Hope - Lesley Pearse [36]
Hope approached her father’s bed purposefully, but recoiled in horror at his appearance. The rash her mother had spoken of six days ago had given his face and body a mottled look, with small eruptions that looked like measles. His teeth and gums were covered in a brown substance, he was breathing too fast, almost like a dog panting, and he was picking at the bedcover like a madman.
There was an evil smell coming from him and Hope guessed he’d lost control of his bowels. For a moment she almost ran back out through the door, but she glanced at her mother on the mattress by the fire and realized that if she did run away, her mother would force herself to get up and deal with it. She couldn’t let her do that.
Washing her father and getting him back on to a clean sheet was the hardest thing she’d ever done. The smell made her retch, and he was so heavy to move. Yet somehow she managed it, and once he was covered up again she propped him up and made him drink some water.
She turned her attentions to her mother then, stripping off her clothes and washing her carefully. She was burning up, yet shivering the way Father had been in the early stages. Hope made her drink some water, then tucked the blankets around her tightly.
‘I’m taking care of Father now, you just go to sleep,’ she whispered.
There wasn’t just the one dirty sheet to wash but several piled in the corner, along with a couple of night shirts and undergarments. Remembering what the doctor had said about soiled linen, she went to the outhouse to light a fire under the copper.
Some of her earliest recollections were of her mother kneeling on the ground, blowing the flames and poking sticks in until she got a good blaze going. Hope had always helped her on washing day, rinsing the clothes in clean cold water, and then hanging the washing on the line. The one thing she’d always wanted to do, but was never allowed to, was stir the boiling washing. Mother always did that with the big copper stick, and once she was sure the clothes were clean, she fished the steaming garments out one by one into a big bowl.
It took eight buckets of water to fill the copper before she could start the fire, but that didn’t prove as easy as it had looked when Mother did it. Hope twisted up some paper and lit that, then added small dry sticks one by one, but the flame flickered and then died. She tried again and again, for over an hour, each time with a little more paper, but still it went out, however much she blew on it.
Hope felt like crying. The sheets had to be boiled up, and if she couldn’t do it there would be no clean ones if her father made another mess. The doctor had made a point about boiling them, so it stood to reason that dirty sheets were dangerous, perhaps carrying the sickness.
In her frustration she banged the copper with the poker, and it was only then that she noticed a little lever at the side of the fireplace. She pushed it, and to her surprise she saw it opened a small trap at the back, clearly to let in air, for she could feel a slight draught.
She tried to light it again, and to her delight at last the sticks began to burn. She added more and more, and only when she was absolutely certain she’d got it roaring did she turn her attention to grating up the soap.
That wasn’t so easy either. She sliced her fingers twice before she got the hang of it. But finally the soap was in the water, and she could put the washing in.
By late afternoon Hope was exhausted. Between running in and out of the cottage giving her parents water, washing their faces, feeding the chickens, collecting the eggs and milking the cow, she’d had constantly to feed the copper fire with more wood. It took some two hours before the water began to boil, and it was an awful lot harder to stir it with the copper stick than she’d expected.
Hooking the