Read Online Bittersweet by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page B

woebegone Stan Laurel look,” Kitty agreed.
    “He always reeks of cheap cigars,” said Grace, “and I can’t stand red hair on a man. In fact, girls, there’s not a doctor here I fancy. They all think they poop ice-cream.”
    Happily for Dr. Neil Cranshaw, he wasn’t privy to these remarks, nor was he aware that Nurse Treadby, who looked like a Botticelli angel, possessed a tongue salty enough to rival the Dead Sea. So he continued to make a nuisance of himself on the Children’s ward, free to plague Kitty because he was rotating through Dr. Dennis Faraday’s service at the moment; Dr. Faraday was Corunda’s child specialist, loved and respected.
    The ward was just emerging from a frenzied battle against an epidemic of diphtheria that had been imperilled by insufficient stocks of specially modified rubber tubing used to assist a child to breathe. A typical Frank Campbell false economy; Deputy Matron Harding had to take the morning express to Sydney, pay far too much for stocks from a medical supplier, then return on the night train to find that Liam Finucan had rigged replacements out of ordinary tubing that worked well enough to avoid what would have been two negligent deaths. As with all infectious children’s diseases, only the worst cases were hospitalised — over a hundred patients between two and twelve years of age with laryngeal diphtheria: a malignant membrane in the swollen throat expanded to block the airway, which this modified pieceof rubber tubing kept open. It was a serious epidemic that saw seventeen children die and four require some months of hospital care due to heart complications.
    There were always two empty but absolutely ready wards at the end of a special ramp to serve as an isolation area for epidemics, but the last time they had been used so intensively was in the three years following the Great War, when influenza killed more people than the war had. It always seemed too that very lethal epidemics attacked children or younger adults; perhaps, thought Edda, if a body had survived everything to reach old age, it was tougher, far harder to kill.
    Kitty hadn’t nursed in the diphtheria wards. Sister Meg Moulton had preferred to keep her in Children’s proper, though Grace, Edda and Tufts all did duty on diphtheria. For Kitty it was double shifts and cancelled days off, but the crisis in available nurses was acute. Only a number of volunteers, retired West Enders, saw Corunda Base survive.
    In a private, unpublicised way, the diphtheria epidemic marked a victory for Kitty, a triumph she shared only with her sisters.
    “Dinner at the Parthenon any night you care to name?” asked Dr. Neil Cranshaw of Kitty while she was making beds.
    And suddenly it was all too much. If there hadn’t been a diphtheria epidemic — if the hospital owned a decent sheet — if Cranshaw didn’t have such a sloppy mouth —!
    “Oh, for Crissake, you dopey moron, shove your invitations up your flaming arse! Now piss off and leave me alone!”
    He would have been less surprised if a butterfly had savaged him during a walk in the garden; certainly he never thought of fighting back. A blaze of violet from those usually blue eyes had him scuttling out of the ward like a mouse evading a straw broom.

B y the time that June of 1927 rolled around, the Latimer sisters had been nursing for fourteen months, entering their second winter under Frank Campbell’s administration, and had conquered all their foes and bogeys. How Grace had lasted the other three didn’t know, save that her streak of cunning stood her in good stead, and her nursing, now that she was more or less inured to messes, passed muster; it had come as a refreshing surprise to learn that not every day brought messes.
    They had rotated once through all the wards. When June dawned Kitty was back in Children’s, together with Tufts. Edda had been convinced someone would spot the likeness between the twins, but not even Sister Meg Moulton did; the