‘Staff Nurse Mann is supposed to be shadowing me,’ Ada said, as she busily laid the metal instruments in the sterilizing machine. ‘But I’ll leave her and Matron alone to finish the ward rounds before I catch up with them.’

Dora grinned as she nodded towards the instruments Ada was loading up. ‘Make sure they’re spotless,’ she joked. ‘You never know, you might be needing them yourself soon.’

13. The New Staff Sister

After her late arrival at Mary Vale the previous night, Edith Mann had walked into her room, where her heart sank. Even though it had been polished until it positively shone and the garden flowers in vases on the windowsills filled the air with a fresh perfume, there was no getting away from the worn carpets, faded rugs and rickety furniture. Nevertheless, Edith threw back her rather stiff shoulders; she had made her decision and now she must live with it. Working at Mary Vale was a necessary move – a sacrifice she had made for the greater cause. Admittedly it wasn’t as smart or as comfortable as her previous place of employment, a rather select nursing home in Harrogate full of snobby young mothers whose every whim was indulged virtually around the clock.

‘Compared to this place it was like Buckingham Palace,’ Edith thought.

Taking a deep, determined breath, Edith critically checked her reflection in the small mirror hanging on the wall. At thirty-nine she was still strong and fit, her long rather horsey face offset by an abundance of thick, dark, wiry hair, now flecked with streaks of silver; her grey eyes were assertive; and her chin firm. She was a woman who had worked hard all her life in order to support her tyrant of a mother, who had never allowed her only daughter so much as a look at any young men. Mrs Mann controlled Edith with violence and threats, and Edith, terrified of her mother’s volatile temper, had towed the line until she fell for the married consultant gynaecologist at her former place of work. That her beloved was a married man with an invalid wife hadn’t dissipated Edith’s passion; if anything, it had enhanced her determination to comfort and support him. Over the past five years they had enjoyed a clandestine relationship which perfectly suited them both and would have gone on for years had it not been for one of the night nurses spotting him sneaking out of the dormitory in the early dawn light. Terrified that their affair would damage Charles’s career and enrage her deranged mother, Edith had immediately resigned her post and looked for work elsewhere. Mary Vale was the first place to offer her a job, and she had snatched at it like a rope thrown to a drowning woman.

‘Charles is my first priority,’ grim-faced Edith told her reflection. ‘And anywhere on earth is better than living at home.’