A Wartime Nurse by Maggie Hope Page A

men staring into the fire as they contemplated what would happen after the fighting ended. Ken wondered if his uncle remembered the miners’ strike of ’26 and the long depression which had lasted for years after. He himself had been a small child at the time and living on a farm by the coast, but he could remember the unrest at Marsden Colliery. The poverty was all around him, the children stricken with rickets and other results of malnutrition.
    He also remembered the murder of the mine agent in Winton and the trials of Tucker’s natural father and half-brother. How Wesley Cornish, Tucker’s father had been found guilty. Ken’s mother was the daughter of Meg and Jonty Grizedale, her childhood sweetheart, Meg told him all about it when he moved to Bishop Auckland to work in the hospital. She feared he would hear it from local gossips. Jane was born after they moved away to Marsden. She had told him how Wesley had deserted her and her two boys, Jack and Tucker, and moved in with Sally Hawkins.
    Now Tucker was the only Cornish left in Winton. Ken wondered why his uncle had not changed his name to Grizedale when his mother married Grandda Jonty, perhaps it would have been better.
    ‘No, it can’t happen again,’ Tucker said, breaking into his thoughts. Ken watched his face in the firelight. Funny, he had not noticed before that he resembled Ken’s own grandmother Meg. The same fair complexion, though Tucker’s bore the blue-marked scars which were a legacy of working in the pits; the same steady, open gaze which was fixed on himself now.
    ‘Well, lad, mebbe you should be away to your bed? You look properly done in.’
    ‘Aye. But it’s been good to talk, Uncle Tucker. Good to relax.’
    Ken got to his feet and stretched his long body, yawning hugely. ‘I’ll say goodnight then.’
    ‘Right, lad. Mrs Parkin will have put a bottle in the bed, you know which room by now.’
    ‘Thanks. See you in the morning then.’
    He left his uncle staring into the dying embers of the fire, a pensive expression on his face. It must be lonely for him now, Ken reflected, with Aunt Betty gone to her Maker and his cousins away in the army.
    Ken drove up to Marsden next morning. It was still early for he had breakfasted with his uncle on a dried-egg omelette before he left for the mine office.
    ‘Tell Mam I’ll get up as soon as I can, mebbe this Sunday,’ said Tucker. ‘Depending if there’s nothing in the pit needs my attention. I’m sorry I haven’t got there sooner, but you know how it is.’
    Indeed Ken did. His uncle had been working seven days most weeks since the war began, for with the men’s week extended to six days the safety work had to be attended to on Sundays. And the equipment down below was getting desperately old and worn; make do and mend was the order of the day. The owners were reluctant to spend good money on new equipment when the nationalisation of the mines was a prospect looming large after the war.
    ‘I’ll tell her,’ Ken promised.
    Now, as he drove through Spennymoor and across to the Great North Road where he turned left for Durham City, he hummed softly to himself, looking forward to seeing his mother and grandmother again.
    The opportunities for such visits had been few when he first came home from Italy, and no doubt they would be few and far between in the next few months, now that the allies were so close to Germany. He expected quite a list of POW casualties to filter through to Bishop Auckland. Then there were the ones on the medical side coming down from the camp up the dale; chest infections were rife among the new prisoners, the winter and the poor diet they had had in the last years of the war exerting the usual consequences.
    Ken eased his foot on the throttle. Now he was on a good road his speed had been creeping up. There was little other traffic about but he was approaching New Elvet on the outskirts of Durham and being so early in the morning there was still a covering of