‘You’re lucky to have got away. England’s a good country to be out of now,’ the Mount Seager day porter once said, and Sarah had enormously warmed to Rosamund Farquharson when the usually cynical and smart blonde replied fiercely, ‘Do you like to keep clear when your best friends are against it? I should think not. And nor do we.’
A little self-righteously, perhaps, they had formed an alliance. They had few tastes in common. Rosamund had been given two years at the London art school by a generous English aunt. She had, it appeared, been hailed back to New Zealand by her parents upon distracted representations made by this same aunt. Her interests were focused so ruthlessly on young men that she had the air of being a sort of specialist. The leap from small town New Zealand and the humble abode of a school teacher’s family to Bloomsbury studio parties, had reacted upon her like the emotional equivalent of an overdose of thyroid gland. Rosamund had listened first with bewilderment, then with encouragement and finally with the liveliest enthusiasm to monotonous conversations about eroticism, at that time the fashionable topic among art-students. She quickly collected an amazing jargon and a smattering of semi-technical information which, like some precocious reincarnation of the Ancient Mariner, she was quite unable to keep to herself. Rosamund was given to using tediously blasphemous and indecent language, and her favourite recreation was a process she called ‘waking up the old dump’. At first Sarah had a notion that most of Rosamund’s dissipations ruled these purple patches to her telling of them; but with the appearance of Private Maurice Sanders among the recovering men of Military 1 she was obliged to change her opinion.
‘This time,’ Sarah thought with a sigh, ‘I’m afraid she is doing an odd spot of the bonnet-and-windmill business. And with Private Sanders! How she can!’
She switched on her headlamps. About two hundred yards ahead the Long Leg ended abruptly. They had reached the edge of the plains. A great river made its exit from the mountains a mile or two to the west, flowing down from the foothills. With the sheer banks of the riverbed the plains ended as sharply as if they had been sliced away by a gargantuan knife, the foothills rising steeply above and the mountains proper beyond. Sarah changed down. The Long Leg dived into a precipitous cutting and finished emphatically at the deep chasm of the river. The wheels of the bus rattled across the wooden planks of the old bridge. The headlamps found white painted rails and uneven planking, loose boards clattering ominously beneath the weight of the bus. Sarah heard one of the VADs say to another, ‘I hate this part of the trip, the bridge is far too rickety for my liking.’
‘I’ll say,’ her pal replied, ‘and that wooden rail wouldn’t stop a dog from falling in, let alone this bus.’
They giggled nervously as Sarah changed down again and in the split-second while the gears were disengaged the voice of the river could be heard, a vast cold thunder among boulders below the high bridge. As they reached the far side vague shapes of trees and a roof appeared against the steep hill to their left.
‘You can hardly see Johnson’s pub in the blackout,’ said a cheerful VAD.
‘Awkward for Private Sanders,’ said the small nurse. There followed a subdued tittering.
‘I reckon he could find it blindfold.’
‘Shut up. You’re not supposed to know.’
‘Poor old Farquharson.’
With a vicious jab, Sarah sounded the horn. The VADs screamed in unison.
‘What’s that for, Transport? Have we run over anything?’
‘A reputation,’ said Sarah.
After a final short, steep climb she pulled the bus carefully into the hospital driveway and parked with a shout to the VADs to remember that Matron expected the patients in bed and sleeping by now, and not to disturb them. She turned her attention to young Sydney Brown. With a sudden wave of sympathy she saw the hospital as he must see it, not the ramshackle collection of well-worn buildings she had come to know and value as a genuine place of sanctuary for damaged civilians and out-of-place servicemen. To Sydney Brown the scent of carbolic, the hush now that they were between the wild river and the immense reach of the mountains up ahead, this must have felt a place of foreboding, a dark and jumbled site where his grandfather lay dying. She smiled kindly at him, hoping he could see her in the reflection from the headlamps, bouncing off the back of the storeroom and the boilerhouse, the peeling paint on the old weatherboards even more obvious in the light from the headlamps than during the blistering heat of the day.
‘I’ll take you to Matron, shall I, Mr Brown? We can get you a cup of tea and then in to see your grandfather. I know Father O’Sullivan was expected, so—’
Her voice petered out. What more was there to say?
‘I don’t want tea, I’ll just see the old man.’
Sydney Brown was up and out of his seat, down the steps, and waiting.
Sarah took out her torch, turned off the headlights, and nodded, pocketing the keys. ‘Yes, of course, come along.’
Mr Glossop’s slow, heavy tread had not long retreated back across the asphalt yard when Matron heard the rattle and squeak of the nine o’clock transport rolling up the driveway and into the parking area. The VADs would take a few minutes to sort themselves out from the journey. Sarah Warne was a sensible girl, one of the few she could rely upon, which meant she had a moment to gather her thoughts before she was needed to brief the night staff with Sister Comfort.
Retrieving the paperwork she had hurriedly tidied out of Mr Glossop’s reach, she looked through the papers. Surely he wouldn’t have pried into her private correspondence? She frowned, because that was exactly the kind of behaviour she’d expect of the infuriating fellow. Even so, he wouldn’t have had time to look through them thoroughly. She sat forward in her chair and spread out the papers before her. Almost twenty-five years here at Mount Seager and, while there had been difficult years, in particular during the influenza epidemic after the last war, when she was a newly appointed ward sister and they had been stretched far beyond their capacity, both to care and to cope, things had never before come to this. The bill for roof repairs to the Surgery was two months overdue. After a dreadfully wet winter, they simply hadn’t been able to risk the old corrugated iron roof any longer, it was bad enough in any other ward, but a serious health hazard in the Surgery. A third letter from the local bakery, with a curt note attached from Elsie Pocock, a woman she had known her whole life, and now Matron found herself crossing the road in town to avoid speaking to her. Two further angry demands for payment, one from the farmer who supplied sides of beef ‘at cost!’ as he reminded her in the letter, ‘at cost!’, and another from the milk factory. The extra beds, the military wards commandeered when the men were sent home with scarlet fever and polio, the more serious complications of burns and amputations for the poor lads who would be forever scarred, all of it meant added work for a dwindling staff as ever more of them left to help the war effort themselves. Every day there were extra patients to feed and laundry bills rising through the rusting roof and the men in charge up in Wellington seemed to have no idea at all how their plans affected ordinary people out in the rest of the country. Her creditors had been patient at first, everyone was having to do more on far less in wartime, but time was running out. Matron would have the respite of the Christmas break, with all but the farmers stopping work for a few days, come January however, she would need to pay up, something had to give.
Matron took up her pen and paper and began composing a letter. As she did so she continued her train of thought. If she had been as flighty as young Rosamund Farquharson, silly girl spoiling herself with Sanders, she’d have put money on one of the sure-fire bets the men in Military 1 were so keen on, but Isabelle Ashdown had never laid a bet in her life, not even as a young nurse when all of her fellow trainees put a penny each into the sweepstake on who would be the first to bag a doctor husband. She thought then that betting on men was foolish and gambling on