Free A Wartime Nurse by Maggie Hope Page B

icy air. She heard voices downstairs as her sister came in from the factory, her mother’s greeting and Clara’s reply. Her father would still be at work, he didn’t usually get home from his night shift until almost midday, and Chuck was at the pit too.
    She could help her mother with the housework today, she thought. Clara would be in bed and they would have the house to themselves for most of the day. But not yet. It was so lovely to be able to stay in bed a little longer, snug under the blankets.
    Theda must have dozed off for the next thing she heard made her sit up, careless of the cold, and look across at the other bed. Clara was already there, she could see her from under the pile of blankets which was heaving slightly and hear what sounded very like sobs coming from underneath.
    ‘Clara?’
    The sounds stopped and the blankets became still but Clara did not answer. Grabbing her woollen dressing gown from where it lay at the bottom of her bed, Theda hurriedly pulled it on and went over to her sister. There was nothing to be seen but the top of her head.
    ‘Are you all right?’ she asked softly, and Clara turned on her side, still keeping her face hidden.
    ‘Just the sniffles, let me sleep,’ she replied. ‘I have to go to work tonight, remember.’
    Theda stepped back. Maybe it was just a cold, though that wasn’t what it had sounded like to her. Still, if Clara didn’t want to talk . . . oh, maybe she did just need a good day’s sleep.
    ‘Has Clara got a cold, Mam?’ she asked later as she speared a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and held it to the bars of the fire.
    ‘A cold? No. At least, she seemed perfectly all right when she came in this morning,’ Bea answered. ‘Why? Does she look poorly to you?’
    ‘No, it’s nothing, I just thought – no, it wasn’t anything,’ said Theda. She took the toast off the fork and went to the table. There was some dripping Bea had made from beef fat that she had managed to get from the butcher and Theda spread some on the toast and bit into it before the dripping melted altogether. Sighing happily, she sat in her father’s chair before the fire and stretched her legs out along the steel fender towards the blaze, feeling the heat seep into her bones. The day was very dark and the main light in the room came from the fire, gas was too dear to light during the day. Bea could not get used to the idea that they were all working and bringing in money now, she was still careful with the gas.
    Toast and dripping eaten in the half-light – how it reminded Theda of family suppers before the war when they would sit around the range and Da would tell them stories because it was too dark to read. Thursdays mostly, the night before payday when there was no penny left to feed the gas meter.
    It was a black moonless night when Theda walked up the yard and to the end of the row to catch the bus back to the hospital. She had an extra few hours to work because of the number of nurses off sick.
    It had started to rain and wind was stirring the few remaining leaves in the gutter so that they eddied and swirled around her legs, making her shudder. She pressed the switch on her flashlight, creating a small pool of light around her feet as she turned the corner and set off across the small piece of waste ground to the road to Winton village. The buses to Winton Colliery stopped early and so she had an extra half-mile to walk to catch another.
    As she walked, Theda thought about Clara. Her sister had got up about six o’clock, looking puffy-eyed and pale, but then she often did when she had had insufficient sleep and no one else seemed to notice anything. Perhaps she had been wrong, it was all her imagination, Clara was just grumpy and tired from working night shift.
    It had been a relaxing day, in spite of her niggling worry about Clara. Theda had ironed the clothes her mother had washed the day before, standing at the kitchen table ironing her father’s