were promised a dance nearer to Christmas. They often met up in the common room to chat or play dominoes or cards. Carmel hadn’t a clue at first, but she quickly caught on and was soon a dab hand at rummy or brag. Often the four friends would just go back to their room, Carmel and Lois feeling incredibly fast as they experimented with some of the cosmetics that Jane and Sylvia had or tried out different hairstyles on one another.
Sometimes they would just chat together. It was soon apparent to the others that though they would talk freely about their families, Carmel never mentioned anything about hers and she neatly side-stepped direct questions. They knew she wrote dutifully to her mother every week for she had told them that much, and to the nun Sister Frances, whom she seemed so fond of. She received regular replies, but never commented about anything in the letters.
As far as Carmel was concerned, her life began when she entered the nurses’ home. Despite her lack of money, a state that she was well used to anyway, she was very happy, and couldn’t remember a time when she had felt so contented. Warmed by the true friendship of the other three girls, she didn’t want to be reminded of the degradation of her slum of a home, and certainly didn’t want to discuss it with anyone else.
In fact, she often found it difficult to find things to write to her mother about. Sometimes the letters centred around the church she now attended, St Chad’s Cathedral. She wasn’t the only Catholic studying at the hospital, although she was the only one in the first year, and they all had dispensation to attend Mass on Sundays. Fortunately St Chad’s was only yards from the home, on Bath Street, which was at the top of Whittall Street. The first time that Carmel saw it she was impressed by the grandeur of the place, though she had to own that for a cathedral it wasn’t that big, and very narrow, built of red brick with two blue spires.
She had made herself known to the parish priest, Father Donahue, but he already knew more about her than she realised. St Chad’s Hospital was primarily a hospital for sick or elderly Catholic woman and Father Donahue called there regularly to hear confession, administer communion, tend or give last rites to the very sick or dying and sometimes took Mass in the chapel for the nuns and those able to leave their beds.
The four nuns who had travelled to Birmingham with Carmel had told the priest all about her and the type of home she had come from. Father Donahue never mentioned this to Carmel, but it gave him a special interest in the girl and he always had a cheery word for her. She would write and tell her mother this, and about the nuns in the convent that she visited as often as she could and who always made her very welcome.
Eve’s replies told Carmel of her father still raging over what he called ‘her deception’. Carmel knew what form that raging would take and that her mother would bear the brunt of it. She would hardly wish to share that with anyone, or what her deprived siblings were doing and the gossip of the small town she was no longer interested in.
One Sunday morning, as Lois watched Carmel get ready for Mass, she suddenly said, ‘My Uncle Jeff is a Catholic.’
‘How can he be? You’re not.’
‘No. He’s married to Dad’s sister, my Aunt Emma, and she turned Catholic to please Jeff. The boys have been brought up Catholic too—the dishy Paul and annoying Matthew.’
‘Dishy Paul?’ Carmel echoed.
‘I tell you, Carmel, he is gorgeous,’ Lois went on. ‘He is tall and broad-shouldered and has blond hair and beautiful deep blue eyes and he only has to go into a room to have all the girls’ eyes on him.’
‘Sorry,’ Carmel said, ‘that is exactly the type of man I dislike most. I bet he is well aware of that and totally big-headed about it.’
‘That’s just it, he isn’t,’ Lois maintained. ‘I think that it is something to do with the family being so down-to-earth—well, Uncle Jeff, anyway. I mean, he owns a large engineering works and they have pots of money, but you would never know it.’
‘And so Paul is going to have the factory handed to him on a plate?’ Carmel said, in a slightly mocking tone, all ready to dislike this so perfect cousin of Lois’s.
‘No,’ Lois said, ‘Paul doesn’t want it. He’s training to be a doctor. Ooh, I bet he will have a lovely bedside manner,’ she said in delight. ‘When they let him loose I should imagine at least half of the female population will develop ailments that they have never suffered from before.’
‘You are a fool, Lois,’ Carmel said, though she too was laughing. ‘No one can be that charming and good-looking.’
‘Paul is,’ Lois said adamantly. ‘I tell you, if only we weren’t first cousins I would make a play for him myself. Paul has everything I admire in a man and I am not talking money here either. He even speaks French like a native. I mean, I learned French but mine is very schoolroomish. Jeff was half French and when Paul and Matthew were little, their French grandmother was alive and lived not far away and they would natter away to her in her native language. After she died, Uncle Jeff said he didn’t want the boys to lose the language, so Paul studied for two years at the Sorbonne.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘A university in Paris. Matthew will go too next year.’
‘You don’t like him so well.’
‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose he is handsome too, in a manner of speaking, but he is a poor shadow next to his brother and he’s the one going to inherit the factory as Paul doesn’t want it, though Uncle Jeff says he will have to start on the shop floor and work his way up, so he will know every aspect of the trade.’
‘I think that is a jolly good idea.’
‘Me too,’ Lois agreed.
The six weeks passed quickly as the days were so busy. The four room-mates were delighted to find they had all passed their exams at the end, and with good marks too. Now they could go down on to the wards like proper nurses.
They began at seven o’clock each day and, with short meal breaks, continued until eight o’clock at night with one day off a week.
Each day, the ward sister would read the report left by the night sister and allocate work to be done that day by the senior and junior staff nurses and probationary nurses alike. Carmel was first under the direction of Staff Nurse Pamela Hammond, whom she estimated to be in her late twenties. Her grey eyes were kindly, and from around her cap, tufts of dark blonde hair peeped. She worked hard and expected her probationer to do the same. As hard work was second nature to Carmel, the two got on well.
In the early days it seemed to Carmel and her friends that they cleaned all day long, unless they were helping serve drinks or meals. They cleaned lockers, bedsteads and sluices. The rubber sheets of the incontinent had to be scrubbed daily and left to hang in the sluice room, bedpans were scalded, and at the end of each day, all dirty laundry had to be folded, counted and put in linen bags to be taken to the laundry. The girls were usually too weary even to talk at the end of a shift and only fit to fall into bed, particularly when they also had to attend lectures in their scant free time away, which they did after the initial six weeks on the wards were up.
Although it didn’t help the weariness, Carmel found the day passed quicker and far more pleasantly once she saw the patients as people. She had done this before in Letterkenny, though many had been known to her at least by sight, maybe from Mass or in the shops. She found if she thought that even the unappealing tasks she was doing were for the patients’ comfort and well-being that gave everything more of a purpose. Also it was pleasant to chat to them as she was working, and many said they loved her lilting accent.
The preliminary six-week period was over just before Christmas. Carmel offered to work through because she had nowhere to go. She had been asked by each of her flat mates in turn to go to their homes for Christmas, but though she know the girls well, she didn’t know a thing about their families and was nervous of descending on anyone at such a family time. Anyway, the hospital was always short-staffed at Christmas and extra hands were always welcome.
Carmel enjoyed the dance put on for the