The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas Page 0,71

dull brain to think straight.

Slowly it started to come back to her. Sippy diet, that meant very bland, lots of milk and cream, suitable for a patient recovering from a gastric ulcer.

She mentally went through a list of suitable dishes. Boiled fish would be bland enough, with mashed potatoes and a spoonful of pureed vegetables, and junket to follow.

Lucy was already busy stirring something on the stove. Beef consommé, by the delicious smell filling the kitchen. Dora hoped her humble offering wouldn’t pale in comparison.

For the next few minutes they were both busy, working in purposeful silence while the sisters looked on from the other side of the room. They didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to their cooking, thank goodness; Dora knew she would be all thumbs if they’d stood over them all the time.

She had boiled her vegetables and potatoes, put her junket aside to set and was lighting the gas ready to cook her fish when she heard Lucy cry out. Dora turned around. Lucy was standing at the next stove, staring into the pan with a look of utter despair.

Dora’s eyes darted to the sisters, still conferring quietly at the far end of the room. ‘What’s wrong?’ she hissed out of the corner of her mouth.

Lucy tipped the pan towards her. The soup had boiled down to almost nothing, a couple of spoonfuls of rich brown syrup. ‘I must’ve lit the gas under the soup again, instead of under the vegetables. It’s ruined.’ Her usual composure had disappeared, and her voice was thick with tears.

Serves you right, Dora thought. She had a sudden mental image of the sisters looking into the pan, then putting a big cross next to Lucy Lane’s name. That would stop her bragging, she thought.

At the other end of the room the sisters were beginning to stir. Any moment they would look up and realise something had gone wrong.

‘Put some boiling water in it,’ Dora whispered. ‘Hurry up, before they come.’

‘But it’ll taste awful.’

‘It can’t be any worse than it is now, can it? Just boil up a kettle and hope their taste buds are too numb to notice.’

Lucy shook her head mournfully. ‘I didn’t light the gas for my vegetables either. They’re not even cooked.’

‘Then you can share mine. Now quickly, get that kettle on while they’re still having a chin wag over there.’

Her face still blank with shock, Lucy did as she was told while Dora strained and pureed her vegetables and mashed her potatoes. Before the sisters came to inspect their trays of food, she quickly dolloped a spoonful of veg on to Lucy’s plate.

They both held their breath as the sisters sampled their dishes. When Dora glanced across, she saw Lucy had her eyes tightly shut, her lips moving in a silent prayer.

After a long time, one of the sisters put a tick on her clipboard.

‘Thank you, Nurses,’ she said. ‘Please send in the next pair.’

It took Millie several minutes to take in what Sister Parker had said to her. Even then she’d had to show her the printed result sheet before she would allow herself to believe it.

‘I’m sorry, Sister, I’m just so surprised I’ve passed,’ she said.

Sister Parker regarded her severely over her spectacles. ‘Believe me, Benedict, no one could be more surprised than I am,’ she said with feeling.

The others had all passed too, and there was much excitement in the nurses’ block as they swapped horror stories.

For once Lucy seemed oddly quiet, Millie noticed. She hadn’t bragged about how well she’d done, or how easy the test had been. She hadn’t made a single nasty remark. During supper, she had even offered Dora the cocoa jug first for once, instead of grabbing it for herself.

‘What’s the matter with her, I wonder?’ Millie mused.

Dora shrugged. ‘Maybe the test has brought her down to earth?’

‘I doubt it. You wait, she’ll be full of herself again by tomorrow.’

‘You never know,’ Dora said. ‘She might be different once we start training on the wards.’

‘The wards!’ Excitement bubbled inside Millie. ‘Just think, we’re going to be real nurses.’

‘Steady on, we’ve got another three years of training before then.’

‘But at least from now on we’ll be on the wards, dealing with real patients.’

‘Yes, and have you seen the state of some of them?’ Dora laughed. ‘I bet after six months we’ll be longing for Mrs Jones again!’

‘Well, she did it. I don’t know how, but somehow she managed it.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’ Veronica Hanley looked up from her quilt-stitching