Daughters of War

by Lizzie Page

  We were met at the school gate, and we tried the same ploy as last time: I was the unlikely daughter, while Kitty, in a black shawl and glasses, was my mother – we wanted to look around. The woman who we met seemed to accept this. The war perhaps hadn’t aged me as much as I feared, I thought; however, most unexpectedly, she insisted that I stay behind in an empty room to fill out a detailed application form.

  ‘I would prefer to look around,’ I said desperately, ‘with my… mother.’

  ‘It’s our policy,’ she said, looking down her pince-nez at me. Since when? I wanted to argue. It wasn’t before!

  ‘Bring it to me when you’re done. I’ll leave you to it.’

  So, Kitty went off with two girls acting as her guides, leaving me anxious in an airtight room with a sheaf of papers and a blunt pencil.

  Twenty minutes later, Kitty came back. It was evident before she spoke that it was bad news.

  ‘I couldn’t find them, May. I’m sorry. How are you doing with the form?’

  ‘Nearly done. Keep looking,’ I urged. We had come all this way and I was not ready to fail.

  ‘It’s not easy.’

  ‘Ask one of the girls where they are.’

  ‘I have,’ said Kitty. ‘It’s just…’ She paused. ‘No one knows anything.’

  ‘Go back out,’ I urged. It wasn’t fair but I couldn’t help but feel this wouldn’t have happened to Elizabeth. She would have bulldozed her way through. Why did Kitty have to be so reticent about everything?

  ‘I really am trying, May,’ she said softly.

  The application form was endless, ridiculous. I was incredibly tense and angry, I suppose. All I wanted was to see my children: was that so complicated?

  Kitty came back about ten minutes later. I knew from her expression it hadn’t happened. The blood had drained from her face.

  She whispered, ‘May, apparently, they’re not here anymore.’

  ‘What? They must be.’

  ‘It seems they’re at a different school. George must have moved them.’

  Pince-nez lady walked in and asked if I had finished my form. I couldn’t be bothered with the pretence any more. I shoved the papers over to her, stood up and announced that we were leaving. I stormed out the school, leaving Kitty to smooth over the goodbyes.

  George had taken them when they’d been nothing but happy here? And where, where in God’s name, had he put my babies now?

  ‘Any addresses? Anything?’ I hissed at Kitty as she joined me by the gate.

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

  * * *

  We didn’t talk much on the train back to London. If only I could work out where they were. There must be a clue somewhere. I kept thinking of the game my Grandma Leonora and I would play, the one with the tray of objects. Something would no longer be there: Darling, try to see what is missing.

  How could George have done this? Was it just to spite me? It must be, because they loved their school.

  I knew mothers who had lost their sons. I had written to them, tried to send morsels of comfort. My situation was very different: I had not lost my daughters. It was a tragedy for me, but my tragedy was not half as bad as many people’s, for my children lived on. In these terrible topsy-turvy times, I was one of the lucky ones. I think this was the first time though that I understood deep down how much George hated me.

  I would continue to search for them, I would continue to write, I would reach them eventually. In the meantime, I had to get on with my life; but I was a mother without her children and the guilt and the shame was overwhelming.

  Favourite Christmas hymns

  ‘Silent Night’ (mine).

  ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ (Joy’s number one).

  ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ (Joy’s tie for first place).

  ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ (Leona’s choice)

  49

  Gordon rejigged the shifts so that we could be together for Christmas 1917: me, Bonnie, Kitty, Matron and him, the old gang. The few heroic British soldiers who had managed to keep going since the very beginning of the war called themselves the ‘Old Contemptibles’. Gordon was trying to get us to call ourselves the ‘Old Despicables’. Fortunately, it hadn’t caught on.

  I wasn’t going back to England for Christmas that year. For one, I had run out of leave, but even if I hadn’t, what would have been the point? I had nowhere to go. No one to see.

  A few days before the 25th, I read a notice in the canteen: Patients and Nurses Variety Show

  This had Katherine’s fingerprints all over it. My hands trembled when I saw someone had written my name (irritatingly misspelled ‘Mai’) on the list of performers.

  ‘You haven’t gone and signed me up?’ I asked Gordon, furiously.

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ he said in an offended voice before laughing and admitting, ‘Bonnie did.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m doing this!’

  Gordon chuckled some more. ‘Everyone’s in the same boat, May. You’ll think of something you’re good at.’

  ‘Bedpans?’ I said.

  * * *

  When I arrived in the canteen the night of the show, one patient was already playing the spoons. It was surprising how musical it sounded. I wasn’t the only one impressed; the crowd of patients and staff gave him a big roar when he finished. I grew more apprehensive – I hadn’t expected standards to be quite this high.

  Doctor Rafferty, the evening’s compère, walked to the front of the tent, clapping loudly. ‘Well, that was a very well-rounded performance, and they were very well-rounded spoons.’

  We groaned. Doctor Rafferty always fancied himself as a comedian. I thought, his jokes are worse than Louis’, then I scolded myself – stop thinking about that man, for goodness’ sake.

  Of course Gordon had a skill. How could I have imagined otherwise? He sang a new song, ‘Danny Boy’, and he had quite a wonderful voice. Doctor Rafferty, pretending to be looking for something, called out: ‘Oh, Danny boy, where are you? It’s safe to come out now!’

  As Gordon took his seat next to me, I nudged him. ‘Well, who knew you could sing?’

  ‘Don’t have much occasion to out here.’ He looked sad. ‘Karim sang beautifully.’

  I squeezed his hand.

  Two patients played ‘Goodbye’ on ukuleles and while the players were both talented, their ukuleles had seen much better days: one was missing strings and the other had lost its entire headstock.

  Then Bonnie took to the floor and did a robust can-can. Many patients would later say it was the highlight of the evening. Although it was less sexy than the one at the Moulin Rouge (or so I had heard), Matron’s head shook violently throughout, and she kept her arms crossed.

  ‘Far too salacious!’ she snapped when Bonnie returned, flushed. ‘See me tomorrow morning.’

  I shot Bonnie a sympathetic look. I still had doubts about what I had decided to do; following a crowd-pleaser like hers was going to be very hard indeed. Dancing was out of the question, singing was even worse.

  Our compère came on, laughing. ‘If you’ve still got two hands – you lucky things! – put them together now for the indomitable Nurse Turner.’

  I stood at the front of the room, cringing. Indomitable? Really? It felt like there were eyes everywhere, boring into me.

  I opened my notebook and, apologetically, read out the poem that I had scrawled on the back page

  This is the song of the mud,

  The pale-yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;

  The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys;

  The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds;

  The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hooves of the horses;

  The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.

  The room remained hushed for a moment. And then there was applause, tremendous applause. Doctor Rafferty thumped me so hard on the back tha
t I almost tipped forward. In the surgical tent he was measured and meticulous but outside it, he was a clumsy man who drank to forget.

  ‘I’ve never heard that one, Nurse Turner! Who was it? I know, I know, let’s ask the audience to guess.’

  The crowd shouted out suggestions: ‘Owen? Sassoon? Keats?’ I could see my team smirking at each other. ‘Shakespeare?’ Even Matron had uncrossed her arms and was nodding approvingly.

  I said ‘no’ to all their guesses. Finally, Doctor Rafferty pushed me to answer: ‘Who wrote it then, Nurse Turner?’

  ‘Me,’ I admitted. And everyone clapped and whooped some more.

  Afterwards, we went to Gordon’s tent, to listen to music and to eat mince pies baked with love in Bournemouth by Lucy, Gordon’s sister. We drank, we chatted and I was proud because I didn’t mention Louis once. I was so tired, though, I fell asleep with my head on Matron’s shoulder and I don’t remember how I got back to bed.

  50

  They brought Little Stan in first, and the stretcher-men were laughing with the orderlies: they’d thought it was a small boy, so what a relief it was to find it was only a silly dummy, a mere toy. But soon after, Stanley himself was carted in with a nasty injury. He’d popped his head out of a trench when he shouldn’t have – and the Bosch was always ready to take advantage of a mistake. Matron sat with him all night. When I went over with a cigarette, she said he was improving. He had even told her a naughty limerick. But later, the moment she left his bedside, he stopped breathing and there was nothing we could do. Matron was terribly shocked.

  There was some debate about what to do with Little Stan – was there anyone in England we could send him to? – but in the end, we decided the best thing to do would be to bury him alongside Stanley.

  Of course, you could never predict which death would hit the hardest: some, strange to say, you could sail through almost unmoved; others, even unlikely ones, would break your heart into tiny pieces. Of all the deaths, Stanley’s got to Matron the most. And not long after, she announced with regret, she was going back to England. Her parents, she babbled, her late husband’s parents.

  ‘Do you think you will nurse again?’ I asked her privately.

  ‘Never,’ she said with complete and utter conviction, and I understood.

  * * *

  So, we went on through 1918. And whereas the tragedies were never as concentrated as they had been during the Battle of the Somme, there was individual heartache every single day.

  Kitty spent more time with Gordon, Doctor Rafferty and the other surgeons than she did with us. They were refining medical techniques by the hour. Often, she came out of theatre, shaking her head: ‘Genius! I can’t believe how we did it.’ She was interested in transplants, said that one day we would transplant livers, kidneys, hearts, perhaps even faces! Bonnie and I mostly ignored her far-fetched schemes. We passed our rare afternoons off with Manuela, a Portuguese nurse with better English grammar than us. Occasionally, we got to spend time with Katherine and Millicent, if the shifts worked out that way or if it was quiet.

  I still wrote long letters to my girls, of course I did, hoping that even if ten letters didn’t find their way to them, the eleventh might. I didn’t know where to send them, so I dispersed them widely: the Pilkingtons, George, Mrs Crawford, Elizabeth’s mother, the Leamington school. Occasionally, a pressed flower would appear from Leona, and once a drawing of a fox came from Joy, but there was no address for return, no information at all. It seemed like they had lost belief in me too.

  I didn’t get many letters from Elizabeth – I imagine it was harder from a ship – but occasionally, she wrote that she hoped I was well, that the work was not too dire. She said she worked mostly with the men with the influenza, a horrible disease; she had got it, but had recovered quickly. (Of course she did!) She said before she left England, she had gone to a professional photography studio in Earl’s Court and had a lovely little photo taken of her in uniform. And what had her mother said when she saw it? She said, ‘Oh yes! We need more cat litter.’ They had proceeded to have a massive row about Elizabeth leaving the country and abandoning Tiggy, Winkle and Delia. (A row that Elizabeth had won, obviously.) She remarked on the camaraderie of the men: how they got up in the night to light each other’s cigarettes or to hold the hands of the distressed. She wrote If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. I have seen the best of human nature. What a privilege, May – To think I never knew all this!

  One time, I heard nothing from her for about three months and then came a wonderful drawing of her three cats: she wrote,

  I miss them. And you, I miss you too, my darling, my little American friend. I’m glad it worked out like this and I know we’ll be together again, splashing our way across Tooting Bathing Lake soon. Look out for my feet…

  First thing in the morning, I couldn’t help it, I wished I was with Louis. I wished I was in his arms, wished he was holding me, kissing me, laughing with me. Sometimes I was petrified he was dead, but in my heart I knew he wasn’t pushing up daisies – not Major Louis Spears – he just didn’t want me. It wasn’t complicated. Or maybe he did want me, but the crux of it was, he didn’t want me enough. And that wasn’t even his fault, it was just one of those things. It was a tragedy, although in comparison with the terrible tragedies around me, I knew I was getting off lightly. But as the sun rose, at 4 a.m., it didn’t always feel like that.

  Throughout the spring, troops were on the move. There were big, horrendous pushes all over Europe. Not so much forwards or backwards now, more sideways. Still action, still terrible deaths, but after the horrible Battle of Amiens, rumours flew that this time we really were on the up and a ceasefire was on the cards. Patients whispered that they had heard this, that and the other, and who knew better than them? But after so many false dawns, most of us were reluctant to even dare hope that the war was coming to an end.

  * * *

  Some hot April morning, 1918, when the heat had made the post yellow and curl up at the ends, Kitty took a knife to the seal of an envelope, burst into tears and threw herself on the lunch table. Bonnie was toying with the ‘monkey meat’ on the plate (even Bonnie couldn’t stomach French canned beef); she put down her fork and so did I.

  I wondered who had been lost now as I waited patiently with Bonnie by Kitty’s side. In my head, I was going through the members of Kitty’s family: There was sweet Andrew, who died last year in Gallipoli. Her father, who had disappeared when she was only little. Hard-working Paul was wounded and lived back home with his dear wife. Her mother had only recently died. It could only be her half-brother Henry, the clever engineer fighting in Egypt.

  But it wasn’t that. Waving her paper like a white flag, Kitty said slowly, ‘I don’t believe this. I’ve been accepted into medical college. In America. Once the war’s over, of course.’

  ‘That’s brilliant, Kitty!’ Bonnie, then I, hugged her.

  ‘I can’t go, how can I possibly go? It’s impossible.’

  Bonnie and I looked at each other.

  ‘Why is it so impossible?’

  ‘The money, everything… it’s crazy.’

  ‘Kitty,’ I said slowly. ‘I might be able to help.’

  I sent a thank-you up to Grandma Leonora. She’d done it again.

  * * *

  Bonnie and I quietly did the dressing for a poor apologetic fellow who was covered in burns from Amiens. The vehicle he was driving had turned into a firebomb. We said he was lucky to have been pulled out alive, but privately, I wondered if he was. He fell asleep the moment we were done, still clutching Bonnie’s hand.

  I offered her the same amount of money I was lending Kitty – it was only fair.

  ‘No.’ Bonnie was adamant. ‘That’s not for me, I don’t do borrowing.’

  ‘But Kitty—’

  ‘Kitty will earn it back and pay it to you thrice over. I would never be able to. Honestly, May, it’s the way I was brought up: in my family, we make money ourselve
s or not at all.’

  Bonnie stayed put with the burnt man and I went to find who we would see to next.

  51

  It fell to me to collect the new matron from the station. As I drove, I remembered my arrival three years earlier – there hadn’t been a station near here, or even a proper road – and I thought about Matron and her invisible line and that made me chuckle to myself.

  New Matron was a tiny neat woman with tidy white hair. She had many years of nursing experience in England. I didn’t know what had prompted her to come out to France just now. It was something I planned to ask her on the way back. I still could never see a newspaper without reading it, so when she placed the previous day’s New York Times on her lap in the passenger seat, I asked, ‘Could I just? You wouldn’t mind?’

  And she said, ‘This? Oh, yes, go ahead. There’s nothing much in it.’

  Hospital Ship sunk by a U-boat in the Bristol Channel, it said.

  I was relieved to read there had been no patients on board. The ship was on its way to France to collect the wounded. Good. And wasn’t it just a mark of desperation that the Hun were doing abhorrent things like this? Targeting innocent doctors and nurses? They must know their time was nearly up.

  Then I saw that it was the Glenart Castle. The Glenart Castle? I felt suddenly breathless.

  My eyes raced across the words. I realised with horror how I knew the name, the very best name of all, but in the next instant, I had no doubt that Elizabeth, my superb swimming friend, would have escaped. She just had that way about her. Elizabeth was far too alive to die, it was impossible.