The Nightingale Girls

CHAPTER Six



MILLIE BROKE INTO a brisk trot down the empty corridor. She knew she would be in trouble if she were caught running – nurses were allowed to run only in case of fire or haemorrhages – but she would be in worse trouble from Sister Parker if she were late on her first day back in preliminary training.

The new students were already busy cleaning when she slipped in to the classroom. Every morning after breakfast and before they started lectures, the PTS students had to clean every inch of the classroom and practical area. They damp dusted, high dusted, cleaned out the cupboards, washed bedpans and bottles, and washed and powdered the rubber mackintosh sheets that were used to protect the mattresses on the wards.

Millie tried to slink off to the sluice before she was seen, but naturally the eagle eye of Sister Parker, the Sister Tutor, sought her out straight away.

‘Oh, Benedict, it’s you again.’ Sister Parker may have seemed like a harmless old dear with her white hair, bright blue eyes behind round pebble spectacles and soft Scottish accent. But Millie knew from bitter experience that she had a sting like a scorpion. Her standards were extremely high, and she could reduce a pro to tears over a badly made bed. ‘I do hope your lack of punctuality this morning is not going to be a sign of things to come?’

‘No, Sister.’

She could feel Sister Parker’s eyes on her, searching for faults. Finally, to Millie’s relief, she said, ‘Well, don’t just stand there looking decorative, girl. Those lockers need cleaning out.’

Do they? Millie thought ten minutes later, as she got down on her hands and knees to scrub out the corners of a locker with Lysol and hot water. No one ever used the lockers in the practice area. It was set out like a ward, with beds, screens, trolleys and all the usual equipment, but no patient ever saw these things. And yet every morning they had to scrub every inch of them.

Millie knew better than to ask why. Once, at the very beginning of her training, she had had the temerity to pose the question. She wished she hadn’t. Sister Parker had ranted for ten minutes about the importance of a regular hygiene routine – ‘Not just when you feel it warrants it, Benedict’ – and then made her copy out the whole lecture on basic asepsis, word for word. She had also made it very clear that a student nurse’s job was to answer questions, not ask them.

Millie had never spoken up in class since.

She sat back on her heels and examined the painful cracks between her fingers. The disinfectant made her chilblains sting so much she wanted to cry.

At times like this, she wondered why she had ever given up her old life. As the only child of the 7th Earl of Rettingham, she was accustomed to a world of privilege and ease. She mixed in grand society and was waited on by a retinue of faithful servants. Before she came to the Nightingale, she had never had to cook, clean or even dress herself, since she had a lady’s maid to do it for her.

She smiled to think what Polly, her maid, would make of her mistress now, on her hands and knees, scrubbing out cupboards. Even she had never had to face such drudgery – her most arduous trial was persuading Millie out of her riding clothes and into a dress occasionally.

‘Daydreaming again, Benedict?’ Sister Parker was standing behind her.

‘No, Sister.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Make sure you get into those corners.’

‘Yes, Sister.’ Millie picked up her scrubbing brush again.

And yet, hard as her new life was, she wouldn’t go back to her old one. She loved her father, and Billinghurst, and growing up in the Kent countryside. She would have loved nothing more than to become mistress of the house herself one day. But as she grew older, her grandmother had made it clear that her future lay elsewhere.

‘Billinghurst will never be yours,’ she had told Millie bluntly. ‘Under the terms of your great-grandfather’s will, the estate is entailed so that only a male heir can inherit.’

Which meant that unless Millie married and had a son before her father died, her beloved Billinghurst and the thousands of acres of prime Kent farming land around it would pass to an obscure cousin in Northumberland.

The Dowager Countess had put all her considerable energies into making certain such a disaster did not befall them. For the last two years, Millie had been groomed and paraded like a show pony before any number of eligible men, culminating in the biggest horse market of them all – the Season.

Millie had been looking forward to it. She loved parties and having fun, and hoped to make new friends. But the reality was very different; she had never known a more humiliating and tedious experience. Being chaperoned around endless dinners and dances, changing her clothes three times a day, making small talk with exactly the same people everywhere she went. And always under the critical eye of her grandmother, urging her to be more vivacious and charming to the biggest bores.

And as for making friends . . . Millie had found most of the other girls to be even more tedious than the men. Far from having fun, they were constantly caught up in petty squabbles and bitter rivalries, all of them as desperate as their ambitious mothers to be seen in the right places and to snare the right husband. It was all too pointless for words.

Millie had come out of the Season, not only unmarried and with no prospect of an engagement in sight, but with a conviction that she wanted to do something more worthwhile with her life than organising a household of servants and deciding what to wear for dinner.

Her grandmother was appalled when she first suggested going into nursing.

‘And how do you propose to meet a suitable husband in a hospital?’ she had demanded.

Thankfully, Millie’s doting father had overruled his mother’s objections. Although Millie suspected that both of them were expecting her to give up and come home as soon as she had her first taste of hard work.

Which was why she was so determined to see it through. If only to prove to her grandmother that becoming a nurse wasn’t just another fad, like her ballet or tennis lessons.

Once cleaning was over and all the mops, brooms and brushes had been put away, it was time for lectures in the classroom.

Millie felt like an old hand as she joined the new students who had gathered in the cramped wooden desks, nervously fiddling with pencils and notebooks. She spotted her new room mate at the back of the class and went to sit next to her.

‘Hello again.’

‘Hello.’ The red-haired girl barely looked at her. Millie knew she hadn’t got off to the best start, waking her up in the night like that. It was entirely her fault; she hadn’t even remembered they were getting a new room mate until the poor girl started screaming.

She had tried to apologise that morning as they queued up for the bathroom, but the girl had barely spoken to her. Millie hoped it was just first-day nerves, and she wouldn’t turn out to be as unfriendly as Helen Tremayne. They had shared a room for three months and the only time they spoke was when Helen was taking Millie to task for her untidiness.

The door opened and they all rose to their feet as Sister Parker entered the room and made her way to the raised dais at the front of the classroom. The class skeleton, christened Algernon, dangled limply beside the blackboard behind her.

‘Good morning, Nurses,’ she greeted them. ‘Welcome to the Nightingale Preliminary Training School. As your Sister Tutor, I will be teaching you basic nursing skills and preparing you for life on the wards during your first three months of training. Should you be fortunate enough to pass your preliminary examination,’ she fixed Millie with a meaningful look over the top of her glasses, ‘you will be returning here for weekly lectures for the next three years. These will be fitted in with your nursing duties on the wards, until you pass your hospital and state examinations and become nurses at the Nightingale.’

A ripple of excitement ran through the classroom. Sister Parker clapped her hands, demanding silence.

‘Really, Nurses, if you’re going to chatter like monkeys every time I say something, we shall never get anywhere.’ Once everyone had calmed down, she continued, ‘Usually at this time we will be having lectures on anatomy, physiology, nutrition, first aid and so on. But as it is the first day in PTS for most of you –’ again she glanced at Millie ‘– we will commence by getting to know each other. You will go around the class and each tell me your names and where you come from. Then later in the morning, we will have a visit from the bookseller and you will be able to purchase some textbooks. I will advise you on what you need. Now,’ she swung round to face the bespectacled pro on the far end of the row, who looked as if she was about to burst into tears, ‘we will start with you. Name?’

‘J-Jennifer Bradley, Miss. I mean, S-Sister.’

‘Do speak up, Bradley. You’re not a mouse.’

A couple of the girls in the front row sniggered unkindly as poor Jennifer Bradley turned puce with shame. Sister Parker rounded on them.

‘Since you seem so sure of yourselves, perhaps we should start with you instead?’ she said with a lift of her brows.

The morning dragged on. Millie idly practised drawing the human heart on a corner of her notebook as they went around the class introducing themselves.

And then it came to her neighbour’s turn.

‘My name is Dora Doyle, and I come from Bethnal Green.’ She said it with an air of defiance, her chin lifted, her unmistakable cockney accent ringing around the room.

All eyes turned to Millie then. ‘Amelia Benedict,’ she introduced herself. ‘But you can call me Millie.’

‘You most certainly cannot,’ Sister Parker snapped. ‘All nurses are to be addressed by their surnames at all times.’

As the girl behind her started to recite her name, Millie noticed a girl with plaited brown hair in the front row turning to look at her with interest. She stared at her for such a long time that Millie glanced down at the bib of her apron to check she hadn’t spilled anything down herself.

They stopped for a tea break in the middle of the morning. As the other students chattered together, Millie noticed Dora Doyle standing by herself, looking out of the window over the courtyard, lost in thought.

She was so intriguing, the way she scowled out at the world from under that extraordinary red hair of hers, as if she was afraid of nothing and no one. And yet the way she had screamed out in the night, anyone would think the Devil himself was after her.

Millie went over to her, determined to break the ice. But before she’d had a chance to say hello, the girl with the plaits elbowed her way between them.

‘It’s Lady Amelia, isn’t it?’

‘Millie, actually.’

She smiled triumphantly. ‘I thought I recognised you! You were presented at Court last year, weren’t you?’

Millie frowned at her, trying to place her face with its turned-up nose and pert mouth. ‘Were you there?’

‘Well, no, actually – but I saw your photograph all the time in Tatler. My mother and I follow the Season every year. I’m Lucy Lane, by the way. My father is Sir Bernard Lane. Lane’s Lightbulbs?’ She waited expectantly. Millie tried to look impressed.

‘I was thinking of doing the Season myself last year,’ Lucy went on, ‘but the headmistress of my school was determined I should stay on. She wanted me to take the Common Entrance Exam, you see. She told my father I was easily bright enough for Oxford . . .’

Millie put on her best listening expression, the one she had cultivated from endless cocktail parties, while she searched for Dora out of the corner of her eye. She was nowhere to be seen.

‘. . . and I have to share a room with the most dreadful Irish girl. So common, I can’t tell you,’ Lucy droned on. ‘Terribly religious, too. I could hardly sleep last night for the sound of those rosary beads clicking. Who are you sharing with?’ she asked, pausing for breath at last.

‘Doyle.’

‘Really? Poor you!’

‘Why do you say that?’ Millie asked, puzzled.

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s hardly our sort, is she?’ Lucy gave her a conspiratorial smile.

‘Our sort?’

‘You know what I mean.’ Lowering her voice barely a fraction, she added, ‘I wonder if we could get Doyle to swap with me? I’m sure she and O’Hara would get on. Then we could share. It would be so much fun, wouldn’t it?’

Millie couldn’t think of anything worse. But mercifully she was saved from replying as they were summoned back into the classroom.