The War Nurses

by Lizzie Page

  Supper was bread and plum jam. Food always tasted better when Lady D had prepared it.

  ‘How’ve you been keeping, young Mairi?’ Lady D asked.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said. Would it always make me want to cry when people asked directly how I was? When Arthur called me young, I hated it, but when Lady D did, I wanted to melt.

  ‘Tell her about Jack,’ Elsie prompted.

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘You write to him all the time—’

  ‘So?’

  ‘When the post-boy comes, you go like this.’ She imitated Shot begging for food. ‘And if there is a letter from him, you’re all—’ She pressed her hand against her heart and swooned.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said coolly. ‘I do nothing of the sort.’ I was more furious with her than I wanted to let on.

  ‘Not another cellar-house engagement?’ Lady D jumped in, beaming and looking from Elsie to me for information.

  ‘No!’ I hissed. ‘I don’t know what she’s talking about.’

  ‘A romance though? I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I persisted. I thought of Jack’s dry lips on mine and of Peter denying Jesus three times just as Jesus had predicted he would.

  ‘The lady doth protest too much,’ said Elsie, winking at the others.

  * * *

  As I washed up the cups and plates, I used the opportunity to ask Dr Munro if he had heard of the mysterious Major General Sir Hector Macdonald. The plates didn’t need much scrubbing – we might as well have licked them clean.

  ‘Where’s this come from, Mairi?’ Dr Munro looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘Just some talk I heard.’

  Dr Munro’s expression was awkward but he always tried to be clear with me. ‘We-ll, Macdonald committed suicide following some lurid accusations.’

  Lurid? I didn’t know what he meant but it made me think, unfairly perhaps, of Ginger at the Pop bar. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There was gossip.’

  ‘There is always gossip,’ I said, smiling. This much I knew. They said that women gossiped, but ten men together in the trenches would come up with forty stories, and the stories they came up with would make your ears bleed!

  ‘Involving… other men.’

  ‘Oh? Oh.’ So Jack was right. Was that what my father meant? Was my brother a homosexual? I could only guess that such people were as outlawed in the Caribbean as they were back home.

  Dr Munro looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Why are you really asking?’

  My father said that my brother should do ‘the decent thing’. What did he mean? Come clean about being with other men? I couldn’t bring myself to say it so explicitly to Dr Munro. I had a feeling it wouldn’t show either my father or Uilleam in a good light, and I wasn’t ready for that.

  Finally, I said, ‘My father struggles with my brother… and I don’t know really.’

  Dr Munro looked relieved. ‘In psychoanalysis, we often observe that fathers feel disappointed that their sons have wasted their opportunities… in much the same way mothers and daughters can often clash.’

  I thought of my mother and thought, a clash would be a fine thing. A clash would mean she’d noticed me.

  ‘It can often work the other way around too. Children can be disappointed with their parents’ shortcomings.’

  I wiped the dishes dry as Dr Munro lovingly prepared his pipe. I could hear Lady D and Elsie in the other room. Whatever had been said was so funny that they were both slapping their thighs. Lady D said, ‘Oh that’s hysterical, Elsie, stop!’

  Elsie continued in a low voice, and Lady D shrieked. ‘No, no, you mustn’t!’

  It made me more despondent. It had been a while since we had laughed like that. Quietly, I said to Dr Munro, ‘Elsie mocks God sometimes.’

  ‘That must be hard,’ he said sympathetically.

  ‘I just… want her to understand how God loves us all.’

  ‘That might never happen.’ He hesitated. ‘Elsie has different gods.’

  That’s a generous way of putting it, I thought.

  Lady D wanted to play her old favourite: ‘Truth or Consequence’. I suspected she had already planned the questions and her answers.

  ‘Where is the place you love the most?’

  Lady D began by talking of the lanes, the views, the dazzling light on the Cornish coast at St Ives. She spoke of lazy days spent on the beach eating pickle sandwiches. We smiled because she always mentioned food.

  Dr Munro couldn’t decide between Berlin and Vienna. As he extolled the virtues of the cities he loved, I realised how painful the constant references to ‘dirty Bosch’ and ‘vicious Hun’ must be when he knew the cities and the people there so intimately.

  ‘Mairi’s turn,’ said Lady D firmly.

  ‘Scotland, perhaps,’ I mumbled, ‘or in the woods with…’ I cleared my throat. I missed my brother. ‘Or, I know, Saunton Sands beach.’

  Suddenly, the jellyfish came back in my mind, then Father’s spanking of Uilleam in the library. My poor Uilleam. What a struggle. Why had all my good memories turned rotten?

  ‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Your go.’

  I thought she was going to take a consequence. Or perhaps she might say Java. That mysterious, exotic place that I still knew nothing about.

  Elsie looked up from her rum as if she had forgotten she was playing.

  ‘How can you even ask this?’

  I had never seen Dr Munro smile so tenderly at Elsie before. I realised suddenly there was real friendship or, if not friendship, an understanding between these two. All her huffing and puffing about him, all his raging about her, concealed a deep mutual admiration.

  ‘I know it,’ said Dr Munro.

  Elsie smiled, but she had tears in her eyes. She turned her toes towards me.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No.’ I laughed. ‘How could I possibly know?!’

  ‘The cellar house in Pervyse,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s my beautiful place.’

  26

  Elsie jumped at the chance to go on a special assignment to England. It was an opportunity to spend some time with Kenneth. The chess wasn’t going well; he didn’t have the aptitude. He was good at wrestling though and had a bent for mathematics.

  But two days before she was due to go, Elsie was struck down with a bug and she was very sick indeed. Her skin went greenish and her eyes were bloodshot. She shivered under the blankets I piled on top of her. I had never seen her so poorly. Even Shot was reluctant to sit with her. It took a while before Elsie admitted to herself how impossible her travelling to England was. Then she begged me to go in her place.

  I didn’t want to, not least because I was loath to leave her like this, but Elsie insisted. ‘We have a duty. Mairi. Think of the boys.’

  After Paul, Martin and even Dr Munro and Lady D had promised that they would look after Elsie, I reluctantly agreed.

  I don’t know what prompted me to do it, but I wired across to Jack that I was coming over. He replied immediately that by God’s grace he was free. He would show me ‘a fine time’. My first reaction was Oh I didn’t mean for that to happen, but perhaps I did?

  I didn’t want to tell Elsie I was meeting Jack, but my story about heading to the Essex coast alone for rest and recuperation rang hollow, so I caved. She didn’t tease me as much as I thought she would – she really was exceedingly sick – but between coughs, she said: ‘I knew you liked this fella! Enjoy Mairi, but whatever you do, don’t get in the family way.’

  Did she have to be so coarse?

  The assignment was to bring five injured British men safely home from further down the line. There were supposed to be six but at the last moment it was decided that one mightn’t make the journey. Two couldn’t walk, two had problems with their arms and I didn’t know what was wrong with the fifth but he was groaning with pain and wasn’t in a good way.

  The harbour in Ostend had lost the limited appeal it on
ce had. It was ugly and utilitarian now it was stuck transporting soliders and military supplies. Dr Munro, Lady D and I stretchered the men out of the ambulance and loaded them onto HMS Asturias. Dr Munro reassured me that an ambulance would meet us on the other side.

  ‘And if it’s not there?’

  ‘You’ll think of something, Mairi!’

  All very well to say.

  There were other nurses doing the same thing as I was, and after I looked at their injured freight, I decided I didn’t have it too bad. I nodded at them politely, but not too warmly. We all had enough on our hands; no one wanted to get lumbered with anyone else’s patient.

  One kind-faced nurse with a strange accent did try to strike up conversation, but I didn’t feel like chatting so I cut her off. Later, I saw her talking merrily in a group and wished I had stuck around.

  One of the boys, who’d lost both legs below the knees, kept calling me Kate. ‘Kiss me, Kate!’ he went on. I let him continue until he pulled me down to his face. If I hadn’t had muscular arms, I would have been forced into a kiss.

  ‘I’m not Kate!’ I snarled.

  When I next went to check on him, he was weeping. His chest had a nasty rattle too.

  The other man with a wounded leg, Lenny, was chatty. I told him what Elsie and I did in Pervyse and he said, ‘God bless, we could have done with you where we were.’

  He told me he had been based south of us and there was nothing good there, just a living nightmare – you didn’t know whether you were awake or asleep or dead. He wanted to hold my hand, and I didn’t mind. He was looking forward to getting back to his son, Peter – ‘home for Easter,’ he said. I had completely forgotten it was nearly Easter: in the cellar and in the trenches, days and weeks got lost.

  When I said that I was sorry about his leg, Lenny replied, ‘Small price to pay for getting out. I’d have given the other one as well.’ Then he blushed. ‘Don’t tell anyone that.’

  I was fascinated by the ink drawings Lenny had on his arm. He told me Kaiser jokes that I did my best to memorise – planning to make Jack laugh with them – but they slipped out of my head almost as soon as they arrived. Uilleam always declared I was no good at telling funnies.

  It wasn’t easy making the groaning man comfortable, but one of the others, Howard, helped me reposition him whenever he asked. (It felt like he asked every two minutes.)

  Howard – who had only lost one arm and seemed quite adept without it – and I built up a rapport over this dismal task, and eventually Howard asked me if I was single. I could see what was coming, so to avoid awkwardness I said that I was engaged. He looked downcast.

  ‘No ring?’

  ‘Not while I’m working.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  I wanted to say ‘Harold’ but I knew I couldn’t. I mustn’t.

  ‘Uilleam,’ I said, flatly. ‘Uilleam Chisholm.’ As soon as I’d said it, I felt bad – Jack was the obvious answer.

  ‘He a soldier?’

  I paused. ‘A pilot.’

  ‘That’s a job and a half,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it!’

  ‘You know they don’t give them parachutes.’

  ‘They don’t need them,’ I told him confidently, which is what Jack had told me. ‘They don’t go high enough, see.’

  Howard looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘I’m just glad he’s not in the trenches.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, patting where his arm used to be. ‘No one wants to be in the trenches. Lucky fella!’

  * * *

  Duty dispatched and boys safely delivered, I met Jack at Southend station. He looked almost handsome when he smiled; it drew attention away from his ears. We decided to go to the end of the pleasure pier. It became our day’s mission and it gave us something to do and talk about. I don’t know what we had been expecting to find at the end, a mile and a half’s walk away from the shore, but truly there was nothing remarkable. It was colder than we’d imagined too, although we should have anticipated that out on the Thames Estuary where the full murk of the river met the sea. Such a mist and a wind, you could hardly tell where grey sea ended and grey sky began. It was certainly no Saunton Sands. By the sea wall, there was just mud and more mud, like where our boys lived in Belgium, but this mud was only home to crabs and sandworms.

  Back on the prom, we ate vinegary cockles and winkles from yesterday’s newspaper: the headline SMALL GROUP OF PACIFISTS ROUTED IN SOUTH WALES revealed itself the more we ate. Apparently, the pacifists had marched down the high street before they were apprehended by the local constabulary.

  Jack worried that some of the cockles were off.

  ‘We’ve paid for them now,’ I said.

  He examined them cautiously, like a man who’d never met with hunger. It made me full of bravado. I grabbed the cockle he was doubtful of and popped it triumphantly in my mouth.

  ‘I’ve a cast-iron stomach.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Being with you is like being with my men,’ he said before looking up, horrified with himself. ‘I didn’t mean…’ He went scarlet. ‘I meant it in a good way.’

  ‘It’s all right, Jack.’ I offered him an arm-wrestle, which is something I used to do with Uilleam. I don’t know what foolishness made me suggest it, but he declined, saying, ‘I’d feel an idiot if I lost.’

  * * *

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Jack asked after I had thrown the cockle newspapers away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Not until now,’ he said quietly. The impact of that didn’t hit me until much later.

  I don’t know how he did it, but as we were sat there, contemplating mud, Jack worked his arm around me. And somehow, he managed to slide his hand lower so that it was over my breast. I didn’t know if it was a mistake, but he didn’t move it, so I think it was intentional. His fingers smelled of vinegar. We sat there with his hand sort of living there, like when an insect lands on you.

  I thought of all the boys I had been with at the moment they died, counting them like you do sheep to try to sleep: 18, 19…

  Elsie would have said ‘No, Mairi, think of all the men who you helped,’ so I tried counting them instead, starting with Dixmude and going upwards, until I got to Harold. And then my heart felt just as heavy as my breast.

  I suggested a stroll, and Jack seemed even more relieved than I was to finally stand up.

  There was a small funicular to the clifftop, but Jack said he would prefer to take the steps. I’d noticed he didn’t like confined spaces, but he didn’t make a thing of it. We walked up slowly – it was steeper than it looked – and Jack had to let go of my hand. He said enviously, ‘I’m out of puff yet you’re absolutely dandy!’

  At the top, there was a grey statue of Queen Victoria sitting on her throne, staring out to the not-quite sea. What would she think of what was happening in Europe? I didn’t suppose they ever told kings or queens the truth. How glorious it must be to think that everything around and beneath you was clean and harmonious.

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. That was a love affair, they said.

  Jack took me by the hand again as we walked back to our guesthouse – a pretty building overlooking a rose garden. I couldn’t help thinking it would make a perfect hospital. Access to the sea and to the station. Nice, large windows. What more could Elsie and I want?

  ‘What you thinking?’ asked Jack, smiling his nervous grimace.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘See that building?’ he said, pointing at the larger building that I hadn’t noticed on the other side of the road. ‘That’s a naval hospital. Nice, isn’t it?’

  * * *

  Inside the guesthouse, the reception area was all dark-wood panelling and there was one of those snooty, suited men at the desk, the kind of man who’s never seen or done anything in his life. I could tell he thought Jack and I were just an average couple. He said, ‘Mr and Mrs Petrie?’

  I turned my splutter
into a cough.

  The snooty man pressed his bell and an ancient porter, bent double, arrived to take up our bags. We had minimal luggage between us, but still, I hated to think of the old fella struggling, so I insisted on taking my own bag. Snooty man and bent-double man were both aghast.

  Jack grinned. ‘I’ll take it, Mrs Petrie,’ he said, pulling the bag off my shoulder and onto his without looking at me.

  This, they didn’t mind.

  As we walked along the corridors, I was reminded of my first time in a hotel, in Harwich, with Elsie. I was such a child back then; it was almost painful to remember my naivety. Why on earth had I wandered off to get her that night? How had I drunk so much I was sick? I tried to concentrate on the here and now, with Jack, but discomfitures from the past kept coming to haunt me.

  The room number three dangled precariously from a broken nail on the door, which didn’t create a good impression, but inside the room was elegant and pale, the sort of room you’d dream about if you were a person who dreamed about luxury hotel rooms. All the furniture matched and fitted just-so. It must have been expensive. I didn’t know how Jack could afford it on his wage.

  There was only one bed. A double bed, larger than the straw mattresses Elsie and I and any number of visitors shared, but still… I hadn’t expected us to share.

  Jack stared at it too. ‘It was cheaper than the twin,’ he said apologetically. ‘I can ask them to change.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I said.

  ‘I can go on the floor.’

  ‘Or I can,’ I offered.

  He shook his head at me. I was beginning to think his embarrassed look was permanent. I didn’t have the will to argue so we left it unresolved.

  We had dinner in the Royal Hotel Ballroom. I didn’t have a special outfit, but Jack said I looked a treat. He wasn’t much of a charmer but there was something about the way he looked at me that made me feel beautiful. I felt underdressed as we walked through the frosted-glass double doors, but once we were inside, I realised that fashions had changed while I was underground. Things were more casual now. I wasn’t the only woman with short hair, though none had hair quite as short as mine. There were no top hats any more and far fewer bonnets. I gazed around. It felt nice not to stand out. Jack had wet down his hair, which made his ears look even more prominent. He was newly shaved and smelled fine.