In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  While Miss Ivens’s Paris tailor ran up the new uniforms—light grey twill with red velvet caducées in the lapel and a heavy dark blue for winter—we received a wire. Miss Ivens didn’t mention it to me at first but kept picking it up and throwing it down as if this might make it go away while we went through the correspondence. Eventually, realising it wasn’t going away, she passed it over to me. “Damn them to hell,” she said. “As if any of this matters. Now that stupid woman has dragged Elsie into it.”

  The wire was from Dr. Inglis, the Association’s president.

  “NAVY BLUE DEFINITELY NOT APPROVED STOP,” it read. “PLEASE USE GREY WITH TARTAN AS AGREED STOP.”

  “Leave it with me,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.” Miss Ivens went off on her rounds. As I sat there looking at the telegram, it occurred to me that Miss McIntosh, the uniform committee chair, might be in a position to help us with procuring the lorry we so badly needed.

  I found Violet and told her my idea. “What if we write to Miss McIntosh that we’re getting the uniforms made and then tell her the trouble we’re having with the lorry and ask for her help?”

  “Oh yes,” Violet said. “And it’s not really an untruth. We are getting the uniforms made, just not her uniforms.”

  “Excellent, Miss Flower Bird,” I said. “Should we tell Miss Ivens?”

  “Oh God, no,” Violet said. “What the chief doesn’t know . . .”

  “The chief doesn’t know.”

  “Exactly.”

  Miss McIntosh did better than intervening with the equipments committee on our behalf; she funded the lorry herself. I felt a little bad that I’d lied to her, even though she was in her seventies and unlikely to come to Royaumont and see that her uniforms had never materialised. Violet assured me we were doing a small wrong in order to do a large right. Miss Ivens, who knew nothing of the scheme, said she’d send me to Edinburgh next time to negotiate her annual budget.

  The lorry could carry five times as much coal as one ambulance. As for the uniform, by the time Dr. Inglis came to visit us again, the doctors were already clothed in the grey twill the Paris tailor had made and the nurses in plain white with blue trim, red for the sisters. The drivers wore no uniform at all. They got about in men’s pants and shirts and whatever else was comfortable and clean. In truth, we were so busy during the rushes that no one had any time to notice whether we were wearing official uniforms or not. Most of us hardly had time for sleep. What we wore was the least important thing in our lives.

  I looked at the photograph again, those strange women bursting out of the snow in front of the lorry. Even in the greatcoat, you can see my youth in my slim legs and face. I was so young, I tell myself now. I was twenty-one, only recently farewelled by childhood, although at the time childhood seemed like ancient history. I was so young, with so little experience of the world. How could I have taken so long to see that, to understand that I was not my brother’s keeper, that I was simply a child who had made an adult decision? “Oh Tom,” I said to myself now. “I loved you so.”

  Early one evening in March, we heard a loud buzzing overhead and switched off all the lights in the abbey. Violet was out in her ambulance, she told me later, thankfully not with a full load of wounded. When she heard what she thought must be enemy planes, she pulled over on the side of that treacherous road between Creil and Royaumont and waited.

  I’d been in the kitchen lighting the stove. I gave the order to turn out all the lights and lamps and then I walked out into the cold, no hat or coat, and saw, far above me in the winter sky, the two zeppelins. They seemed such jolly machines I almost waved, relieved it wasn’t planes from Germany come to drop their bombs. We later learned the zeppelins were just as deadly. They went on to bomb Paris. They could have bombed Royaumont just as easily, Quoyle said the next morning when we were in the kitchen making up the order for supplies.

  “Why ever would they do that?” Cicely Hamilton said. “We’re not a target, Quoyle. We’re a hospital.” Cicely didn’t much like Quoyle, who was close to Miss Ivens.

  “Seems to me everything’s a target,” Quoyle said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Dissatisfaction registered,” Cicely said. She’d taken to wearing a beret on the side of her head, for suffrage Quoyle had told me. The beret was too far to the side, though. It looked as if it might fall off. I wondered if she’d pinned it there.

  Despite Cicely’s cavalier attitude about the bombs, we became more cautious. The front was now just twenty-five miles from Royaumont; sometimes we heard the guns, and the drivers found shell holes along the road to Creil. We realised that while we all felt safe within the abbey’s cradling walls, we would not be immune to the bombs of the Germans. Soon after the zeppelins flew over, we started blackout drills.

  Tom came to visit me again that week. He walked from Chantilly and went to the kitchens where Quoyle had just finished making custard for the patients. He had a dog with him, a stray he’d found, a pretty little spaniel with no brains at all, and he asked Quoyle if the dog could stay at the hospital as he wasn’t allowed to have a pet in his unit. When I came in, summoned by one of the orderlies, Quoyle had put out a large bowl of the custard with a pile of biscuits for Tom and a bowl of water for the dog. Tom was sitting at the counter, eating happily, listening to Quoyle’s various complaints. The dog, for its part, was lying in front of the stove. “Bingo’s his name,” Tom said when I asked. “He’s your new dog.”

  When I objected to the custard and biscuits she’d served up for Tom—the staff weren’t fed like this—Quoyle simply said a man had to eat. And as for the dog, Quoyle said it would cheer the poor patients.

  “‘A man has to eat,’” I said to Tom as we walked over to the stables. “How come you always charm people like that?”

  “I don’t do anything.” He grinned. “It’s just my nature, Iris. They see how nice I am.” An affable chap, Tom’s school reports always said, but without drive or motivation. Charming, by all accounts, but one wonders how far charm can take him, his latest had said. Well, it had taken him all the way to France and hot custard and biscuits.

  I punched his arm. “I’d have liked some custard too.” Until the abbey vegetable gardens produced, we were restricted to what supplies we could get and the patients always came first. I felt like I’d eaten nothing but bread and soup my whole life. “And what do you expect us to do with a dog?”

  “It can be the hospital mascot,” he said. “I have a cat too, in my room, and a couple of birds, but my officers don’t know about them. There’s strays everywhere, pets whose owners have gone.”

  We walked together in the grounds, taking a seat in the cloisters near the little fountain that had thawed out now and chattered happily all day. It wasn’t sunny, so we had no patients out in the cloister, but it was warm and the rain was holding off. I told Tom things had settled with Edinburgh somewhat—the committee was always complaining about our equipment orders.

  “How they expect us to run a hospital without wound dressings is beyond me,” I said. “Even beds for staff have been slow to arrive. I’m sleeping on the floor this week.” We’d been told extra beds for the new staff were on their way across the Channel, only to learn they’d not even been paid for and would be another three weeks. Meantime the patients’ beds, which had been bought as cheaply as possible, were falling apart. Miss Ivens, never one to let a patient suffer, would be the first to give up her own bed for a patient. So I’d give mine up to Miss Ivens and share with Violet again but then Miss Ivens would give mine away to a patient too and someone else would offer her theirs, until none of us had beds again.

  Tom had become very quiet as I spoke. “Are you all right?” I said finally.

  He took my hand. “Iris, I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it, Tom?”

  “I’ve been up to the north this past week. Captain Driscoll said I could do a mail run
up there. I thought it would be fun, visiting the blokes, bringing their mail. I went in a truck with some other posties, got dropped off near the companies I had to deliver to.” Tom had become very still. He was staring at the water in the fountain, as if it had something to tell him. He gripped my hand tightly. “Iris, if you could see what it’s like . . . They live in these holes they dig in the ground. It was quiet when I was there but at any time the big guns might start firing on them, from the other side, or even from their own side when they get the calculations wrong, one young bloke told me. They just get blown up. They never know when it will happen. They’re just so brave. I really want to go up and help them. If you could talk to Captain Driscoll, I’m sure he’d let me.”

  I knew I had to respond carefully, not bring up Tom’s youth, which would only make him feel more strongly he should be fighting. I kept hold of his hand. “I can understand how you feel. I really can. It’s helplessness. I feel it too.” Soldiers had told us stories about the conditions they fought in and we saw the state of them when they arrived at Royaumont, with wet dirty uniforms, dreadful infections, and feet often in a terrible state from standing in water. “We do what we can at Royaumont, but for every soldier we save, hundreds die, some for want of the most basic care. But what you’re doing, although it doesn’t seem much, is important. When you gave them mail, were they happy?”

  Tom nodded. “They sure were, poor bastards.” He cheered a little then. “I suppose you’re right. At least we’re doing something.” He took away his hand. “But you can’t keep me under your thumb forever.”

  I was going to argue with him but stopped myself. “Just until you reach your majority,” I said lightly. “Then you’re out on your ear.”

  Tom wanted to do more than just deliver mail, and I had an idea of just what that could be. “Come, let’s go over to the garages and see if we can make use of you.”

  We walked across the lawns and found two of the drivers in the garages. I introduced Tom—”My brother’s a mechanic,” I said, and asked them if they needed any work done on their cars.

  “We do them ourselves,” Kathleen Parnell said, eyeing Tom. She was a surly girl from Liverpool and had been involved in the Cause before the war, Violet had told me. “We don’t need a man to tell us how to fix a car,” she said now. She showed us her hands, covered in dirt and grease. The two girls left the stables soon after, as if Tom brought some sort of illness with him. Oh dear, I thought. This hadn’t been what I’d wanted at all. It would only make Tom feel even worse.

  “You can fix my car.” Violet emerged from the little kitchen we’d set up for the drivers. “Tom, it’s you. How are you?” She took him lightly in her arms and kissed each of his cheeks in the French way, her eyes on me, letting me know she was going to make up for their first meeting. I beamed at her.

  She was wearing her goatskin coat. Most of the drivers had put their furs away in favour of woollen greatcoats now for the spring, but Violet felt the cold and held on to the warmer coat. It made her look like a little round bear. She must have just come in. “You look the part at least,” Tom said.

  “What part is that, dear?” she said.

  “Aren’t you all suffragists out here? That’s what the fellows in Creil told me. ‘Don’t cross the Royaumont chauffeuses.’” He softened his voice. “When I met those first two, I was pretty sure the chaps were right. But you’re more difficult to work out.” He grinned.

  “You have it in one,” said Violet. “I’m a suffragist and we wear the skins of animals and sacrifice the male of the species at the full moon. Which is this week, my friend. Come look under my hood. There’s a rattle.”

  “A rattle,” Tom said. “Is that a mechanical term?”

  “Yes,” Violet said. “A mechanical term. Come on now.”

  She took his hand and led him across the garages to her car. I was grateful to Violet then, for I knew the more useful Tom felt, the less he’d think about trying to get a transfer to a fighting unit. And Tom—well, any man really—seemed to brighten Violet’s day, which needed brightening. It wasn’t easy driving to and from Creil and seeing what she had to see.

  I left Violet and Tom to their machine and went to the office to go through Miss Ivens’s mail—she hadn’t had time this week and there were sure to be urgent matters to attend to. I approved expenditure on new X-ray films, responded to a telegram from Edinburgh querying our equipment order again, and drafted a letter from Miss Ivens to the Croix-Rouge about our new wards. Then I went to the doctors’ dining room to see if Miss Ivens needed anything. All of the doctors were there seated at the large table except Dr. Dalyell, who was in her lab, and Dr. Savill, who was away. Cicely was at the far end of the table.

  “Oh good, Iris,” Miss Ivens said to me. “Would you translate this for us?” She handed me a clipping from a newspaper.

  I knew Cicely would prefer to be the one to translate for Miss Ivens but I couldn’t suggest it without looking as if I was shirking, so I sat down where Miss Ivens gestured, near her at the head of the table. Cicely scowled at me for the entire time we were there.

  “Listen to this,” Miss Ivens said to the group as I quickly scanned the article.

  “These ladies are suffragettes,” I read out loud. “They do not belong, it behooves us to say, to the revolutionary, or better, rowdy, element of that federation. We have been present at operations and wish everyone could see the minute precautions and the delicacy with which the feminine hands of the doctors, and the qualified nurses who assist them, tend to the often frightful wounds of our brave combatants.” I looked up.

  “We’ve made the news, girls,” Miss Ivens said.

  “Minute precautions and delicacy. That’s you they’re talking about, Frances,” Mrs. Berry said. She sipped her tea thoughtfully.

  “I think it’s your feminine hands they mean, Ruth. I’m more likely the ‘rowdy.’ But what this article means is that people are noticing. We are the women of Royaumont. There are nurses and orderlies and drivers, but it is this team of doctors that has made the greatest difference to our success.”

  After the meeting broke up I went back to find Tom still underneath Violet’s car.

  “Oh Iris, your brother’s a whiz,” Violet said. “He’s cleaned the engine, fixed something in the wheels I don’t quite understand but that might have killed me if he hadn’t come along, and he’s tightened up my brakes. Not that I use the brakes much, I must admit.”

  I laughed. “I can vouch for that.”

  Tom came out from under the car. “All done,” he said. He stood up and wiped his hands on a cloth hanging out of his pocket. He looked grown suddenly, like the mechanics who came to work on the tractors at home. “I’ll just take her for a test run.”

  “Tom, you don’t have a driving licence,” I said.

  “So? Neither does Violet.”

  “Did I say, don’t tell Iris?” Violet said to him, mock-angry. “Did I say she’ll just worry? And what do you do? Tell her straightaway.”

  “Violet, you don’t have a licence?” I said.

  “I have a kind of licence,” she said slyly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I know how to drive. Oh Iris, don’t tell. Please don’t. As soon as you do, they’ll send me home to miserable old Cornwall and Mummy staring into space. Don’t. Please.”

  I sighed. “Violet, you are the living end.”

  “Well, let’s just focus on the living part and not the end. Come, Tom, take us for a spin around the neighbourhood.” We climbed into the car, Tom behind the wheel, and went for a quick run to pick up some more mail for Miss Ivens from the post office in Viarmes. We farewelled Tom at the station and Violet and I drove back to Royaumont.

  “Thank you for being so kind to Tom today,” I said. “He had a lovely time. I could tell.”

  “So did I, my dear. My God, Iris, I didn’t get a good lo
ok at him that first time with all our coats and scarves. I thought him handsome. But he is absolutely beautiful.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I know beauty is always more than physical and he has a way with him as well. But frankly he could have said not a word and I’d still be swooning. In fact, he should have kept his mouth shut. He looked better before he spoke. He even smells good.”

  “Violet,” I said, becoming uncomfortable. “He’s fifteen years old.”

  “So how long do I have to wait?”

  “Violet!”

  “Sorry, sorry. To you, he’s the little brother. To me, he’s a man, or near enough that I could care less. Those eyes. They pierce a soul. Oh, oh.” She mocked a swoon. “And he’s nothing like the baby he was when he first came. He’s growing up so fast.”

  “Violet, he’s a boy.”

  “Believe me, honey, I know the look. He is most definitely a man.”

  “You won’t be the first to be all ogle-eyed over my brother. He has no interest in girls.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Violet said.

  “Violet, you cannot talk about my young brother as if he’s one of your stupid lovers.”

  “I’m not. And they’re not stupid. I’m just saying . . . Oh, come on, Iris. I’m not the only one. Every orderly in the place came over to the garages this afternoon, to drop off milk or pick up fuel or see one of the drivers. Half the nurses too. That boy’s a man waiting to happen. Who knows who the lucky girl will be?” I looked at Violet. She was right. The other women at Royaumont looked at Tom too. I’d not really thought of him as a man. He’d always been just my little brother. Once he’d needed nappies and bottles, then milk and biscuits, then a good talking to about his school results.