wait no longer. Two months later, silently she opened the window of her bedroom and climbed down the stairs; she crossed the living room into the kitchen where the pan of fat lay beside the oven. She turned on one of the gas rings and lit it with a long match. As the fat seethed and bubbled she opened the door into the garden. She went back to the stove, and then threw another lit match into the pan. The fat burst into flames at once, and at that moment Millicent ran out into the garden and closed the door behind her. As soon as the flames took hold of the house, she began to call out ‘Fire! Fire!’ She knew that her mother and grandmother slept well, and kept her voice low. But the smoke was now creeping about her and she screamed in earnest. Some windows were opened. ‘Fire! Fire!’ In the confusion the fire brigade was called by a young neighbour, Peggy, from a telephone box at the corner of the street.
By the time the firemen came, it was too late to save the lives of the two women trapped in the flames. It seemed to be little short of a miracle that the girl had survived and was quite unhurt. Of course she broke down in tears when told about her mother and grandmother, and she was for a while inconsolable. She spent the rest of the night sitting in the kitchen of a neighbour, drinking tea. She was questioned gently by a police detective on the following morning. Yes, she had smelled the smoke and heard the sound of fire; instinctively she had opened the window of her little bedroom and, driven by fear, she had jumped down to the garden. It was a distance of only a few feet, and she had not been injured. Still, she could not help but limp a little.
When the fire took hold of the house, she never heard any sound from her mother and grandmother; they must have beeen smothered as they slept. She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose.
‘You had a lucky escape, young lady,’ the policeman said to her.
‘Lucky?’ She blushed.
Her aunt Helen came to collect her that afternoon; she was now Millicent’s most prominent living relative; and she was very tearful. She was wearing a large black hat, and Millicent noticed with disgust that she had a perpetually dripping nose. ‘You poor thing,’ she said, as she threw her arms about the girl. Millicent was carrying Montmorency, who was only slightly singed. She gently disengaged herself from her aunt’s embrace.
Millicent had already decided that she did not want to attend a new school. She would be fourteen the following month, and had no need to do so. ‘You know,’ she told her aunt after living with her for a month or two, ‘I think I might be a good nurse.’ Aunt Helen was delighted. It would take this difficult girl off her hands; she had in fact two nieces who had looked on her for support and protection during the war. As well as Millicent Swallow she had a second niece, Maud Finch. There were many such extended families in wartime. But, with the shortages, two were too many.
Aunt Helen was in charge of the local Women’s Institute and, according to administrative practice, served on the board of governors of the local sanatorium on Ealing Common.
The sanatorium was under the auspices of the Roman Catholic bishop and, according to the strict regulations, even the youngest nurses were addressed as ‘sister’. They dressed as plainly as nuns in a convent, and tried to be equally demure. Millicent was recruited without discussion. Nurses were needed. As a very junior nurse – now known as Sister Swallow – she was assigned a cubicle with another young trainee, Sister Appiah, who had a habit of tearing photographs out of the Barbados Gleaner and pasting them into a large red volume. Her principal interest was in the many beauty contests on the island and it was rumoured that Sister Appiah had taken first prize in one of them; so she was known by the patients as Sister Beauty, when in fact Millicent believed that she was on the plain side. Millicent had in fact taken an immediate dislike to her, and waited for a chance to cause her trouble.
In the winter of 1944 an epidemic of dysentery spread across West London that particularly affected the frail with vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal cramps. There was such an overflow of fluids, of all varieties, that the nurses were happy to delegate their work to the trainees. All of whom, including Sister Appiah and Sister Swallow, were called to duty as a result. Millicent already regretted having joined the profession. One evening Millicent knocked quietly on her aunt’s office door in the sanatorium, at the end of a long corridor. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you ought to come with me.’ Her seriousness and quietness affected her aunt, and slowly they tip-toed along the corridor.
They walked through the three wards, accompanied by such a cacophony of groans and tears that Millicent put her hands up to her ears. ‘Don’t do that, sister,’ Aunt Helen rebuked her. ‘It creates a bad impression. We are all God’s children.’ At the same moment both women heard the distinctive sound of Caribbean music, vey close to the cha-cha-cha, which could only have come from the nurses’ day room. Helen stared at Millicent. ‘Is this why you called me?’
The girl nodded and then bowed her head as if in shame. She knew very well that the blame would fall on Sister Appiah. ‘Say no more about it,’ Helen told her. ‘There are more ways than one way to skin a cat.’
Within a fortnight Sister Appiah and the other revellers had been transferred to work in a mental institution at Hounslow, and Millicent had the luxury of the shared cubicle to herself. Space was still comparatively cramped, however, and a few days later there was a knock at her door. ‘Sister Millicent! Sister Millicent! God be with you!’ Immediately she sensed an intrusion. The matron was accompanied by a young woman of indeterminate age who continually brushed her hair across her face with a nervous gesture.
‘I am reserving my special ones to your care,’ Helen told her. ‘This is Sister Finch.’
So what was so special about this pale-faced brat? The fact she was Millicent’s cousin was known only to Aunt Helen at the time. Favouritism
