Act of Will - Barbara Taylor Bradford

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had never done a domestic chore in her entire life, had found that first day unspeakable. Balking at the tasks assigned to her, she had asked herself despairingly how she would manage. Yet she had not dared complain to her superiors. Being intelligent, and alert, she had understood within the space of a few hours that they were not interested in the likes of her. She was inconsequential in the hierarchy of the hospital, where everyone – doctors and nurses alike – worked extremely hard, and with conscientiousness.

      On her second morning she had gritted her teeth and attacked her chores with renewed vigour, and she had learned the best way she could, mainly by observing the other maids at work. At the end of the first month she was as efficient as any of them, and had become expert at scrubbing floors, scouring bathtubs, washing and ironing sheets, making beds, emptying bed pans, cleaning lavatories, disinfecting the surgical ward and sterilizing instruments.

      Every night she had fallen into her hard little cot in the maids’ dormitory, so bone tired that she had not noticed her surroundings or the uncomfortable bed. She was usually so exhausted in these first weeks she did not even have the strength to weep. And when she did cry into her pillow it was not for her state of being or for her mean and cheerless life. Audra wept out of longing for her brothers, who were as lost to her now as her mother and Uncle Peter lying in their graves.

      There were times, as she scrubbed and polished and toiled in the wards, that Audra worriedly asked herself if she had brought this disastrous state upon her brothers and herself. Guilt trickled through her when she remembered how insistent she had been about taking those inventories of her mother’s possessions. But generally her common sense quickly surfaced and Audra recognized that they would have been punished no matter what. In fact, she had come to believe that Alicia Drummond had callously determined their fate on the very day their-mother had died.

      When Audra had been pushed out of The Grange and sent to the hospital, Aunt Alicia had told her that she could visit them every month, on one of her two weekends off, and spend special holidays with them. But Audra had only ever ventured there twice, and then merely to collect the remainder of her clothes and a few other belongings. For as far back as she could remember, she had never felt anything but uncomfortable in that appalling house; she understood she was not welcome.

      The second time she went to fetch the last of her things she had had to steel herself to enter The Grange, and she had made a solemn vow to herself. She had sworn she would never set foot in that mausoleum of a place again, not until the day she went back to claim her mother’s property. And so, over those early months of 1922, as she had learned to stand on her own two feet, she had kept herself to herself. She had continued to do her work diligently, and she had stayed out of trouble at the hospital.

      If her daily life was dreary, and lacked the normal small pleasures enjoyed by most girls of her age, she nevertheless managed to buoy herself up with dreams of a pleasanter future. Hope was her constant companion. No one could take that away from her. Nor could anyone diminish her faith in her brothers. She was absolutely convinced that they would send for her, that she would be with them in Australia soon. Three months after Frederick and William had left England their letters had started to arrive, and these had continued to come fairly regularly. They were always full of news, good cheer, and promises, and the pages had soon grown tattered from her constant reading of them. Audra treasured her letters; they were her greatest comfort and joy in those days.

      The hospital routine had scarcely varied during Audra’s first year. The work was hard, even for the strongest of the girls. Some of them had left because their daily chores had worn them down and inevitably demolished their interest in nursing. Only the truly dedicated remained. Audra, with nowhere else to go, stayed out of sheer necessity.

      However, there was also something very special in Audra Kenton, call it stubbornness, that made her stick it out until she could graduate to nurse’s training. Small though she was, she had unusual physical stamina, as well as a mental energy and toughness of mind that were remarkable in one so young. Despite her youth, she possessed inner resources which she was able to draw on for courage and strength. And so she had valiantly continued to scrub and clean and polish endlessly…run up and down endless stairs and along endless wards…forever on her feet or on her knees.

      The toil and monotonous grind of her days quite apart, Audra could not complain that she was ill treated in any way, for she was not. Everyone at the hospital was kind to her and the other little ward maids, and if the food was plain, even stodgy at times, at least there was plenty of it. No one ever went hungry. Audra, plodding along and braced by her stoicism, would tell herself that hard work and plain food never killed anybody.

      But by the end of the year she was looking to better herself. Her eyes were focused on the day she would take a step forward and start climbing the ladder. She had been sent to work at the hospital against her will, but slowly, as she had mastered her chores, she had had a chance to look up, to observe and absorb. Gradually she had begun to realize that nursing appealed to her.

      Audra knew she would have to earn a living, even if she went out to join her brothers in Sydney; she wanted to do so as a nurse. According to William, she would have no trouble finding a position in a hospital. He had written to tell her that there was a shortage of nurses Down Under, and this knowledge had fired her ambition even more.

      It was in the spring of 1923, not long after Audra had started her second year at the hospital, that her chance came. Matron retired and a successor was appointed. Her name was Margaret Lennox and she was of a new breed of woman, very modern in her way of thinking, some said even radical. She was well known in the North of England for her passionate espousal of reforms in woman and child welfare, and for her dedication to the advancement of women’s rights in general.

      With the announcement of her appointment there was a flurry of excitement and everyone wondered if the daily routine would be affected. It was. For, as was usually the way, a new broom swept clean and a new regime, in this instance the Lennox Regime, was swiftly instituted.

      Audra, observing everything with her usual perspicacity, decided that she must waste no time in applying for nurse’s training at once. From what she had heard, Margaret Lennox favoured young and ambitious girls who wanted to get on; apparently she went out of her way to give them her unstinting support and encouragement.

      Two weeks after Matron Lennox had taken up her duties, Audra sat down and wrote a letter to her. She thought this was the wisest tactic to use, rather than to approach her personally. Matron Lennox had been in a whirlwind of activity and surrounded by a phalanx of hospital staff since her arrival.

      Less than a week after Audra had left the letter in Matron’s office she was summoned for an interview. This was brisk, brief and very much to the point. Ten minutes after she had walked in, Audra Kenton walked out, smiling broadly, her application approved.

      With her superior intelligence, her ability to learn quickly, Audra swiftly became one of the best student nurses on the hospital staff, and earned a reputation for being dedicated. She found the new work and her studies challenging; also, she discovered she had a desire to heal, and therefore, a real aptitude for nursing. And the young patients, with whom she had a genuine affinity, became the focus of the love she had bottled up inside her since her brothers had gone away…

      Now, remembering all of this, as she lay in the grass on the crest of the slope above the River Ure, Audra thought not of her diplomas and nursing achievements over the past four years, but of Frederick and William.

      Her brothers had not sent for her in the end.

      They had not been able to save up the money for her passage to Australia. Things had not gone well for the Kenton boys. Frederick had had two serious bouts with pneumonia and seemed to be in a state of physical debilitation a great deal of the time. Apart from the problems with his health, he and William were unskilled and untrained. They had had a hard time scraping a living together.

      She sighed and bestirred herself, then sat up, blinking as she opened her eyes and adjusted them to the brightness. Poor Frederick and William had had nothing but bad luck really. Their letters, which arrived less frequently these days, were permeated with defeat. Audra had all but given up hope of going out to join them in Sydney. She

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