Hearts of Gold by Catrin Collier Page A

Church. Sister Lena Church was the martinet who ran the maternity ward. She’d been christened “Squeers” by a nurse when a stage production of Nicholas Nickleby had played at the Town Hall.
    The name had stuck, and not only because she had a squint. If she had any saving graces, neither her nurses nor her patients had seen any sign of them.
    ‘Homes side has rung through. Unmarried has gone into labour.’ Sister Church paused in the doorway of the sluice room where Bethan was scouring bedpans. ‘I only hope they’re not sending her over too early. The last thing we need is workhouse clutter on this ward. When you’ve finished that, get the delivery room ready and the bath run. But mind you don’t skimp on those bedpans to do it. There are enough cases of cross-infection without you adding to them.’
    ‘Yes, sister.’ Bethan fought the temptation to bite back. Sister’s commands were like sergeant-majors’ orders, with never a “please” or a “thank you”. But three years on the wards of Cardiff Infirmary had accustomed her to routine brusqueness. What she found difficult to accept was the underlying hint that any job entrusted to her would not be carried out properly.
    Head down, she continued to scrub until she heard the squeak of sister’s rubber soled boots walking past the door and down the ward that housed the mothers. Then she turned on the cold tap, rinsed and disinfected the pans, and stacked them on the shelf above the sink. She washed and dried her hands, mournfully examining their cracked and sore state, before removing her rubber apron. Straightening her veil, she left the sluice room and turned left, out of the main ward into a corridor. She walked into the principal delivery room and reflected, not for the first time, that it was a miserable place in which to make an entry into the world.
    Its one small paned window overlooked an inner courtyard hedged in by high, grey stone walls which darkened the atmosphere even further. The room itself was half tiled with brick shaped tiles. Time and countless trolley knocks had cracked and stained their surface, transforming them from white into a patchwork of grubby beiges and greys. A mahogany dado separated the tiles from the upper wall, which was glossed the same sickly shade of green as the rest of the hospital.
    A grey metal bedstead covered by a pink rubber sheet was the only furniture. No table, no chair, no pictures on the wall to relieve the monotony, only a cumbersome radiator built on a gigantic scale, that ironically did little to warm the room. Bethan laid her hand on it. It was warmer than the air. Marginally.
    Rubbing warmth into her hands, she left the room to fetch bed linen and a birth pack.
    ‘Patient’s on the stairs and sister’s screaming because the bath isn’t run.’ Laura poked her head around the door. ‘Here, I’ll finish that, you sort out the bathroom.’
    Bethan ran.
    There was only one bathroom on the ward, off the same corridor as the delivery rooms and linen cupboard. It contained two baths. Bethan sat on the edge of the one nearest the door and pushed the wrinkled rubber plug into the hole. She turned on the hot tap. A thin stream of lukewarm, brownish water trickled into the tub, covering a bottom long denuded of porcelain covering by the friction of countless bodies and scourings with Vim.
    As soon as she sat down she realised how tired she was. She’d been on her feet all morning, and her nerves were stretched.
    A porter had mentioned that Matron was calling the final-year students into her office one at a time to give them their examination results. Bethan hadn’t worked in the hospital long enough to know if this was normal practice. If it wasn’t, did it mean that the results were dreadful? If she failed would she lose her job, or would the hospital authorities give her a chance to repeat the year and try the examinations again? So much depended on Matron’s recommendations in cases of failure, and