The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas Page 0,70

undoing his belt. Dora shrank back against the hard wooden bedhead. ‘Leave me alone,’ she whimpered. ‘You don’t belong here. I need to study . . .’

‘I know what you need.’ His hands gripped her shoulders, pushing her down on the bed. She struggled against him, but his weight pressed down on her so she couldn’t breathe . . .

‘Doyle? Doyle, wake up.’

When she opened her eyes, it wasn’t Alf’s leering grin she saw, but the concerned faces of Millie and Helen looking down at her.

‘You had a nightmare,’ Millie told her kindly. ‘You were thrashing about and shouting.’

‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’

‘Us and half the mortuary too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Helen padded back across the room to her own bed, yawning.

Dora gulped in a deep, calming breath and felt her racing heartbeat slowing down.

‘What were you dreaming about?’ Millie asked.

‘I don’t remember,’ she lied.

‘You kept telling someone to leave you alone?’

She saw Millie’s frown of concern and panicked. Had she given herself away? ‘It was probably something to do with the PTS test,’ she said. ‘I’ve been worrying about it a lot.’

‘Haven’t we all?’ Millie said.

‘Can we go back to sleep now?’ Helen mumbled sleepily from the other side of the room.

They went back to bed, and moments later Dora once again heard the soft breathing that told her her room-mates were fast asleep.

She lay awake, staring up at the ceiling. Tired though she was, she was too terrified to close her eyes in case she cried out again and gave herself away. Alf Doyle, she thought bitterly. Even now, he still made her too afraid to sleep.

The four sisters who filed into the student block could not have looked more unfriendly if they’d tried. The students watched them arrive from the window of the nurses’ home.

‘Is Sister Hyde with them?’ Millie whispered anxiously. ‘Oh, please God, don’t send her again. If I even see her in that examination room, I’ll just fall to pieces, I know it.’

‘I’m going to fail anyway,’ Katie groaned. ‘I’ll be the only O’Hara girl not to qualify. I’ll be sent back to Ireland and my mammy will die of shame.’

‘I don’t know what you’re all getting so worried about.’ Lucy, as ever, was perfectly calm and poised. ‘It’s only a couple of tests. You should pass it easily, as long as you’ve prepared.’

Dora was glad she wasn’t the only one who gave her a black look. Lucy’s perfection had started to grate on all of them over the past few days.

Sister Parker didn’t help their nerves, either, fussing over them like an anxious mother hen.

‘Make sure you arrive promptly for each of your tests, and don’t address the examiners unless addressed by them,’ she’d warned them over and over again. ‘Remember to bring a clean apron in case of accidents. And, Doyle, can you please do something about your hair?’

Dora tucked her curls under her cap. She could understand Sister Parker’s anxiety. It reflected badly on her if her students didn’t do well in PTS.

There were two days of tests for the students, a practical and oral test followed by a written examination. For days they had been practising their bandages, taking each other’s temperatures, checking pulses and respiration and swotting up on the bones and organs of the human body and their various functions. But as she made her way unsteadily to the student block with the seven other students from her set, Dora could feel all the knowledge she had worked so hard to cram into her head slowly ebbing out like a retreating tide.

They waited in the classroom to be called. Finally the first four were summoned, two into the kitchen and two into the practical area.

Millie followed her partner, Gladys Brennan, into the practical area as if she were going to the gallows. ‘I’m going to get a capelline bandage, I just know it,’ she hissed to Dora.

Dora smiled, but the smile was wiped off her face when she was summoned to the kitchen with Lucy Lane.

Why did it have to be her? she thought wretchedly as she followed her down the corridor. No matter how good she tried to be, Lucy would make her look hopeless by comparison. They were given the task of preparing a meal for a patient on a Sippy diet. Lucy immediately knew what to do, moving with practised efficiency around the kitchen, pulling out pans, peeling vegetables and chopping up beef, while Dora stood motionless at the stove and tried to get her