by Leah Fleming
Yolanda’s uniform had hung useless on the hook behind her bedroom door since her arrival. Every time she went to wear it her mother would weep.
‘You’ve done enough for Greece. We need you here, now we can be truly a family once more. I have such plans.’
How could she tell them she was here only by accident? Helping a wounded soldier onto the gangplank of the Ulster Prince from the ferry boat, he’d suddenly collapsed, clinging to her for dear life, and she’d had no option but to hold his hand and escort him right into the bowels of the hospital ship. She’d needed to pass on his notes and check details. It was only when she’d heard the engines roaring into life and felt the motion of the ship that she’d realized they were heading out of the harbour under cover of darkness. It had been too late to scramble up on deck and plead her case.
As the hours passed, her panic had turned into weary resignation. Nobody would turn back for one nurse, and besides, she was needed here. It had been a relief to learn that they were heading out to Crete. The decision whether or not to stay on in Athens had been taken out of her hands, though she worried about her nursing friends, especially Penny. What must she be thinking? Were they waiting for her to report for duty? What if Penny had boarded another ship? There’d been such danger on the crossing – was she still alive? Yolanda felt guilt as well as relief when she heard rumours that other ships had been sunk, and she had a sickening feeling she would never see her friend again. Already Athens was feeling a world away from her life now. She had no papers, only her Red Cross credentials and the knowledge that Momma and Papa were close by and would claim her.
Once her momma held her and wept, it was as if a soft warm blanket of love enveloped her, muffling all her good intentions to report for duty immediately. How quickly that blanket had turned into a smothering cocoon. Within this tight-knit community of 300 souls, she was welcomed, but she was also expected to return to being the cherished but dutiful daughter, in need of a matchmaker who would find her a suitable spouse.
When the raids on Chania began, some Orthodox Greeks left for the villages and hills, leaving their shops closed up, but the Jewish quarter stayed put and battened down their hatches when bombs set fires all around them. But there were no Jews or Gentiles when frightened families crawled out of the rubble, needing their wounds dressed and their dead buried quickly. Yolanda had donned her uniform, wrapped her cloak around her and rushed off to the clinic, refusing to hide away when she was sorely needed.
‘How can you leave us again?’ her mother cried.
‘I have to go and help. Surely you want me to save lives?’
For that there was no answer, and instead, Solomon patted her arm and simply said, ‘Be careful, come back soon.’
Now, as they sheltered in the clinic basement, listening to the whistles and thuds all around them, clutching terrified children, injured parents trying to smile through their pain, Yolanda knew she was doing the right thing. She had gone out briefly in a lull at the insistence of a man searching for his wife. She had stood shocked at the devastation around her: roofs ripped, mules and donkeys lying dead and bloated, and the terrible stench of death she now knew so well. It was a fruitless search, and she returned having gathered up injured stragglers wandering around in a daze of shock.
Then they got everyone tearing makeshift bandages – soldiers, civilians, anyone with hands that could function. With each new intake of wounded came more rumours: ‘The Tommies have driven them back . . . No, the Tommies are defeated. The airport is landing fresh troops . . . they are coming from the sea. Tomorrow they will be in Chania.’
Yolanda was too weary to worry if any of this was true. She felt as if she’d been at battle stations for years, not months, and she knew everyone on the island was united in defiance of the assault coming from the sky.
‘If they come into town, head into the hills with us,’ said Andreas Androulakis, one of the young doctors who looked just like a storybook pirate with a black patch over one eye. ‘If they think Cretans will open their doors and give them raki and biscuits, they are in for a big surprise. What will you do?’ he asked grim-faced, full of concern. They’d worked together for three nights. He should have been on the mainland with the Cretan Division but for his being blind in one eye.
Yolanda shrugged. ‘I have parents close to Kondilaki Street, living with my uncle. I’m not sure they’d want to move . . .’
‘Get them out of there into one of the hill villages. Your community will be watched,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve heard bad things about round-ups.’
He didn’t need to spell it out. ‘I’ll stay here with the Red Cross,’ she said smiling.
‘You’re a good nurse but I urge you, change your name and get fresh papers. Better to be safe . . .’
Andreas meant well and she was flattered by his concern, but how could she abandon her family name? It would mean renouncing her religion and race. She could never do that. Or could she? Uncle Joseph had assured her parents that Crete was a good refuge for Jews. Their community was thousands of years old here. But no one had imagined this sudden attack. Whatever happened next, she could never abandon her parents, not now, and her skills and experience were needed. She was not going to desert her post just to save her own skin, but if her parents were in danger she might need to think again.
Galatas,
23 May 1941
Life in a cave was challenging. Penny was so tired she could hardly eat. The caves were cool and damp, and she was glad of the warmth of her faithful cloak as camouflage at night when she crept out into the darkness, stumbling from one cave to another.
‘We’ve got to stop this bombing. The lines of stones marking out a cross in the sand have long been obliterated. Any ideas, Penny?’ said Doug as he tried to lounge on the duckboard.
In the privacy of these caves all formality had broken down. She was now Penny and the two doctors were Doug and Pete. ‘Have we got anything red? I think we should make ourselves a huge flag and advertise our position,’ she suggested.
They purloined some white sheeting and found a bright tablecloth in Cretan stripes that Doug had bought as a souvenir for his fiancée, Madeleine. One of the villagers gave them a blood-red woven blanket and some needles and thread. They cut the fabrics into a cross shape and began to stitch up the flag by the light of the oil lamps. It gave the frightened and bored patients something to keep them occupied, and they knew a huge Red Cross flag would help protect them.
Penny peered out into the darkness with a heavy heart, seeing the sky lit up from the burning of Chania city. Only a day ago she’d been sitting by the harbour eating ice cream, admiring all the tall Venetian mansions with their carved lintels and the old Turkish wooden roof balconies. How many of them were reduced to ashes now?
When the flag was eventually finished they hauled it up onto the grassy promontory on top of the caves, weighing it down with rocks. No one could miss the emblem from the shore or sky. They stood admiring their handiwork. ‘That should do the trick,’ Pete said. Penny hoped he was right for they were in a desperate situation now. There was grim news that Maleme had been taken.
‘It’s just a blip,’ Pete Ellis assured her in front of his patients. They had isolated the German prisoners for their own safety, and most of them were too ill to be any trouble. Some of them had even offered to help sew the flag, grateful to be safe in the caves. The Luftwaffe would respect the Red Cross badge, Penny was told in perfect English by one wounded officer.
Doug was guarding his ever-dwindling supplies and brought in some huge pithoi jars of tsoukoudia, raki spirit made from the juice of grape skins, fermented into a potent brew, to be used for disinfecting and swabs. ‘If ever the dressings get overripe and you want to gag at the stench, I suggest two nips before you unwind them and tackle the rot. Oh, and two nips after,’ he said with a stern face.
‘On the wound?’ Penny asked in all innocence.
‘Down your bloody throat,’ he roared. Then, seeing her flinch:
‘And don’t be so prissy. I heard you swearing in very fruity Greek . . . where did you learn to swear like that?’
‘We learned a lot of new words on the Albanian border,’ she smiled. ‘And much more besides,’ she added. You didn’t live in the backstreets of Athens without learning how to shake off attentions, stop your bag from being stolen, or your place in the queue being usurped by pushy old women. Thank goodness her mother was not around to see how her skin and her language had coarsened. Her manners and English accent might sometimes remain those of an English debutante, but she thought nothing of tearing round the camp in shorts in her spare time, ignoring the wolf whistles. If they noticed her long legs then her patients were on the mend.
The next day they got no more strafing, which gave them time to make a burial party and gather anything useful from the wreckage of their hospital. Linen was sent out into the nearest villages for laundering and fresh oranges brought in. Everyone was trying to pretend all was normal but the roar of guns was never far off. A battle was raging for the airstrip and they must sit it out, come what may. Their wounded were in no condition to do much to save themselves if the camp was attacked again.
Penny felt such a sense of protection for her patients, like a tigress defending her cubs. Perhaps that was how her mother had felt for her girls – well, for Effy at least.
There were injured civilians creeping in, wanting help, bringing oranges, lemons and vegetables as payment for her services. Now there were hundreds of men to feed, and the store cupboard was almost bare.
‘I wish we knew how the land really lies,’ she whispered at the end of her shift, as she and Doug sat sipping fresh orange juice laced with raki, better than any champagne, under a starlit sky.
‘We’ll know soon enough if it’s going badly. We’ll be overrun in minutes but we’ll put up no resistance. You get everyone under cover, no rifles or tin hats on view. We must stay neutral.’
One of the orderlies, overhearing them, shouted, ‘We can’t just take it lying down. There’s some of us left who can take a few out with us.’
‘You do that, Barnes, and I’ll shoot you first. Give these poor sods a chance of life, even if it’s in a Jerry prison camp. Shoot and we’re all done for. They’re not all barbarians. The Geneva Convention will protect us.’
Another voice piped up from the sand, ‘Tell that to my friend Corky. They pulled him bleeding out of the ditch, and shot him.’
‘We shot them out of the sky, they saw their mates axed as soon as they landed, I’m hearing, by old women with hatchets. War’s a filthy business; fear makes you do cruel things. Come on, back into your cave.’ Doug got up and saw them moved out of earshot.
‘One hothead can cause trouble. Fear is like a virus infecting the whole jolly lot of them. I hear bad stuff happened on both sides. We just patch up whoever’s brought in, friend or foe. If the planes come back, I have another idea up my sleeve, insurance, you might say, to protect us from more bombing.’
‘What’s that?’ Penny asked curiously.
Doug disappeared and came back with a folded flag with a swastika in the middle. ‘Just a trick I learned from my father in the Great War. If we put that up, they’ll leave us alone and might even drop us a few supplies,’ he winked. ‘But keep this under wraps. I hope to God it doesn’t come to this. If Jerry was to find out, we’d be in trouble.’
Penny stared up at the midnight sky studded with stars as far as the eye could see. The sound of ack-ack fire set her mind on a new track. Where was Bruce? Had he been evacuated with the Harrington party? How were Angela and her girls? Was the Harringtons’ house or Villa Artemisa, Evadne and Walter’s house in Athens, still standing, or were they all reduced to a pile of ashes and smoking rubble? Who was looking after the wounded civilian population in the burning city?
It felt as if she were living in some strange dream, bone-weary, the raki now having its effect, wondering what she was doing on this island. Why then was she feeling more alive than she had ever done before? What was going to happen next was way out of her control, but she felt excited knowing she was in the hands of destiny. All she could do was watch and wait and pray.
2001
‘This gets more and more intriguing, Aunt Pen.’ Lois was sitting by the pool, watching Alex jumping in and out of the water. ‘I do recall Mummy once saying there was something in all the papers; something about a “Cave Nurse”, they called her. There was a cutting in Granny’s bureau. She said it almost made her grandmother forgive you for bolting all those years before. What happened to Doug and Peter, the doctors?’
I was about to continue when we heard a car braking in the drive and, shortly after, someone ringing the bell. Lois pulled on her towelling robe as a tall man with a clipboard peered round the door to the pool.
‘Hi, sorry to disturb you,’ he apologized. He was wearing smart cream chinos and open-neck shirt, and sandals showing bronzed feet. ‘I’m Mack, from Island Retreats, your guide and rep. I’m just calling in to introduce myself and make sure you’ve settled in.’
In his late forties, he had one of those grizzled lived-in faces creased by sun, his fair hair sprinkled with grey, but he was still slim, athletic-looking, with a military bearing. He seemed a bit old for a holiday rep, but I liked the look of him and ushered him in to join us.
‘Come and have a drink with us.’ I can still be quite sociable when I’m in the mood.
‘Mustn’t stop too long,’ he smiled, eyeing Lois with barely concealed interest.
She held out her hand. ‘I’m Lois Pennington and this is my great aunt, Penelope George, and my son, Alex. Do sit down.’
I noticed he didn’t protest as we moved the chairs further under the umbrella.
He checked we were satisfied with our accommodation, and handed us lists of emergency numbers and hospital data. ‘We can easily arrange for you to be booked on any tours and excursions.’
I had wondered when the hard sell would come.
‘We can also give you lists of tavernas but we can’t single any out. Ask around and you will see the busy ones,’ he smiled. ‘If you want to walk round the old town of Chania, there’s a Saturday morning tour. I have to admit, I did it once as a tourist and here I am now, working on the island. Funny how life turns out. You must visit the Palace of Knossos, and Samaria Gorge in the south, but only if you’re fit.’ He looked in my direction and I wanted to tell him I could’ve done the long downhill walk carrying a wounded soldier on my back if needed, a few years back, and many of my patients had to do it in the war, but I said nothing.
‘You must go to a Cretan dance night, fun for everyone . . .’
‘We’re here for a special reason,’ Lois interrupted him. ‘We are attending the Battle of Crete commemoration.’
‘You’re interested in the island’s history?’ he asked.
‘I am in its history,’ I couldn’t help myself replying. ‘I was a nurse here.’
‘Really? How interesting. Do the organizers know you’re attending?’ He peered at me as if I were some ancient specimen in a glass cabinet.
‘No, this is a private visit. I have no wish to take part.’ There was a silence and then he rose to leave, as if our request had unnerved him.
‘Right then, well, I hope you have a marvellous holiday. If there’s anything you need, here’s my card and number. I shall see you around, no doubt. It’s a small place. Must dash . . .’
Lois and Alex waved him off. ‘I thought there was more to him than just trying to sell us trips,’ she sighed, gathering up all the bumf. ‘What a wonderful summer job if you’re single. Let’s make some lunch and then go to the beach. I’m sure Aunt Pen would like a siesta.’
‘There is somewhere I’d rather like to visit later, another beach further west, if you don’t mind?’ I asked.
‘No problem, especially if we can hear more about your Cave Nurse adventures.’
That nickname, given to me by the press in later years, always embarrassed me. It was only o
ne tiny episode from my time here. No one ever realized how complicated my life became because of it. Never complain, never explain, they say, but if there’s to be any peace in returning here I must relive those dangerous days before and after the fall of Crete. Besides, there are secrets from that time, I’ve never shared with anyone, secrets that have burdened me for years. Perhaps now will be the time to offload them once and for all?
Brecht stood in the village street looking up at the war memorial by Galatas church. Memories came flooding back as he walked up the steep hill, leaning on his stick. The wreckage of old houses was transformed, painted and pristine once more, the kafenion was exactly how he remembered it. How could this now peaceful hamlet have been the sight of a pitched battle of such ferocity?
These streets were taken and lost, over and over. Brave men on both sides died in those little alleyways, sacrificing their lives for a strategic hill post and guns. The tide of this epic struggle ebbed, flowed and finally crashed over the heads of soldiers and civilians alike, but he could claim nothing of the victory when it came. He was in another place by then. It was time to retrace that terrible journey one more time.
25 May 1941
For days after landing, what was left of his battalion patrolled outside the relative security of the thick walls of Agia Prison compound, making forays into the surrounding olive and citrus groves, gathering up remnants of shattered battalions still hiding, bringing in the wounded and burying the dead. Morale was low as they stuck helmets on grave markers. Devastation was all around them: flattened trees, dead animals, broken gliders, the detritus of a failed operation. Hardened men blanched at the carnage.
It was then that, for some, sorrow turned into anger. Rainer wasn’t always there to stop some of the reprisals taken out on villagers who’d defied them and taken up arms. Whole villages were razed to the ground; men, women and children taken out and shot. No trials, no mercy. He didn’t like such summary justice but he knew where it was coming from. The defiance had been brutal so the reprisal must be equally so.
