Hearts of Gold by Catrin Collier

the homes, although they were run as separate units, the hospital dealing with the sick and the homes with the destitute.
    The destitute and “casuals” generally entered the site through massive, high wooden doors that fronted High Street, and the sick and maternity cases by the huge metal main gates situated around the corner in Courthouse Street. To the locals, the whole complex was known by its Victorian name, “The Workhouse”.
    And they, like their parents and grandparents before them, knew many who had entered its high walled precincts only to leave for an unmarked grave in a derelict corner of Glyntaff cemetery.
    Bethan and Laura had only ever worked on the maternity ward of the hospital. A VD ward, euphemistically described as the “clinic” because one was held there two days a week, and wards for the terminally ill were housed in the same block as the maternity unit. On these wards were mainly miners, young girls, and children who’d contracted tuberculosis or one of the other severe, often fatal, respiratory illnesses that haunted the mining valleys. A separate block behind the maternity unit held “J” ward, a unit for children under three, sick, orphaned and those whose parents had been admitted as destitute.
    J Ward was the only ward in the hospital where the sick and “parish” cases overlapped. The rest of the Homes side was virtually a closed book to Bethan. She came across the inmates often. It was difficult not to. Squads of young, pregnant girls from the “unmarried mothers” wearing the workhouse uniform of grey flannel were often commandeered to scrub the miles of stairs, corridors and outside steps of the complex. If it wasn’t the pregnant girls and women who were hard at work, then it was the orphans from Church Village homes who’d reached the age of sixteen without finding a foster parent, job or sponsor.
    The council had no other recourse but to send these “adult orphans” to the Homes, where they carried coal, laid fires, swept yards and washed bed linen for their daily bread and marge until they found either a sponsor or a job. And with the town strangled in the grip of a depression that was vacating shops and bankrupting longstanding, respectable traders at an alarming rate, most of the inmates could be forgiven for believing that they were in the workhouse for life.
    Those who could no longer pay their rent, the elderly who couldn’t look after themselves, girls who disgraced their families – they all ended up in the Graig. Occasionally Bethan heard cries from the yards as families were split up. Men to the male, and women to the female casual wards, their children under three to J ward, those over three and under eleven to Maesycoed Homes, a couple of miles away, and those between eleven and sixteen to Church Village homes several miles away.
    The elderly went into the geriatric wards.
    In addition to these semi-permanent inmates, every evening Bethan and Laura passed lengthy, verminous queues of “occasionals” waiting to sign into a casual ward for the night. Three hours of coal shovelling or stick chopping earned them a delousing bath, evening meal, breakfast and bed. There were always more casuals in winter than summer, but if they were capable of walking, they signed themselves out the next morning even in a snowstorm.
    The nurses on the casual wards had a more difficult job in many ways than the nurses in the hospital, but Bethan sensed a “looking down” by the medical staff on those who worked with the destitute. It wasn’t only that they spent their days delousing patients, and supervising menial tasks; it was the lack of any real medical work.
    Bethan knew one or two of them, widows or women with unemployed husbands, who’d been forced to take on the role of family breadwinner. She felt sorry for them and, when she wasn’t too busy to think, wondered why they didn’t apply for a transfer to the hospital wards.
    One of the reasons could have been Lena