The Virgin and the Whale

by Carl Nixon

  Elizabeth takes the stairs down to the ground floor and walks through the maze of corridors. The hospital is relatively empty. It is hard for her to believe that it was only last November when the Spanish influenza epidemic had been at its height. The number of dead in Mansfield did not reach the same levels as in the capital, where most of the returning soldiers who carried it home on the troopships had disembarked. Even so, all the hospital’s beds had been filled. Patients lay on mattresses and gurneys in the corridors. There had been little the nurses could do for the worst cases. They were forced to watch as seemingly strong, healthy men and women died, sometimes within hours. But that had not stopped the entire staff from working until they dropped — quite literally.

  Elizabeth herself had become sick during the third week of November. One minute she had been feeling fine; the next, she was unable to stand. She lay at home for five days, delirious and sweating, tended only by her mother. It was testament to Elizabeth’s will that only a few days after the fever broke she was back helping the sick. Two of the other sisters and one of the doctors had not been so lucky. Their funerals were solemn but hasty affairs.

  When Elizabeth arrives at Ward Six, the usual chorus greets her over the sound of the gramophone.

  ‘Morning, Sister.’

  ‘Hey, look who it is.’

  ‘Got time to chat with an old soldier?’

  She moves from bed to bed, asking questions and making mental notes about the dressings that need to be changed, medications administered, who has improved or deteriorated. Private Cooper has lost most of his sight to mustard gas. Elizabeth sits on a chair and reads him a letter from his young wife. She lives on the Coopers’ farm at the foot of the mountains, with her mother- and father-in-law. When Elizabeth reaches the end of the letter, she hands it to him. Cooper folds it very carefully.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  During the war the entire north wing had been used for the slow tide of wounded and diseased men shipped back from overseas. Most of them, however, have now gone. Ward Six alone has been set aside for the returned servicemen with conditions that have not responded to treatment. Those diagnosed with shell shock have been sent to Sunnyside, the mental asylum in the east of the city. The remaining patients boast complicated wounds or amputations, unexplained seizures or bouts of fever.

  The majority of soldiers have already returned to the professions and trades they practised before the war. The government is eager for normality. After years at war, the men are no longer riflemen, artillery gunners, sappers, snipers or stretcher bearers. They are not captains, second lieutenants, sergeants or even lowly privates. They are expected to slip seamlessly back into the roles of husbands and fathers, farmers, electricians, bakers, bankers, high school teachers, tanners, tailors; suddenly all more or less equal. Even some majors and generals are now plain Fred or Rob, just the bloke in the house next door who used to be something or other in the army. After coming down the narrow gangplanks of the troopships they have all been absorbed into the waiting arms of the crowd. They shed their ranks nervously, along with their uniforms. It feels strange to have a choice of what to wear.

  Put the war behind you. Look to the future. These are the slogans that they have been sold. And that is what they try to do.

  So why do their hands shake? Why is it so hard to slip the bone button into the waiting hole? Why do they wake gasping and sodden in the night, their heart going like a racehorse? Their kids cry when the old man shouts about nothing much.

  Hard to explain to their wives how things were — how things still are. They don’t want to burden them. What’s the point in talking about old horrors? Or even the good times, of which there were many.

  All the men in Ward Six are in love with Elizabeth. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is because she is particularly attractive. There are prettier nurses. Nor is her patients’ love bestowed on her because she is kind; quite the opposite, in fact.

  Elizabeth sees her patients for what they are, men who are bereft of eyes, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys — in various combinations, both likely and unlikely. They are mutilated, broken, cripples.

  You may be thinking that this is a mistake on her part. A nurse should be kind. Shouldn’t Elizabeth see her patients for what they were: whole complete human beings? And what they could be: potentially productive members of a society keen to reconstruct itself?

  That is certainly how the mothers and wives express themselves when they visit the patients in Ward Six. When they look at their son or husband, their eyes avoid the stump or the smooth sheets that begin halfway down the bed. They — kindly — pretend that they do not see the rubber tube snaking out from the hospital pyjamas and disappearing under the bed. The visitors always talk about the good years before the war. They talk about a bright future.

  Elizabeth, however, lives strictly in the present. She seldom talks to her patients about the past and never makes promises regarding the future. Nursing overseas taught her that. Instead, she massages stumps to restore circulation. She dresses infected wounds without fuss or unnecessary comment. She smooths cream into flesh that is dry and cracked where it has been set on fire. She is practical and caring. But she is not kind.

  Elizabeth’s matter-of-fact acceptance of how things are proves to be an even greater balm to her patients than her ministrations.

  The truth is that the men in Ward Six have come to despise Kind. Every day, they look with far-seeing eyes from the mountaintop of their situation over the kingdom of Kind. They see how it borders on the desert land of Condescension. They understand that Kind has as its capital the crumbled ruins called Pity.

  six

  Human warfare could be studied exclusively through the examination of the evolution of velocity.

  In physics, velocity is defined as the rate of change of position. It is generally measured in metres per second. The average velocity (v) of an object moving through a displacement (Δd) in a straight line during a time interval (Δt) is described by the formula:

  This is a dry definition; obviously unsuited for storytelling. It is only after some consideration that I have included it here, because it proved remarkably pertinent to all those countless protagonists who lay dead and dying at Anzac Cove, on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Seen from a distance, even physics can have a certain poignancy.

  The soldiers who fought in the first great conflict of the twentieth century were unfortunate enough to have been born into an era when advancements in science and manufacturing had elevated velocity to an art form. The largest European conflict to precede the Great War had been the Napoleonic Wars, a full hundred years earlier. Then, soldiers on all sides were armed with muskets. These had to be primed by hand; the powder carefully inserted, the bullet tapped into the muzzle. A man fighting at the Battle of Waterloo would have been expected to fire his musket only three times a minute under ideal circumstances. Even then, the weapon was wildly inaccurate over any distance greater than 80 yards.

  Compare that with the Vickers machine gun. A single gun with a crew of three men could fire 450 to 500 rounds per minute at a muzzle velocity of 813 yards per second. The gun could fire on positions up to 4500 yards away. During twelve hours in the British attack upon High Wood in August 1916, ten Vickers guns fired a million rounds.

  Not to mention artillery. The 3633 6-inch Howitzers built between 1914 and 1918 and used by the British forces fired a total of 22.4 million high explosive rounds. Each shell left the barrel at 1400 feet per second and had a range of 9500 yards. That is just one type of artillery weapon used by one army.

  Even the small-bore bolt-action rifle carried by nearly every combatant in the trenches during the First World War could be expected to fire between eight and twelve rounds a minute. It was accurate at 655 yards, but could still kill at more than twice that distance.

  The same technology that allowed Henry Ford’s motor vehicles to roll off their assembly lines so efficiently allowed these rifles,
machine guns, artillery weapons and the bullets and shells they fired — all the modern marvels of velocity — to be manufactured by the millions.

  A case in point: Sergeant Paul Ronald Hill, originally from the small English town of Walton. Elizabeth Whitman nursed Sergeant Hill at Longhurst Hospital, just outside London, after he was admitted on 5 March 1915.

  The sergeant had been wounded while he was standing in the window of a Catholic church in the remains of a French village, the name of which he did not know. He was lighting a cigarette and wondering where the rest of his company had got to when a German sniper’s bullet struck the right side of his jaw.

  The bullet that found Sergeant Hill left the sniper’s rifle at a truly impressive 2441 feet per second. It slowed only slightly over the distance of 500 yards; certainly not enough to make any tangible difference to Sergeant Hill.

  His head was turned slightly in order better to admire a stained-glass window depicting St Sebastian, through which a shaft of sunlight was falling. He thought the window gruesome, but its blue and red and purple panes were beautiful if seen in the right light. The same could be said of the bullet that shattered his lower jawbone on the right side just behind his last molar and carried on, slightly slowed but undeterred, through ligaments and the soft tissue of the mouth, severing most of the sergeant’s tongue (he had been captain of his university’s debating team and a valued member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society; of course he had). When the bullet encountered the left side of his face — just doing its job, nothing personal — it punched through that mandible as well before finally leaving the man’s body.

  It is an interesting historical side note that the bullet had enough energy left to carry on 30 feet to the other side of the church, where it became embedded in an oak beam directly above the choir stalls. The bullet remains there to this day in the fully restored church; a faithful, if ironic, witness to generations of sermons on the nature of brotherly love, to marriages and baptisms, to a century of hymns proclaiming eternal peace.

  Sergeant Hill was left clutching what was left of his face. He had to hold his jaw with both hands to prevent much of the lower half falling onto the floor at his feet where the flagstones were already dark and sticky. His mouth was a geyser.

  If not for the swift and competent attention of a medic, Sergeant Hill would have lost enough blood to have become just another sacrifice to velocity’s progress. The medic had been lying on one of the pews near the altar, trying to catch a few hours’ sleep. Sergeant Hill did not feel any pain. Not at first. The medic strapped what was left of his face together with bandages and the sergeant’s own leather belt, injected enough morphine to make him comfortable, reassured him that everything was going to be fine — an obvious lie, even to the wounded man — and left to find two stretcher bearers.

  After passing through a regimental aid post, a casualty clearing station and a field hospital where they could not do much more than crudely sew together what was left, the sergeant was evacuated to London nine days later and then transferred to Longhurst, where Elizabeth Whitman had recently joined the nursing staff.

  The hospital had formerly been a stately home. Before the war the twelfth earl had dined with his guests in Sergeant Hill’s ward. On the morning of his arrival, Elizabeth was on duty. She allocated the sergeant to Ward Four, the third bed from the door, on the south side. There were twenty other men in the room. A large fireplace at one end was burning and the patients were glad of its heat.

  Over the next eight months, Sergeant Hill underwent four extremely painful and sapping operations. Even then, there was little resemblance between Before and After.

  The hospital was within 30 miles of the sergeant’s home town. From her room at the end of the ward, Elizabeth watched during his family’s visits. Because only a third of the sergeant’s tongue remained, talking was almost impossible. His mother wept through her fixed smile. Sergeant Hill’s father could not look his son in the eye.

  Elizabeth was on duty when his mother broke the news that the sergeant’s fiancée, who had made a single shocked, fleeting visit to the hospital, had broken off their engagement. The sound of a man with grafted bones, wire for a jaw and a savaged tongue weeping in the night was not something that Elizabeth would ever forget.

  seven

  At precisely 8.30 a.m. on Saturday, Martin Templeton pulls his employer’s shiny black car up outside the cottage at 22 Sydenham Street. It is a misty morning that promises to clear into a fine day.

  Elizabeth grew up in this house and has lived there with her parents and her son, Jack, ever since her return from England. It is a modest cottage — weatherboard, square windows. There are only two small bedrooms. The outhouse is at the back, next to the vegetable patch where her father grows lettuces and carrots and runner beans up lengths of twine fixed to the paling fence.

  Elizabeth has been waiting in the shadow of the porch. She steps out through the gate before Martin Templeton is able to come to the front door. It embarrasses her enough that he holds the car door open for her.

  ‘Please, I can manage.’

  ‘Just doing my job,’ he says cheerfully.

  She knows that her mother will be watching at the kitchen window. Ingrained in both her parents is a profound distrust of the blurred hierarchy of wealth and connection that passes for class in this young country. Those working-class immigrants who sailed out from England and Scotland often did so believing that they would find themselves living in a place where a man is as good as his master. It is a credo they defend, sometimes with an almost religious fervour.

  At the moment when Elizabeth is slipping into the leather and walnut comfort of the car, her father sits in front of a coal fire in his cramped living room. He is reading the shipping news in yesterday’s newspaper while drinking his second cup of milky tea. Elizabeth’s father worked for the port company all his life. He retired five years early as a result of the coal dust that had accumulated in his lungs over a lifetime of loading the black nuggets onto ships. He votes for the Workers’ Party and still insists on paying part fees to the union from his invalid’s pension, ‘to support the cause’.

  Elizabeth knows that if her father were to see her stepping into a chauffeur-driven car, the door being held open, he would spit on the ground. His wife has the good sense not to mention it later, when she delivers his third cup of tea.

  Martin Templeton drives with both hands on the wheel, the fleshy pincer now in a black glove, three fingers of which are stuffed with tissue paper so that they do not hang limply. He is polite but mostly keeps a professional silence. The car smells of tobacco and leather polish.

  Elizabeth is driven along Mansfield’s wide, flat streets, past the cottages and factories, and then over roads lined with bungalows and villas. Eventually they cross an indistinct border into a dappled suburb where the houses have grown self-satisfied and fat, and are cloistered behind high fences. At the very edge of the city, the car slows to a near stop and, swinging off the main road like a ship turning against the current, passes between stone gateposts.

  She leans forward. ‘Are we here?’

  ‘Yes, this is Woodbridge.’

  Martin drives slowly along the tree-lined driveway. Elizabeth glimpses a house set among wide lawns, and framed by enough greenery to constitute a small forest. She cranes her neck and gazes at the largest private home she has seen since she left England. Woodbridge boasts wide bay windows, top and bottom, and a turret of sorts on the north side, complete with a spire. The roof is tiled in dark slate.

  For her father’s sake at least, Elizabeth tries not to be impressed, but it is difficult. This is a house designed to impress. As with the city’s university and other public buildings, there is something unmistakably colonial about Woodbridge. This is not what enormous wealth would have provided elsewhere. Woodbridge is made of weatherboard, not stone or brick; its bones are of the finest native timbers. The slates on the roof were quarried nearby and local craftsmen created the leadlig
ht windows using techniques and flourishes not seen on other shores. Likewise with the intricate wooden fretwork curling around the top of the verandah.

  The tyres crunch on the deep shingle as Martin Templeton brings the car to a stop in front of the steps, which sweep up to the verandah. He almost leaps from his seat and has Elizabeth’s door open before she can do it herself.

  ‘Well, here we are then,’ he says, then lowers his voice. ‘We’re a bit late. You’d better go in, pronto. Mrs Blackwell likes everything just so, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Before Elizabeth reaches the top of the steps the front door is opened by a maid. She is a skinny red-headed girl of no more than fifteen.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Whitman. Welcome to Woodbridge.’ The girl’s voice is high with nerves, the words obviously rehearsed. It is, Elizabeth thinks, as though the poor thing has been primed to greet royalty.

  ‘Hello, and thank you.’

  ‘This way, please.’

  She follows the maid into a large vestibule, panelled in dark wood. An empty coat rack stands guard over an elephant’s foot full of umbrellas and walking sticks. Family portraits cover the walls. All the Blackwells for three generations have assembled to inspect each visitor, to give them their oily nod.

  Elizabeth is suddenly irritated: by the uniformed chauffeur and the maid, by the huge house with a name, by the inspection of these stony-faced ancestors. She is not annoyed by the people themselves, but by the roles they are playing. During her time nursing in England, Elizabeth witnessed more than enough of the casual subjugation of people that is class in action.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks the girl.

  ‘Merry,’ she says hesitantly.

  ‘Hello, Merry. I’m Elizabeth. But my friends call me Lizzy.’ A wink.