by Annie Murray
‘Why don’t you step inside a moment?’ she invited. ‘I’m sure Edith will be here by now.’
She looked round the office door. ‘Edith – there’s someone here to see you.’
She cursed herself for ever afterwards for her terrible clumsiness. Only as she began to climb the stairs did it dawn on her what this might mean. The way Edith’s usually gentle expression turned stony as she got up from her desk, the way she got up from the chair as if her legs were like rocks weighing her down.
Daisy was already on the first landing when she heard the terrible, stifled cry from downstairs, the moan of pain which brought Margaret running through from the back room into which, Daisy thought afterwards, she should have taken Mrs Paige in the first place. Mrs Paige who was to have been Edith’s mother-in-law when her Arthur came home from the merchant navy.
Arthur, whose ship had just been one of the latest of many to be sunk by a German U-boat.
The sounds of Edith’s grief echoing up the stairs tore into her. They were the sounds of someone who loved – really loved – and had lost the most precious thing in her life.
Thirty-Seven
February 1917
‘My Darling Fergus . . .’
Annie, propped on the bed, alone in her nurse’s room, leaned back trying to position her thin pillow, to cushion her back against the iron bed frame. She thought for a moment, smiling. My Darling Fergus . . . When had she ever imagined she would write such words? It made her laugh at herself. She, Annie Hanson, going all soft over a man – who would have thought?
Taking out the photograph she gazed on it for the umpteenth time. She remembered that afternoon – it seemed a short while ago – when she had stood arm in arm with him in the photographer’s shop, looking adoringly into each other’s faces and laughing at themselves for doing it. Fergus’s smile reached out to her from under his military cap, his laughing eyes, almost as if he had just made one of his teasing jokes.
‘I wish you were here, you cheeky devil,’ she whispered. Her smile faded and her spirits sank. It was rare for Annie ever to sit still for long enough to allow her thoughts to intrude. She was forever busy on the wards or, on brief times off, rushing to see the family, or, even more rarely, Lizzie Poole. But now she let the dark reality of the war filter into her.
Of course, she saw the wreckage of war every day – the wounds and amputations, the blinding and the wrecked lungs, the nightmares and terrors. Each life that came into the hospital brought with it a calamity of fear and loss, and for almost every man the trauma of having been too young, having been pushed and harried beyond anything that was reasonable for body and soul to withstand.
One of her patients saw Germans everywhere: hiding under beds, striding along the ward towards him or transposed on to the faces of the lads around him. There were the gangrene cases, the lads with trench foot, the boy who shook and shook . . . So often the work came down to one task after another – beds and dressings, observations and hygiene. It helped to stop you thinking too deeply.
Now, the dark pall of it all, the newspaper pages of lists of the dead, the trenches, dug in and trapped in a stalemate, each side taking more lives from the other. All the women dressed in black, the crêpe-draped houses; desperate seances for those clawing at the door of death to hear a beloved voice from beyond. The war was well into its third year now, and for what? Separating loved ones, breaking families and neighbourhoods. She thought of Aunt Hatt, how much loss there was now compared with a year ago. Tears filled her eyes. And how much longer must it all go on?
‘Thank heaven you are all right,’ she whispered, gently touching the face in the picture with her fingertip. She ached for him to be here, for him to take her in his arms, loving, teasing. But they were blessed compared with so many of the soldiers. Safer than most, anyway. ‘Come home to me soon, my love,’ Annie whispered.
He had written to say that he was in another place now and though he did not name it, she guessed, from his description – there being a large number of hospitals – that he was in Étaples, on the coast of Picardy.
‘There is something exceedingly strange about this place,’ Fergus had written.
It’s a fishing port and the town is one of poky, scruffy little streets, the places surrounded by villages and farms, but now, well there’s the ambulance depot (called Thumbs Up corner, apparently) and then, looking out from the edge of the village, an encampment, spreading for miles – like a town in itself, a sea, almost, of dull huts and pale tents, which make up the collective hospital and staff quarters. I am told there are upwards of six thousand patients here. I cannot say it is an easy place. There is a constant movement of lads going out ‘up the line’ or back, in, of course, much reduced states. Out of all the places I have visited so far, here there feels a sense of exhaustion, of bewilderment and dread. Or perhaps it is that I am simply tired and a little worn down. I don’t have to tell you the nature of the work – the staff are on duty for almost inhuman hours. And because the camp is neither quite France nor England, there is a numbing atmosphere of displacement.
However, I am of course kept busy. Only now – at a very late hour – I have a few moments put aside from sleep to write to you, my dearest love. How sweet, what a salve of blessing is the thought of you – more than I can ever describe. Otherwise this place can feel like nothing but the effort of picking up the pieces of a gargantuan exercise in futility. Words we are not allowed to say, to think. Perhaps some of our patients will, in time, end up in your hands. It is a consolation, dearest, to think of this link between us.
There is so much I could say. Voices and images from the day present themselves before my mind but I am too weary to write all and must – have a duty to – try and snatch some sleep.
I love you, my dear girl. How feeble those words seem, compared to what my heart would like to say. But I send you all the affection and devotion that tired heart can muster. Apologies for this scrappy note. How I wish we could talk freely and face to face. I shall write again as soon as possible.
With my love, sweet one, and goodnight. Fergus.
Annie took her pen again, trying to rouse herself from the feeling of dark, sinful despair that was washing through her. She must rally something in her of her cheerful buoyancy. Fergus certainly did not need to be sent an envelope full of gloom and despondency.
All is going along as smoothly as ever here. Though I must say, I am writing this in this crabbed hand to make the paper last. That is another thing – like so many others – becoming harder to find.
The family are going along, despite everything. My Aunt Hatt is like a blazing flame of energy these days, working all hours in the business. They are of course still making fuses (I think that’s right) as well as the usual things. She seems to be on a mission. Margaret worries that she might burn herself out in the process, but to me it seems the thing which is keeping her going. Grief has whittled her to a thinner, nervier Aunt Hatt and it is painful to see. But it must be better than sitting home alone, dwelling on it all.
And Clara is now running a nursery and gradually accumulating children. She is a fierce disciplinarian and something in her has changed and become considerable. Aunt Hatt’s house now has six or seven children there in the day and Clara has drawn up a programme for them all. How she manages I don’t know, but it is extraordinary to see the depths in people which the war has exposed. I am impressed by her – moved in fact. She is a brave and clever soul.
A few highlights for you, heard this week on the ward: ‘Nurse, nurse? Why are those telephones ringing? They never stop ringing – why doesn’t someone answer them?’ (Said while there is a complete absence of any telephones ringing at all.)
The padre’s visit: ‘Sister, what religion is this man?’
Sister, absent-mindedly, ‘Oh, methylated, sir.’
There was a lantern lecture this week from a clergyman called Mr Rees. ‘Egypt and What I Saw There.’ Which didn’t strike me as the most imaginative of titles
, but the talk itself was a wonder. Shall you and I travel to Egypt and see the pyramids and tombs, once all this is over, my love? It seems that dreams are a flame of life which can hold us all together.
‘Dear Den,’ Daisy wrote.
She stopped, stumped as ever by quite what to say. Den’s very rare letters were brevity itself. He was not used to writing, but she found something sweet in the fact that he tried to write at all.
‘Dear Dais, I hope this finds you well. I am getting on all right. I hope you are all right and the family . . . I’m thinking of you Dais and wish I could say things better.’
Other than that, he ended, always, ‘Love from Den.’
They did not read like love letters. Except that she knew they were.
Daisy thought sometimes of James Carson’s flowery outbursts which she had found so exciting at the time and now she wondered which was the more real. James Carson: all mouth and trousers, she thought. It was a phrase she had overheard one of the lads in her smithing class use and she had struggled to keep a straight face. Whereas Den said very little but something came through – the effort of putting pen to paper, his regard for her. Even though they never said anything much it felt warming to receive them. She had no real idea where he was and he never said anything about the war. All she could do was to try and think of cheerful things to tell him.
‘I have a nice piece of news to tell you,’ she wrote, relieved to relate something other than the daily round.
Yesterday your Lizzie changed her mind about working with Clara and has said she would! Clara is getting new children all the time and although Lizzie says she won’t earn what she would at Kynoch’s (or not yet, Clara said), she won’t have to pay for Ann and she said she would rather play with children than churn out .303 bullets all day. After all, if there’s one person who knows about little ones, it’s Lizzie! You should see the garden at Harriet Watts’s house, Den – the snowdrops are out and the children can go outside and run about. My little Hester is happy as a lamb there and I think Lizzie will be too.
I’ve been getting along all right and have been teaching some classes with the head of the school, Mr Gaskin. I was nervous at first, but he’s a very nice man. And it’s all so much better now that Hester is older and I know she is in good hands with Clara instead of having to bother Margaret, which I always felt rather worried about. She has done so much for me, but even so, with Pa being so busy . . .
Daisy stopped, taken aback to realize that it was a relief to have someone to pour out her feelings to. But she had written more than she intended and she crossed out the last part of the sentence.
‘I’m going on too long,’ she finished. ‘When really not much has happened.’
She signed off, ‘Kind regards, Daisy.’
She did not want to give Den any false encouragement.
Thirty-Eight
March 1917
‘Daisy.’ Margaret gave her a meaningful look across the table where they had just eaten tea. Auntie Annie had come to visit and Margaret clearly wanted to speak to her alone. ‘Could you please take John and Lily up with you to help get Hester ready for bed?’
Daisy, seeing the pale, strained look on Annie’s face despite her attempts to chat cheerfully, got to her feet. Her father did the same.
‘I just need to go and finish off out the back . . .’ Philip said vaguely, and headed towards the workshop again.
‘Come on, you two,’ Daisy ordered. To her surprise there was no protest from John. ‘You can play with your soldiers while Lily helps me,’ she whispered to him.
She could see that they too had felt an atmosphere in the room.
Margaret waited, the tension rising in her, until the door closed behind Daisy and the children. She turned and poked the fire, adding a shovelful of coal. When she looked back at Annie, she saw that the mask of cheerfulness had already slipped and she looked pale and desperate. She worried for her sister. Even nursing in peacetime took its toll, both physical and emotional, but now she sometimes wondered how they all kept going.
‘What is it, dear?’ she asked, leaning to lay her hand over Annie’s as it rested on the table. It was cold as a fish. ‘Oh, Annie – are you ill?’
To her dismay, Annie covered her eyes with her other hand and began to sob quietly. Annie, her tough, wiry little sister who almost never cried.
‘Oh, my dear – whatever is wrong?’ She leaned down, eyes full of worried sympathy, and waited.
‘I haven’t heard from him.’ Annie uncovered her face and her eyes bored desperately into Margaret’s. ‘Not a word all week. Usually he writes every day – almost, anyway. If he can. And if he can’t I know there’s always a reason, some sort of rush on so that he’s working all hours. But now it’s . . .’ She calculated. ‘Six days since I’ve heard from him.’
‘But . . .’ Margaret could see all the misery and worry in her. Her mind raced. Was it that this Fergus fellow had somehow deserted Annie – was now somehow growing cool or disloyal?
Annie could read her thoughts. ‘He’s not like that. His letters up until last week were . . .’ She stopped, keeping all Fergus’s loving words privately in her heart.
Annie looked as if she had not slept for several nights, her face gaunt, eyes unnaturally big and haunted.
‘Six days is not so very long, in the circumstances,’ Margaret tried to reason with her. ‘It might just be the post, surely . . .’
‘No.’ Annie was adamant. ‘The post is reliable.’
‘But he’s not at the Front, is he?’ Margaret said.
‘No. But they could be shelling the hospitals, couldn’t they?’ She looked lost. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ More desperate tears came then. ‘But there’s something wrong – something’s happened, I just know it has. We write all the time, like a conversation. It’s vital!’ She looked wildly at Margaret. ‘He would never not write to me!’
‘Oh, my dear.’ Margaret got up and wrapped her arms round her little sister’s shoulders, feeling her shake with sobs. Margaret held her, as she had now held Aunt Hatt and Clara and Edith, feeling the force of loss, of anger or grief or fear in all of them.
Dear Lord, she prayed inwardly, this war, this evil, godless slaughter. Where are you, Lord? What is your divine will? Show us your light and hope – hide not your face from us . . . And please, please, don’t let anything have happened to this man Fergus, who holds my dear sister’s heart in his hands.
‘The worst thing is that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, I can do,’ Annie raged. She got up and paced the room, fiercely wiping her eyes. Standing near the mantelpiece with a glow of firelight behind her, clenching a fist, she said, ‘It’s only now that I know what love is – this force, this power, growing in you, inhabiting you, tearing at you. I think of our crucified Lord – and it’s only now that I’m even beginning to understand what love means. And in some ways, by heaven, I wish I didn’t.’
She prayed as she had never prayed before. Throughout most of her life, Annie’s prayers had consisted of intercessions – some very heartfelt, others more dutiful – on behalf of others and their welfare. There were all the villagers she had helped or nursed as a young woman, before she and Margaret made their new home in Birmingham. Since the war began there had been innumerable young men who she had felt bound to remember in her prayers.
Now her reaching out to God was like a howl that she felt from the very core of her. In her agony, she knelt in her room, when Susannah was not there, her head, still often swathed in her nurse’s veil, pressed to the floor, hands clenched into claws, begging the Almighty.
Just let him write. Please, please, just let me get a letter from him so that I know he’s all right. Why hasn’t he written? Oh, Fergus, please . . .
Never in her life had she been in such a state. She remembered what Margaret had told her about Edith, about the heart-rending sounds she had made when she heard the news about her Arthur. Thinking of it made her freeze with dread. Arthur’s ship was sunk by a German
U-boat. And the lads who went to the Front – Den and all the others – anyone close to them lived with fear day after day. But Fergus, she had thought reasonably safe. Had he just deserted her for some reason? But she knew that this was not the reason, knew him, his love and integrity well enough to be sure he would not behave in such a way.
So where was he? What was happening? On the wards she tried to hide her worry and act the role that was needed. In her room afterwards, she was close to falling apart.
Susannah was kind and sympathetic. She came in one day to find Annie pressed to the floor in supplication.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she exclaimed, gently helping Annie to her feet, whereupon Annie burst into further tears. She took her in her arms as Annie sobbed. ‘Still no letter from him? Oh, Annie, you poor girl!’
They sat side by side on the bed, while Annie cried out some of the tension which sat like a stone in her all day.
‘I’m sure you’ll hear soon,’ Susannah said, stroking her back. ‘They’ve probably got a rush on of some sort.’ But they both knew that there was no big battle going on, or not that they had heard about.
‘I knew I should never get involved with a man,’ Annie said, in a feeble attempt at joking as she wiped her eyes. ‘Nothing but blasted trouble.’
Another few days passed and then the letter arrived. Her whole body jolted with hope as she saw an envelope addressed to her, but even as she took it she could see that the handwriting was not Fergus’s. It was a larger script, ornate and cursive in blue-black ink. Hope sank, like a stone slowly disappearing into mud. She had just come off an early shift that afternoon and she took the letter and climbed with leaden legs to her room.
Lochiebank House
Auchtermuchty
Fife
March 19th, 1917
Dear Miss Hanson,