Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [52]
A cheerful-looking girl with ginger hair and freckles came up to her and smiled. ‘If you’re looking for a table there’s a spare seat on ours,’ she offered.
Gratefully Grace followed her over to one of the tables where four other girls were already seated.
‘Now we’ve got a full table I suppose we’d better introduce ourselves,’ the ginger-haired girl suggested. ‘I’m Hannah Philips.’
‘Grace Campion,’ Grace followed her, listening carefully as the other girls gave their names: Iris Robinson, small and pretty with dark hair and huge dark eyes. Jennifer Halliwell, who spoke with what she explained to them was a Yorkshire accent, adding that her family were originally from Leeds. Doreen Sefton, who said that if the war went on for long enough she wanted to join the army as a nurse, once she had done her training, and finally the prettiest of them all, in Grace’s opinion, Lillian Green, who had blonde curls and huge blue eyes, and who was so slim and delicate she looked as though she might blow away in the lightest wind, and who giggled and explained that she had decided to train as a nurse after she had met a gorgeous-looking doctor at a friend’s party.
After they had eaten their sandwiches and cake, and drunk as much tea as they wanted, Home Sister stood up and gave them a talk about what was expected of them and the high standards set and demanded by the teaching hospitals. She emphasised how fortunate they were to be given the opportunity to train at such a prestigious hospital.
Their lessons, they learned, started at eight o’clock in the morning and did not finish until six o’clock at night. At the end of their three-month training they would sit an exam and if they passed it then and only then would they be allowed on to the wards, as that lowest of nursing ranks, the probationer.
Once they’d been dismissed, everyone made their way back to their rooms.
‘You’ll find that the six of us will tend to stick together now,’ Hannah told Grace knowledgeably, when they were the only two of the original six who had still not reached their rooms. ‘So it’s a pity we’ve got Green as one of our number. That sort always causes trouble. You mark my words.’
Grace didn’t know what to say. Hannah had already told them over tea that her elder sister and her cousin were both qualified nurses, and she certainly seemed to know the ropes better than anyone else.
‘I don’t mind a bit of a lark around but when it comes to chasing after doctors, saying that you’ve only taken up nursing so that you can do that …’ she gave a disapproving shake of her head.
Alone in her own small room, Grace undressed, hanging up her uniform carefully, and then once she was washed and in her night things she sat down to write to her family.
Her head was buzzing with all that had happened. There was so much she wanted to write that she hardly knew where to start. She felt both uncertain and excited, half of her wishing that right now she was at home in her mother’s kitchen, with its familiar sights and smells, and most of all her mother in one of her floral pinafores bustling about looking after them all, and the other half of her sharply aware that she had taken the first step from being a girl at home to being an independent young woman. She stifled an exhausted yawn. She didn’t want to write anything that would alarm her mother, like how hard the work was going to be, or how nervous she had felt listening to Home Sister’s stern warnings about the penalties for not making the grade or breaking one of the very many rules. It had been such an extraordinary day – a day that would live in her memory for ever. There were things like meeting the other girls in her set that she would always share with them; things that were apart from the life she had known at home. And yet these were also things she wanted to share with her family.
It would take her ages to write down everything she