by Lizzie Page
‘Back arm, Mummy,’ she corrected me.
‘And that one.’
‘I’ll write,’ said Leona, hugging me again. She held my chin in her pretty paws. ‘You’ll write to me?’
‘All the time.’ I felt suddenly choked and relieved and confused all at once. Was it fair? Was it right?
Leona jumped up and snatched the hairbrush from Joy. ‘Mummy, Mummy, why should you never fall in love with a tennis player?’
It took me a moment to realise that this wasn’t life advice, this was Leona telling one of her jokes. ‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Because love means nothing to them. Do you get it, Mummy?’
‘I think so,’ I said cautiously. ‘It’s funny, yes.’
I warned the girls we might have to stop The Wind in the Willows before its conclusion, but that evening I couldn’t stop. We carried on through the weasels storming the hall. I had to see it out. Justice was restored. Toad was winning back his home. Leona was half-asleep, her little mouth open. Joy was pressed into me.
Why hadn’t I done this more often? My mouth grew dry and I began to skip the extraneous words. I read on and on, until Joy was asleep too, and then I slipped out from between them.
* * *
In the end, I didn’t have to tell George. The next day, while I was taking the girls back to school, he went through my room (something he liked to do occasionally) and, although my diary with all its unpleasant opinions was well hidden under my bedside table, he managed to find my notebook of lists. Fortunately, there was nothing too incriminating in there. Except for this one thing.
He wobbled at the top of the stairs, waving my notebook around. He was drunk.
‘“Tell George” what?’
I considered lying – I still had two days to go – and I had planned the reveal to be at the last moment. All the better to stop any resistance. But a sudden bravado seized me. I am my own woman, I told myself. What would Elsie Knocker do?
‘I’m going to France, George. I’m going to help the war effort.’
He was silent at first. I don’t know what he had expected. Tell George we are out of pie, probably. Tell George the hat stand fell.
He did not expect momentous things from me.
He just went downstairs. I could see he didn’t know how to react. Finally, he must have settled for the old, oh, May is a dunce, what does she know?
I shouldn’t have followed him, but I suppose I was looking for a row or a resolution of some kind. Human nature, isn’t it? The walls smelled of alcohol; come to that, the whole house probably did. George laughed to himself as he knocked back the whisky. Silly May, always in la-la land.
‘What can you do to help?’ he said, sneeringly.
‘I’ll do whatever I have to do,’ I said steadily.
‘You’re not going.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘For one, you’re useless, you don’t even know the price of a pint of milk.’
I blushed. Early in our relationship, he had caught me out, once, and he had never let me forget it.
‘You’re as much use as a nun in a brothel… I forbid you.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I can. You’re my wife.’
‘I thought a promise was just a scrap of paper to you, George.’ I still hadn’t forgiven him for his enthusiasm to abandon Belgium to the lions.
He snorted. ‘What about the girls?’
Nice of him to show an interest after all these years.
‘They board, George. Anyway, it’s all arranged. I’ll be home for the school breaks, Mrs Crawford is determined to help and the Pilkingtons are always pleased to have them.’
George stared into his drink. When he next looked up, he had dramatically changed tack. I don’t know how he managed it, but tears were rolling down his cheeks. It did nothing but harden my resolve.
George fumbled for my hand.
‘Is this all about the… my… lady-friend? Don’t go overreacting.’ Translation – lie down and let me trample over you. ‘It’s nothing.’
Here’s the thing: George didn’t even realise how much he had hurt me, and if anything, that made it worse. It’s nothing? If you’re going to throw away your marriage, at least make it meaningful.
* * *
‘A hospital in France?’ Percy, who had been hunched over Morning Light in St Ives, stood bolt upright. This canvas was the size of a small child. An ‘abstract’, he called it. In my head I called it a ‘distract’. ‘I didn’t know you spoke French!’
I had been home-tutored by a Madame Durand before she had been trampled on by a horse, then a Mademoiselle Martin. Twice a week from when I was eight until I left with George. ‘Mais, oui,’ I said playfully, but Percy wasn’t in the mood to be amused.
He rubbed his paint-streaked elbow. ‘It isn’t because of Elsie, is it? Because she’s always like that, she does stuff first and then thinks about it later. Only…’ He paused. ‘I don’t think she thinks about it later at all.’
‘It’s not because of her,’ I said, offended he didn’t think I was capable of doing something by myself. ‘I want to serve.’
‘There are plenty of hospitals in London though.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m itching to get in the thick of it – I think I can make a contribution.’
I thought of Grandma Leonora. She had always said I took after her. So, if she was strong, so was I. She always made me feel capable. Unlike my mother, who was all doom and gloom.
Percy paused. ‘I’ve never doubted you’ve got hidden talents.’
‘Well, what’s the point of having a talent that is hidden?’
Percy sighed. ‘What does old Georgie say about it?’
For a brief, crazy moment, I wished George would turn himself around, fall in love with me again, give up the booze, give up the women, give me some freedom and I could stay in this warm studio for ever with Percy: what was so bad about my life now that I had to dismantle every single piece of it?
But the brief crazy moment passed. Europe was at war. I was more determined than ever.
I didn’t want to go back to blackness any more. The melancholy had left me the instant I had signed on the dotted line: I was a woman on a mission.
‘He doesn’t have much choice,’ I said firmly.
‘He’s not a violent man, is he?’
I laughed. ‘Oh no, George is harmless.’
‘Are you sure?’ Percy looked relieved.
I thought of George falling over, dropping glasses, ripping curtains, smashing plates. ‘He is the very definition of a buffoon.’
My heart contracted unexpectedly. I had loved him once, I told myself, don’t be so cruel.
Percy wanted me to look ‘properly’ at Morning Light in St Ives.
It felt like I was taking a test that I hadn’t revised for.
The painting had been blue, brown and grey but then, last-minute, Percy had elected to cast a great red smear down the middle. He mumbled that he had been influenced by the outbreak of war. He had started out with an image of something simple and pretty, yet it had ended up like this.
‘It’s not like anything I’ve seen before,’ I said truthfully.
He continued painting, while I read and knitted for a while. Neither of us was much in the mood for talking. I saw that I ought to be home. One more day and then I was off.
Percy cleaned his brushes thoroughly. The water swirled around, red. I thought of spilt blood. I thought how delighted everyone in France would be to see me. A volunteer all the way from America!
‘Is this goodbye then?’
‘I suppose…’
Although I knew Percy was very fond of me, I was still surprised that he was this downhearted. I supposed that at heart he was a lazy fellow, and he was probably wondering how he would find a new ‘friend’ without having to go to the effort of leaving his studio.
‘When will I see you again?’
‘When the war’s over? Or this summ
er? Whichever is soonest.’
Percy walked me all the way down the many stairs, which he never usually did. The musty hall was full of old newspapers and letters to people who had long since moved on.
‘This is absolutely what you want?’
I said that it was. I said I could think of very little else since I had decided. My melancholy had become a mere blot on the far horizon and, for the first time recently, I felt I might not be swept back towards it at any moment.
Percy nodded slowly. He had a little swoosh of black paint just under one ear and I leaned over to brush it off. He caught my hand and pressed it to his lips.
‘Stay safe, May, you are…’ He hesitated, searching for the right thing to say, ‘very precious to me.’
Things to pack
Uniform (including sixteen aprons and rubber-soled shoes – black!).
Summer clothes, nothing too heavy.
Swimming costume (perhaps ambitious, but you never know. Even volunteers must have some time off).
Shoes with heels (just in case there are parties), beautifully polished! Thank you, Mrs Crawford.
French/English dictionary.
Matchbox.
Towels.
Scissors.
Forceps?!
Needle.
A tin cup, knife and fork.
Nice pens/notebooks from Morleys.
Chocolate for journey.
Ditto apples (any variety).
Walt Whitman Poetry Collection.
9
It was after eleven and I was in bed. The street was quiet, apart from the occasional bark of a worried dog. Some people said that when the wind was blowing a certain way, you could hear the guns going off in France.
My suitcase was by the door. It looked respectable. It said: Voluntary Aid Detachment reporting for service. I had tried on my uniform several times and was pleased at how responsible I looked. The dress material was harsh and starchy but it had smooth lines and was unfussy. Underneath, I would be wearing the new, softer-style corsets and the regulation black stockings.
I pictured my matron falling at my rubber-soled feet. (My matron – how I liked that!) ‘Thank goodness you’re here. We’re desperate for reinforcements.’
George knocked on the bedroom door but before I could say ‘Go away,’ in he trotted. He was carrying a circular silver tray, the one we used for ‘best’. Two glasses wobbled on it and a bottle of red wine. I suspect this was the second bottle, because he was already ‘tipsy’, as he’d call it. Placing the tray on my bedside table, he plumped himself down like he was staying a while. My poor blankets sank under his weight. He was wearing his red silk kimono, the one that only just managed to belt up over his paunch. He used to say: ‘If I hadn’t married you, I would have married a little Chinese.’
He was still wearing his shoes – perhaps a hint that he wasn’t entirely confident that things would go his way.
‘May, let’s make a baby.’
I might have been tempted once. Then he kicked off his shoes, lay down on my covers and added, ‘We might get a boy this time.’
‘Oh, get out my room, George.’
‘But we make such beautiful children, May, you can’t deny it!’
It was true, but I was no longer a compliant sixteen-year-old. I could see further than my nose.
‘We don’t want more children, George.’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Well, I certainly don’t. You’re making a fool of yourself. Accept it, I’m leaving.’
‘You can’t.’ He responded incredulously. ‘How will it look?’
Ah, there was the rub. George didn’t care about me, or what I did or didn’t do: I was showing him up. I was making him look like a man who couldn’t control his own wife.
‘You promised to obey your husband, remember?’ He moved closer to me on the bedspread.
‘You promised to be faithful, remember?’ I quipped back.
He threw his glass, but instead of smashing dramatically, as I imagined he intended, it rolled onto my bedspread. That stain would be a bugger to clear up.
‘Can’t you do anything right?’ I hissed. George stood glaring at me for a moment, like some giant who’s just discovered his golden-egg-laying goose has gone. Then he turned, sloping away, his head banging the side of the doorframe as he left. With any luck, that was really going to smart in the morning.
George wasn’t a tennis player, but love meant nothing to him.
How to get to Field Hospital 19 in Bray-sur-Somme in six easy steps
Taxi to station (or ask Elizabeth?!)
Train
Another train
Ferry
Train
Car
You can do this!
10
The journey to the hospital in France wasn’t half as painful as I had anticipated. I had mostly been worried about crossing the Channel – there was talk of torpedoes – but it was smooth sailing that day. I loved the sensation of being at sea. I drank copious amounts of coffee and smiled at everyone. Here she comes, I told myself, biting my lip with pleasure, May Turner. American VAD, Brave War Nurse. My shoulders felt gloriously light. (I shouldn’t have drunk so much coffee though, I kept needing the loo.)
Elizabeth had driven me, in her inimitable way, to the station. She was wearing just her blouse and skirt, no winter coat, but insisted she was just dandy. It was all part of the process. We were quiet to begin with; it was as though everything that had to be said, had been said. (Actually, we had hardly spoken of it at all.)
The Tooting Bathing Lake would open soon, and Elizabeth had high hopes of other places she could swim, ones that were open for longer hours: Hampstead Ponds, Clapham Municipal Pool. The bad news was that expedient Mr Albert had only gone and been conscripted, but Elizabeth had got over it quickly. She had devised herself a new training programme, bizarrely involving more handstands and more roly-polys for ‘strengthening’. She was also trying to eat more to bulk herself up.
I told Elizabeth about my parting with George. As I retold the story, I realised I didn’t feel sad about leaving, I just felt sad about how little affection we had for each other now. How could this have happened?
‘You could have separated without going to France,’ she offered quietly, echoing Percy.
A funeral cortège was blocking our way. Elizabeth clumsily put her car in reverse and I felt my heart in my stomach as, at high speed, we sped backwards down the high road. Once we reached the bottom of the street, the procession could pass. The horses went by horribly close to us and I found myself holding my breath to make myself smaller.
Behind it, a group of children were irreverently running with buckets, ready to pick up the manure. When they saw us they shouted, ‘Ladies, lady-driver!’ I waved at them regally. (Sometimes, I did surprise myself.)
‘I know,’ I continued, more cheerful now the horses had gone, ‘but this is more final. And I so want to do my bit. This is –’ I coined one of Mrs Crawford’s wonderful phrases – ‘killing two birds with one stone.’
Elizabeth sighed, crunched into forward and careened ahead, narrowly missing a small boy. I prayed no one else would run out in front of her. Once she had driven over a man’s foot and had the audacity to shout at him for it.
‘I wish things were different.’
‘Me too,’ I said, nodding vehemently.
‘For us, I mean.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant. I watched her profile as she drove. Elizabeth was such a fine-looking woman, with her striking red hair, and I was reminded that she had been a great friend to me. I felt a surge of gratitude to her for putting me together when I was so lonely. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably still be crying in my gilded cage. I owed her, I knew that. And I knew, from bitter experience, that it is much harder to be the one left behind than the one leaving.
* * *
Even with my untrained eye, I could tell which regiments were going out for the first time and which were the regime
nts returning out. How could you tell? You just could. It wasn’t that the men were older, but that they looked older somehow, more ragged, more gnarly, less keen… I touched the bun I had cajoled my hair into. Was I suddenly going to look older too?
The driver dropped off two engineers and then I was alone with him, as he took me onwards to Bray-sur-Somme (or Goodness-knows-where, as I had christened it). What would the matriarchs at the tennis club say to this? ‘May Turner, alone in a car, with a man who wasn’t her husband?’ But the driver had no qualms, or at least showed no signs of any. He explained that mine was a smaller field hospital along a long mud track. There was a bigger military hospital only one mile away and if necessary, we’d house their overflow. I liked the way he referred to the hospital as ‘yours’.
He was trying to reassure me: ‘Yours is quiet.’
As he drove, he pointed out other buildings and half-erected buildings and troops marching and men with spades and buckets.
‘That’s the Canadians,’ he said, then squinted. ‘The New Zealanders are somewhere here too,’ he said vaguely.
‘Quite the world effort,’ I observed happily.
‘Chinese labourers. There’s Indians too, down that way.’
‘Indians!’ I exclaimed. ‘Heavens! In London, they think it’s just English people out here,’ I added, although by ‘London’ and ‘they’, I was thinking mostly of George. George sang ‘Rule, Britannia’ as he shaved in the oval mirror that made his face look so much larger than it really was.
As soon as we arrived, it became apparent that the word ‘hospital’ too was something of an exaggeration. The main building was a glorified shed. It wasn’t that glorified either. I later found out that it used to house cattle. Outside, there was a selection of white tents. I thought of the Native American villages we’d learnt about at school.
‘What a noise,’ I said as I awkwardly got out the car.
‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘Between here and the front line there are twenty, thirty hospitals. It’s a good starting point, not much going on in this part of the Somme.’