The Nightingale Girls

The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas



About the Book



In at the deep end

Three very different girls sign up as trainee nurses at a big London teaching hospital in 1934.

DORA

Leaves her overcrowded, squalid East End home for a better life. But has she got what it takes to keep up with other, better educated girls? And will her hated stepfather ever let her go?

HELEN

Born for the job, her brother is a doctor, her all-powerful mother a hospital trustee. But will Helen’s secret misery be her downfall?

MILLIE

An aristocratic rebel, her carefree attitude will find her up in front of Matron again and again. Will she ever care enough to make a nurse? Or will she go back to the glamorous life she was born to?

THE NIGHTINGALE GIRLS

What have they let themselves in for?





About the Author

Donna Douglas is a freelance journalist and – as Donna Hay – had a number of successful romantic novels published by Orion.


The Nightingale Girls



Donna Douglas





Chapter One



‘TELL ME, MISS Doyle. What makes you think you could ever be a nurse here?’

After growing up in the slums of Bethnal Green, not much frightened Dora Doyle. But her stomach was fluttering with nerves as she faced the Matron of the Nightingale Teaching Hospital in her office on that warm September afternoon. She sat tall and upright behind a heavy mahogany desk, an imposing figure in black, her face framed by an elaborate white headdress, grey eyes fixed expectantly on Dora.

Dora wiped her damp palms on her skirt. She was sweating inside her coat, but she didn’t dare take it off in case Matron noticed the frayed cuffs of her blouse.

‘Well—’ she began, then stopped. Why did she think she could ever be a nurse? Living on the other side of Victoria Park from the Nightingale, she had often seen the young women coming and going through the gates, dressed in their red-lined cloaks. For as long as she could remember she’d dreamed of being one of them.

But dreams like that didn’t come true for the likes of Dora Doyle. Like any other East End girl, her destiny lay in the sweatshops or one of the factories that lined the overcrowded stretch of the Thames.

So she’d left school at fourteen to earn her living at Gold’s Garments, and tried to make the best of it. But the dream hadn’t gone away. It grew bigger and bigger inside her, until four years later she had taken her courage in her hands and written a letter of application.

‘What have you got to lose?’ Mr Gold’s daughter Esther had said. ‘You’ll never know if you don’t try, bubele.’ She’d even lent Dora her lucky necklace charm to wear for the interview. She could feel the warm metal sticking to her damp skin beneath her blouse.

‘It’s a hamsa,’ Esther had explained as Dora admired the exquisite little silver hand on its delicate chain. ‘My people believe it brings good fortune.’

Dora hoped the hamsa’s powers weren’t just extended to Jews. She needed all the help she could get.

‘I’m keen and I’m very hard-working,’ she found the words at last. ‘And I’m a quick learner. I don’t need telling twice.’

‘So your reference says.’ Matron looked down at the letter in front of her. ‘This Miss Gold clearly thinks a lot of you.’

Dora blushed at the compliment. Esther had taken a real chance, writing that reference behind her father’s back; old Jacob would go mad if he found out his daughter was helping one of his employees to find another job. ‘Miss Esther reckons I’m one of her best girls on the machines. I’ve got the hands, she says.’

She saw Matron looking at her hands and quickly knotted them in her lap so the woman wouldn’t see her bitten-down nails, or the calluses the size of mothballs that covered her fingers. ‘Grafter’s hands’, her mother called them. But they didn’t look like the right kind of hands to soothe a fevered brow.

‘I have no doubt you’re a hard worker, Miss Doyle,’ Matron said. ‘But then so is every girl who comes in here. And most of them are far better qualified than you.’

Dora’s chin lifted. ‘I’ve got my certificates. I went back to night school to get them.’

‘So I see.’ Matron’s voice was soft, with an underlying note of steel. ‘But, as you know, the Nightingale is one of the best teaching hospitals in London. We have girls from all over the country wanting to train here.’ She met Dora’s eyes steadily across the desk. ‘So why should we accept you and not them? What makes you so special, Miss Doyle?’

Dora dropped her gaze to stare at the herringbone pattern of the polished parquet. She wanted to tell this woman how she took care of her younger brother and sisters, and had even helped bring the youngest, Little Alfie, into the world two years ago. She wanted to explain how she’d nursed Nanna Winnie through a bad bout of bronchitis last winter when everyone thought she’d had it for sure.

Most of all, she wanted to talk about Maggie, her beautiful sister, who’d died when Dora was twelve years old. She’d sat beside her bed for three days, watching her slip away. It was Maggie’s death more than anything that had made her want to become a nurse and to stop other families suffering the way hers had.

But her mother didn’t like them talking about their personal business to anyone. And it probably wasn’t the clever answer Matron was looking for anyway.

‘Nothing,’ she said, defeated. ‘I’m nothing special.’ Just plain Dora Doyle, the ginger-haired girl from Griffin Street.

She wasn’t even special in her family. Peter was the eldest, Little Alfie the youngest. Josie was the prettiest and Bea the naughtiest. And then there was Dora, stuck in the middle.

‘I see.’ Matron paused. She seemed almost disappointed, Dora thought. ‘Well, in that case, I don’t think there’s much more to say.’ She began gathering up her notes. ‘We will write to you and let you know our decision in due course. Thank you, Miss Doyle . . .’

Dora felt a surge of panic. She’d let herself down. She could feel the moment ebbing away, and with it all her hopes. She would never wear the red-lined cloak and walk with pride like those other girls. It would be back to the machines at Gold’s Garments for her until her eyes went or her fingers became so bent with rheumatism she couldn’t work any more.

Esther Gold’s words came back to her. What have you got to lose?

‘Give me a chance,’ she blurted out.

Matron looked askance at her. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Dora could feel her face flaming to the roots of her hair, but she had to speak up. ‘I know I don’t have as much proper schooling as the other girls, but I’ll work really hard, I promise.’ The words were falling over themselves as she tried to get them out before she lost her nerve.

‘Really, Miss Doyle, I hardly think—’

‘You won’t regret it, I swear. I’ll be the best nurse this place has ever seen. Just give me the chance. Please?’ she begged.

Matron’s brows lifted towards the starched edge of her headdress. ‘And if I don’t?’

‘I’ll apply again, here or somewhere else. And I’ll keep on applying until someone says yes,’ Dora declared defiantly. ‘I’ll be a nurse one day. And I’ll be a good one, too.’

Matron stared at her so hard Dora felt her heart sink to her borrowed shoes.

‘Thank you, Miss Doyle,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

Matron Kathleen Fox watched from the window as Dora Doyle hurried across the courtyard towards the gates, head down, hands thrust into her pockets. The poor girl couldn’t get away fast enough.

‘Well?’ she asked Miss Hanley. ‘What did you think?’

‘I’m sure it’s not my place to say, Matron.’

Kathleen smiled to herself. Her Assistant Matron’s mouth was puckering with the effort of not voicing her opinion. Veronica Hanley was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, strong-featured, with sensibly short greying hair, large hands and a deep, booming voice. ‘Manly Hanley’ Kathleen had overheard some of the younger nurses calling her. She had just turned fifty, a good ten years older than Kathleen herself, and had been at the Nightingale since she was a pro. She struck terror into the hearts of all the nurses, including the sisters. Even Kathleen sometimes had to remind herself who was in charge.

‘All the same, I would value your opinion,’ she said.

‘Her shoes were scuffed, there was a hole in her stocking and a button coming loose on her coat,’ Miss Hanley said without hesitation.

‘I’ll admit she was hardly promising.’

‘She could barely string two words together.’

‘That’s quite true.’

Matron was used to interviewing girls who couldn’t wait to gush about their talents, their dedication to nursing and their admiration for Florence Nightingale. But Dora Doyle had just sat there, staring out from under that explosion of frizzy red hair like a trapped rabbit.

And yet there was something about her, a spark of determination in those green eyes, that made Matron think she had real potential.

‘Perhaps she might be better applying to the Infirmary?’ Miss Hanley suggested.

The City Infirmary was an old Poor Law hospital, a former workhouse just down the river in Poplar. It was small, badly funded and run by ill-trained staff and auxiliaries. It also had a shocking reputation among the locals, who referred to it as The Graveyard.

‘After all, she’s hardly Nightingale’s material, is she?’ Miss Hanley went on.

They were interrupted by the maid bringing in afternoon tea. They paused as she set the tray down on the console table just inside the door and arranged the bone china cups and saucers.

‘What makes you say that, Miss Hanley?’ Kathleen asked when the girl had gone.

‘I would have thought that was obvious. We only accept girls with education and breeding.’

‘Miss Doyle is adequately qualified.’

‘From a night school!’ Miss Hanley’s lips curled over the words.

‘Which surely shows determination and character, if nothing else.’ Kathleen moved across to the table to pour the tea. ‘I can’t imagine it was easy for a young girl, working long hours in a garment factory then trooping off to study in the evening, can you?’

‘That may be. But it takes more than that to be suitable for the Nightingale.’

It certainly does, Kathleen thought as she passed a cup to her.

As the Nightingale was a prestigious teaching hospital, it tended to attract girls of a certain background. Well-bred, well-spoken, middle-class girls who were looking for a respectable way to fill their time until they found themselves a young doctor to marry.

It was the same in most hospitals, she knew. But even more so at the Nightingale. Sometimes when she heard the young students talking among themselves, she wondered if she’d accidentally strayed into an exclusive finishing school.

Miss Hanley had even boasted that the previous Matron’s sure-fire way of discovering if a girl was suitable for training was to ask if she belonged to a tennis club. Kathleen doubted if Dora Doyle had ever seen a tennis racquet, let alone picked one up. But she was passionate, determined, and obviously no stranger to hard work. Which was more than could be said for many of the students who came through the Nightingale’s doors. Most of them were totally unprepared for the rigours of nursing; many of them didn’t make it through the twelve weeks of preliminary training.

‘Obviously it’s your decision, Matron,’ Miss Hanley conceded stiffly. ‘But I have to say, girls of that class seldom do well as nurses. They simply don’t have the character for it.’

‘Oh, I don’t think Miss Doyle is short of character.’ Kathleen lifted the teacup to conceal her smile.

She wondered what Miss Hanley would say if she knew that Kathleen was once just like Dora Doyle, a millworker’s daughter from a small Lancashire town, who had dreamed of something beyond life in the blowing room of a cotton mill. She too had once sat across the desk from a forbidding-looking Matron and begged for the chance to show what she could do. And now look at her. Barely forty and already in charge of the nursing staff of one of the country’s top teaching hospitals. Sometimes she had to pinch herself to believe it was true. Not everyone approved, of course. She knew there were some people at the Nightingale who thought that she and her newfangled ideas would lead to the ruination of the hospital’s good name.

Change was a dirty word at the Nightingale. The hospital had been run the same way for the last thirty years, under the iron rule of its old Matron. And when she retired, many had believed Miss Hanley was the natural choice to carry on her good work – including Miss Hanley herself. But the Board of Trustees decided the Nightingale needed new blood, and so Kathleen had been appointed instead.

Now, after a month in the job, she still felt like the new girl. She could hear the whispers of the senior staff following her down the corridors as she did her morning rounds, everyone wondering what to make of the new Matron, who smiled too much and talked to the young nurses in the same friendly way she did to the senior consultants.

It didn’t help that Miss Hanley didn’t miss a chance to remind her: ‘That really isn’t the way we do things here at the Nightingale, Matron.’

She went to look out of the window. Beyond the gracious Georgian façade of its main building which fronted the road overlooking Victoria Park, the Nightingale Hospital was a sprawl of blocks, extensions and outbuildings arranged loosely around a central paved courtyard with a small cluster of plane trees at its centre. These housed the wards, the operating block and the dispensary. Beyond them lay more buildings, including the dining rooms, nurses’ homes and the doctors’ quarters.

Up until a few weeks ago her office had also been situated down there. But when she took over as Matron, Kathleen had insisted on moving into the main hospital building so she could be closer to the wards.

It had caused much consternation among the senior nursing staff. ‘Why does she need to keep an eye on us?’ the disgruntled sisters asked amongst themselves – stirred up, Kathleen suspected, by Miss Hanley. But it was worth the trouble. She was now in the heart of the hospital, where she belonged. Not only was she closer at hand to deal with emergencies on the wards, but her new office gave her a good view over the courtyard, where she could see everyone going about their business.

The damp chill of early September had given way to a few glorious days of Indian summer. Patients basked in their wheelchairs under the shade of the plane trees, enjoying the autumn sunshine. As she watched, a young nurse emerged through the archway from the dining block, heading back across the courtyard to the wards, doing the brisk heel-toe walk that almost but didn’t quite break the ‘no running’ rule.

As if she knew she was being watched, the girl suddenly caught Kathleen’s eye. She ducked her head, but not before Kathleen saw the guilty flush on her cheeks.

She turned away, smiling to herself. ‘So you don’t think we should give Miss Doyle a chance?’ she said.

‘I don’t believe she would fit in.’

I know how she feels, Kathleen thought.

Perhaps for once Miss Hanley had a point. If the new Matron couldn’t even fit in, how would someone like Dora Doyle ever cope?