The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn

Author:Kate Llewellyn [KATE LLEWELLYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730449713
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

There are dozens of such letters that Richard smuggled out of Northfield in a shoebox when he left (nothing was supposed to be taken out of the infectious diseases hospital). Years later, I found our son, Hugh, with his friend Tony laughing and reading these to each other in our shed, where they had found them. I took a pile of these letters and threw them into the incinerator in the back garden. But somehow another box or two of letters survived.

Around this time, I had applied for a nursing job with an ophthalmologist, Doctor Max Moore, who had rooms in a building on the corner of North Terrace and King William Street. However, there was a problem for me when applying for jobs. I had been told that I would not be given a recommendation from the hospital because of a farewell party. After my final exams, and a few days before I had left the hospital, my friend Mary, who had graduated a few months earlier and who now lived above the nurses’ rooms on sisters’ floors, invited me to come to her room when I came off duty at eight o’clock. When I walked in, I saw about eight of my friends, who called out, ‘Surprise!’ And that was how the farewell party began. After about nine o’clock, we decided it would be wiser to move downstairs to my room because the noise of the party might draw the attention of one of the sisters. I can remember somebody calling out in the corridor as we walked down: ‘The champagne’s gone but there’s sherry left.’

My room had a bucket of flowers that Richard had sent me (we had no vases), and there were ball dresses laid out on the bed because I was packing to leave. Amid this scene of suitcases lying open, underwear and chaos, the party went on. As my friends were leaving, they told me they would return the next day to help clean up the room. They put the empty bottles in my wardrobe to keep them hidden, just in case a sister might find them. I lay down among the spilt flowers, the overflowing ashtrays and spillage and went to sleep.

The next morning, after being on duty for an hour or two, I went back to the nurses’ home at the breakfast break. Joanie was rooming a few doors down from me and I asked her if I could lie on her bed until we all met at lunchtime and had time to clean up my room. She agreed and asked me for the key to my room so she could see what sort of state it was in. She returned, gave me the key and we went back on duty.

An hour or so later, the ward sister told me that Matron had rung and wanted to see me at once in her office. I walked over and from behind her desk Matron said, ‘Nurse, Sister Sawtell tells me that the cleaner has drawn her attention to the state of your room.

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