In Distant Fields

by Charlotte Bingham

  A few minutes later Pug set off, taking with him two of the sturdiest hunters, and as a valet Pete Cooke, a young man from the village who had been helping out round the house and garden.

  ‘It’s going to be the most terrific adventure,’ Pug told the young man as they prepared to take their leave. ‘We’re going to have a heck of a lot to tell everyone around here when we get back, but first we shall put the wind up Jerry, give him a bloody nose, and be back in time for Christmas.’

  Pug gave a last hearty wave to his mother, a hug for Elizabeth, and then, complete with horses and dogs, he set out on what he hoped was going to be a really great adventure – a party to end all parties, as some of his friends were already calling it.

  Inevitably, once Pug had gone, Elizabeth was only too pleased to be invited up to Bauders to help entertain the newly arrived patients. She had wanted so much to do something to help, but with Bertie having enlisted and Hughie still in America, she felt it would be unfair on her mother to leave her alone. But now Maude was off to London, and Elizabeth was free to fill her time as she chose.

  It took a little time to collect all the sheet music necessary, but before long Bauders started to ring to the sound of song, a chorus of the wounded and the recovering led by Partita and Kitty and accompanied by Elizabeth in rousing renditions of favourites such as ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You’, ‘Little Grey Home in the West’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘The Sunshine of Your Smile’.

  The sister looked up from her list and stared at Allegra.

  ‘And for you, Lady Allegra Knowle, night duties, you have been put down for night duties.’

  Allegra studied Sister’s face. She had the look of someone who had never found anything in life about which she could possibly be cheerful. Why then did such a woman want to take up nursing the sick, who, after all, needed cheering, if nothing else? It might have been because she was so hardened to the idea of life being about suffering, and little more. Or it might have been because she sensed that by taking up a nursing career she could reach a position of power and importance.

  ‘Thank you, Sister.’

  No matter what Sister asked her to do, Allegra was always at pains to look and sound as if she had just been asked to do something quite lovely. She had accepted the strict discipline of the hospital, the unbecoming uniform, being called at six, and lights out at ten. She had not flinched at washing filthy bodies, or missing meals. She had accepted her ten-hour day as being something that was only to be expected. Yesterday, the hospital being short-staffed on account of an outbreak of influenza among the nurses, she and another young nurse had attended an amputation, not of a soldier, but of a man whose drunken neglect of his body had resulted in gangrene setting in. The other nurse had passed out after half a minute, but Allegra, used as she was to seeing headless chickens that had been left by the foxes, dead calves and culled deer, was proud to be able to write home to her mother that she had not flinched.

  All in all, it was not difficult for Allegra to understand why she had been put on dreaded night duties. It did not feel like a compliment, but in truth it was.

  ‘You may take early tea before you come back on duty,’ she was told, but she did not feel like tea. Instead she took her letter pad and a pen, sat quietly in the corner of one of the common rooms and wrote to James.

  She imagined that he was having quite a time of it at camp, sleeping under canvas, which he had always adored. It seemed, from what he had written to her the previous day, that when not going on route marches, having kit inspections and all the rest of it, he and Bertie and the rest went into Weymouth and enjoyed themselves. Allegra stared ahead of her, wondering how a soldier’s wife should react to such news. Should she ask more, or leave it at that? She decided that she should leave it at that, and wrote instead of how she missed him, and wondered whether he would be taking off to France sooner or later.

  The answer came back, and it was sooner.

  It is all chaos here, everyone rushing about buying last-minute items that they very likely will never need. But we have all been determined to have as much fun as possible before embarking from Southampton for the show in France. We all want to get there before it is over!

  As she took her place at the night desk, on the day she received this news, Allegra thought that there was something about the wards at night that made them seem not better, but much worse. The creaking of the beds, the indeterminate sounds emanating from every ward and building, and a weird and worrying chorus of noises that she had no wish to identify. The light she was using cast weird shadows over the floors and ceilings. And then of course she never knew what to expect. Would there be a sudden death? Or an emergency with which she could not cope, and which might mean calling for assistance?

  The large area at whose head she sat on a raised dais was an all-male ward, one of the longest in the hospital. At night men of all ages slept and muttered, snored and called out from pain, or loneliness, or because they were having nightmares. She tried to concentrate on the books in front of her, studying the many aspects of hygiene, studying the right and wrong methods of bandaging, the proper use of morphine. Anxious as she was to concentrate, her studies all seemed strangely surreal at night, the weird shapes of limbs in her books, the men under their grey hospital blankets; she was frightened, but determined not to show it.

  She stared into the strange shadowy scene below her raised desk. War seemed to happen very slowly, like a wave coming towards you on the far horizon, and then it crashed over you, and you had to swim as hard as you could. She thought of Waterside House, of everyone in the waves, laughing and kissing, and then for some reason, the sound of a slow waltz she had danced at the servants’ ball at Christmas came into her head, and she could see the faces of all their servants and friends and neighbours passing her as she danced with Smart, the younger footman. Then came the sound of her brother singing ‘I am a Pirate King’.

  To have and to hold from this day forward. She longed for James, but knew in her heart of hearts that he would be too thrilled about the war to long much for her.

  ‘If anyone gets out of bed, or attempts to get out of bed, you are to stop them at once, and call for assistance,’ Sister had instructed her. ‘Please have your eyes sharp about you.’

  A sound distracted Allegra from her reading. She stared down the length of the ward, lit only by the occasional dim bulb. As she stared she saw a man getting out of bed and walking, not towards her elevated desk on its square platform, but off towards the end of the ward, which led to nothing but a wall.

  Allegra stood up. This was exactly something of which Sister had warned her. She picked up her lamp and walked quietly down the ward, her sturdy walking shoes squeaking as she passed line after line of beds, some containing old men snoring, some young men with their heads hidden under their blankets, perhaps because they were as frightened as she. She reached the bed in question and held her lamp over it, but the man was still in bed, fast asleep, his face turned away, so she quickly turned and tiptoed back to her desk. Now she was convinced that she must have nodded off for a few seconds and imagined the scene which had just played out.

  Dawn at last came, and then the sound of the milk cart arriving in the London street outside, and with it all came relief in the form of other nurses arriving on duty. Curtains were pulled, and the usual routines of the morning started up. Allegra, not wanting to seem unwilling, and despite the dozen or so hours she had been on call, did not take herself off but moved down the ward, helping men to sit up, helping others to the bathroom, doing all the usual duties expected of her and the others, until she finally came to the last bed, the inmate of which was still sleeping. The nurse she was accompanying went to the top of the bed.

  ‘Mr Martin?’ She touched his shoulder, understandably tentative because some of the patients could become violent if woken too quickly. ‘Mr Martin?’

  She pulled the pillow back a little, and then looked round at Allegra, trying to keep the express
ion on her face as calm as possible.

  ‘I think Mr Martin’s dead,’ she stated in a low voice.

  Allegra could now see from the set of his jaw that he must indeed be dead. She stared. She knew that it was the same bed, she knew it was the same man whose bedside she had visited in the night, she knew it for certain because it was the last bed down that side of the ward.

  ‘Better tell Sister.’

  They both turned and hurried back down the length of the beds, but when they reached the doors that led out to the corridor, Allegra stopped the other girl.

  ‘Vera?’

  The girl turned round and looked briefly at Allegra.

  ‘I saw Mr Martin get out of his bed last night, I know I did. I went down the ward because I thought he might be sleep walking, or needing the bathroom, but when I got to his bed, he was still in it, as I thought at the time, asleep.’

  Vera Logan nodded, and turned away. ‘It happens all the time on night duty,’ she said in an unsurprised voice. ‘Just keep it to yourself. Everyone tries to explain it away, but you know what I think?’ She raised her eyebrows and nodded back over her shoulder as they hurried on together. ‘I think that was his spirit walking out of his body, and no one can tell me any different.’ She lowered her voice once again, because another nurse was overtaking them. ‘One night when I was first on night duty a woman I had only just settled down, walked straight past my desk, and when I went to follow her – quite cross too, I was, I can tell you – she walked straight through the ward doors without opening them. You can imagine. I was only new to the hospital and so frightened I was hard put not to scream. But then I realised that she must have died, and it was her spirit that had passed me, and so it turned out it was.’

  Allegra frowned, and for a second she could not have said whether her colleague’s firm belief in spirits made her feel better or worse, but realising that it probably made her feel better, she hurried on after her. She knew she was doing the right thing, she knew nursing was the only way to keep her mind off what was happening to James, but she also knew that come what may, as soon as she could, she would have to try to go to France. London was not the place for her. It was too far from James, too far from Al, it was too far from everything for which they were fighting. Yes, she would nurse, but no, it had to be in France, as near as possible to the fighting.

  Later that day she met her father for lunch at his club. She knew he would not want to know about her nursing, about how proud she had felt that she had been able to get through helping with a major operation when the other girl had passed out, so she went straight to the point.

  ‘I want to go to France – to nurse, Papa.’

  It was always best to face her father with what you wanted head on. Any other approach would be a failure.

  ‘I thought you might. London is not really the place for you, Allegra. You are like Boodles, you miss the open air. If he feels shut in, and I understand that, he starts digging up holes in the park.’

  ‘No, Papa, I am not that desperate for Bauders!’ Allegra laughed, but her father frowned, because he was not quite on to why she was laughing, so she stopped.

  ‘Every time I take him out, Boodles starts digging up the park,’ the Duke went on. ‘The keepers are going to take a gun to him if he goes on. I should send him back to Bauders but there’s no one there I can trust to keep an eye on him. Mr Tuttle has to take on every kind of task nowadays, and I am not sure that Wavell and Boodles get on the way I would wish.’

  He stared ahead of him. His past life at his beloved Bauders seemed like a beautiful dream. He hated London, hated the traffic, hated the noise, hated the dirt, did not even much like his club. It was full of old bores reading newspapers and pretending to be busy when they were all just waiting around for news of the war.

  ‘I shall have to stay here and try and contribute something,’ he finished finally, his voice sad, his face a picture of misery, ‘but if I were you, Allegra, and I know I am not, I should go to France, really I should, and as soon as you can. They will be needing nurses there, plenty of nurses, God help us, they will really.’

  Allegra stared at her father, taken aback, not by his encouragement but by his melancholy.

  ‘Do you not think it will go right for us, that it is going right for us?’

  Her father shook his head. ‘News is coming through. Not good, Allegra, not good at all. We shall know a little more soon, but do not expect it to be of the best.’

  Her next evening on night duty, Allegra wrote to James,

  Your evening out in Weymouth must have been a holiday after being on exercise, and now I wonder when it is you will be going over there? Do you have any idea and if so, can you tell me? I gather from everything you say that it’s all pretty chaotic, and I know how anxious you are to get over there as quickly as you can in case it’s all over before you get dispatched, but for me I hope you can stay a little longer so that at least I have the comfort of knowing you are still safe within these shores. People are still saying it will all be over by Christmas, and if that is the case, please God, you may not have to go at all. I know you’ll be dreadfully disappointed, but I won’t, because I love you, James, and can’t wait for us to be together again.

  She stared down the ward, remembering her father’s melancholy expression, and as she did she started to see the war in France in terms of the ward with men of every race and creed huddled up somewhere under thick blankets, hundreds and hundreds of them in beds like the patients in her ward, but now not finding comfort in sleep or in the warmth of their beds, but finding only more suffering and even more fear, fear that they might die from their wounds before light, that they might slip away to eternity into the impersonal darkness of night. She frowned, trying to get rid of these nightmare images by thinking of Bauders. How she longed for home and how she longed most of all for James, and how she longed, now prayed, for this silly war about nothing at all to be at an end, soon, please, please God, soon.

  A sound came from down the ward. She stood up, shading the light on her desk with a hand. Peering into the gloom of the ward, it seemed to her that she could see someone else getting out of bed. She was sure of it, she could see the figure quite plainly, heading not for her station but walking calmly in the opposite direction, with one arm of his pyjama jacket flapping uselessly by his side.

  As the memory of Vera Logan’s words came back to her, Allegra found it took all her courage to walk down the ward once more. It was Rory Jenkins! Was he too dead? Her mouth went dry as she put out a hand to touch his arm, but this time it was a proper pyjama jacket, and it was Rory Jenkins all right. He was sleepwalking.

  Allegra could have laughed out aloud with relief as, holding on to his good arm, she led him back to his bed and settled him in once more.

  ‘Everything all right, Nurse?’ Sister asked as early morning dawned, and at long last it was time for Allegra to go off duty. ‘Any trouble at all?’ she asked, picking up the night duty log.

  ‘None, except Rory Jenkins sleepwalking.’

  ‘They do that, you know. Sometimes it’s a sign of getting better, I always think, trying to get out of the hospital, go home. Now off you go, Nurse,’ Sister instructed her. ‘Go home and get some sleep. We’re expecting a big intake today, so we’re all going to have to be on our toes in the next hours.’

  Allegra thanked Sister and was about to take her leave, only to be stopped by a call from the bed of the patient sleeping nearest to where she had been sitting at her desk.

  ‘Nurse,’ he said in an even quieter whisper, indicating for her to come as close to him as she could. Allegra bent down to hear what he wanted to say.

  ‘Yes – yes – Mr … ?’ she said, searching for his name.

  ‘Jim, dearie. Jim’ll do just fine.’

  ‘What can I do for you? Is there something I can get you?’

  ‘Not get me, no – but there is something you can do for me.’ He looked up at her. ‘Write a letter to my mother for me? Tell her wh
ere I am, how I am, you see I can’t––’ He nodded at his right hand as if it was a person. ‘He doesn’t work right, see?’

  I know, I know.’

  Allegra sat down by his bed and, taking out some of her own paper and a pen, she started to write the letter for him. Sleep, after all, could wait for just a few more minutes.

  * * *

  Maude looked up from penning her latest letter to Hughie in America. It was her last-ditch attempt to try to persuade him how unnecessary it was for him even to think of returning to England. The army would not want him; his asthma would mean that he would be passed unfit. It would be foolish to return. Even as she signed the letter she knew what his reply would be; it would be the same as he had said last time they had exchanged letters. ‘No matter, Mamma,’ he had written. ‘I will be happy to take anything on offer.’

  In fact, even before his mother had sat down to write to him on the subject, Hughie had undergone a medical examination in New York to ascertain the current state of his health and had been privately delighted to be told that his condition had improved dramatically. Neither he nor his doctor could understand the exact reason for his improvement.

  ‘I can only think that it is the lack of damp here, or just being away, the change; that can happen to asthmatic patients. I have seen it before.’

  Hughie smiled. ‘Or it might be a well-deserved absence from my beastly father,’ he volunteered.

  The doctor laughed. ‘Could be, Mr Milborne, could be that exactly, who knows?’

  Hughie had, however, decided to keep the good news from his mother until he returned, when his intention was to enlist as soon as possible. He simply could not abide the idea of not going to the party along with all the rest. Bertie was going. He would go too, and that was all there was to it.

  Later he sat down to write to his mother that as soon as he could wrap up his affairs in America he would be home: ‘If the army won’t have me, then I can always join a knitting circle!’