Free A Nurse's Duty by Maggie Hope

before taking them out on a ward round and bringing them back to be scrubbed again. And the second-year nurse was waiting for her to help make the beds and Karen knew she wouldn’t get her corners right first time and would have to face Sister’s lashing scorn. Despairingly, she thought that the most important thing in the world to Sister was that the corners of the bedclothes should be just at the right angle and the wheels turned in precisely. Even the patients were expected to show just the right amount of arms and chest, covered of course in white linen, above the turned down sheets.
    There were no letters from Dave or Joe either. She hated going back to Morton Main and facing people and telling them, no, she hadn’t heard. They would look at her pityingly and she would know they thought she was a deserted wife.
    Then one morning there was a lovely long chatty letter from Gran. Karen’s heart lightened as she took it from Home Sister and slipped it into the bib of her apron to be read later during her ten-minute break for breakfast. She had recognized the copper-plate handwriting at once, the letters formed laboriously and painstakingly as Gran had been taught at the Wesleyan School in her youth. The beautiful letters contrasted oddly with the content for Gran wrote as she spoke, in the idiom of Weardale, words coming straight from the heart. She wrote of the doings in the dale and then continued to her main reason for writing:
    Your mam telled me that man of yours went off to Australia along of Joe. There’ll be nowt good comes of it I doubt. It’ll all end in tears, a young couple separating like that. Maybe you should not have denied you were wed, our Karen, when you went to that grand hospital of yours. It was a lie and nowt good comes of a lie. Though I know how badly you wanted to better yourself, be a nurse. But why you had to go away and do this new-fangled training in Newcastle, I’ll never know. You could just as well have learnt the trade from the lying-in nurse at Morton Main or gone as an assistant at the workhouse hospital in Auckland. Still, you know what you’re doing no doubt.
    Aye, well, I reckon your time there will pass. But I’m thinking of your mam. What’s she going to do if you go gallivanting off to Australia after that man of yours? Kezia will likely have enough on her plate with the new babby coming and I fear for your mam.
    Hoping you are keeping well as I am.
    Your loving grandmother,
    Jane Rain
    Karen, sitting in a corner of the ward kitchen, reading the letter during her break, smiled wryly. She could almost hear Gran saying the words she had read. Gran’s thoughts were always for her daughter, she worried incessantly about her.
    Gran herself was wiry and strong and had never suffered a day’s illness in her life. But her daughter Rachel had been at a vulnerable age when the hard times came to Weardale and they had left their mark. Thinking about her mother, Karen sat on longer than she should have done and was brought back to the present by the appearance of Sister in the kitchen doorway, the bow under her chin quivering with indignation.
    ‘Are you intending to sit there all day, Nurse?’ she demanded. ‘It’s Matron’s round this morning and the sluice is a pig-sty! Now, get in there at once.’
    ‘Yes, Sister.’
    Karen fairly scuttled past the bristling starch of Sister’s apron, heading for the sluice. It was gleaming, not a thing out of place, just as Karen had left it before going on her break. Sighing, she picked up a cloth and the bottle of Eusol and began wiping everything once again. It was Thursday tomorrow and her day off. She would go and see Gran in Weardale. If she was up at dawn she might still have time to call at Morton Main on her way back. She could spend an hour or two with her family before reporting back to the hospital at eight o’clock.
    ‘Eeh, our Karen, what are you doing here?’
    The carrier’s cart creaked to a halt and Karen climbed down