Tom, dearest, I think of you every day and hope you are keeping well and safe. I go to the usual Sunday service at the camp, but it isn’t the same without your dear face in the congregation. Mr Kingston asked if I had heard from you and I told him you were all right. Nothing from Mam or Dad about us getting married.
I hope this letter reaches you all right and that you will answer it soon. I will write again soon.
Love from your Molly.
Well, this letter has something new in it, thought Rachel. Freddie’s marriage.
Rachel had been wondering when Freddie had got married. Clearly he wasn’t when he had visited Sarah at the convent, but why hadn’t he told Sarah about Heather while he was there? Maybe he’d been afraid that Heather would refuse him. Well, she hadn’t and he was not only married, but an expectant father at the time he was killed. This whirlwind wedding on his Christmas leave explained that. Poor Heather, two or three days of wedded bliss before Freddie returned to the front, and she probably never saw him again. It was unlikely he had more leave before July. He must have known he was to be a father, but her child couldn’t have been born before September. There was a touch of bitterness, Rachel thought, in Molly’s comment about his rushed marriage, no problem because he was an officer. It also sounded as if she had written to her parents saying she wanted to get married, but had received no reply. Did her parents stand out against it? Rachel wondered. She moved on to the next letter.
17th January
Dear Molly
Thank you for your letter which came today. We have moved now and are living in the usual way. I am back with the lads who I was with before. Harry’s brother is here and could not believe it when I told him who had been nursing Harry. He said, “What does my little cousin know about nursing?” and I said, “A great deal, she’s very good at it!” That shut him up for a bit, but he was sad that Harry had died.
It is very cold and wet here and there is shelling most of the time. Don’t worry about me, dear Molly, as I shall keep my head down. Sarah’s brother is back here too. He saw me just before we came up here and was pleased that my arm was quite better. I didn’t say anything about him getting married, it wasn’t my place, but we have to wish them well. Don’t worry, my dearest girl, we will be married as soon as may be. You will be 21 in May so your dad won’t matter then.
I cannot tell you what we are doing, but we are kept busy and it helps to pass the time. If you are able to send some cigarettes they would be most welcome as there are never enough here. I’ve never had a parcel from home so have had to rely on the kindness of the blokes who do get them. They always share, so I’d like to share something of mine with them. It is wonderful to hear my name called when the post comes up the lines. Look after yourself, my little girl. I can’t believe you really are my girl yet, I have to keep telling myself.
Your loving Tom
Rachel read slowly through the letters, learning snippets about life both in the trenches and behind the lines in the billets where the men stayed when they were relieved at the front. Occasionally things which Tom had written were blacked out by the censor, leaving Rachel to guess at what he might have said that was so sensitive, but as the correspondence unfolded, she watched Molly and Tom learning more and more about each other.
In one letter Tom told something of his childhood.
5th March
My Dearest Girl
I write this in truth for you really are my dearest girl. I told you I have never had a girl before and that was true. I also told you I have no family and was an orphanage boy. That is also true. I was found in a cardboard box wrapped in newspaper on a doorstep near University College Hospital in London. The man who found me was a carter. He took me into the hospital and they looked after me until I was strong enough to go to the orphanage. In the box was a piece of paper which said, “Look after my Tom for me”. So, they called me Tom Carter. Tom for myself and Carter for the man who found me.
So, my Molly, when we get married you will have to share my borrowed name. Will you mind that? I’ve never lived in a house with a family, but we will. The Carter family will have a home and all their children will be wanted and loved. No doorsteps for our babies. I used to wonder who my mum was and why she dumped me. I suppose I’ll never know the answer to the first and the answer to the second is obvious.
Thank you for your parcel with the cigarettes, the tinned jam and the chocolate. Very popular bloke I am at tea time! I love to get your letters, Molly, they keep me going so keep them coming!
Your loving orphan, Tom
In another letter from Molly it became clear that she and her parents were still not on good terms as she wrote,
12th March
Dearest Tom
I have at last had word from my father. He is still very angry that I am here at all, and says he has no intention of letting his daughter marry some street urchin from a gutter in London! It has nothing to do with who you are or where you come from. My father and me have always been difficult together. I haven’t told this before because it is very difficult for me, but my father wants more from me than a daughter should give. I got away from him when I was fourteen by going into service at the Manor. Mam knew, but she would never hear a word against my father, and accused me of lying when I tried to tell her. I should have told you all this when we were together, but it never seemed the right moment. Our time was too precious to waste talking about my dad, but I realise now I should have told you as I am sort of damaged goods and may be you will change your mind about me. He used to say I mustn’t tell, that it was “our secret”, but I can’t have secrets from you, Tom. He never did me any real harm, but he might have if I hadn’t got away. I wish I’d told you before, but it is very hard even to tell you now. Anyway he will never say we can be married, so we’ll have to wait till I’m 21 before we can.
I am sorry to tell you all this in a letter and not to your head as I should have done. I hope you will understand.
I will always be your loving girl, Molly.
Rachel looked through the letters again to see if she had missed the letter Molly had received from her parents, but there was no sign of it. Probably she had torn it up or burned it, Rachel thought. I would have done.
Tom was very quick in his reply.
17th March
My darling girl
What a goose you are to think that anything could change how I feel about you. It changes how I feel about your father. I don’t think you’d better let us meet in the near future, Molly, or I might do something I’d be sorry for. Still little chance of that at present, him being safely in England and me being stuck here. Don’t ever mention damaged goods again, to me you are my lovely Molly who will one day be my wife whether her dad likes it or not!
No time for more now, work to be done, but remember how much I love you.
Tom
1916
21st March
Molly, my darling girl,
Such wonderful news! We have been given 72 hours local leave. I will be coming to town by train and will then come out to see you. I don’t suppose you will be able to come to the town, can’t see that Rev. Mother of yours letting you go, so I will come to the village and see you there.
We leave here in three days time and then have two days in billets before the leave. I should be with you about the 26th. I will have two nights in the village before I have to set off back again.
I can’t wait to see you, my dearest. It is your face I have kept in my mind all the time I’ve been here.
I will write again, but if you don’t get my letter you will get me instead. As I arrive on Sunday I will go to the camp for the evening service, perhaps you can too!
My love to you, little darling
Tom
17
Since the beginning of the year, though there was still a steady stream of men being brought to the hospital, it had been possible to keep pace with them. There had not been the sudden influxes of wounded like those which
had come during the autumn, bringing the wards chaos and upheaval, and one ward was now devoted to the medical cases which arrived. Life settled to a slightly easier pace, though the hours were still long and the sisters still exacting. Sister Eloise had recovered from the bronchitis that had taken her off duty, and the ward was running much more smoothly since she came back.
Sarah and Molly had had their off-duty hour on occasional afternoons restored to them. Winter was beginning to lose its grip on the world, though the nights were still very chilly and the stoves in the wards had to be kept alight night and day. On their free afternoon, they still went to the village and ate cake at Madame Juliette’s, and the sight of a gentle greening in the trees and hedgerows lifted their spirits after the long dark cold of the winter. Wild daffodils struck bravely through the cold earth and there was the faintest heat in the spring sunshine.
Molly still went across to the convalescent camp for the Sunday evening service, and she saw the men that she had helped to nurse pass their medical board and pronounced fit for duty. Sent off to the station in Albert, they would march away from the camp in groups, heads high, uniforms clean, boots polished. Molly watched each detachment leave and wondered how many of them would see the end of this war, which seemed to be dragging on into eternity.
Sarah watched them go, and her heart wept within her, but she never shed an open tear. Over the months at the hospital she had toughened in many ways. She was no longer upset when taken to task for some failure by Sister Bernadette, she simply sighed and put right her mistake. Gradually she learned how to perform the tasks necessary in the day-to-day nursing of the men. She was not a natural nurse as Molly had turned out to be, but she drove herself hard and learned to cope stoically with the daily round in the ward; the pain of the men, both mental and physical, and her inability to alleviate it. She felt just as deeply about the men in her care, but she no longer took each death in the ward as some sort of personal failure. She drew strength from being part of the community, and though she still enjoyed leaving the convent for an afternoon, she found the routine that she now lived out strangely comforting. She and Molly still shared their room, and their friendship continued to grow. They were comfortable together, knowing each other so well. Like sisters? Neither of them had ever had a sister, so she didn’t know, but they were close, drawing strength from one another.
When the post came, Molly saved her letters from Tom to open in private. She never rushed to open his letters, she needed to be alone, so that she could conjure up his face and hear his voice in the words he had written. She would put the letter in her skirt pocket and keep touching it in delicious anticipation during the day as she went about her work in the ward, only slitting the envelope later in the privacy of their room.
When Sarah came up from the chapel this particular evening, she found Molly sitting on her bed writing her nightly letter to Tom, radiant with happiness. She positively glowed with it so that the moment Sarah walked in through the door she knew something had happened.
“Molly?”
“He’s coming to see me,” Molly cried to her in delight. “He’s got a seventy-two hour local leave pass.”
“Tom?”
“Oh Sarah! Who else? Of course Tom.”
“But where will you meet him?” asked Sarah foreseeing all the pitfalls in this that Molly was blithely ignoring. “Surely he won’t come here, to the convent? They won’t let him in. It’s not like when Freddie came. He was my brother.”
“I know all that,” Molly said cheerfully, “but we can meet in the village, or at the camp. He’ll go and see the padre, and so can I.”
“In the village?”
“When we go, you and I. It’ll be perfectly proper if you’re there too. We’ll just have tea and cakes at Madame Juliette’s like always.”
Sarah looked dubious. “I don’t know, Molly,” she began, “Reverend Mother…”
“Doesn’t need to know,” broke in Molly. “Sarah, we are talking about the man I am going to marry. He’s my fiancé.” Molly was pleased to use the word. “My fiancé. If we were at home now and he came to call for me on my day off, it would be perfectly proper for me to walk out with him. Why not here?”
“It’s different here,” Sarah said. “We have to live by the rules of the convent, we agreed to do that when we first came.”
“Well I didn’t have a fiancé when we first came,” said Molly obstinately. “Sarah,” she pleaded, “I have to meet him one way or another. We’ll have so little time together.”
Sarah sat down beside Molly and gave her a hug. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll think of something. Perhaps I could explain to Aunt Anne that you are going to be married and she could speak to Mother.”
“I don’t want Mother knowing anything about it,” Molly said firmly. “She as good as told me that she’d send me away if I saw him again. If he turns up now she’ll know I disobeyed her and she may well send me away anyway.”
When the light was out, each girl lay in her cocoon of darkness considering what to do. Molly was planning ways she could slip away from the convent to meet Tom in the precious few hours they would have. She thought about the gate in the convent wall, leading to the camp outside. As far as she knew it was never locked as the padre and the doctors used it whenever they came over to visit the wards. When she came off duty, it would be easy enough to slip through the gate instead of going up to their room. If she chose her moment no one would see her, and no one, except perhaps Sarah, would miss her, and there Tom would be, waiting for her. She only had to persuade Sarah to cover for her if necessary.
Sarah was wondering what she ought to do in the situation. Should she allow herself to be drawn into this deceit? To be used as an illicit chaperone by Molly and encourage her to flout the convent rules, or should she stand back and let Molly get on with this on her own? If she did that there was almost no doubt that Molly and Tom would be caught out, yet if she connived at their meeting, she might be making everything worse for Molly in the long run. She was seriously concerned with how things stood between Molly and her Tom. The letters had come thick and fast, and Sarah knew that there was a new dimension to their relationship since Tom had left. She felt in her heart she shouldn’t be doing anything to encourage Molly in her infatuation with this man, but she could see how happy it made Molly and she couldn’t bring herself to destroy that happiness either.
“When does he arrive?” she asked Molly as they were getting dressed the next morning.
“He says the 26th,” answered Molly casually. “That’s Sunday.”
“And will you be going to the service at the camp as usual?” Sarah asked innocently.
“I always go to the service when I can be spared,” replied Molly with equal innocence.
“Let’s hope Sister Eloise can spare you then,” teased Sarah.
Molly stared at her dumbstruck. “ Oh Sarah, you don’t think that this Sunday, of all Sundays…”
“No, Of course I don’t, silly! I was only teasing you.” Sarah had decided that Molly going to church in the camp was the very best way of her meeting with Tom. The Reverend Kingston would be there, and so would a host of other people; it would be perfectly proper, and, more to the point, she, Sarah, would not be compromised in any way.
Molly waltzed through the next few days, her eyes shining. She wrote to Tom saying she would be at the evening service and would see him there. No other letter came from him and occasionally she was attacked by doubts. Perhaps something had gone wrong. Perhaps the leave had been cancelled. Perhaps they hadn’t been relieved at the front. Perhaps he’d been…. She forced aside such thoughts and imagined him, waiting at the gate to meet her when she crossed through, perfectly properly, for Sunday evening service.
Sunday finally arrived and for Molly every minute was an hour. She woke early; the day had finally come. She had been terrified that they would have an unexpected arrival of wounded so that she couldn’t be spared from the ward, but as the hours crawled b
y, this became less and less likely, and eventually Sister Eloise said, “You may go to your church now, Molly,” and with demure thanks, Molly slipped out of the ward to take off her apron and fetch her coat and hat.
The day had been a fine one, and as Molly crossed the courtyard, the sun was beginning to paint evening into the sky above the high, grey walls. She paused with her hand on the gate and looked behind her. There was no one in the courtyard, the ward doors were now closed against the creeping chill of the March evening, and the windows that overlooked the yard were dark and empty. There was no one to see her leave, or to see who was waiting as she closed the gate behind her.
He was there, looking as handsome in his uniform as she had ever seen him. For a moment they simply looked at each other. Each had been afraid that this magical thing that had grown and flowered between them might have mysteriously perished; that things would not be the same when they saw each other again. Would they find the person they thought they knew, or someone different; someone whom they had known once and remembered only hazily, or worse still had never known at all?
Would Tom still be the brave yet sensitive man Molly had nursed and comforted, or would he have changed, over the intervening months back in the trenches, become a stranger hardened by war? Would Molly still be the same beautiful young woman, that Tom remembered, her face eager and bright, her eyes lit with inner determination and strength?
The Lost Soldier Page 26
