A Wartime Nurse by Maggie Hope

girl, if you liked dark eyes and hair. Very dark her eyes had been that night, in the gleam from his flashlight. And very big and frightened too. Who on earth did she think he was – the bogey man? The ghost of a tommy knocker? A dead entombed pitman?
    ‘Hello? Manager’s office. Cornish speaking.’
    The voice of his uncle cut into his thoughts. Ken sat forward carelessly, jarring his leg against the side of the desk and wincing at the stab of agony that coursed through it.
    ‘Uncle Tucker?’ he forced himself to say.
    ‘Ken? What is it? What’s wrong?’
    ‘Nothing . . . nothing’s wrong. I just thought – I have the evening and tomorrow off, and wondered if I could invite myself to dinner? It’s a while since I was out. If you haven’t anything else on, that is?’
    ‘Delighted, old lad, any time. Pot luck, of course, but I’m sure there’s something in.’
    ‘I can get some food points . . .’
    ‘No, no need. Mrs Parkin will have something in. You know her, she’ll rustle up something. It’ll be grand to have a chin-wag, looking forward to it. See you about seven, then? Have to go now, Ken, things to do.’
    Ken replaced the handset, his melancholy mood of the morning lifted. Uncle Tucker was right. It would be grand to have a good meal and a quiet talk in front of a roaring coal fire like the ones from his childhood instead of these infernal electric heaters or, worse, the smelly coke stoves in the huts.
    He pulled the theatre list and pile of notes to him and opened the case notes of the first name on the list. There was the afternoon to get through first. The orthopaedic man was coming in from Darlington. There was a fractured tibia that had to be broken and reset for the man had lain for almost a week in the mud at the front. A man who must be fifty-years-old at least, though he swore he was only forty-five. Poor devil, he must have been in the last show. Defeat twice in a lifetime was too much for anyone.
    Ken worked away steadily, reading the notes to remind himself of each patient on the list, then he went over the bed list which Matron had prepared for the whole of the section. When he had finished he rose and took it along the corridor to her office.
    The sitting-room fire in the manager’s house in Winton Colliery did indeed roar up the chimney as Ken had known it would. He sat in an armchair opposite his uncle and stretched his legs to the blaze, feeling relaxed and cosseted for a change. There had been fish for dinner, bought in fresh that morning from Shields and queued for by Mrs Parkin at Campbell’s fish shop in the town. Bless the woman! And thank God fish wasn’t rationed too.
    ‘More whisky, Ken?’
    Tucker Cornish held out the decanter and poured some into his nephew’s glass and Ken added water from the jug on the occasional table by his side. Taking a sip, he smacked his lips in appreciation.
    ‘How did you manage to get hold of it? Single malt, isn’t it?’
    ‘Glenmorangie. I bought it in 1939. This is the last bottle, I’m afraid. Still, with any luck the war will be over soon, and things will get back to normal.’
    ‘I’m not so sure. Oh, not that the war will be over soon, at least the war with the Germans. I mean that things will get back to normal. I don’t think we will be able to afford luxuries. The country has taken a battering. It’s going to take an awful lot to get it back to normal. Wars don’t come cheap either in men or money.’
    Tucker stared into the fire, his face sombre. ‘Now we have to win the peace. We can’t let it happen again as it did after the last show; the miners and others thrown on the scrapheap. Something will have to be done, as the Prince of Wales said before the war. Not that he did anything, nor anyone else either. It took a war to do that.’
    ‘I think Labour will get in. The soldiers coming home this time won’t stand for what happened between the wars. There’ll be a revolution else.’
    The room grew quiet, both