The Bannister Girls

by Jean Saunders

  Angel’s face burned. The man who spoke had an accent similar to Harriet Garth’s. She turned her back on the group.

  ‘Let’s walk around a bit,’ she hissed to Margot. ‘If we keep moving, we may not feel so peculiar.’

  She didn’t need telling that the ship’s motion was doing odd things to Margot. The whiteness of her face told her so. Angel was a reasonably good sailor, but it gave her an excuse to get away from these disturbing revelations. There was no use anticipating what they would find when they arrived in France. They were to be allocated their jobs then.

  They managed to find a corner near the nurses, and leaned on the rail. Dover was a hazy mist behind them. Ahead of them was the narrow stretch of choppy grey sea, busily populated with craft plying back and forth between the two Allied countries. Taking the well and whole; bringing back the dead and maimed…

  ‘Did you mean what you said?’ Angel asked. ‘About changing your mind about working in a factory?’

  Margot nodded weakly. ‘Please don’t talk about packing food right now. The thought of food at all makes me –’ she paused while she breathed deeply, trying not to retch as she fought down the nausea. There was nothing Angel could do but wait until the paroxysm subsided.

  ‘I don’t want us to be separated,’ Margot managed eventually. ‘We should stick together. I’ll ask if I can be a hospital helper, then at least I’ll see you between your ambulance journeys.’

  ‘We may have no choice,’ Angel said worriedly. ‘But it won’t do any harm to ask, and of course I want that too.’

  ‘Have you written to tell Jacques you’re coming?’

  The Channel breeze cooled the sudden heat in Angel’s cheeks. It had been her first instinct…

  ‘No.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘Why on earth not? He’d get leave, try to see you! I thought you’d have written to him immediately.’

  Angel didn’t answer. Of course she’d wanted to let Jacques know, but the confusion in her mind still raged. The longing to see him again was tempered by a bittersweet fear that he may have changed in the months they had been apart. People did change, feelings altered, love died. It was almost better not to know than to risk seeing that in Jacques’ eyes. Her own father had proved to her that love didn’t last for ever. How could he still love her mother when he was consorting with that Yorkshirewoman? How long had the pretence gone on? Living a lie…

  ‘Angel, when are you going to tell me what’s hurt you so badly?’ Margot said quietly. ‘It’s something to do with your father, isn’t it?’

  Angel drew in a painful breath. They were jostled on all sides by anonymous uniforms and unknown faces. She had meant to keep the hurt to herself, but somehow, as she stared out to sea and saw the growing line of the French coast turn into green and gold, she felt as though she and her closest friend were alone. And she was finally able to say the words that lay like gall in her heart.

  ‘He has a mistress. Doesn’t that shock you? My so-respectable father!’

  Margot knew what it must have cost Angel to confess to something that wasn’t her fault, but which nonetheless touched every one of her family. And it wasn’t so staggering, since Margot had already guessed the truth.

  ‘No, it doesn’t shock me,’ she said evenly. ‘Your father’s human, like all of us. The Royals have had mistresses and lovers for centuries. Why should we lesser ones be so different?’

  ‘I don’t care about Royals! I only care about us!’

  ‘Isn’t that being a little selfish?’

  Angel turned to look at her now, her face flushed with anger. To her friend, it was a healthier emotion than the blank bewilderment that had masked her face for much of the time since arriving on Margot’s doorstep.

  ‘Selfish? It’s my father who’s being selfish –’

  ‘Who’s he hurting? Not your mother, who’s always been so self-sufficient she probably only ever needed him for procreation, and once all that sordid business was done with, I’ll bet she never allowed him into her bedroom again. Can you deny it? Remember how wicked we used to feel at college, taking bets on it?’

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘He’s certainly not hurting Louise, who by all accounts is well rid of that chinless wonder, Stanley, and good luck to her with her haggis man. Ellen couldn’t care less what your father does, as long as she goes her own sweet way. So that leaves you – Daddy’s darling. Face it, Angel, you’re jealous.’

  Angel glared at her.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous –’

  ‘You’re just plain, old-fashioned jealous. You can’t bear to think that some other woman has claimed your father’s affections. All these years when your dear Mama has been frigid and unloving, he’s lavished all that generous love on little Angel, and now he’s found a real warm flesh-and-blood woman. At least, I presume that’s what she is. Do you care so little for him that you begrudge him that?’

  ‘I thought you cared about my feelings.’

  Margot put a sympathetic arm around her.

  ‘I do, darling. That’s why I can’t bear to see you so unhappy, but don’t blame your father for being a normal healthy man, and don’t punish Jacques for just being a man.’

  The V.A.D.s were being called together, and given brief instructions where to go when the ship landed at Calais. There was a depot there to deal with the fresh intake, and they would receive their orders. There was no more time for soul-searching or confidences, to Angel’s relief. Margot’s words had been too near to the truth she wouldn’t admit and hadn’t realised, to want to dwell on them.

  Three hours later, after endless delays and arguments, they were given space in the same truck leaving for northeast France the following morning. Angel’s First Aid training and ability to drive had given her slightly more status than Margot, but their insistence that they must stay together had finally worn down the Section Leader, who dismissed them as being of little use anyway.

  They’d learn, she thought grimly, stamping their cards with a flourish. If they were out here for a lark, the way some of these upper class girls were, they’d soon be cut down to size. The hospitals receiving casualties from the Front Line soon decided which of the women volunteers were made of steel and which of cotton wool.

  They had to sleep in makeshift quarters that night, on hard fold-up beds with little bedding. It was cold and miserable, and the other girls who had travelled with them eyed them suspiciously, in the same way that factory girls treated them with inverted snobbery. Resenting the air of breeding and money that no rough clothing could disguise; refusing to show friendship for fear of being taken down a peg or two.

  ‘Little snots,’ Margot muttered to Angel. ‘What do we care, anyway? We’ve got each other.’

  They were on the road early next morning, herded into an army truck with two other V.A.D.s going to the same clearing hospital and a group of men returning to their unit. The other girls giggled and flirted with the soldiers, and completely ignored Angel and Margot. It didn’t bother them. By the time they got out of the bone-shaking truck that jolted every bone in their bodies, they felt ready to crawl into hospital beds themselves.

  The ‘hospital’ caring for British wounded was part of the Town Hall in a small town called Piersville. The regular cottage hospital could never have dealt with all the casualties arriving almost hourly. Piersville was a typical French town, such as Angel and Margot had often visited with their families.

  In its centre was the town square, surrounded with trees and little shops, patisseries and pharmacies and boulangeries, all the lovely names that tripped so delightfully off the tongue.

  Nostalgia for times past swept over Angel. As children, she and Ellen and Louise had always loved the quaint French patois of the shopkeepers, charmed in their turn to find the little English girls practising their French with solemn attention to vowel sounds and accents. She had never been to Piersville, but the essence of the place was that of every small French town and village…

&nb
sp; Except … the minute they alighted from the truck, stiff and aching in every muscle, she knew it was vastly different. In time of war, the very character of a country changed. The normally sleepy square throbbed with the sound of trucks and ambulances. The trees in the square, usually alive with chirping, gaily twittering birds, merely rustled their leaves as the traffic rolled by. There were no birds to be seen in the grey unseasonal sky over Piersville.

  In the distance, Angel suddenly became aware of the dull sound of gunfire to the east. It had probably been there all the time, but until the engine of their truck was silenced, she only just registered it. It wasn’t so far away, she thought, her heart jumping, as a blast that was louder than the rest split the afternoon air.

  There was something else. A sickly, unpleasant smell that drifted all around them as the doors of the hospital were opened wide. It was a weird mixture of the dank sweat of hopelessness, disease, excreta and vomit. It filled the very air, tainting it. Glancing at Margot, she could see by her pinched nostrils that she was aware of it too. But come what may, they were in it now. They were part of this bloody war.

  A hospital official came out to the truck, a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  ‘There should be four for us today,’ he said shortly to the truck driver. ‘Bannister, Lacey, Green and Martin.’

  They sounded like a music hall act, Angel thought with a feeling of rising hysteria. The four of them side-stepping out onto some brilliantly lit stage, spangles glittering in the spotlight, Tango-orange smiles flashing at the audience as eight feet tapped their way across the stage to the sounds of wild applause … Bannister, Lacey, Green and Martin…

  Within weeks they had become seasoned V.A.D.s, and thoughts of anything so light and frothy, anything so normal, as a stage show, was farthest from any of their minds. Green and Martin had been put straight into the surgical section of the hospital, having done some nursing in England. The Sister in charge told Angel and Margot to report to the recovery wards, where Doctor Lancing was expecting them.

  ‘What a bloody name for a doctor,’ Margot stuttered. ‘God, I’m scared, Angel. And what about you? Why aren’t they giving you an ambulance?’

  ‘I don’t know! Why do you expect me to know everything?’

  ‘I was only trying to be helpful,’ Margot said resentfully. ‘I thought that was why you came, to drive ambulances.’

  They learned very quickly that they did as they were told. If there were weeping wounds to be dressed that didn’t need expert attention, they dressed them. If there were sheets to be changed from the disgusting mess some of the poor devils made on them, they changed them. If there were heads to be held while wounded soldiers spewed blood and vomit into metal containers, they held them. If there were nightmares to share in the dead of night, they shared them.

  They learned of more horrors of the Front from the babblings of delirious men than were ever reported in English newspapers. They heard young boys boast of the effectiveness of pissing on rags and pressing them to their noses to combat the awful gas attacks. They learned of the lice that crawled into a man’s skin until he felt he was being eaten alive. They came to recognise the pungent smell of creosote as the endless stretcher cases were brought in from the trenches.

  ‘Kills the bloody lice all right, darling,’ one of the remnants of Kitchener’s army could still joke in the midst of appalling wounds. ‘They tell us it makes the trenches more hygenic, see? What a bloody laugh that is, when you’re slipping and sliding in somebody else’s shit. ‘Course, they forget to tell you the creosote brings you out in blisters if it gets on your skin or your clothes. Seen some of the blisters, big as ass-holes, have you?’

  Angel nodded without expression, feeling the depth of the men’s degradation that they could speak so freely and not notice.

  ‘You should do as I did, mate,’ the man in the next bed guffawed. Angel found it hard to look at him because of the gaping hole in his face that was raw and livid. ‘The little bastards lay their eggs in the seams of your clothes, so you run a lighted candle up the seams. That soon gets the little turds hopping. You learn plenty of new tricks in a war.’

  Angel and Margot were learning them too. They learned to close their ears to the interesting discussions between patients on the merits and demerits of ridding themselves of lice. They tried to ignore the scathing insults that passed between the genuinely wounded, and the despised S.I.W.s who had worked their passage home – their ‘Blighty one’. Cowards who were brought in with knowingly self-inflicted wounds were the lowest of the low.

  They had to harden themselves to the terrible cries and screams that permeated the hospital walls, because if they didn’t, they would never have been able to carry on. They shared the hazards of nursing to the best of their capabilities, and tried to hide their pity at the sight of the men in their torn and ragged blood-stained uniforms, and the disagreeable shock of finding some of the clothing alive with maggots and lice. They tried not to notice the nausea that came with the reek of ether and the appalling sickly-sweet smell of gangrene. They held the hands of the dying. They wrote letters home for men who had no hands to hold a pencil, or eyes to see the writing paper.

  They were constantly ordered to take their time off and not waste it by doing extra duties. It was little enough, and the Ward Sister snapped at them that they would be less than useless to her if they dropped from sheer fatigue. They had borrowed bicycles several times and ridden in the direction away from the Front Line, where fields still grew green, and the wild poppies and daisies and waving cornflowers, still flourished despite a war.

  In the cramped quarters they shared, they stretched out wearily every night on their narrow beds, generally too numb to move a muscle. As if to underline her resentment towards the Sister, Angel swore in the colourful phrases they heard daily on the wards. Margot grinned, leaning up on one elbow.

  ‘Sister’s right, Angel. We should get away from here more than we do, if only for an hour or so. Where shall we go? Is there a dance in town, do you think?’

  Angel’s eyes suddenly filled. A dance in town! It seemed years since she had even thought of such a light-hearted, frivolous thing. So long since she had been held in a young man’s arms and teased in the meaningless way she had flirted with the young bucks in London, ardently professing true love if she would but spare them a kiss.

  She looked at Margot. Both of them changed, older, having seen sights those other two girls could never have imagined. Young men’s bodies had been exposed to them, all their dignity stripped, and neither they nor the men had felt shame or embarrassment. There was nothing but deep sorrowing pity for their plight, a reaching out of the senses towards all humanity. They were two different young women from the butterflies of pre-war days. Angel felt a brief sadness for those other two, and scrambled to her feet before it overwhelmed her.

  ‘All right, let’s find something to do. There are cafés in this town. There must be music, if not dancing. Do you remember the accordions in the evenings at Montmartre?’

  ‘Piersville isn’t Paris,’ Margot said drily, but Angel’s desperately gay mood was catching, and they changed out of their uniforms in a trice, wearing their own clothes and feeling the comparative softness against their skins.

  They washed away the grime of the day and touched their mouths with lipstick, running combs and powder through their sweat-stained hair until it felt reasonably clean and fragrant. Feeling human again, and pushing away the guilt that they left behind them the broken bodies of the wounded still lying in agony on hospital beds. And holding on to Sister’s stern words. What good would they be if they collapsed from sheer fatigue?

  The evening was still warm as it should be in mid-June. It was a shock to realise they had been here so long. Days had merged into weeks, into months. There had been mutters of leaves due to them, but so far nothing had transpired. Tonight, they didn’t think about it. They had a little time to themselves before they tumbled exhausted into bed as usual.


  They had gone out very little since arriving, but if there were any dangers of roaming around in a small French town near enough to the Front Line, they didn’t consider them. Tonight, they could pretend they were tourists. The war didn’t exist. Just for a few hours…

  In the intimacy of a small crowded café where they drank cheap red wine and listened to the plaintive singing of a husky-voiced French singer, accompanied by an old accordion player, Angel felt her throat constrict. She spoke excellent French, and the words of the song told of lost love, of empty partings and sweet reunions, and shrieked to her of Jacques. She had deliberately kept him out of her mind of late, filling her days with her self-imposed tasks, letting the exhaustion of the nights take her into oblivion.

  ‘When are you going to try to find him, Angel? Isn’t it what you came here for?’

  Margot’s soft voice broke through her dreaming. She had forgotten that Margot’s French was as good as her own. Margot could read every expression on Angel’s face, and know how brittle was the mask she constantly wore. There was no use denying where her thoughts lay, and she spread her hands as if in supplication.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s all so confusing –’

  ‘What’s confusing? You love him and he loves you, and he doesn’t even know you’re in France. I think you’re touched in the head. Have you read those letters your mother sent you?’

  Angel shook her head. She and Margot had been diligent in writing home, and Clemence had posted a small packet of letters written in Jacques’ familiar handwriting, and the temptation to rip open the envelopes had eluded Angel so far. There was so much Margot didn’t understand. She didn’t know that Angel began every letter home with the words ‘Dear Parents’, unable to make any reference to her father more personal than that. She mourned the loss of the old relationship with Fred, but she couldn’t seem to break past the knowledge that Harriet was somewhere in the background, taking the love that belonged by right to Clemence and his daughters.