Snowflakes in the Wind

by Rita Bradshaw

  Abby needed little persuasion to put herself forward to become part of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. She was patriotic and found herself hungry for adventure, and the QAs’ uniform – a strikingly attractive combination of grey dress and scarlet-trimmed cape – was an added bonus. Once the matron had spoken to her, the thunderclouds of a Second World War became obvious and she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. In the Far East two of the world’s ancient civilizations, China and Japan, had clashed in a war that looked as though it would engulf the whole of the Pacific; Europe’s dictators were using a bloody civil war in Spain as a military exercise, and democracies were seeking to appease Hitler by sacrificing a free nation, Czechoslovakia, while Stalin’s Russia was entering an unholy alliance with its bitterest enemy.

  So it was, as Britain was forced to go from a policy of appeasement to declaring war on Germany when Hitler invaded Poland at the beginning of September, Abby and another nurse from Hemingway’s found themselves on the way to a mobilizing unit some twenty-five miles south of Edinburgh. Kitty and four other nurses had joined up at the same time but had been allocated to a different unit, much to Abby and Kitty’s disappointment. They had hoped to remain together.

  In peacetime, the centre had been an imposing five-star hotel and it was set in glorious countryside. Now, however, the elegant tennis courts were covered in khaki tents. As Abby and Sybil climbed down from the bus that had transported them to the centre from the train station, the warm September air echoed to the despairing bellow of a sergeant major who was drilling a number of nurses in the distance.

  The two women looked at each other. The September afternoon was beautiful, the sky so blue and the sun so hot it was like a July day, and the scents of summer hung in the gentle breeze. It seemed impossible they were actually at war. But here they were, and already, from the way the sergeant in charge of the bus had yelled at everyone, they felt they were in the army. At Hemingway’s, their positions in the hierarchy of the hospital had earned them a well-deserved respect. Now Abby felt as nervous as when she had first arrived at Hemingway’s as a trainee.

  It was clear Sybil was feeling exactly the same, her murmur of, ‘What on earth have we let ourselves in for?’ bringing a rueful smile to both girls’ lips. Not that they were given any time to reflect. After being shown their sleeping quarters, they were chivvied along to the army doctor for a full medical examination, after which their inoculations for typhus, typhoid and smallpox followed. Once that was over, and while their arms were still stinging, they were marched to a room for their initial ‘welcome’.

  The sergeant major who surveyed the new intake appeared distinctly unimpressed. He walked among them, hands clasped behind his back and chin up, shaking his head now and again. ‘So you want to serve your country as army nurses?’

  No one replied, surmising – correctly – that the question was rhetorical.

  ‘Well, let me tell you, ladies, that you will need to be toughened up before you can be moulded into the army’s idea of a nurse. Right? The purpose of this training unit is twofold. One, to train you physically and professionally for what lies ahead, and believe me, it won’t be pretty. It is also to create a mobile hospital unit in which you will remain together, in different locations as needed, for the duration of the war. Your unit will comprise doctors, pharmacy and laboratory technicians, and army privates trained in first aid who are known as orderlies. Is that clear? Good.’

  More pacing up and down.

  ‘In the army you are not required to think, merely to obey,’ he continued loudly. ‘Rank is paramount. Everyone has their role to play, and there is no room for what you might call initiative. You are now QAs, and that means more than the new uniform you will be wearing.’

  Much more followed, and by the time Abby and Sybil were dismissed and told to make their way to the mess room where their evening meal was waiting, Abby’s head was spinning. Sybil felt the same, her mutter of, ‘Come back, Matron Blackett, all is forgiven,’ bringing a smile to Abby’s face.

  After their meal another lecture followed. This one was regarding the list of endless forms that the nurses would be required to complete in a military hospital for even the most simple of procedures, after which each girl was given a photograph detailing the correct locker layout and told to memorize it. Inspections would take place each morning, and woe betide any nurse whose locker was less than perfectly arranged. Abby didn’t dare look at Sybil for fear of laughing. The army was making Matron Blackett appear to be almost flexible.

  In spite of being tired that night, it took Abby a long time to fall asleep, her mind so active she wished she could flick a switch and turn it off. She had gone home for a brief visit before she had left for the training centre in Scotland, and her grandfather hadn’t been able to hide his distress when she’d told them she had enlisted as a QA.

  Why couldn’t she have been content to nurse the ill and needy here at home? he’d asked her more than once. She didn’t have to put herself in danger to fulfil her vocation. Robin had said nothing, but it was clear he agreed with Wilbert by his very silence. It was only Rachel who had hugged her and said she had to follow her own star.

  But it wasn’t really the family she was thinking about as she tossed and turned in the narrow army bed. It was Nicholas. There hadn’t been a day in the intervening years that she hadn’t dissected their last meeting word for word, doubts about whether she’d done the right thing in sending him away paramount. And now, with Britain at war, she found herself even more uncertain. Useless to tell herself it had been the only thing she could have done. Her head knew that; her heart was a different matter. The years had been a subtle torment at times, knowing he was out there living, laughing, perhaps even loving, and all without her.

  She’d written him letters many times pouring out her regret but she had never sent one of them. It wouldn’t have been fair because nothing could change.

  Now it was worse, though. They were at war and although nothing much had happened yet, it would do. Everyone said so. Nicholas might be injured or killed and she wouldn’t know. Of course that had always been the case – war or no war – but somehow it was more poignant now.

  Eventually she drifted off into a troubled sleep, waking in the morning in a more positive frame of mind. It was the nights, when she was exhausted and her resistance was low, that doubts and regrets consumed her. Her days were always so busy she didn’t have time to brood. And she soon found being in the army was even more exhausting than life at Hemingway’s but that was welcome. It meant she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

  The nurses were certainly put through their paces physically and Abby often wondered how poor Kitty was coping. Her friend was two or three stone overweight, added to which Kitty hated any form of exercise. Now, at the training centre, Abby and the others were made to hike up and down the steep Scottish hills in battledress and tin hats with full packs on their backs, along with vaulting five-bar gates and learning self-defence. More crucially, they learned how the army dealt with casualties in the field and exactly what was expected of a nurse under fire. They mastered how to keep medical records in the field, how to purify water and the layout of a hospital under canvas. Abby became familiar with the progress of a patient from the time they were picked up by the stretcher bearers until they were evacuated by sea or air back to the United Kingdom, or – if sufficiently recovered – sent back for service with their company.

  The lectures the women attended were no less challenging. They detailed the kind of injuries the battlefields inflicted on human flesh and bone, and the surgical officer describing the amputation of a cold and gangrenous limb took no account of the nurses’ bleached faces. Neither did the army dental officer when his turn came. When lecturing on how to deal with a fractured jaw he spoke matter-of-factly and coldly, but the content was no less harrowing for that. ‘Treat for shock first,’ he said flatly, ‘and then pick out any loose teeth and bits of b
one before you put a stitch through the patient’s tongue and tie it to a button on his jacket. Only then send him down the line on a stretcher for the surgeon.’

  Abby glanced round the room at this point. More than one of her fellow trainees were looking distinctly green about the gills, and she knew how they felt.

  One of the things the centre placed a great deal of importance on was teaching the hitherto civilian nurses the necessity of becoming rank conscious, and to feel and behave like the army officers they were. Fraternizing with other ranks was a definite no-no. While undergoing their training, they were to mix socially only with other officers. Whenever they left the camp to go into Glasgow or Edinburgh, the sergeant major bellowed, as though they were hard of hearing, that full uniform must be worn, and they were always to be accompanied by other officers. Did they understand? Always.

  Saluting was another aspect of training some of the nurses found difficult. As Sybil complained to Abby, ‘When someone salutes me I’m always so surprised and flummoxed the last thing I think to do is to salute back. And then by the time I do remember it’s too late, and I’m in trouble again. I mean, it’s embarrassing, this saluting thing. I’m a nurse, for goodness’ sake. Just a nurse.’ It was a view shared by quite a few of the trainees and one that the army was determined to erase.

  By the time Abby and Sybil had been at the training centre for a few weeks, it had become apparent to the powers that be that the first rush and scramble to ship nurses to join the British Expeditionary Force in France was somewhat unnecessary. The expected assault by Germany on Western Europe wasn’t happening, and the thousand or so QAs who were residing in France by the end of the year were writing home that time dragged. Despite the dampening down of the initial panic, however, the rigid training at the centre continued, but at least the nurses gained more time to pull their full QA uniform together and become more accepting of what was required of them.

  Christmas came and went, and Abby and Sybil, like everyone they spoke to, were finding the ‘phoney war’ tedious towards the end of their mobilization period. As the finish of training grew nearer, a certain tension mounted among the nurses. Speculation was rife as to when they would be leaving – and for where – but the war warning of ‘Walls have ears’ was the watchword, and the nurses were under strict orders not to discuss their movements with anyone. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Abby complained to Sybil one evening in February when they had been at the centre for several months. ‘We are never told anything at the best of times.’

  Sybil nodded, adding in an undertone, ‘But the writing’s on the wall, sure enough. Why else have they started us pulling everything together today?’

  A little shiver of excitement slid down Abby’s spine. Sybil was right. A crucial task that had to be undertaken before a unit could embark for overseas service was packing up the equipment a mobile military hospital would need in the field. The laborious job took days as each piece of hospital equipment had to be wrapped, labelled and crated in meticulous order so that the whole lot could be reassembled with the minimum of delay in the field. Each surgical instrument had to be greased to prevent rust, wrapped in oiled paper, sewn in sacking and packed in the crates which were then stencilled with a number.

  Abby looked down at her hands. Her fingers were already sore from sewing the coarse sacking, and her hair and skin stank with the smell of lubricating grease, but if it meant they were finally going to be on their way . . . Wherever their way was, of course.

  The next day the QAs knew their departure date was imminent when the sergeant arranged for the purchasing of a kit that would provide them with warmth and shelter in any kind of terrain. The list comprised a tin trunk, a camp bed, a bedroll, a canvas wash bowl and tripod, a collapsible canvas bath that looked woefully inadequate, a canvas bucket and a tiny paraffin stove. This, they were told, along with their regular uniform and tropical kit, was to be packed in the way they had been taught to make the most of every inch of space.

  The next days were ones of cleaning, painting, sewing and hammering as the finished crates grew in number and rumours abounded. But still no one knew anything for sure.

  It was on the fifth day, as the nurses were finishing their evening meal in what the army insisted on calling the mess room, that Abby turned to Sybil and the others and said softly, ‘We’re going to hear something in the next twenty-four hours. I feel it in my bones. Perhaps even tonight.’

  ‘Well, I’m ready.’ Sybil glanced towards the window where a sleety snow was falling. ‘And I hope it’s anywhere but England. This winter seems to have gone on and on.’

  It had been a vicious winter which hadn’t exactly lifted the spirits of the common working man. In January the Thames had frozen over for the first time in decades and the worst storms of the century had swept a beleaguered UK. Two million nineteen- to twenty-seven-year-olds had been called up to add to their womenfolk’s distress as food rationing had come into play; the rigid new rationing laws demanding the compulsory registration of every household with their local shops.

  Yes, Abby thought, it had been a long, hard, cold winter but as yet the UK had been relatively untroubled by Hitler and the war. It couldn’t continue and the warning signs were already trickling through the apathy which the ‘phoney war’ had caused. The Germans had gained ground in January in a fierce onslaught along a 120-mile front north of Paris, and the Luftwaffe had attacked British ships in a flare-up of the sea war. Just the week before, Hitler had ordered German U-boat commanders to attack all neutral shipping as well as Allied vessels in the Channel, declaring that all shipping was fair game.

  The nationwide government anti-gossip campaign had gathered steam too, and posters were everywhere – in offices, barbers’ shops, banks, docks, hotels and pubs. Hitler was depicted crouching under a bus seat, leaning on his elbow on a bar counter and even lying on a luggage rack. ‘Walls have ears’ and ‘Keep it dark’ were the new catchphrases, and when one of the nurses had giggled at a poster showing two old women gossiping on a train with Hitler and Himmler sitting behind them, remarking that one of the old ladies looked like her granny, their sergeant major had nearly burst a blood vessel. The poster had been stuck on the wall of the mess room in front of where they queued for their food, and he’d come up behind her and screamed so loudly in her ear that she had dropped her plate of stew all over his highly polished boots.

  Abby glanced across the room to where the poster still hung. It was funny, she thought, and they shouldn’t make it so comical if they didn’t want folk to laugh. But then, the army didn’t see the funny side of anything and she was sure their sergeant major didn’t know how to smile.

  As though her thoughts had drawn him, she watched in the next moment as he made his way over to them. ‘Lecture room two in’ – he consulted his watch – ‘three and a half minutes.’ His unforgiving gaze swept over the table. ‘And for crying out loud, try to look more like army personnel in front of the major else he’ll wonder what the hell I’ve been doing over the last months.’

  ‘The major.’ Abby looked at Sybil. ‘We’re going, they’re going to tell us we’re going . . .’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hong Kong, October, 1941

  ‘It can’t go on, you know.’ Nicholas took a sip of his gin cocktail. ‘We’re sitting ducks here and the Japanese must know it.’

  ‘Here he goes, the prophet of doom.’

  ‘I mean it, John.’ Nicholas looked at his friend who was a fellow army doctor, having joined up, like him, as soon as war was declared. The two of them were comfortably ensconced at their table in the officers’ club. ‘Look at how many Chinese refugees have fled here to escape the slaughter in their country in the last few years.’

  ‘But that’s a private fight between two age-old oriental enemies, Nick. You know that. I’m not saying the Japanese aren’t brutal so-an’-sos, and the massacre of all those thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Nanking was horrendous, but the Japs won’t targe
t us here. Why would they? They’d be fools to take the colonies on.’

  Nicholas shook his head. John was like many others here who genuinely believed that the British and Empire forces in the Far East, alongside the Americans, wielded enough military muscle to defeat the Japanese if they dared to attack. They forgot that Britain’s Asian forces had been severely depleted by the need to send men and machines to Britain and the Middle East. The trouble was that John wanted to believe that life on this paradise island where everyone was busy having a good time would continue. The endless parties, squash, tennis, dancing and sailing that were part of colonial life were seductively dangerous. ‘John, you know as well as I do that we’re hopelessly unprotected here, both in equipment and men. Before the war Hong Kong might have been a key staging post of the British Empire but not any more. The RAF are still recovering from the Battle of Britain and our navy are stretched to the limit defending the homeland and maintaining our fragile lifeline across the Atlantic. Churchill’s hung us out to dry. I’m sorry but that’s the way I see it.’

  John Baxter stared at the man he counted as a dear friend. He had a lot of time for Nick but he could be one hell of a killjoy. ‘You don’t think this might be because you’ve always felt guilty about being posted here, especially since the war’s hotted up? Look, we were sent here, end of story. It could have been anywhere but it happened to be the exotic East where when the day’s work’s done, we’re forced to sit on airy verandahs drinking Singapore slings and chatting up women. Not that you ever do any of the latter. It worried me for a time, you know, your lack of interest in the opposite sex. Especially with us sharing a room.’