No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  In the early morning before the C.O.’s weekly inspection of the block, whilst VADs and up-patients swept and polished floors, scrubbed lockers, burnished every inch of brass in sight, the bed-patients carefully spread their red handkerchiefs on their top pillows to protect the pristine whiteness from last-minute cigarette ash and Brylcreem. Immediately the official party was spotted crossing the square, cigarettes and handkerchiefs vanished. During those inspections, and for my first few weeks in the hospital during all medical rounds, in N.D.K. the up-patients had throughout to stand to attention by their beds and the bed-patients to lie to attention. In private, quite a few of the new and younger M.O.s admitted to sharing my fury at this iniquitous absurdity. The troops’ philosophical attitude astonished me. ‘You got to look at it this way, miss. If you goes on sick parade in the army, you puts yourself on a charge.’

  ‘You mean it’s a crime to be sick or injured?’

  ‘You’ve said it, miss!’

  On our block diagnosis list, against name after name: N.D.K. Against others: tonsillitis, septic finger, Vincent’s Angina, fractured finger, query incipient gastric ulcer, backache, ring worm, dermatitis too mild for SKINS. What precisely went into SKINS I was never thankfully to learn but always secretly feared from the strange linen masks I glimpsed on the faces of the men leaning over the permanently cordoned-off area of the long, narrow, iron-railed balcony connecting all the upper floors and overlooking the square.

  An amazing – to me – number of our patients in N.D.K. had injured fingers and one arm in a sling. The men blamed their new tanks and enjoyed curdling the blood of new VADs with the horrors that awaited newly mechanized troopers. From their accounts, there was not a tank crew in the British Army with a full quota of fingers and thumbs. Invariably they retold their cherished, apocryphal, story of the sergeant-instructor who pressed the wrong button in a demonstration. ‘There he stood, miss – I tell you no lie – there he stood with nothing but the two stumps. Talk about surprised! Blood everywhere! Swimming in it, the lads were!’

  At first in N.D.K. roughly every half-hour I had to put down some broom, scrubbing-brush, or brass-polishing rag and wash my hands to re-tie a sling. In desperation I asked my mentor, Mrs S, for help. ‘I must be doing them wrong as mine keep coming undone.’

  She laughed. ‘Nothing wrong with your slings. The boys are undoing them. They’re just trying it on as you’re young and new. You can stop this easily if you tell the next to try it that Sister’ll have you on the mat if she catches more of your slings coming adrift. These boys are exactly like their fathers last time – they like their bit of fun but they’ll risk perjury and the glass house to save a VAD being put on the mat by a Sister.’

  Her advice worked instantly, which astounded me, but not so much as the soldiers’ habit of regarding admission to N.D.K. as admission to paradise. ‘Been telling me mate, miss – all right in here!’ Up went a thumb. ‘All right, it is!’

  On admission almost every patient was escorted in by his special mate from his unit. I learnt to identify the mate as the soldier who jumped first from the ambulance or van, looked the most worried and carried the small kit. ‘Small kit’ comprised razor, brush, comb, haircream, occasionally toothbrush, and other personal possessions small enough to pack in a knitted khaki scarf with one of the double-sided ends pushed into the other to make an open-ended bag. At visiting times the mate coaxed, bullied or bribed comrades to stand-to for him and arrived to stand or sit by his friend’s bed, often without either exchanging a word and sharing pages of the Daily Mirror or Razzle. When, as happened very rarely, a really ill or injured man was temporarily admitted to N.D.K. to await a bed in an acute block, his mate haunted our side exits to the square, dodged M.O.s, Sisters and N.C.O.s and waylaid VADs. ‘Excuse me, miss – just a word about me mate – how’s he doing? You’ll – er – you’ll tell him I was asking and – tell him chin-up.’

  From the N.D.K. patients I first learnt the military art of scrounging. Later I met a battalion of expert scroungers, but none surpassed the scrounging talent of one Cpl C in N.D.K. Cpl C was a regular soldier with five years’ service, a small sturdy man with dark hair, calm eyes and already an old soldier’s rigidity in his young face. He was an up-patient with one arm in a sling and it was the constant dread of the block VADs that one day he would be discharged back to barracks. If we ran short of floor polish, scouring powder, coal for the only and open fire on which we boiled eggs, reheated porridge, heated kaolin poultices, and when Sister was not around brewed-up instead of boiling the water for her mid-morning tea, the cry went up, ‘Corp! Please!’ The Cpl would silently don his cap, straighten his red tie, amble out into the square and return within minutes with the essential commodity either hidden in his sling, or when this was coal, in a fire bucket beneath a thin layer of sand. That we were always kept short of essentials ceased to surprise me after my first month in the Army as I then accepted, if never understood, authority’s habit of never replenishing such stores in full or in time.

  Our block Sister was then an elderly, elegant QA Reservist, with First World War medal ribbons, black silk stockings and high-heeled black court shoes. One evening someone discovered the following day was her birthday. Next morning, ten minutes before Sister came on at eight, Cpl C came into the reception hall with a large bunch of daffodils for Sister’s desk. A cookhouse orderly lugging in the porridge buckets told me he had spotted the Cpl in the night helping himself from the C.O.’s garden. Whether or not this was true, I could believe it, but denied it firmly as a scurrilous rumour.

  Never in N.D.K. did the Cpl scrounge for any but the communal or the nursing staff’s good. When the front inner tube of the aged bicycle I had bought from another VAD for ten shillings was ruined by my habit of riding on flats, the Cpl produced and organized the fitting of a new tube. I was grateful but concerned. ‘Corp, you’re an angel, but – er – did you get this from one of the other VAD’s bikes?’

  ‘Miss Andrews, are you suggesting I’d scrounge from a nurse? What do you think I am?’ He was so incensed that despite my abject apology he sulked for two days. Luckily he overheard my explosion when a broom fell apart. ‘I don’t mind sweeping this entire block with tea-leaves, a broom with three hairs and a handle two foot long, but if this miserable head falls off again I’m going to re-muster to the ATS! If the Army wants us to keep this block clean, why can’t they give us decent brooms?’

  ‘Let’s have it.’ The Cpl strolled over, jammed the head back on the pole. ‘Face it, Miss Andrews. The Army’ll never replace anything just because it falls to pieces. Got to crumble to dust first.’ He glanced out of the window and at a medical orderly leisurely pushing dust along one of the acute block balconies. ‘Seems they’ve had an issue of new brooms over there.’

  ‘They have.’ I was bitter. ‘Trust the acutes to get first pick.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He kicked off the head he had just repaired. ‘This needs a nail. I’ll take a walk—’

  ‘Hey, Corp – please! The acute orderlies’ll lynch you – if you’re thinking—?’

  He gave me a long, expressionless look. ‘I got five years’ service, Miss Andrews. I never think.’

  I never saw that wrecked broom again nor asked how the much longer pole of the brand new broom with which I was presented twenty minutes later had been deeply charred round the point used for the block identification letters. Sister raised plucked eyebrows. ‘Someone has been using that broom as a poker. You VADs must be more careful. I cannot permit such misuse of army equipment.’

  ‘No, Sister. I’m sorry, Sister.’

  The patients did not mind us sweeping floors, but objected strongly to the sight of a VAD ‘swinging a bumper’. A bumper was a very long handled, heavy, flat and oblong-shaped at the polishing face, floor polisher that had to be used daily on all ward floors. In the acute blocks, generally, as these still had medical orderlies, bumpering was done by men. In blocks without orderlies, by VADs. The best results were achi
eved by first slinging down a handful of wax polish then one-handedly swinging the heavy bumper to and fro. But as few female wrists and arms had the necessary muscular strength for this, most VADs, as myself, used both hands. Seldom for more than thirty seconds. ‘That’s no job for you, miss! Let’s have that bumper! Oy – Andy – Taff – Bert – stand by to take over …’

  In N.D.K. the patients only began calling VADs ‘nurse’ instead of ‘miss’ after Dunkirk, as it was really only then that we properly nursed them. In those earlier months we served their meals, made their beds, scrubbed their lockers, swept their ward floors always twice and often three times daily, polished brass coat-hooks, doorknobs, keyholes, emptied and washed thrice-daily the collection of tin lids they used as ashtrays, lit and tended the one coal fire mainly with bare hands as we had no coal-tongs and the provided shovel and poker were large enough to stoke an express engine. Our ‘nursing’ seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ring-worm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains, taking and charting temperatures, very occasionally doing a minor surgical dressing or removing a few stitches, sticking on and removing strapping plaster, and handing out doses of Gee’s Linctus by the gallon, M. and B. tablets by the dozen, and the troops’ beloved A.P.C. tablets by the gross.

  We had a few lead-swingers (malingerers), and two or three genuine hypochondriacs who kept reappearing when yet another newly qualified M.O. straight from teaching hospital was sent to cut his military teeth in N.D.K. The gravity of Pte X’s, Tpr Y’s or Gnr Z’s alarming symptoms worried these young men. ‘You say the pain catches you here?’

  ‘You’ve got it, sir! Catches me cruel, sir – hot knife in me belly it is, sir, then down it goes into me right leg and can I move it? Helpless, sir – see? Like a log, that’s what.’

  ‘The numbness affects the right leg? But in these notes from your own M.O. the numbness is stated as affecting the left leg.’

  The aggrieved note in the patient’s expression and tone were perfectly judged. ‘I says it was the right to the M.O. back at the unit, sir. Can’t say I’m sure how he got it wrong, sir.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes. Er — admit for observation, please.’ And against the diagnosis: No diagnosis known.

  The conscripts and the volunteer soldiers approved of the new M.O.s. The regulars smiled lugubriously, ‘Give ’em a couple of months to forget civvy street and all you’ll get then me lads is the old Aspro and iodine.’

  ‘Excuse me, Sgt, but why Aspro and iodine?’

  ‘This way, miss. If you feels bad in the Army, your M.O. he gives you a couple of Aspro: if you’re hurt bad, he bungs on iodine. Don’t reckon he knows no more but if he do he’ll not let on, not if he wants his promotion.’

  In those first, deceptively halcyon few months of 1940 most weekday evenings, and specially on Fridays and Saturdays, the green baize notice-board in our Mess was festooned with open invitations to parties in the many Officers’, Warrant Officers’ and Sergeants’ Messes in and around the camp. The Sergeants gave the best parties. I did not go to many, as a few weeks after our arrival I met Desmond, a cavalry subaltern who also wanted to be a writer and we preferred talking to parties.

  Desmond, very tall, thin and nineteen, had joined his county yeomanry as a Territorial. He loathed the Army but loved his cavalry breeches, boots and the high cap still worn by cavalry officers. On the evening when he arrived wearing the new battledress his gloom was tragic. He owned an old Baby Austin and as either he, or his batman – I was never sure which – had a talent for scrounging petrol, often we drove to Salisbury, Marlborough, and around and over Salisbury Plain.

  I loved the Plain. Double-summer-time had begun, and on the long, light, evenings a blue haze shimmered over the empty miles of green-brown turf. The occasional lines of low trees made dark green fringes against the bluer sky and the unset sun that had barely touched the horizon when I had to be back at our Mess for nightly roll-call at 10 p.m., enhanced the conviction that daylight and youth must last for ever. Sometimes we regressed to childhood, drove off the road and over the undulating turf pretending the car was a tank and ignoring the possibility of mines. We talked of the books and plays we would write and the books only Desmond had read. ‘My God, girl! You mean you’ve never read Evelyn Waugh? Christ, you must!’ We sang duets, endlessly. Our favourites were Begin The Beguine and A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square. ‘Come on, Lucille – you be my Anne Zeigler and I’ll be your Webster Booth. On the fourth – da da da da – That certain night, that night we met, there was magic abroad in the air …’

  And magic at Stonehenge one night.

  We had both been free at five, driven to Salisbury, gone round the Cathedral and forgotten the time and the war until blackout screens went up in the restaurant. ‘Desmond! I’ve missed roll-call!’

  ‘Christ, so you have! Be on a charge?’

  ‘If I am, I’ll be the first VAD in history to be put on one. Oh, woe. Madam’ll flap like mad.’

  ‘Tell her we’ve had a puncture.’

  ‘No one’ll swallow that obvious line.’

  ‘Anybody who knows anything about my tyres’ll swallow it. Always having punctures. Anyway, it’s more likely to be swallowed because it is so bloody obvious. Bods’ll think if it really was a line you’d think up a much better story.’

  ‘Maybe. Should I ring Madam?’

  ‘Don’t be so wet. How could you ring up when stuck out on the Plain with a puncture? But if you’re going to be hung, why not for a sheep? Then we can go and look at Stonehenge in moonlight. My batman’s mate says there’ll be a good moon tonight and he should know. Chap was a fisherman in civvy street.’

  ‘Then why’s he a trooper?’

  ‘God only knows. Chap swears blind he joined the navy.’

  It was dark when we left the restaurant and in the blackout Salisbury had slid back into the Middle Ages. The refined lines of the Georgian houses, the soaring elegance of the Cathedral spire, were hidden, but the jumbled outlines of the medieval buildings leaning against each other or companionably towards the opposite rows in the narrow streets, were still darkly etched against the low, dark sky. As we left the city Old Sarum loomed above, a massive black shadow fortified by the unseen ghosts of Iron Age men, of Romans, of Normans. We wondered how those alien soldiers had thought and felt when they looked down from the ramparts over the hostile miles of the Plain, and we grew so engrossed we lost our way.

  After about an hour of crawling in the thin rays filtering through our black-papered headlights, I unwound my window. ‘Your batman’s mate’s slipped up. Dark as the inside of a cow’s stomach.’

  ‘At least it doesn’t smell of cheese. Where the hell’s that bastard of a moon?’

  As if on cue the low sky suddenly lifted and the moon broke through. A three-quarter moon that hung low over the land and to our shout of disbelief illuminated the great stones standing alone and unguarded only a few hundred yards from our road. Desmond eased the car on to a grass verge, switched off the lights and in a near-trance got out to remove the rotor-arm from the engine. He looked around. ‘Can’t see any chaps around wanting to shoot us. Let’s go closer.’

  The moonlight grew stronger as we walked over the dark springy turf and with every step the strange stones grew larger, clearer, and beyond the outer ring supporting the great lintels, the paired uprights of the inner horseshoe framed weird shadows on the grass. In silence we slithered into them up the guarding ditch and walked amongst the stones. The silence was so absolute that it seemed almost possible to hear the earth’s rotation. Hand-in-hand we wove in and out of the uprights, first the outer then the inner, with the compulsion of children weaving round a maypole. Whatever ancient human tragedies and pagan rites had taken place within those stones, if only for that hour, the unquiet spirits of the past were at rest. A tranquillity as tangible as our handclasps transported the war and all the rest of mankind to another planet. We did not talk until we were in the car and nea
rly back at the camp.

  Desmond switched off lights and engine for the final few yards and coasted to a stop well away from our Mess drive. I crept in through the garden and one of the open French windows of the darkened ballroom. My particular friend Joan was awake. ‘Thank God. Thought you’d had an accident. Roll-call was OK. I answered for you and said you were in the bath. Good party?,’ she whispered.

  Party was the wrong word but served. ‘Glorious. Thanks a lot.’

  Someone overheard us and later told Betty. A few evenings later she stormed into the ballroom before going on night-duty. ‘You stupid kid! What do you think you’re doing letting that wretched boy keep you out half the night? Harmless – don’t kid me! Cavalry, isn’t he? Everyone knows what the cavalry are like! Have you told Mummy and Daddy about all these dates? Then I’m jolly well telling them as I can’t be responsible…’

  Her anxiety was misplaced. Being only nineteen – and whether or not he liked it I never knew – Desmond accepted outwardly as automatically as myself the invisible strait-jackets imposed on us when alone together by our engrained moral conventions. These allowed a few chaste kisses and hand-holding, but very little more and nothing below the waist. If this was a strain on the very young, it was also a fairly reassuring social armour when current mores laid on the young no burden of guilt for suffering from inhibitions. When too emotionally immature to know how to handle one’s sexual emotions, it was often a great relief to know that all one was expected to do was control them. Desmond would have been furious had he known I described him to my parents as ‘a very nice boy’. I was never in love with him, but was very sorry when, a few days after I wrote home about him, he was posted north.