by Pam Weaver
They arrived in Ramsgate at about four in the morning. As he’d been seasick half way across, Alan wasn’t feeling so good. Neither of them had eaten for three or four days and after standing in the water for so long, Alan could hardly feel his feet. Some of the rescued men were in a distressed state. One chap had gone off his rocker and was in such a panic to get off the boat that one of the sergeants had to knock him out to gain control.
Alan had to haul Ginger off the boat, with his limp arm around Alan’s shoulder and his head lolling. He didn’t seem to be able to use his feet either.
‘Come on, mate,’ Alan encouraged. ‘Nearly home. Forty-eight hours with your little missus and you’ll be as right as rain.’
He ended up having to drag Ginger towards a line of St John ambulances waiting for them at the jetty. The WVS ladies were passing mugs of hot, dark, sweet tea around. It was only as the ambulance man took Ginger from him and Alan let go that he realized his pal had been bleeding. When he took his hand away from Ginger’s waist, Alan’s hand was covered in blood.
‘This one’s a goner,’ he heard the ambulance man say.
Alan’s mind went into freefall and everything went black.
‘They say the troop train will be passing through Worthing tomorrow,’ Uncle Lorry said.
Aunt Bet’s face lit up. ‘Does that mean Alan will be coming home?’
‘Shouldn’t think so, love,’ said Uncle Lorry. ‘He’ll be sent back to the barracks first and then he can apply for leave.’
It went unsaid, but they were all thinking the same thing … if he’s survived.
News filtered through to North Farm that Mrs Vickers had had a baby, a boy called Derek. As she hadn’t heard from Barbara, Frankie decided to call round to see Mrs Vickers. The baby was a good excuse. He was a bonny little chap with a red screwed-up face and long fingers. For someone who had just given birth, Mrs Vickers was doing amazingly well.
‘Barbara will be home again soon,’ she explained when Frankie asked for her London address. ‘My sister is a lot better now.’
Frankie felt a little awkward so she gave Derek a rattle and left.
*
Because petrol was rationed, the local florists had banded together to form an association. This meant that they took it in turns to collect their orders from their suppliers rather than doing it individually. This month it was Mrs Waite’s turn so Frankie had to take the van to the station to collect everything. As it happened, she was on the platform waiting for the London train to pull in when the first of the troop trains went by. She was met by a heart-rending sight.
The train slowed, probably because it was going through a station, and Frankie was desperate for a sight of Alan. He had to be on the train, didn’t he? His barracks was Hilsea and this was the Portsmouth train but instead of the usual proud smart soldiers, she was faced with the sight of bedraggled and exhausted men. They were in various states of dress or undress, unshaven, exhausted, pale or asleep. Men had their head on the tables, or they leaned their heads against the headrests with their mouths wide open. Some slept on each other’s shoulders. She even caught a glimpse of some poor soul asleep on the floor. As the train picked up speed, the porter standing next to her mumbled, ‘Poor blighters.’
Doreen had passed her medical to get into the Wrens but her lack of education let her down. She was bitterly disappointed but that was when Ronald stepped in. He promised to help her with her reading and mathematical skills and he set about devising a plan.
It was four days before the family heard what had happened to Alan. Apparently he had been rescued and was unharmed in body. He had, however, been admitted to hospital near Ramsgate. An old mate of Uncle Lorry lent them his car and the following Sunday Aunt Bet, Uncle Lorry, Ronald and Frankie set off to see him.
The hospital turned out to be in a country mansion which had been requisitioned by the government. The sweeping drive to the main entrance was certainly impressive and after the recent spell of bad weather, it was a real treat to see it bathed in sunshine. As they went up a flight of steps to the main entrance, they could see some patients in the grounds but there was no sign of Alan. There was a small desk to the left of the main doors and the receptionist took down their details. The family was told to wait in the waiting room and someone would come down to them. By now their anxiety levels were rising. Why all this fuss? They had expected to simply walk onto the ward.
After a few minutes a man in a white coat came down and introduced himself.
‘Doctor Boucher,’ he said extending his hand towards Uncle Lorry. Then he motioned them all to sit down. He was a small man, balding and slightly stooped. He looked about fifty and he had a tired expression. ‘Your son,’ he continued, addressing Aunt Bet and Uncle Lorry, ‘is not physically hurt but I’m afraid he’s suffered a bit of a breakdown.’
Frankie blinked. A bit of a breakdown? What did that mean? She glanced over to Ronald but he wore a blank expression.
‘It happens sometimes,’ the doctor went on. ‘A person can come through a great trauma and appear to be all right but then it really hits home and the body sort of shuts down.’ He sat on a chair next to them. ‘He looked pretty awful when he came in,’ he sighed. ‘Some of those lads had been on those beaches for as many as five nights. You can just imagine. No toilets, unwashed and wounded. The nurses had to cut their uniforms off them.’
‘Is that what happened to our Alan?’ Uncle Lorry asked.
Doctor Boucher nodded. ‘Not only that but we believe his best friend died in his arms on the way back from France. The poor chap appears to have been shot, and your son blames himself that he didn’t even notice.’
Aunt Bet put her hand over her mouth and let out a small whimper. Frankie leaned over and squeezed her other hand.
‘It’s the shock, you see,’ the doctor continued. ‘The shock and the guilt.’
‘Guilt?’ said Frankie. ‘What has he got to feel guilty about?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Doctor Boucher agreed, ‘but we find that a lot of our patients do. In Alan’s case I would say he feels guilty because he had no idea his friend was so badly injured and because he survived and his friend didn’t. They were all exhausted. From what I can gather, Alan didn’t take his boots off for four days or more and he spent almost a day standing in the water waiting to be picked up so his feet are pretty bad as well.’
Aunt Bet swallowed hard. ‘Will he recover?’
‘Given time.’
Uncle Lorry looked around. A couple of patients shuffled past them; a nurse was with them but they seemed to be in a world of their own. One man was continually doing and undoing the buttons on his coat and the other was clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘What sort of hospital is this?’ he said cautiously.
‘A mental hospital,’ said the doctor.
Uncle Lorry leapt to his feet. ‘You’ve put my son in a nut house!’ he exclaimed.
Aunt Bet grabbed at his sleeve. ‘It’s all right, Lorry.’
‘Oh, no, it’s not, Bet!’ Uncle Lorry shouted. ‘None of my family has ever had anything wrong with their heads and I’m not having it. My boy locked up with a load of lunatics. No, it won’t do.’
Doctor Boucher sighed. ‘But he isn’t locked up Mr Cavendish,’ he said patiently as if he had seen this reaction a thousand times over. ‘Right now he’s too ill to take care of himself. We have given him a safe place where he can collect his thoughts and talk about what’s happened to him, which will help him to come to terms with it.’
Uncle Lorry snorted.
‘But you believe that he will get well?’ Aunt Bet said cautiously.
‘As I’ve said, given time …’ said the doctor. He turned towards Uncle Lorry adding, ‘… and understanding, I see no reason at all why he might not return to society.’
‘Can we see him?’ Ronald asked.
‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘I understand that you’ve come a long way so I’ll make sure the ward sister knows and she’ll rela
x the visiting hours. I have to caution you not to pressurise him or try to make him talk about Ginger.’
‘Ginger?’ said Aunt Bet.
The doctor rose to his feet. ‘His friend.’
They all headed towards the door. ‘Perhaps,’ Doctor Boucher added as an afterthought, ‘only two at the bedside. I don’t want him overwhelmed.’
As he and Alan’s parents left, he called over his shoulder to Ronald and Frankie, ‘There’s a small tea room on the side of the house. You’re welcome to get some refreshments there.’
With a heavy heart, Frankie watched her aunt and uncle walk up the stairs then followed Ronald out of the building.
Nineteen
On the way home, nobody spoke. Frankie spent all of her time biting back the tears. It was too awful to see Alan – big strapping Alan who had been more like an older brother to her – reduced to a shivering, hollow-eyed wreck of a man who, at times, didn’t even seem to be aware that she was in the room.
She and Ronald had found the tea room and even had time to stroll in the grounds before Uncle Lorry came to find them. Alan’s room, which was on the first floor, had three other beds in it but the other occupants weren’t there. He looked up when she and Ronald walked into the room but didn’t acknowledge them. He was sitting in a big chair by the window and Frankie’s first impression was that he had diminished in size. Conversation was difficult and punctuated by long silences when she and Ronald couldn’t think of anything else to say. They felt a sense of relief when the ward sister came to say that Alan needed a rest and that it was time for them to leave.
During the drive home, Uncle Lorry was angry. ‘He’s never going to get better in a place like that,’ he grumbled. ‘Fancy locking him up with a load of nutters. It isn’t right.’
‘I’m sure they’re doing their best,’ Aunt Bet ventured. ‘You heard what the doctor said. To get better, he needs to talk about it.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Uncle Lorry snapped. ‘He doesn’t need to talk. He just needs to get on with life. They’re treating him like some hysterical woman.’
‘It’s the new way of doing things, Dad,’ said Ronald.
‘Load of tommyrot more like,’ his father retorted. ‘What he needs is to get back home to the farm where he belongs. That’ll do him more good than all the talk in the world.’
Whilst Frankie understood her uncle’s determination to get his son back home, she questioned the wisdom of removing him from hospital. Doctor Boucher seemed very caring and he understood Alan’s mental state. Uncle Lorry’s assertion that ‘all the boy needed was to buck up and forget about it’ was far too simplistic. Alan wasn’t just miserable. He was damaged.
*
Back home, they were the ones who ‘got on with it’. Aunt Bet began the first round of bottling fruit and making chutney. Uncle Lorry strode around the farm, biting people’s heads off and making himself extra work so that he didn’t have to come into the house apart from meal times. Ronald took on extra book-keeping jobs and continued to help Doreen with her studies. Frankie had never seen them kissing or anything but they seemed very close.
Frankie carried on too, but she was so frustrated. On the one hand, the government was saying that the country needed every able-bodied person to fight for freedom, yet on the other hand, they had imposed an age restriction. Like Doreen, she badly wanted to join up but the Wrens and the WAAFs only took women of eighteen and over. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another year and the war would probably be over by then. At this stage of her life, the only services open to her were the land army or the Auxilary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the army which was known by its acronym of ATS. But this was June and she’d have to wait until September for her birthday before she could apply.
She’d fished out her birth certificate from the dresser drawer where Aunt Bet kept all the important papers. She studied it carefully, wondering if she could alter it in some way, but changing the word ‘September’ was impossible.
It wasn’t until she was throwing out some waste at work that Frankie hit upon an idea. She had wrapped all the bits in a newspaper and as she was about to toss it into the bin, she caught sight of a headline. Fire took everything. Underneath was the story of a woman who had lost her home and everything in it when a chip pan caught fire. It was a light bulb moment for Frankie. What if she told the authorities that she’d suffered a house fire? She could say she was already eighteen but she couldn’t prove it because she’d lost all of her papers in that fire. Of course the authorities might check up on her but with a war on, who would have time for that? And even if they did, by the time they found out, she would have been enlisted for some time and would most likely already be eighteen. They’d hardly chuck her out, would they?
On the way home that night she stopped by the ATS recruiting office which had been set up in a small room in the Old Town Hall. An enormous army sergeant took down her details, her name and address and her date of birth (the new one making her a year older).
‘Well done, Miss,’ he boomed as he rose to his feet. ‘You’ll be hearing from us soon.’
Frankie shook his spade-like hand and headed for the door. Outside on the step, she was tempted to do a little jig. All she had to do was pass the medical and she was in.
*
With the terrible events of Dunkirk behind them, everyone settled back to an uneasy peace and Barbara came home. Frankie called round to see her again but she wasn’t very talkative. She’d found herself a job in a NAAFI canteen set up in Broadwater for the Canadian troops.
‘She’ll be like a kid in a sweet shop,’ Aunt Bet muttered darkly when Frankie told her but Frankie wasn’t so sure. These days Barbara seemed very subdued.
The whole country had expected the Germans to follow up their occupation of France with an invasion along the south coast but instead, Hitler turned his attention towards Russia.
‘I reckon the Nazis think we’ll be happy to settle for a peace treaty,’ Ronald said.
‘Churchill will never agree to that,’ Uncle Lorry harrumphed.
Frankie had to agree. They had read of him saying as much in the House of Commons. ‘The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain to begin.’ And he was right.
From July onwards, although the weather was glorious, the idyllic peace of the countryside was interrupted by the incessant drone of aircraft. Day after day they heard Hurricanes and Spitfires from Tangmere, Ford, Westhampnett and Shoreham heading over the Channel to intercept the German Luftwaffe. The boys in blue were doing their best to stave off the Nazis and many a day they heard a dog fight overhead.
Frankie had her medical and passed with flying colours but she didn’t say anything to Aunt Bet and Uncle Lorry until an official-looking envelope dropped onto the mat one morning. Her aunt and uncle were still driving to Ramsgate every other weekend to see Alan but there was hope that he would be transferred to Graylingwell hospital’s Summersdale block. Uncle Lorry was still upset that his son was classed as mentally frail but if he was in a more local hospital, such as the one in Chichester, he firmly believed it would be much easier to get Alan home.
To her enormous surprise, when she opened her letter, Frankie discovered she had to report to the ATS training camp the day after tomorrow.
‘I wasn’t expecting it to come so soon,’ she confessed as she told Aunt Bet what she’d done.
There was a list of requirements with the letter but she was only allowed to take one small suitcase. Mrs Waite seemed a little shocked that Frankie was going so soon but she and the girls wished her luck. Doreen took the news stoically. Frankie knew she’d have mixed feelings: pleased for Frankie but disappointed that she still hadn’t managed to get into the Wrens. They hugged and wished each other luck. ‘You will write?’ asked Doreen.
‘Of course,’ Frankie assured her, ‘and you write back. I’ll be good practice for you.’
The next day, Aunt Bet came with her to the station to see her off. Frankie was b
oth nervous and excited. When the train arrived she climbed aboard and put her suitcase onto the overhead rack. Then she opened the window and leaned out.
‘Take care, lovey,’ said Aunt Bet, ‘and don’t forget to write.’ There were tears in her eyes.
‘I won’t,’ said Frankie. ‘And thank you for all you’ve done for me.’
Aunt Bet looked such a forlorn figure as she waved goodbye from the platform. Frankie felt so sorry for her. Just that morning they had had a letter to say that Alan had been diagnosed with Battle Fatigue and would be in hospital for at least a few months. When he read it, Uncle Lorry had thrown the letter onto the kitchen table and stomped outside, slamming the door behind him. The one good thing was that Aunt Bet still had Ronald at home. With his ear trouble it wasn’t likely that he would be going anywhere.
*
Frankie arrived at the barracks at four-thirty. She was directed to her hut by the soldier on the gate. There were several other girls already inside and as she came through the door, they introduced themselves. Almost as soon as she’d heard their names Frankie forgot them, but they had come from all over the country and, like her, with a single purpose – to help win the war.
Her bed was between a girl called Peggy and another called Arlene. Peggy was about her age but Arlene seemed quite a bit older. Peggy was from Powys in Wales and had two brothers, both in the army. Arlene had a cut-glass accent and her father was a Brigadier which was why she had chosen the ATS. She obviously moved in exalted circles but she didn’t put on airs and graces.
Peggy kept looking up at the clock on the wall. ‘I hope we get something to eat before we go to bed. I’m ravishing.’
Frankie guessed she hadn’t intended to use the wrong word but didn’t correct her. When Arlene caught her eye, they exchanged a wry smile.
