be better applying to the Infirmary?’ Miss Hanley suggested.
The City Infirmary was an old Poor Law hospital, a former workhouse just down the river in Poplar. It was small, badly funded and run by ill-trained staff and auxiliaries. It also had a shocking reputation among the locals, who referred to it as The Graveyard.
‘After all, she’s hardly Nightingale’s material, is she?’ Miss Hanley went on.
They were interrupted by the maid bringing in afternoon tea. They paused as she set the tray down on the console table just inside the door and arranged the bone china cups and saucers.
‘What makes you say that, Miss Hanley?’ Kathleen asked when the girl had gone.
‘I would have thought that was obvious. We only accept girls with education and breeding.’
‘Miss Doyle is adequately qualified.’
‘From a night school!’ Miss Hanley’s lips curled over the words.
‘Which surely shows determination and character, if nothing else.’ Kathleen moved across to the table to pour the tea. ‘I can’t imagine it was easy for a young girl, working long hours in a garment factory then trooping off to study in the evening, can you?’
‘That may be. But it takes more than that to be suitable for the Nightingale.’
It certainly does, Kathleen thought as she passed a cup to her.
As the Nightingale was a prestigious teaching hospital, it tended to attract girls of a certain background. Well-bred, well-spoken, middle-class girls who were looking for a respectable way to fill their time until they found themselves a young doctor to marry.
It was the same in most hospitals, she knew. But even more so at the Nightingale. Sometimes when she heard the young students talking among themselves, she wondered if she’d accidentally strayed into an exclusive finishing school.
Miss Hanley had even boasted that the previous Matron’s sure-fire way of discovering if a girl was suitable for training was to ask if she belonged to a tennis club. Kathleen doubted if Dora Doyle had ever seen a tennis racquet, let alone picked one up. But she was passionate, determined, and obviously no stranger to hard work. Which was more than could be said for many of the students who came through the Nightingale’s doors. Most of them were totally unprepared for the rigours of nursing; many of them didn’t make it through the twelve weeks of preliminary training.
‘Obviously it’s your decision, Matron,’ Miss Hanley conceded stiffly. ‘But I have to say, girls of that class seldom do well as nurses. They simply don’t have the character for it.’
‘Oh, I don’t think Miss Doyle is short of character.’ Kathleen lifted the teacup to conceal her smile.
She wondered what Miss Hanley would say if she knew that Kathleen was once just like Dora Doyle, a millworker’s daughter from a small Lancashire town, who had dreamed of something beyond life in the blowing room of a cotton mill. She too had once sat across the desk from a forbidding-looking Matron and begged for the chance to show what she could do. And now look at her. Barely forty and already in charge of the nursing staff of one of the country’s top teaching hospitals. Sometimes she had to pinch herself to believe it was true. Not everyone approved, of course. She knew there were some people at the Nightingale who thought that she and her newfangled ideas would lead to the ruination of the hospital’s good name.
Change was a dirty word at the Nightingale. The hospital had been run the same way for the last thirty years, under the iron rule of its old Matron. And when she retired, many had believed Miss Hanley was the natural choice to carry on her good work – including Miss Hanley herself. But the Board of Trustees decided the Nightingale needed new blood, and so Kathleen had been appointed instead.
Now, after a month in the job, she still felt like the new girl. She could hear the whispers of the senior staff following her down the corridors as she did her morning rounds, everyone wondering what to make of the new Matron, who smiled too much and talked to the young nurses in the same friendly way she did to the senior consultants.
It didn’t help that Miss Hanley didn’t miss a chance to remind her: ‘That really isn’t the way we do things here at the Nightingale, Matron.’
She went to look out of the window. Beyond the gracious Georgian façade of its main building which fronted the road overlooking Victoria Park, the Nightingale Hospital was a sprawl of blocks, extensions