No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

‘Doing fine, but isn’t it a bit damp and chilly?’

  ‘Don’t bother me, nurse, and like as I says to the Sister before I come out – I’d rather get in a bit more practice on me todd. Folk mean kindly wanting to offer a hand like, but I got to fend for meself.’ He looked down at his feet, and the rain poured down the inside of his coat collar. ‘Now I got the two, it’s meself as got to stand on ’em, isn’t it? Do a bit more each day like and this afternoon I’ve promised meself I’ll get to the gates and back to the ward. And how you been keeping, nurse?’

  We talked a little then I rode on and not to hurt his feelings did not risk looking back until well away. The rain was heavier. Through the curtain of water I watched the solitary khaki figure lumbering on, awkwardly, crabwise, up to the gates and a couple of steps beyond. As he began to turn, I got back on my bicycle.

  Chapter Nine

  May 1944, Hydestile. On the calendar, early summer. Outside the ward windows, a sky the pale parchment of February. Against that sky, the trees in the wood above the hospital looked artificially lush and painted into a landscape by an artist who had never lived in the country.

  The Allied Invasion of Europe was daily expected. Hydestile, as hospitals all over the country, awaited the sea of British casualties that must sweep back over the Channel as surely as our retreating army had swept back four years earlier. As May ended and June opened, every evening the whole sky was blackened with Allied bombers flying east. Looking up on those evenings was just like looking up into a series of giant, black, open umbrellas. Directly one droned slowly away, it was replaced by another, and another. Often it seemed even the wealthy United States could not possibly afford one more plane, yet still the evening umbrellas reappeared and moved on eastwards, black and inexorable as death.

  After Dunkirk and perhaps to the end of 1942, I might have found those umbrellas exciting, gratifying. The war had lasted too long for those trivial emotions. I had seen too much human mutilation, too many ruined homes, too many tears, to feel anything but sick at heart and stomach when watching those air armadas. Only my intellect could accept the death and destruction they were about to cause to so many, including so many of themselves, were necessary to save the life of civilization, just as in the operating theatre I had had to accept it was necessary to cut off a breast, cut out a stomach, uterus, rectum, or amputate a limb to save an individual life. Never once in any operating theatre was I able to watch, or assist in, a major operation without that same sickening of the heart and stomach. (The only aspect of my general training that I abhorred, from first day to last, was my theatre-training.)

  Throughout the first half of that year my training had forced my intellectual, but not emotional, acceptance of the inevitable approach of the greatest personal disaster of my life to that point. Father, though still living at home a near-normal life, was dying on his feet of an inoperable carcinoma of the lung. ‘I can understand your desire to rush him into St Thomas’s for operation,’ said the specialist I consulted in private during nights-off just after Christmas, ‘and I know your thoracic surgeons are now successfully removing certain lungs. Unfortunately, your father’s growth is far too extensive – and you must remember his age.’ He showed me Father’s X-rays, read my thoughts. ‘Yes. A wonder he’s still with us.’ He switched off the X-ray screen light. ‘He wants to remain at home and on his feet as long as he can, and I’m not stopping him. I’ll do what I can to help him with the symptoms as they arise. I only wish there was more—’

  There was only one thing to say, ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

  * * *

  4th June 1944. ‘Hey, Lu, have you heard? General Alexander’s taken Rome at last.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  6th June 1944. ‘D-Day, eh, nurse? Can’t say I envy that General Eisenhower and the lads if they’ve had the gales we’ve had here. Still, I reckon they’ll have too much on their minds to be sea-sick.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  A week later, ‘What’s all this about Hitler’s launching a Secret Weapon on London?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much cop from today’s papers. Sort of little robot-planes. Flying bombs, or something. Says the RAF are having a party shooting them down.’

  I listened without interest. On the following day I was due to start a week’s holiday and all my thoughts were concentrated on getting home. Great anxiety, as great grief, is a very isolating emotion, and always in my particular case it shutters my outward mental vision as successfully as it does my physical vision.

  Betty and John had managed to have the same week on leave as myself. Betty was now a WAAF sergeant plotter in the operations room of a Pathfinder (RAF) station in the Midlands and engaged to a Squadron Leader on bombers. John was a RAF student at the University of St Andrews. The next evening we had all reached home and had our first look at the V1s. ‘Ugly little things,’ we agreed, as two more small robot-planes with square-tipped wings and flames spurting from their tails streaked jerkily inland, high in the sky. I thought they sounded like revving motor-bikes. John disagreed. ‘More like a Ford Model T.’ We were all glad our parents now had the Morrison shelter Father had bought last year as the ‘tip-and-runs’ had continued to harass the Channel coast towns since 1940.

  The shelter stood against an inside wall of our ground floor sitting-room which was emptied of most of its normal furniture. The shelter (6ft 6in long, 4ft wide, 2ft 9in high) looked like a large, square, squat steel table with stout meshing between the legs. Inside there was room for two adults in reasonable comfort, four if squeezed like sardines. Father could lie in the shelter propped up, which was essential for his cough, but not sitting up. From the second week in June 1944 to all but the last night of his life, Father and Mother slept in our Morrison every night. In those early weeks of the attacks the V1s were launched on England from sites in France, Belgium and Holland, it seemed incessantly; some were shot down into the sea by the coastal guns, others over open country by the RAF, but many others got through to London, and Kent and East Sussex earned a new nickname: Doodlebug Alley.

  On our final Sunday afternoon, sitting over tea at our dining-room table, we watched two RAF fighters, one Spitfire, one Mosquito, shoot down five flying bombs over The Ridge – the long fold of hills backing Hastings and St Leonards. ‘Five down between first and third cups,’ observed Father. ‘Unusual Sunday teatime entertainment. I must say it is very pleasant to have my whole family round the table again. When was the last occasion? ’41, as I recall.’

  Three weeks later, on the afternoon of 13th July, after surviving sixty bombing operations over Germany, Betty’s fiancé was killed in a mid-air collision over their station. The following morning Betty went home on forty-eight hours’ compassionate leave. She had to be back in her ops. room by the evening of Monday 17th. At 1 a.m. on the 18th July 1944, Father’s long, gallant fight with terminal cancer ended in seconds and without pain, in a major internal haemorrhage.

  A few days later his body was buried in the small, very beautiful country graveyard of the rightly named Church in the Wood, at Hollington, on the inland outskirts of St Leonards. The summer had at last arrived, the sunshine was brilliant, every rose in Sussex seemed in bloom, and the trees in full summer glory hung over our heads and Father’s open grave. High above the trees the flying bombs spat fire from their tails as they raced jerkily towards London, the RAF fighters wheeled, screamed and spat machine-gun bullets; and the massive battery of anti-aircraft guns then ranging the coast roared out a requiem.

  Chapter Ten

  The expected sea of Allied casualties flowed elsewhere. Into the London hospitals, on to Hydestile and other hospitals, flowed the sea of civilian flying-bomb casualties.

  The first flying bomb landed on Kent on 13th June 1944 (Swanscombe); the last to arrive over Britain was destroyed over Kent (near Sittingbourne) on 29th March 1945. In those nine and a half months over 9,000 flying bombs were launched on England. In the first three weeks of the attack, alone, as the Prime Minister, Mr
Churchill, told the House of Commons on 6th July 1944, 2,754 flying bombs had been launched and had killed 2,752 people. The number of people injured by the flying bombs and detained in hospital on that day was about 8,000. This figure did not include those who had suffered minor injuries and were treated in first-aid posts and hospital out-patients’ departments. (The final figures for flying bomb casualties were 6,139 killed, 17,239 seriously injured.)

  London, more battered, burning, bleeding, grimly angry, grimly humorous, grimly indomitable than I had ever seen before. ‘If it’s not them blitzes it’s them doodles, nurse. You pays ye money and you takes ye choice.’

  The worst agony of grief had to wait. A victory slid by barely noticed. On 23rd August 1944, Paris re-captured by the Allies. In the newspaper reports and under the pictures of the Free French troops decked with flowers and kisses entering their capital for the first time in four years, a new word, ‘Liberation’. Time only for momentarily recalling one French baker, wondering if he had survived, and if so, if he remembered enough to feel ashamed; or if, as I had noticed happened to patients after bad illnesses and myself after personal agony, in self-defence he had developed those patches of amnesia without which life can be unliveable.

  In September 1944 the V2 rocket attacks on London began. (The first landed in Chiswick on 8th September.) Interwoven with the impression of being bombarded by some elemental force too swift, too silent until arrival, and too destructive for human comprehension or even fear, the news of yet another British Thermopylae.

  A patient hitched up his headphones. ‘Seems our lads are still hanging on at this Arnhem, nurse.’

  ‘That’s great!’ But we both knew it was not and that our lads were being slaughtered. Yet ‘great’ applied. The men who had dropped from planes and gliders to try and establish a bridge-head over the lower Rhine and so cut off the German Army in Holland fought, and many died, with great courage.

  No time for dwelling on courage. In a very few weeks, State Finals.

  Before our results arrived I developed a septic right forefinger, had the nail off under an anaesthetic and for two days was the only patient in the sick nurses’ ward on the ground floor of Riddle House. Our Home Sister could not have nursed me with more care had I been on the D.I.L. I then returned to work on ‘dry-duty’ with my right arm in a sling. The hospital was too busy to spare even a one-handed nurse. Being ‘dry’ meant I could not get my right-hand wet – i.e., scrub-up – which ruled out all ward work. I spent my time (just under three weeks) chaperoning, mostly in the ante-natal clinics in Mothercraft, in one of the innumerable caverns in the hospital basement. ‘Dry hours, 9.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., I regarded as a sinecure, and standing all day in the airless basement was compensated for by the comforting thought that overhead was the thick basement ceiling and remains of the hospital. I was frequently very frightened during those months, but never when in the hospital basement. It had been built to withstand the pressure of the Thames for long years before anyone thought of world wars, and it was always my secret conviction that it would withstand a rocket, though almost certainly there I was wrong. Luckily the only enemy weapon from the air that did not fall on St Thomas’s, London, in the Second World War, was a rocket. (Had one done so it is highly unlikely this writer would be recording these moments.)

  Our main Maternity Unit had long been evacuated to Surrey, but, as the distance was too far for the ante-natal clinics, these continued in Mothercraft. Most of the women I chaperoned were having their first babies. A number were unmarried girls uniformly appalled by the diagnosis. ‘Oh, no, doctor, no! I can’t be! It was just the once!’

  Endlessly repeated, there and later when I was a pupil-midwife, ‘Just the once!’

  And, in private, from experienced obstetricians: ‘When will the human race learn it only has to be once? If I had my way, nurse, every mother in this country would hang framed over her every infant daughter’s cot, ONCE IS ENOUGH TO MAKE A BABY.’

  I was in a sling the morning the letters arrived from the General Nursing Council for England and Wales. A friend opened mine. ‘You and me, both, Lu. S.R.N.s.’

  My main reaction was relief as it meant more pay and on £5 a month I could afford the train fare home more often on my days off. Father’s pension had died with him, and as he had neither savings nor insurance, and mother only a small widow’s pension, from his death his children, as millions of others, had to support themselves on their own earnings.

  Off ‘dry’ duty, back to an upstairs bricked-in ward, and the sweating shirt-sleeved students with the stretchers came back to the ward doorway.

  ‘My, God, Christmas again! I thought the war’d be over by now. Why aren’t we in Berlin?’

  ‘Field-Marshal von Rundstedt.’

  ‘Why the hell has he got to hold-up the Yanks in the Ardennes? He must know he hasn’t a prayer – and if you give me your spiel about Jerry being a fighting man once more, Lu, so-help me, I’ll bloody crown you! I’m fed to the back teeth with fighting men who won’t pack it in not because they’re so bloody brave but because they bloody enjoy fighting and can’t bear life unless there’s a war on. If it weren’t for men we wouldn’t have wars. If you ask me, most men love wars – until they get chewed up in the machinery. Let me have men about me who are not only fat but cowards! I want to live in peace!’

  ‘So do the rest of us who are trying to catch up before Hospital Finals! If you and Lu want to start a private war, get up to your rooms and stop yak-yak-yaking down here!’

  ‘Well, nurses, I hope you found your Final results quite pleasing and will enjoy the remainder of your fourth year and the insight it will provide into the full responsibilities of the ward Sister and hospital administration. Unfortunately I must warn you that this new ruling from the Minister of Labour (Mr Ernest Bevin) applies specifically to newly trained State Registered Nurses as yourselves. I presume you have all read the official directive on the notice board.’

  ‘Sister, please, does this mean we have got to do either midwifery or a tuberculosis training even if the war with Germany ends before our fourth years?’

  ‘According to the new ruling, nurse, yes. Were the war to end tomorrow, the country will remain very short of midwives and nurses with the T.B. certificate. Once you have acquired the certificate of your choice, as I understand the ruling, you will then be free to join the Armed Forces Nursing Services or take other civilian nursing posts, but nurses are unlikely to be released from the nursing profession for some considerable time to come.’

  I seethed with inner fury at the Government’s arbitrary treatment of a profession that in my growing opinion was overworked, underpaid, and arguably one of the most valuable in the country. My fury was accentuated by a recent event at home. Our rector of the now long-bombed St John’s had called round to see Mother on one of my days off, to ask for Betty and John’s official RAF numbers and ranks for inclusion in the Roll Of Honour he was drawing up for the serving members in his parish. He had with him the Government’s official list of all occupations regarded as National Service. ‘I’m sorry, my dear Lucy, but I’m afraid I can’t include your name, as civilian student nurses are not listed as doing National Service. Of course you were a VAD. Your name can be entered as a VAD.’

  ‘No, thanks, rector. I’m a civvy nurse. Leave me out, please.’

  After being woken by a flying bomb switching off overhead for the last time in late March 1945, it took me a very long time to accept so much was all over. Only then, when nights were undisturbed, could I afford the luxury of nightmares, and regularly woke soaked in sweat, or leapt instinctively out of bed when an early tram turned sharply off Westminster Bridge. For over a year I could only sleep flat on my face with a pillow over the back of my head and neck.

  At last, daily off-duty was free time. Time to write; time for thought, friends, and even more than I had been stealing since the autumn, for the theatre. The flying bombs and rockets had near-emptied the London theatres. Through the generosity of
the managers who daily sent free tickets to the London hospitals for the nurses’ use, in those months I think I saw every play in London, and British theatrical history in the making at the New Theatre, St Martin’s Lane.

  The New was the temporary home of the bombed-out Old Vic Company that included Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Margaret Leighton. That season they put on four plays. Arms And The Man, Peer Gynt, Uncle Vanya, and Richard III. I saw the first three twice, and the fourth, thrice. No need for notes to recall the memory of the Margaret Leighton silver and slender as a young moon in the darkness of the hall of the Mountain King; Ralph Richardson musing dreamily on the swing as Uncle Vanya; the magic of Laurence Olivier’s voice, heard in person for the first time. Towering over all other memories, Olivier as Richard III, moving about the stage with the evil grace of a scarlet spider; standing at the right corner up front by King Henry’s coffin, his black head and mournful face bent piously over an open prayer book and glancing languidly sideways at the audience with eyes alight with mockery and triumph.

  With another girl who shared my passion for the theatre and co-operation of our ward Sisters, whenever possible on matinees we were off 2 to 5 and sent to last lunch at 1.30, which added an extra half-hour to our off-duty. Wartime matinees and evening performances started earlier because of the blackout. By missing lunch, racing over to Riddle, leaving our caps and aprons in the ground floor cloakroom, donning waiting coats and scarves to camouflage uniform dresses, running over the bridge, up the embankment, Northumberland Avenue and St Martins Lane, we could drop into our front stalls as the curtain rose. (Always our free tickets were for the best seats.) Richard III ran a little longer than the other plays, and as we had to be back on-duty as Big Ben struck five, Richards final, desperate ‘A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!’ signalled our urgent need to creep silently from our seats and back up the nearest aisle as Richmond (Richardson) sprang forward in blue and gold from upstage centre: ‘God and your arms be praised, victorious friends; The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.’