A Wartime Nurse Read Online Free

Shildon now.’ She felt so bereft, the fact that she was starting her new job hardly entered her mind.
    I’ll write,’ said Alan. ‘And you know that song “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree?” Soppy, I know, but I mean it.’
    ‘I won’t,’ said Theda, and hurried off to the hospital gates. When she looked back, he had gone.
    The layout of the hospital at Bishop Auckland might be different from that at Newcastle, but the work, the discipline and the comradeship were the same, Theda found. And as ever there was a chronic shortage of trained staff so she was kept busy the whole time she was on the ward, at first on a ward for officers, separate from the old workhouse section. Going back to her room in the nurses’ home, tired and ready for her bed, she had little time to worry about her men at the front, Alan now beside Joss.
    ‘You are always in my mind,’ she wrote nevertheless in her twice-weekly letters to Alan. She sat one night, just before lights out, and thought about him, her writing case open on her lap in bed, the fountain pen he had sent her for her birthday in her hand. She looked at it, a blue marbled bakelite case with a gold nib. Somehow in the time since he went away they had grown closer. Every morning her heart beat a little faster as she went to check her pigeon hole to see if there was a letter from him, and when there was she would thrust it under the bib of her apron and save it for her break.
    She would take it up to her room, foregoing her cup of tea and half a teacake, and devour the letter instead. She would kiss it in the place where his fingers had been, and smile at herself for being a lovesick idiot. Then the intensity of her worry for him would hit her with full force and she would close her eyes and will him to stay alive.
    You only knew the man for a couple of days, she told her reflection in the dressing-table mirror as she sat in bed and thought what to write in reply. For she couldn’t let him know just how terrified she was that she was going to lose him, have him snatched away by the war. The bloody war . . . who invented war, anyroad?
    There was a small supply of the new wonder drug, Penicillin, solely for the use of the British officers on the ward. Understandable really, it was in such short supply and the officers were needed to win the war and save them all from the Nazis. But if anything happened to Alan, if he was wounded (God forbid!), would there be any of the wonder drug to save him? Oh, she hoped so. She hoped some doctor would use it to save her Alan.
    He had been away for almost two years, apart from one Christmas when he came home on a fortnight’s leave. Theda had been transferred to the Children’s Ward and felt she had really found her niche – she loved working with the children. She had a week’s holiday though, and when Alan climbed down from the train on Darlington station she was there to meet him. There was what looked like a whole regiment of red-bereted men, looking fit and sun-tanned and smiling hugely as they grabbed hold of their wives or girlfriends, but she knew Alan straight away, even though she had seen so little of him before he went away.
    He dropped his kitbag and swung her off her feet and the first thing they did was buy an engagement ring at the jeweller’s on the High Row: a gold ring with three small diamonds set in platinum, slightly on the cross, as was fashionable.
    ‘I love you,’ said Alan as he slipped it on to her finger. ‘I want to marry you when the war is over.’
    ‘Are you sure? Are you really sure?’ asked Theda, looking up at him. She herself had been sure, had been filled with a wild elation when he stepped off the train and she had seen him again, for she had feared he would be not at all as she remembered him, had worried he would be different from his letters somehow. But he was the Alan she remembered and Theda knew now that she loved him.
    ‘I’m sure,’ he said and put his arms around her, there in