To Have and to Hold by Anne Bennett Read Free Book Online

cousin of Lois’s.
    ‘No,’ Lois said, ‘Paul doesn’t want it. He’s training to be a doctor. Ooh, I bet he will have a lovely bedside manner,’ she said in delight. ‘When they let him loose I should imagine at least half of the female population will develop ailments that they have never suffered from before.’
    ‘You are a fool, Lois,’ Carmel said, though she too was laughing. ‘No one can be that charming and good-looking.’
    ‘Paul is,’ Lois said adamantly. ‘I tell you, if only we weren’t first cousins I would make a play for him myself. Paul has everything I admire in a man and I am not talking money here either. He even speaks French like a native. I mean, I learned French but mine is very schoolroomish. Jeff was half French and when Paul and Matthew were little, their French grandmother was alive and lived not far away and they would natter away to her in her native language. After she died, Uncle Jeff said he didn’t want the boys to lose the language, so Paul studied for two years at the Sorbonne.’
    ‘Where’s that?’
    ‘A university in Paris. Matthew will go too next year.’
    ‘You don’t like him so well.’
    ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose he is handsome too, in a manner of speaking, but he is a poor shadow next to his brother and he’s the one going to inherit thefactory as Paul doesn’t want it, though Uncle Jeff says he will have to start on the shop floor and work his way up, so he will know every aspect of the trade.’
    ‘I think that is a jolly good idea.’
    ‘Me too,’ Lois agreed.
    The six weeks passed quickly as the days were so busy. The four room-mates were delighted to find they had all passed their exams at the end, and with good marks too. Now they could go down on to the wards like proper nurses.
    They began at seven o’clock each day and, with short meal breaks, continued until eight o’clock at night with one day off a week.
    Each day, the ward sister would read the report left by the night sister and allocate work to be done that day by the senior and junior staff nurses and probationary nurses alike. Carmel was first under the direction of Staff Nurse Pamela Hammond, whom she estimated to be in her late twenties. Her grey eyes were kindly, and from around her cap, tufts of dark blonde hair peeped. She worked hard and expected her probationer to do the same. As hard work was second nature to Carmel, the two got on well.
    In the early days it seemed to Carmel and her friends that they cleaned all day long, unless they were helping serve drinks or meals. They cleaned lockers, bedsteads and sluices. The rubber sheets of the incontinent had to be scrubbed daily and left to hang in the sluice room, bedpans were scalded, and at the end of each day, all dirty laundry had to be folded, counted and put in linen bags to be taken to the laundry. The girls were usually too weary even to talk at the end of a shift and only fitto fall into bed, particularly when they also had to attend lectures in their scant free time away, which they did after the initial six weeks on the wards were up.
    Although it didn’t help the weariness, Carmel found the day passed quicker and far more pleasantly once she saw the patients as people. She had done this before in Letterkenny, though many had been known to her at least by sight, maybe from Mass or in the shops. She found if she thought that even the unappealing tasks she was doing were for the patients’ comfort and well-being that gave everything more of a purpose. Also it was pleasant to chat to them as she was working, and many said they loved her lilting accent.
    The preliminary six-week period was over just before Christmas. Carmel offered to work through because she had nowhere to go. She had been asked by each of her flat mates in turn to go to their homes for Christmas, but though she know the girls well, she didn’t know a thing about their families and was nervous of descending on anyone at such a family