Authors: Maggie Ford
Call Nurse Jenny
Contents
Will she ever be her soldier’s sweetheart?
Jenny has been in love with the handsome and successful Matthew Ward since she was sixteen. Only she was too shy to make her feelings known.
When Matthew joins the army Jenny is also determined to do her bit for the war effort and becomse a nurse. Her newfound skills give her fresh confidence. However, when they meet again will he be the same man she once loved?
Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.
She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.
The Soldier’s Bride
A Mother’s Love
From her bedroom window Jenny Ross could look down into Victoria Park Road, where she lived. Her mother preferred the back bedroom, which was far quieter.
The houses at this end, coming off from the busy Cambridge Heath Road, one of the many arteries serving East London, were modest two-up two-down homes with tiny gardens at the back but none in the front. They weren’t exactly poor or slummy – being in the better part of Hackney – but they couldn’t match the fine houses further along, those that faced or backed on to Victoria Park itself.
Some were double-fronted, some three-storied. All had long if narrow back gardens. They had front gardens with low brick walls and shrubbery to shield them from the noise of poorer East End children who trooped to the park in hordes for a bit of fresh air with packets of sandwiches and bottles of lemonade, or to swim at the lido, costumes tucked under their arms, or to feed the ducks with stale bread or just to hang around the ornate drinking fountain and clink the dented metal cups on chains against its granite sides as loudly as they could. The sound could sometimes be heard clear across the park’s lawns and flower beds and playing fields.
At her dressing table Jenny leaned nearer her window to see better the large houses once occupied by the middle class in a previous era: small business people, shop owners, bank clerks, all waited on by armies of domestic staff as their basements still bore witness. Now, in 1939, domestic staff were a thing of the past except for the occasional charlady who lived out and came and went at set times. Vacuum cleaners had taken over, and white vans that collected laundry once a week, returning everything clean and pressed the same day, and dry cleaners for finer clothes.
Lipstick poised, Jenny wasn’t thinking much about these things. She was thinking more about one particular house, the first one in that row of houses which she could see well, almost opposite. It too was large, not as large as some of those further along, though fine enough, but in that house lived Matthew Ward with his mother and father and sister Louise.
Jenny had met him through becoming friends with his sister four years ago when she and her mother had first come to live in this area after her father had died. Mumsy, who had leaned on her husband all her life, had been inconsolable. After his death, unable to face living in their house in Approach Road on the other side of the park, it had been decided she and Jenny leave all their painful memories there and move. They hadn’t moved far, but it was smaller, more manageable; it was comfortable and held no sad memories though Jenny suspected Mumsy still carried each and every one of them in her heart like little fetters. But had they not come here she’d never have met Matthew. He had been sixteen then, and she fifteen.
She thought of Matthew now; how her heart raced every time she saw him. She thought of the looming threat of war, as most people were doing. Barrage balloons were already floating in the breeze on the end of their cables like fat floppy silvery fish, soldiers were digging trenches in the parks and anyone with a garden was sinking an Anderson shelter into it. And already children were being evacuated to the country to escape possible air raids. But mostly she thought of Matthew, whether he’d be sent away to fight – if there was a war.
For a moment, she took her eyes off his house, bathed in the golden light of an August evening, the sun still well above the horizon so as to make it still seem afternoon. It was no good watching the house forever. No sign of life from there. He must already have gone while she had been helping Mumsy to clear away the dinner things. Lingering dismay hung heavy inside her but she doggedly applied her lipstick in the dressing-table mirror all the same. Perhaps she could still make it in time.
Her bedside clock stated ten past seven and she was not yet ready. It was a good ten minutes’ walk along Cambridge Heath Road to St John’s hall. No good getting a bus, she might have to wait ten minutes for that. St John’s Friday night dance started at seven thirty, but there was no guarantee that Matthew would even be there, though he’d said he would be.
She had met him closing up his father’s electrical shop as she got off the bus from Leadenhall Street where she worked in an accountant’s office. He had grinned at her as she passed, totally unaware how her heart had flipped at the sight of him.
‘You look a bit hot and bothered, Jenny.’
She hated his shortening of her name. He was the only one among her friends who did. But she smiled. ‘So would you be, working in the City. You’re lucky. It’s been a real baker there today.’ She had hastily changed the subject to what had been uppermost in her mind, posing her question as casually as she could. ‘Are you going to the hall tonight?’
Most of the young people she knew frequented the events St John’s church put on. Matthew was a helper with the Boys’ Brigade, she a Girl Guide lieutenant, and both of them, like most of their friends, would help out at bazaars and church fetes and Sunday school. And there was the Friday dance.
Matthew had lifted his broad shoulders in a gesture of doubt. ‘I’ll see how I feel come seven o’clock. Bit too hot for dancing. Might think of going to the lido for a swim. Did have a date for tonight. Mare Street Regent, but it was only casual. It’s too hot to sit in the pictures.’
So that had been that. She had laughed lightly, nodded and moved off, feeling vaguely sad for the casual date waiting about outside the Regent cinema, golden hopes dying as frustration set in. That was how he was, quite unaware of the hearts he broke, hers included. But then, she’d never registered in his book. She was more certain than ever that he wouldn’t be at the dance tonight, since his front door remained firmly closed when she glanced yet again towards his house. But just in case …
Hardly had the thought touched her than she saw the door open. And there he was. Her heart that a second before had sunk into her very slippers now rose like a bird leaving a tree’s topmost branch.
Mesmerised, she watched the tall, lithe figure stride with an easy grace along the road, crossing it diagonally to pass beneath her window. Gaining Cambridge Heath Road, he turned – and Jenny’s heart leaped again for joy – in the direction of St John’s.
The second he was out of sight, she jumped into action. Reaching blindly for the pillbox hat that went with her blue flowered summer dress, her unguided fingers caught the small froth of blue net and sent it tumbling to the lino from its already precarious perch on the edge of her dressing table.
‘Damn! Bloody, bloody damn!’ she burst out. Why was it that the mere sight of him sent her into paroxysms of clumsiness, she who at work was always known for being so calm and collected? One can always rely on Jenny Ross to cope in a crisis – she’d heard it said more than once and even derived a certain modest pride from it. Yet coming anywhere near or even seeing Matthew Ward was enough to make her no longer mistress of her own actions. And now, the mere thought of arriving late for the Friday dance perhaps to find him gone off elsewhere by the time she arrived, perhaps taking most of her friends with him, sent her into a panic she’d rather no one witnessed.
It seemed all the more precious to be near him these days what with the threat of war and young men talking of joining the Territorials, keen as mustard to have a go if the balloon did go up. Nothing their parents said of the Great War seemed to be making any difference to some of them. And if Matthew joined up, it would be goodbye to her secret joy of being near him.
She had no illusions about herself. Even as she crammed the stylish little hat on her head, she tried not to acknowledge the ginger hair, which some called auburn but which to her could be nothing other than ginger, nor the milky complexion that went with it, typical of those of her colouring. She was well aware of Matthew’s preference for dark-haired, petite types.
As far as she could see the hat did nothing for her. She smiled grimly at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, the raging curls swept severely back from a high forehead into a comb at the nape of her neck; her mouth wide, her nose, in keeping with her firm narrow face, very straight. How she would have preferred to have a short retroussé nose like that of Jean Summerfield, Matthew’s current girl, even though such a one would have looked incongruous on the face her critical green eyes now studied. A strong reliable face to match a strong reliable body.
Jenny gave a huge sigh. Well, make the best of a bad job. Mirror, mirror on the wall …
‘I wish I was dark-haired and petite,’ she’d remarked to Matthew’s sister only a few weeks ago, her thoughts still centred on Jean Summerfield.
‘Why?’ Louise had said in her blunt, straightforward way. Louise was the type who offended quite a lot of people by her almost epic frankness, rather like her mother, never seeing it as offensive, though people knew where they were with her. Not one to falsely flatter, also like her mother, one could always rely on the truth with Louise Ward. The way she had said ‘why’ had given Jenny a certain encouragement to open her heart to her.
‘It’s the sort Matthew usually falls for,’ she’d admitted.
‘And you’d like my brother to fall for you?’
That had been just a little too candid and Jenny remembered cringing inwardly, wishing she’d bitten off her tongue. ‘Of course not. It’s just that I hate being ginger and tall. I hate my face and my frame. I’m so ungainly.’
‘You’re not ungainly,’ Louise had said without glancing up from the dusty old church hall bunting they’d been sorting out ready for yet another church fete to raise funds.
When she hadn’t answered, Louise, still busy unravelling strings of faded triangular pennants, had gone on: ‘I suppose you are tall. What, five foot eight? But you’ve got a nice figure, and there’s nothing wrong with your looks as I can see.’ Louise had stopped what she was doing to search her mind for a comparison, ‘A bit like Katharine Hepburn …’
‘For heaven’s sake, Louise!’ Jenny had broken in with a self-critical laugh. If the girl had been a natural flatterer she could have been forgiven, but this sweeping statement set Jenny, crouching beside her, back on her heels. ‘I can’t compare with a
film star
.’ Hepburn of Hollywood with her high cheekbones and dancing eyes was one thing, Jenny Ross from across the road with her too-curly hair and her wide shoulders was quite another. ‘For heaven’s sake, Louise, don’t be so silly.’