Half of the Human Race

by Anthony Quinn

  Within minutes she had summoned an assistant surgeon, Dr Muir, whose look of grave complicity indicated that Connie’s misgivings had proven accurate. Private Mullen would have to go under the knife once more, probably that afternoon. Having half listened to the surgeon murmuringly explain the matter to him, Connie waited for some minutes before returning to the boy’s bedside. At first she thought he might want time on his own to consider it; then she decided that such news was too terrifying to bear alone. His face was pale against the pillow, and his gaze, which had been fixed on the middle distance, narrowed on her as she stood before him.

  ‘Sister?’ He gestured limply at the bedside chair, which Connie took.

  ‘Matthew. You’ve talked with Dr Muir, then?’

  The boy nodded, and looked away. ‘Can’t ’ardly believe they’re takin’ the other one off too …’ He swallowed hard, his eyes blinking rapidly. There was a baffled hurt in his West Country accent. ‘Just seems –’ He stopped, and shook his head. Not yet used to the idea of one leg lost, he looked dumbfounded at the prospect of losing the other.

  ‘I gather your mother and father will be coming up,’ said Connie, trying to beguile him with a note of brightness. ‘They’ll be pleased to see you home again, won’t they?’ Mullen nodded again, miserably. He was silent for some moments, then said, with a brave little laugh, ‘Won’t be so easy to go courtin’ any more, what with …’ His voice failed.

  ‘Well, with your good looks, I should think the girls will come to you.’ He was good-looking, now she thought of it, with his dark brow and pronounced cheekbones. Perhaps some nice girl would … but of a sudden the feigned nonchalance had gone from Mullen’s expression, usurped by candid alarm. He had a more immediate worry in view.

  ‘The lady – the doctor who was here – she’ll be doin’ it?’

  ‘That’s right – Dr Muir.’

  ‘Not a man, then?’ His voice had dropped to a despairing undertone.

  ‘All of the surgeons in this hospital are women, Matthew. Dr Muir is one of the best – you’ll be in excellent hands.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was acceptance, but there was no conviction in it. Connie’s heart turned over in agonised sympathy for the boy. Trembling herself, she gave him her best smile – she had overused it as a device these last two years, but it still got appreciative responses from the men. She stood up, and laid a hand softly on his shoulder.

  ‘I have my rounds to do –’

  ‘You’ll come again, though?’

  ‘Of course. Before they take you in.’

  Connie glanced at her watch as she exited the ward: eleven forty. There would be another convoy of wounded arriving later this afternoon, putting pressure on their already overstrained resources. The hospital, set up by Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray, was run entirely by women. In the August of 1914 Connie had begun working for the Women’s Hospital Corps at the Hotel Claridge, on the Champs-Elysées. When those premises proved inadequate, the Corps had relocated the following spring to London, establishing a new hospital on Endell Street, near Covent Garden. They had taken over the gaunt old Georgian workhouse of St Giles, allegedly the one described by Dickens in Oliver Twist. She could imagine Bumble bawling at the orphan boys every time she went through the dining hall, with its stone flags and high embrasured windows, while the little pens with padlocked gates labelled Old Males and Young Males gave a plangent echo of its former incarnation.

  She proceeded from the south block, reserved for severe cases, into the open central square, now cleared of the railings that belonged to its past. In the summer the square was used as a garden for convalescents and visitors, and on high days and holidays for musical entertainments, but in the present crisis of incoming wounded it functioned more or less as an open-air ward. Those not in urgent need of treatment lay on the stretchers which had borne them in. The hospital had also received another influx of Voluntary Aid Detachments – VADs – to help cope with the numbers. Connie, as one of the thirty-six trained nurses, was often required to instruct these willing but rather unworldly novices in the care of the wounded. She had seen these girls flinch and even faint at the sight of a terrible battlefield mutilation – some soldier without a limb, without a jaw – but, unlike certain of her fellow professionals, she refused to scold them afterwards, on the simple grounds that they were girls. They had most of them been born into genteel homes and raised to live idly until a husband might show himself. What could possibly have prepared them for this?

  She could now hear the matron delivering a stern-voiced lecture to a VAD over some footling misdemeanour. She stood listening in the corridor for a moment. The offender, loftily addressed by her surname, would respond with a quiet ‘Yes, Matron’ and ‘No, Matron’ at every pause in this verbal storm, and Connie wondered, not for the first time, why a position of influence so often begat in its owner the urge to bully and humiliate others. She had for years thought this trait peculiar to the male – since it was generally men who occupied those positions – but nearly three years of working in hospitals among women had taught her that the female of the species, if not actually deadlier, was at least as well versed in the psychological strategies of ‘breaking’ her subordinates. She had observed something cold and unyielding in certain highly trained hospital nurses. It was as though they had to scour all pity and understanding from their personalities before they could become truly professional.

  Hearing the tone shift into a new cadenza of sarcasm, Connie tapped lightly on her door, and entered. The matron’s eyes flashed with the irritation of one diverted from an indignant exercise of authority. She was a tall, rigorously poised woman whose angular features seemed to have sharpened themselves on life’s hard corners. With a quick glance at the subject of her displeasure – it was an earnest, round-faced VAD named Juliet Bridges – Connie asked if she might have a quiet word.

  ‘Can it not wait, Sister?’ she said brusquely.

  Connie gave a little shake of her head, and the matron, with a peevish harrumph, addressed the VAD. ‘If this happens again, Bridges, I will be forced to act. I will not have our patients put at risk. That will be all.’

  She might have been addressing an impertinent child, rather than a volunteer who gave of her best in difficult conditions. As the girl shuffled, eyes downcast, out of the office, the matron tilted her head enquiringly at Connie, whose low but clear voice might have been an unconscious rebuke to her interlocutor’s shrillness.

  ‘It’s about Mullen in St Ursula’s –’ the wards were all named for female patron saints – ‘I was wondering whether his family had been sent for.’

  ‘I believe they have. Why?’

  ‘He’s going into surgery again, this afternoon. Gangrene – in his other leg.’

  The matron lowered her eyes, and her mouth twitched thoughtfully at one corner. It was as close to a reflex of compassion as Connie had ever witnessed in her. ‘I gather they’re farming people, in Devon somewhere – arrangements have to be made.’

  ‘Well, I could send a telegram … if you’re too busy, I mean –’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ the matron rejoined sharply. The tone of nettled authority was unambiguous; this queen bee would not lightly yield an inch of her dominion. It would have been unremarkable behaviour in a man, Connie thought – rather disheartening in a woman.

  ‘Very good, Matron,’ she said, betraying not a whit of true feeling in her tone. That was another useful thing she had learned in the course of her medical career.

  She was on her way to St Mary’s ward, refuge of the worst burns cases, when she saw a figure cowering in a shadowed alcove along the corridor. She realised in an instant who it was.

  ‘Bridges?’

  The VAD, still smarting from her dressing-down, turned to her a face blotchy with tears. ‘Sister Callaway –’

  Connie produced a handkerchief from her sleeve and handed it to the distressed girl. ‘Perhaps you could tell me what that was about …’

&n
bsp; The kindness of Connie’s tone set the girl off on another flurry of sobs, through which the story brokenly emerged that Bridges, on night duty, had fallen asleep in the ward, and by a stroke of bad luck had been discovered by Matron herself. For some reason falling asleep on duty was considered an especially scandalous breach of discipline, even though the long hours and gruelling work made resistance, on occasion, all but impossible. ‘I simply couldn’t help myself,’ Bridges sniffled. At nineteen she was still on probation as a VAD, and plainly feared the ignominy of being dismissed from the service. ‘Matron said she thought I might be sent home as – “unsuitable” …’ Her voice quavered on the word, as if there could be no more shocking an indictment of her character.

  Connie hushed her consolingly, and then, in vocal mimicry of her tormentor, said, ‘That won’t be necessary,’ which prompted a gluey laugh from the girl. Their complicity was secured. ‘I’m sure you’ll prove to Matron how conscientious you normally are.’ And sooner than you imagine, was Connie’s next thought. That the great offensive had been launched in France was all over the newspapers. The Times had described the lines along the British front as ‘90 miles of uproar and desolation’. The multiplying casualties were the proof; if they became more numerous then Matron would not have the luxury of dismissing her, or anyone. Connie waited for a few moments while Bridges composed herself, then sent her on her way. The girl was by no means among the most hopeless of the recent intake of VADs, whom the soldiers would playfully nickname ‘Very Attractive Damsels’ and, less gallantly, ‘Victim Always Dies’. A few weeks before, Connie had explained the rudiments of sepsis to a VAD not much older than Bridges, and when an officer with an abdominal wound was being prepared for surgery she instructed the girl to shave the patient very close – ‘Don’t leave a single hair,’ she said. Connie returned ten minutes later to find that the stomach of the etherised patient was untouched. His moustache, however, had been removed so fastidiously that his upper lip was almost raw from the razor.

  For the next hour she dressed wounds, did TPR (temperature, pulse, respiration) and supervised the new recruits as they gave the men bed baths. It was a procedure prickly with humiliation on both sides: many of the VADs had never before seen a grown man naked, while some patients baulked at being treated by such fresh-faced girls. Connie adopted a brisk method of tutoring, and split the trainees into pairs, reasoning that two together would rally better than one in conquering squeamishness about the butcher’s-shop appearance of wounded flesh. The septic fingers and lice they caught from the men were merely occupational hazards. Just before lunch a message came summoning her to surgery upstairs. On arrival she found Dr Muir being dressed by theatre nurses in her green apron and hygienic face mask; rubber gloves soaped, sterilising drums opened, a familiar mood of controlled urgency at large.

  ‘Ah, Sister, I was hoping you might assist me with our amputation.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Connie, whose apprenticeship to Henry Cluett at St Thomas’s before the war was known among the senior staff. ‘May I talk to the patient before we proceed?’

  ‘Yes, but do be quick about it.’

  Two orderlies were wheeling Mullen on a trolley towards the electric lift when Connie caught up with him. Fear had rendered him almost grey, and his lips, parched and violet-coloured against the ghastly pallor of his skin, were twitching as if in silent prayer. On seeing Connie he reached out to take her hand, and she felt an animal terror in his grip.

  ‘Where am I going?’ he asked in a small, wretched voice. For a moment she thought he might be posing a philosophical question, but then realised there was no guile in it.

  ‘First we’re taking you to the anaesthetic room. We put you to sleep for a little while – you understand?’

  She stood close to the trolley as the lift swayed upwards. The boy’s hand was so tight on hers it was beginning to hurt, but she kept her eyes on him and said nothing. At last the lift arrived at the surgical ward, and they rolled him into a small side room where a theatre nurse was preparing the chloroform. They could all smell it. Connie’s hand was now aching inside the boy’s desperate clenched fist.

  She lowered her head to his ear. ‘Matthew,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be coming in with you.’

  Mullen made an infinitesimally small movement of his head to show he understood. Suddenly his gaze sharpened on her, and in a steadier tone than she had heard him use before, he said, ‘Sister. What’s your name – your actual name?’

  Surprised, and moved, she told him.

  ‘Constance,’ he repeated, as though it would be important to remember it. The nurse was now hovering on the other side of the trolley, holding the monstrous-looking rubber funnel with its tin mask of drugged oblivion. Still gripping her hand, he smiled in the same brave way she had seen that morning. ‘Now for the big adventure,’ he said, and she managed a smile in reply. His head lifted protestingly as the mask came down to smother his mouth (‘This machine is a nuisance,’ said the anaesthetist crossly), then Connie felt the boy’s hand go loose around hers. She laid it at his side, and his insensible body was wheeled into the hot glare of the theatre. She hurriedly put on her own cap and mask, like a latecomer to a secret cabal, and followed after.

  It was a quarter to four by the time she had cleaned herself up and changed. The blood had soaked right through to her underwear; it trickled down her legs and into her stockings. Unable to bear the thought of leaving them stained, she went down to the boiler room and fed them piece by piece into the incinerator. She had been on her feet since half past six that morning, yet only now did she realise how bone-tired she was. Even the matron, not much given to displays of concern, advised her to take ‘a lie-down’. Connie would dearly have loved to rest her head, but that would have meant remaining within the hospital walls – and she had to get out, if only for a while. The afternoon was oppressively sultry, and on the streets leading through Covent Garden she tried to keep within the shadows cast by the rearing brick warehouses. The neighbourhood’s costers called and whistled to one another, their loaded barrows giving off the sweetish scent of day-old fruit. But it could not banish the smell of blood from her nostrils. The high-buttoned jacket of her uniform, made from grey-green serge, was too hot for such weather, but she walked on, unheeding.

  She turned at the foot of Wellington Street into the Strand, and thence into Fleet Street, where she caught a passing 23 ’bus up Ludgate Hill. Seeking distraction, she stepped off at St Paul’s, and made her way into the warren of Georgian shopping streets that huddled around the churchyard. She wandered into Old Change, a long narrow lane of drapers and dressmakers. At this hour leisured ladies were dipping their heads to the windows, shop assistants were loafing on the pavement, a postman wheeled past, side-saddle on his bicycle. Life was going on oblivious to the agonised struggles of young men on stretchers and tables, oblivious to the bloody-handed efforts of surgeons and nurses to save them. This was as it must be, thought Connie. If such a burden of suffering became intimately known to all, how could they carry on? She was gazing at a window, deeply abstracted from the bustle around her, when she heard a voice close at her ear.

  ‘Constance?’

  She turned to stare at a woman, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed summer hat, and at her skirts two young girls appraising her with solemn eyes. Both wore embroidered white pinafore dresses, with scarlet ribbons in their hair. It took Connie a moment to emerge from her reverie and recognise the person who hailed her as Marianne Garnett.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I was miles away …’

  ‘So I see!’ Marianne replied with a laugh that showed her strong white teeth. She was wearing a beautiful high-necked muslin dress stitched with tiny silk flowers. She candidly studied Connie in her uniform. ‘The Women’s Hospital Corps. I wonder – are you at the Endell Street Hospital?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘Oh, I’m great friends with Flora and Louisa. We marched together, in the early
days. Seems ages ago now …’ The allusion to suffrage prompted Connie to wonder how much Marianne knew of the story behind her flight to Paris three years before. On the outbreak of war the King himself had issued a remission of sentences on imprisoned suffragettes. Under a general amnesty Connie was safe to return to England, though she had not resumed contact with any of her former comrades, apart from Lily.

  ‘The cause …’ Connie mused ruefully. ‘It appears to have been rather forgotten since – since this all began.’

  ‘Don’t believe that, my dear. It is never forgotten. And if women keep taking on jobs in munitions and the factories I can’t see how the government will deny us again. They will have to make us citizens. We have earned the right – even though it was ours all along.’

  Connie nodded, thinking of the uniformed woman who had just collected her fare on the ’bus. ‘Isn’t it odd how it takes an actual war for them to realise that we can do most of the same things men can?’ She now noticed the intense quizzical gaze of the girls at Marianne’s side. ‘So – these two must be the Miss Garnetts …?’

  ‘Ah, yes, I should have introduced you. This is Nancy,’ she said, patting the taller girl, ‘and my younger one, Bella. Girls – my good friend Constance.’

  ‘How d’you do?’ said Connie, inclining her head. She realised that it might be her uniform that had mesmerised them. In the meantime a sly smile had crept up on Marianne’s face.

  ‘So may I – congratulate you?’

  Connie frowned in confusion. ‘I’m sorry …?’ – at which Marianne gestured at the shop window she had happened to catch her looking in. Connie now saw that it was filled entirely with bridal gowns. She had been so lost in thought she hadn’t even noticed. ‘Oh … no, not at all. I’m – far from it …’

  She realised she was blushing, but Marianne, unfazed by her discomfort, talked on. ‘I dare say your career has given you no time to think of marriage.’