Bilgewater Read Free Page A

intolerable. Perhaps it was intolerable, it occurs to me now. Perhaps that is why my mother upped and died. Perhaps my mother took one look at me and thought, “I’m bored stiff and now
this
.” I think that it may be Paula who makes desirable the wonderful peacefulness of father, and the great tornado of Paula which makes the still air round father such delight.
    She is thirty-six and comes from Dorset. That in itself is extraordinary for up here. You meet plenty of people in the North-East from Pakistan or Jamaica or Uganda or Zambia or Bootle but scarcely a body from the south coast of England.
    Paula arrived here mysteriously—I don’t think she had thought it all properly out—when she was seventeen as assistant to a real matron who retired hastily leaving Paula to swoop into power. She must have looked and been most improperly young but I would like to see the Headmaster or Board of Governors or representative of any Ministry of Education, Emperor, Principality or Power who could have removed her even at seventeen had she a mind to stay. And not a gestapo, K.G.B. nor any hosts of Midianites I think would ever have wanted Paula to go. Once you’ve met her you need her. The world runs down, the lights go out and everyone starts stumbling in the dark the minute Paula isn’t there.
    She’s lovely, Paula. She has a grand straight back joining on to a long, duchess-like neck and a whoosh of hair scooped into a silky high bundle with a pin. She’s tall, with a fine-drawn narrow figure with sloping shoulders and whatever she wears looks expensive. At father’s school functions she sails in dressed in anything and sits down anywhere and all eyes turn. She nods and smiles, this way and that, and all the pork butchers’ wives in polyester and earrings on the platform look like rows of dropping Christmas trees.
    Paula has a voice like
Far from the Madding Crowd
—beautiful. “There’s my duck,” “That’s my lover.” To show you the full marvellousness of Paula when she says, “That’s my lover” to any of the boys who’s in her sick room I’ve never heard of one who sniggered.
    Paula’s deep funny burry voice goes with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and hurtling feet. She is always running and usually towards you. “Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,” always makes me think of Paula, and I told her so the first time she read it to me when I was about eleven. I was a very late reader and it was an effort even at eleven to sit down and read for long so Paula used to read to me. I wish she did so still.
    â€œWarm south,” says Paula, “Wish I wurr an’ not in this God-forzaken hoale.”
    â€œWhy d’you stay here then?” asks the boy of the day, calling through from the sick room. There is a sick room for solitary sufferers and a San for epidemics. The sick room nearly always has someone or other in it, usually one of the youngest ones. They troop up in droves. “Matron, I’m sick,” “Matron, I’ve got a burst appendix,” “Matron, I’ve punctured a lung,” and she bundles them off whizz, bang, thermometer, pulse—“Rubbish, my lover. Stop it now, do. Sit through on the bed and drink some cocoa and hush whilst I read to our Marigold.” She sorts them out every time, the ones who are sick and the ones just home-sick. They say terrible things sometimes.
    â€œMatron, I’m bleeding from the ears.”
    â€œMatron, Terrapin’s committed suicide.”
    â€œMatron, Boakes is in a coma.”
    If it’s not true, and it hardly ever is—she knows. If it is true she’s like a rushing mighty wind and the local hospital is on its toes in an instant as she hurtles down upon it ahead of the stretcher, orderlies toppling like ten-pins, the plume of hair bouncing masterfully to the very lintel of the operating theatre door. She’s