The Bad Penny Read Online Free PDF Page A

kittens whose nappies needed changing, they were only dreams.

Chapter Two
    Patty stood on the balcony of the Ashfield Place landing houses, looking down on the quiet cul-de-sac below and feeling a thrill of proprietorial pride as she did so. She had agreed to rent No. 24, which was the last house on the top landing and was ideal, she decided. The road was quiet with no through traffic, and because landing houses had modern amenities they were much sought after, so she knew she had been very lucky to be offered this one. She also knew whom she had to thank for her good fortune. It had been her friend and mentor, Mrs Ruskin, who had given her the name of the landlord and told her that a property was about to become vacant in the landing house.
    It had been January when Mrs Bogget had given Patty notice to leave, but it was actually March before she found the sort of accommodation she had been seeking. To be sure, she had had to leave Great Homer Street barely five days after Merrell’s birth, and had moved into another lodging house where even more girls were crammed into the small space available. Higgins, of course, had returned to the hospital as she had planned, far happier to be amongst her own kind in the nurses’ home even though it meant constant interference and criticism from more senior nurses, and even those doctors who deigned to notice her existence.
    Patty had chosen midwifery as a career chiefly because it gave her the independence she had craved for so long. Moving into the hospital as a probationer after her years in the orphan asylum had merely been changing one sort of slavery for another. Probationers were considered the very lowest form of life in the hospital hierarchy. They were condemned to doing all the really dirty and unpleasant jobs, to working the most unsociable hours, to eating whatever food was plonked before them and to being constantly bullied and harassed by anyone who had worked at the hospital longer than they.
    Patty’s brains and determination had quickly singled her out from the crowd, but that did not make her either popular or particularly well regarded. Her fellow nurses frequently referred to her as ‘Peel, that nasty little swot’ and Patty, who had grown used to abuse at the orphanage, had had to grow an even thicker skin as a consequence.
    When she had qualified, she had known at once where her future must lie, for her happiest days in the hospital had, in fact, been spent out of it, when she was doing her ‘midder’ training. For six whole months she had ‘lived out’ with Mrs Ruskin, an experienced midwife, and had revelled in her first real taste of freedom. At the orphanage, she and the other girls, once they were old enough, had done most of the housework, which included preparing vegetables, washing up piles of dishes and scrubbing the vast flagstones on the kitchen floor. Cooking on such a large scale had been beyond them, however, so when Patty had moved in with Mrs Ruskin she had been unable to boil so much as an egg. Under her mentor’s guidance this had soon changed, Mrs Ruskin informing her grimly that she had always believed in sharing work equally. She had taught Patty to boil, bake and fry, to make bread, cakes and pastry, to cook a blind scouse when money was short and to whip up a light omelette when eggs were the only thing available.
    Alongside this domesticity came an excellent grounding in midwifery itself. Mrs Ruskin, despite her title, was a single woman and had as little time for men as had Patty herself. ‘They has their fun with some foolish young gal and leaves us to set all to rights nine months later,’ she told Patty severely. ‘Most of ’em drinks their wages away and expects their woman to gerrup from childbed and cook ’em a good meal. What’s more, they think she ought to work outside of a house, no matter how many brats they wish on her. Oh aye, when you’ve been a midwife as long as I have, you won’t think much to men,