A Christmas Promise. Annie Groves
would never have a friend like Morag ever again. She missed their heart-to-heart chats but most of all she missed having Morag as the best and kindest friend she had ever known … It would have been nice to share her thoughts, maybe to go out dancing instead of being old before her time. Sally almost laughed out loud; since when did she have time to go dancing these days? All she seemed to do was work, sleep and, more rarely, enjoy the company of her young half-sister, Alice – Morag’s daughter.
If she was being honest now, Sally thought, she was beginning to understand how her father and Morag were drawn to each other. Morag had been so wonderful – the best of good friends, taking over the most intimate nursing of her mother as though she had been her own, when Sally needed to leave her mother’s bedside to give way to her tears.
Morag, with her gentle nature, wonderful sense of humour and, most of all, her compassion; so like her own mother – if Sally were truthful, even if only to herself, there was a part of her that was glad Morag took care of her mother when she was unable to do so, for, there was nobody else she would have trusted to do it.
It was so easy now to see how her father would have been instantly beguiled by her friend, and Sally realised now that she wasn’t betraying her mother’s memory by thinking this way. Her father had found comfort in Morag’s company and that comfort had eventually led to love – for both of them. With hindsight, Sally could see it now. Life was too short and too precious to live with regret.
Her father was not the kind of man who could have his head turned by any young flibbertigibbet who came his way – he truly loved her mother, of that Sally had no doubt – but neither was he the kind of man who was strong enough to live alone or wallow in grief. He celebrated her mother’s life in everything he did. Morag had been his strength when Sally had been so defeated by grief and absolutely useless, emotionally and substantially, to her father. So who better to fill her mother’s shoes and – yes – her bed? Sally knew that, at the time, she would have thought nobody was good enough to take her mother’s place – absolutely nobody.
Yet, thinking of it now, she knew that Morag would never have had any intentions of becoming a substitute for her own mother. The thought of it still brought on a small shudder of distress, but now she had to put the feeling to one side, because she had to move on, for Alice’s sake as well as for her own wellbeing. Harbouring such toxic thoughts as she had done in the past was not healthy. It had been wrong to foster bitterness and a single-minded refusal to see anybody’s point of view, except her own.
‘Ah, Sister, there you are.’
Sally turned suddenly to see a young, floppy-haired doctor approaching, wearing what looked like a brand-new stethoscope and a wide grin, his white coat-tails flying as he walked.
Sally’s freshly starched apron rustled as she turned to see the object of the young nurses’ affection. One of the trainees gaped in the doctor’s direction and said quickly, her face taking on a pink tinge as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t, ‘I’m sorry, Sister, I didn’t see you standing there. Did you want us for something?’
‘No, Nurse,’ Sally said in her usual calm manner. ‘You carry on.’
‘Carry on, Nurse, you are doing a sterling job,’ Dr Parsley said enthusiastically, undermining Sally’s authority, for which she gave him a withering look. This was the young doctor who, according to the probationers, was a bit of a lady’s man and, according to Matron, was a pain in the rear.
‘How lovely to meet you, Sister,’ Dr Parsley said, holding his hand in front of him, which Sally pointedly ignored. ‘And may I say how beautiful you look in that disapproving grimace.’
‘Indeed.’ Sally’s nonplussed demeanour was fully witnessed by the probationers, whom, she suspected, Dr Alex Parsley was trying to impress. ‘This way,’ Sally said, walking into the sluice room. ‘Nurse, show Dr Parsley where he can put his preposterous observations.’ Sally knew that once they took their Hippocratic oath these newly qualified doctors left their common sense at the door.
‘Oh, Sister, would you be a pet and see if there are any rooms to let hereabouts?’
‘Did your last slave die of exhaustion, Dr Parsley?’ Sally asked with an air of disdain as she left the young doctor in the care of the salivating nurses. She had no intention whatsoever of finding the young upstart a room.
Sally knew what she had to do. She had left making the journey far too long, and the time had come to visit her home city. Her mind was made up. The only problem was she wanted to go right now, but she wouldn’t be able to have leave until well after Christmas, maybe even after spring.
‘Ah, Sister, so glad to have caught up with you,’ said one of the older and much more experienced doctors. ‘There is a gentleman in bed five who has been asking for you in his sleep – his name is—’
‘I know who it is, thank you, Doctor.’ Sally could feel the hot colour rise to her throat and cheeks; Callum was calling her name in his sleep.
‘I see there’s a new lodger in Ian Simpson’s house, Olive,’ Nancy Black said as she closed her front door and began to attack her pathway with a balding sweeping brush. Olive was not in the mood for Nancy’s prattle this morning but knew she that thinking of mundane things would stop her fretting about her daughter, Tilly. Nancy would jump at the chance of a bit of gossip, no matter how small or insignificant. Olive knew her neighbour, like a starving crow, fed on the smallest piece of tittle-tattle for as long as possible.
‘I heard on the wireless that the war might be over by Christmas,’ Olive tried changing the subject, knowing that Nancy, now leaning on the threadbare brush, enjoyed a good old moan about the war.
Keeping busy as usual, Olive intended to fill every minute of her day so she didn’t worry. She hadn’t seen Tilly since April, when she’d been home on forty-eight hours’ leave, and now it was September – and soon to be her twenty-first birthday. Tilly had written only sporadically, and Olive had no idea where she was posted. It was a big wrench to a mother who had watched and nurtured her only daughter so carefully for those twenty-one years.
Olive couldn’t stop the disturbing thoughts that sometimes filled her mind in the darkest, sleep-deprived hours of the night, not only because she had no idea where Tilly was since she moved out of London, but also because she hadn’t been honest with Tilly for the first time in her daughter’s life: she had kept the really important news that Drew was in London to herself. Sally had told her he was being discharged from hospital any day now and she wondered if he would go straight back to America as his father had wished.
‘There haven’t been as many raids lately and if the news is anything to go by, it looks like the Nazis are running out of steam,’ Nancy called over the fence, breaking into Olive’s thoughts. ‘All the hysterics from Hitler about taking over London have come to nothing, just as I knew it would.’ She gave an exaggerated nod of her turbaned head. ‘I could have told them that Hitler was full of hot air … silly man, doing all that ranting.’
‘Maybe Mr Churchill should have come to you first, Nancy,’ Olive answered drily. ‘It would have saved an awful lot of bother.’ She shook her head as she dipped her disintegrating chamois leather into the galvanised bucket and, having given it a good rinse, she then vigorously removed all trace of city grime from her front windows, saying as she wiped, ‘We’ve got Hitler on the run now for sure.’
Olive wished the war would be over soon for the sake of both sides. She recalled reading in the newspaper that the German industrial port of Hamburg, was bombed nine times in eight days! It must have been as bad as the blitz, she thought. She believed that not everybody was bad to the core, but though she felt a deep abiding pity for the thousands of people who had been killed in the resulting firestorm that had destroyed nearly half of Hamburg’s factories, she wouldn’t say so to Nancy.
‘Serves ’em right,’ Nancy said with a vehemence so unbecoming