Remembrance

by Theresa Breslin

  Chapter 22

  IN EARLY DECEMBER Maggie received a note from Mrs Armstrong-Barnes.

  Maggie found the afternoon less of a chore than she had expected. Mrs Armstrong-Barnes strove to make her welcome, asking her questions about her work at the hospital and in the munitions factory.

  ‘There was an article in the newspaper recently about some titled lady who is most skilled in working a lathe.’

  ‘People from all walks of life work in the munitions factory,’ Maggie replied politely. ‘Everyone seems to want to help with war work. Charlotte says that you and your friends host charity teas.’

  ‘I don’t mind that so much. It means one can make a small contribution.’ Mrs Armstrong-Barnes lifted the teapot. ‘The War has brought many changes, but actually it’s the flowers I miss the most. The gardener would send the boy to the house every week with great armfuls of blooms he had picked, and one of the parlour maids would arrange them. Agnes had such a light touch. Even on the bleakest days she made something of evergreen. The gardener’s lad has been called up, and Agnes drives a tram in Liverpool now.’ She sighed as she poured the tea. ‘Things will never be the same again.’ She looked keenly at Maggie. ‘But then perhaps you believe that they shouldn’t ever be?’

  Maggie waited. An answer seemed expected of her, and she considered whether she should oblige or not, finally deciding that to say nothing was in some way wrong. She looked directly at Charlotte’s mother. ‘I don’t think life should be lived the same way as before the War. It is wrong that children go hungry, and I believe that inequality of man and woman is unfair.’

  Mrs Armstrong-Barnes gazed out of the window for a moment. ‘I know that I should be much more concerned about politics, but I always left that to my husband. He worked so very hard, and my place was to see to the things that enhanced life. Now some of these matters seem so … inappropriate.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll leave you to explore the library. Please take whatever interests you, or stay and read here if it is more convenient.’

  * * *

  Maggie had no idea where to begin. She guessed that the books were kept in some kind of order, but in the public library the librarian usually brought her books to her. She set aside a volume of poetry, and then noticed some books on art and artists. Maggie recalled that Francis had visited Europe before the War and studied art subjects at University. She opened one on Goya. He was the Spanish artist Francis had mentioned in one of his letters. The painter, the book said, forsook depicting battle scenes as celebrations of men at war as he began to see these highly stylized representations of glorious victories as propaganda tools. Goya’s drawings personalized the conflict of the Spanish Peninsular War, showing individuals maimed, and, importantly for the first time, the horrendous effect of war on a civilian population. The violent twisted shapes assaulted Maggie’s eyes and then some extracts from his letters caught her attention, ‘… in Nature, colour does not exist any more than lines … there is only light and shadow … relief and depth … planes which advance and recede … Give me a piece of charcoal and I will make you a picture.’

  Goya had used rich colours and a variety of tones in his paintings of Spanish court life, and had then developed the tortuous dark drawings and etchings depicting war. His use of drawing material bonded so well with his chosen subject that they became one force in expressing the horrors of war.

  It seemed to Maggie a reflection of Francis’s letters, moving from summer in France and Belgium, through autumn, into winter. And, as she read more about Goya, his work and his life, the comparison was more apt, and she knew that she more deeply appreciated the development of Francis’s mind and mood. Across the years the artist spoke to her. ‘There are no rules in painting … it is a deep play of understanding that is needed.’

  Was this how Art fulfilled both creator and receiver? she wondered. Through literature and painting or any other medium; reflecting life, giving vent to emotion, articulating thought, expressing that which could not be encompassed. She felt as though she was on the brink of understanding some great truth, and hurried home carrying the books with her.

  Maggie thought that she should explain the gift which she sent Francis with her next letter.

  It was almost two weeks before Maggie received a communication from Francis. It was a small package and as she unwrapped it she realized it was a page from the sketch-book, wrapped and protected as best he could. It was a drawing of wild flowers, clumps of cornflower and daisy among a cascade of ammunition boxes. Francis had written:

  Maggie kept the drawing by her bedside. Her correspondence with Francis had triggered a reaction within her. Sometimes his letters confused her, with their random mixture of opinion coupled with acute factual observations. His dry comments on his fellow soldiers’ behaviour, his deep empathy with the suffering of the French and Belgians, gave her insight into his character. In return, her own writing contained thoughts and emotions such as she never would have expressed under ordinary circumstances. Although at times almost overwhelming her, his letters never failed to stimulate. She resolutely sought to fully comprehend what he was trying to say. Looking up words in her dictionary, pursuing references in the bookshop and library, she enjoyed these quests in themselves, and then when successfully piecing everything together, she would reread his letter and be elated for days.

  Was it to do with education? she asked herself. Would she have felt like this had she continued with her schooling at fourteen or fifteen? But learning at school had been functional. Girls were taught to sew and knit, as that would be useful to them in later life. Children learned to count, subtract, and do long division with endless combinations of pounds, shillings and pence, so that they could housekeep. Spelling and poems were learned by rote; their words caught and trapped, rather than absorbed and explored. But in his letters Francis wrote about the meaning of things; why a thing should be, and why it might not. He challenged opinion (including his own), he discussed creative thought. She had quite simply never experienced anything like this before.

  The culmination of all this was that, as Maggie sat one night attempting to reply to Francis’s latest letter, she experienced a moment of self-realization. She was sitting in quiet reflection before beginning to write, when she was suddenly conscious of her mind moving. Her thoughts raced away from her in complex patterns. She was on the point of stepping off a ledge, and she found herself trembling.

  She wanted to write and tell Francis all of this, but felt inept. She believed that her words might be inadequate, her sentences clumsy. She put her pen down and, holding her hands out in front of her, stared at the fingers that would have to write the words. For a few moments she gazed at her hands, and then slowly she turned them face up. She studied the lines on her palms, some distinct, some interconnecting, small and long, some straight, others arcing, curving in different directions, crosshatching and interlacing, yet each sulcus unique in its own form. Maggie cupped her hands together and put them to her breast.

  Chapter 23

  IN LATE NOVEMBER Charlotte turned to Maggie in the nurses’ rest room at the hospital and said, ‘I’m going to France.’

  ‘France!’ Maggie repeated. ‘Why? Don’t you think that you do enough here?’

  ‘No,’ replied Charlotte. ‘We think that we are working hard, but I have friends who are nursing in the hospitals in France, and they are telling me that more staff are needed. There will be another Offensive in the spring and their situation will worsen.’

  ‘You would leave your mother?’

  ‘My mother has spoken of spending time with her sister since her two boys were killed. She has said that she might let the Red Cross use the house as a convalescent home. My leaving will give her the opportunity to do both.’

  ‘I think your mother thought that you might then take a nursing position within the house,’ said Maggie. ‘She sees how strained you are, and wants to make things easier for you.’

  ‘I don’t want things to be easier. And I could n
ot bear another Christmas and New Year at home.’

  ‘They won’t take you when they find out that you are only sixteen,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Then I shan’t tell them.’

  ‘They’ll ask for your birth certificate,’ said Maggie. ‘There has been such an outcry from mothers about the Army accepting underage recruits that they’re bound to check.’

  ‘I have thought about it,’ said Charlotte. She picked up a pencil and found a scrap of paper. ‘Look, my birth year is 1900. I can easily change it to look like 1896.’ She wrote down 1900, and then with a bold stroke she wrote over the number, making it larger and changing the nine to an eight and then the two zeros to a nine and a six. ‘See! Now I am twenty!’

  ‘What will your mother say?’ Maggie spoke slowly. An idea was beginning to form in her own head. If Charlotte could change her birth certificate, then so could she.

  ‘I’ll tell her only that I’m going away to London for special nursing training, which I will have to do in order to qualify to go abroad. She will have to write a letter giving permission for this, but I will dictate the words and make them general enough to cover my nursing abroad. Then by the time I am in France it will be too late for her to do anything about it.’

  Maggie leaned over and peered into Charlotte’s face. ‘You might get away with it,’ she said. ‘You are tall enough …’ She took Charlotte’s chin in her hand and turned her face towards the window, seeing as she did so that pain and grief had wearied her youthful looks. ‘If you altered your hairstyle a little, and put on some face powder …’ Maggie paused. ‘If they would accept a probationer, would you mind if I came along?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Charlotte. ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. I’d so appreciate your company. Two friends of mine from the Cottage Hospital are there at the moment.’ She laughed. ‘They write and tell me about handsome doctors and dashing army officers.’

  ‘And I thought that your main reason was to be like Florence Nightingale.’ Maggie struck a pose with her arms crossed over her chest. ‘I believed that you saw it as your mission to tend our wounded men and ease their pain.’ And as Charlotte smiled, she added, ‘You’ve laughed twice in the last few minutes, Charlotte. That’s more than I’ve seen you do in the last four months.’ She linked her arm through Charlotte’s. ‘If the thought of going to France can do that, then it has to be a good idea.’

  Alex took a great deal of interest in Maggie’s travel arrangements, asking her the name of the railway station from where she would be leaving and where she would arrive in London, the price of her ticket, and the places the train would stop on the way south. Normally she would have found him a dreadful nuisance, but they had become closer since John Malcolm’s death, so she indulged him by telling him every detail and helping him look up street plans of Edinburgh and London. His teacher also encouraged his sudden interest in geography and lent him more books with maps of England and France and Belgium. Alex spent hours studying these, and when no-one was watching he copied the maps, and any useful information, into his notebook. By the time of Maggie and Charlotte’s departure he had notes on every aspect of their journey.

  Maggie’s father accompanied both girls to Edinburgh to see them off. Maggie had waited until they had left the village before she told him that she might not return after her two months’ training in London, but go instead to France. He became very silent throughout the rest of the journey, and it was not until they stepped onto the platform at Waverley Station that he spoke.

  ‘I know that your mother will have talked to you about various matters as you became a woman, and also regarding the way of the world,’ he began awkwardly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Maggie said hastily. She recalled her mother’s embarrassed fumbling for words when some years ago she had tried to explain to Maggie the workings of basic bodily functions. ‘I know all I need to know.’

  ‘Few women have money, possessions or position in their own right,’ her father persisted. ‘But a woman does have the dignity which nature gave her, and she must use that to protect herself.’

  ‘Nurses are given advice and strict instruction on their behaviour,’ said Maggie, thinking to herself of how quickly she had ceased to be shocked by what she had seen and had to deal with in the hospital.

  Her father was not to be deterred. ‘You will be away from home. And if you do go to France you will meet men who have just been, or are about to go, into combat. You may feel very sorry for these soldiers and they may try to take advantage of you because of this.’ He looked anxiously at Charlotte. ‘Forgive me for speaking this way, Miss Armstrong-Barnes, but events have placed us in circumstances that we did not expect to find ourselves in, and your father is not here to advise you.’

  ‘I do thank you for your concern, Mr Dundas,’ said Charlotte, and impulsively she kissed Maggie’s father on the cheek. He went bright red.

  ‘No need for that,’ he said stepping back quickly.

  It was the first time Maggie had seen her father in such extreme discomfort. In the shop he was king in his own little kingdom; in the village which he rarely left he was a well-respected businessman.

  As the train was about to depart Maggie also kissed her father. ‘I hear what you are saying to me,’ she said.

  But later on the long train journey south she apologized to Charlotte for her father’s behaviour.

  Charlotte looked up in surprise. ‘I didn’t consider him to be at all rude. Any father or older brother would have done the same.’

  ‘He is domineering,’ said Maggie, ‘and he wishes to keep myself and my mother contained in certain ways.’

  Charlotte replied, ‘Yes, but he does all this out of love for you. It was very difficult for him to speak out this morning. Yet he cares so much that nothing ill should happen to you that he takes the time to try to warn us both against the evils in the world.’

  Maggie thought of her father’s attitude towards her. ‘Still, I feel that sometimes he is asking that I be less than I am.’

  In London at the offices of the Red Cross the Sister gave Charlotte a searching look. She examined the certificates and letters of reference from the Cottage and the City Hospitals. She held out her hand. ‘Birth certificate?’

  Charlotte met her gaze with a cool smile and handed over her birth certificate with the altered date. The Sister’s eyes narrowed and she glanced again at Charlotte. ‘Do you have your parents’ permission?’ she demanded.

  Charlotte kept her voice steady. ‘My father is dead, my mother has written this letter.’

  The Sister took a note of all Charlotte’s details, kept the letter, and returned the certificates to Charlotte. ‘You girls look younger by the hour.’ She shook her head. ‘Barely out of the nursery, and demanding the vote.’ She handed Charlotte some papers. ‘This is the information you need. Read it carefully. You can still withdraw at this stage. Please do not accept training unless you are absolutely serious about this. Contrary to any newspaper reports you will not be going on a picnic to France to meet handsome cavalry officers.’

  From behind her in the queue Charlotte felt a nudge from Maggie, and she bent her head quickly to hide a smile as she replied, ‘I didn’t imagine it to be so.’

  Chapter 24

  CHARLOTTE AND MAGGIE spent most of December in London with friends of Charlotte’s mother, and soon found themselves invited to various social events.

  ‘My mother would be so happy to see me socializing in this way,’ Charlotte confided in Maggie one evening as they returned from a dinner party. ‘She didn’t really approve of my taking up nursing but because of the War she could not object too much.’

  ‘Don’t you enjoy going out and about, not even a little bit?’ asked Maggie, who found that she liked London a lot. Rather than being overwhelmed by the city as she thought she might be, she found it interesting to be in different company and have so many places to visit. Her expanding knowledge of art and literature heightened her appreciation of what she saw, and meant that she fe
lt able to chat more confidently with Charlotte’s friends and relatives.

  ‘I am impatient to be away.’ Charlotte spoke softly. ‘I feel that we are wasting time while men are dying in France and Flanders.’

  At once Maggie felt embarrassed at sounding so trivial, and as if she understood the older girl’s feeling Charlotte covered Maggie’s hand with her own.

  ‘It’s just that for me London is so new and exciting—’ Maggie began to excuse herself.

  ‘I understand,’ Charlotte interrupted her, ‘and so it should be. It is only that I have been coming to the city every year since I was small, but this is your first time so it is right that you are so taken up with it all.’

  The other person who knew how thrilling it must be for Maggie to be in London was Francis. At one time he had studied there and knew the galleries quite well. He sent her several hurried letters suggesting which ones to visit and what to see, and included some of his own personal notes on specific works. She wrote back quickly with her own comments and opinions. It seemed incongruous and certainly a little unfair that she should share famous works of art with him in this way. Outside Ypres his battalion occupied the trenches along the Yser Canal while across the Channel she stood, with his notes in her hand, gazing at a Botticelli Madonna or a da Vinci drawing.

  When she mentioned this in a letter he wrote in reply:

  On Christmas Day Maggie and Charlotte declined invitations to go out. They had shopped the previous week and had sent Francis a box of presents. That night they sat by the fire and spoke little, but were each glad of the other for company.

  After Christmas Maggie wrote to Francis to let him know that they would be moving on, and a few days later she received a letter that he had written to her during the last weeks of December.

  The parcel included a bundle of sketches of soldiers at Christmas dinner, drawings of men eating and drinking.