The Nurses of Steeple Street Read online

  ‘I arrived a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll just be getting used to the place, then. Don’t worry, you’ll settle in quickly.’ Polly sat down on the bed and pulled off her shoes. ‘Have you met Phil yet?’

  ‘Phil?’

  ‘Philippa Fletcher. Except everyone calls her Phil. She’s the other trainee. About this height, brown hair, grey eyes. Usually in a bad temper about something.’

  ‘Ah.’ Agnes nodded. ‘Yes, I think I have met her.’

  Polly smiled. ‘Oh dear! I can see you have. Don’t worry, her bark is far worse than her bite. She’s a sweetie once you get to know her.’

  ‘We didn’t get off to a very good start,’ Agnes said ruefully. ‘I stole all her bathwater.’

  ‘No wonder she was cross, then. Phil and Miss Templeton cover one of the rural areas, out towards Wakefield,’ Polly explained. ‘They have to travel miles and miles on their bikes, and poor Phil so looks forward to her relaxing soak when she comes home. Don’t look so stricken, you weren’t to know!’ She smiled at Agnes. ‘You’ll get used to everyone and their little ways soon, I’m sure.’

  I wouldn’t bet on it, Agnes thought, fiddling with her collar buttons. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a month. I finished my probation last week, so I’m making calls on my own now.’ Polly fluffed up her blonde hair and reached for her lipstick. ‘Have they told you which nurse you’ll be paired up with?’ she asked, catching Agnes’ eye in the mirror.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Oh, well, with any luck you’ll get someone nice. Most of the district nurses here are delightful, with a couple of exceptions.’ She grimaced at her reflection as she painted on a perfect pink Cupid’s bow.

  A picture of Bess Bradshaw came into Agnes’ mind. If any of the district nurses were nice, she certainly hadn’t met them yet.

  A bell rang downstairs. ‘Teatime,’ Polly declared, pressing her lips together and putting the gold cap back on her lipstick. ‘Now you can meet everyone.’

  The other nurses were already seated around the table, but the hum of conversation stopped the moment Agnes walked in. Her stomach sank at the sight of so many curious faces turned towards her.

  ‘Ah, Miss Sheridan,’ Miss Gale greeted her. She looked even tinier beside Bess Bradshaw, who sat next to her. ‘Do come and join us. Everyone, this is our latest recruit, Agnes Sheridan.’

  ‘But she doesn’t like to be called Aggie,’ Bess Bradshaw put in, a hint of mockery in her voice.

  There was a low murmur of greetings around the table from the other women. Agnes tried to take in their names as Miss Gale introduced them all – Miss Templeton, Miss Goode, Miss Jarvis, Miss McLeod, Miss Hook – ‘And of course, you already know Mrs Bradshaw,’ Miss Gale finished, with a glance to the woman at her side.

  ‘Oh yes, we know each other all right!’ Bess said.

  Agnes couldn’t look at the other nurses as she took her place at the table between Polly and Miss Hook. The women’s expressions were bland, but she knew what they were really thinking behind those polite smiles. Bess Brad-shaw would have told them all about their dismal visit to Quarry Hill, and how the new girl had made a fool of herself.

  ‘And this is Miss Fletcher, one of your fellow trainees,’ Miss Gale went on. ‘I daresay she will help you to settle in.’

  The cross-looking girl scowled back at her from the far end of the table. If their earlier encounter was anything to go by, Agnes didn’t think Phil Fletcher was going to offer much help at all.

  Dottie had set out a delicious-looking tea, with plates piled high with sandwiches, cakes and scones with jam. It was a long time since Agnes had seen such a spread. At St Jude’s meals had been very Spartan affairs, eaten in silence at a long table in the chilly refectory, with the Matron watching over them all. Here, laughter and chatter flowed as plates were passed around the table, and cups filled with tea from the big brown china pot.

  Of course, the nurses all wanted to know about Agnes. She braced herself against the barrage of questions. Where was she from? Did she have any family? What had made her decide on district nursing?

  ‘I hear you trained in London?’ Miss Goode spoke up. She was younger than most of the other nurses, in her late twenties, and looked as if she lived up to her name with her pleasant face, shiny pink cheeks, fluffy golden hair and wide blue eyes. Angelic goodness seemed to shine out of her.

  Agnes nodded. ‘At the Nightingale Hospital.’

  ‘So you’re a Nightingale girl, are you?’ Miss MacLeod, a brisk Scot, nodded her approval. ‘It’s a very fine establishment, so I understand. We can expect great things of you, Miss Sheridan.’

  Agnes heard Bess’ muffled snort from the other side of the table and blushed furiously.

  ‘I have a friend at the Nightingale,’ Miss Goode said. ‘Miriam Trott and I trained together, but she has just been appointed a ward sister there. You must know her?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ Agnes said quietly.

  ‘But you must,’ Miss Goode insisted. ‘She has been there at least six months. She is on one of the female wards. Gynae, I think …’

  ‘I left the Nightingale six months ago,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Oh? And where have you been since?’ Miss McLeod wanted to know.

  Agnes stared down at the crumbs on her plate. ‘St Jude’s,’ she said in a low voice. She could feel her face flaming.

  Miss McLeod frowned. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘It’s a maternity home. In Manchester.’

  ‘I suppose you went there to do your midwifery?’ Polly said excitedly. ‘Lucky you. I can’t wait to do mine.’

  Bess gave another derisive snort. ‘You’ve got to finish your training here first,’ she said, helping herself to a scone.

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Agnes looked up, her own embarrassment forgotten. There was something going on, but she wasn’t quite sure what.

  ‘And so she will, in a few months,’ said Miss Jarvis, giving Polly an encouraging smile. She was in her forties, tall and angular. But her soft voice and warm smile transformed her gaunt features.

  ‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ Bess muttered. ‘And I see you’re wearing make-up again?’ she added. ‘How many times have you been told about that?’

  Now it was Polly’s turn to stare down at her plate. The poor girl looked crushed. ‘I am off duty,’ she murmured.

  ‘You’re still wearing your uniform.’ Bess pointed the end of a butter knife towards her. ‘I’m warning you, if I see you wearing it again I’ll drag you to that bathroom and scrub it off your face myself!’

  A slight frost seemed to descend over the tea table, and the conversation suddenly became stilted and self-conscious. Miss Hook lifted the mood slightly by reciting an amusing poem she intended to submit to the Queen’s Nurse magazine. But as the other nurses listened, Agnes was still painfully aware of Polly sitting silently beside her.

  Only Bess Bradshaw seemed unconcerned as she spooned jam on to another scone and stuffed it into her mouth. She really was an unpleasant woman, Agnes thought.

  It was almost a relief when tea was over and they could all disperse. A couple of the nurses went off to the common room, while others returned to their rooms. Agnes approached Polly as she was heading towards the stairs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Polly replied, but her smile was brittle.

  ‘Take no notice of Mrs Bradshaw. She’s a horrible woman,’ Agnes said.

  Polly stopped on the stairs. ‘What makes you say that?’ she asked.

  As they returned to their room, Agnes explained what had happened earlier that day. Polly listened sympathetically.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said when Agnes had finished. ‘What an awful thing to happen on your first day.’

  ‘Mrs Bradshaw didn’t make it any better,’ Agnes said. ‘ “Call yourself a nurse, Miss Sheridan?” ’ s
he mimicked the Assistant Superintendent’s Yorkshire accent.

  Polly smiled. ‘That sounds just like her. And you’re right, she can be very unkind sometimes.’

  ‘Well, I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to pay any attention to her,’ Agnes declared. ‘And I don’t think you should either.’

  ‘That might be more difficult for me than it is for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  Polly’s smile grew sad. ‘Because she’s my mother,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t have to humiliate poor Polly like that,’ Ellen Jarvis said as they left the dining room together.

  Bess had been expecting her to say something. Ellen was always sticking up for Polly. ‘I were only speaking the truth,’ she insisted. ‘You know what she’s like. Never sticks at owt.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘She didn’t stick to her nurse’s training first time round, did she?’

  ‘Yes, but she went back to the hospital and got her qualification in the end. That can’t have been easy for her. And she’s doing very well with her district nursing.’

  ‘She’s only been training for a month! And you heard her, she’s already going on about midwifery.’ Bess shook her head. ‘As I said, that girl never sticks at owt.’

  ‘Well, I think she’s showing a great deal of character, under the circumstances.’

  Bess understood what she meant, but chose to ignore it. It was all very well for Ellen to lecture her, but she wasn’t Polly’s mother. She hadn’t been through all the heartache that Bess had.

  And even though they had been good friends for many years, sometimes Bess found Ellen Jarvis a bit too saintly.

  ‘Time will tell,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to talk about my daughter. What do you make of the new lass?’

  ‘Miss Sheridan? She seems all right to me. Very quiet, but I suppose she’s just shy.’

  ‘I think she’s hiding summat.’

  Ellen laughed. ‘Oh, Bess! How can you say that? You hardly know the girl. Besides, Miss Gale has vouched for her. She and Miss Sheridan’s mother were old school friends, I believe.’

  ‘I know, but there’s summat about her I can’t put my finger on.’

  ‘I might have known you’d be suspicious!’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Bess said. ‘But I’m going to ask Miss Gale if I can go on t’district with her.’

  ‘Haven’t you done enough? You’ve already frightened the girl out of her wits today. You don’t want to scare her off completely.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be a district nurse in the first place if she’s that easily scared. No, I’m going to find out exactly how well trained our hoity-toity Miss Sheridan really is.’

  Ellen looked at her friend thoughtfully. ‘You really have taken against her, haven’t you?’

  ‘As I said, there’s summat about her I can’t put my finger on,’ Bess said. ‘But if Agnes Sheridan has a secret then I mean to find out what it is!’

  Chapter Three

  ‘Butchered,’ Lil Fairbrass said. ‘That’s what I heard, at any rate.’

  Christine Fairbrass sat at the kitchen table, trying to fathom a difficult algebraic equation while her mother huddled on the other side of the room by the range, talking to their next-door neighbour Rene Wells in hushed whispers. Christine knew she wasn’t supposed to be listening, least of all understanding what they were discussing, but it had been all over Quarry Hill by the time she got home from school. By teatime, everyone knew how poor Maisie Warren had been found dead by the district nurse, with her poor little bairns sobbing next to her.

  Christine had come home to find that her mother had taken in Maisie’s two children. Now the eldest sat across the table, chewing on a crust of bread and dripping, while the youngest lay in Lil’s arms sucking noisily on a bottle. Christine had to stop occasionally to brush away the crumbs the grubby little girl managed to scatter over the table.

  ‘Look at him,’ Lil sighed, hugging the baby closer. At least she’d changed his nappy so the house no longer reeked of pee. ‘Poor little loves. They don’t know what’s going on, do they? Bless their hearts.’

  ‘What will happen to them, do you reckon?’ Rene asked.

  Lil shook her head. ‘I dunno. I suppose they’ll have to go to the workhouse, since Maisie has no family to take ’em in. I’d have ’em myself, but what with Christine and the boys and my old dad just moved in, we can’t afford any more mouths to feed.’

  ‘And there’s no sign of their father, I suppose?’

  ‘That good-for-nothing!’ Lil’s lip curled. ‘No one’s seen anything of him since he cleared off last month.’

  ‘And we all know why he went, don’t we?’ Rene lit a cigarette. ‘Couldn’t face up to his responsibilities. Left poor Maisie in the family way and with a load of debts to pay.’ She drew on her cigarette and blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Poor lass, no wonder she were desperate. She were struggling to keep a roof over their heads as it was, without another baby to look after.’

  ‘I’d wring Annie Pilcher’s neck if I got hold of her.’ Christine’s mother hissed the name, her voice full of venom. ‘She’s the one who did this to Maisie.’

  Christine kept her eyes fixed on her schoolwork, but tilted her head so she could hear their whispered conversation.

  Annie Pilcher lived on the other side of Quarry Hill, in a cottage even more rundown than the one where the Fairbrasses lived. She was a scrawny, grey-haired woman, so slightly built and unassuming that you could pass her on the street and never look twice at her. Christine couldn’t imagine how she could have killed Maisie Warren. Maisie had been a big, tough woman, like Lil herself. She could have flattened Annie Pilcher in a minute.

  ‘I heard Annie’s gone off to visit her sister in Castleford for a couple of days,’ Rene said.

  Lil pursed her lips. ‘Aye, and if she’s got any sense, she’ll stay there.’

  Christine put down her pencil, curiosity getting the better of her. ‘What did Annie Pilcher do, Mum?’ she asked.

  Rene and Lil exchanged wary looks.

  ‘Never you mind,’ Lil said.

  ‘She just does – favours for women, that’s all,’ Rene explained to Christine.

  ‘Favours!’ her mother muttered, so low Christine could barely hear her. ‘She didn’t do poor Maisie any favours, did she?’

  ‘All the same, there’s plenty of women around here have reason to be grateful to her.’

  ‘And a few more in their graves because of her, too! And I’ll thank you not to go filling my Christine’s head with any ideas about that woman, Rene Wells.’ Lil turned to Christine. ‘You stay away from Annie Pilcher, d’you hear me? Don’t even speak to her if you can help it.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Christine went back to her work, feeling mystified. She knew her mother had a quick temper, but she couldn’t imagine someone as inoffensive as Annie Pilcher ever upsetting her. She was like a little grey mouse, scurrying around the streets.

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t tell your lass more about these things,’ she heard Rene whisper. ‘She ought to know.’

  ‘The less she knows, the better it will be for her. She’s far too young for all that.’

  ‘Come off it, Lil. She’s sixteen years old. She should know what’s what by now.’ Rene took another puff on her cigarette. ‘Bloody hell, you weren’t much older than her when you were expecting your Tony.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I want my Christine to go the same way,’ Lil said firmly. ‘She’s a good girl. She in’t going to bother with men. She’s going to make something of herself.’

  Christine looked up and found the small girl staring at her across the table. She was wiping her nose on her sleeve, but her eyes were fixed on Christine, wide and reproachful. Almost as if she knew something …

  Christine looked away sharply.

  ‘She’s still a lass, Lil,’ Rene was laughing. ‘Clever or not, one day she’ll meet a young man who’ll catch her eye
, and the next thing you know …’

  ‘Not my Christine. She’s got a brain in her head, and I want her to use it. Why else do you think I work my fingers to the bone to pay for uniforms and books so she can go to that grammar school? It’s so she won’t spend the rest of her life in a dump like this.’

  Christine stared down at the page in front of her, trying to concentrate. The numbers jumbled in front of her eyes.

  She wished she could tell her mother the truth. Lil Fairbrass deserved that. She had been a good mother, looking after Christine and her five elder brothers single-handed since her husband died fifteen years earlier. There hadn’t been a man in her life since. Lil lived for her kids, taking in washing and working night and day to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

  Or perhaps she would understand. She loved Christine, and all she wanted was for her to be happy. To Lil, and to Christine’s brothers, she was the baby of the family, the clever one, the little princess to be cherished and protected from harm.

  But they couldn’t baby her for ever. Rene was right. Christine was a young woman, not a little girl any more. She had grown up.

  And she had fallen in love.

  She caught her mother’s gaze out of the corner of her eye. Lil was watching her, as she often did when she thought Christine wouldn’t notice her. Love and pride shone out of her plain, worn face.

  Tell her, urged a small voice inside Christine’s head. She ought to know …

  ‘D’you think Mum’s awake yet?’ the little girl piped up from across the table. ‘Only I want to see her, and she’ll be worried if me and Ronnie in’t there …’

  ‘Oh, love.’ Lil plonked the baby into Rene’s lap and beckoned the little girl over. ‘Come here a minute, pet. I’ve got summat to tell you.’