Hetty Feather Read online

  'Oh, Polly, you can picture! Will you be my special friend?'

  'I should like to be your friend more than anything, Hetty,' said Polly.

  I stayed cuddled up with her until dawn, then I hurtled back to my own bed only a few moments before the big girl monitor burst into the room.

  I helped Polly smooth her apron and tippet into place when we got dressed. When I placed her cap upon her head, I whispered, 'There, all your new curls are tumbling down past your shoulders.'

  When Ida smiled at me at breakfast, I said, 'This is my new friend, Polly.'

  Ida nodded at Polly in a kindly way.

  'Ida is quite the nicest maid in the whole hospital,' I told Polly.

  Ida blushed deeply, the pink in her cheeks making her look almost pretty. 'Hetty is quite the most artful girl in the whole hospital,' she said sprinkling sugar on my porridge. She sprinkled a little on Polly's plate too.

  I made sure Polly sat next to me in lesson time, and I resolved to help her with her ABC very patiently. But I didn't need to! Polly's schoolmistress foster mother had taught her charge well. Polly could read as fluently as me, though I was now top reader of the entire infants class. She could write neatly too, in a curly copperplate that sent Miss Newman into raptures.

  'Look, girls, mark this penmanship! See with what style Polly writes her lesson, and not a single mistake!' she said, showing us all Polly's page.

  If Polly had not been my true friend, I would have been a little irritated. Half the girls groaned jealously. Sheila and Monica started making up a vulgar verse together about Polly Penmanship. I quelled them with a terrifying look. No one should be allowed to tease my friend!

  Polly proved gifted at darning too, sewing neatly and smoothly, an accomplishment that proved more popular. Our clothes were not marked in any way. We were handed out our clean clothes randomly on Sunday. If you were given badly darned stockings, the toes all cobbled together, you knew you'd be driven mad by the irritation, forever forced to take your boot off to ease the stocking this way and that.

  Polly and I pictured together every playtime. We'd spread our arms and pretend we could fly. We might look as if we were simply running up and down the playground with our arms outstretched, but we knew we were swooping high above the sooty rooftops of London town. One day we'd fly to visit Polly's foster mother and sit at Miss Morrison's skirts and eat seedcake for our tea; the next day we'd fly to my village and sit with Jem in my squirrel house and eat gingerbread.

  I told Polly about Madame Adeline and Tanglefield's Travelling Circus. I invited her to take part, though privately I was a little unsure about her as a circus performer. Although she got no more food than the rest of us, she remained a very sturdy child, flat-footed in her institution boots. But I need not have worried. Polly had as much imagination as me.

  'There was a parrot at Miss Morrison's. He was called Polly too, though I think he was a boy. He used to squawk dreadfully and nip everyone, but he was very good with me. It was my special job to feed him, and he'd say, "Good girlie, good girlie." So I'll be a bird trainer at the circus and teach parrots to sing songs, and great hawks and eagles and albatrosses will fly about my head and do such tricks,' she said. She waved her hand and I saw her performing birds and marvelled.

  I shared my purloined Police Gazettes with Polly, and we gasped and giggled together at their grisly stories. I wondered if Polly would wish to terrify the dormitory with her own version at night, but she was a tactful girl and left the public tale-telling to me.

  She did still cry at times, long after the other girls slept, but I always slipped into her bed and cuddled her close and comforted her.

  13

  Polly and I even got ill together that winter. I'm not sure which of us started sniffing and sneezing first, but within a day we both had red and running noses and hacking coughs. Matron Pigface Peters gave us a rag each to wipe our noses, but they were made of harsh, hard cloth and rubbed us raw. Our heads were aching and our arms and legs hurt. All we wanted to do was lie down, but we were forced up into our everyday routine. It was especially cold and we stood shivering at playtime, barely able to stand.

  'Run around, children! You need plenty of fresh air to blow those horrid colds away. Don't pull those long faces at me!' said Matron Pigface.

  'But we're so cold, Matron. Mayn't we stay indoors just this once?' I snuffled.

  'Cold? Of course you're cold if you loll around like that! Do some skipping! Take some exercise, you lazy little girls. And stop that shivering! You've got your good thick coats.'

  We had our coats, but we had no woollen scarves or mittens. We had no underwear, so the icy wind blew straight up our skirts. We staggered miserably up and down, our faces grey, snot running freely. By bedtime we were both wheezing and dizzy with fever. I could not croak out a story for everyone. I could barely breathe. I lay there, head throbbing, while my bed seemed to rise up and down, voyaging to the ceiling and back. I lifted my head and was violently sick all over my pillow and coverlet. I crouched, shivering and sniffing, desperate to know what to do. I was sure I'd be punished for making such a terrible stinking mess. I had to try to clear it up, but I didn't know how.

  'Oh, Hetty Feather, have you been sick?' Sheila called. 'I can smell it from here. How disgusting you are!'

  'She couldn't help it,' said Polly. 'I feel sick too. Oh no—!' She vomited as well.

  'Stop it! You're both disgusting,' said Sheila.

  Some of the other girls woke too and groaned and complained.

  'Ssh! I hear footsteps. It's Matron!' Monica hissed.

  I started crying then, unable to lie down in my bed, terrified I might be whipped for being out of it. But it wasn't the dreaded Matron Pigface Peters. Lovely Nurse Winnie was on night duty. She came in with her lamp.

  'Oh dear, oh dear, who's been sick?' she said. 'Is it you, Hetty? And poor Polly too!' She came up to me and felt my forehead. 'You have a fever, dear. You need proper nursing – and you too, Polly. Come along with me, girls.'

  She ushered us out of the dormitory and down the corridor, into a room we'd never been in before, like a small dormitory with twelve beds.

  'This is the infirmary, girls. Let's strip off those soiled nightgowns and get you washed and clean again, poor lambs.' She was so gentle with us that we both started crying, unused to such tenderness. When we were in our clean nightgowns, we were tucked into bed in the infirmary with new softer rags to blow our noses and bowls beside us in case we were sick again.

  'There now. Try to get some sleep. I'll go and check the other girls and strip your soiled beds. Don't cry so. You'll feel better soon.'

  'We're not going to be punished?' I said.

  'Goodness, Hetty, you're both ill with the influenza. Of course you're not going to be punished.' Nurse Winnie sounded shocked. 'Dear goodness, what must you think of us!'

  'I think you're lovely, Nurse Winterson,' I said.

  She was truly angelic to both of us: she held the bowls when we were sick again; she lifted us onto the chamber pot; she wound wet towels round us to bring down our fever; she gave us sips of sugared water; she read aloud to us when we were restless; she clasped our hands when the doctor came to examine us. By this time the infirmary was full of sneezing sick girls, with further beds lining the corridor.

  'Half the hospital has gone down with this wretched virulent influenza,' he said as he listened to Polly's chest. 'However, you're a sturdy child with excellent lungs. You'll be running around in a day or so, as right as ninepence.'

  He looked graver when he undid my nightgown to listen to my chest. He bent closer, till his pomaded hair was right under my nostrils. He kept prodding me with the cold end of his stethoscope, shaking his head. 'This child is nowhere near as robust,' he declared. 'Severely undernourished. She has a sparrow's bones, no meat on them at all. She needs feeding up!'

  'I eat the same as Polly, sir,' I said, but he took no notice.

  'Give her black beer in the mornings, and full cr