To Have and to Hold

by Anne Bennett

  Jeff shrugged. ‘She doesn’t seem to worry about it,’ he said. ‘Or if she does, she hides it well.’

  ‘Could you not talk her out of it?’ Eve said. ‘Hasn’t she done her bit for long enough now?’

  ‘D’you think that I have not tried over and over to do that?’ Jeff said.

  ‘But she has a baby to see to now.’

  ‘I pointed that fact out to her, but to no avail.’

  Eve shook her head sadly. ‘God, but she is an obstinate girl.’

  Jeff laughed. ‘All I can say to that, Eve Duffy, is that it takes one to know one. Carmel is in your mould, my dear, and you have taught her well, for the pair of you are as stubborn as mules at times.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Carmel returned to a hospital in mourning for the staff and patients killed. Lois said she had seldom seen anyone as distraught as Pete had been, and that without the support of his mate Dan, he would have collapsed altogether. Dan was tremendously affected himself and when he looked at the damage to the General Hospital and the death toll, he told Sylvia he wanted her out of there, and as quickly as possible. Sylvia was not fully recovered herself and, still grief-stricken over the death of her friend, clung gratefully to Dan, whom she wanted to marry more than anything in the world.

  So, just a fortnight after Carmel returned to Birmingham, she and Lois were witnesses to the civil marriage ceremony in the registry office between Sylvia and Dan Smiley. There was no time for a honeymoon, or even a night away, but after the wedding, Dan intended installing his bride in his parents’ house in a little village called Wilnecote, near the market town of Tamworth in Staffordshire. Dan said the village had never had the hint of a bomb of any sort and that, apart from rationing and the blackout, you could almost forget there was a war on at all.

  ‘I will probably be bored to tears,’ Sylvia told Lois and Carmel. She had been born and bred in bustling Birmingham and didn’t know how she would take to village life at all. ‘But Dan said that in his opinion I have done my share and he has enough to worry about looking after himself on the battlefield without fretting that I will be safe as well.’

  ‘You can’t argue with that really, can you?’ Lois said.

  ‘No,’ Sylvia agreed. ‘I do love him to bits and I have always got on with his parents.’

  ‘Well then,’ Carmel said, ‘why the long face? After the war you will probably have the man you love by your side and a baby or two of your own to rear.’

  Sylvia knew she had much to be thankful for, but she left the hospital and her friends with genuine regret, and Carmel and Lois knew that they would miss her greatly.

  Afterwards, Lois said it was just typical that Sylvia had left to escape the bombing but that, after another fairly minor raid in May, there were just a few sporadic forays until July and then nothing at all.

  ‘Seems as if Hitler has really finished with us at last,’ Jeff told Lois and Carmel one evening in September.

  ‘We all thought that before,’ Lois reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but Hitler hadn’t set his beady eyes on Russia then. Think he has bitten off more than he can chew there. Should have read his history books and learned what happened to Napoleon when he tried a similar tack. Anyway, it augers well for the rest of us if the Luftwaffe are concentrating their energies there. What’s the news at the hospital?’

  ‘The damage has nearly all been repaired,’ Lois said. ‘Well, what I mean is the ward is useable again, except one side of it, which has been sealed off. If we really are free from raids now they might have a chance to get it back the way it was.’

  ‘I am out of all that now, anyway,’ Carmel said. ‘I have been transferred to Men’s Surgical.’

  ‘Oh, why is that then?’

  Carmel shrugged. ‘Short-staffed,’ she said. ‘And they are really rushed most of the time because as well as servicemen to deal with, they are having injured Germans in as well. It’s no rest cure, I can tell you.’

  By the early summer of 1942, everyone had began to relax, convinced at last the raids were definitely over. Added to that, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December the previous year, America had officially joined in the war. GIs were becoming common on the streets of Birmingham. ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here’ they might be, but most people thought having their support had to shorten the war.

  There was a rumour flying around the hospital that a bomb had been dropped over Solihull way on the morning of 27 July, but few believed it because there hadn’t been any sort of raid for almost a year.

  However, there was no doubting the drone of enemy planes heard heading their way that same evening and then there were the first explosions in the distance.

  ‘Where’s the bloody sirens?’ shouted one man. ‘Are they all asleep or what?’ The words were barely out of his mouth when the piercing sound rent the air.

  And although the raid wasn’t particularly long or fierce, the number of casualties was extremely high, partially because the sirens, warning people to take cover, had sounded too late.

  Far more worrying, though, was whether the raid had been the forerunner of another blitz, especially when the sirens rang out again in the evening of 30 July, despite the fact that that raid was light and barely lasted any time at all.

  The following day, Matron told Carmel she had a specific job she wanted her to take on with one of the patients.

  ‘Yes, Matron?’

  ‘His name is Terence Martin,’ Matron said, ‘and he was admitted after the first raid on 27 July. Some of the vertebrae in his back were crushed or cracked. Apparently he was helping people escape from a cellar and the lot collapsed top of him. He now has metal rods inserted in his spine. He is confined in a cage of sorts to prevent movement and it is hoped that in time the spine will heal and the bones knit back together. He’s also had a neck brace fitted, mainly as a precaution. An added difficulty is that either because of shock or trauma he hasn’t spoken one word since the accident. I thought you might understand how he feels better than anyone else. I am assigning Cassie Browning to help you. She is only a first-year probationer, but shaping up very nicely and it will be very valuable experience for her.’

  Carmel had worked with Cassie on the wards and thought she had a lot of promise, and she was looking forward to being so involved with the total care of one particular patient.

  ‘You will be directly answerable to Dr Stevens, who operated on Mr Martin,’ Matron said. ‘However, you must report to me on his progress every day and especially if there has been any deterioration in his condition. Now, I am sure you will want to meet him.’

  Mr Terence Martin was held rigid in his bed, his light brown hair flopping over his forehead, stubble covering the lower part of his pale face. In his pain-filled eyes, Carmel saw the misery and despair that had locked him away from everyone and everything. Oh, how well she remembered feeling that way, for she too had once been in that black pit of depression.

  From the first she had felt drawn to help the desperately unhappy man, and by the end of the first week she had seen a slight improvement. It was small but significant. Every day, with Cassie’s help, she would wash and shave the patient. She would be as gentle as she possibly could because his body was very battered and bruised, and she was aware too that sometimes she was washing very intimate parts of him, but he seemed unaware of it.

  The second week, he began lifting his arms as they washed him and when Carmel thanked him, she knew he had heard and understood what she had said. His food had to be puréed, and each day Carmel would check it for lumps before either she or Cassie would spoon it into his mouth. He would purse his lips when he had had enough.

  The first time he did this, Carmel, who was feeding him, smiled and said. ‘Well, I don’t see that you need much stoking, lying there all day and every day. When we have you on your feet and charging up and down the ward, I imagine that there will be no filling you. No, indeed, none at all. What do you think, Cassie?’


  ‘I think you are right, Nurse Connolly,’ Cassie said. ‘I’ll bet there will be little food refused then.’

  Terry Martin wanted to smile. He often wanted to smile at the things Carmel said, and the way she had of saying them, and at the banter between her and the young one. From the beginning Carmel had been glad of the younger girl’s cheerful disposition, for she found it was harder than she had imagined working with a silent and virtually unresponsive patient. As they weren’t on the ward and were working so closely together, Carmel had allowed Cassie greater licence and so there was a lot of banter between them and some of it was amusing, but Terry had forgotten how to smile. He hadn’t done so since that terrible day in November 1940, not that it did any good to remember that. It was like probing a sore tooth: better by far to push it down to the furthest recesses of his mind.

  ‘Would you like a drink now?’ Carmel asked, and she helped him take a drink out of the metal, lidded cup by his bed, which he had trouble using unaided without soaking the front of himself.

  A few days later, Carmel was aware that Terry’s eyes had left the point on the ceiling on which they had seemed fixed, and were following her and Cassie around the room and listening to their chat as they dealt with some aspect of his care.

  That night, she wrote letters to her family in Letterkenny and to Sister Frances, telling them what she knew of Terence Martin and asking for him to be included in their prayers. She also sought out Father Robertson after nine o’clock Mass the following Sunday, which day she had off, and, after explaining, she asked to have a Mass said for Terry.

  ‘I don’t know if he is a Catholic, Father,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if he is anything at all, if you know what I mean, but I thought God wouldn’t mind that if he is in need.’

  ‘No indeed,’ Father Robertson said. ‘I mean, Jesus didn’t ask the blind man if he was a regular at the synagogue before he restored his sight, now, did he? Is this man very badly injured?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Carmel said. ‘Though they say he will recover eventually. But it’s his mind, you see. He is a poor tormented soul who doesn’t feel worthy even of being alive.’

  ‘But how do you know this, my dear?’ the priest asked. ‘I thought you said he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk.’

  ‘Terence Martin doesn’t need to talk, Father,’ Carmel said earnestly. ‘You can read all this in his eyes. They are dark grey and fathoms deep, but so expressive.’

  ‘Rest easy, Carmel,’ the priest said. ‘I will say a Mass for this man of yours and pray for him each night. Between me, you and the Good Lord himself, the man will have no choice other than to get better and quick.’

  Two days later, as Carmel gently spooned puréed stew into Terry’s mouth, he suddenly pushed her hand away. He had eaten little and so Carmel asked, ‘Have you had enough?’

  He made no attempt to answer what Carmel asked. Instead, he held her gaze intently for a second or two and then said hesitantly, ‘Why are you bothering with me?’ in a voice husky from lack of use.

  However, Carmel didn’t care what the voice sounded like. Terry had spoken for the first time since the accident, and her heart soared in thankfulness. But she reminded herself he’d asked a question that needed addressing. ‘Why wouldn’t I bother with you?’

  ‘You don’t know me, what sort of person I am.’

  ‘I know all I need to know—that you are ill and I am tending you because I am a nurse and that is what we do. So shall we go from that premise?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘So we will have no more of that kind of talk.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so,’ Carmel said with an emphatic nod of her head.

  Matron was as pleased as Carmel was at Terence Martin’s progress. ‘The timing couldn’t be better,’ she said. ‘Dr Stevens intended to see how he was getting on tomorrow anyway. This will be a bit of good news for him.’

  Dr Stevens was pleased with everything, not least the way that Mr Martin’s back was healing. He praised Carmel for keeping the scar so clean and infection free. He was nearly at the door when he suddenly turned.

  ‘Connolly?’ he said to Carmel. ‘Were you married to Dr Paul Connolly?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Stevens.’

  ‘Heard he had married a nurse,’ the doctor said. ‘You have my sympathies, my dear. It was a tragic waste too, for he was a first-class doctor and a thoroughly nice chap into the bargain. I well remember when he was a student here.’

  Carmel was too choked to make a reply and barely had the door shut on the doctor than Terry called across, ‘What happened to your husband?’

  Carmel waited until she had crossed the room and sat on the bed, so that Terry could see her, which also gave her a few seconds to compose herself. Then she said, ‘Paul was with the Medical Corps of the Royal Warwickshires and he didn’t return from Dunkirk.’ She left time for that to sink in, time for Terry to make a comment and when he didn’t she said, ‘Now my turn for a question for you. Were you in the Forces, Mr Martin?’

  ‘No,’ Terry said. ‘I am a gas fitter, a reserved occupation. And what is all this Mr Martin business? I have a name and it’s Terry.’

  ‘I’ll call you Terry when we are in here,’ Carmel promised.

  ‘Have you a name, or have I to call you Nurse Connolly?’

  ‘My name is Carmel.’

  ‘Pretty name. Unusual.’

  ‘Not particularly in the North of Ireland where I came from,’ Carmel told him. ‘And while we can use our Christian names when we are in the room on our own, Dr Stevens and Matron might not like such familiarity so when they are here, I will be Nurse Connolly and you will be Mr Martin.’

  ‘That’s daft!’ Terry said. ‘Is that the rule for young Cassie too? She told me her name while you were on your break.’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ Carmel said. ‘We are supposed to treat you in a totally professional way. It is just more difficult in a situation like this. Anyway, your turn for a question.’

  ‘Right,’ Terry said. ‘Did you and Paul have any children?’

  ‘Just the one, a little girl that we called Beth. She is just two and a half.’

  She saw the blank look suddenly flood Terry’s face as if someone had turned the light off in his eyes, and was alarmed. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Terry said. ‘It’s nothing, but I don’t want to play this game any more and I am too tired to answer any more questions.’

  Carmel didn’t argue. Terry certainly seemed suddenly very weary and she tucked the blankets around him and left the room, and so didn’t see the tears seep from his eyes as he closed them.

  When Terry woke up Carmel realised the shuttered look was still there on his face and he was exactly the same three days later. He answered anything asked him brusquely and sometimes not at all. No one else saw a problem, particularly the doctor, who had popped in a couple of times since Terry’s silence had been broken and was delighted with him. Terry did whatever he asked him and answered his questions, and Dr Stevens remembered how unresponsive and uncommunicative he had been and thought Carmel had worked a miracle.

  Carmel, however, wasn’t happy at all. One evening she talked it over with Lois, and Jeff, who was round to see her. ‘He makes all the right responses and that is it,’ she said. ‘There is no real communication. It’s just as if he has pulled down the blind and effectively shut himself off. He reminds me of a hurt or damaged animal that has dragged himself away to lick his wounds in private. I’m sure inside Terry Martin is curled a tight knot of heartache.’

  ‘Maybe this is his way of coping,’ Lois said. ‘Anyway, aren’t we warned not to get personally involved?’

  ‘That’s what we’re told, all right,’ Carmel conceded. ‘It is sometimes quite hard to put into practice. It is tough dealing with Terry physically, knowing that I can only do so much. Even when he recovers, he will still be carrying around emotional scars that will probably drag him down again.’

  ‘Does he have v
isitors?’

  ‘No,’ Carmel answered. ‘I spoke to the nurse who was on duty when he was admitted and those in the post-operative unit. They told me that no one had even been to enquire whether he was going to live or die, never mind visit.’

  ‘Ah, that’s sad,’ Lois said. ‘But I would still keep right out of it as far as you possibly can.’

  Knowing Lois had a very valid point, Carmel said nothing, and things continued in the same vein day after day. When, after three weeks, the matron asked Carmel what she had found out about Mr Martin’s background she had to say, ‘Virtually nothing, Matron.’

  ‘Nothing? You are with him day after day,’ the matron said incredulously. ‘Don’t you talk together?’

  ‘Not really,’ Carmel said. ‘I ask him questions if I have to and he answers, in monosyllables if he can.’

  ‘I can scarcely believe this.’

  ‘I think there is something in his past bothering him that I would hesitate to disturb because I think his mental state is very precarious,’ Carmel said. ‘When Terry, Mr Martin, first began to talk, Dr Stevens made some comment about Paul and when he had gone Mr Martin asked me what had happened to Paul and I told him. Then he asked me if I had any family and it was when I told him about Beth that he changed. He said he didn’t want to answer any more questions. If anything, he has gone backwards since then.’

  ‘Dear, dear, this will never do,’ Matron said. ‘Till Mr Martin spoke to you he hadn’t opened his mouth and all we knew about him was the things the neighbours knew, and that too was precious little. No one has been in to see him or even enquire about him and my guess is no one knows where he is. Of course, it is quite possible that the man is alone in the world but we need to be sure. What would he do if you asked him direct questions again?’

  ‘I don’t know, Matron, but I have the feeling that he would become very distressed.’

  ‘Would you try it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t the doctor ask him these things?’