true,’ Rick felt obliged to protest, but Dulcie could see that he was looking uncomfortable. Because he knew the truth!
‘Yes it is,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘Mum’s always favoured Edith, and you know it. It’s all very well for you to talk about families sticking together, but when has this family ever done anything for me? Mum hasn’t said a word to me about wanting me to stay. If you ask me she’s pleased to see me go. That way she can listen to Edith caterwauling all day long.’
There was just enough of a grain of truth – even though Dulcie had deliberately distorted and exaggerated it – in what she was saying for Rick to fall silent. During their childhood his sister had always been the one who seemed to get it in the neck and who had borne the brunt of their mother’s sometimes short temper, whilst Edith was indeed their mother’s favourite. Despite all that, though, he felt obliged, as the eldest of the family, to persist doggedly, ‘We’re family, Dulcie, and families like ours stick together.’
‘Fine, but they can stick together without me.’
‘You’ll regret leaving,’ Rick warned her, ‘and I’m only telling you that for your own good. Moving in with strangers – no good will come of it.’
‘Yes it will. I’ll not have a thieving sister helping herself to my clothes, nor a mother always having it in for me. Besides, it’s a really nice place I’m moving to, and you can see that for yourself ’cos I need you to give me a hand getting my stuff over there tonight.’
Rick sighed. He knew when he’d lost a fight, especially with Dulcie, who had her own ideas and opinions about everything, and who was as sharp as a tack when it came to making them plain.
‘All right, I will help you,’ he agreed, ‘provided you promise me that you’ll come home every Sunday to go to church with Mum.’
Dulcie was tempted to refuse, but she needed Rick’s help if she was to get her things to her new digs in one trip, and besides, something told her that her new landlady was the sort who thought things like families and going to church on Sunday were important. If she didn’t accept Rick’s terms she could end up finding herself dragged off to church by Olive. It would be worthwhile coming back once a week, if only to show off her new – unborrowable – clothes to Edith.
‘All right,’ she conceded.
‘Promise?’ Rick demanded.
‘Promise,’ Dulcie agreed.
Sally looked round her small Spartan room in the nurses’ home. The few possessions she had brought with her from Liverpool – apart from the photograph of her parents on their wedding day, in its silver frame – were packed in her case, ready for her to take to Article Row. As soon as she’d come off duty she’d changed out of her uniform, with its distinctive extra tall starched Barts’ cap, much taller than the caps worn by any nurses from any of the other London hospitals. Sisters’ caps were even taller, and even more stiffly starched, Sally guessed.
Workwise she’d fitted in quite well at Barts. She loved theatre work and had been welcomed by the other theatre staff, most of whom were down to be evacuated should Germany’s hostile advances into the territories of its neighbours continue and thus lead to a declaration of war by the British Government. Normally, of course, Sally would not have been allowed to ‘live out’ but these were not normal times.
Not normal times . . . Her life had ceased to be what she thought of as normal many months ago now.
She sat down on the edge of her narrow thin-mattressed bed, nowhere near as comfortable as the bed waiting for her in Article Row, and nowhere near as comfortable as the bed she had left behind her in Liverpool in the pretty semi-detached house that had always been her home. The house that she had refused to enter once she had known the truth, leaving Liverpool in the pale light of an early summer morning to catch the first train to London, with nothing but a recommendation to the matron at Barts from her own Hospital, and the trunk into which she had packed her belongings. Heavy though that trunk had been, it had been no heavier than the weight of her memories – both good and bad – on her heart.
She hadn’t told her father what she was planning to do. She’d known that he would plead with her and try to dissuade her, so instead she’d asked the taxi driver to take her first to her parents’ house, from her temporary room at the nurses’ home, where she’d put her letter to her father very quietly through the letter box, before going on to Lime Street station.
Her father would have read her letter over breakfast. She could picture him now, carefully pouring himself a cup of tea, sitting down at the blue-and-white-checked-oilcloth-covered table, with the paper propped up against the teapot, as he read the words that she had written telling him that she wanted nothing more to do with him.
Pain knifed through her. She had loved her parents so much. They had been such a happy family. Had been. Until the person she had thought of as her closest friend – close enough to be a sister – had destroyed everything.
A mixture of misery and anger tensed her throat muscles. The death of her mother had been hard enough to bear, but the betrayal of her closest friend; that had left a wound that was still too poisoned for her even to think of allowing it to close. As with all wounds, the poison must be removed before healing could take place, otherwise it would be driven deeper, to fester and cause more harm. Sally could not, though, see any way to remove that poison or to salve its wound with acceptance and forgiveness. She couldn’t. If she did she would be betraying her poor mother, who had suffered so dreadfully. She reached for her photograph and held it in both her hands as she looked into the faces of her youthful parents, her father so tall and dark and handsome, her fair-haired mother so petite and happy as she nestled within the protective curve of his arm.
Her mother had been such a happy, loving person, their home life in their comfortable semi so harmonious. Sally had grown up knowing that she wanted to be a nurse and her parents had encouraged her to follow her dream. Her father, a clerk working for the Town Hall, had helped her to enrol for their local St John Ambulance brigade as soon as she had been old enough. Those had been such happy days, free of the upsets that seemed to mar the childhoods of others. In the summer there had been picnics on the sands at Southport and Lytham St Annes; visits to Blackpool Tower and rides on the donkeys, trips across the Mersey, of course, in the ferry boats that plied between Liverpool and New Brighton, whilst in the winter there had been the excitement of Christmas and the pantomime.
And then when she had started her formal nurse’s training at Liverpool’s prestigious teaching hospital she had felt as though all her dreams had come true, especially when she had palled up with Morag, the pretty girl of Scots descent, whom Sally had liked from when they had first met up as new probationers.
Sally could still remember how awkward and excited at the same time she had felt when Morag had first introduced her to her elder brother, Callum, with his dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Callum, who looked as handsome as any film star and whose smile had made her insides quiver with delight.
Morag and Callum had become regular visitors at her parents’ home, welcomed there by her mother once she learned that they had lost their own parents, when the small rowboat they had taken out on Loch Lomond during a holiday there had sunk, drowning them both. That had been two years before she had met them, and before Callum’s job, as a newly qualified assistant teacher, had brought them both to Liverpool, where Morag had decided to train as a nurse.
They had all got on so well together, her father and Callum sharing an interest in natural history and often going off on long walks together, whilst Morag had shown Sally’s mother how to make the Scotch pancakes they all learned to love too much, small rounds of batter cooked on a flat skillet and then served warm with butter.
But then her mother had become ill, and had felt too sick to want to eat anything.
It had been Morag who had held her tightly after the doctor had broken the news to them that her mother had stomach cancer, Morag who had so willingly and, Sally had believed, lovingly helped her to nurse her mother through the long-drawn-out and heart-searingly hard to bear pain she had suffered in the last weeks and days