Edinburgh Excursion Read online

  Edinburgh Excursion

  Lucilla Andrews

  Copyright © The Estate of Lucilla Andrews 2019

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1970

  www.lucillaandrews.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images © evenfh / Romariolen (Shutterstock)

  izusek (istockphoto.com)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Also by Lucilla Andrews

  from Wyndham Books

  The Print Petticoat

  The Secret Armour

  The Quiet Wards

  The First Year

  A Hospital Summer

  My Friend the Professor

  Nurse Errant

  Flowers from the Doctor

  The Young Doctors Downstairs

  The New Sister Theatre

  The Light in the Ward

  A House for Sister Mary

  Hospital Circles

  Highland Interlude

  The Healing Time

  One Night in London (The Jason Trilogy Book 1)

  A Weekend in the Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2)

  In an Edinburgh Drawing Room (The Jason Trilogy Book 3)

  Wyndham Books is reissuing

  all of Lucilla Andrews’s novels.

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  by signing up to our free newsletter.

  Go to www.lucillaandrews.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I do thank most sincerely the late Professor R. W. Johnstone and the nursing authorities in Edinburgh for the help, advice, and kindness I received when seeking the technical background for this novel. The City of Edinburgh exquisitely exists and has its own admirable Health and Welfare Services, but all the characters and events in Edinburgh Excursion are fictitious.

  LUCILLA ANDREWS

  Chapter One

  I noticed him at Waverley Station that first day. He was waiting on the platform a few feet from my carriage door, and as he was about John’s age and height I wondered which would have appalled John more ‒ his short back-and-sides haircut or his trouser turn-ups. I did not remember noticing his face, yet I recognized him instantly when I saw him again. I didn’t even remember seeing Edinburgh Castle when my taxi took me for my first drive down Princes Street. My body was in a new city, bound for a new job and a new life, but my mind was still in London.

  The one person I knew in Edinburgh that day was my only brother, Bassy. Bassy was twenty-one, in his second year at the University, two years younger and eight inches taller than myself. He shared a flat with three other boys over some second-hand bookshop near the Royal Mile, and when not protesting was reading History. When we last met at home in January his hair and beard had needed a hedge-cutter. Our parents had not minded as they thought Socrates would have approved. Socrates was one of their pin-ups. They were both archaeologists and at present on a dig in Jordan. We all got along very well and kept in touch on picture postcards.

  I had sent Bassy a card with the dates of my District Nurse’s Training Course and had one back from him a few days ago. He had a heavy date on this evening, but wanted me to have supper at his flat tomorrow. ‘Chaps eager’, he wrote, ‘and sex-starved as bird-shortage nearly as acute as in deep south. All expecting swinging London dolly. Kindly recall my image and oblige. Turn right at sweet-shop. Love, B.’ He had not asked why I had suddenly decided to move north after my telling him in January nothing would persuade me to work out of London. Beneath all the yellow hair Bassy had a kind streak as well as quite a good brain.

  It was odd to think January was only four months back. It seemed to belong in another lifetime and to another girl ‒ a complete girl, with mind and body in absolute co-ordination.

  The taxi stopped. ‘Here we are, miss!’

  There were six girls in my new set ‒ three English and three Scottish. Four of us had come up on the same train, but we only discovered this when sorting ourselves out at the flats after our Superintendent’s welcoming lecture.

  Our Superintendent, Miss Bruce, was a slim, youngish woman with a serene face and calm, clever eyes. She took us through the four months’ syllabus ‒ working hours, rest-days, the general conditions we could expect to meet on the district, the extraordinary conditions we would almost certainly meet when least expected ‒ and then dealt with our apparently unusual living arrangements. ‘As extensive structural alterations are presently being made to the District Students’ Home, two furnished flats in a private block only a short walk from here have been rented as temporary accommodation. In all probability you will remain there throughout your course.’ Miss Bruce paused to look us over with a faint smile. ‘I trust you’ve no objections to living out, Nurses?’

  The girl sitting on my right had a Grecian profile and the very white skin that occasionally, and in her case wonderfully, accompanies bright red hair. She joined in the ‘None, Miss Bruce’, with so much less enthusiasm than the rest of us that I looked at her curiously. She did not notice as she was giving all her concentration to her right hand’s attempts to remove her left fingers from the knuckle.

  Miss Bruce was glad we approved and hoped we would find our flats comfortable. She knew she need not request six highly recommended and carefully chosen State Registered Nurses to show consideration for their fellow-tenants, but she thought we might be interested to learn the tenants of the two lower flats were quiet, retired business people. The top flat was occupied by a professional man. ‘He owns the building,’ added Miss Bruce in her quiet and faintly lilting voice.

  The chubby-faced girl on my left had wide-set brown eyes that tilted upwards slightly at the outer corners. She caught my eye and murmured without moving her lips, ‘You reckon Big Brother’s got the whole joint bugged?’

  I could not answer as Mi
ss Bruce had glanced our way. The girl’s name was Gemmie Downs and she was from Liverpool. Later, when we found she, Redhead, and I had been allotted to Flat 4, Gemmie asked if I thought Miss Bruce had overheard.

  ‘Doubt it. I only just got you.’ I turned to the red-haired girl. ‘Did you?’

  She was a Catriona Ferguson from Sutherland. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Alix. Did I what?’

  Gemmie explained. ‘So you’re Scotch then, Catriona? How come I saw you on the train? Train in England?’

  As Catriona was almost overpoweringly well-mannered she only looked momentarily pained. ‘I’ve spent this last week visiting a school friend in London. I trained in Glasgow.’

  I said, ‘Seeing we’re fellow-aliens, Gemmie, mind if I give you a tip my brother gave me once? Unless one wants to wreck the Act of Union for good, one drinks Scotch but everything else is Scottish.’ Catriona was blushing. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I ‒ er ‒ wouldn’t have put it so strongly, but Scottish is the correct term.’

  Gemmie grinned. ‘Get away! Hey, Alix, your brother up here? How’s that? Where you from then?’

  ‘London. I did general and midder at Martha’s.’

  ‘Done your midder then? Why aren’t you on the three months’ course?’

  ‘I’m not an S.C.M.; just Part One. How about you?’ Gemmie had trained in Liverpool. She was a gay, amiable extrovert and inside of an hour gave us her life’s history and main motive for moving out of her own patch. His name was Wilf Hawkins, he was a fitter working on the same shop-floor as her dad, and he had been asking her to marry him for the past three years.

  ‘I’d to get the hell out of it. Nowt else to be done.’

  Catriona was sympathetic. ‘Your parents don’t approve?’

  ‘That’s the bloody rub! My mam thinks he’s a lovely lad ‒ and my grannies ‒ and my aunties! My dad reckons I could do a packet worse. They’ve kept on and on. “When you going to wed him, then?” I’d to come away!’

  I asked, ‘How’d Wilf take that?’

  ‘Right nicely! That’s his trouble! He’s such a bloody nice bastard! Get this, then! Three years ‒ three years ‒ and not once ‒ not the once ‒ one touch below the waist! What can a lass do with a lad like that?’

  Catriona consulted her hands. I said, ‘Tough going.’

  ‘I’ll say! And when I says, “Right, then, I’ve had enough, I’m off up to Edinburgh!” what does he say? “Right, then, give us a shout when you get back and we’ll down the disco.” There’s hot-blooded passion for you! It’s that mucky Mersey air!’

  Catriona raised her eyes. ‘I think the Mersey’s fascinating. I took a trip there once with my brother.’

  Gemmie and I looked at each other quickly, and as quickly away. That was the first of the many similar glances we exchanged that evening. When Catriona was in the bath Gemmie came into my bedroom and closed the door. ‘You reckon that Catriona’s for real, Alix?’

  ‘You mean her freaky good manners? Yes, I think they’re as real as her hair. The roots are the same red.’

  ‘I spotted that.’ She examined the family photo on my dressing-table. My life’s history, if not my main motive, had followed hers. ‘What bugs me is how such a soft sugar-plum with all those right fancy lah-di-dahs could’ve lasted out her general in Glasgow. I’ve not heard as Glasgow’s a cushy patch. But she makes out like she doesn’t know how many beans make five.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just crippled with shyness. Gets some that way.’

  ‘Aye? You reckon that’s why she’s told us nowt about herself?’

  ‘Either that, or as we’ve not let her get a word in and she’s too polite to shout us down.’

  ‘I’ll not say as you’re wrong, there.’ She laughed and examined my Martha’s badge. ‘Think you’ll miss your old firm?’

  ‘I enjoyed Martha’s.’ I hesitated. ‘But I don’t think so. I’d been there long enough. Time to move on.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ She eyed me keenly. ‘What’s his name, then?’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Doesn’t he fancy getting wed?’

  ‘Yep. Not to me. He’s married now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘sorry. Shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘That’s all right. So’s your Wilf from the sound. Think you will marry him eventually?’

  ‘Not knowing, love, can’t say. Always wear your hair up?’

  ‘Only when in uniform or trying to impress authority with my stability of character.’

  ‘Right pseud, eh?’

  ‘That’s me, even if I’ve never taken a trip, with or without my brother.’

  She grinned. ‘That’s the one that bloody threw me! She must’ve run into pot, L.S.D., the lot!’

  ‘They may put it another way, up here. I’ll ask Bassy tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Reckon you’ll be strong enough for visiting after our first day’s work?’

  ‘Hell, yes! We don’t start till eight-fifteen, finish five-fifteen, and Miss Bruce said that for the first few days we’d be driven round by our high-powered escorts. After the nightmarish hours we still work on midder in Martha’s, district work,’ I added blithely and ignorantly, ‘sounds like a sinecure.’

  I remembered that idiotic remark more than once next day. The experienced district sister acting as my escort and teacher was a Mrs Duncan. She watched sympathetically as I heaved myself out of her official Mini that evening. ‘All feet, Miss Hurst?’

  I smiled. ‘Sister, they haven’t felt like this since my first day out of P.T.S. five years ago!’

  ‘How well I recollect the sensation, though my own first day on district was twenty years back! The district nurse taking me round ‒ and we then called them nurses not sisters ‒ was a stout old body and I but a slip of a girl like yourself. She didn’t pant and puff half as much as I did, and though Edinburgh born, bred, and trained, till then I’d no idea of the number of steps in this city of steps. I thought you managed the lands well today.’

  ‘Lands? Oh, yes ‒ those apartment houses. Thanks, but coming straight on from midder helps.’

  ‘There’s nothing to touch midwifery for keeping one in trim for a good scamper.’ She was a pretty woman with a fresh, unlined complexion and short, curly grey hair. ‘Apart from your feet dropping off, how do you feel about your first day’s nursing far from the security of hospital walls?’

  I thought back over the day. I thought of all those unlatched front doors in new council estates, old terraced houses, new privately owned houses, new flats, old, towering apartment houses. Mr MacThis, Mrs MacThat, rows and rows of Macs and Mcs ‒ old, young, less often middle-aged; some chronic, some accidents, some just home from hospital, some dying. At every front door Mrs Duncan’s ‘Good day to you!’ had met with the same undercurrent of relief in the different voices replying, ‘It’ll be the Nurse! Come on in, Nurse!’

  I said, ‘It’s even more different than I expected. I think I’m going to like that difference a lot, though I do now find it rather unnerving.’

  ‘If you lacked the wee shivers down your spine you’d be lacking in imagination, my dear. To move into a different world is always an unnerving experience at first. That’s what you’ve done. The well-equipped wards of any large general hospital are in one world; the wee beds in the wee homes of ordinary folk, in quite another. And when making the change the greatest change of all has to take place to the nurse, herself. The student has to alter her whole hospital-formed attitude to nursing when working on the district. In hospital, on her own territory, the nurse is the hostess, the patients her guests. On the district, Miss Hurst’ ‒ she raised a finger to mark her point ‒ ‘from the first day to the last, the nurse is the guest in her patients’ homes. Never, ever, lose sight of that fact. You are now the guest, and whether you will prove welcome or otherwise in your patients’ homes depends only on yourself. We’ve all suffered unwelcome guests in our time, but can you imagine anything worse when you’re feeling poorly and maybe
elderly and alone? But this blethering’ll not get you away to your student brother, nor me to my cooking before my man gets home from his work.’ She checked her reflection in the driving-mirror. ‘Mercy! Age may not have withered Cleopatra, but it’s doing a grand job on me.’ She hitched forward her hat-brim. ‘What can’t be repaired must be camouflaged. See you at eight-fifteen. Cheerio just now!’

  She had given me a lift home from our headquarters. I waved her off from the pavement outside the tall, grey, flat-faced building that had once, according to Mrs Duncan, been a private house. The houses on either side and across the road were much the same size. Mrs Duncan said they had mostly been converted into flats and that our road and its immediate vicinity were generally considered one of the best residential areas in Edinburgh. When she told me this on the drive home I had intended taking a good look at our classy road, but was halfway up the four flights before I remembered.

  Gemmie was stretched on the sitting-room sofa, her shoes off and hat on her chest. She opened her eyes as I limped in. ‘Just a bloody sinecure, eh?’

  I kicked off my shoes. ‘That’ll teach me to open my big mouth. How’d you make out?’

  ‘Not so bad, though I’m a wreck of me former self. You?’

  ‘Same.’ I took off my coat and unbuttoned my apron. ‘Where’s Catriona?’

  ‘Gone to sup with some auntie she’s got living over what she calls t’other side. Reckon we’re wrong side of the tracks?’

  I told her what Mrs Duncan had said, then suggested she came with me to Bassy’s. ‘You’ll be doing a favour. Seems there’s a bird-shortage.’

  ‘Thanks, love, but some other time. I’d a letter from my Wilf by afternoon post down headquarters. He says he’s fixed his landlady and will I ring him reverse at seven for a chat.’

  ‘Round one to Wilf!’ I went off to change with Bassy’s image in mind. The result got Gemmie off the sofa.

  ‘Groovy! Where’s your placard?’

  ‘Bassy’ll provide.’

  She circled me. ‘I fancy that black cord pinny. It looks great over that blue rollneck. Mind, there’s two things wrong. Though your hair’s down, I can still see your face, and your yards of legs should be in thigh boots.’