The War Nurses

by Lizzie Page

  Harold stood dramatically. You wouldn’t notice his gammy leg unless you already knew about it. Elsie once said that he was the most handsome soldier in active service, although she jokingly retracted that after a squadron of Canadians arrived further down the line. (‘By Jove, they’re a good-looking bunch of Gilberts, aren’t they? So well fed! Must be all that corn!’)

  He placed two boxes on my jigsaw, then slowly opened them up. Each contained a velvety base and on that velvety base sat a medal: pink ribbon attached to a silver metal crown, leading to two crossed swords, then a heavy circle with a lion within it, surrounded by inverted triangles and a green wreath background. I had never seen anything like it.

  ‘I have here… Chevaliers de I’ordre de Leopold,’ Harold said with gravitas.

  ‘Wha-at?’

  ‘The King of Belgium wishes to give you the highest honour in the land for your bravery and support.’

  For once, we were both speechless. I was gawping like a goldfish; tears were welling up in Elsie’s eyes.

  Elsie spoke in a trembling voice. ‘What an enormous honour. Thank you for bringing them to us, Harold!’

  I couldn’t believe it. And to be told in front of my father (which maybe Harold had intended) made it all the more special.

  Elsie grabbed me. ‘Mairi, my sister, I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t have done anything without you.’

  We fell into each other’s arms. Elsie’s scratchy head was next to my cheek. I had never felt so emotional. We didn’t have to go. On the contrary, they liked us!

  Then Elsie went to hug Harold, and, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, I received an awkward hug from my father.

  ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ Father said, which irritated, but I wouldn’t let anything take away the joy of the moment. He must have been proud, he must have been, even if he could hardly show it.

  Elsie said, with delight, ‘Every man in the trenches will know about us now!’

  Harold responded, ‘It’s nothing more than you deserve after two years here.’

  ‘Two years,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  Just then, Dr Munro arrived to see my father. Shot was especially delighted to see him, which was funny because Dr Munro never bothered with him. Still, Shot worked around his ankles lovingly. Elsie didn’t waste any time in showing Dr Munro our medals. He turned them over, like a jeweller asked to give a valuation and not sure whether his price would disappoint.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said, although he couldn’t have sounded less congratulatory. ‘Honours from the King of Belgium, no less! It’s a shame more of us couldn’t be recognised.’

  ‘You weren’t here, were you?’ Elsie said coolly.

  ‘We are only a few miles away.’

  ‘Might as well be two hundred miles for a dying man. ‘

  Ignoring her, Dr Munro said, ‘I will see if Helen and Arthur will be eligible for an award too.’

  ‘Helen and Arthur in America? Good luck to you.’ Elsie grinned. ‘Helen never even cut off her hair!’

  Dr Munro looked embarrassed. But still Elsie wouldn’t leave it.

  ‘What about Lady D? Oh, but you always forget her contribution, don’t you?’ Elsie was euphoric and couldn’t resist the chance to crow. ‘Perhaps a nude yoga session is in order?’

  I didn’t like her then.

  ‘Elsie!’ Harold said, as Dr Munro stomped off.

  ‘Oh, I can’t help it. Let me be triumphant, just this once. This is the best thing ever. And… is that champagne I spy, Harold?’

  ‘With a tin of peaches!’

  Elsie looked at my father, who was looking uneasy at her exchange with Dr Munro. ‘Harold has the most excellent contacts.’

  We drank Harold’s champagne from the chipped cups we had scavenged from abandoned homes. The bubbles fizzed up my nose. I had never understood the fuss about champagne.

  ‘Chevaliers de I’ordre de Leopold!’ Elsie repeated gleefully.

  ‘What a title,’ Harold said. When he drank, his eyes went sleepy and content. I wondered if Elsie found them as sweet as I did.

  ‘Elsie… as we are gathered together on such a momentous day, I have something to ask.’ Harold was unnaturally coy.

  I thought he was going to ask for a recommendation for a good restaurant where we could celebrate in style. That was the gallows humour he had. That was how we always got along. But he didn’t say that. He was watching Elsie intently.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Elsie responded.

  Harold paused. I was still smiling. ‘Would you consider converting?’

  ‘Umm, under what circumstances?’

  There was a strange, pregnant silence in the room. Harold ducked his head. He took Elsie’s cup from her hands, placing it on the table. She crossed her hands demurely in her lap. I had never seen her sit like that before and I wanted to giggle but I also couldn’t work out what was going on.

  ‘Harold?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Marriage?’

  ‘Ah. Under those circumstances… I might consider it.’

  She looked from me to my father, then back to Harold.

  ‘Is this a proposal, Harold? Because you’re not down on one knee.’

  ‘You know my knees, Elsie. Besides it’s a wartime proposal, the usual rules don’t apply.’

  I heard myself laugh. Was this Harold’s idea of a joke?

  Elsie was biting her lip. She had been proposed to a million times and managed to bat away the boys like she was swatting flies from the loo, but kindly, so they never knew they were being swatted. It was an art I could never master. How would she let down Harold now?

  ‘The answer is… yes.’

  ‘Yes to…?’

  My throat had constricted. I felt like I was underwater. I made a strangled gasp. She never even prays!

  ‘Yes to everything, of course!’

  Elsie and Harold hugged, then kissed, lips pressed together, before pulling back and laughing. I looked away from them and found myself staring at my father: his startled expression probably mirrored my own.

  My father said, ‘Congratulations, Elsie. You’ll be a baroness.’

  ‘Really?’ Elsie twirled around to look at us with her bright sunflower eyes. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me!’

  22

  Over the next few days and nights, there wasn’t time for any deep conversations. There wasn’t time for anything. Our sports-day plans were put on hold. We didn’t even have a moment to savour the tinned peaches. With great, or perhaps ironic, timing, as soon as my father left for home, the action on the Western Front heated up again. The Germans were throwing everything they had at us.

  We were sending men over the top and they were dying. Their friends pulled them into the ditches. We pulled them out of the ditches and into the cellar. I sometimes worried my back was going to break with the hard work of it, but it didn’t, although I think my heart may have.

  Old friends – our darling post-boy, two of the Belgian football team, one of the engineers and our facilitator and friend Dr Gus – were killed. Some took their last gasps in our arms. Others we frantically gave a temporary fix, and then tore off to Furnes or Ghent where the staff were so well-drilled that the men were in the operating rooms within moments of us parking. On day three, when we pulled up at Furnes, a French doctor was squatting at the gate, smoking a cigarette. He wearily got to his feet, then stared, shaking his head incredulously at our load: ‘But we’ve nowhere to put them any more. Mon Dieu. There’s no space…!’

  The ambulance from Sutton Coldfield was a dream to drive but as Elsie said, ‘It can’t perform miracles.’ She looked at me snidely. ‘Only your God can do that.’

  It was like some terrible, disgusting game of ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’, only our role was to go along the trenches, dead, dead – run for it, let’s try to save this poor fella.

  I was in the trench with a young boy, somewhere bet
ween duck and goose. No way had he seen his eighteenth birthday. Paul and Martin were nearby, searching among the bodies for anyone they could help. Elsie let me stay with the boy and I hauled his dying body over my knees. There was blood everywhere, but I focused on his pale face as he was slipping away from Earth, it was the least I could do. I gave him a mother’s kiss on his white, strangely unblemished forehead. But he raised his index finger to touch his lower lip.

  ‘You want me to kiss you?’ I asked.

  The smallest sign of a worn smile.

  I bent, meeting his lips with mine. I closed my eyes and I think he closed his. I could hear the clatter of death around us but I stayed, sharing my first sweet kiss with this unknown lad, until I felt sure he had gone.

  After six consecutive days of bombardment, Dr Munro and Lady D drove to Pervyse and said we must take some time out or we would drop dead from exhaustion. They were going to take care of the trench-run with Paul and Martin. Dr Munro had no jurisdiction over us, but we were both so tired we didn’t know whether we were coming or going. ‘I’m not going to Furnes,’ Elsie declared wearily.

  Dr Munro and Lady D looked at each other. ‘We thought you’d say that,’ said Dr Munro.

  ‘So I packed you a hamper,’ continued Lady D. ‘Even if it’s just a few hours – it will do you the world of good.’

  ‘Take care of Shot,’ Elsie said tearfully. ‘We can’t afford to lose him too.’

  Dr Munro put his hand on Elsie’s shoulder. ‘I know.’

  We drove west for forty minutes. The sounds of the war receded a little behind us but not completely. There were flowers. We found a spot for a picnic and settled down on a blanket. Where Lady D had found the food was anyone’s guess. She had filled the hamper with fresh tomatoes, celery and meat of unknown provenance

  ‘Don’t imagine it’s Doris,’ Elsie warned.

  ‘That’s something else I’ll never get used to.’ I sighed.

  For the finale: a raisin biscuit each. I didn’t like to think when it had been baked – and if they were raisins, and not flies, as Elsie teased – but whatever it was, it went down a treat. There was also an extra surprise: two mints in wrappers. Elsie said I should take both and after some resistance, I accepted.

  We walked, our boots flattening the long grass. We clambered through a field and passed through a kissing gate. I shut out an image of the dying boy. How tender he was. Then we continued through another field, where a lonely bull sat.

  ‘There’s supper, Mairi.’

  We were almost far enough away to pretend the war wasn’t happening.

  After trekking a little further, we rested again. An insect crawled along my leg. It was too small to be a spider, too big for an ant. I let it walk up my thigh before brushing it away. Elsie had snuggled down on the blanket as if to sleep. I decided if we were ever going to have ‘the talk’ then it had to be now. I took a deep breath and proceeded, in the sympathetic way I had been rehearsing to myself in the cellar.

  ‘Elsie, as you know, it’s a… huge commitment to be a Roman Catholic.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, gazing up at the overcast sky.

  ‘So…’ This threw me. I didn’t know how much more it needed spelling out. ‘It’s a wonderful commitment, to take on a religion and all the beliefs and rituals associated with it, but it is… hard, Elsie. Not everyone is up to it.’

  She looked straight at me. ‘What are you trying to say, my darling?’

  ‘Just—’ I flipped. I couldn’t contain it any more. ‘You are the biggest non-believer I have ever met in my entire life! Only yesterday you said that God was a rotten egg and even if he did exist, which you insisted he didn’t, you’d take a gun to him yourself.’ I shook my head furiously. The cheek of the woman! She just didn’t know – or didn’t want to know – what she was letting herself in for.

  Elsie sank back in the long grass. She looked like a woman from another age: a courtier in the palace of King Louis XVIII or a model for Vermeer. But beneath those cheekbones, those symmetrical teeth, I suspected that steel, not blood, ran through her veins, and in place of her heart was a calculator. She didn’t reply and instead concentrated on the sun on her face. I was all puffed up with my arguments but with nowhere to go.

  Finally, she looked at me with her green, godless eyes, which in this light were as grey as the German uniform.

  ‘Mairi, you are so transparent.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are letting hanky-panky come between us.’

  ‘What… how do you mean?’ I asked incredulously. Sometimes, I could have slapped her around those pretty cheeks. Really.

  ‘Don’t you remember what Munro said?’

  I stared closely at her, not understanding.

  ‘At the start? The three reasons that a team will break: hanky-panky, money and ego?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I think you’re jealous.’

  ‘I’m not jealous,’ I said helplessly. Was this what it was? ‘I’m not jealous of you! How dare you!’

  She stared back, then relented. ‘I’m sorry, Mairi.’ But she didn’t sound at all sorry.

  And of course, although I was determined to say it first, she had to get in there quicker –

  ‘Let’s get back.’

  23

  A card finally came from Uilleam in December 1916. ‘The heat, the rum, the cars, the herbs…’ – no hint of anything untoward. In fact, it was like all his correspondence and except for a couple of hints at the end – ‘Send Mummy my love’ and ‘How’s my award-honoured sister?’ – it could have been the same letter as he sent last year. Still, those clues suggested he must somehow have been receiving my notes, and – small consolation – he must have been alive to write to me. He didn’t ask for money and I was glad, because I didn’t see how I could defy my father on this one.

  When I told Elsie that Uilleam might be on the run, she screwed up her face. ‘Poor Uilleam,’ she said, surprising me.

  What about me? I thought. What about my poor parents? It was Uilleam who seemed to be attracting trouble: first fooling around with some poor girl from a good family, then letting her down somehow and finally running away! But Elsie didn’t like my father, so I supposed it was natural all her sympathies would flow towards my brother.

  Since Jack was in Stow Maries, over three hundred miles away, I was sure that our correspondence, although frequent, was purposeless – ‘pointless’, as Elsie would say – but in the new year of 1917, a telegram arrived: Jack was doing a training exercise on the Continent. Work permitting, he would like to see me again. I found I didn’t have an excuse.

  It will be agreeable to get away, I thought. Elsie’s engagement continued to disturb me. I had prayed about it, yet I couldn’t even admit to my Lord the extent of my confusion. Was it jealousy? I didn’t know. I had never experienced this emotion before. Elsie and Harold were possibly my two favourite people – this side of the Atlantic anyway – why shouldn’t they marry? After all, hadn’t I once contemplated the same fate for Elsie and Uilleam?

  * * *

  I set off to see Jack with Shot galloping at my heels. I explained he couldn’t come and promised a treat on my return. And then I drove away apprehensively. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing.

  * * *

  The seaside town of Dunkirk is one of those sleepy French resorts that I imagined that history would bypass. Here you could almost forget what was going on down the road. Although it was in another country – always a thrill to cross a border! – it only took about two hours to travel from Pervyse to the steps of the City Hall where Jack and I had arranged to meet. I waited in the car, wishing I had some distraction, until I spotted him sloping hesitantly towards me. It wasn’t fair, but when I saw him, I wished he could have bounded. Why couldn’t men be more like dogs?

  Jack and I discussed our respective journeys. Like me, Jack could talk at length about cars and mechanics. I think we both surprised ourselves with how easily our conversation flow
ed.

  We found a bench facing the dark-grey sea. Seagulls nestled on the crests of the waves. There was no one else around. Jack kept saying he couldn’t believe I’d come to meet him. I couldn’t believe I’d come to meet him either! Sometimes the birds called and made me think there were people nearby, but we remained alone.

  Jack said he hadn’t known what to bring for me. In Calais, he’d found one tiny shop still open and had managed to acquire antiseptic foot powder and some Lifebuoy soap. He looked doubtfully at them in his lap.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll take them back?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘They’re thoughtful gifts.’ Who said romance was dead?

  He’d out-done my father, that was for sure.

  * * *

  I hadn’t realised at first, because he hadn’t made a song and dance of it, but Jack from Ingatestone was quite the hero. He had rescued men from burning planes and he had the medals to prove it. He didn’t seem pleased about this though, not like my father. He didn’t want to go into details but he intimated that it was horrid. He called his awards his ‘ribbons’ and whenever he said that I thought of Madeleine’s little ribbon around my wrist.

  I eventually learned that he had saved three different men over a period of a few weeks. One hadn’t survived – a young man from Glasgow. It was his family Jack had been visiting when we met that day at the Assembly Rooms.

  This hadn’t put him off flying. Quite the reverse. When he described his experiences in the air, his face gave me a sweet indication of what ten-year-old Jack must have looked like. ‘Up, up among the clouds!’

  If it weren’t for the war, I doubt we would have met. Ingatestone, he said, was a leafy village in mid-Essex where everyone knew everyone’s business. Jack’s father, like his grandfather before him, worked the land. Jack grew up working in the stables.