I’ve been accused of lacking romanticism because of my post yesterday, so here is my chance to prove that wrong.
There was a nurse called Daisy, but she was known by her more sensible middle name of Joan. She was a sensible woman, reliable and hard working, and she became a charge nurse at the London hospital where she worked. When war broke out, no one was surprised when she volunteered and she soon found herself working in a combat hospital in North Africa. It was hot and unfamiliar, and she was kept very busy looking after the wounded soldiers, but she thrived there and had what they used to call “a good war”. In spite of the long hours she managed to have a bit of a social life in her time off, and ended up spending more and more time with Bill, a handsome young pilot who had actually been a hand surgeon before the war. They became very close but when the war ended they lost touch and she went back to London.
After a few years there she decided she was ready for a new adventure and she got on a ship and sailed away to New Zealand. She got a job as matron at Kaitaia Hospital in the far North. As part of her work she sometimes had to deal with the people on the hospital board. One quiet man on there was an engineer with a tragic past. Norman’s wife had died of a stroke at the tender age of 51, leaving him with six children to bring up alone, ranging in age from 21 to only 13. (She had asked her GP in despair after baby number 5 if there was any way she could stop having any more children, and he said, coldly, that that was her job as a wife and it would be interfering with God’s plan to try and change it. But that’s another story.) As well as being on the hospital board, he was a city councilor, and was a loved and respected man by all who knew him. Joan, a sensible and capable woman, was also a loving one, and eventually she and Norman married. She was a saviour to he and his children, and when, several years later, the youngest daughter was tragically killed in Naples, she was the rock that kept the family together. (Helen was also a nurse, beautiful and fun, but had had her heart broken by a young doctor, and so she and her sister Judy had decided to get away to Europe on a cruise, an adventure to put the roses back in Helen’s cheeks. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. She was killed crossing the road soon after arriving in Italy, because she was looking the wrong way). Too short a time after that, Norman got cancer and died, leaving Joan alone, as the children were all grown up by then.
Joan settled into life as a grandmother in a small town, doing good works for the community, and joining the hospital board herself. One day, when she was in her sixties, she got a letter postmarked from the UK. It was the pilot, Bill. He had never married, and now that he was retired as a surgeon, he was thinking of emigrating to New Zealand. They wrote to each other for several months, and discovered the spark between them was still there. He came to see her in Kaitaia, and it was as if the years just fell away, and they were in their twenties again, young and in love. They married the following year, moved to a retirement village North of Wellington and lived happily ever after.
Until… (OK, sorry, but you should stop here if you love a happy ending above all things…) several years later she started to suspect he was having an affair. Bill denied it vociferously and threatened to have her admitted into the local insane asylum for her paranoid delusions. Except, of course, he was having an affair, with a 68 year old trollop who lived a few doors down. Eventually the truth came out, and he left Joan and moved in with his lover. Poor Joan was mortified. She had the sympathy of the whole retirement complex but it was only with the passage of time that she started to feel better. She made new friends, and Bill grew frail and soon died. However, eventually time caught up with her, she started to get forgetful and developed angina. She didn’t want to lose her drivers licence, thinking that she was happy to take the risk of dying in a fiery car crash rather than lose her independence, but when her GP said she might take other innocent people with her, she reluctantly agreed. A year after that she moved into the hospital wing of her retirement home, where Bill had spent his last weeks some years before. A few months later her mobility scooter was taken off her for running over another little old lady. Her deterioration was swift after that, and in 1998, when I was heavily pregnant with another step great grandchild for her, she died.
As she had been in the armed forces she had a couple of old soldiers at her funeral representing the RSA. One of them was so confused and doddery he ended up marching off in the wrong direction and the other chap had to chase after him and bring him back in line. They did a beautiful job saluting the casket, though.
The End
The moral of the story: all men are bastards.