Matron came to visit X-ray yesterday. What a tartar she is! If the H.M.O. is God, Matron has equal rank with the Virgin Mary, and I think virginity is a prerequisite for the job, so it isn’t an invalid comparison. No man would ever get up the courage, it would take a dove flying in the window to quicken any matron. They’re always battleships in full sail, but I must say that the Queens Matron is a very trim craft. Only about thirty-five, tall, good figure, red-gold hair, aquamarine eyes, beautiful face. You can’t see much of the hair for the Egyptian headdress veil, of course, but the colour’s definitely not out of a dye bottle. Her eyes would freeze a tropical lagoon, though. Glacial. Arctic. Oooooo-aa!
I felt rather sorry for her, actually. She’s the Queen of Queens, so she can’t possibly be a woman too. If you want to slap a coat of paint on a wall or you stick up a poster to amuse the patients, Matron decides what colour the paint will be or if the poster can stay there. She wears a pair of white cotton gloves, and while she can’t do it in X-ray (strictly speaking, she’s the guest of Sister Agatha in X-ray), on all ground where nurses work or play she runs the tip of one finger along skirting boards, window ledges, you name it, and God help a ward sister whose premises produce the faintest tinge of grey on that white glove! She heads the domestic as well as the nursing staff, she ranks equally with the General Medical Superintendent, and she’s a member of the Hospital Board, which I have found out is chaired by Sir William Edgerton-Smythe, who just happens to be my dishy Mr. Duncan Forsythe’s uncle. The reason why he’s senior H.M.O. of Orthopaedics at his age becomes clearer. Unk must have been a great help. What a pity. I rather thought, looking at Mr. Forsythe, that he was the sort of man who doesn’t stoop to string-pulling Upstairs. Why do idols always turn out to have feet of clay?
Anyway, I was introduced to Matron, who shook my hand for the precise number of milliseconds courtesy and rank demand. Whereas when I met Sister Agatha, she stared straight through me, Matron held my eyes à la Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. It seems Matron came to discuss the purchase of one of those new rotating set-ups for X-ray theatres, but a tour of the whole place was obligatory.
Tonight’s wish: That I stop thinking of Forsythe the Crawler.
I’m here! I’m in! I hired a taxi truck this morning and hied myself and my cardboard cartons full of loot to 17c Victoria Street. The driver was a great bloke, never passed any sort of remark, just helped me inside with my loot, took the tip graciously, and pissed off to his next job. One of the cartons was chocka with tins of pink paint—ta much for the hundred quid, Dad—and another held about ten million assorted pink glass beads. I started in without any further ado. Got out the drum of ether soap (handy to work in a hospital and know the value of ether soap), my rags and scrubbing brush and steel wool, and set about cleaning. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had said she’d clean it up when she showed me the place, and she hasn’t done a bad job, really, but there are cockroach droppings everywhere. I’ll have to ring Ginge at Ryde again and ask him for some of his cockroach poison. I hate the things, they’re loaded with germs—well, they live in sewers, drains and muck.
I scrubbed and scoured until Nature called, then went out to look for the toilet, which I remembered was in the laundry shed. Pretty awful, the laundry shed. No wonder Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz didn’t include it in the tour. It has a gas-fired copper on a meter that eats pennies and two walloping big concrete tubs with an ancient mangle bolted to the floor. The bathroom is behind it to one side. There’s an old tub with half its enamel missing, and when I put my hand on it, it tipped down with a thump—one of its ball-and-claw feet has been knocked off. A wooden block will help that, but nothing short of several coats of bicycle enamel will help the bath itself. A gas geyser on the wall provides hot water—another meter, more pennies. The wooden latticed mat I put straight into a laundry tub for a soak in ether soap. The toilet was in its own wee (good pun!) room, and it’s a work of art—English china from the last century, its bowl adorned inside and out with cobalt blue birds and creepers. The cistern, very high on the wall and connected to the bowl by a squashed lead pipe, is also blue birds. I sat down pretty gingerly on the old wooden seat, though it is actually very clean—the thing is so high off the floor that even I can’t pee without sitting down. The chain is equipped with a matching china knob, and when I pulled on it, Niagara Falls cascaded into the bowl.
I’ve worked all day and never seen a soul. Not that I had expected to see anybody, but I’d thought that I’d hear Flo in the distance—little kids are always laughing and squealing when they’re not bawling. But the whole place was as silent as the grave. Where Pappy was, I had no idea. Mum had provided a hamper of edibles, so I had plenty of fuel for all the hard labour. But I wasn’t used to being so absolutely alone. Very strange. The living room and the bedroom each had only one power point, but as I’m very knacky at stringing my own power, I got out Gavin’s tool kit and multimeter and popped in a few extra outlets. Then I had to go to the front verandah to examine the fuse box. Yep, there was me! One of those ceramic plug-ins with a piece of three-amp wire between its poles. I took it out, shoved a fifteen-amp wire in it, and was just closing the box when this crew-cut young bloke in a rumpled suit with tie askew came through the gate.
“Hullo,” I said, thinking he was a tenant.
“New here, eh?” was his answer.
I said I was, then waited to see what happened next.
“Whereabouts are you?” he asked.
“Out the back near the laundry.”
“Not in the front ground floor flat?”
I produced a scowl, which, when you’re as dark as I am, can be very fierce. “What business is it of yours?” I demanded.
“Oh, it’s my business all right.” He reached inside his coat and produced a scuffed leather wallet, flipped it open. “Vice Squad,” he said. “What’s your name, Miss?”
“Harriet. What’s yours?”
“Norm. What do you do for a living?”
I finished closing the fuse box door and put my hand under his elbow with a sultry look modelled on Jane Russell. At least I think it was sultry. “A cup of tea?” I asked.
“Ta,” he said with alacrity, and let me escort him inside.
“If you’re on the game, you’re awful clean about it,” he said, looking around my living room while I put the kettle on. Pennies! I’ll have to buy bags of the ruddy things, there are so many gas meters to feed.
“I’m not on the game, Norm, I’m a senior X-ray technician at Royal Queens Hospital,” I said, pottering about.
“Oh! Pappy brought you here.”
“You know Pappy?”
“Who doesn’t? But she doesn’t charge, so she’s apples.”
I gave him a cuppa, poured one for myself, and found some sweet bikkies Mum had put in the hamper. We dunked them in our tea in silence for a minute, then I started to pump him about Vice. What a beaut learning experience! Norm was not only a mine of information, he was what Pappy would call a “complete pragmatist”. You couldn’t keep prostitution out of the social equation, no matter what all the wowsers like archbishops and cardinals and Metho ministers said, he explained, so the thing was to keep it quiet and orderly. Every girl on the street had her territory, and the trouble started when a new girl tried to poach on an established beat. All hell would break loose.
“Teeth and nails, teeth and nails,” he said, taking another crunchy bikky. “Then the pimps get out their knives and razors.”
“Um,