Hope - Lesley Pearse [135]
‘It will make the pain go,’ she told him. ‘Just drink it for me.’
He seemed to hear her and did as she asked, then within a few minutes he was still.
‘Thank you,’ he croaked. ‘Will you tell my wife to kiss the babbies for me and say goodbye for me?’
‘You’ll be able to kiss them yourself soon,’ she lied. ‘Go to sleep now.’
Dr Meadows asked her to come out in the backyard with him when he’d made his rounds of the other patients.
After the darkness of the ward, the sun was so bright she was blinded. But it felt good to breathe fresh air again.
‘I fully expected to find you’d already turned tail and run,’ the doctor admitted wryly.
‘I have been tempted,’ she said and launched into a despondent description of how her first morning had been. ‘I can’t believe that no one does anything for the sick!’
Dr Meadows sighed in sympathy. ‘I know exactly how you must feel, Hope. I do what I can when I call, but it isn’t anywhere near enough. The truth of the matter is that the sick are just brought in here to die; we aren’t tackling the disease at all.
‘But there is no medicine which will save their lives. I can’t even claim that clean beds, bathing them or swaddling the sick in more blankets will make any difference to the outcome. In past epidemics it has been evident that it is in the hands of God if they recover, not through nursing.’
‘But it’s inhuman not to make their last hours more comfortable and give them some dignity,’ Hope said heatedly. She was hot and sweaty, hungry too now that the bowl of porridge she’d been given for breakfast before six this morning was a distant memory. ‘Besides, those women are paid to do a job, and if they won’t do it they should be told to go.’
Dr Meadows ran his fingers through his hair in a weary gesture. ‘Those two live here, in the workhouse part of the hospital. Just as the two last night do,’ he said with a tinge of reproach. ‘They didn’t choose to nurse the sick, they were ordered to do it, and their only reward is an allowance of beer or gin. Can you blame them for being less than enthusiastic?’
Hope felt chastened, for she had been promised four shillings a week and her board and lodging. ‘No, I suppose not.’
‘What we need is some way of recruiting the right kind of women into nursing, and then training them properly,’ he said dejectedly. ‘At present we have either those from holy orders, or paupers, nothing in between. But with low wages, appalling conditions and the risk of infection, what is there to attract good women? Look at you! If you hadn’t been press-ganged into it, would you be here?’
‘You didn’t press-gang me,’ Hope said. ‘You’ve been very kind to me, sir, especially making out I was your cousin! I think that’s why I got a room on my own. And Alice was really kind too. Will you thank her for the things she sent me? It meant a great deal to me.’
‘Alice liked you very much, her little gifts were her way of telling you that,’ he said earnestly. ‘And I will pass on your message. But my name is Bennett. Cousins can’t be formal.’
Hope blushed, for he had a way of looking at her that made her feel very odd.
‘Have you had your dinner yet?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I thought Sister Martha would come and tell me about that.’
‘She’s been assisting in a leg amputation,’ Bennett said.
‘You’ve been taking someone’s leg off?’ Hope winced.
‘Not I, the surgeon, but I administered the chloroform. The poor man should make a full recovery, but I don’t know how he’ll feed his family. He won’t be able to work with only one leg.’
Bennett took her down to the room just off the kitchen where she’d had breakfast earlier in the day. There were six people eating, two rough-looking men who appeared to be orderlies, a very old nun whom Bennett introduced as Sister Clare, and three nurses who looked only marginally cleaner and younger than Sal and Doll, and stared at Hope with hard eyes.
She was given a large bowl of greasy-looking greeny-grey soup and a lump of bread. Bennett