Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  Jean-Marie would have his treat.

  A major was waiting for her in the kitchen when she finished her rounds the next morning, trying not to think of Angus, trying to resist the urge to order a car and attempt to search, to find the général and ask for answers. Angus was a captain, decorated with the country’s highest honour. If he could be found, he would be found, and not by Sophie Higgs.

  The kitchen was the only room in the house that had no beds in it. The major stood up as she entered.

  ‘I’m sorry, I hope you haven’t been waiting long. Jean-Marie only just remembered to give me the message.’

  ‘He appeared to be the only one on duty.’ He nodded to her abruptly. ‘Major Commington, British Medical Corps.’

  ‘Miss Sophie Higgs. I am pleased to meet you, Major Commington.’ She had to work on the smile today. ‘And we are all on duty — either on duty or asleep. But as you can see, this house was never designed as a hospital. We have no waiting rooms or reception rooms.’

  ‘Nor any trained personnel either, I gather, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘We are all trained, Major.’ She tried to make her tone both professional and charming. ‘All of us have worked with the wounded for over three years. We also have the good Dr Armoire.’

  ‘A French leech merchant, I’m told. A job done badly does not get any better for being done often. Miss Higgs, it has come to our attention that you have malingerers here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘We have received eight notifications of shell shock from your establishment in the past week. Miss Higgs, apparently you do not realise that the War Office no longer recognises shell shock as a medical condition. It is simply another term for cowardice or lack of moral fibre.’

  She closed her eyes for a second. I have two choices, she thought. I can tell him to get out — out of my house, out of our lives. And then I shall find the Military Police inspecting the hospital every few days, hauling men out screaming and trembling …

  She looked up at him and smiled with every ounce of art she had, saw the automatic smile flick back. She fought to dredge up charm, to keep her voice soft. ‘It is so hard to keep up with regulations, isn’t it, Major Commington? Especially for a woman.’

  He gave a pleased huff. ‘Yes, indeed, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘You must be so tired of trying to organise so many unofficial hospitals.’

  ‘If you only knew, Miss Higgs.’

  Sophie smiled at him again. ‘I will do my best not to add to your headaches, Major. From now you will find no more shell shock cases here.’

  He bowed. ‘Thank you, Miss Higgs.’

  Was Angus in some ward, too numb to even speak his own name, the horror of what he had seen that morning of the first mustard-gas attack too much for him to bear? Or had he finally refused to serve, unable to carry on, even as liaison to the général? They wouldn’t court-martial a VC, but they could shoot him and say it had been enemy fire, say he was missing, announcing the death long after his family could find out the truth.

  No. She wouldn’t believe that. He was alive. He must be.

  She waited till she heard the clank of the crank as the major’s driver started his staff car, then went to find Dodders, who was scrubbing chamber pots in the scullery.

  ‘What’s up, old thing?’

  ‘We need a second hospital. And a benign army doctor, who will put “high blood pressure” instead of “shell shock” on medical certificates.’

  Dodders nodded, clearly thinking of something else. ‘Soapy, you’d better come see this.’

  ‘This’ was their back courtyard, full of weeds, broken furniture … and men in French uniforms. Among them were skeletal children, women with dusty skirts and desperate eyes. As she looked through the window, she saw Madame Fuchon bring out a big black pot of stew, holding it up so that each person could drink a ladleful.

  It was surprisingly orderly, terrifyingly silent.

  ‘This is where the potatoes have been going,’ said Dodders.

  The potatoes came with the corned beef, carrots and cabbage sent weekly by Mr Slithersole. War-ploughed France could hardly feed its own, much less the various armies fighting — and eating — on its fields. Mr Slithersole’s supplies came from across the Empire, including Canada, closer than Australia for perishables. Neither France nor England produced enough food to feed her people now. The huge pre-war harvests had become meagre, planted and harvested by women and old men with no machinery or horses to help. But more ships were making their way across the Atlantic: American and Australian. A shipload of flour, potatoes, corned beef could reach them in three weeks … Sophie almost smiled at the heresy of planning to use other than Higgs’s corned beef.

  Sophie nodded. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘You always do, old thing,’ said Dodders.

  Sophie waited in the kitchen until Madame had come in with her empty pot. ‘Madame, what is this, please?’

  Madame looked at her steadily. ‘These men, they are soldiers of France, mademoiselle. When they can no longer fight they are let go, to find their way home, and starve while they are doing it. The others,’ she shrugged, ‘some have a roof, but no food. Others have neither food nor roof. Should I let them go hungry, mademoiselle, while we have food?’

  If Angus were staggering dazed in France or Belgium, Sophie hoped he’d find a haven that might feed him too.

  ‘We will feed them,’ she promised softly. ‘Let them all come.’

  Chapter 61

  JANUARY TO OCTOBER 1918

  Dear Sophie,

  Dodders wrote to her brother about your hospitals. Her brother was at school with mine, and he passed the story on to me as an example of English pluck. I didn’t let on you are Australian or maybe New Zealander like your dad. Well done, old girl. Reckon you can organise supplies yourself, but just you remember you don’t HAVE to do it all yourself, and it won’t take me more than two shakes of a dog’s tail to get our suppliers to send stuff your way too.

  We’ve got a baker’s dozen of new helpers this month. I’m the only one who started who’s still here, and looks like I’ll be the only one to finish the war here too — whenever that may be — mostly because dealing with the supply side I don’t get my hands wet and cracked and infected like the others. A year on and three months off to recover seem to be what our girls can manage. Midge is in Dover, off looking after her brother, Doug — got his leg blown off. Human beings are designed wrong, in my opinion. We should have fewer appendages to get shot at. Especially men.

  Anne writes that she is recovering well from the wounds she recieved when the shell got her. Wish I could get back to see her, but her ma is turning out to be a brick. Thought she’d have pink kittens about a daughter with a scarred face, because she was in a right dither about one with big feet and spots. But it seems a daughter shot up by the Hun isn’t the same as one who isn’t a fairy princess to be presented during the season. I’ll never understand the upper crust. I miss her and Midge more than I can say.

  Speaking of crusts, don’t you go forgetting to eat either. Keep up your own strength, girl. I speak from experience. It’s right easy to get so caught up feeding others you end up looking like a match with the wood shaved off, and about as much use.

  One day this war will end and there’ll be good times again. I plan to get a motorbike like Dodders’s.

  Your loving friend,

  Ethel

  Time had vanished in routine after Alison’s death. Now it returned. Every second was pushed to make twenty. Here, in the midst of carnage, Sophie had never felt more alive.

  The village café became a canteen, with soup and bread for all. The church became a hostel — Monsieur le Curé had vanished as a chaplain to the army — with two rooms, one for men and the other for women and children, presided over by two nuns with faces as white as their wimples, who kept decency and order. After his initial reluctance, Sophie’s father’s funds now appeared limited only by her energy
to use them.

  Worry about Angus had become a small burning sore. She worked, and bore it.

  By March she had two hospitals, five canteens and four refugee hostels operating, and an alliance with two American women. They coordinated relief parcels sent from the United States and originally left in a heap on the dock to rot, but now ferried in vans driven by more trousered women up to Belgium from the south of France.

  Life was made up of sandwiches of duty: making lists, added to ordering supplies, waiting endlessly for telephone calls to be put through at Monsieur the Stationmaster’s, while back in England the dowager duchess had the telephone line extended to her bed, and was calling every friend for volunteers and help.

  Men died in her hospitals. They saved many too. They saved women and children who might have starved, or been driven by desperation to acts they would not be able to face if — when — peace returned.

  In odd moments between anguish and exhaustion, and in the three seconds before falling over the wall into a few short hours of sleep, Sophie felt the deepest fulfilment she had ever known.

  The Laurels, Sussex

  15 April 1918

  Dear Sophie,

  I have heard from Her Grace that you have opened not one but two hospitals in France, and canteens and hostels for refugees too. I wish you to know that you have whatever support I or my husband can offer you. I have already organised for six chests of woollen children’s garments to be sent to your Mr Slithersole. He assures me that whatever one sends to him will find its way to wherever you need it most. Our St Anne’s Ladies’ Guild is collecting old clothes to make patchwork quilts, and they assure me there will be fifty finished to send to you next week.

  Thank you for your support the last time we met. I do truly hope we will meet again in happier circumstances.

  Yours always,

  Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks (Emily)

  Chapter 62

  Everything ends — us, the war, the world. Take no notice, my dear Isobel, I am just tired.

  Miss Lily, 11 November 1918

  11 NOVEMBER 1918 TO JANUARY 1919

  The guns stopped.

  For an hour, perhaps, Sophie was unaware of it. A man was dying: one of the cases where moving him would be futile, death would only be hastened, pain increased, the end more agonising in a truck or bullock cart. Sophie sat while he coughed up blood and black tissue that could be lung, throat, tongue, from lips bubbled and blistered like boiling water that had somehow set on a living face.

  It was the worst of deaths: a man who needed to die, a body that refused to let him do so.

  At last the gasping stopped. His eyes stretched wide, his face set in the last moment of pain. His heart had finally stopped, thought Sophie gratefully, the torn lungs no longer having to strain.

  She stood up, went to the window and saw Jean-Marie pedalling hard even though he was hurtling down the hill, waving his slouch hat — tattered, with a bullet hole through the brim, a present from an Australian soldier, and Jean-Marie’s proudest possession.

  ‘Mesdemoiselles! L’Armistice! L’Armistice!’

  Charlie bounded at his side, his leaps even higher than before. Charlie has been listening to the guns, she thought. Now he does not have to hear them any more.

  Dodders was already at the front door. The other women gathered around her. Men called from their beds.

  ‘An armistice? Is it true, miss? Is it really true?’

  She shrugged, felt dampness on her face and realised she was crying. No, not her. Her body, shedding tears. For her mind could not believe it. Not yet.

  The world was war. It had always been war. It would always be war.

  Impossible that the war could be over.

  It was.

  They went back to work: the pans to be emptied, the dressings to be changed, the bodies to be laid out. Men didn’t stop dying because the shelling had ceased. But today when Suzie, Pats, Dodo, Tish, Rachel, Blinkers and all the others stopped their trucks, their vans, their ambulances at the hospital that Sophie had made her headquarters, it was to drink a cup of chicory coffee topped up with brandy.

  ‘We’re going home,’ said Dodders. She shook her head. ‘We made it through. We’re going home.’

  She cares, thought Sophie. Not just about the men. Perhaps they are all one cause to her. She cares about us. Me, Sloggers, Blinkers, Stinkers, Ethel, Sylvia, Marie — the army of unofficial women who had borne so much of the war. And Jean-Marie, of course, too.

  Sophie glanced out the window at Jean-Marie, riding his bicycle in tighter and tighter circles about the courtyard, around a heap of the rubble from next door, while Charlie chewed a bone that had been twice boiled for soup.

  He has survived, she thought. Jean-Marie at least is safe, and Charlie. Angus, are you safe too?

  Eight weeks later Jean-Marie was in bed number eighty-six, Charlie lying on the floor beside him, as though to guard him as he had guarded Sophie that long night over a year ago. The winter winds had teeth of ice. Weakened bodies slumped with influenza. Most of the military patients had been moved now, even the shell shock cases, now that there was no war for the authorities to send them back to. The two worst burns cases had been the last to go; the sister of one had arranged a private ambulance, to spare the men the hours on windswept railway platforms and on a boat’s deck.

  Perhaps it helped Jean-Marie’s mother to have Sophie sit with him, all through that night, as the small body coughed and heaved and tried to breathe.

  Dodders brought them cocoa at two am, as well as freshly heated bricks to warm the cot. How did I never see how small he is? marvelled Sophie, cuddling Charlie’s warmth as she sipped her cocoa. Perhaps because of his energy, burning so brightly as he pedalled from post to post.

  ‘If there were justice in this world, Jean-Marie would have a medal,’ she said to Dodders across the bed.

  ‘If there were justice in this world, none of us would be here.’ Dodders’s face was white behind the glow of candlelight. ‘Get some sleep, old thing. I’ll wait with him.’

  Wait, thought Sophie. Have we accepted death as inevitable now? But then she realised ‘wait’ could mean so many things: waiting till morning, till his fever broke, till he turned the corner … it was she who assumed that waiting was for one thing only.

  She would have to get used to peace, and hope. There is still hope, she told herself. Hope for Jean-Marie; hope for Angus, in a prison camp perhaps.

  Her hands hurt. Her hands always hurt. Like Dodders’s, Marie’s and Sylvia’s, her hands were always red and cracked, always in water after touching infected wounds, always infected themselves. Never so badly that she had to stop working, like some of the girls, who’d had to go back to England to recover. Her work in administration had given her hands some respite. My body is still strong, she thought, looking down as the boy heaved another breath. But I will have to wear gloves now, if I am to be beautiful. Women over forty must always wear gloves, Miss Lily had once said. A smile can be any age. Hands show the years you’ve known. How many years ago had that been? Literally a lifetime. She was not the Sophie of five years ago, or even two.

  One year of war aged more than ten of peace. My hands are old, thought Sophie. My soul is old too. And then, It has been more than a year since I thought of how I looked.

  Despite the plague of influenza, peace, true peace, was coming at last.

  Whitehall, London

  20 January 1919

  My dear Sophie,

  Thank you for your last letter. You are the one woman in the world who says, ‘I hope your work is going well’, assuming that I work for my country as devotedly as any man who wears a uniform. It has been perhaps the hardest duty of this war not to wear one.

  My work, and that of others, has resulted in a negotiated peace. I may say to you, as I cannot say to others beyond the cabinet and trusted associates, that this is a bad peace. The terms the French demanded are a continuation of the assault on Germany, meant to keep them powerless
, starving and in the gutter. Clemenceau has been merciless, vengeful and deeply shortsighted. Germans will look up and see what might have been, what might still be. The terms signed in that train carriage in the forest of Compiègne merely extend the war, though the actual hostilities may not break out for another decade, or even two. Germany will rise again and rearm.

  Do we rearm ourselves too, diverting funds that should be put into peace? Or do we beat our swords into ploughshares and hope that without the deadly competition between empires, Germany will stay content within its negotiated borders? My questions are good ones, my dear, but unfortunately for my job and my country, I have no answers.

  I have heard of your work from many quarters, by the way. You have impressed even Whitehall. ‘Excellent work,’ one private secretary said to me last night, ‘especially for a colonial.’ I can see your smile at that.

  I hope I will see you in person soon too, but, you will note, I do not urge you home to England, much as I wish to see you. You will do your duty as long as you are needed, nor would I wish Sophie Higgs to do otherwise.

  Yours always,

  James

  Jean-Marie did not die. Nor did his mother, who went down with the ’flu herself just as her son recovered. Nor did Stinkers, nor Sloggers, who both went down with it as well.

  Dodders died, though. Dodders with her grin and motorbike. She would never peel turnips at the Workmen’s Friendship Club again; never chain herself to a parliamentary railing for women’s suffrage. Dodders died as she had spent her whole adult life: working for others.

  It was only when Sophie went to wake her for her shift that they realised.

  Her face looked different. Vacant. Some people looked the same in death. Not Dodders.

  Sophie did not get the ’flu. Somehow her body resisted the illness, just as it had refused to let the infections in her hands take hold. Jean-Marie’s father did not get the ’flu. He returned, thin and still in uniform, on the day they first let Jean-Marie out of bed, his mother recovering, watching from the window, Charlie leaping at his small master’s side.