Free The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens

the town, and was back again the next day. It wasn’t visitors’ day, so of course she was not allowed to see me. I could hear the argument going on in the passage outside the hut. I knew who would win, and sure enough, the old lady sailed in presently, followed by Sister, scarlet in the face. It was winter then and the windows of the hut were low, but we were not allowed to have the lights on until five. On this particular day, a leaden, soaking afternoon had made it twilight in our hut by about four o’clock. A hideous man called Stringy Salter was making up the stove with a lot of noise. He wore a red blanket round his waist and a filthy white sock over the plaster on his foot. Two other up-patients, very decent chaps really, but not prepossessing, were playing cards. One had a hacking cough and the other had a patch over one eye. We had had our tea, but I had been slow with mine because I didn’t want it, and the orderly had not cleared it away. A plate with a great hunk of bread and butter and a cup without a saucer, half full of tea which I hadn’t been able to drink because it was too strong, stood on my locker beside the old tin lid I used as an ashtray. The man in the bed next to me had died the night before and the springs of the bed were bare, because his mattress had gone to be fumigated. My mother sat down on the black iron and looked at me.
    â€˜This is just terrible,’ she said. ‘You can’t stay here.’
    â€˜Oh, it’s all right,’ I said airily. ‘It’s fine. You see it at its worst today. Come on a sunny morning when we’re larking about with the V.A.D.s—’ At that moment, the most horse-faced of all the V.A.D.s, a brave old relic of the last war, chose to come pounding down the ward with a bucketful of dirty dressings, like a swineherd going to the sties. The orderlies were supposed to take them from the sluice out to the bins, but they usually forgot.
    One of the men called out to her: ‘Annie—’ That was her name, Annie. Annie Rooney they used to call her. ‘Annie, for Christ’s sake, when are they going to turn these bloody lightson?’ Only he didn’t say bloody, unfortunately. He had to lie flat on his back and couldn’t see I had a visitor.
    Annie answered him tartly: ‘You shut your noise, young Bobby Combes, or you won’t get any light at all tonight.’ That was her idea of a joke. She was a cheery old soul, but to one who didn’t know her finer qualities, she must have sounded a bit grim. She had a voice like a nutmeg grater; she smoked like a chimney off duty and would do anything for you if you gave her a packet of cigarettes.
    I could see my mother getting more and more worked up. ‘Why hasn’t this bed got a mattress on it?’ she asked. I told her and she got up quickly, and Sister, thinking she was going away, came up and said: ‘I shall have to ask you to leave now, Mrs. North. The ward is closed.’
    â€˜It should never have been opened, in my opinion,’ said Ma, showing a ready wit. She squeezed my hand in the gloaming and whispered that she would be back tomorrow. I must say, I never thought she would get in. Sister had redoubled her defences by having screens round the bed and saying I had had a bad day and was too ill to see anyone. I could hear them at it on the other side of the screens. I found out afterwards that the men were laying bets on the pair of them and Scotty Macrae won half a crown and a rubber air cushion when my mother came triumphantly through the screens. I don’t know how she managed it, but she came every day after that, visiting hours or not, and Sister pretended not to notice her or arranged to be off duty when she came. She used to talk to me about my mother, of course, and would lay the cold end of her stethoscope on my chest and tell me that my heart was worse. ‘And no wonder,’ she gloated.
    My first hint that