The War Nurses

by Lizzie Page

  He wanted to tell me about some of the people he’d met in Stow Maries.

  ‘I’m all ears,’ I said, before blushing furiously. Why did I have to bring them up?

  I imagined my mother deliberating over Jack, doing her calculations. Was I worth more than him? Could I aim higher? Probably not with the whole brother-on-the-run business and my situation, living underground in a Belgian cellar with rats for years. Being an uncivilised cave-dweller was unlikely to increase eligibility in a woman, although it might be a bonus in a man.

  Also, Jack was not just any fella, he was a decorated man – although whether that was sufficient for my mother was anyone’s guess. It was unlikely to make up for his humble roots… or was it? I had rarely been able to predict her views on anything.

  Jack told me about his life at the airbase, before saying softly, ‘You don’t mind? I… gave them your details.’

  ‘What for?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’ll hear any news direct, that’s all. My parents don’t—’ he pretended to scribble on the napkin, reminding me that they didn’t write.

  I thought, I am actually pretty sure what my mother would think.

  I laughed gaily. ‘But Jack, you’re in England!’ and he laughed too: ‘Thank bloody goodness for that!’

  Mother wouldn’t like his swearing, but then I swore now as well.

  Jack said, ‘Your letters make me happy.’

  I was about to reply but the waitress came over with our cherry pies and we lost the thread. Never mind. We tucked in with great enthusiasm. When we had finished, I wiped my mouth with the napkin, looked up at him doing the same, then we both burst out laughing.

  * * *

  Our room was so posh that it had an adjoining bathroom, which was where I undressed. In the absence of anything else to wear, I came out wrapped in my overcoat and slipped into bed. I hoped Jack had checked the mattress and the pillow for fleas as I felt too shy to do a thorough inspection myself. Jack was already lying on the floor.

  I felt terrible that he was paying to sleep there and said so. Even so, I was surprised when he suddenly got up, pulled back the cover and climbed in next to me.

  ‘Of course, I won’t… touch you…’ he said, his voice trembling.

  ‘Thank you.’ Despite Elsie’s insinuation, it hadn’t occurred to me that he would try.

  ‘Nothing to worry about.’ His voice was muffled by the pillow and I could hardly hear him.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Unless you want me to?’ he added neutrally. ‘Touch you, that is?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that so I pretended to be asleep and I believe he did the same.

  With my eyes closed, I thought about Germans breaching the line, invading our cellar right at that moment. I pictured Elsie trying to run away, desperately fighting them off. I knew she would be thinking, Thank goodness, Mairi was spared.

  * * *

  In the morning, I woke up with a hand on my thigh. I thought at first that I was lying next to Elsie. I was so used to sleeping by her side on the straw. The hand very slowly, speculatively, stroked my leg over my nightdress. It felt nice.

  Then I remembered where I was. I swung out of bed fearfully.

  I thought of my father’s disapproving face. My mother would probably expect nothing better.

  ‘Shall we go sightseeing before I leave, Mr Petrie?’

  Jack insisted on accompanying me to the train. A bulky woman with a hat as large as a toddler was at the station entrance pushing her white feathers of cowardice on to passers-by. I scowled at her. I had heard of this kind of agitator before, but never had the misfortune to come across one. People tried to ignore her, but she persisted in thrusting feathers at men who weren’t in uniform, hissing words like ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’, and saying ‘Whatever will your children say when they know you did nothing during the war?’

  I thought of the men I knew who were waiting to be ordered to go over the top to their deaths. They had no choice.

  I imagined this woman sitting in her warm living room, preparing her batch of feathers, brushing down her skirt, selecting her shawl, full of self-righteousness.

  I thought she might set off Jack again, but he ignored her and shook off the feather so it fell on the ground and was trodden on by passing muddy feet within seconds. He raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘I’m getting better at keeping my temper, Mairi. No more shouting in public for me.’

  ‘You were fine,’ I said, thinking that woman deserves to be shouted at.

  * * *

  We sat on a metal bench with swirly armrests waiting for the 3.30 p.m. to Harwich. Nearby, I watched a group of children excitedly going on a trip. They formed a sweet crocodile behind their teacher.

  I wished Jack would just head off. I hated a long goodbye.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be so forward.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. I knew he was kind.

  ‘Back in the hotel room, I mean.’

  ‘I know!’ I said again. This was excruciating. Why wouldn’t he drop it?

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t let me,’ he whispered, and his pimply skin was quite pink. ‘It’s one of the reasons I love you, Mairi.’

  ‘What is?’

  He looked embarrassed. ‘That the rules are still important to you, despite everything.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by this, but I knew he was trying, in his awkward way, to pay me a compliment.

  Jack paused and the red came back to his cheeks. He hugged me and I stayed in his arms like that. If we had been there much longer, perhaps I would have relaxed into it, but I was keeping one eye on the time. I could hear the whistle of the trains, sense the incoming steam in the air. It was Jack who pulled away first. I wondered if I was too rigid for him.

  He looked me in the eyes and, at least as far as I was concerned from out of nowhere, he asked, ‘Will you marry me?’ in a rushed and quite-unlike-Jack voice.

  Oddly enough, my first thought was What would Elsie say?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said as honestly as I could. He deserved the truth. I felt bad, because Elsie had been so robust and positive in her response to Harold’s proposal and my reply to Jack couldn’t have been more tepid. I was as lukewarm as the coffee in the trenches.

  Jack said, ‘I thought you’d say that.’ But he seemed pleased. It occurred to me that he liked me because I wasn’t spontaneous: because he knew what to expect with plodding old me.

  ‘Let me know what you decide,’ he added softly. A grimy white feather had stuck itself to the underside of his shoe. ‘I’ll be a good husband to you, Mairi.’

  27

  On Easter Sunday, Elsie greeted me at Ostend with a squeal and a hug. She had made a hearty recovery, although I couldn’t help noticing she was even thinner in the cheeks. Her eyes looked larger than ever and the skin around them was taking on permanent purple shadows – like the men in the trenches. I knew immediately something was on her mind.

  She hadn’t been looking after the car. The exhaust was puffing out a trail of thick black smoke and you could barely see through the windscreen, it was that grimy.

  Once we were on the road, I asked, ‘What’s been happening?’

  Elsie paused. I knew that look. She wasn’t sure how to frame it. My first thought was Harold. Something must have happened to him.

  ‘No!’ She looked at me strangely. ‘Hal is fine. He’s in Lyon.’

  ‘Are we finally being sent away?’ Our ribbons couldn’t protect us forever; but as long there were men in the trenches, we had work to do.

  ‘They can’t get rid of us that easily,’ Elsie said quietly.

  ‘Something’s wrong though,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t hear?’

  The newspapers in England were spectacularly useless. The pride they seemed to have in printing anything but a detailed account of the situation in Europe was astounding. I remembered the paper on the pier: SMALL GROUP OF PACIFISTS ROUTED IN SOUTH WALES.
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  She hesitated. ‘Things are getting worse, Mairi.’

  ‘How on earth could things be getting worse?’

  ‘Gas.’

  28

  We needed to have gas masks with us at all times.

  ‘At all times,’ insisted Elsie sternly, although we both knew she was more forgetful than me with equipment.

  It felt as though a new dread had come in and sat uninvited on the bench next to all the old dreads: shells, snipers, starvation and the rest.

  ‘How do you reconcile your God with this?’ Elsie asked acidly.

  I shook my head. I’m not doing this now.

  Gas was the very worst news to come back to. Even a cellar door from Harrods was no defence. And of course, however bad it was for us down below in the cellar, it was hundreds of times worse for the boys out there.

  There was something so revolting, so crude about it. I thought of David and Goliath, but I realised it wasn’t that clear: this was some ugly struggle between Goliaths, and there were thousands – no, millions – of Davids on each side.

  If I thought I had seen it all last year – and I had thought that – I was proved wrong over the next weeks.

  How apologetically those poor dear boys dragged into the cellar departed from us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ one sweet lad panted as his throat closed up. ‘I’m scared.’

  Elsie was ready to go out to the trenches again. Duck, Duck, Goose. There were more injured boys to rescue there today. We couldn’t comfort everyone. These days there was little time to hold a boy’s hand as he slipped away. There were too many of them.

  ‘It’s all right, love.’ I couldn’t stop crying.

  ‘Mairi?’ Elsie called, which got Shot up and running. ‘We have to go.’

  His hand was in mine. He didn’t even have the strength to squeeze my fingers. ‘Will God forgive me for my sins?’ he whispered, or something like it. He had a strong accent – Irish, I think – but his family lived in Bristol. The damp half-written letter in his pocket informed me of this and the fact that he was only recently nineteen: he thanked his mother for the birthday socks. They kept his feet warm and cosy and reminded him of home. He asked about his grandmother, his great-aunt, his little brother and even his tortoise. ‘Don’t give it too much carrot or it will get bad guts.’ He wrote that he prayed his little brother would never have to go through any of this.

  ‘Hurry, Mairi! They need us!’ Elsie sounded exasperated.

  ‘Everything will be better in heaven.’ I couldn’t stop the loud sob that came out. ‘Dear boy, I promise.’

  Elsie had impatiently thrown open the cellar door. I untangled my fingers from his. I would not cry again. ‘You are loved.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ hissed Elsie.

  The boy let out a croak and I changed my mind. ‘You go,’ I said.

  Elsie looked at me furiously. Her mind was on the living, not the dead. But I couldn’t leave him. Imagine if it were Hal or me… Would she go then?

  Yes, she probably would have.

  ‘Come now, Mairi,’ she said in her quietest, most threatening voice. She wasn’t used to me being defiant. No one was.

  ‘I’m staying,’ I said, keeping my focus on my poor lad. When I looked up, Elsie was still there, staring at me as though she couldn’t believe her eyes. Then she thundered off, dragging our first-aid boxes – they might have been from medieval times for all the good they did – up the stairs.

  He only took six or seven minutes more and I was glad I stayed with him, no matter what she thought.

  * * *

  We did six-hour shifts at a time, slept for two hours, then started up again. Elsie and I didn’t need to speak much; we knew what had to be done. It was my idea to put vinegar on cloths and hold them over the boys’ noses and mouths to numb the sting of the gas. When we ran out of towels, then cloths, then socks, it was Elsie’s idea to use our sanitary protection. We did what we had to do, side by side, clearing the trenches, mending those who might make it, abandoning the ones who hadn’t and muddling through with those who were neither here nor there.

  To the trenches Elsie and I marched, masks over our faces, unrecognisable to even our oldest friends. Trying and failing to give the boys hope.

  And then as abruptly as it had started up, the gas stopped. An international agreement? An international sense of shame? Or maybe just an unexpected wind pushing the gas back towards their own men.

  We could just about breathe again. For a while.

  The new post-boy cycled towards us with his great mail bags of messages. ‘Hey ho, Madonnas!’ he said, laughing. He liked to ring his bell despite the effort causing him to wobble more than usual.

  Letters still came from Jack:

  Sometimes, it’s easier to think of myself not as an individual person, but just as one part of a great swathe of millions of people born and living around now. Just a segment, a cog in the wheel. Do you know what I mean?

  I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Maybe it was meant to encourage me, but I felt far away from Jack now, far away from anything human or earthly.

  At the bottom of his note, after his signature and heralded by a deliberate postscript, he had written:

  Have you a response to my proposal yet? Here are twenty kisses for your age, and twenty-four for me, a total of forty-four kisses. Let me know before we reach forty-five!

  I didn’t want kisses – everything was foul and gas-filled now – and even if I did, I didn’t want them from Jack. I rushed off a reply:

  Did you think to ask my father for my hand, Jack? My family are old-fashioned and it would be a sign that you respected and understood our values if you did.

  How annoyed my father would be if we skipped even that small step. I would hate to have Father’s icy disappointment directed at me. To have both his children let him down would be too much. I thought of Uilleam – what would he think of Jack?

  And then, because everything I had written seemed too curt and too dismissive to send to a suitor, I added, ‘It is horrific here. I can’t even bring myself to tell you of the suffering around us.’

  As soon as everything quietened down, Elsie disappeared up the road to socialise with the engineers. Then when Harold came back in the middle of May, they rode out together to drink beer and to see ‘Ginger’ and their officer friends in Pop where they could pretend this had never happened. Nineteen-year-old boys from Bristol hadn’t been gassed and crying nurses hadn’t had to fight to stay with them because there were other people out there who might actually make it.

  Neither Elsie nor Harold asked if I wanted to go with them any more. Just as well. I didn’t want to.

  Fan mail still came for the Madonnas. The more we got, the less worthy I felt of it. What did they know? When I admitted this to Elsie, she said ‘Don’t read them, just take the money,’ but I couldn’t do that. It felt disrespectful.

  Our admiration knows no bounds. May God be with you.

  * * *

  Word of your kindness has reached us, even in Australia. I wonder if you could send your autograph?

  Amid the post, I found a brief note from Uilleam:

  We don’t hear much about the war out here, Mairi. But reading between the lines, it sounds horrendous. I wish we were back in our garden, dreaming of cars that could float and motorcycles that could fly. Dig deep, dear Mairi.

  ‘Dig deep’ was the phrase my father used. It didn’t suit Uilleam. He was more of a ‘dig shallow, then wander off to do something else’ kind of person.

  Fondly, your beloved brother.

  PS. Has Gypsy got hitched yet? I’m still available.

  ‘Where are you?’ I wrote back to his old address. I wanted to shake him. ‘I need to know you’re safe.’

  * * *

  A sour note came from my mother. I had long stopped being excited by her correspondence. She had heard that I had been in England, from a newspaper article in the Express, no less: MADONNA’S WHIRLWIND UK VISIT. Why had I not arranged
a meeting? How would Mrs Godfrey and the circle feel if they found out I had been and gone without seeing them? In other news, Mrs Godfrey’s daughter, Alice, was expecting her second child in September. Would I be able to send souvenirs?

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the middle of June that I realised there had been no letters from Jack for several weeks. No ‘how wonderful to hear from you’s or stirring stories of flying adventures. At first I wondered if he had dispensed with writing and simply taken the train to Dorset to meet my father face-to-face. This seemed unlikely because he would surely have had to find out the address first through me. As time went on, and I still heard nothing, I grew scared that I’d repelled him with my last letter. I had gone too far. But he hadn’t known what I had been dealing with when I wrote to him. The gas had sucked any thoughts of the future away from me.

  Anyway, Jack wouldn’t mind, I hoped. Jack knew I was an old-fashioned girl. Didn’t he say he liked that about me?

  But then why didn’t he ruddy well reply?

  Lady D visited with a tin of biscuits and her typical good spirits. If she saw that things were strained between Elsie and me, she did not mention it. Indeed, she kept saying ‘You two this’ and ‘you two that’ so after a while, Elsie and I forgot we were at loggerheads and smiled at each other.