by Mary Hooper
The ship hooted loudly enough to make Poppy put her hands over her ears and they were off, leaving the crowds on the quayside waving, crying and hurraying in equal measure.
The ship slid along the side of the quay and Poppy got a quick look at some of those who’d gathered to wave goodbye to their soldier boys: mothers and fathers, sweethearts, sisters, children. And pets . . .
Someone on the deck below Poppy was shouting ‘Good dog! Easy, Blue!’ to a sprightly Border collie on a short lead who was evidently barking his misery at his master going off to war. The animal carried on non-stop and then, as the ship began to turn herself ready to move out of the harbour, suddenly jerked the lead away from the hand of the woman who held it and jumped into the water.
The woman screamed, the people about her shouted, and Poppy heard a frantic ‘No! Go back, Blue!’ from the dog’s owner on the ship.
Blue took no notice, however, and was seen to be swimming frantically after the ship in an effort to catch her up. Those on the shore shouted an alert, which was taken up by those on board the Paris Belle who’d witnessed the event, and in a few moments everyone in sight was yelling and pointing at the small black and white animal doggy-paddling through the waves.
After perhaps a minute, with the ship about to leave the safety of the home port, her engines stopped. The collie swam on and, to loud cheers, a small rowing boat was lowered on ropes from the Paris Belle into the water. This held three people, who were – the word quickly spread – a seaman, the dog’s owner and a vet going out to Flanders to tend to horses. The seaman pulled hard on the oars to reach the dog. The collie was picked up and hauled on board by its owner, and subsequently held upside down by its rear legs by the vet so it could choke out water, all to loud cheers from those on ship and shore.
Once they were out of the harbour and on the open sea, Poppy discovered something new about herself, something she’d had no idea about before: she suffered from seasickness.
Queasy and dry-mouthed but trying to ignore it, she spoke to two young women, trained nurses, about where they were heading and heard that they’d both been on leave from a tented hospital in Calais. ‘Absolutely everything is under canvas,’ they told her. ‘Operating theatres, dining hall, kitchens, nurses’ bedrooms and bathrooms. We love it – except when it rains.’ They went off and Poppy was just about to approach a girl she perceived from her uniform to be another VAD, when she realised that walking on a floor which first sloped one way, then the next, was making her feel quite ill.
Feeling the cold and shivering by now, she went inside, into what once had been a grand ballroom, and looked for somewhere to sit. The more she walked around, however, the worse she felt. In the end, utterly nauseous, she sat down on the grand central staircase, rested her head on her knees and prayed for the journey to France to be over as quickly as possible.
A short while later, word spread that a canteen had opened one deck up, and Poppy, thinking a hot drink might do her good, got to her feet. She was only halfway across the room, however, when she felt horribly sick and had to rush into the lavatories.
‘Not got your sea legs?’ a girl in a St John nurse’s uniform asked sympathetically when she came out.
Poppy shook her head. ‘My mother told me to chew a piece of ginger, but she didn’t actually tell me where to get it and . . .’ But the mere thought of eating anything made her feel so ghastly that she had to turn around and lurch back into the lavatory again.
When Poppy came out, she sat herself down on a bench on deck, stared ahead resolutely and prayed she would see land very soon . . .
Chapter Four
20th February 1916
Dearest Ma,
I am on French soil. I am a Continental traveller. How sophisticated I am!
I wasn’t feeling so good a few hours back, mind you. Gosh, seasickness is ghastly. I’ve never felt so ill or been so glad to get anywhere in all my life. When the ship reached Boulogne-sur-Mer and I walked unsteadily down that gangplank – green in the face, I’m sure, and with my legs all wobbly beneath me – I felt like kneeling and kissing the ground.
I am sitting with a selection of other young women, all nurses and VADs, in a building which looks like a log cabin. This, I’ve been told, is a harbour master’s office, and we are all waiting to see which hospitals we are to be sent to. I hope and pray that it doesn’t mean a further sea trip round the coast. I think I’d run away!
I’m sure you will have heard from Billy by now. The lucky boy has been sent to a farm in Scotland to help out with the livestock before he’s reassigned to a new regiment. This will mean freezing early mornings and very hard work, but it’s better than being on the firing line.
I will finish now by sending you and the girls all my love. I will leave a space on the back of the envelope to put my new hospital address so you can write to me.
All my love and a kiss for Mary and Jane,
Poppy
PS If there are great big black lines on this letter it will mean that certain words have been deleted by the censor.
Poppy, still waiting in the wooden shed but happy to be away from the ship, longed to know what France looked like. All she’d seen so far was a part of the dockyard very much like the one they’d left in Southampton. As they’d gone from the ship to the shore, however, she’d heard the thunder of far away guns and seen streaks of fire lighting the sky. Wherever that was, she thought, men were fighting, inflicting horrible injuries on each other, breathing their last. It was going on right then, while she sat in this closeted room. Now, just a train ride away, men were blinding each other, mangling limbs, tearing flesh and bleeding their life blood into the earth.
It made her feel quite desperate. It seemed so primitive, like something a Stone Age man would do. Surely, she thought, there must be a better way of settling disputes than that?
There were lamps burning in the cabin, which made the room hot and stuffy and gave off a strong smell of paraffin. When Poppy loosened her cloak, the young woman beside her, who’d been making half-hearted small talk, suddenly noticed the mid-blue of her cotton dress and looked rather surprised.
‘Oh, you’re just a VAD,’ she said.
Poppy, immediately on the defensive at the word just, glanced at the other girl, who was wearing the darker blue dress of a trained nurse. ‘That’s right. I did my training at Southampton.’
‘Are you a domestic?’
‘No, I’m a nurse.’
‘Hardly a nurse, are you, dear?’ said the young woman. ‘I studied for two years to be able to call myself that.’
‘Really?’ Inside, Poppy bubbled with fury; outside, she managed to smile. ‘I realise I’m not fully qualified, but my ward sister at Netley was pleased enough with my work to suggest I come over to France.’
‘I suppose they have to take what they can get,’ came the reply. Poppy, quietly fuming, didn’t say anything and the girl carried on, ‘My aunt is Matron-in-Charge at a hospital in Étaples and they’re crying out for more properly qualified nurses. But that’s not what I’m going to do – I’m going to be trained to work an X-ray machine.’
‘How interesting,’ Poppy said in a deadpan voice which revealed she didn’t really think it was.
‘They’re marvellous things! One can see at a glance which bones are broken and which aren’t. Saves an awful lot of trouble.’ She gave Poppy another look. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen one.’
‘I have, actually,’ Poppy said. ‘We had them in Netley. But I shouldn’t care to work one. I’d much rather be hands on with my work.’ So saying, she moved slightly on the bench so as to leave a small gap between the two of them.
She knew that some fully qualified nurses resented VADs, especially as injured soldiers hardly seemed to know the difference between them, calling them all ‘nurse’ and thinking they were all angels. Poppy, however, had encountered no nastiness or segregation from the trained nursing staff at Netley – in fact, the very opposite. Sister Kay and Nurse Gall
agher had gone out of their way to teach her the correct bandaging techniques for different types of wounds and breaks, and indeed most other things concerning the care and welfare of an injured man.
The conversation between the two most definitely at an end, Poppy stood up, stretched and sat down again.
Another half-hour went by and, though her eyes felt itchy and heavy, she didn’t want to fall asleep in case her head slipped on to the shoulder of Miss Hoity-toity alongside her. In the end, she put her suitcase on the floor, sat down beside it and went to sleep resting her head against it.
Another ship docked but Poppy, exhausted from the journey and the travel-sickness, was fast asleep and didn’t hear more girls arriving in the room.
At eight o’clock in the morning, two VADs came in with a rattling tea trolley and Poppy woke to find the number of nurses there had doubled. Soon after this, she was informed that she’d been assigned to a base hospital just outside the port of Boulogne, known as Petit Boulogne. She was particularly pleased – firstly because it wasn’t Étaples and she wouldn’t have to travel onward with Miss Hoity-toity, and secondly because she would be travelling to the hospital on the top of a London omnibus, one of a group of buses on loan to the army.
Boulogne and the surrounding area had once been fashionable holiday places, but since the war nearly all the hotels, restaurants and public buildings had been taken over by the military. Most of their original inhabitants had gone, and the shopkeepers who were left made their living selling food, cigarettes and souvenirs to passing soldiers.
The hospital Poppy would be working in had previously been a casino. Boulogne offered what was possibly the fastest sea route across to England and had train lines which ran from the central station not only further around the coast, but also towards the front line, so casualties could be put on a train close to the battlefield and brought to a base hospital quickly. Here they could be treated and either returned to the front line, or possibly – what they all craved – stabilised, ready to travel home to England on a ‘Blighty ticket’.
On giving her name to an orderly, she was taken down into the basement to rooms which had once been used for storage but were now converted into small bedrooms or cubicles, each one separated from the others by screens on wheels. Each cubicle had hooks with coat hangers, a small chest of drawers with a lamp on top, and a plain wooden chair. The sheets and blankets for the narrow single beds stood, neatly folded, waiting to be put on, and Poppy did this as soon as she’d unpacked, knowing she was bound to be too tired later, after a day on the wards.
The bedcover was faded and patched, but clean enough. Having made up the bed and thinking to herself that it looked quite inviting, Poppy, still feeling the after-effects of the journey, lay down for a moment before unpacking. She closed her eyes and, without meaning to, went straight off to sleep.
In this way she started off very much on the wrong foot with Sister Sherwood of Ward 5, who’d requested a VAD and two trained nurses from HQ at Devonshire House, but had been given only a VAD. This VAD, unbelievably, had had the audacity to fall asleep as soon as she’d arrived.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Poppy said. It was two hours later, after she had been woken by a nurse despatched in search of her and taken into Sister Sherwood’s presence. ‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I just tried out the bed and . . .’
But Sister Sherwood was writing a letter and didn’t look up.
Poppy waited politely for her to finish. When Sister’s letter had been folded and the envelope addressed, she added, ‘I didn’t get any sleep on the ship, you see, and I kept being sick and was just so exhausted that –’
‘As exhausted as these soldiers are after weeks in trenches on the front line?’ Sister Sherwood interrupted, gesturing down the ward. ‘As sick as they are, as deprived of sleep as they are?’
Poppy hesitated. ‘No, of course not,’ she said, very quickly adding, ‘Sister.’
‘I will not have anyone in my ward who is less than fully committed. You have a strange idea of nursing if you think you can go to sleep before attending to your patients. Haven’t you had any training at all, girl? Don’t you know the men come first at all times?’
Poppy, knocked sideways by this onslaught, didn’t say a word. The worst thing had happened, she thought. She’d not only be working for a misery-guts of a sister, but she’d got off on the wrong foot with her.
‘If you’re not going to pull your weight or you intend to bring my ward into disrepute in any other way, you may turn round now and go straight home.’
Poppy, stung to tears, blinked hard to disperse them. Sister Sherwood? More like Sister Shrew . . .
‘You already know the rules, Pearson. Just see you obey them. Now, perhaps you can start by taking round the men’s water jugs – if that’s not too much trouble for you.’
It was not a good start.
Chapter Five
Ward 5 in the casino hospital seemed much more subdued than Ward 59 in Netley. At Netley the boys were always playing tricks on each other, teasing Poppy and the other nurses or singing ditties with dubious meanings, but on Ward 5 there were none of these high jinks.
At first Poppy put this down to the forbidding presence of Sister Shrew, but after a while realised that that was only part of it; it was mainly because the boys in the casino hospital were in worse shape than the Netley boys. Most patients arrived straight from a casualty clearing station, and once in a ward would sleep, have their smashed limbs set or amputated, and receive treatment for any other wounds or illnesses. Only when their conditions were considered stable would they be moved on. Very rarely had men arrived in Southampton straight from the battlefield, covered in mud and with their wounds untouched, as they sometimes did in Boulogne.
In its favour, Ward 5 was considerably more glamorous than Hut 59, for it had once been one of the casino’s gaming rooms. A bevy of draped mythic goddesses were painted on the ceiling, there were mirrors of gilt, and lavish depictions of the twelve months of the year were hung on the walls.
The beds, running in four straight lines down from top to bottom, dominated the room, however. These, and the metal lockers and blue counterpanes, were standard War Office issue. Sister Sherwood didn’t have Sister Kay’s powers of acquisition as far as pyjamas were concerned, either. With Sister Kay it had been a matter of honour that all her patients wore neat and tidy red- or blue-striped flannelette pyjamas, the tops always matching the bottoms. Those worn by the boys of Ward 5, although always clean, were second hand and showed enough variety of stripes, colours and checks to make a patchwork quilt.
Poppy was to find that the boys in the beds – however mismatched their pyjamas – were every bit as grateful, thankful and stalwart as they’d been in Netley. The ward was primarily for amputees, with its current occupants including eight double amputees and one triple amputee, but nearly all of these men had something else wrong in addition: a stomach wound, a head injury, a smashed-up shoulder, pneumonia, or a face that had been slashed with a bayonet.
The unfortunate man with three limbs missing was Private Norman, who was waiting for his wounds to heal a little more before being despatched to the Rehabilitation Centre at Roehampton, where he would be fitted with prosthetic limbs. But he needed a considerable amount of treatment first, for not only did he have one leg and two arms missing below the elbow, but he was covered with shrapnel wounds and had also contracted trench foot, which had led to two of his smallest toes being removed from his remaining foot. The irony of this, he told everyone, was that his other foot, the one which had been amputated, had been completely trench foot free.
‘Fancy losing the good ’un and keeping the mangy one!’ he remarked to Poppy. ‘Where’s the fairness in that? Why couldn’t Jerry have shot off the bad foot if he wanted to shoot anything?’
But he was a cheerful young man and, being the only triple amputee, was made quite a fuss of in the ward. Even those who’d been unfortunate enough to lose two limbs couldn’t complain
when confronted with someone who’d lost three. If the other men received food parcels from home, they’d always see he got a few squares of chocolate or a slice of cake.
Two weeks after reaching the Casino Hospital, Poppy had her first afternoon off and found time to write to her friend.
Casino Hospital,
Nr Boulogne-sur-Mer,
France
28th February 1916
Dear Matthews,
How are you? Are you really busy at Netley? Writing to you using your second name looks strange, but when I put ‘Dear Essie’ at the top of this letter it didn’t seem as if it was really you I was writing to.
I’ve now spent my first few days in a big military hospital – it’s nicknamed the ‘Casino’ (which it used to be) – and have to tell you that I am not very happy. For a start, the weather here is atrocious. Everyone at home said that the weather in France would be better than in England, but it’s not. It is absolutely pelting with rain and has been since I arrived. Anyway, that wouldn’t be so bad if hospital life was all right, but that’s awful, too. I have an absolute beast of a woman as my superior – Sister Sherwood, or Sister Shrew as I’ve renamed her. She is the meanest, coldest, most shrewish person you could ever meet and not at all the sort of woman anyone would want as their ward sister. I didn’t get off to a good start with her because I accidentally fell asleep the morning I arrived, but although I really apologised, she’d already made up her mind that I was a dead loss.
The end result is this: I’m not allowed to do ANYTHING. That is, I’m not allowed to do anything that a ten-year-old child wouldn’t be able to do blindfolded. I can lay trays, fill jugs and tidy lockers and – oh yes, she doesn’t mind this – take round and collect bedpans, but nothing else. Of course, there are some horrifically injured men here, but I’ve had plenty of experience of horrific injuries and think I’m now quite proficient at cleaning wounds, packing them out and re-bandaging. I could be useful giving injections and applying poultices, bed-bathing men with legs in traction and lots of other things, but Sister doesn’t allow me to do any of these.
