1 London, 1904
I took Georgina the usual way home, east through Kensington Gardens toward Hyde Park. She had fallen asleep with a fistful of daisies, and I pushed the pram along the bridleway, nodding at the other nurses. Her shoes nudged the end of the cushioned carriage; she would soon outgrow it, and I felt a distant stab of mourning for the baby she had been. She could sit up herself now, which she did on fine days with the hood folded down; she loved to see the Household Cavalry with their piped uniforms and plumed hats, and ladies would put down their parasols to admire her.
I crouched to retrieve a woolen bear lying on the sand beside a pram. The baby’s nurse sat on a bench reading a novel and had not noticed. Behind her a tangle of small boys tore about the grass, bashing one another with sticks.
“Oh, thank you,” the nurse said as I passed her the bear. She took in my uniform, distinct from the other nurses’, designed to set Norlanders apart from the rest: beneath a smart brown cloak I wore a fawn drill dress with a white cambric apron edged with lace. At my throat a frothy cream tie completed the summer uniform. In winter we wore light blue serge, and all year round we did our heavy work in pink galatea, cleaning the nursery and making up fires.
“I wish she went off like that,” said the nurse. She nodded at the occupant of her pram: a slim, serious-looking child a little older than Georgina, who glared at me from beneath a white sun hat. “How old?”
“She’s seventeen months,” I replied.
“And look at her lovely curls. It’s a shame this one’s hair’s so straight. She pulls out her rags when I put them in.”
“You could try setting them when she’s asleep. If you wet the rags first, it’ll dry like that.”
The nurse brightened. “That’s an idea.”
I said goodbye and she returned to her book. We passed through Albert Gate, where black stags stood guard on the park railings, and I smiled at the old woman who sold windmills and toy balloons. The windmills waited rigidly in their crates for a breeze to stir them that August afternoon, and the woman spun one half-heartedly. She never smiled back, but I supposed I looked much the same to her as all the other nurses. We flocked to the park after lunch with our charges, occupying the lawns and benches, spreading blankets on the grass, feeding the ducks and pushing prams through the rose gardens. An hour or two later we’d pass her again, heading home for naps and paste sandwiches before taking the children downstairs to see their parents.
Georgina was the only child of Audrey and Dennis Radlett, though Mrs. Radlett was expecting again. I’d laundered Georgina’s linens in readiness and circled cots in catalogues to show Mrs. Radlett; Georgina would still be in hers when the baby came. The new arrival excited me, though I was yet to find a monthly nurse for feeding, and the prospect of sharing my nursery even for a few weeks caused a distant flutter of anxiety. For the top floor of number six Perivale Gardens was my kingdom, my domain: my office, schoolroom and workshop. Sometimes it was a tearoom, if Georgina wished to give her toys refreshment; occasionally it was a jungle, and the two of us would crawl on our knees on the carpet, hunting for lions and tigers.
Georgina’s hand opened, causing the daisies to scatter over her blanket, and deftly I swept them up and put them in my pocket. On the nursery windowsill I’d arranged in jars the flowers we’d picked in the park, and I was teaching Georgina their names. Georgina already had an impressive vocabulary, quietly absorbing as I pointed at plates and spoons and toys and stamps. “Tag!” she’d declared one afternoon a few weeks ago, straining out of her pram to point at the Albert Gate stags. I’d felt a rush of pride and love for this cheerful, confident little girl, who everybody adored when they met, and who reflected adoration back at them.
On Knightsbridge, motorcars growled past carriages and choked the road with fumes. I glanced about at the redbrick apartment buildings, the hot potato man, the green Bayswater omnibus and the Chinese laundryman unloading fresh linen from his cart. Crossing sweepers stepped aside for ladies in wide hats on their way home from department stores, tailed by their maids laden with boxes. Perivale Gardens was a large, quiet square a few minutes from the busy thoroughfare. A score of houses stood around an oblong lawn, guarded by black iron railings and planted with cedars and rhododendrons. The Radlett home was tall and stuccoed, with smooth white columns flanking a glossy black door. At the top was the nursery, which overlooked the long and sunny garden, and the neighbors’ gardens either side. The Bowlers next door kept hens, and sometimes let Georgina collect the eggs.
The hall was empty and silent, and I carried Georgina upstairs, where she allowed me to remove her cream leather shoes and settled in her cot with a sigh. I closed the blinds and pulled the curtains, glancing into the street for a moment and seeing the butcher’s boy on his rounds with his basket. He went down some steps and a kitchen maid examined its contents at the door, piling packets into the crook of her elbow. My father did his rounds with Damson, our docile pony, A. May, High Class Fruiterer & Greengrocer painted in large white letters on the side of his cart. My brothers and I would fight over who sat at the reins with him as he steered us through the streets, waving at people. “You take the reins, Rhubarb,” he would say, putting them in my hands.
I closed the curtains.
At half past three, Ellen brought me a ham roll and a pot of tea, and I gave her a copy of Young Woman I’d read and a penny dreadful I hadn’t. I took a seat at the table beneath the window to eat, looking about to see what needed dusting; in summer, within hours of my morning clean, a thin layer of grime drifted in through the window and coated everything. On the bookshelf, the golden letters of my testimonial book winked from the black spine. On graduation day, the Norland Institute principal, Miss Simpson—who we fondly called Sim—handed them out from a gleaming stack. The books contained everything we would need for our fledgling careers, from uniform materials to blank pages for references. My photograph was pasted in the front, larger than I would have liked; I appeared stern and unsmiling, one hand resting nervously on the table beside me. At the end of my three-month probation, Mrs. Radlett had marked my needlework very good, punctuality excellent, neatness excellent, cleanliness excellent, order excellent, temper excellent, tact with visitors very good, tact with children excellent, tact with servants very good, power of amusing children excellent, power of managing children excellent and general capability excellent. I was awarded my certificate in the autumn and kept it inside my trunk. Some nurses had sent theirs home for their parents to frame, but I imagined handing it to my mother, could picture her bemusement that there was such a thing as a certificate for caring for children.
I’d finished my roll and begun tidying when there was a light knock at the door. “Come in, Ellen,” I called, moving the miniature globe an inch to the right and setting its equator. There was no reply.
“Mrs. Radlett!” I straightened at once. She was a young mistress, only a few years older than me at twenty-three or-four, and so gentle and feminine. A wide smile was the natural shape her mouth took, and pretty gowns and gleaming brooches showed her plump figure and creamy skin to its advantage. Her hair was the color of toffee cooling on the stove, and she wore it in all the latest styles copied from magazines. My own hair was thin and dark and would not be coaxed to any height. My skin turned brown easily, and since the Norland hat offered no shade, I took care to keep out of the sun.
“Good afternoon, Nurse May,” said Mrs. Radlett. She was good-natured and liked to tease; one of her favorite games was playacting at being grand and proper, though the joke was slightly lost on me. “Would you join me in the parlor when you have a moment?”
“Of course, ma’am, I’ll come now. Miss Georgina’s having her nap.”
I followed her into the house. The downstairs was far removed from my own quiet story, with its own rules and codes and timings, from which I was happily exempt. Nurses were not servants, existing in that tricky place between domestic and family, belonging to neither. Sim warned us it could be a lonely profession: friendless, she had called it. But I’d been friendless most of my life, and found only joy in the busy hours, and peace in the quiet ones. Every morning I took Georgina to the dining room, every evening to the drawing room, where Mr. and Mrs. Radlett devoted an hour to entertaining her before supper. Mr. Radlett played the piano while Mrs. Radlett danced with her daughter, lifting her into the air and guiding her fat feet around the carpet. They were as delighted to see her as if they’d been away a week, and sometimes Georgina sobbed as I carried her back to her nursery, reaching backward for her mama. “Up the wooden hill and down Sheet Lane,” I would murmur as we climbed the stairs, and by the time the nursery door was closed she had often forgotten her anguish. She sucked her thumb when she was tired, and I always removed it from her sleep-soaked mouth when Mrs. Radlett came to kiss her good-night.
The parlor was at the front of the house, seldom used and stuffy in summer, with the windows fastened to keep out the dust from the street. The blinds were closed against the heat, and the lace curtain hung flat against them. The Radletts’ house was tastefully decorated and filled with antiques; the mistress even had her own library. As a couple they were intellectual and political. They entertained often and friends called frequently at the house, filling it with cigar smoke and leaving sticky rings of sherry on the sideboards, decorating the hat stand with feathers and ribbons, like a strange tree of exotic birds. In the eaves of the building there was little to disturb me, but occasionally Mrs. Radlett asked me to bring Georgina down to kiss and pass around before bed. She always deferred to me, and was politely inquisitive about her daughter’s diet and routine; there was no doubt whatsoever who was in charge.
“Do sit down,” she said now. I took a seat in a stuffed armchair beside a potted fern.
“I have some thrilling news.” Mrs. Radlett placed a hand on her rounded stomach. She had recently begun to show beneath her waistband, and Ellen had let out her skirts. “I’ve been longing to tell you for weeks, but Mr. Radlett forbade me until it was all agreed and finalized, which it was last night, so now I can share it with you.”
I felt a glimmer of excitement and straightened my apron.
“As you know, Mr. Radlett is doing splendidly at Dalberg and Howard. So splendidly that—” she spoke slowly, pausing as if for dramatic effect “—the firm is sending him to Chicago, to work there as their senior architect. He’s going to design a university, Nurse May, isn’t that wonderful?” She clapped her hands, barely able to contain herself.
She went on quickly: “Of course, we want you to come with us, to be Georgina’s nurse out there. I hope you wouldn’t imagine for a second that we would go without you! Oh, please say you’ll come. Mr. Radlett is searching for a house for us now; you wouldn’t believe what you can get in America—positive mansions for practically pennies! And there are wonderful parks and shops, and new buildings going up all the time. Heavens, our next child will be American. How about that? I hadn’t thought of that until now. How strange.” An expression of childlike wonder moved across her face.
“Chicago,” was all I could say. Even from my mouth, the name sounded foreign and glamorous. Coming from a smoky suburb of Birmingham, I thought London the most exciting place on earth, but Chicago was as distant to me as Mars. I calculated how long it would take for a letter to reach me there, how long it would take to return home, and a small, hard shape like a pebble formed in my stomach.
“Yes,” Mrs. Radlett was saying, “we must pack the house and ship our things, so that will take some time. But we hope to be on a steamer ourselves in a month or two; I know Dennis is eager to get started. The passage goes to New York and we can take a train from there. I expect we’ll stay in New York for a spell, wouldn’t that be something? I’ve always wanted to go there. Nurse May, are you quite well? You do look queer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, do say you’ll come. You will come, won’t you?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Silence. The carriage clock ticked, and the porcelain spaniels observed tranquilly from the mantelpiece. Mrs. Radlett had not been expecting my reply and attempted to recover herself, stroking her stomach automatically. “Why ever not? Of course, you must take a few days off before we go, to bid your farewells.”
I could not meet her eye and stared at the carpet.
“Nurse May? I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Oh, I am, ma’am. I’m thrilled for you and Mr. Radlett.”
“But not for yourself. Are you unhappy with us?”
“No. I’m very happy here.”
“Then why on earth won’t you come? I simply can’t fathom going without you, Nurse May. I hadn’t even considered it! I won’t consider it. You are like a family member to us, and Georgina adores you. I adore you, and Dennis does, too.” Her voice trembled and grew higher, and I realized with horror my mistress was about to cry.
My own throat thickened, and my nose stung with tears. “Thank you, ma’am. You’re so good to me, you and Mr. Radlett. And I am so fond of Miss Georgina.”
“Then why won’t you come? Is it your salary? I’ll speak to Dennis about increasing it, if that’s the case.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that.”
“Are you unwell, then? Or...betrothed?” Relief flooded her. “Are you engaged to marry?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Heavens, what is it, then?”
“It’s my siblings,” I said. “I can’t leave them.”
She burned with alarm and curiosity. “Forgive my indelicacy, but I thought your parents were alive?”
“They are, ma’am.”
“Has one of them been taken ill?”
“No.”
“Out of work?”
“No.”
“Then why ever can’t you leave them?”
My voice cracked with sorrow. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Mrs. Radlett.”
She sat back in stunned silence. Across the square a carriage discharged its passengers, then continued on its circuit; the horse hooves reached a crescendo outside the window, then faded. I thought of Georgina asleep upstairs, and the jam jars lining the windowsill, and the daisies in my pocket, ruined now. I thought of the tea cooling in the pot Ellen had brought me, and the half-finished copy of Woman’s Signal I’d folded beside the armchair for later, and how the nursery on a rainy evening, with the hiss and flicker of the gas jets, was the most comfortable place I’d ever known. Georgina would wake soon and call out for me, safe in the knowledge I would lift her from her cot and give her a clementine or a sugar biscuit. I could not look at her mother, because tears were blurring my vision. The room was so quiet I could hear my heart breaking, and it sounded like a daisy snapping at the stem.
2
“Nurse May.” The principal’s tone was neutral; she had answered the door herself.
Nine months had passed since I’d seen Sim, when she attended me at Perivale Gardens for my inspection: Ellen served coffee and madeleines in the sitting room as the principal made notes and Mrs. Radlett hovered. Now, faced with her, that time vaporized to dust; I was as damp and nervous as when I’d started, and resisted the urge to mop my brow. I followed her inside and closed the heavy black door behind me.
Inside the whitewashed entrance the familiar smells rushed to greet me: fresh bread, carbolic soap, clean linen and pencil shavings. The scent of femininity was overpowering, of girls moving through the rooms, perfumed and perspiring. To me, it smelled like learning. The house at Pembridge Square was a gleaming palace compared to the schoolhouse in Balsall Heath, a dull, miserable place, where chalk dust danced in the light that struggled through the dirty windows. At home, my education ended with the school bell; my parents were too busy with the shop to teach us, so I taught my brothers in the evenings. At three and five years younger than me, Ted and Archie were willing enough but bickered through my lessons. Robbie, fifteen months my junior, was slow and reluctant, and even now his letters were riddled with errors.
The Norland Institute was situated in a large white villa on Pembridge Square, ten minutes north in a cab from Perivale Gardens. I’d left that morning, and would have preferred to walk there myself through Kensington Gardens, but the Radletts had insisted on waving me off in a cab; my trunk was to follow me to my new address. The farewell had been just as awful as I’d expected, with Georgina’s forehead wrinkling in confusion in her mother’s arms. Mrs. Radlett raised one of her daughter’s arms and made it wave, and she’d bawled as the cab pulled off. That had been too much to bear; I’d turned away and pressed my handkerchief to my face.
The institute was the first place of its kind: a school, home and agency for children’s nurses. A little over two years before, I’d sat the entrance exam for the scholarship and, by some miracle, passed. I’d barely understood any of the questions: tell the story of Enoch Arden; describe the whereabouts of the following streets and shops in London; write the recipe for marmalade. Enoch Arden was unknown to me, and I had left Birmingham only once in my life, so the locations of Gooch’s and Harrods and Urquarts were as unfamiliar to me as the Palace and Tower. Though I did know how to make marmalade: I shared my grandmother’s recipe before setting the pencil on the desk and glancing with bleak devastation at the other girls, all of whom were writing vacantly, as though they constantly sat exams. That afternoon I thought I’d never see London again. My chaperones were Mr. and Mrs. Granville, who lived in the next street and looked after us once or twice as children; they bought me a sarsaparilla at Whiteley’s before taking me back to the train, and it was with a leaden heart I returned to the Midlands. Nobody was more surprised than I when the letter arrived on the mat at Longmore Street, informing me that the tuition fee of £36 was gratis, a word I had to look up at the public library. I also had to order, at my own expense, the fabric for my uniforms from a clothier named Debenham & Freebody; for that I used my savings and had just enough left over to buy copybooks and pencils. I soon found out that all the other girls used pens.
My nine months at Norland were almost excessively happy. At first I’d been anxious and withdrawn, nowhere near as well educated or self-assured as my nine classmates. The only person at Norland who had an accent like mine was one of the maids. I shared a bedroom at the back of the house with an Irish girl named Bridget, who had black hair and a severe hooked nose, like a jackdaw. She was friendly and straightforward, and as we settled in beside each other, the unease melted away.
But it returned now, as familiar as an old cloak, as I followed Sim. She was small and slender, almost doll-like, but her countenance was not; her curly brown fringe was streaked with steel and so was her demeanor. Yet she was a fair and generous principal, not above tidying up stray teacups and distributing the post. She was the only member of staff who lived at the institute, though I had only ever seen her in her neat serge dress with the gold watch at her waist; it was a mystery to the students when she bathed. Her parting advice was that we ought to display our silver hairbrushes at our new homes, for the servants to see. I had only a comb, but Sim didn’t miss a thing; the week before graduation I found a box from William Comyns on my dresser. Nestled inside was a silver-backed hairbrush, heavy as a pistol, with bristles as stiff as pins.
She led me toward the back of the house and her office, passing a pair of students in blue uniform coming downstairs. They took in my cloak and hat and gave shy smiles. To the left was the refectory, where more girls in blue dresses and white aprons bent over books and chewed pens. With a pang of nostalgia I realized it was exam season. ...
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