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Authors: Margot Livesey

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BOOK: Eva Moves the Furniture
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As he described the Indian motorcycle his mother was helping him buy for Christmas, I gradually recovered my composure, and by the time we parted my fears were focused on Lily. I told her I'd been at the library all afternoon and, when she believed me, felt so wretched that I vowed to give Ian up. A few days later I was once again making excuses to pass the forge.
At last, on Christmas Eve, I confessed about the infirmary. “Jesus,” he said, his face crumpling, “I'll never see you again.”
“Of course you will. Glasgow isn't far, and I'll be home for weekends and holidays.”
“It won't be the same. You'll be full of fancy city ways. You won't want to be bothered with me.”
I argued, even though I guessed he spoke the truth.
We met on New Year's Day at the willow tree to say goodbye. Both our eyes were watery, and as I leaned against him I thought Lily had been right to worry. I could easily have been one of those girls, like Jessie, who married in early haste.
GLASGOW
I left Ballintyre the Monday after New Year's, wearing a navy-blue coat David had given me for Christmas and carrying the suitcase Lily had taken to Glasgow in 1915; it contained my two sets of uniform and my clothes. The nurses' hostel had sent a list, even including the underwear, which Lily insisted on following. I had sneaked in only a couple of items: my favourite green blouse and a pair of shoes. The taxi came on the stroke of eleven and the three of us rode to the station. While David bought my ticket, the first single to Glasgow I had ever purchased, Lily rattled off advice: Don't talk to strangers. Ask a policeman if you need help. Don't skip meals. Always carry a clean handkerchief.
I was relieved when the train wheezed into the station, but as I leaned out of the window to wave goodbye two strangers appeared before me. In place of my beloved ageless father and my aggravating
aunt stood an elderly man, stiffer and stouter by the month, and a leaf-thin woman whom the merest breeze could blow away. My girlhood was gone, and its passing had brought David and Lily to the far side of middle age. How had I failed to notice?
But I was eighteen, and the train soon rocked away my sadness. At Glasgow Central when the taxi driver suggested a wee tour of the town, the knowledge that this was just what Lily had warned against added a special piquancy to our trip down Buchanan Street. I stared longingly at the lighted shops and bustling pavements. Soon I would be among this glamourous crowd. The nurses' hostel bore a strong resemblance to the grammar school in Troon, and as I stepped inside the same combination of floor wax, disinfectant, and cabbage smells greeted me. I gave my name, and the porter said, “Good afternoon, Nurse McEwen. Nasty weather.”
I was still marvelling at my title as he led me upstairs to my room and pointed out the rules on the back of the door. “The bathroom is down the hall. Supper is at six-thirty.”
The room was small and spartan: a single bed, a chest of drawers, a desk and chair, a wardrobe, an easy chair. The walls were a greenish grey, the curtains a greyish green. The sole decoration was a calendar. That this was to be my new home seemed impossible. I opened the suitcase and began to unpack, but after only a couple of skirts, I faltered. The sight of the neatly folded clothes which Lily had ironed and packed the day before made me sink down on the edge of the bed. In my entire life I had not spent a single night away from Ballintyre. Of course David and Lily would write and I would go back for holidays, but never again would I have the certainty of being in their company day after day.
I might have spent the rest of the evening sitting beside my half-empty
suitcase, save for a knock at the door. “Come in,” I called, standing to meet a stranger.
A dark, curly-haired girl peered round the door in comical fashion and introduced herself. Daphne lived next door and had come to take me to supper. As she led the way downstairs, she told me that the previous occupant of my room had quit just before Christmas. “Some sort of breakdown. Poor girl.”
I nodded, my attention fixed on the hem of her uniform, considerably shorter than my own. Mine had been measured by Lily to be exactly the regulation three inches below the knee. In the dining room, amid the din of cutlery and conversation, I asked questions and listened to Daphne's advice. “Avoid Sister McTavish. She'll have your guts for garters. Graham is a good egg. Volunteer for the dispensary. It's painless and gets you a gold star.”
Back in my room, as I laid my clothes in the chest of drawers, I recalled Daphne jumping up to fetch me another cup of tea. How much easier it was to embark on a friendship without having to look over my shoulder.
 
 
The next day I found myself plunged into ceaseless work. In my daydreams I had imagined myself taking the pulse of pale men, holding my cool hand to the foreheads of feverish children, but mostly I had been preoccupied with living in Glasgow. I had paid little attention to the fact that student nurses worked sixty hours a week and had to study as well. When was there time for Shona's high jinks?
Within a few weeks I felt much as I had at Mr. Laing's. I did not seem able to do anything right, either during lectures or on the wards, and it was small consolation to know that this time the
errors were my own. My first day on the ward, Sister caught me accepting a peppermint from a patient, and it was downhill from there. I could not keep all the do's and don'ts straight. I understood there was a correct way to give an injection or treat a disease; why did it matter, though, how I rolled a bandage or made a bed? Worse than all this, I was afraid of pain, of wounds. I closed my eyes even when injecting the dummy.
Daphne, who was three months ahead of me, insisted that the work got easier, that everyone made mistakes, but that did not seem to be true of my classmates. In the few minutes each night before I fell asleep, I racked my brain for alternatives. Might I be qualified to work in a library like Mrs. Nicholson? Or perhaps there was something I could do in a hotel? I was seriously contemplating giving notice when, after several days of shivering and coughing, I fainted during anatomy. The sister had paused in listing the bones of the wrist to reprimand my cardigan; even on the coldest days, nurses were forbidden to wear anything over their short-sleeved uniforms. As I reached to remove the garment, I slid to the floor.
I came round in the women's ward of the infirmary. The nurse who held a glass of water to my lips told me I had bronchitis. “Don't go,” I begged as she made to leave.
“Quiet, dear,” she said, and whisked away.
She was busy, not unkind, but later when patients made the same appeal to me, I would remember the searing loneliness of those hours, my bed like an island of one, and try to find an extra minute to stay and talk to them. Meanwhile, when Lily came to visit, only pride prevented me from begging her to take me home; I scarcely heard the strange story she told of how, only a few months old, I had escaped my crib and nearly fallen down the stairs.
As my strength returned, day by day, I drifted closer to shore. Watching the nurses, I could see that the apparently petty rules made sense: knowing how to do the simple things—plump a pillow, take a pulse—made it possible to do the complicated ones—stop a haemorrhage, save a life. By the time I recovered, I had missed so many weeks I had to start the training over again, but everything was different; now I actually wanted to be a nurse.
Any lingering doubts were swept away by the prospect of war. Almost from one day to the next, the hazy rumours from Europe clarified into dark ferocious facts; Chamberlain's umbrella became a joke. Blackout blinds were hung in the infirmary and the hostel. Gas masks and ration books were issued. Signs pointed the way to air raid shelters. David wrote that he was trying to get into the Home Guard. Ian enlisted in the Royal Scots, and Isobel joined the WRAC. Like the other probationers, I complained bitterly about not being qualified in time.
 
 
In January 1940, the air raids started. Night after night we woke to the sound of the sirens, and at the infirmary a memo was posted: What to do in the event of an air raid. At the first warning, all patients were to be conducted to the cellars. In practise, however, with only two nurses to a ward, this proved impossible. Less than half the patients had been carried down when the all-clear sounded. The memo was revised. Ambulatory patients should make their own way to the cellar; everyone else was to be placed beneath their beds. Even this proved impractical and more dangerous to some patients than the raids themselves. Finally the night nurses settled for sing-alongs.
At the hostel the drill was simpler. We were to make our way promptly, with our gas masks, to the boiler room, where old benches from the dining hall had been set up. Sometimes we had sing-alongs there too; the sister in charge of probationers turned out to have a surprisingly good voice. Or sometimes Daphne and I played Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. But that sort of fun only happened when the raids began early. Usually the heat of the boiler room and the dim light—reading or sewing were impossible, though some nurses knitted—lulled us into a stupour from which the all-clear roused us. On the worst nights we were barely back in bed before the sirens started again.
We grew pale and short-tempered. The nurses who were on night duty became objects of envy; at least they could rest, undisturbed, during the day. But when my turn came, it was harder than I expected, even with blackout blinds, to fall asleep. I lay in bed, listening to the maid sweeping the corridor, and thought of Ballintyre and the birds singing in the apple tree outside my window. At last I nodded off to dreams filled with missed trains and lost objects. I arrived on duty at 9 P.M., heavy-headed, and was sent to men's surgical. “Just my luck,” muttered the staff nurse, on hearing that this was my first night. The two of us had twenty-seven men in our care.
Her strong Glasgow accent was not unlike Daphne's but she herself showed no trace of Daphne's kindness and humour. During the next few hours, as she chivvied me from task to task, her forehead never once unfurrowed, even when a drunk brought in at closing time with a broken ankle burst into a lusty version of “Donald, where's y'er troosers?” Finally at one o'clock, with everything more or less under control, she announced she was going to dinner.
“Watch the drip on number eleven,” she said, handing me the keys to the dangerous drugs cupboard. “Bed number four is in trouble.”
She marched away and in the wake of her departure one of those odd silences fell when, for a few minutes, no one was snoring or groaning or crying out, and from behind the drawn screens of number four, which I had passed a hundred times that evening, I heard tiny mouselike gasps. In all my thoughts of nursing, strange to say, it had never once occurred to me that some patients failed to recover. Even performing last offices on the pink-and-white dummy we used for bandages and injections had failed to prepare me.
Now I stood beside the flimsy screens, listening intently, until some mixture of pride and compassion forced me inside. In the glow of the night-light a slender man lay propped on several pillows, head lolling, eyes closed. I was struck by the ordinariness of his striped pyjamas, similar to David's, and then by how youthful his face was in spite of grey hair. (Later I encountered other patients in whom pain had lessened, not deepened, the marks of age.) As he stammered from one breath to the next, I clasped my hands and counted like I used to do between the flash of lightning and the peal of thunder, as if the interval would reveal some crucial distance. I was reaching hesitantly for his pulse, a wholly useless gesture I was terrified to make, when from a nearby bed a voice whispered, “Bedpan, nurse.”
By the time I returned, he was gone. I don't know for how long I remained, counting into the hundreds, hoping for one more gasp, before I heard the staff nurse's footsteps.
“He died,” I told her. “Number four. I couldn't stop him.”
At my babble, her frown intensified. She held out her hand, not in comfort but for the keys. “Pull yourself together, Nurse McEwen. Off you go to dinner, and pick up a shroud on your way back.”
A shroud, I thought. Where on earth would I find that in the middle of the night? But when I asked, the porter took me to a room lined floor to ceiling with neatly folded garments. “Adult?” he demanded. “Small, medium, or large?”
And suddenly I understood that the other great business of the infirmary, besides helping the sick to return to the world, was helping them to leave it. Yet how seldom anyone spoke of this. Only Father Wishart and Samuel acknowledged our role as watchers at that perilous threshold. Samuel told me that the first time a patient died on the operating table, he had sliced into the chest cavity and begun to massage the heart by hand, shouting for the man to come back. “I couldn't believe there was nothing to be done,” he said. “The anaesthetist had to pull me away.”
Walking back to the ward, carrying the flimsy shroud through the darkened corridors, I thought of Barbara. I was glad she had died at home with people who knew her name, who were not afraid to take her hand.
 
 
I could not write of this to David or Lily, but some of it made its way into my letters to Ian. He turned out to be a surprisingly eloquent correspondent, who outwitted the censors to let me know he was in Algeria. I was glad to hear from him, both for his news and for the kudos of having a friend on active service. I wrote back promptly—after all he was fighting for king and country—but when Daphne invited me to join her and Arthur and Arthur's mate, Roy, for an evening, I accepted without a qualm. Over fish and chips, she and I took turns telling stories about the infirmary; by this time I had
learned from her how to transform even my worst adventures into comic episodes. The men shook their heads and blinked with laughter. Then we made our way to the Odeon.
Although Roy and I went out on three or four occasions, I can barely recall his face, perhaps because we were almost always in the darkness, of either the cinema or the blackout. I do remember that first time, walking back to the hostel, when he slipped his arm around my waist and I leaned towards him. Suddenly someone was tugging at my sleeve. I leapt back, but it was only Daphne. “Two minutes till curfew,” she whispered.
BOOK: Eva Moves the Furniture
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