A Wartime Nurse Read Free

this smashing fella waiting downstairs in the lobby? Tall, dark and handsome, with a gorgeous tan. A corporal, an’ all.’
    Theda hadn’t time to answer, she was pushing past Nurse Lewis and flying down the stairs, and there was Joss, home safe, and a great weight lifted from her shoulders. She flung her arms around him and he swung her off her feet and laughed exuberantly. It was the same old Joss, only older and with his skin tanned to mahogany and his body filled out to that of a man.
    ‘Steady on there, our Theda,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come all this way just to be knocked over by a slip of a lass like you.’
    They had a lovely time, dancing at the Oxford Galleries in the town, and she discovered that Joss was a great dancer, swooping around the floor with dash and verve. But, of course, he had to go back to his unit.
    ‘I have to catch the 11.10 train to King’s Cross,’ he said, and showed her his docket. ‘I only had forty-eight hours’ leave. But when Mam said she thought it was your afternoon off, I had to pop up and see you, hadn’t I?’
    ‘I’m so glad you did,’ said Theda, and behind her eyes the tears threatened. ‘I can’t come to the station with you, I have to be back at the hospital.’
    ‘Aye, well, I’ll be back. I can’t tell you where we’re going but if I see our Frank, I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’

Chapter Two
    Joss didn’t see Frank, thought Theda sadly as she sat in the bus bringing her home to Bishop Auckland, the certificate confirming that she was now a State Registered Nurse safely in her shoulder bag. It took an hour and a half to travel from Newcastle to Bishop and that didn’t include the fifteen minutes from the town to Winton Colliery.
    There was something sad about leaving the nurses’ home, having packed her bags and removed all her personal stuff from her room so that it became once again the impersonal little box with a bed and a wardrobe and dressing table that it had been when she moved in more than three years ago. On the bus she had plenty of time to reflect on the past and found herself doing just that.
    Joss had come home from Dunkirk but Frank had not; Theda had gone back to Winton to be with her family for two days, which was all the time she was allowed.
    ‘There is a war on, Nurse,’ Matron had said, implying that Theda’s was not the only family to be bereaved at this time. Theda felt like swearing at her. Of course she knew there was a bloody war on. Hadn’t it just been brought home to her in the worst way it possibly could have been?
    Now she moved restlessly in her seat on the bus, crossing her legs and folding her arms as she stared out of the window at the shops of Chester-le-Street where they had just come to a halt to pick up more passengers. The memory of that interview still made her angry though today she had more idea of what Matron had to contend with, running a hospital in wartime.
    Joss was in North Africa now, fighting under Montgomery.
    ‘The young ones didn’t stand much chance,’ he had said when he came home from Dunkirk. Too green altogether. We tried to help them but—’ He had fallen silent and Theda thought, But you weren’t much older than Frank. But she was well aware it was the scant experience he had had in the army as a boy soldier and then in the Far East that had helped him. So, after all, it had been a good thing Joss went to India.
    The bus was pulling into Durham, turning off the great North Road at Neville’s Cross and going down the bank into the city, under the railway viaduct and into the bus station. The cathedral towered overhead on the promontory on the other side of the Wear and Theda stared at it as she always did. It looked so grand; how could ordinary people have built it all those centuries ago? She didn’t notice when a soldier slipped into the seat beside her until she felt the rough serge of his uniform against her leg.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘Was I taking up more than my