Sisters of the East End

by Helen Batten

  ‘All right, Sister?’ a man dropped his workbag and picked me up.

  ‘Yes, yes, I think so, thanks,’ I said as I smoothed down my habit.

  ‘Are you sure, love? You didn’t ’arf ’it your ’ead ’ard.’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you very much.’

  ‘Well, look after yourself, treacle.’

  ‘Um … thanks.’

  Treacle? I had an image of gooey sticky liquid penetrating my brain as I wobbled off down the road. The delivery was, thankfully, straightforward. It was a third child for a laid-back, salt-of-the-earth Cockney woman. Within the hour a new baby boy had arrived in the world but as I leant over the bath to examine the dish that held the placenta, I suddenly felt a terrible throbbing in my head and then I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the bed with a newborn baby in the cot beside me.

  ‘’Ere, love, ’ave a cuppa. You ’ad a nasty turn.’

  The poor mother, who’d only given birth half an hour ago, was standing over me with a cup of tea. At this moment Sister Alice, having completed her routine rounds, walked into the room. The look on her face when she saw me lying in bed with a newborn baby beside me was priceless.

  That evening, after all the prayers, I was sitting in my room staring into space, still with a slight headache, when there was gentle knock on the door. It was Sister Alice. She came into the room and sat on my bed.

  ‘Sister dear, you are sad. Something is not right.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Alice.’

  ‘I was wondering if I could help.’

  Sister Alice was my midwifery tutor and it was not her job to look after my pastoral care, so with that first piece of humanity and evidence of love, I started to cry. When I used to cry when I was little, my mother would say, ‘Just look at those crocodile tears! I’ve never seen any so big,’ and she and my siblings would laugh at me, which didn’t really help. Sister Alice was more sympathetic and drew me to her impressive bosom and gave me a hug. I hadn’t been hugged for six years. In the 1960s Sisters were discouraged from anything other than the most minimal greeting peck on the cheek. The wonder of human physical contact. I had so missed it, and I blurted out randomly a whole host of things I had been holding inside.

  ‘I am so confused, so lonely. I’ve lost my way. Everything looks different; I don’t know where I am. I thought I knew, but now I don’t. I don’t know anyone any more.’

  ‘You feel lost at the moment, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do. I don’t know how to find my way out.’

  I had to stop speaking while I cried some more, big childish sobs. Sister Alice’s habit was getting wet.

  ‘You have lost the path.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m so scared.’

  My nose was running and dripping onto her habit. She couldn’t see. My head was on her shoulder.

  ‘It’s Cecilia. I can’t seem to get past her going. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how it could have happened. Why didn’t she speak to me? I miss her so much. But I can’t make sense of it. No one will talk to me about it; it’s like she’s been erased. But she hasn’t: not in my heart.’

  I had pulled back from her shoulder and I was jabbing at my chest, and I could hear with some alarm that my voice was raised.

  ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m really, really angry. Angry with her, angry with me … angry with all of you, just going along as if nothing has happened. As if she doesn’t matter.’

  Sister Alice remained calm. There was silence as we both listened to the echo of my words and then she asked, ‘And angry with God?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, OK then, yes. I’m angry with God.’

  ‘And what is He telling you?’

  ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing.’

  ‘You have prayed?’

  ‘Oh Sister, of course I’ve jolly well prayed. But He isn’t listening.’

  There was a shocked silence, or rather my shocked silence. She didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps chose not to notice, that I was actually shouting at her now.

  ‘You have told Him that you are angry with Him?’

  I paused. I thought about it and said a bit more quietly, ‘No. No, I suppose I haven’t. But I can’t hear or feel Him. It’s like He just vanished in Cecilia’s suitcase.’

  ‘Perhaps you are just too angry to let Him in. Because He is here, you know. He hasn’t gone. Perhaps it is you that has gone off in Cecilia’s suitcase.’

  She was smiling at me now. I couldn’t help but smile back through the tears. I loved her calm certainty, it was very reassuring, and holding and infectious.

  ‘Catherine Mary, you have to be real with God. You have to take your anger to Him. You have to sit with Him, tell Him you are angry with Him and tell Him why. Use your tears; make them your prayer. In order to grow in love with God you have to be real, you have to present all shades of your being to Him, even the angry ones.’

  She paused, drew a hanky from the folds of her habit and wiped away my tears. I felt like a child.

  ‘Sometimes God is absent. That is when we most need our faith and patience. He will come back if we let Him and are truly open to Him. As you know sometimes He doesn’t speak to us directly but wherever you look, there are references to Him. He shows Himself through other people, small acts of kindness. I saw Him at work this afternoon when you were lying on the bed with the miracle of life beside you and a new mother had got up and made you a cup of tea. Once I had got over my surprise, I felt deeply moved. It was a beautiful nativity scene and put me in mind of Jesus’s unlikely start in a manger and the innkeeper’s grace.’

  I pictured what Sister Alice had seen. I hadn’t thought about it like that at all. Well, I wasn’t really thinking – I had a really throbbing headache – but suddenly I felt moved too.

  ‘Sister Alice, could you tell me about what happened to Cecilia? Just a little. Just something that might help me to understand.’

  ‘Of course it’s against our rules to discuss these matters, but yes, I am moved to tell you. Perhaps it is the Holy Spirit reaching out to you, Catherine. Sometimes we are called to break earthly rules by something higher. Anyway, Sister Cecilia did not want to be a midwife. She did not believe this was her calling and this brought into question her whole calling to the religious life. She has gone away to consider these questions. What concerns me at this moment is that it seems to have had an impact on your calling.’

  ‘Yes, it’s like my foundation has been pulled away. I suddenly feel as if I’m the house built on sand rather than on stone.’

  ‘But is it sand? You see, I’ve always felt your calling to this work, to being a midwife, is very, very solid. To walk with someone in childbirth, coping with their pain and suffering, to seek and find God in the context of bringing new life into the world, I witness you feeling this, in a way that Cecilia never did.’

  An image came to mind of my first baby, little John.

  ‘Yes, Sister, I have felt that.’

  ‘Then you are in the right place, doing the right thing. If the work and the life brings you closer to God, if you feel God beside you when you do this, you are in the right place; you are called.’

  I nodded. Sister Alice had given me a glimpse of the path again.

  ‘But I do think you need a rest and some space to be with God. There is some need for an opportunity for reconciliation. I want you to take a couple of days off – stay in your room, go for walks, it doesn’t matter – but I would like you to attend prayers. In the meantime I want to give you this.’

  From inside the folds of her habit she produced a small, worn leather notebook.

  ‘I would like to read the diary of one of our Community who was also called and managed to find God in the most extreme situation. Read, be with Nurse Wren, and God and pray. You will find a way back. Your calling is built on the most solid foundations. It is built on stone, I know that, my child.’

  Sister Alice left and for the first time since Sister Cecilia had
disappeared, I experienced some kind of peace and slept soundly.

  The next morning I woke up early and started turning the fragile pages of Nurse Wren’s diary. Out slipped an old sepia photograph of a lady standing in what looked like a muddy farmyard. She had big gumboots on her feet, a long sensible overcoat with an ethnic satchel strapped across her body, and a floppy felt hat. Her head was tipped slightly quizzically to one side and she had a determined yet kind expression. I thought that perhaps she was only in her mid-twenties. I started to read her words and was immediately plunged into the chaos of the First World War. On the first page Nurse Wren wrote,

  It was pitiful to see quite tiny children with both feet and often one hand swollen and discoloured, absolutely helpless to treat apart from amputation, which they dread most of all.

  I realised straight away that this was not going to be an easy read.

  Nurse Wren had been working for the Community of St John when in August 1915 she was sent to help care for the casualties of the fighting in Serbia. At first she appeared to be in good spirits and described a chaotic journey on a jolting bullock wagon, being thrown on to the laps of the good women of the Scottish missionary hospital to the amusement of the local townsfolk. But on arriving in camp she was faced with a typhoid epidemic.

  We were badly needed in camp as many of the staff were slowly recovering from typhoid fever and the number of patients were daily increasing … often they came two and three days journey by bullock wagon as there are few doctors left in Serbia since the typhus scurge. Tuberculosis is rife, as is cancer.

  Nurse Wren set to work with good humour, cheerily describing nights spent battling with tents, ropes and pegs as she tried to cope with the vicious Balkan storms,

  Quite amusing, only being unused to the ropes, one had a fair amount of tumbles! I fear few of our English acquaintances would scarcely have recognized us when we came off duty in the mornings.

  She had only been there a month when the Germans started to bomb the camp. As bombs dropped around it seemed their only protection was to close the tent flaps. It soon became obvious more effective measures were needed and the patients were moved a few miles and ended up strewn along the roadsides in all sorts of strange garments. But the Germans were advancing quickly. They were given orders to discharge all the civil patients.

  That was very sad, so many were quite unfit to travel. Bullock wagons were commandeered by the government and trains were no longer available, these days are not easy to write about.

  As the Germans began to bombard Belgrade the casualties started to pour in.

  Their wounds were fearful and we wondered how they managed to get to us, some had been five days without any attention and little food.

  More than half could not be admitted. They had run out of beds and food, and many were just left by the roadside.

  The Serbs slept with their blankets pulled over their heads so every night Nurse Wren had to go round checking they had not died. It was particularly important as, according to Serbian tradition, they should have been holding a lit candle in their hands as they passed into the shadows. Her night shifts were spent trying to make sure this happened.

  As Belgrade fell they made preparations to leave camp. With no food, Nurse Wren said the discomfort of the patients was ‘indescribable’. However, she said that they did not complain and did not fear death, and put their trust in the medical staff. Then, on 25 October, they were given the order to march and they had to leave their patients behind to the mercy of the Enemy. She described it as heart-rending but ‘our training imposes strict obedience. I dare not judge.’ Ah yes, the ‘O’ word. I could identify with that.

  I decided to put on my black cape and go for a walk. Outside, Poplar was busy. It was a spring day, with breezy fluffy clouds and bright sunshine across a light blue sky; clear and contrasting with the hectic, messy world underneath. There was building work everywhere. On the ruined bomb sites there were cranes constructing new tower blocks. The streets were filled with busy, optimistic women in headscarves with shopping bags and men with cigarettes in their mouths, looking purposeful. Children were crowding the streets on their way home from school. The war had been over for nearly 20 years, life was renewing itself, the world was moving on; but was it moving on without me?

  I didn’t feel able to go back to the diary until the evening. What then unfolded was the story of Nurse Wren and her party’s dramatic hike across a snow-covered Serbia, chased by the rapidly advancing German Army. The aim was to get to the coast to catch a boat out of the war zone. I was struck by the sheer chaos of it all. Whenever they reached a town there were all nationalities – French aviators, pitiful Austrians, German prisoners – penned into an orchard begging for bread and cigarettes, selling their helmets and belts:

  One lad who spoke English well told us he had only left Berlin one month, he and his fellow prisoners were starving. They had all rather been shot than brought to Serbia to starve.

  Then there was the indiscriminate nature of the suffering. Nurse Wren watched as a car went over the mountain, killing the Scottish nurses inside. A nun in a bullock wagon was accidentally shot in the lung by a Serbian soldier. When the Serbian soldiers travelling with Wren decided to steal a pony, the owner shot a soldier, the owner’s son then shot a nun by accident and it all ended with the Serbs shooting the son.

  As the weather worsened sleet turned to snow, which turned into blizzards. The Germans blocked their path so they had no alternative but to walk over the mountains. Nights were spent in stables, huddling together with soldiers of random nationalities for warmth, sleeping upright because there was no room. Everyone got dysentery. During the day they passed frozen bodies on the roadside and the snow was covered in blood from the bleeding feet of refugees, reduced to wearing sacking on their feet. They passed packhorses, too weak to carry on, which had been left to die.

  They just stood looking meekly beside the path with no food. Snow covered everything too deeply for them to find any green food yet we could only push on, dreading a similar end.

  The lack of food, and the hunt for it, was a constant theme. Sometimes they lived on maize bread with Nestlé’s cream (Nurse Wren always carried her bread wrapped in a handkerchief in her coat to stop it from being stolen). Many days they walked tens of miles through the snow with no food at all. Even when they were given food, they were not able to cook it. A Turkish farmer gave them some precious meat, but it was three days before they could find somewhere to cook it. After leaving it overnight boiling in a pot, they woke up to find it had been stolen, with only the bare bones left. ‘Still, at least we had slept well,’ she wrote.

  And that was what I took most from Nurse Wren – her resilience and resourcefulness. She never gave up, or slid into self-pity, or lost her faith in both humanity and God, and all done with a wry sense of humour.

  Many times she praised the kindness of strangers and most of all, the Austrian Prisoners of War. One day, when the Ford car carrying the wounded got stuck in the snow and the chauffeur ‘lost his mind’, Nurse Wren walked three miles to the nearest village to borrow some oxen. Surly villagers refused her but after walking another mile she came across ten Austrian Prisoners of War, who offered to come and help. They got the car out, but all Wren’s party could spare was a penny each, yet the Austrians were quite satisfied.

  Indeed the kindness shown us by the Austrian prisoners all through our journey, allowing us to use their camp fires, often holding our billycans on sticks to boil them quickly for us, knowing we had nothing to give them in return was most astonishing.

  When her boots started to fall apart she commandeered some slippers.

  I managed to annex a pair of bedroom slippers which I securely tied over my boots. They were pale blue. Never did my bedroom slippers do such good service before, soon they had frozen securely on.

  When they eventually reached a town, Nurse Wren and a few of her nursing companions were taken to the house of a local Turkish official. She delig
hted in telling of the glee of his many wives at meeting these foreign women. The Turk talked to them through a brazier and passed them food and cigarettes. The wives, meanwhile, settled down to watch them undress and get into a clean bed. Nurse Wren was mortified by the state of her pestencrusted clothes.

  We had certainly been in some difficult positions, but none quite so distressing as this, not having removed our clothes for fifteen days.

  When they finally got a first glimpse of the coast, it seemed too good to be true. She sat down and gazed at the sea, enjoying thoughts of home. Unfortunately the boat they were supposed to escape in was sunk in the harbour by German bombs. But hearing a rumour of another boat further up the coast, she decided to take the risk and walked another three days. The Italian captain was eventually persuaded to take her and she spent the night crossing the Adriatic standing upright in the forecastle, rolling with the waves and being rained on. On arrival at Brindisi she said she made a ‘sorry spectacle’.

  Up the street we ran, clutching our first white bread. Only those who have eaten maize bread for nearly nine weeks can realise the joy of a freshly baked loaf of white bread. The amazement of the people of Brindisi was amusing. Such a worthy company, in all kinds of attire, rushing through these delightfully clean and peaceful streets, must give them a very queer impression of the usual quiet people of Great Britain.

  She eventually reached Southampton on 23 December, just in time for Christmas.

  At this point Nurse Wren quoted a prayer she found inside a book,

  Father, who watchest in the silent heaven,

  knowing the sight, bidding me know it, yet

  Unconquerably silent, till I choose.

  Oh! In dizzying, weary to and fro,

  And counter-winds of question, in the blank

  And shoreless void of doubt, where stares a soul,

  Let me not err, Father of souls, not err

  Thou wilt not speak, Yea, Lord, but let thy hand

  Bar the false path in silence.

  I closed the book and put it down. It seemed to be a prayer for me too. I had definitely been in the shoreless void of doubt and for the moment the Lord was silent; but was he barring the false path with Sister Alice’s kind visit and the gift of Nurse Wren’s diary?