Hope Page 31

  ‘I fully expected to find you’d already turned tail and run,’ the doctor admitted wryly.

  ‘I have been tempted,’ she said and launched into a despondent description of how her first morning had been. ‘I can’t believe that no one does anything for the sick!’

  Dr Meadows sighed in sympathy. ‘I know exactly how you must feel, Hope. I do what I can when I call, but it isn’t anywhere near enough. The truth of the matter is that the sick are just brought in here to die; we aren’t tackling the disease at all.

  ‘But there is no medicine which will save their lives. I can’t even claim that clean beds, bathing them or swaddling the sick in more blankets will make any difference to the outcome. In past epidemics it has been evident that it is in the hands of God if they recover, not through nursing.’

  ‘But it’s inhuman not to make their last hours more comfortable and give them some dignity,’ Hope said heatedly. She was hot and sweaty, hungry too now that the bowl of porridge she’d been given for breakfast before six this morning was a distant memory. ‘Besides, those women are paid to do a job, and if they won’t do it they should be told to go.’

  Dr Meadows ran his fingers through his hair in a weary gesture. ‘Those two live here, in the workhouse part of the hospital. Just as the two last night do,’ he said with a tinge of reproach. ‘They didn’t choose to nurse the sick, they were ordered to do it, and their only reward is an allowance of beer or gin. Can you blame them for being less than enthusiastic?’

  Hope felt chastened, for she had been promised four shillings a week and her board and lodging. ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘What we need is some way of recruiting the right kind of women into nursing, and then training them properly,’ he said dejectedly. ‘At present we have either those from holy orders, or paupers, nothing in between. But with low wages, appalling conditions and the risk of infection, what is there to attract good women? Look at you! If you hadn’t been press-ganged into it, would you be here?’

  ‘You didn’t press-gang me,’ Hope said. ‘You’ve been very kind to me, sir, especially making out I was your cousin! I think that’s why I got a room on my own. And Alice was really kind too. Will you thank her for the things she sent me? It meant a great deal to me.’

  ‘Alice liked you very much, her little gifts were her way of telling you that,’ he said earnestly. ‘And I will pass on your message. But my name is Bennett. Cousins can’t be formal.’

  Hope blushed, for he had a way of looking at her that made her feel very odd.

  ‘Have you had your dinner yet?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I thought Sister Martha would come and tell me about that.’

  ‘She’s been assisting in a leg amputation,’ Bennett said.

  ‘You’ve been taking someone’s leg off?’ Hope winced.

  ‘Not I, the surgeon, but I administered the chloroform. The poor man should make a full recovery, but I don’t know how he’ll feed his family. He won’t be able to work with only one leg.’

  Bennett took her down to the room just off the kitchen where she’d had breakfast earlier in the day. There were six people eating, two rough-looking men who appeared to be orderlies, a very old nun whom Bennett introduced as Sister Clare, and three nurses who looked only marginally cleaner and younger than Sal and Doll, and stared at Hope with hard eyes.

  She was given a large bowl of greasy-looking greeny-grey soup and a lump of bread. Bennett declined anything himself but sat with her while she ate it.

  ‘What is it like?’ he asked.

  ‘Not quite as bad as it looks,’ she grinned.

  Bennett smiled. ‘Are you always so stoical?’

  ‘I am about food, I know what it’s like to be starving,’ she shrugged.

  ‘You’ve seen the very worst of St Peter’s today,’ Bennett said earnestly. ‘But the cholera ward is not representative of the whole hospital. Dr Peebles, the surgeon, is excellent; they have a good record for midwifery here too. But the building is old, and isn’t really suitable for a hospital.’

  ‘Why are they still using it then?’ she asked. ‘Surely it is bad to bring people with infectious diseases to a workhouse where there are orphans, old people and the insane?’

  ‘When the new General Hospital was built it was the intention that all the sick would go there,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But it just isn’t large enough, not when an epidemic like this strikes. And St Peter’s is not a workhouse exactly; it’s more what you might call a refuge.’

  ‘I thought a refuge meant a place of safety?’ Hope said with a touch of sarcasm.

  Bennett half-smiled. ‘You’d better not start me on that subject,’ he said. ‘It is something I tend to rant about.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

  ‘Well, in the old days, until just before you were born, most of our unfortunates, the poor and old, simple or sick, got what they called outside relief. They stayed in their own homes and got money from the parish to support them. St Peter’s and places like it were for those who had no home or were too sick or old to look after themselves. In the main they were decent places, and St Peter’s was one of the best.

  ‘But the government wanted to get the ratepayers on their side by saving money, so they brought in a new Poor Law. Outside relief was stopped because they believed it encouraged people to be idle and feckless, and instead they built hundreds of workhouses all over the country, forbidding, prison-like places with no comforts whatsoever, which would deter all but the most desperate.’

  Hope nodded. ‘My parents were always afraid of ending up in one,’ she said.

  ‘It is people just like your parents who suffer the most from the new Poor Law,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘Imagine your father was laid off work for a few weeks, Hope, or became sick. Under the old law he could fall back on parish relief to tide him over to feed his family until he got well, or went back to work. Old people could stay in their villages, helped in their infirmity by neighbours and family. But suddenly all that was wiped out; not a penny would be handed over.

  ‘Once these unfortunates have used up their savings, sold their belongings and are starving, they are forced to leave their home and go to the workhouse.’

  He stopped his impassioned outburst suddenly and grinned sheepishly. ‘Oh dear, I didn’t mean to go into all the iniquities of that! What I really meant to point out was that the trustees of St Peter’s have tried to keep it as it always was; a home for those who have now here else. It continues to shelter the aged, the feeble-minded, orphans, mothers who cannot have their babies at home, and the sick. It doesn’t have the barbaric regime of the Union work-houses; no one here has ever picked oakum, or broken stones for building work. But like most charities, it is flawed. In emergencies the doors are opened too wide, and right now we have far too many sick. Without the facilities or the staff to nurse them.’

  Hope noticed that he was blushing, clearly embarrassed that he had tried to defend St Peter’s.

  ‘You are something of a rarity,’ Hope said impishly. ‘I didn’t think the gentry cared about anything or anybody but themselves.’

  He looked startled. ‘Do you see me as “gentry”?’

  ‘Well, you are,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not. As I told you yesterday, but for my uncle’s support when my father died, I would probably have gone into service too. Anyway, to get back to St Peter’s and the crisis we are in here, if it wasn’t for the Sisters of Mercy, who fortunately think God has personally instructed them to stay here, I don’t know what we should do.’

  Hope smiled. ‘That sounds as if you don’t believe in God.’

  ‘I’ll believe in Him if He chooses to end this epidemic,’ he chuckled. ‘Or taps me on the shoulder and shows me how it starts. I have had many an argument with Mary Carpenter about faith. She tells me I should be ashamed for having none. But what about you, Hope? Are you a believer, or a doubter like me?’

  ‘It depends,’ she smiled. ‘When I was
selling kindling I’d offer up a little prayer each time I approached a front door. I believed if they bought some wood, I doubted if they didn’t. Betsy used to say that gin worked better than religion. One glass and your troubles fade away.’

  She watched his face, expecting a look of alarm which would quickly be followed by a little sermon on the evils of drink. But he only smiled.

  ‘I should go back to the ward now,’ she said. ‘And you have patients to see.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ he nodded, ‘a great many of them. Look after yourself, Hope. Don’t despair, will you?’

  Hope often thought of that request from Bennett in the following two weeks, for it was hard not to despair, surrounded as she was by suffering. Every day patients died, and as fast as they were carried away to be buried, new ones were brought in. Often these new victims’ names were unknown, and to Hope it seemed the cruellest stroke of all to die without an identity.

  Sal and Moll took an almost fiendish delight in reporting the panic in the town, and how people were fleeing in droves, the rich in their carriages and the poor trekking out to sleep in fields rather than risk catching the disease. They said that at night the streets were deserted, and many ships were refusing to come into Bristol docks because of the epidemic.

  They sagely said that when the weather turned cold and wet there would be hundreds of poor and desperate people turning to the workhouses for shelter and food. They would be too frightened to return to the infected rookeries they’d run from, and they’d have no money for anywhere else.

  But the hot weather continued relentlessly and the stink from the river behind the hospital was overpowering. Hope found herself daydreaming more and more often of walking in the coolness of Lord’s Wood. She would remember the clean smell of damp earth, the way the sunlight filtered down through the canopy of leaves, and the utter peace; she wanted to be there so badly it hurt.

  At night when she retreated to her little room she would bury her nose in a sprig of lavender or rosemary bought from a young girl who stood by the hospital entrance, and remember the garden of her childhood home. She wished she could see her brothers and sisters, be a child again and feel the warmth of their love for her. It wasn’t right that at only seventeen she was shut away in this death house.

  Bennett was what stopped her running away. However hard and disgusting her work often was, he was counting on her and she couldn’t let him down. Thanks to him she had a few remedies at her disposal now. When new patients were still in the early stages of the disease she spooned syrup of rhubarb into them every few hours, put mustard poultices on their bellies, gave them ginger or cinnamon tea and put more blankets on them to keep them warm. Six of these patients didn’t sink into the second stage, which delighted her, but she had no way of knowing whether it was the result of her nursing or merely God’s will. But, determined they should recover and defy the legend that no one ever left the hospital, she fed them arrowroot mixed with boiled milk until they were able to manage soup.

  But six recoveries out of seventy or more that had either already died or would die soon wasn’t good enough, and she had to battle against the apathy of everyone else involved with the cholera ward.

  Sister Martha was so weak that everyone took advantage of her. Moll and Sal did as little as possible, only stirring themselves when someone died to rob them of their trinkets. Even the man in the stores often refused Hope more supplies of soap, soda and vinegar. Once he said it was a waste to lavish such things on a ward where no one got better.

  But the single thing which distressed Hope most was that no one but her took any notice of Bennett’s instructions on hygiene. It made perfect sense to her that hands must be washed after touching a patient, that aprons and caps had to be washed daily, and that all water for drinking should be boiled. Sal and Moll were too lazy to wash either their hands, or caps and aprons, and they snorted with derision about boiling the drinking water and said the doctor was as mad as some of his patients.

  Hope had never lost her conviction that the water in Bristol was full of poison. In the nearly two years she had been in the city she had never once drunk water straight from the pump; even when she was dying of thirst she boiled it and drank it as tea. Gussie and Betsy had drunk it, and they had died, while she remained healthy, so she took this as evidence that Bennett was right.

  She tried to convince others of it too, pointing out that Doll and Sal only drank tea or any kind of alcohol and that was why they remained in rude health.

  Bennett appreciated her spreading his gospel, but he pointed out that he couldn’t be certain that the disease came through water, as all the town’s water came from the same source. And as almost all those stricken came from the filthiest, most populous parts of the town, this did tend to support the commonly held medical opinion that the disease was airborne.

  Yet no one was able to explain the entirely indiscriminate nature of the disease. Most priests, doctors, nurses and the cart drivers who had handled the sick had remained healthy. Sometimes just one person in a large family caught it, while the rest remained untouched. In some lodging houses all but a handful had died; sometimes it was just the children who were infected. There was no pattern at all.

  There were plenty of extraordinary theories too. Some people placed the blame for the epidemics on the Jews in the town, which made no sense whatsoever. Others called doctors ‘Burkers’ after the infamous Burke and Hare who robbed graveyards for bodies for dissection. Some of the more strident evangelical preachers were insisting it was God’s judgement for the wholesale depravity in Bristol, and that it was spread by prostitutes around the busy ale houses.

  Hope had many a discussion with Bennett about these strange ideas, and he stoutly insisted that the clergy and their pious, hypocritical followers should consider why women were forced to turn to prostitution in the first place, and do something about that.

  Hope realized she was becoming increasingly captivated by Bennett. It wasn’t just that he was her only friend, or that he treated her as an equal, but because of his understanding of the real evils of poverty and his ideas on how it could be beaten.

  There were plenty of gentry who made benevolent gestures, and Hope was sure that these people had good hearts. But sadly their lives were too different from those who huddled in stinking rookeries to understand that a new set of clothes, a daily hot meal or a few shillings could never solve the problem. All this did was offer temporary comfort.

  Bennett likened poverty to a kind of swamp which people either stumbled into or were born in. He understood that once in it, it was hard, often impossible, to get out without help, and that for many, criminality, or selling themselves, was the only way to keep afloat.

  Like his friend Mary Carpenter, he saweducation as the only real and sure ladder out of the swamp. He insisted with some passion that by giving every slum child the tools of reading and writing they could build a better life for themselves.

  In a way, Hope was living proof of this. The education she had received had enabled her to understand concepts and ideas beyond the narrowconfines of the way she’d been brought up. She felt stimulated by Bennett’s somewhat radical views. He was caustic about the idle rich, and deeply suspicious of many who held prominent positions in the town, claiming they lined their own pockets at the expense of the poor.

  The brightest part of any day was when Bennett came to the ward. Hope had only to see that thin, somewhat stern face break into a smile and she forgot how tired she was. When he praised her efforts she felt exulted, and when she watched him examining his patients and saw the tenderness in his hands, the grave concern in his eyes, she felt moved to tears.

  Almost always he would stop long enough for a cup of tea with her. They would take their cups out into the backyard, and talk.

  For the first two weeks their conversations were mainly about the patients, what was going on in the town and how the epidemic was reported in the newspaper. But as the days went by their chats became more personal
, and one hot afternoon when for once the ward was very quiet, Bennett told her a little about his time at medical school in Edinburgh.

  He painted a picture of a shy, rather awkward young man who felt intimidated by the students who were richer, smarter and far more sophisticated than he was. ‘They thought I was a swot because I didn’t go out drinking every night,’ he said a little sheepishly. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to tell them I didn’t have the money for drinking, or that I didn’t dare fail my exams because of my uncle.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they became very good doctors,’ Hope said stoutly.

  Bennett gave a humourless laugh. ‘Most of them have gone a lot further than I,’ he said. ‘Two or three have practices in London’s Harley Street. Oswald Henston, a real bounder, is at St Thomas’ Hospital. Some of them have become army and naval doctors. I often think I would have done better in the army.’

  Hope guessed he meant that he considered joining his uncle in Bristol a mistake.

  ‘But treating the poor must have given you much more varied experience than you’d ever get treating soldiers?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he sighed. ‘They do say that as an army doctor dysentery is the only medical condition you’ll become an expert in. But I should like to go to India or some such exotic place. My uncle is always pointing out that I’ll never find a wife until I have something interesting to talk about.’

  ‘Isn’t this place interesting enough?’ Hope asked. She hung on every word he uttered and she couldn’t imagine any woman finding him dull company.

  Bennett raised one eyebrow. ‘A gentleman doesn’t engage in such coarse subjects with a lady!’ he said with mock horror.

  Hope laughed. ‘I suppose it would make most ladies reach for their smelling salts.’

  ‘It is that feigned delicacy in society ladies I find most irksome,’ Bennett said thoughtfully. ‘Only a couple of months ago I was late for one of my uncle’s friends’ parties one evening because I’d been delivering a baby. I apologized to the hostess and her two daughters and explained why, but I received a frosty glare. Apparently it isn’t “done” to mention such things as childbirth in front of unmarried women!’