AA Gifts & Baskets Idea Blog

She pulled herself up sharply from her day-dreaming as Hilary Sadler crossed the forecourt ahead of her.  Today she was all in purple, a difficult color for most people, but Jenny admitted honestly and generously that Hilary really looked ravishing.  She was a nice person, good at her job, and even the men from the small streets near the great docks liked her, and were prepared to tell their little troubles to her.

With the Almoner was a tall, elegant woman in a coat that surely is mink.  Jenny didn’t know a great deal of furs, but that coat was a dream of a coat.  The rest of her clothes were black, and no other stoned but diamonds but diamonds could look quite like those in the ear studs that women wore.  But being Jenny, she also noticed that the woman looked absolutely torn apart with anxiety.  She was talking hard to Hilary, who had turned, and Jenny could see the Almoner’s usually vivid smiling face was now quite serious. Uneasy, Jenny thought.  AS she passed, Hilary was saying” Theirs is only St. Jude’s left Miss Jerrod.  And they really aren’t equipped for this.  For the child’s sake, won’t you bring yourself to reconsider?  This is a very nice hospital and very efficient. As Jenny passed, the woman’s clear carrying voice and perfect diction made it impossible for Jenny not to hear her reply.  “I’ve’ tried every avenue, every hospital so that Amanda won’t come to this one, but it seems that fate is driving me to letting her be admitted here!  There’s nothing left that I can do to prevent it!”

Jenny wondered what on earth could make that elegant, well-dressed woman so adverse to her child coming here.  As the Almoner said it was a very good hospital and if it was not the latest to be built with all the gleaming chromium and glass in evidence, Jenny felt that her hospital could still stand up to such new ones in sheer efficiency and quality of service.  And David Redmayne was the R.S.O…

A ship coming into the docks suddenly moaned out its warning, and all the little tugs fussily guiding it in chirruped their bright replies.  Perhaps, Jenny thought, Mrs. Jarrett didn’t want her child to be in a town like Shacklestock where, if only because of its great docks, there was necessarily a good sprinkling of patients of almost every country on earth, such as little Querina, the Arab girl whose father was a dock labourer, and Brigid, the Norwegian girl, and Mike who had just been discharged, and who was always telling them that his country used to be called the Gold Coast.  Jenny had agreed with him that those two words did sound much more romantic and swashbuckling than the new name.

People… children… so fascinating to Jenny and to David too.  They were never tired of discussing patients coming or going through the great gates of the hospital, to be swallowed up in a constant movement of that enormous red brick ant hill.  Its warmth enveloped her now, as she went in.  Bright and warm and busy, it was almost at home.  She could forget the biting win outside, which was too cold for snow, too cold for the White Christmas the children were looking forward to so much.  She turned her eyes away from the grey world outside, and gave her thoughts up to how she could fashion that crook for the shepherd, while she changed out of the new coat and her best dress and got onto her uniform.  Uniform that was also brown: by a coincidence, and one that never failed to amuse Jenny’s elder brother the uniform of the hospital was brown in all its facets.  Plain brown for the ward sisters, brown stripes and scarlet belts for the staff nurses, brown and yellow checks for the students, and “mud and clay” stripes, to quote Jim, for the P.T.S.  Jenny had two more years to go before she could qualify for a scarlet belt, and in the meantime she didn’t feel that the checks did much to acquire for her the glamour she was always yearning for her.

Mrs. Jarrett didn’t notice the nurses or their uniform as she went through the hospital to see again the man she prayed and would help her child to live.  She searched the faces of all the men.  There was one man she never wanted to see again, and she recently heard that he was in this very hospital, the one hope that now held any hope for her.  It wasn’t fair!

As she waited, she thought back over the recent year to the time she had taken her little girl on that ill-fated cruise when she became ill. How could one child on a luxury pleasure cruise contract an illness that would zap her life away?  Why, she asked herself if it had to be any child, why did it have to be hers, of all the children who had been on that ship?  Sunshine, and incredible blue sky, and blue sea, the white of paintwork and the white of the uniforms of everyone working on that boat were colours that lived with her, her whole memories of the trip.  She kept them in her minds eye so she could blot out Amanda’s face the first day she had been ill.  That clay colour the child’s skin color took could still make her shiver.  Remember the blue sky, but she couldn’t.  It was fading.  Too much grey and bitter weather here and Shacklestock was such a grey town.  Grey, uninviting, shabby and sinister, with its mean streets and its torn hoardings and its traffic.  What a place to bring one’s child, to be cured or…

Comments are closed.