The War Nurses

by Lizzie Page

  * * *

  On my final morning in Furnes, after the usual porridge breakfast (which tasted so much the worse after my having been spoiled by the luxury of thick-cut marmalade in Scotland), I got my things ready. Helen hugged me, her glasses wavering. She whispered conspiratorially, ‘Look out for a copy of my book!’

  And I whispered back, ‘Can’t wait!’ though I doubted she’d ever finish it. She was joining some ‘Stop the War’ campaign group in America and Arthur didn’t look too healthy to me. He would need some looking after, no doubt. Helen didn’t have time to write more limericks; how would she find the time to write an entire book?

  Arthur walked me out. ‘No need to leave your newspapers, Arthur!’ I told him, but he insisted I needed help. My bags were weighed down with as much food for the boys as I could manage to carry, but still I ended up helping him – I didn’t trust Arthur not to drop everything.

  ‘How is Elsie?’ Arthur asked after we had loaded up the car. He put his hands in his pockets. I supposed it was to disguise the trembling.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Why didn’t she come back with you?’

  I was surprised he didn’t know. ‘She’s gone to see her little boy.’

  Arthur chewed his tongue. ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said uncertainly. Why wouldn’t I?

  ‘You’d never know Elsie was a mother, would you? Or a widow even.’

  I didn’t know what he was trying to say, but I didn’t care. Arthur was odd, and now he seemed even odder. His accident had probably made it worse. We noticed that sometimes – how the proximity of death exaggerated a personality. An easy-going person might become lazy, a coper might become efficient, or an angry person might become aggressive.

  ‘I hope we meet again, Mairi,’ he continued.

  Even that sounded strange – I realised it was because he hadn’t called me ‘young Mairi’ for once. I was glad he had finally stopped patronising me and I doubted we would meet again anyway, so I could afford to smile warmly at him.

  I bounced into the driving seat, excited to get back to the cellar. To see my best friend again. It had been the longest time Elsie and I had been apart in nearly a year. Nothing else mattered.

  Arthur leaned in. He was so close to me that when he spoke, spit landed on my arm and on the steering wheel. ‘Mairi – a bit of advice. Don’t be a cock-tease like her. It’s not nice.’

  I knew the cellar needed a tidy-up, and after that I wanted to sift through Madeleine’s things for a while. I always found that soothing. As I drove back, planning everything I would do, I decided that Elsie and my conversation about the suffragettes must have been a misunderstanding. No woman, especially one of Elsie’s capabilities, could possibly be against the women’s vote. It was simply that Elsie didn’t feel a fundraising speech at the Glasgow Assembly Rooms was the appropriate place to discuss it. She was probably right.

  I drove past vehicles carrying ammunitions and trucks carrying new soldiers. If they hooted, I waved back. The routes to and from the Western Front were growing busier. Was that a good sign?

  The first thing I saw when I pulled up in Pervyse was darling Shot. He ran over, barking wildly, his ears flapping madly, letting me know that I was home. Was there ever a friendlier, more heart-warming sight than that? Here was innocence, here was loyalty! Shot didn’t care if I had too many freckles and not enough bosom! He didn’t worry about the future or regret the past. I grabbed him, stroked him and he gazed in my eyes so lovingly it almost brought tears to mine. This is amour too, Mother. Martin followed Shot out, wiping his hands. He nodded curtly, then strode off.

  Opening the trapdoor of the cellar, I pulled myself and Shot down.

  ‘Wait ’til you see what I’ve got for you,’ I told my good boy.

  Everything was as quiet as I expected it to be but as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I suddenly spotted four shiny boots in the straw. Had the Germans invaded? Shot didn’t seem alarmed. The boots were attached to legs. The legs were attached to two people, both fast asleep.

  ‘Hellooo?’ I called uncertainly, doubt coursing through me.

  Elsie and Harold jumped up to greet me, delighted. Shot wriggled out of my arms and made his way into the straw too, tail wagging.

  Elsie hugged me fiercely. ‘Mairi, Mairi, Mairi. I hate it when we’re apart!’

  Harold hugged me too, which was unusual. I blushed. It was easier to pick up Shot again and to direct my attention to him. ‘You just wait, little fella…’

  I was discombobulated. Not that Harold was here – no reason to think he wouldn’t visit – but why was he asleep in the straw? I wondered if maybe he had been hurt again, but there was no sign of an injury.

  ‘You have straw in your hair, Elsie.’

  She smoothed it out.

  I wished I had returned sooner. I had wasted precious time at Furnes, and with Mrs Godfrey and my mother at The Ritz. Elsie wasn’t supposed to be back yet. Had I known she was coming back early, I would have made sure I did too. Elsie hated being alone above anything else. It was her weak spot. She’d do anything to avoid it.

  Elsie had bought me a jigsaw puzzle: a picture of Bruges with canals and a bell tower. I don’t know why she had got me a present or why she had chosen this. Bruges was under German Occupation now and I’d never shown any interest in it anyway.

  ‘Ladies, when all this is over, I’ll take you there.’ Harold was being unusually effusive.

  ‘When all this is over’ was one of our favourite phrases. We prefaced many of our sentences with it. What we would eat, what we would do, what lives we would live ‘when all this is over’.

  But although we said it more than ever, I had begun to believe it less. The war would never be over. It was nearly one year old now. What they couldn’t resolve in one year, they probably wouldn’t resolve in ten.

  ‘Not just Bruges,’ declared Elsie, who seemed unusually bright-eyed too. If she had had a tail, she would have been wagging it. ‘We’ll visit all the European cities, won’t we, Mairi?’

  I kept looking between her and him. What had happened? Was I missing something? If they were together now, they didn’t say it outright.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Do you like your present?’

  ‘I… love it. Thank you.’ They shared a look. More body language I couldn’t read. ‘So how was Kenneth?’ I asked wildly.

  Elsie declared he had been utterly brilliant. He loved the chess set. ‘He loved everything,’ she enthused, which I guessed meant that contrary to her fears, Kenneth had adored her too.

  Later, as we sat having tea, she said in a high voice most unlike her usual measured tones, ‘The toy soldiers ended up in the mud.’ She turned with lowered eyes to Harold.

  ‘La plus ça change…’ Harold said. I nodded knowledgeably although I wasn’t sure I understood.

  Shot gnawed with satisfaction on his bone.

  19

  I tried a different strategy with the Bruges jigsaw. Usually, I took the traditional ‘edges first’ approach. This time I started in the middle with the clock but I was making scant progress. What was it about beginning with the edges that meant success?

  Harold continued to drop in to see us, and sometimes he would sit with me while I did my puzzles. Sometimes, he would go off with Elsie. I looked forward to our stove-side discussions on morals or ethics and I always wished he could stay longer.

  After our Glasgow trip, the appetite for stories about Elsie and me had grown. Every week that autumn, there were articles about us in the papers. Journalists and photographers visited us in the cellar and not just British ones; people came from all over the world to tell our story.

  There was a lot of censorship and even though we were asked to paint a picture of our lives, it had to be the right kind of picture. I already knew from experience that the British had very strict rules about what could be sent back home in letters. But if we thought the censorship in the letters was tight, the censorship
of the newspapers was astonishing.

  The message we had to convey was not our men’s desperation, not a fight for survival, but patriotism, nationalism, honour and duty.

  We had to be the kind of women that people back home would warm to: we couldn’t be too fierce, too strong, too agitating or too trailblazing, we mustn’t be those dreaded suffragettes or women’s liberators, for then people might lose all sympathy for us. We certainly mustn’t get above our station.

  We had to be consistent in our sweetness, our maternal love for the boys. We had to be gentle nurses, and pleasant women above all else. As long as we kept to this image, I gathered, people would still be interested. If they were interested, we could continue our work helping the boys. And that, after all, was what we were there for.

  The photographers liked us arranged in front of the Chater-Lea and the sidecar. They were quick at setting up their tripods and their cameras and we stared where we were told to stare. Usually Elsie stood upright with a reassuring arm around me or a parental hand on my shoulder.

  One time, I suggested we tell the man from the Liverpool Echo about Madeleine’s family and the things I collected. ‘He could take a photo of the bear!’

  But Elsie wrinkled her nose. ‘Stick to the script,’ she said emphatically. ‘The readers don’t want to hear about that.’

  Another time, as we posed awkwardly, an acned photographer in a cap told us that we were the most photographed women of the time.

  ‘What? Us?’

  ‘Don’t look so surprised!’ he said.

  ‘Look devoted,’ Elsie said out of the corner of her mouth, smirking.

  This unsettled me. It was all right for Elsie with her natural charm and confidence – hers was a face that could launch a thousand ships, but my face wasn’t going to convince anybody of anything. In fact, mine was a face that could well put people off forever.

  Flash, the bulb went off.

  When I told Elsie my concerns, she couldn’t understand what I was blathering about.

  ‘Why, you’re lovely to look at, Mairi!’

  Sometimes, I tried to get Shot in the frame, but he would jump away. He could be most uncooperative. Once he did a wee right where the photographer wanted us to sit. ‘Shot understands,’ Elsie said, laughing. She was unfazed. ‘He doesn’t want to be involved!’

  I hardly recognised myself in the photos. I looked hearty and outdoorsy. (My mother would have said I looked like a peasant.) Here I stood in my headdress and uniform – Elsie wasn’t wrong – like a warrior woman. Like a Native American Indian but without the feathers or face paint. I wondered if Harold ever got the newspapers? He never said. Or Jack from Ingatestone? Did he recognise me?

  The newspapers had curious headlines too:

  CRINOLINE NURSES!

  ‘Have we ever worn crinoline? Which century do they think this is?’

  DORSET GIRLS ON THE FRONT!

  ‘Since when was I a “Dorset girl”?’ I complained. ‘I’m not a Dorset girl, either,’ replied Elsie indignantly. ‘I’m thirty-two!’

  As for ELSIE SAVES THE DAY, well, of course I didn’t want or expect to be headline news but to be absented was painful too. I was just an addendum, a paragraph at the end:

  ‘Mrs Knocker is joined in the cellar house by Miss Mairi Chisholm, daughter of Mr and Mrs Roderick Chisholm of Chedington, Dorset.’

  Then there was: THE COMPASSION OF THE WIDOWED MRS KNOCKER. I joked that it sounded like a terrible folk song but I did wonder, what about the compassion of the young Mairi Chisholm? Wasn’t that worth a line or two?

  ‘Take it all with a pinch of salt,’ advised Elsie.

  ‘Why do they write about what we do, anyway, and not the boys out there? Why us?’ I asked.

  ‘The boys are all in there, darling. Ninety-nine percent of the time. Why shouldn’t they shine a light on us ladies? Just once in a darned while?’

  ‘B-b-but…’

  ‘This press is our bread and butter, Mairi,’ she warned.

  She was right. The press was bringing in money, and increasingly, I was striking off things from our wanted list. We had more bandages, painkillers and antiseptics than you could shake a stick at. I began a new page in the logbook: ‘Buckets, spades, towels.’

  Elsie leaned over me, laughing: ‘Anyone would think we were going for a trip to the seaside!’

  One time, I asked Elsie which she preferred dealing with – ‘Chilblains and syphilis or photographers and fan mail?’

  She said, ‘Chilblains and syphilis, any day!’

  I’m not sure if that was completely true, but what was true was that despite her love of the press, her smile was never more satisfied than when she’d sewn someone up or when she’d brought someone back to life. I recalled Arthur and Helen saying that she hadn’t brought a man back to life in Furnes, but I’d certainly watched her bring men back to life in the cellar at Pervyes.

  A few weeks later, in October 1915, a modern ambulance I hadn’t seen before rolled up the road and parked noisily. Elsie and I were coming back from the trenches with a poor chap showing signs of shell shock. With any luck, we’d got him early enough and a few days in the cellar might just about sort him out.

  ‘Who on earth is that?’ Elsie asked indignantly. She was fiercely protective of our patch. Arthur once joked that he wouldn’t put it past Elsie to piss up the cellar-house walls to mark her territory. Elsie had countered with ‘What do you think Shot is for?’

  We ignored the new arrivals with their show-off vehicle, carried our fella in and warmed him up. Shortly afterwards, there was a tentative knock on the door. Shot growled, making his typically poor attempt at being menacing.

  They were two doctors from the English town of Sutton Coldfield. They looked similar: smart men with neat moustaches; and they had similar smart names: Cyril and Cecil. They were probably in their forties, certainly of my mother’s generation rather than my father’s, and both were grey before their time: grey hair, grey suits, grey faces. One of them explained that they had come to donate to us their purpose-built ambulance.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ Elsie asked abruptly.

  They both looked bewildered at her response. ‘No.’

  ‘That… that vehicle out there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It can’t be! No.’ Elsie stared at them fiercely, as though she was about to throw them out. Shot barked, sensing trouble.

  ‘Elsie?’ I said, trying to calm Shot.

  ‘It’s yours,’ continued one of the doctors, Cyril I think, nervously. ‘Mrs Knocker, we are giving it to you. If you don’t mind, that is?’

  For one terrible moment, I thought that Elsie was going to refuse it.

  ‘No, no.’

  I don’t think this was the reception they had expected.

  ‘Yes, yes?’ the same doctor said, only now with an anxious chuckle. ‘It’s all yours.’

  Finally, it dawned on Elsie that it was true. She threw her arms first around the speaker and then around his colleague. I was afraid she was going to kiss both of them on the mouth. They were too old, I thought, to enjoy that!

  We went out to explore our new vehicle and found it was as perfectly fitted inside as it looked from the outside. A proper ambulance, not a converted car! It had everything we would need. Elsie’s expression was as delighted as my own. This was an ambulance that dreams were made of. After we had given it a thorough, joyful inspection, Elsie invited the grey doctors for tea and oat biscuits in the cellar. We couldn’t stop smiling and it was, after all, nearly four o’clock. Time for a celebration.

  ‘You don’t still actually live down there?’

  ‘We do!’ I always felt stupidly proud when I told people that.

  ‘What? Sleep and eat and—?’

  ‘And all, yes.’

  ‘Isn’t there shelling?’

  ‘Not much at present.’

  But right then, as though proving a nasty point, a shell did whizz overhead, and we all had to flee downstairs, pulling the
cellar door fast behind us. As I did so, its wood cracked, which meant yet another ruddy thing I’d have to see to.

  Down in the cellar, the poor chap we’d brought in was being cheered up by Shot. From barely being able to speak, now he pulled himself up to tell us, ‘I’ve got a spaniel at home. His name is Joey. Boy, can that dog eat!’

  The two doctors looked around in astonishment, taking in the straw, the commode, the cans of Maconochie, the soaps, the buckets, the unwritten postcards, the smell: everything. I hoped they could see that while we were unorthodox, we were still careful and capable. What we did worked, or at least it worked better than anything else did.

  We spent a happy hour talking about our experiences. Cyril, the more talkative one, was especially taken with Elsie. He wasn’t handsome, but as he spoke I saw he had a certain charm. Elsie didn’t seem in the mood for flirting though; she was unusually serious with them both.

  ‘Being a widow must have given you a greater understanding of death and grief,’ he ventured, and we all nodded.

  ‘It was some time ago,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Only a few years, Elsie,’ I said sympathetically. Elsie was always humble about what she had endured. She looked up at our concerned faces. ‘I suppose,’ she said, then added, ‘Life can be hard.’

  ‘I lost my wife three years ago,’ said Cecil. He and Elsie looked at each other and it was as though they shared a secret communion.

  Elsie stood up sharply and announced it was time we went back to the trenches. She would often cut meetings short like this. Journalists, photographers, army officers… all dismissed like children. It seemed to reveal a lack of manners and the doctors looked put out. Elsie added that the soldiers would be wanting their hot soup and they seemed to be mollified. Ah, it was for a good reason. It was decided that Paul would drive them to the train station, then back to Sutton Coldfield they would go. We all shook hands warmly and Elsie and I thanked them once again.