A Protestant Ulsterman, Liam Finucan had taken his medical degree at St. Bartholomew’s in London when Matron Gertrude Newdigate was there, so they were old acquaintances; his love for pathology had led him to the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and his qualifications were such that he could have headed the pathology department of any hospital in Sydney or Melbourne. That he had chosen a minor post at Corunda Base was due to his wife, Eris, a Corunda girl he met and married in London. In 1926, when the Latimer girls commenced nursing, he had been in Corunda for fifteen years.
Typical of many pathologists, he was quiet and shy, owned no bedside manner, and found the dead more interesting than the living. However, by the middle of July, after two weeks of instructing the new nursing trainees, Liam Finucan developed a side to his personality hitherto undetected by anyone who knew him, and that included himself. Out of a mental stables came a war horse, and out of a cobwebbed cupboard came a suit of armour; mounting the one and donning the other, Liam tilted his lance and rode off to make war. His quarry wasn’t that miserable skinflint Dr. Frank Campbell; it was Matron Newdigate.
“You’ve given these four girls absolutely no kind of help or support, Gertie, and it has to stop,” Liam said, his softly lilting voice steely, foreign. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! When one of the old-style nurses starts here, she’s taken into the West End fold, overwhelmed with advice and many kindnesses. Whereas these four young women have no one to turn to at all. I don’t care how new you were to your own job when they started, you had a duty to them that you shamelessly ignored because their presence upset the West End majority. D’you think I’ve forgotten how much you grizzled to me during your first week at the thought that you were going to be lumbered with the new trainees after all? Here it is, the middle of July, and you’ve acted as if they don’t exist. You saddled them with a quarter of a dilapidated house, gave that fat and lazy crawler Marje Bainbridge charge of them, and rewarded her with half of the same house!” His eyes had gone the same dark grey as a stormy sea, and pinned her contemptuously.
“Your new-style trainees are even more tired than they should be,” he went on. “Their accommodation is pure Frank Campbell — hard chairs and two-foot-three beds, a kitchen they’re forbidden to use. By the sheerest accident their house is on the steam line, so at least they’ve been warm, but they have to chop wood and feed it to their boiler to have hot water, and that’s unconscionable! Hear me? Criminal! In spite of their privileges they’ve been brought up to think of themselves with humility — it’s just your good luck that their mother is a selfish bitch.”
He leaned forward to put the palms of his hands flat on her immaculate desk, and glared at her. “I’m off to see Frank Campbell next, but I’m warning you, Gertie, that I expect your wholehearted support in this. Since the girls are required to live in, they will each have a bedroom. You will provide a common room with easy chairs, and desks and bookshelves for studying. The kitchen will be at their command for light meals as well as liquids, and see they have an ice chest before spring. Get off your pampered bottom and see to their welfare! Use Marje Bainbridge as a chaperone, by all means, but not in the lap of luxury. I hear that there will be money to build a new home for nurses, but until it’s finished, I want my trainees adequately accommodated.”
Gertrude Newdigate had listened, but wasn’t prepared to take the blame for Frank Campbell’s parsimony. “Fight your own battles with that awful man!” she said coldly. “My hands are tied.”
“Rot! I’ve known you for twenty years, and you don’t scare me. Nor does Frank. Gertie, think! Those four young women are so good, that’s the real tragedy of it! Why on earth are you risking four potential matrons just to please a gang of petty West End nurses who don’t know sodium from potassium? Who wouldn’t know a Latin or a Greek medical root if it bit them on the bum? Devote your energy with the West Enders to convincing them that in future Medicine will demand educated nurses, so look to their daughters. Don’t be so in tune with yesterday!”
Her natural detachment was returning; she could see what Liam meant, though she hadn’t intended it to happen. The trouble was that she was too new to Corunda Base, and hadn’t understood how dismal the quality of West End nursing was when it came to science and theory. Still, she had one dagger she could slip in.
“How is your wife?” she asked sweetly.
He didn’t bite, he spurned the bait. “Philandering, quite as usual. Some things never change.”
“You should divorce her.”
“Why? I’ve no mind to take another wife.”
The Latimer girls loved Dr. Liam Finucan, a solitary ray of light in a densely black tunnel. Having discovered how bright and well prepared they were, he applied himself with vigour and enthusiasm to the task of tutoring them, thrilled to find that their knowledge of mathematics and physical phenomena enabled them to understand things like the gas laws and electricity already. They were as competent as men in the early years of a medical degree. When it came to subjects new and strange, they seized upon knowledge eagerly. Even Grace, he was learning, had more than enough brains to cope with the theory; what slowed her down was lack of true interest. To Matron he had said “four matrons”, but three was more correct. Whatever Grace burned for, it was not to become a registered nurse.
His favourite among the four was Tufts, whom he always called Heather. Edda was the more gifted and intelligent, but the pathologist in Liam admired order, method, logic, and in those areas Tufts reigned supreme. Edda was the flashy surgeon, Tufts was the plodding pathologist, no doubt about it. His liking for her was reciprocated; neither the monocled handsomeness of the surgeon Max Herzen nor the bubbling charm of the senior obstetrician Ned Mason held anything like as much attraction for Tufts as Dr. Finucan did, with his white-winged black hair, long and finely featured face, ship’s grey-blue eyes. Not that the unromantic Tufts mooned over Dr. Finucan, or dreamed of him when asleep; simply, she liked him enormously as a person and loved being in his company. Understanding her nature, her sisters never made the mistake of teasing her about men, especially Dr. Liam Finucan. Though nothing about her was nunlike, Tufts did bear some resemblance to a monk.
The fire Liam lit under Matron was a little like a torch, in that Matron lit a fire under Sister Bainbridge, who kindled one under the leader of the West End nurses, Lena Corrigan, and she felt the flames enough to set the whole West End nursing coterie ablaze. The after-burns went on for weeks.
Suddenly the nurses’ house was opened up and ruthlessly scoured: the four girls each had a private bedroom; four easy chairs and desk sets appeared in a common room, which even held a wireless set; the kitchen could be used for light meals; there were two bathrooms, and hot water was laid on at the bottom of a hastily dug trench. Harry the porter picked up their uniforms for laundering every single day, and the kitchen cupboards held hard biscuits, tins of jam, bottles of sauce, plenty of tea, Camp Essence of Coffee & Chicory, cocoa powder, saline powder for cool drinks, and blackcurrant cordial. All of which paled before the vision of the ice chest, big enough to hold a large block of ice and keep the eggs, bacon, butter and sausages cool.
“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” said Grace with a sigh.
Out of the blue, totally unexpected, Sister Bainbridge was moved to a small house next door on the same ramp. But before she went she introduced the girls to the magic of Epsom salts; dissolved in hot water in a tub or basin, they cured aching bodies and aching feet. How had they ever survived without the bliss of Epsom salts?
