‘No. The Doc. says its OK now. Snag is, I still want to be a journalist, but the parents won’t have any. I’ll probably be a VAD. The parents’ll let me do that as Betty’s one already’.
‘Are you old enough?’
‘They’ll take me in the BRCS (British Red Cross Society) if Daddy signs the consent form as I’m underage.’ I watched a posse of small boys surfacing like dolphins from attempts to drown each other and vaguely recognized one of the spluttering faces as John’s. ‘I saw a Commandant here yesterday. She says I’ll have to go to some lectures and do ninety hours at the East Sussex (the Royal East Sussex Hospital) before I can be Mobile. Then I can nurse in military hospitals in this country but not overseas as you have to be twenty-one. Maddening! Years to wait.’
‘War can’t last that long. Think you’ll like nursing?’
‘Dunno.’ I stared at, but no longer saw, the human dolphins. Instead I saw myself gallantly dodging shells on French battlefields, gliding softly, gracefully up long hospital tents laying my cool hands on fevered brows. ‘Maybe.’
‘Let’s go in again.’
We swam out to the raft and I climbed on it laughing as I climbed blind because my hair was over my face. I never used a cap in the sea, I loved the feeling of water in my longish hair and the swish of the sea slithering by my ears. We had the raft to ourselves for a while and lay side by side on our backs squinting up at the absurdly blue sky. The gentle rocking of the raft and the warmth of the sun enveloped me in such a glorious sensation of well-being that it was rather frightening. I thought suddenly – I wonder if I’ll ever do this again. I never did.
It was the last Monday in August. That evening, as usual, we took down the tent poles, furled the ancient orange-striped canvas walls, rolled our swimsuits in damp towels, and carried the tent back into the cavern under the promenade that smelt of upturned rowing boats, fishing tackle, old sandals and damp canvas. John said next year we would have to have a new tent as ours was more mends than tents. I never saw our tent again nor heard if it and the cavern survived the war. St Leonards’ pier did not.
Next morning Father signed my consent form and after handing it in to the Commandant of my new Detachment, (BRCS, Sussex 14), I ordered – at Father’s expense – full indoor and outdoor uniform for Betty and myself. Father raised his eyebrows over the bill for twenty pounds odd. ‘I thought I’d agreed to fit out a couple of Red Cross nurses, not finance a hospital.’ The following afternoon our family collected our civilian gas masks from our own church hall. Father was one of the churchwardens, and in that hall on countless Saturday mornings in the holidays I had helped arrange the altar flowers and at other times to put up and serve behind the trestle tables in jumble sales, sales of work, or handed round trays of tea, bridge rolls with the butter running like oil, sandwiches decorated with sausage-stick flags. ‘Tomato on the left, fish paste on the right – yes, such a pity the fête was rained out – yes, jolly lucky we’ve got the hall …’
All the early rehearsals for the Christmas Nativity Play were held in that hall and owing to the Rector’s enthusiasm for his productions, few of his parishoners’ children between ten and sixteen managed to avoid being in the cast. Once in, by some unwritten but fixed adult law, there was no escape until the seventeenth birthday. Often this was then extended for the star performers without objection, as the star parts were much sought after. A few always remained in the same adult hands. The Rector was St Joseph and producer; the Curate, John the Baptist; Col … X (Ret.), the Centurion; and the Rector’s wife, Gabriel, as she was small, slim, elegant and the only person in the parish to possess or fit into her long-sleeved, high-necked gold lamé evening dress. Children started in the crowd scenes as Children of Jerusalem. Once in the teens, the boys rose to Extra Shepherds and later for the three with most carrying voices, to the Three Shepherds. All the Shepherds wore sacks with slits for heads and arms, sacks wound round their feet, and wine bottle straw cases round their bare calves. Ahead for the most talented Shepherds lay three of the star parts, the Three Kings. The Kings did no speaking but were literally in the limelight from their first appearance at the end of the three aisles to the opening notes of ‘We Three Kings’ to the final tableau on the dais in front of the rood screen. They wore borrowed silk dressing-gowns, rows of maternal necklaces and bracelets, and two had gold and silver paper crowns and the King from the East a silver lamé turban above his blacked-up face.
For Shepherds who failed to make Kings lay the lesser glory of marching as Roman Legionaries and being drilled in the hall by the Centurion in his old parade-ground voice. The Legion wore cardboard helmets, breastplates, daggers, and short, stone-coloured kilts of great antiquity – and to the younger cast, of unknown origin, but generally agreed by the off-stage crowd waiting in hall, ante-room, vestry and Lady-chapel to have been worn by Harold’s army in the Battle of Hastings. ‘What you mean they didn’t wear no kilts then? Was you there, smartie?’
Girls, normally, progressed from Children to Angels. One couldn’t, said the Rector, have too many Angels. Then he took me aside and explained very kindly why he could not make me an Angel. ‘Your hair is too dark. I’m afraid we can’t have black-haired Angels, so I want you to be – er – a Girl of Jerusalem.’
I seethed with fury and envy. Betty, Ann, Ruth, Peggy – all the other girls had silver stars and tinsel on their miserable fair hair and long white nightdresses with silver cord belts, and all I had was a mouldy brown tent and stiff white cambric triangle hiding most of my regrettable hair. I kept pushing back the triangle and authority kept heaving it forward. ‘No, no, dear, you mustn’t show so much hair. No respectable Girl of Jerusalem would show so much hair. You wouldn’t want the congregation to think you a fast girl, would you?’
I would. If I could not be an Angel I wanted to be Mary Magdalene – a vain want as she did not figure in the play. Then I discovered the unexpected compensation of being a non-speaking crowd of one and mostly off-stage. All my entrances, as the Shepherds, were from the vestry on the left, whilst the main crowd of adults and children came from the Lady-chapel, right. The vestry crowd had to overflow into the ante-room and the Rector did not mind where we sat to wait, so long as we kept still and quiet. Directly the organist began ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’, someone produced cards, and to the cry ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ we used my tent skirt as a card table and settled down to the game. It was there, from the shepherds, that I learnt poker, whist and vingt-et-un.
The church was newish and being the size of a young cathedral had ample room for the dais and many crowd scenes. We always had several semi-dress rehearsals before the three public performances and during the former the Rector dodged in and out keeping an eye on us and, as a fold of my voluminous skirt had been flicked over the cards, nodded approvingly. ‘Good quiet youngsters – what’s that Gabriel, my dear? Can’t hear the Baptist from the front?’ He dodged away and his voice floated back. ‘Louder, dear boy, louder! Take it from: “I come as one crying in the wilderness …”’
When I was sixteen, on the day of the final full-dress and make-up rehearsal, the statutory Virgin Mary caught ’flu. My tent was replaced by bright blue muslin, my cambric triangle by white georgette and after the opening minutes I was on stage in the main spotlight throughout the play. George that year was near the end of his apprenticeship, home for Christmas and as an ex-King risen from Shepherds and Crowd had refused to perform but agreed to work the spotlights. He was a very good-looking boy and in previous plays had barely acknowledged my schoolgirl existence, but after that play ended he took me to a movie, and fed me a banana split, a wild luxury that cost 1s. 3d.
On the afternoon of 30th August 1939, the trestle tables were up in the church hall, but in place of jumble, handmade tea-cosies appliquéd with daisies, simpering crinoline dolls to hide telephones, drawn-thread tablecloths and over-stuffed pin cushions, were geometrical stacks of small, square, brown cardboard boxes containing the civilian gas masks issued free
to the entire civilian population. Behind the tables not efficient or fussy middle-aged women and reluctant daughters, but youngish men with neat, official, faces and older men with habitual military and naval haircuts and broad armbands labelled A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions). We found the hall half-empty, but the official who dealt with us said there had been quite a rush earlier and he expected another later when people knocked off work. He demonstrated the correct use of a gas mask on himself and his muffled voice sounded as choked as he must have felt from his red face when he took it off. ‘Remember to make sure the straps that go over the head are tight enough to hold the mask tautly under the chin, or the poison gas can seep in.’
John asked what happened if it was mustard gas. ‘Our science master says civilian gas masks aren’t any good for mustard gas.’
The official said that was a most interesting question, young man, and rootled amongst the boxes for masks for mother and myself as if searching the right size in shoes. ‘How about this for you, madam? And for the young lady?’ Mother did not think it mattered what size she had as she knew she would stifle if she ever had to wear one as she never could stand anything over her face. ‘Remember how I objected to my veil in Egypt, Billee – and when I was a girl and veils were very fashionable and becoming always I removed mine.’ Father and the official clucked soothingly and the latter said of course we couldn’t be sure but would all hope no gas would be used. John surfaced from a mask. ‘Old Stinks says it will. Old Stinks says the Germans’ll drop lots of gas on us and if we aren’t all burnt and blistered with mustard gas we’ll get the sort that’ll make us sort of drown in our lungs in a green sort of froth glug-glug-glug – no, honestly, Daddy he did and he says …’
I stopped listening having noticed the ante-room door was open. On the chairs the Shepherds and I had used when playing cards and waiting for cues, young women waited and beside them babies in prams. Another official was carefully demonstrating the bulky tent-like apparatus provided by the Government to protect infants too small to wear masks in gas attacks. When packed away the apparatus needed a square cardboard box large enough to take up half the pram.
The door between ante-room and vestry was shut. The church sounded empty, but not to me. ‘Watchman, what of the night? … I come as one crying in the wilderness … And there were shepherds watching their flocks by night … Behold I bring you tidings of comfort and joy … Now then, choir and Children only, “Away In A Manger”! … Thank you, Children! Very nicely sung! Back to your places in the Lady-chapel.’ In the Children’s Corner in the Lady-chapel in blue letters on gold: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’
Mesmerized, I watched those obscene boxes being loaded onto prams and felt I had been kicked in the stomach and ashamed to be a member of the human race. I thought: no wonder Jesus wept. Two thousand years later – suffer the little children to come and get the gas masks that in a concentrated attack might, with luck, keep them alive for ten minutes. Long enough, it was said, to run to the nearest gas-proof shelters. (I presume there were gas-proof shelters in south-east England in the Second World War, but I never saw one. Nor did I see the bomb that destroyed our church but left the steeple standing, a few years later. Our GP and his daughter, my great girlhood friend Ann, were in their house, roughly two hundred yards downhill from the church and heard the bomb fall, but no immediate explosion. Once the sound of diving aircraft faded they went into the road and looked up the hill. ‘We saw the church give a little shake and then all but the steeple cave in. We waited watching from across the road until the huge dust cloud settled and then saw the whole body of St John’s had vanished. Luckily it was a weekday and empty.’)
St Leonards stands on a series of hills. When we walked back up our own hill from the church, a crocodile of small children passed us on their way down. The crocodile moved slowly, raggedly, and the children clung to each other’s hands as if so unsure of the ground under their feet as to be in active danger of falling through. Their hair was untidy, their faces unusually pale and pinched, knees thin and bare, socks crinkled, and they had gas mask boxes slung with string over their shoulders, small, obviously new and cheap suitcases, large white labels tied to the lapels of their coats and jackets. The expression in all their faces took me straight back to my first years at boarding-school when I too had felt lost and scared without understanding why and had secretly feared it must somehow be my fault that I had been sent away from home.
Father said the children were evacuees from London being taken to their new billets. ‘Madness and thoughtless!’
‘But, Daddy, shouldn’t they be out of London if it’s going to be bombed?’
‘Of course, but not brought for refuge to the East Sussex coast. If we have air raids the enemy’ll be bound to fly in over Sussex and Kent as that’s the shortest route to London. Bad enough for those poor youngsters being shifted from home without the prospect of being shifted on again.’
John asked if his school would be shifted. ‘Last term some boys said this time next year the school would be in Devon or somewhere.’ Our parents were silent. ‘I think this war’s going to be jolly exciting. I say – you don’t suppose we won’t have it?’
Father said that remained to be seen and we finished our walk in silence.
Two days later, on 1st September 1939, in a borrowed BRCS nurse’s uniform, in a men’s acute surgical ward in the Royal East Sussex Hospital, Hastings, I started the first of my ninety hours’ basic nursing training. Before that first shift ended, one of the many patients listening intently pushed up his wireless headphones. ‘There we are then, nurse. Old Hitler’s marched his lads into Poland.’
Not recognizing the title, I looked round to see the nurse he was addressing, then realized this was myself and what else he had said.
Chapter Three
When the train stopped at Southampton, the only civilian in our crowded carriage woke abruptly, clicked back his teeth and leapt onto the platform. Two minutes later he was back with a sausage roll balanced on the teaspoon in the saucer of his cup of Southern Railway tea. It was February 1940 and the war had not yet removed saucers from the railway buffets of southern England nor chained to buffet counters the solitary teaspoon for communal use.
The nine sailors who had rearranged themselves and their kit to give Betty and me window seats when we changed trains at Brighton reached under the seats for the small brown attaché cases that for that day alone seemed an incongruous appendage to bell-bottoms, flapping collars, round caps that defied gravity and bore only the ambiguous H.M.S. on the name ribbons. From then on I associated those cases with the Royal Navy as never once in the entire war did I see a seaman of any rank travelling without one.
The sailors’ cases were stacked with packets of crusted sandwiches and pork pies. In a large biscuit tin at six that morning Mother had packed enough food for Betty and I to survive a week in the train should one of the still un-materialized major air-raids so delay our journey to Hampshire. We shared the twelve bananas with the sailors as the elderly civilian said he was much obliged but if there was one thing he couldn’t touch it was a banana or he’d know it for days. The war must have helped him there, as those were the last bananas I saw whilst it lasted.
The sunlight filtering through the anti-blast brown paper strips criss-crossing the windows was surprisingly and unseasonably warm. January had been extra cold and for weeks every branch and twig on the bare trees had been encased in ice that transformed the evergreens into glittering emeralds. To find myself travelling on a summer’s day in February enhanced the sensations of unreality, and my mind’s life-long facility for framing personal situations with newspaper headlines, framed, ‘journey to a war’. Not that I believed it. The large suitcase on the rack over my head might be filled with grey-blue nurses’ dresses, white aprons with large red crosses on the bibs, white caps with smaller red crosses on the front turn-up, but I felt exactly as if going back to school. My new outdoor uniform coat and skirt were still nav
y blue serge, and if my white man’s shirt and black tie were some variation, the double-breasted navy greatcoat on the rack was as bulky and ill-fitting as my old school coat. When I protested, ‘It doesn’t fit me anywhere!’ the tailor half-strangled himself with his tape-measure in embarrassment: ‘Ladies’ uniforms are not – er – meant to – er – follow a lady’s form, miss. The coats and jackets are meant to hang loosely from the shoulders and the skirts from the waist.’ I had had to accept this and the thick grey woollen stockings but regarded the last as the ultimate sacrifice as I was proud of my legs.
Our third-class travel warrants had arrived with our call-up papers a few days earlier. Warrants and papers were heavily stamped, Mobile. At our next change the sailors heaved out our cases, holdalls, rugs and the carrier bag with the remains of the picnic and said we must give them a shout anytime we weren’t shipping Mobile and they’d muster their ships’ companies to carry our bags.
That station in peacetime served a small market town. ‘Clapham Junction of Southern Command now, ladies,’ said the harassed R.T.O. (Railway Transport Officer). ‘Any chap who doesn’t know what to do with his chaps shoves ’em off on a forty-eight, they end up here and we’re supposed to shove ’em on – but in what?’ The question seemed rhetorical since the station was nearly as alive with trains as with men. Big trains, little trains, trains without engines, engines without trains, engines pushing other engines, shunted to and fro, stopped and started, without apparently leaving the station. Every visible carriage was jammed with troops, every inch of platform, buffet and waiting rooms a solid sea of khaki. The R.T.O. sighed over our warrants, two Military Policemen loaded themselves without luggage, the ranks squeezed themselves apart to give us a path to a train of three coaches and an engine waiting in a siding. We were put into a first-class carriage. ‘Matter your warrants are thirds? Not the slightest, ladies! All the chaps are trying to get away from your camp, not go there. Probably have this to yourselves. Cheerio!’
No Time For Romance Page 5
