All in the Mind

Tilly was dreaming.

It was VE Day and they were dancing in the streets. All the lights were lit. She kept looking at them, not quite believing it. She was dancing with Johnny, her head against his chest, exhilarated by his closeness and the knowledge that the war was over.

It was so real, the dream. She could feel the rough fabric of his greatcoat against her cheek, smell its particular aroma of damp wool and tobacco.

She felt the dream slipping away and tried to hold on to it, but it escaped her grasp and shifted seamlessly into memory.

They had danced late into the night; long after the gates to the nurses' home were locked. Eventually, exhausted and intoxicated with the euphoria of the crowd, they had walked back to the nurses' home and he had given her a leg up to climb the wall.

And as she sat at the top of the wall, one leg on each side, getting ready to swing over to the other side, he had grasped her by the ankle and said, "Will you marry me, Tilly? As soon as I'm demobbed."

She looked down at his face, illuminated by the one street lamp in the lane, one lock of hair hanging over his forehead, his expression earnest and pleading.

She said the first thing that came into her head. "You're supposed to get down on one knee."

"OK," he said, with a grin, and dropped down on one knee. Did he know? Did he know then what her answer would be?

"Tilly" ... he began in a loud, theatrical voice.

"No, get up," she whispered urgently. "Someone might hear."

"Who cares? What are they going to do - sack you?"

She smiled back at him in the lamplight. "You fool!"

And she pulled her leg out of his grasp and dropped gracefully down to the grass on the other side.

"Well?" His head appeared over the top of the wall. "Will you?"

"Yes," she whispered back to him. Then she picked up the skirts of her uniform and ran across the lawn towards the darkened building. As she ran, she heard someone whistling the Wedding March, the sound fading as he reached the end of the lane and turned into the street.

She climbed up the drain pipe and slid carefully through the window, so as not to wake the others, only to find that she was the first one back. She felt a little deflated. For all she knew, she might be the only soul in the hostel. Everyone else was still out merrymaking. Except matron, of course. No effort of the imagination could envisage that august figure dancing in the street.

They slipped in, one after another, over the next couple of hours, accompanied by excited whispering, and Tilly sat up in bed, her knees up against her chest, and listened to their adventures. For reasons she did not care to examine too closely, she said nothing about her own, much more exciting, evening. Partly because she was put out by being the first back and thus appearing to be the least adventurous, and partly because she didn't - quite - believe it.

She suspected that Johnny had been carried away by the general excitement and would reconsider in the cold light of morning, which was at that very minute creeping into the grey sky above the nurses' home.

With a sigh, she got out of bed and got ready to go to work.

"No rest for the wicked, eh, Tilly?" one of the girls said, as she stumbled past in her shabby dressing gown, clutching her towel and toothbrush.

"All right for some," she called back, as the girl rolled over and went back to sleep.

Her uniform was in a mess. Johnny had collected her from the hospital last night and taken her straight to the street party. She had had no time to change. Her blouse was crumpled and a bit sweaty under the arms. She sniffed it dispiritedly. It would have to do. She didn't have another one clean. Her skirt was much the worse for wear for having been left on the floor where she'd dropped it the night before and, on closer inspection, she found there were slimy green marks on the hem from the moss on the top of the wall.

"Oh, bloody hell," she said, as she took the lot to the bathroom to see what repairs she could make with soap, lukewarm water and a toothbrush.

* * * *

Sister gave her a filthy look as she turned up in the ward, ten minutes late. "Where have you been?" she demanded. "And what on earth have you done to your uniform?"

"Sorry, Sister," Tilly muttered.

Sister rolled her eyes heavenwards with a long-suffering expression.

After that things just went from bad to worse. She dropped a bedpan on her way to the sluice-room and had to get down on her knees to scrub away the resulting mess just as the doctors were beginning their rounds. Then one of her patients had a seizure and began screaming obscenities. Then, stupid through lack of sleep, she was just about to administer an injection to the wrong patient, when one of the other nurses stopped her.

"Are you all right?" she said.

Tilly nodded, weak with relief at her narrow escape from disaster. "Oh, thank you, thank you." she said to her saviour. "It's just I'm really tired."

She looked over her shoulder to see if Sister was in earshot. "I was out dancing half the night." She bit her lip. "I should have had more sense."

The other nurse smiled at her. "Well, it's not every day we celebrate the end of a war. And there's no harm done, is there?"

She patted Tilly on the shoulder in a brief, maternal gesture, and carried on with her interrupted journey down the ward.

Tilly watched her progress with a jaundiced eye. She felt utterly depressed and hopeless. Impossible to recapture the euphoria of the night before.

She turned back to her patient, the right one this time, and held the hypodermic to the light, ejecting a tiny spurt of liquid to clear out any air before she plunged it with a certain degree of satisfaction into his upper arm.

He gave an involuntary start. "Steady on, nurse."

"Sorry," she said, and looked up to see Johnny coming down the ward carrying an extravagant bouquet of flowers that almost obscured his face.

Sister had materialised behind him and was marching purposefully to head him off, but he reached Tilly first and thrust the bouquet into her arms, before throwing himself down on one knee.

"Now I'll do it properly," he said. "Tilly, will you marry me?"

Sister had stopped in her tracks and was watching with a bemused expression.

Tilly took a deep breath. "Yes," she said.

A spattering of applause went up from the patients, gaining in volume as more joined in. Several nurses appeared in the doorway and began smiling and clapping as they realised what was going on. To Tilly's astonishment even Sister had joined in. Then Johnny got to his feet and took her in his arms and she lifted her face to be kissed.