Hearts of Gold by Catrin Collier Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t, by the end of the day we’ll know whether we’re qualified or not. And if we are,’ she lifted her eyebrows suggestively; ‘we can always request a transfer.’
    ‘You’re a hopeless case,’ Bethan laughed as they climbed the steep flight of stone stairs. ‘I really must remember to warn my brothers about you.’
    ‘Both of them?’ Laura asked indignantly.
    ‘Both of them,’ Bethan retorted firmly, as she unfastened her cape and prepared herself for duty.
    As far back as she could remember Bethan had wanted to be a doctor. The proudest day of her life was when she passed the entrance examination to Pontypridd Girls’ Grammar School, the saddest when she realised that a drastic cut in miners’ wages had robbed her father of sufficient money to keep her there. Her mother’s unemotional, realistic attitude had taught her to accept the inevitable. Enlisting the aid of a sympathetic teacher she applied to every hospital in the area; and at fourteen left home to take up the position of a live in ward maid at Llwynypia hospital in the Rhondda. When she was sixteen the Sister on her ward recommended her for nursing training in the Royal Infirmary in Cardiff, and she’d loved it.
    Laura arrived to train alongside her, and they’d shared a cubicle in the nurses’ hostel. Both of them soon discovered that trainee nurses were treated worse than domestics. The work was hard, the split shift hours impossibly long; their superiors demanding,
    But Bethan found her patients and their ailments fascinating, and when things were really tough, Laura was always there with a joke to lighten the load.
    During the three years she’d trained she and Laura had scarcely seen their families. Trainee nurses’ holidays rarely coincided with Christmas or Easter, and summer visits to Barry Island on the train with the other girls, and winter window shopping trips around Cardiff had taken up most of their fortnightly free afternoons. But just as they’d finished their third year finals, Bethan had received a letter from her mother suggesting a move to the Graig hospital so she could help out with family finances. Realising that Elizabeth would only have made the suggestion as a desperate last resort, she saw Matron, and applied for a transfer without giving a thought to what her own plans might have been.
    And Laura, always the supportive best friend, decided to make the move with her.
    Times were hard for everyone, but when she returned home they managed. Her father had three days’ work guaranteed in the Maritime every week. The boys had left school, although Haydn like her, had dreamed of going to college, and both boys occasionally brought home the odd few shillings.
    However, it was her own and her father’s much reduced wages that kept the family going.
    ‘Only sixty seconds of freedom left and then it’ll be twelve hours before we can call our souls our own again,’ Laura muttered as they shuffled into line behind the qualified nurses ready for the ward sister’s inspection.
    ‘Ssh,’ Nurse Williams, one of the qualified nurses, admonished as the squeak of rubber soled boots over linoleum heralded the approach of authority.
    Both Laura and Bethan had found the Graig hospital very different from Cardiff Infirmary. The first thing she and Laura had discovered was that the place was known by many names, any one of which was enough to strike fear into the hearts of the poor and elderly who were terrified of dying alone and abandoned in one of its wards. The name least used was the official one, “The Graig Hospital.” In newspaper reports of its social and fundraising functions it was generally referred to as “The Central Homes” because all the wards, although housed in separate blocks, occupied the same vast tract of land sandwiched between the railway lines at the bottom of the Graig hill.
    Despite the efforts of the staff to educate patients, few people differentiated between the hospital wards and those of