The Butterfly Girls [antikvár]

Chapter One 'Two to the Jubilee, please,' said the nurses. They were young, fresh-faced, shaking raindrops from their capes. A morning lecture at the Infirmary had kept them late, they'd had to run through a shower for the tram. Had only just caught it, which was a bit of luck. 'Might have missed our dinner,' said Martie Cass, settling into a wooden seat beside Alex Kelsie, as the conductor pressed the bell and the tram moved off. 'Such as it is. When are we going to get something decent to eat again? You'd think the war was still on.' The Second World War had in fact been over for four years, but austerity was still with Scotland. There were still shortages of everything. Except, as Martie said with grim humour, TB cases. Always plenty of those. The girls were in their second year at Edinburgh's Jubilee Chest Hospital, both good friends, not just as colleagues. They had been brought up together in the Stockbridge Colonies, a little community of terraces by the Water of Leith, a mile or so from Princes Street, where their parents shared a house. It was perhaps not too surprising that both should have chosen nursing, but Alex had had a particular reason for wanting to nurse tubercular patients, and Martie liked to joke and say she was only in it for the extra money. In fact, if it had been true, Alex wouldn't have blamed her. Everyone knew that Martie's folks, Sid and Tilda Cass, were a pair of skinflints, and that Martie, cheerful and outgoing, liked to