No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  In those and other performances in other theatres, at varying moments the voices of the cast were drowned by the chugging above or the explosions nearby. I never saw one actor or actress hesitate more than the seconds necessary for a hearing, duck, wince, or pay any other visible attention to the dangers obvious to all. But when a low flying bomb or an explosion ripped the eardrums a few seconds before some line such as ‘Did you hear that gentle tapping on the window?’ cast and audience collapsed with laughter. Then the play went on, and the audience went back into the dream world that provided the short, blessed, escape from reality so desperately needed.

  After Father’s death my now old friend Charles, recovered from his illness and qualified, insisted on taking me to the Prince of Wales Theatre to see Sid Field. I had never before seen Sid Field and when we sat down was in no mind for laughter. Sid Field golfing, Sid Field in long black overcoat, black homburg hat, trailing white scarf as the prototype of all blackmarket spivs, Slasher Green from the Elephant and Castle, reduced me to helpless laughter. I had never (and have never) seen any comic to reach his brilliance. The packed audience rocked, writhed, bellowed with laughter. That was the only time I saw Sid Field on the stage and I never forget the occasion or his genius. The Old Vic Company gave me hours of enchanted escape. Sid Field gave me one evening of pure joy at a time when I had forgotten the word ‘joy’ existed.

  By March 1945 the Allies had crossed the Rhine, the Russians, advancing even more swiftly into Germany from the east, had crossed the Oder. I had moved to Casualty and in my first month there had personal contact with British nursing history. It was the last month before the retirement of the Sister Casualty (the late Miss Annie Beale) who had held that post unbroken since 1909, and been a Nightingale probationer while Miss Nightingale was still alive and in close contact with her School.

  As I saw that legendary (in St Thomas’s) Sister Casualty, she was a small, stoutish, be-spectacled, elderly lady with grey-white hair, a brisk manner, and no equal in the speed at which she could diagnose at sight and allot to the correct place on either the rows of long wooden benches or in one of the many small examination clinic and dressing-rooms that lined both sides of her department, the non-stop flow of incoming patients. With equal speed and efficiency she dealt with the equally non-stop incoming and outgoing long and short white coats, white aprons, blue-coated porters, tweedy and shirt-sleeved students, stretcher-trolleys and wheelchairs. Amongst my many mental pictures imprinted for life is the one of Sister Casualty on my first Saturday afternoon in her domain, when the solitary flying bomb of the afternoon switched off its engine overhead. Sister Casualty, standing straight as a guardsman with her be-frilled cap and the starched, lace bow under her venerable chin in impeccable order, announcing with calm firmness, ‘Will all patients and staff please get down on the floor,’ to a department already crouched on its knees with its head under the nearest bench. The bomb exploded on ruins and brought down every medicine and lotion bottle on every shelf in Casualty, but otherwise did no serious damage. Before getting off the floor, I squinted up at Sister. She was still upright and briskly polishing her spectacles.

  The next night one of my friends arrived back at Riddle House from her weekend at home, white and breathless. She had forgotten to ask for late leave and a key to our front door locked at eleven, and her train had been late in at Waterloo. ‘To save time I thought I’d nip back through The Cut (Lambeth). I knew it was daft and soon as I got into The Cut I was scared stiff. I could feel I was being watched from the darkness and nearly screamed when two shadows suddenly loomed up on either side of me. Two spivs – black coats – black hats – the lot. And they gave me hell. “Nurse ain’t you? Going back to old Thomas’s? What you think you’re doing then. Don’t you know no better than to come along of here this time of night? Ain’t you got no sense, gal? We’ll see you back but don’t you never try this on again, see? Don’t you never!” They practically frog-marched me all the way back to our front steps still narking, then vanished in the blackout before I could thank them.’

  Someone said she was lucky they had not been GIs; someone else thought the Poles were the worst; then by common consent that particular accolade was awarded the French Canadians. Those views were only based on academic observations. London had for years been filled with alien Allied servicemen and British servicemen, had the normal hazards of any great city, and was under a constant blackout that in winter transformed the early evenings into pitch darkness. But never in my training, as in the Army, did I know or hear of one nurse even mildly assaulted when walking in the streets of London alone or with another girl, in the blacked-out nights. When away from the hospital, we wore not protecting uniforms but civilian clothes. Nevertheless, to say ‘I’m a nurse’ produced seats on the most crowded buses, trams, tubes, trains, and more free taxi-rides from London taxi-drivers than I could possibly recall.

  To our St Thomas’s patients, we were ‘The poor nurses. Lovely girls. It’s not right.’ And the residents were, ‘The poor doctors. Lovely young men. It’s not right.’

  The war with Germany was nearly over when another rocket landed in our zone. I was loaned to a ward for the afternoon and evening. Just after nine that night I pushed a metal trolley out of the ward entrance as a young couple charged up the stairs and up the short outer ward corridor. ‘Nurse, have you got our Doreen? Age, nine – short fair hair – brown eyes, tall like. That old Sister below reckons as you might – oh, nurse!’ The young mother grabbed from the lower shelf of my trolley a pair of dusty, blue, child’s sandals. ‘Them’s our Doreen’s! See, Frank, see – that’s the buckle come off down the Tube last night and I mended it afore we come back home this morning – oh, thank Gawd! You got her – you got her – how is she, nurse? All right, is she? Can we see her – be with her?’

  That was the most terrible professional moment of my nursing life. A few minutes earlier I had closed the eyes and straightened the limbs of the unknown, dead child who had worn those sandals.

  I thought that night that I had seen the worst of man’s inhumanity to man. About three months later I discovered I was wrong when I heard the first-hand accounts from some of the twelve senior medical students from St Thomas’s who were amongst the first Allied contingent to arrive in Belsen Concentration Camp. ‘The pong was beyond belief or description. Faeces everywhere. Right up the walls, thick on the floor and all over the kind of wire pigeon-holes they had for beds. No bedding, pigeon-holes full of skeletons, only some of the skeletons were alive and they all had diarrhoea and were starving and too weak to lift themselves. On our first morning when we walked into our first hut – it wasn’t like walking into hell. Hell, in comparison must be clean and decent. And there was this extraordinary, thin wail going round. We couldn’t understand it – we were working in pairs – and neither of us spoke German. One of the skeletons, I think he was a Pole, spoke English and told us the wail was their way of trying to cheer us. He died the next day. Rows died. Everywhere outside the huts were bloody great mounds of dead. All unburied.’

  When they reached Belsen, on 2nd May 1945, the unburied dead numbered 12,000. In the first few weeks after the Allies’ arrival, 12,800 former political prisoners beyond saving also died. Quite near Belsen Camp was a German Army Panzer Training School with sturdy barracks, a cinema, a swimming pool and just beyond the gates, a German Army Hospital. Roughly three miles away was a country village called Bergen. After Belsen Camp was finally evacuated and with flame-throwers the Allies burnt down all the original prison huts, some of the Bergen villagers, I was told, helped tidy away the ashes.

  On 1st May Hitler killed himself in his Berlin air-raid shelter. One evening in the last week of the European war, an old VAD friend now in her fourth year at the London Hospital, asked me to a party at her parents’ home in Hampstead. At one point she and I and some young men were chided for laughing by a newcomer, a young woman of about twenty-seven with lank, dark hair and a darkly intense manner. ‘The trouble with all
of you’, she said, ‘is that you haven’t the faintest notion what’s really been happening in this war!’

  One of the men, a newly returned civilian with an artificial foot in his left shoe, had known her at University. ‘Where did you get your great insight into the recent hostilities, darling? I thought you’d wangled a nice cushy Ph.D. after your degree in Eng.Lit.?’

  ‘My dear man! Let me tell you I have spent the last three months working in a hospital as a nurse! Once one has nursed, one knows what real suffering is and one can’t be expected to enjoy or approve frivolity.’

  My friend and I exchanged glances. A middle-aged man, standing near, looked up from his pin-striped legs. ‘Personally, I subscribe to Aristophanes’ view that only those who have known great grief are really cheerful.’

  I had a day off on the last day of the European war and spent it at home. All day we waited for the official announcement from General Eisenhower and were still waiting when I had to return to London. In the outer suburbs the bonfires were being lit, and my carriage shouted from the windows to the porters as we drew into Victoria. ‘Old Ike made up his mind yet?’

  ‘Not yet, mate. War’s still on, seemly.’

  In Riddle House I went out on our roof with one of my set. Her only brother had been missing since the fall of Singapore. John was in Texas training as a pilot on one of the Lease–Lend inter-services training schemes. ‘I don’t feel all that victorious, Lu. Do you?’

  ‘No.’ We leant on the roof wall and looked down with the same dazed detachment learnt from the same years of bad news. Having for so long been braced against the bad, the defences needed time to relax enough to accept the good. ‘Doesn’t look that victorious. Doesn’t look much different, aside from those few lights in windows and the bonfires.’

  Very few lights visible from that roof that night. Nearly everywhere windows as lifeless as those bricked-in across the road. The hospital looked unchanged. The blast and sandbag walls outside the entrance to Casualty, Out-Patients, the many side ramps running down into the basement, were merging as usual into the shadows. The crumbled blocks, the roofless, windowless wards, the heaps of rubble, the empty, uneven patches, belonged to the pigeons and the inquisitive gulls wheeling in from the black river. Below in the Lambeth Palace Road a few of the private cars had the black paint half-scraped from their headlamps, but one tram had both heads clear and as it swept round from the bridge with the half-roar, half-scream that so uncannily resembled the sound of a diving plane, the whole road was illuminated by twin searchlights.

  When the light faded, more bonfires blazed on old bomb-sites and in cul-de-sacs, and, as a red glow rose over Lambeth, I shivered in memory. In a clearing a few hundred yards off a little group of people lit another bonfire, dragged an upright piano from a half-ruined empty house and against one jagged outer wall. A man began playing Roll Out The Barrel, some children started dancing round the fire, and their strangely elongated shadows danced on the high, jagged wall behind the piano.

  Voices floated up. ‘When is Ike going to make up his mind about stopping the war?’ Girls’ voices from the windows below; men’s voices from the Two Sawyers, the pub on the nearest corner; students’ voices from the hospital terraces. All sounded packed with false excitement. Good news was not to be trusted and who could be sure the news was good until General Eisenhower officially accepted the Germans’ unconditional surrender and told the Allied armies in Europe to stop fighting?

  The students on the terrace let off a few tatty fireworks. One of the tugs on the river sounded her siren, other tugs followed and then all the ships in the docks. We went inside. ‘Has it come, girls?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The sirens’ chorus continued until quenched by a tremendous thunderstorm that seemed to last all night. I fell asleep to the comforting uproar and knowledge that it was only thunder. In the morning I woke with a start, sweating, as an early tram turned down from the bridge, and discovered General Eisenhower had ordered ‘the cessation of hostilities at one minute past midnight’ whilst I had been asleep.

  I was on at 7.30 a.m. and free from 2 p.m. for the now official Victory half-day given to the whole Casualty medical and nursing staff. Half of us had that first day of peace, the other half, the second. We had expected an empty department. Lambeth had other views. Now the war was over the time had come to nip up to old Thomas’s and let the doctor take a good look at that old trouble in the tonsils, stomach, knee, back, big toe, little finger. All day our benches were packed.

  One woman had a headache. ‘Torment, doctor, that’s what. Torment. I tell you no lie. Started up the day the war started and not given me no peace, not the once. If you was to ask me, doctor, I’d say as I got a geezer up there with a hammer and he’s been a-banging away, bang bang bang, since it started.’

  It was 4.15 p.m. and the house-physician attending her had the same half-day as myself. ‘Not to worry, madam. War’s over. That chap with the hammer’ll ask for his ticket. You’ll have no more headaches.’ Filling in her blue Casualty card at the standing desk, he murmured to me, ‘Chap needs a Long Service Medal. How long’s he been on the job?’

  I could not remember, either. We used our fingers to calculate from 3rd September 1939, to 8th May 1945. He wrote in to the hour, the exact time-span of the headache.

  Charles was working as a houseman in the Sector, had the same Victory half-day but less-active patients and reached London by 3.30. He came into Casualty and sat in an unwanted wheelchair. When asked by other members of the staff if he needed attention, he replied truthfully, ‘No, thanks, I’ve been discharged. Just waiting for someone.’

  I eventually got off just before five, and having changed quickly out of uniform, with Charles and a temporary escort of three Thomas’s housemen, joined the crowds streaming west over the bridge into Parliament Square. All traffic in that area had stopped, and pavements, roads, islands, lamp-posts and railings were massed with people. We managed to squeeze onto an island at the foot of Whitehall towards the end of Mr Churchill’s speech to the crowd from a Ministry of Health balcony, but I could not hear a word he said for the laughter. ‘Pity you missed most,’ said the man jammed against Charles’s left side, ‘old Winnie was in top form. Spicey!’ We joined in the wild cheering after the speech. The crowd cheered everything and everyone from the Prime Minister to the inevitable policeman who lost his helmet. A little later we were swept back with the one crowd, the three housemen swept away by another. Charles and I found ourselves in the front row of the parted ranks through which the ubiquitous Mr Churchill with permanent beam, cigar in mouth and two fingers raised in the V-sign, was driven into the House of Commons. ‘Mind your backs, please,’ coaxed the police, to allow through two more cars. I recognized the occupant in the back of the first as Mr Hore-Belisha, but not the man in the next car, though I cheered him with the crowd.

  ‘Realize who you’re cheering, Lucy?’ Charles yelled into my ear. ‘Ernie Bevin!’

  ‘My God! No!’ Most of my set had already been directed by the Government into midwifery or T.B. nursing. I had chosen the former and signed to start a midwifery course in August, before inquiring the pay for this enforced project. It had never occurred to me this would involve losing money as well as time. The pay for pupil-midwives was £4 per month.

  The moment was too good to be shadowed by anger. I forgot the Minister of Labour within seconds of his car’s disappearance into the House of Commons yard.

  We decided to visit the King and Queen, along with, apparently, half a million others. It took us so long to squeeze through Birdcage Walk, that again our ranks were parted for Mr Churchill’s car. More wild cheers, beams, and V-signs from the cigar-smoker. The crowd outside Buckingham Palace was the thickest yet, the cheers were not so much wild as affectionate. ‘Didn’t catch him nor his good lady turning no evacuees, did you,’ observed the Londoners clinging with ourselves to footholds on the Victoria Memorial. ‘Stuck it out here same as we had to and when a bomb’s go
t your moniker on it you can’t say as it makes no difference if you got a crown on your napper or a titfer. Took his chances, he did – and his good lady – and when they says to her as she best scarper to Canada with the two young ’uns, she tells ’em straight out – politely like, mind – as she can’t leave her old man and the young ‘uns can’t go without their mum can they, so ta very much but the lot’ll be staying put. Here they comes – and with old Winnie this time!’

  The atmosphere grew more euphoric. We greeted and were greeted by total strangers, exchanged life, war histories, and bad jokes that we assured each other were good enough for ITMA. We saw very few drunks, and heard from the crowds and discovered most pubs in that area had long run dry of their meagre supplies.

  In the last pub we visited, the landlord offered us his remaining stock. A siphon of soda and small bottle of what looked like purple syrup. The landlord said he would tell us straight he’d not fancy it himself. ‘Alright, mind, if you’re partial to a drop of linctus.’

  Charles sipped his mixture. ‘Nothing against a good linctus, but I wouldn’t call this vintage. Bit hard,’ he added. ‘Here we’ve been singing for ages about getting lit up when the lights go on in London. How in hell do you get lit up on linctus? I thought this would be like Armistice Night. My father said that was a riot.’

  The landlord was elderly. ‘Your old man’s dead right, boy. Different, this do. Mind you, this do’s been a different do and it’s not really all over bar the shouting yet seeing as we still got to finish off the Japs. But nice to have the lights back on. Fetching them back ten-thirty, won’t it be? Reckon they’ll be having quite a time fixing all the fuses seeing they’ve not been needed for six years.’ He stacked away glasses, wiped his counter. ‘When you’ve done I’ll shut up and nip out to watch ’em fetch ’em back on.’