My Father's Moon by Elizabeth Jolley

Author:Elizabeth Jolley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742282152
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2008-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

The powdered household milk is in the chest as I hoped, tins of it and real coffee too. I find more soup, mushroom, cream of asparagus, cream of chicken, vegetable and minestrone. I am quite reckless with my torch. Christmas is coming, I take a little hoard of interesting tins.

I discover that Night Sister Bean has a weakness for hot broth and I try, every night, to slip a cup along to her office in the early part of the night before I start on anything else.

Several things are on my mind, mostly small affairs. For some time I have Corporal Smith’s love letter to Ferguson, sixteen pages, in my pocket. It is not sealed and her name does not appear anywhere in the letter. It is too long for one person so I divide the letter in half and address two envelopes in Corporal Smith’s handwriting, one to Sharpe and one to Ferguson. Accidentally I drop them, unsealed, one by the desk in Night Sister Bean’s office and the other in the little hall outside Matron’s room. We are not supposed to be intimate with the male patients and I feel certain too that Corporal Smith is a married man, but there is something else on my mind; it is whether a nurse should send a Christmas card to the Matron. It is something entirely beyond my experience.

In the end I buy one, a big expensive card, a Dutch Interior. It costs one and ninepence. I sit a whole morning over it trying to think what I should write.

A very Happy Christmas to Matron from Nurse Wright

Nurse Wright sounds presumptuous. I haven’t taken an external exam yet. She may not regard me as nurse.

A very Happy Event… that would be quite wrong.

A very Happy Christmas to You from Guess Who. She might think that silly.

Happy Christmas. Vera. Too familiar. Veronica I have never liked my name.

A Happy Christmas to Matron from one of her staff and in very small writing underneath N/V Wright.

I keep wondering if all the others will send Matron a Christmas card. It is hardly a thing you can ask anyone. Besides I do not want, particularly to give Ferguson the idea. She will never think of it herself. And who can I ask if I don’t ask her?

I put the card in Matron’s correspondence pigeon hole. The card is so big it has to be bent over at the top to fit in. I am nervous in case someone passing will see me.

Again I am relieving on Bottom Ward. Always it is this bottom Ward. This time I have to creep round cleaning all the bed wheels.

‘And quietly,’ Sharpe says, ‘Nurse Queen and I don’t want everyone waking up!’

The card worries me. It will take it out in the morning. The message is all wrong.

One of her staff! I can’t bear to think about it.

The card is still there, bending, apologizing and self conscious in the morning. I want to remove it but there are people about and correspondence must not be tampered with.

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