‘Thank you.’ Holly stood up and shook the woman’s hand then quietly left the hospital. Although it sounded very challenging, she had a feeling that she would enjoy working there and all she could do now was wait and hope that the reference the matron back in London gave her was good enough for her to get the job.

‘I’ve no doubt you’ll find it very different to working in a big hospital,’ her mother commented over dinner that day. ‘I can actually remember going to the opening of the place. My father took me along. It was Reginald Stanley’s idea that the town should have a hospital. God bless him, that man has done so much good. He must own half of the businesses in town now but you could never begrudge him his wealth because he is always so generous to worthy causes. And to think that he made his fortune originally in America panning for gold. It was our good luck that he decided to make his home in Nuneaton when he came back.’

‘Doesn’t he own the brickworks in Stockingford?’ Holly asked.

‘Yes, but he also owns engineering firms and pits and employs hundreds of men. He was the one responsible for bringing in an architect from London to design the hospital and he funded a lot of the work on it himself.’

‘Then he must be a gentleman with a big heart.’

‘He certainly is,’ Emma agreed. Alice started to cry then and there was a rush to see who could get to her first to pick her up. The little lady already had everyone in the house dancing to her tune.

When Holly returned to the cottage hospital two days later, as promised, she learned that the matron at UCH had given her a glowing report.

‘So when would you like to start?’ Matron asked her.

‘Tomorrow?’ It couldn’t be soon enough for Holly. She had too much time to think about things at the moment. Matron agreed eagerly, much to Holly’s relief; she could hardly wait to start.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Within days Holly realised that working at the cottage hospital was indeed very different to working in London. The five nurses were expected to do shifts and so she was allocated a room where she could rest if all was quiet while she was working at night, which she very soon discovered was very rarely. Unlike UCH, here she tended to rush from one ward to another wherever she was needed and usually she was so busy that she didn’t have a minute to herself.

As always the children’s ward was the one that tugged at her heartstrings. As the matron had warned, many of the children were from the slum areas of the town and she soon found out that dealing with them when they were first admitted was far from easy. Most of them were filthy and crawling with head lice so the first job was to get them into the bath and into clean clothes ready for Dr Nason to examine them. The babies posed no problem but some of the slightly older children had never had a bath in their lives and could put up quite a struggle.