The Palace of Strange Girls. Sallie Day

be breaking her toys or screaming, but this doesn’t mean she hasn’t got problems. She’s likely to tell you if you find the time to ask and listen to what she says.’ Seeing the expression on Ruth’s face, the teacher had added, ‘Well, perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe all she needs is a good cuddle and some reassurance. All of us could do with that, couldn’t we?’

      The teacher had said all this in such a caring and reasonable tone that Ruth had been quite worried about it. Until, that is, she sat down and thought about it. Then she realised that it was all nonsense. Elizabeth is obedient because that’s the way she’s been brought up. Ruth expects her to be quiet and polite at all times. Who wants a cheeky daughter who’s forever shouting and misbehaving? Ruth stopped calling in at school after that. But the accusation still makes her angry.

      Faced with Florrie’s comment, Ruth pushes her chair firmly back under the table. She gives Mrs Clegg a bleak, tight-lipped look but Florrie continues, ‘The poor mite. She’s so thin and pale. She looks as if she could do with plenty of good food and a nice bit of sunshine, wouldn’t you say?’

      Ruth ignores the remark. She heads out into the lobby where there is a brief exchange of views between mother and daughter before Beth drops the newly won sixpence into a collection box for the local disabled.

       Blackburn, November 1958

      The revelation of Beth’s illness came as a direct result of Mrs Richmond having syringed her husband’s ears and thus rendered audible to him the heart whisper, the rhythmic sigh of a leaking valve and phantom echo of escaping pressure, that had accompanied the Singletons’ younger daughter throughout her six years. Beth stands before the old doctor as her mother peels off the layers of jumper and blouse, liberty bodice and vest. Dr Richmond places two pallid fingers above her shoulder blade and raps them sharply with the crooked fingers of his left hand. The exercise is repeated over the child’s back, Beth alive to the uneasy vibration and flinching away from the discomfort when her chest is sounded. Dr Richmond reaches for his stethoscope, places the steel nodes in his ear and rubs the bright circle on the palm of his hand. There is complete silence. Ruth presses her lips together, too frightened to breathe, resisting the urge to join in while Beth inhales and exhales to order. Both mother and child pant briefly when the stethoscope examination is concluded, Ruth for oxygen and Beth with pain.

      Dr Richmond removes the stethoscope from his neck with deliberation and folds it carefully until the ancient black rubber settles into its accustomed cracks. Ruth immediately stiffens in the hard-backed chair she has been occupying since she and her younger daughter were summoned from their sojourn in the doctor’s waiting room – a two-hour wait during which Ruth had silently rehearsed all the reasons why she mistrusts the good doctor. If he’d been faster off the mark when she’d come to see him about her stomach pains back in 1950 she might have carried the child to full term. Of course, she doesn’t have any proof that it was a boy that she lost at thirteen weeks. But Ruth knows, as clearly as any real mother would know, that it was a boy. Sitting again in the same room waiting to see the same doctor, she had felt the old anger rising.

      Dr Richmond sighs and says, ‘You can get this bonny little girl dressed again now.’

      Ruth has recognised a number of traits in Elizabeth since birth, but ‘bonny’ is not one of them. It makes no difference how well she feeds Elizabeth, the child remains weak and tires easily. Her shoulders are permanently hunched over her chest, she sweats too easily and she still asks to be carried up hills. It is a back-breaking task for a woman over forty. Ruth has resisted seeing the doctor before now. Her relationship with old Dr Richmond is not an easy one.

      In order to cover her impatience Ruth now busies herself with dressing the child, stretching the wool vest over her head and struggling with the curling rubber buttons on the Ladybird liberty bodice.

      When decency is restored Dr Richmond ventures his professional opinion. ‘There might be a slight problem, Mrs Singleton,’ he says. This example of kindly understatement is characteristic of Dr Richmond. He has had cause on many occasions, when delivering bad news to anxious mothers, to adopt a certain reassuring ignorance of fatal consequences. He has no cures for pneumoconiosis (a familiar complaint among the miners at Bank Hall Colliery) or pulmonary embolism, or parietal gliomas, or any one of the number of terminal conditions he is forced to witness within the space of a single day. The varnish of confident infallibility afforded to the newly qualified has worn away over the years to reveal his humanity in all its uncertainty and inadequacy. He spends his mornings on call. His white starched cuffs are stained brown with iodine and rasp against his wrists as he takes pulses, measures blood pressures, pinches swollen ankles and tests stubborn joints. He rubs the folds of his softening jowls as he considers prescriptions or waits for the arrival of the ambulance. By late evening he has listened to a litany of complaints and drunk his way through all manner of liquid that passes for tea in the houses of the poor.

      Only then does he return home to the silent remembrances of former patients. His house bulges with mortuary gifts: gold watches, pipe stands, copies of the Bible and amateur paintings of local landmarks. Patients leave wills that afford him war medals from battles fought in the Mediterranean or North Africa while he was busy delivering the next generation in the cold austerity of Bank Hall Maternity Home. Financial bequests from wealthier patients are spent on repairs to the roof of his surgery, coal fires in his waiting room, lollipops for his infant patients, outstanding rent for miners laid up with lung disease and weavers laid off with mill closures.

      Ruth is aware of Dr Richmond’s reputation but, since she is not in need of charity or sympathy, she persists in her interrogation. ‘What is wrong with her?’

      ‘A slight chest irregularity. Probably minor, nothing to be anxious about. I have a colleague who might have a look at her. Mr Tomlinson at the hospital.’

      ‘He’s a heart man, isn’t he? Is it her heart? What’s wrong with it?’

      ‘It might be a circulation problem. You yourself have noticed she’s breathless sometimes. I thought I heard a slight whisper when I listened to her chest, but I could be mistaken. We doctors aren’t infallible.’

      ‘What do you mean, a whisper?’

      ‘Let’s wait until Mr Tomlinson has seen her, shall we? Then we’ll be sure what we’re talking about.’

      ‘And when will that be?’

      ‘I’ll have a word with him first thing tomorrow. He’s a good man. Can you take this little girl up tomorrow around two o’clock? Save all the bother of waiting for an appointment. Now I must get on, there are patients waiting to be seen.’

      Ruth quits the surgery with some reluctance. She senses that there is something seriously wrong, but can get no further with old Richmond. She is too clever to be misled by his diagnostic hesitation, or the sudden availability of a hospital appointment. There is something wrong with her daughter and only Ruth’s iron restraint in the company of strangers keeps her from crying in the queue for the bus home.

       4

       SHORE CRAB

       This crab often hides under the sand with just his eyes and feelers showing and so he may be difficult to spot. He can also appear unexpectedly from under a stone but beware! The green and black shore crab has two very sharp pincer claws; once he latches on to something he won’t let go! Score 20 for an unexpected appearance.

      ‘Bloomin’ ’eck, Ruth, how much longer?’ Jack has been hauling three deckchairs around the sands for all of twenty minutes while his wife searches for a suitable location. The perfect spot has to be at the furthest possible point from the pier (roughnecks), sewage outlets (polio) and any patch of sand that has even a trace of tar. It’s not an easy task. Jack’s patience, along with the muscles in his right arm, is stretched to the limit. It is only when Ruth stops, turns and begins to retrace her steps along the beach that Jack drops the three deckchairs, windbreak