Still, there was no point worrying: what could you do but get on with it?
Their medical unit at the Clearing Station was small and tight-knit and they all relied on humour to get through the terrible sights they dealt with every day. There were twenty of them in total, mostly men. In the hospital itself there were two doctors, the Sister-in-charge, a regular Sister, a couple of regular nurses and some male orderlies. There were also the two ambulance crews, and these were made up of a handful of Red Cross volunteers, like herself and Benny Jones.
Her thoughts were broken abruptly by a wild cry from behind them:
‘Go! Go! Go!’
Suddenly Bill Wentworth and Harry Smith, two Red Cross stretcher-bearers, came running out of the ramshackle hospital huts, stuffing their breakfast rolls into their mouths and simultaneously pulling on their white regulation armbands emblazoned with a large red cross.
‘All right, Posie?’ shouted Bill, straightening his tin hat. ‘We’d better go. We’ve spotted our other ambulance heading back this way along the railway tracks, so we’ll pass them as we go along. It looked laden down, unfortunately. This way we’ll get a head start.’
The two men jumped up easily into the back of the ambulance among the stretchers and medical supplies, and Harry broke into a falsely-cheery rendition of ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ which they all took up and belted out as loudly as they could.
As they were jolting down the muddy track on the way to the front line, they saw their other ambulance in the distance, returning home, but ahead of it was another grey army truck hurtling its way towards them. Its driver indicated for them to stop, and he leant out of the window, his breath steaming into the frozen air:
‘Casualty Clearing Station, Number 8? Nearby, is it?’
Posie nodded and jerked her thumb backwards, her foot very light on the brake pedal, wanting to be off.
‘What you got in there, boyo?’ asked Benny Jones, leaning across playfully from the passenger seat towards the truck driver. ‘I’m hoping you’re going to tell me it’s a load of sweets and letters from home? Post? Or at least replacement medical supplies?’
The driver of the van shook his head:
‘Nah, not as such, mate. Replacements though. I’m bringing you a new nurse, and my orders are to take one away.’
If only they had known then just what a portent of doom the truck represented, and just how prophetic the man’s words actually were.
****
Sixteen hours later, in the unreliable warmth of the flimsy one-room staff hut, Posie collapsed onto a wooden bench strewn with newspapers and old magazines. Their shift had finished at last.
Wind whipped around the building, promising a storm outside. Her whole body drooped with fatigue. Harry Smith was sleeping already, along with several other staff, all snoring and dozing on the bare floorboards. Next to her, Benny Jones sat down wearily, rubbing his eyes. For once he hadn’t got anything to say. It had been a long, long shift and not a particularly happy one either.
Bill Wentworth was frying bacon at the Primus stove in the corner of the hut, feeding Merlin pieces of the fat. Bill had cut big doorsteps of brown bread and had smeared them with butter before laying the bacon on top haphazardly. He came over to Posie and Benny with the sandwiches, placing them on top of an old medical trunk which served as a table.
‘Bacon sarnie, anyone?’ he said quietly.
As they munched their dinner in inconsolable but companionable silence, the door at the back of the hut was flung open, but not by the wind. Into the dimly-lit room walked an unknown woman carrying a Tilley lamp, straight as a pin, with a face far lovelier than any Posie had seen before. In fact, the woman was breathtakingly beautiful.
Tall and thin with white-blonde hair scraped back off her face into a nursing hood, the woman was pale as a silver Valkyrie. She had huge navy-blue eyes which she blinked very slowly and deliberately. She wore the Sister’s official nursing clothes of blue and white, and she looked as cold and proud as the carved figurehead at the mast of a ship. Posie noticed how the men around her suddenly all had their mouths open, slack-jawed. Even Benny and Bill had forgotten about their bacon sandwiches.
‘Good evening, volunteers,’ said the woman primly, with a pompous manner which Posie immediately hated.
‘I am Sister Fyne, Sister Llewellyn’s replacement. I’m your new Sister-in-charge for the next three weeks. You will be taking your orders from me while you are in this Clearing Station. Do I make myself understood?’
The men were nodding dumbly, but Posie stared at the woman uncomprehendingly. Their small team had been working well enough in this Clearing Station for months now, and yet they were being spoken to by this woman as if they had only just arrived, rather than the other way around. And why on earth was the Sister speaking to them as if they were somehow second-rate, just because they were volunteer medical workers, rather than people who had had medical careers before the war? The sights they had had to grow accustomed to would make most so-called ‘professionals’ shudder and recoil in horror.
‘What are you staring at, nurse?’ Sister Fyne snapped at Posie, who continued to chomp on her large sandwich in an unladylike fashion.
‘And why are you in here, anyhow? This seems to be the men’s recreation room. Come here! You should not be in here alone with them. Out! Now!’
Stifling the urge to giggle, and about to point out that there simply wasn’t anywhere else to go except this one small sparse hut, Benny Jones saved her:
‘What about the sixteen hours Posie’s just spent, Sister, with only us for company? We was all in one ambulance together; no bigger than this here table we’re sitting at now. No chaperone for miles, unless you count the wounded and dying men we were transporting. Nobody had a problem with that then, did they? And she’s not a nurse, Sister. She’s our ambulance driver, an’ all. A proper good one, too.’
But Posie couldn’t see or hear what Sister Fyne said in reply, as at that very moment all the lamps and candles blew out.
‘Rats! Doesn’t make for a good start, does it?’ muttered Benny bitterly, as a second quick bang of the door indicated that Sister Fyne had left the hut again. ‘Takes herself a touch too seriously, that one, doesn’t she? For all her pretty face. Only three weeks to get through though until Helena is back from leave. We’ll just have to grin and bear it.’
‘Oh, we’ll bear it all right,’ said Bill Wentworth, laughing. ‘Sister Fyne can tuck me into my bed any night she pleases! Coo-ee! What a beauty! Oh, lummie! Don’t look at me like that, Benny! And nor you, Posie! You know I’m only joking! Anyway, what can happen in three weeks?’
But fate was not smiling on any of them.
In fact, it seemed a great deal could happen in three weeks.
****
For a start, working conditions quickly got much worse.
In the two weeks leading up to Christmas 1917 the small Clearing Station was simply overwhelmed with casualties. It was harrowing work and the medical staff were all tired. The men needed a distraction in the face of so much death and destruction.
Sister Fyne.
She was in the right place at the right time. Within days of her arrival, the men in the medical unit had fallen under a sort of spell. An infatuation. They began to watch Sister Fyne with rapturous, adoring looks on their faces, whispering in corners about her being ‘the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.’ Posie had never been the jealous type, and she had found it funny at first, but then, as time passed and Sister Fyne’s manner towards everybody seemed to get even snappier, even more pompous, Posie found the general adoration by the men simply frightfully annoying. The week before Christmas was especially trying.
One dark, cold afternoon Posie voiced her frustrations about Felicity Fyne to Sister Dulcie Deane, the regular Sister, who was folding lint bandages into neat square bundles in the semi-private sanctity of the supplies cupboard.
Dulcie was the only other half-decent woman in
the place, although everyone knew you couldn’t trust Dulcie with anything half confidential unless you wanted it spread around the place like wild fire. Dulcie Deane had been transferred to the front line unwillingly, from a big London hospital. Her conversation revolved around just how wonderful her life had been living it up among the bright lights of London, mixed in with any gossip which happened to be going.
‘I know it’s really trivial,’ Posie said, guiltily. ‘But it bugs me the way the men can’t see through her! When Sister Fyne deigns to speak to you it’s as if you’re no better than something she’s stepped in which niffs a bit! I’m fed up of her.’
Dulcie nodded her head enthusiastically.
‘Tell me about it! She has a terribly brusque bedside manner, too. The poor patients! She’s never got time to joke or smile for them, either: just keeps muttering on about being ‘efficient’. Don’t worry about the men in the medical unit. They’re a bunch of idiots! I’d like to think the lot of them are hallucinating, as they’re so tired; you know, like sailors with mermaids.’
Posie nodded, feeling slightly mollified. She liked the idea of Sister Fyne being likened to a mermaid: it suited her somehow; cold, remote, unreal.
‘But I tell you this, it’s gone way beyond a joke now.’
Posie started up guiltily from her half-daydream as she realised Dulcie was still chattering away.
‘Sorry?’
‘I think things might be turning nasty. Guess what I overheard today?’
Posie wasn’t really that interested in gossip or in Dulcie’s overheard goings-on. She suspected that poor Dulcie was fuelled by a few pangs of jealousy, and who could really blame her? A freckly girl with short dyed-red hair, Dulcie Deane was fairly nondescript, and although she was nice and had always got on with the job in hand, she had so far played a pretty poor second fiddle to the buxom charms of Helena Llewellyn, and she was now paling into absolute insignificance next to the dazzling Felicity Fyne. To her frustration.
‘Mnnn? What did you overhear?’
Dulcie frowned, serious.
‘Dr Winter is taking Sister Fyne out tonight! Casualties permitting, of course. They’ve rigged it so they’ve both got the same evening slot of leave. They’re walking out to Arras together. It’s a date! Our cool-as-a-cucumber Dr Winter is as silly as the next man for her!’
Posie was brought back to earth with a bump. She didn’t really like Dr Winter especially, had never warmed to him or even admired him as the others seemed to, but she wouldn’t have expected something as low as this from the man. Two-timing.
‘WHAT?’
Dulcie nodded, her freckled face flashing Posie a look of triumph which only secret knowledge can bring. ‘Yes, I heard them talking. They’re going to the Lion d’Or for supper.’
Posie frowned, sieving the information for accuracy. It was fairly normal for members of the medical unit to walk to the nearest town, Arras, in their spare time, and sometimes they walked out together or in groups. Two small hotel restaurants on the large town square continued to serve up beer and basic meals to the Allies, despite the destruction in the square itself and in the surrounding cobbled streets, which were all now just heaps of rubble. The biggest hotel, the Lion d’Or, had even allowed the Allied medical staff to come and have a bath there every two weeks, with a strict ticketing arrangement in place. But for Dr Winter and Sister Fyne to go to Arras together, for a meal, alone? With no chaperone? It was scandalous, even in wartime. Posie concluded that Dulcie must have got her wires crossed, or misheard. Posie shook her head:
‘No, it doesn’t signify anything. Maybe it’s a professional thing – you’ve just got the wrong end of the stick, that’s all – maybe Dr Rolly’s going too?’
‘No. He’s not. And you don’t work in the main ward. I do. You should just see the glances passing between the two of them this last week. I don’t know where to look sometimes.’
‘But what about…’
‘Helena?’ finished off Dulcie, on a high note. She shrugged rather dramatically. ‘Who knows? “Out of sight, out of mind”, perhaps?’
And so Posie had learnt that it wasn’t just the likes of Harry Smith and Bill Wentworth who went gooey whenever Sister Fyne appeared.
Slowly, slowly, the whole unit seemed to learn the truth. That things had moved on to a whole new level, and Sister Fyne was actually courting Dr Winter. And then steadily, eventually, the spell was broken. The men in the unit seemed to wake up. Tea-break whispers of ‘Is it serious?’ were slowly replaced by ‘What about Helena?’ and then, anxiously, ‘Is anyone going to tell Helena?’
An angry, betrayed feeling hung over the unit in the days leading up to Christmas, and Dulcie Deane went around the place with an exaggerated pursed-up mouth, putting up a few pathetic paper chains made from old newspapers in an effort to be festive, and trying to ensure she didn’t have to share the same shifts as Sister Fyne.
‘It pains me to say it, but both of them are to blame,’ Benny Jones said miserably on Christmas Eve, as a few medical workers sat cloistered together in the staff hut, smoking and napping between their shifts. Dulcie Deane and Posie were sitting on the floor at Benny’s feet, carefully sorting the Christmas goodie tins which had been sent for the injured soldiers by Princess Mary and the Royal Family in England.
‘It’s Dr Winter’s fault just as much as Sister Fyne’s, that’s what I keep telling myself. I never thought I’d say it but the man’s a blaggard. They deserve each other, so they do.’
Dulcie snorted.
‘That’s as maybe. Anyway, I’ll put you all out of your misery and tell you that he’s written to Helena at last. Ending it. I saw him today at his little desk in the doctors’ ante-room. And then I heard what he said to Sister Fyne.’ And here she paused for effect, making sure that everyone in the hut was paying attention.
She continued, relishing the limelight:
‘He said: “Don’t worry, I’ve told her that it’s all off. A telegram will go out tonight. We can make things official now. We’ll get the Army Chaplain to marry us on his rounds on Boxing Day.” Make of that what you will.’
Benny Jones tutted to himself sadly. ‘Helena will get the telegram tonight, then, in Wales. Rats! What a Christmas present! Poor girl. A broken heart!’
‘What will Helena do?’ asked Bill Wentworth, nervously. ‘She’s due back here next week. Surely she won’t want to work alongside Dr Winter if he’s gone and married someone else in the meantime? It would be terrible for her.’
Dulcie Deane sighed. ‘She’ll have to stay on here, for a while anyway. It takes weeks to organise a transfer for a nursing Sister. The paperwork takes ages. Even in emergencies, even in wartime.’
But as it happened, no paperwork proved necessary.
****
Christmas Day that year was a working day like any other, but a staff Christmas dinner of sorts was organised in two shifts for whoever could attend.
Dinner was set up on a long makeshift trestle-table in the staff hut with old magazine pages laid out haphazardly instead of a tablecloth. People were coming and going in a mad hurry, getting up and down for all the world as if they were playing a real-life game of musical chairs.
It was not a cheerful affair. For once Posie wanted to be alone with her thoughts, not having to pretend to be jolly in a place where there was little to celebrate. To Posie the whole dinner seemed like a strange, surreal blur: half-forgotten pre-war delicacies like roast chicken and crispy potatoes were served up by an army cook, with candied fruits for pudding and extra packets of cigarettes and sweets for whoever wanted them. It felt odd and somehow reckless to be eating Christmas food so close to the front line of a battle.
And Posie felt strangely homesick and lonely, which was unusual. But it was her first Christmas without Harry, for one thing. She missed her brother Richard too. Richard was an Army Officer somewhere out here in the fields of France or Flanders, but where he was exactly at the moment was anyone’s guess. She was still waitin
g to hear from him; a letter or a Christmas card, perhaps. But Posie wasn’t unduly worried by his silence; she knew that messages between battalions and hospitals even geographically close to each other on the front line could be delayed for days and weeks.
Instead, she had been cheered that morning to receive a small parcel from her father, the Reverend Parker, from his Norfolk Rectory: a bright hand-painted Christmas card of a ruby-red poinsettia, a bottle of her favourite parma violet perfume and a small packet of humbugs from the village shop. Right now her thoughts were dreamily wandering back home to gentle Norfolk: to the green fields unbroken by trenches and barbed wire fences; to the sweep of peaceful golden beaches unspoilt by mines; to the arc of endless blue sky which had formed the backdrop to her childhood. To the blissful silence…
‘Penny for your thoughts, Parker?’
Posie looked up from her meal in surprise and saw that the vacant seat opposite her own had been taken by the odious Dr Winter, whom she had only ever spoken to once or twice before, never having much need to spend time in the main ward or operating theatre. He had already started to eat his dinner. The two seats on either side of him were still empty, probably on purpose. The ill-will towards the man was palpable in the room, as if he was emitting a particularly bad stink. Posie sighed and rustled up her manners. It was Christmas, after all.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I was miles away. If you really want to know, I was thinking of home.’
He smiled. Dr William Winter was one of those very tall, nervy, angular men who had been blessed from boyhood with a fair, sculpted beauty which he carried carelessly but certainly. He was extraordinarily good-looking, and what Posie assumed The Lady and other such magazines meant when they described someone as ‘easy on the eye’. And he knew it, too. But up close there was something about him which Posie didn’t like and which she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something almost reptilian maybe. Perhaps it was the slow, measured blink of the eyes, which were small and sad, or the smile playing needlessly around the mouth, which made him look as if he were enjoying a private joke.
The Vanishing of Dr Winter: A Posie Parker Mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 4) Page 2
