Hope - Lesley Pearse [145]
She had never been able to understand why some girls let men bed them without being married. But this feeling she had inside her for Bennett explained it now. And he hadn’t even kissed her yet!
It rained almost constantly for fifteen days. Dirt paths that had been baked hard became quagmires, weeds deprived of water all summer sprang up in walls, cracks in pavements, anywhere they could. The river level rose alarmingly. It was said that many low-lying areas of Somerset were under water, and just as people had grumbled about the lack of rain, now they complained because it wouldn’t stop.
In St Peter’s rainwater found its way in through holes in the roof. The lying-in ward was the worst; the ceiling looked like a sieve and many of the new mothers had gone home because however bad their own homes were, they weren’t in danger of being drowned there. There was one leak in Hope’s ceiling, but fortunately it just missed her bed and she caught the water in a bucket. But the evil smells everywhere in the city lessened as the rain washed the filth away, and gradually the reported cases of cholera dropped.
‘S’pose me and Doll will ’ave to go back to t’other side,’ Sal remarked gloomily on the first day not one new patient was brought in.
Hope didn’t know what to say to that remark. Sal and Doll didn’t deserve any sympathy as they certainly hadn’t shown the sick any. But just the same Hope felt a bit sorry for them, for she’d seen the old folk over in the other part of the hospital. They spent all their time in a crowded dormitory with no comforts; they couldn’t make themselves tea as they could here, they wouldn’t get an allowance of drink either.
‘You’ll be all right though,’ Sal continued, a touch of venom in her voice. ‘You sucks up to Sister Martha an’ the doc. Watch out they don’t make you look after the lunatics! You won’t like that. They eat their own shit, piss all over the place and the last girl they put in there got strangled.’
Hope decided to ignore Sal. While it was true that some of the mad people did truly disgusting things, and a nurse had indeed been strangled a year ago, Sister Martha had promised she wouldn’t make Hope work there. Anyway, they still had fifteen patients to look after in the isolation ward, and at least half of them were going to recover, for they hadn’t sunk into the final stage of the disease.
When Hope looked round the ward now, she felt quite proud that it was as clean as a very old building could be. Her rough, reddened hands testified to the amount of scrubbing she’d done and she’d even cleaned the windows so that natural light came in during the day. She fully intended to browbeat Sister Martha to get the walls and floor limewashed once the epidemic was over, and to insist proper beds were put in here.
Her victories so far were tiny ones. No new patient was ever put down on dirty straw now; they were fed tea, soup and more substantial food if they could manage it. They were washed regularly, received what medicine was available, and no one ever died alone when Hope was on duty.
But she was all too aware that this wasn’t nearly enough. A hospital should be a place where people came in sick and left well again.
In the middle of November, Hope said her goodbyes to the last patient on the cholera ward.
‘Just remember to take good care of yourself, Mrs Hubert,’ she said warningly, reaching forward to wrap the small, white-faced woman’s shawl more securely around her, for it was very cold outside. ‘We don’t want you back in here, do we?’
Mrs Hubert was one patient Hope had never expected to survive the disease. She’d had seven children, three of whom had contracted the disease too and died. She had clearly been malnourished and worn out before she became sick, and with an out-of-work husband, who hadn’t even bothered to come and