Shadows of the Workhouse

for him. That shows he’s getting well, doesn’t it?” I was struck by the fact that we all see what we want to see. Peggy appeared to have closed her mind to the reality of Frank’s condition, to the extent that she literally couldn’t see it. To her, Frank was exactly the same as he had always been, her brother and her lover. He was the beat of her heart, the blood in her veins, and the physical changes, obvious to anyone else, she just did not see.
    It was arranged that I should call for home nursing twice a day, and that Sister would come any time that Peggy requested.
    I do not know whether or not Sister Julienne noticed the sleeping arrangements in the little house. The prefabs were constructed in a rectangle with a single large room and two small rooms leading off it. These were intended as bedrooms, but one of the rooms in Frank’s house was a dining room, which we could see through the open door. The only room used for sleeping had a double bed in it. If Sister Julienne noticed these things, and put two and two together, at no time did she say so. The Sisters had seen it all before, many, many times. In cramped living conditions, where a family of ten, twelve, fifteen or more lived in one or two rooms, incest was hardly surprising. Families kept their secrets and the Sisters did not comment or judge. I felt that there was nothing in human life that they had not witnessed in the seventy years they had worked in Poplar.
    Later Sister said to me, “We will have to keep up this pretence that he is going to get better. The charade has to go on – treatments that will do no good, drugs that are useless – to give, the impression of medical competence and nursing care. ‘Hope’ lies in those treatments and, without hope for the future, most of our patients would find themselves in torment at the end.”
    One day when I called they were studying travel brochures received from Thomas Cook. Frank was very alert in his mind. His speech was slower and quieter, but his eyes were bright, and he seemed almost animated.
    “Peg an’ me, we thinks we’ll go to Canada for a good ’oliday when the treatment’s done an’ I’m on me feet again. She’s never bin abroad afore. I was in France and Germany in Hitler’s war, an’ I never wants ’a go near Europe agen. But Canada, now – big clean open spaces. Look a’ this ’ere, nurse. Lovely pictures, aren’t they? We reckons Canada’s just the place for us, don’t we, Peg? Who knows, we might stop there if we likes it enough, eh, Peg?”
    She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes glowing with happy anticipation. “We’ll go on the Queen Mary,” she agreed. “First Class, like a couple of swells.”
    They both laughed and squeezed hands.
    Together Peggy and I helped him to the bathroom. It was difficult, but he still had the strength to get there. She washed him all over, because although he could get into the bath, he did not have the strength to get out. In clean pyjamas he sat in the sitting room looking at the plaster ducks flying across the wall, whilst Peggy and I changed the bed with the text over it, executed in big, childish embroidery stitches, ‘God is Love’.
    We had taught Peggy many essentials in the art of nursing, such as treating pressure points and dealing with pain or nausea. She was quick to acquire any small skill to make Frank more comfortable. I enquired about appetite, pain, bowels, vomiting, headaches and fluid intake, and left them happy with their plans for Canada. Should it be Vancouver or the Rockies? They couldn’t decide.
    The air was sweet as I left the little house, and the sounds of the huge cargo vessels, the cranes, the lorries, seemed far off. I thought of the thousands of powerful men working ceaselessly in that great port, and the fragility of life. Health is the greatest of God’s gifts, but we take it for granted; yet it hangs on a thread as fine as a spider’s web and the tiniest thing can make it snap, leaving the strongest of us helpless in an instant.
    Frank received a six-week course of radium therapy and was taken twice a week by ambulance to the hospital. Both he and Peggy expressed wonder and a touching appreciation that all this was free on the new National Health Service. “It’s lucky I got ill now, an’ not a few years ago. I could never ’ave paid for all this expensive treatment.” They seemed completely confident that it would be effective, probably because it was so elaborate.