Salt and Pepper

Jackie Huck

Description

When Susan Salt meets vivacious Vale Pepper at Benjamin Hale Hospital in 1964, little does she envisage the many changes to her life. How can shy nursing cadet Susan survive the rigours of the hospital's strict and seemingly unfair regime, and the ensuing wrath from Matron and Sister Mandrake, in equal measure?Excruciatingly embarrassing predicaments arise daily. Clandestine meetings and 'strip tease' soon become a game of 'Cat and Mouse' in the labyrinths of the hospital. Will Salt go or stay?With binding friendship and support from each other will Salt and Pepper fit into the cruet?

Informations

• Publié par: 2QT Limited (Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910077429
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Salt and Pepper
Into the Cruet






Jackie Huck








2QT Limited (Publishing)


First eBook Edition published 2014 by
2QT Limited (Publishing)
9781910077429

Copyright © Jackie Huck 2014
The right of Jackie Huck to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

Author/Publisher disclaimer:
This novel is a work of fiction, although the working conditions and discipline of that time are, according to the authors recollection, factual. However the names and events and place names are the work of the authors imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.


Cover Design and Illustrations by Pauline Henderson



A Paperback of this title is available
ISBN 978-1-910077-23-8




For Eddie in remembrance, and love





Other publications by the author:


Cats Like Me
A collection of poems and writings about Cats
Available as Hardback ISBN 9781908098290 and
Paperback ISBN 9781908098122




Chapter 1
It’s an overall not a uniform
A s I fell through the sewing room door of Benjamin Hale General Hospital that July morning in 1964, I had a head full of expectations and little else. Too eager and poor to await my eighteenth birthday, I had been accepted as a nursing cadet, although my father had been at pains to point out that ‘you’d earn a sight more up at t’mill.’
I was greeted by a squat, frog-faced woman in pink, who gave me a look normally reserved for a snotty child without a hanky. Her badge announced she was Mrs Frost, Assistant Sewing Room Attendant, a title that accounted for her attitude.
‘You’re late!’ she snarled, as the clock hit ten past nine. ‘These are yours.’ She thrust a heap of garments into my outstretched palms. ‘Put one on, that leaves you with five. Here’s your cloak and laundry bag, everything has your name on. This is your locker key. Don’t lose it! You’re number 146, in the basement.’
Five other girls were already pulling on yellow outfits which would not have looked out of place in the workhouse. ‘I look like a skivvy with yellow jaundice!’ said a girl whose golden locks resembled a laburnum in a storm.
‘It’s a good fit. You must remember it’s an overall, not a uniform,’ said Mrs Frost.
The blonde gave another twirl. ‘It doesn’t fit anywhere, it’s like a mail sack.’ She was half a head taller than my five foot five, a corncob of a girl, nibbled in all the right places, with sky-dyed eyes which shot out of a pale complexion. Her made-up eyebrows swept up as she spoke, her voice drawled a lazy Lancashire accent, red-glossed lips scowled as she looked with disgust at her reflection in the wall mirror. From her discarded clothing it was clear she was more used to leather and denim.
Another girl with a bony chin and heavy brows was busy buttoning a similar yellow overall. ‘It’s very serviceable, and yellow and jaundice mean the same.’
The blonde gave her a look that would have wilted a prize petunia, as I searched for a spare table. ‘Just drop them on the floor,’ she said. ‘Have you ever seen anything more ghastly? It‘s like baby’s poo.’
The overall was an odious colour resembling the yellow colour-wash on many post-war walls. It was a button-through dress with no waist, hanging in a straight line from the armpits. Short sleeves reached the elbow but were so wide that two plump arms could fit up each opening. Rules demanded the length be six inches below the knee, but they tended to sweep the ankle like grandma’s nightshirt, with a cushion-sized pocket on each side of the skirt. Ghastly just about summed them up.
‘No one wears black-seamed stockings these days,’ said bony chin, her eyes on my snaking seams. ‘That went out years ago.’
‘First I’ve heard about it,’ Blondie put in. ‘The only reason my stockings haven’t got seams is that I couldn’t find any.’
The door crashed open. ‘Are you lot not ready yet?’ asked the new arrival, obviously a senior cadet with an air of exaggerated importance. Her glance wafted across my seams, and I felt like the new girl at school who’d turned up with the wrong-coloured gym knickers. ‘Right, come on!’ The order given, she spun on her heel and was off.
The others, heaped with possessions, followed and I tried, rapidly scooping up overalls, laundry bag, cloak, coat and holdall. Loaded like a camel I stumbled for the door, only to hear a tinkle as the vital locker key slid through my fingers.
I peered over and around my stack but the locker key, reluctant to leave the sewing room, had vanished. Blondie was wedged in the doorway. ‘Get a move on,’ she said. ‘The Yellow Commander has gone and we’ll lose her if we’re not careful.’
‘I’ve dropped the key.’
‘What?’
I gave up, dumping my gear like the rag and bone man’s wares. ‘I’ve dropped the locker key. You go on, I’ll catch up.’
‘Us idiots should stick together, we’re an endangered species,’ she said, kicking the door closed and chucking her pile down besides mine. ‘Where do you think it went?’
‘It must have bounced.’
We went down on hands and knees, two yellow pigs snuffling around the floor. We could have been invisible: cadets were often invisible.
The sewing room lay over the laundry on the northern outer reaches of Benjamin Hale and was accessed by a rickety wooden staircase, its rubbed, creaking banister ready for collapse. The heat from the laundry hit like a tropical jungle and followed up the stairs, causing sweat to ooze. The sewing room lived up to its designation and was crammed with material and machines. Strip-lighting from an off-white, long-since painted ceiling glared down on the workers, an assortment of young and middle-aged women bent intently over their machining.
Every uniform and overall for all levels of staff was produced in this claustrophobic workplace. Theatre gowns and cotton masks were made and repaired, as were sheets, pillowcases, curtains and tablecloths. The windows brought in little light as most of them were obscured behind piles of cloth. Bales of varying shades of blue, white, pink and yellow filled every available space, and cotton bobbins with the attendant pins, binding, buttons and lace were crammed onto shelves and tables. The machines were crowded together and the clamour was constant.
‘Is that it?’ Blondie asked, pointing under a nearby machine table where something shiny was lodged in a crack in a floorboard. I put my head down so my nose brushed the floor and spied a small key peeping out between piles of fluff and bits of cotton.
‘However did it get there?’ I gasped. I tried to get my hand under the bottom shelf but my knuckles wouldn’t fit.
‘Let me try.’ Blondie grovelled about. ‘No good, we’ll have to prod it out with something.’ She dragged out a cane from a dusty corner. ‘This might do. I wonder what they use it for.’
‘For beating cadets who lose their locker keys?’
‘I think we’re going to get on.’ With a smile, she extended a hand around a table leg. ‘Vale Pepper.’
I started laughing as our hands met. ‘Susan Salt.’
‘A match made in the cruet. I’d already decided I didn’t like any of that other lot, so you and me will be friends.’
It was a delicate manoeuvre, with an inch and a half working room. The cane reached the key easily but there was a tiny gap in the floorboards, which lovingly waited for the key to vanish down forever. We considered moving the table but the combined weight of table, industrial sewing machine plus overloaded drawers put us off, and we were clearly not going to get any help from ‘the workers’.
‘I expect table-moving and helping cadets in distress is not in their job description,’ Vale observed.
‘Do you think she’ll give me another if this one disappears?’
‘No chance,’ said Vale. ‘You’ll have to spend your nursing career humping uniforms, oh excuse me, overalls from place to place. A bit like one of the labours of Hercules.’
‘Who?’ I was trying to wriggle the key out and not getting very far.
‘Oh, some big feller from mythology. I had a cat called Hercules but a bit like your key, he went down the nick. Let me have a go.’
She was more successful and the key started to move, jumping out of the groove into the fluff. ‘They don’t clean under here very often,’ said Vale as she swept the cane from side to side, pushing an assortment of cotton, cloth, toffee papers and pins out from under the table. I delved in and with a sigh of relief pulled the key out.
‘Whatever are you two doing?’ said a voice above a pair of sling-back shoes. I travelled upwards past the stockings and noticed the beginnings of a ladder. The Assistant Sewing Room Attendant bent down.
‘I lost the locker key.’
Her expression would have curdled cream. ‘Well, that’s a good start! I hope you’ve found it. These keys can’t be replaced, they stopped making those lockers thirty years ago. If a key goes missing the locker has to be scrapped. Have you any idea how much a new locker costs?’
I shook my head. ‘Do you know where the rest of the cadets went?’
‘So, you’ve lost them as well,’ she smirked. She was about