Heroes' Welcome by Young Louisa

Author:Young, Louisa [Louisa Young]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Locke Hill, July–August 1919

Rose’s Further Correspondence appeared. They were going to give her £800. She was going to study at London University and then at University College Hospital. She would start in September. If she needed more support in future, she was to be in touch with them. She was a clean hatching thing, with wings to spread and a strength and power that had to be acknowledged.

Her life was not over. She was not some dull unloved creature with no purpose, she was not alone, halfway through a dreary life to a dingy death.

The boldness of it! In so many ways she was surprising herself.

Major Gillies shook her hand, said he was proud of her, and sorry she would leaving. Should things not go as planned, he said delicately, she would be welcome back.

‘Do you doubt my abilities, Major Gillies?’ she asked, with the playfulness permitted by their imminent separation and the time they had worked side by side. But she half meant it. She was proud now. Woman Doctor! She bloody well would be the Woman Doctor.

‘No!’ he said. ‘No, indeed. On the contrary,’ and they smiled and it was a little awkward. So then he said, if she ever needed a reference, and so forth, and it was all all right. She would have time for a holiday, even. Scotland, she thought. And so a period of her life was ending, and spinning off.

But to leave Locke Hill! Well, the strangeness should have been in leaving Peter and Julia – but neither of them were there. And that in itself was so strange. The falling apart of things which even if they had not seemed … strong, had seemed permanent.

How much we take for granted! she thought, as she folded her vests to pack them. We all said to each other, oh of course, nothing will be the same now – and here I am, surprised because things are not the same. This period of my life will become like my schooldays, calved off from my life like part of an iceberg, drifting away in the distance as I sail on ahead, until I can’t see it clearly or remember that much about it. How will I look back on these past years? As something marvellous and character-forming? As something important? And shall I have many more such sections of life to live through and then to lose?

For a moment she wondered whether she was a ship sailing through the universe of her life, or whether she was a rock, around which the river of her life flowed. Then she decided it didn’t make that much difference, in practical terms, as she still had clothes to wash and dry, because she was not at all persuaded by the shared laundry at the VAD medical student hostel. And after Scotland she was going to be working very hard.

But the main issue was Tom. That is a child, she thought, who has been left enough – but he is not my child.

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