They drove in on roads lined with fields and copses which slowly merged into the spacious houses of the suburbs and then into streets lined with terraces clenched tight against clumps of factories which belched black smoke. Gulls wheeled over the hospital as they approached, flying in from the docks. The sky was lighter over there, as it always was by the sea, Annie thought, remembering the call of the gulls and the cold of the sea as it had dragged the sand from beneath her feet. Sarah stopped the car at the entrance to the tall redbrick building. A statue of Queen Victoria looked over them to the town and the bedding plants had been cleared from around the plinth as it was September. ‘So,’ said Sarah as the engine jumped, then died. ‘So one day they will put up a plaque saying that on September 1932 at two-thirty in the afternoon Nurse Manon began her career.’ She laughed and laid her leather-gloved hand on Annie’s arm. Annie sat back, feeling the leather-seamed seat, seeing the dark brown wood of the dashboard, the pot-pourri that hung in muslin from a knob and which Sarah said would trick you into thinking the Morris was a new car with new smells.
