by Lizzie Page
‘Oh?’
‘Bit of a deadlock.’
We walked on. ‘Mind the—’ I nearly tripped. ‘Ropes.’
Ropes, ropes everywhere. I gingerly made my way through. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ He was in a hurry now. ‘Big push…’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, thinking of Joy pushing over Leona in a squabble over Mrs Crawford’s teacakes.
‘It’s a decisive attack,’ he explained. ‘Everyone involved…’
‘Here?’ I asked, alarmed. It was so quiet; it didn’t look like they were ready for supper, never mind a decisive attack.
‘Over in Belgium.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Poor chaps. I’ll leave you to it, Nurse Turner.’
Nurse Turner, I thought. He was the first person to call me that. I could get used to it.
* * *
The person I was sharing a tent with had barely left a mark or a footprint. Both camp beds were beautifully made. In between them stood a small table and on that was a Bible and a small vase of posies. How thoughtful of someone to have got those for me. I hung my bathing costume on a hook on a pole. The heeled shoes for the weekend I slipped under my bed. The just-in-case party dress disappeared amid the sixteen aprons in one of two painfully slim wardrobes. I wouldn’t mind if my room-mate wanted to borrow any of it occasionally. I wasn’t as spoilt as to imagine everyone had as nice clothes as I had. I made sure I was as tidy as I could be – Mrs Crawford would have been impressed.
Unpacking didn’t take long and I went out to look for someone to report to. There were fewer people around than I’d imagined there would be, until, some tents further along, I heard voices in what sounded like a meeting. I stood outside, swinging between nerves and excitement. The wind whipped up the tents, making a flapping noise. In the far distance, muffled explosions – and was that gunfire? The people inside the tent were discussing a gramophone, oblivious to me. When there was a break in the conversation, I took a deep breath, ready to duck in and introduce myself, but I was beaten to it by someone saying: ‘Have you met the new VAD?’
‘Not yet…’
‘She’s got a strong accent.’
‘So have you…’ Someone else laughed. I smiled to myself. This was true. Although I wasn’t great with English accents, I guessed this one was from the East End of London.
‘It’s foreign. American, I think.’
‘God help us,’ said an older woman’s voice. I stopped smiling. My heart dropped. ‘I’m sharing with her.’
‘Matron, you should have put her in with the other volunteers,’ said a man.
‘We can’t have three in a tent, it’s ridiculous. No, she’ll be absolutely fine in with me.’
There was a silence, which I couldn’t help but feel was everyone disagreeing with her.
‘She’s attractive,’ said the younger voice. ‘In a posh kind of way.’
Posh?
‘She won’t be for long…’
They took bets. They actually bet on how long I would say. No money changed hands, but still. The man gave me one month, which I thought was mean-spirited until the woman with the strong London accent chimed in with two weeks, then the older woman declared: ‘I don’t give her one day. She’ll have a bad night’s sleep, complain about the mattresses, then disappear before dawn.’
I made a mental note never, ever to complain about mattresses.
‘I’ve seen it before. The volunteers like to be called Nurse’ – I flushed – ‘but they won’t stoop, they’re not used to hard work.’
There was more laughter. I couldn’t hear what the man said.
‘I bet she’s brought a bathing costume with her,’ someone said and sniggered.
Oh God, I thought. My cheeks flamed, and I resolved to secretly dispose of my swimsuit before anyone saw it.
At the next lull in the conversation, I decided to interrupt. I didn’t want to hear any more of their terrible assumptions, however accurate they might be. Chirpily, I called out ‘Knock, knock,’ and pushed through without waiting for a reply. I was just in time to see two younger women look at each other guiltily. Maybe they guessed I had heard. The man didn’t even glance up; he was fiddling with the gramophone. The older woman stared me up and down. I felt like a fish about to be descaled. She had a severe expression that matched her voice.
She was Matron, so also my room-mate. At thirty-eight, she was only ten years older than I was, I found out later, but on first impressions she seemed ancient. Physically, she was a little like Mrs Crawford, with a shelf-like bosom and a stout behind. Her hair was swept back severely and streaked with grey on top. I thought she was one of those fierce types, slow to smile but when she did it was worth it. However, she didn’t smile.
When I asked her name, she shook her head at me. I shook mine back. I was beginning to feel like I did at the tennis club, about to get whacked in the stomach by a stray ball.
‘Why do you ask?’ Her head was tilted to one side.
‘I… since, we’re sharing a room, I mean, tent—’
‘You will call me Matron at all times.’
‘Of course, Matron.’ It was tempting to curtsy. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the man had stopped his forensic examination of the gramophone and was smirking at the girls. He winked at me.
* * *
Matron walked me back to our tent, which was a shame because I would have liked to get to know the others. I followed her meekly, doing a good job of avoiding the ropes.
‘There is a line here.’ She pointed down the middle of the tent, from one end to the other. I looked, I squinted, I prevaricated, then finally I said, ‘I can’t see anything, Matron.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s an invisible line, but WE.DO.NOT.CROSS.THE.LINE.’
‘We do not cross the line,’ I repeated.
* * *
‘Think of it like the equator,’ said Kitty helpfully, grinning, in the canteen later when I told her what had happened. I had a feeling I would like Kitty. It wasn’t just her name, she was catlike. She was small, fair, with dark eyes and dark eyelashes. She was slow to speak, careful, as if she didn’t want to say the wrong words.
‘I think she might be mad.’
She giggled, spooning broth into a bowl. ‘DO NOT CROSS MATRON.’
I sat down with my tray opposite the other girl, Bonnie. With her wide features and eyes set far apart, Bonnie reminded me of a whale. Leona, who used to collect pictures of deep-sea monsters, would have been delighted. Bonnie was tall – about a foot taller than me – and broader even than Elizabeth. She had long muscular legs and a healthy head of hair. Despite her stature, there was something charmingly childlike about her, and although I shouldn’t have, I privately labelled Kitty the clever one and Bonnie the not so clever one. Kitty and Bonnie had trained from the moment war broke out and had been out here for three months.
‘At first, the real nurses didn’t like us volunteers—’ Bonnie started.
‘It’s not that they didn’t like us, they didn’t trust us,’ corrected Kitty.
‘I suppose three months’ training sounded paltry compared to what they had.’
‘Exactly, so they used to keep us segregated, but we showed them we work as hard as anyone and they accepted us eventually.’
‘Not everyone…’ Bonnie leaned forward to say. ‘It’s all a bit topsy-turvy here.’
‘I like topsy-turvy,’ I said, thinking of Mrs Crawford and how sometimes you might be forgiven for thinking she was the boss of the house.
‘Yes,’ said Bonnie. ‘It’s the way Gordon likes it too. He’s not keen on divisions or hierarchies.’
‘Gordon?’
‘Doctor Collins.’ She smiled. ‘He’s a law unto himself.’
Cases at Field Hospital 19, Bray-sur-Somme
Heartbreak/Homesickness
Trench foot
Pneumonia
Typhoid
Sepsis
Bullet wounds
Shrapnel injury.
11
On my very first morning in France, I had to give a man a bed-bath. What an initiation, I wrote to Elizabeth, knowing this was the kind of story that delighted her. In my VAD guidebook, it had advised ‘avoid the front area’, but there was no avoiding it. My victim didn’t seem too embarrassed once I got going with the sponge, so I wasn’t either. I had told myself to think of Grandma Leonora to get me through any awkwardness, but I found I didn’t need to. He was in some pain – he had some minor shrapnel injuries in his arm and back – but he didn’t cry out. I admired his dignity and told him so.
He said, ‘After the things I’ve seen, preserving my dignity is way down the list of my priorities.’
Matron, who had been overseeing the process from the other side of the room, said, ‘Do the others now, please,’ so I assumed it met with her satisfaction too.
* * *
It was mostly cleaning, making beds. Sheets needed wringing, needed working in the mangle, not just plonked into hot water, thank you, Nurse Turner. Preparing patients for surgery or looking after them when they came out. Bringing bedpans, removing bedpans and writing letters home for them. Jugs of water bedside. Checking temperatures, looking out for fevers, infections, oozing wounds. If there was anything too heavy, I could call the French orderlies, who were mostly elderly former soldiers who didn’t speak English, or the English orderlies and stretcher-bearers, who were mostly volunteers from England. If there was anything more onerous, I was instructed to fetch a real nurse. It was hard to tell who was who at first. There were some cleaners but not enough, as I later found out, and there were cooks, kitchen and administrative staff too. Some seemed experienced, others less so. Everyone seemed to muck in.
We were divided into two teams, and we each worked long days: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. (with a break around 2 p.m. for three hours) or the night shift from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. I enjoyed the stillness of the night shift but I struggled to sleep the next day if the tent was bleached with sunlight. Katherine, Lucille, Sybil and Beryl were the nurses and volunteers on the other shifts. Occasionally, my team would whinge about them: who had forgotten to put the blankets in the right place or who had left the poor fella in bed three without water. I’m sure they complained about us too, but it was understood that we were never to make a thing of it, and most transitions were smooth. They were all sympathetic, hard-working women and occasionally, when our matron was being particularly heartless, I wished I was in their team instead. Their matron was a perpetually concerned-looking woman whose motto seemed to be ‘Happy nurse equals a happy patient’, whereas our matron’s motto might have been ‘A nurse’s job is never finished’.
* * *
We didn’t talk about our patients at mealtimes. It was another of those unspoken rules, meant, I supposed, to protect us. Instead, we talked about light, irrelevant things: revues we had seen, places we had visited or wanted to see. There was a farm not far from us belonging to a lovely man, Farmer Norest, who, unlike many, was staying put. His chickens laid only occasionally. We spent hours discussing this. I thought the noise of the guns must put them off, but Gordon loved to expand on his theory that they were pacifist chickens. Conscientious-objector hens.
‘Conchies?’ said Matron, disgusted. ‘Then they should be shot.’
She had a mean streak the size of France.
* * *
Kitty didn’t write soldiers’ letters, she preferred bedpans or carting off soiled dressings! That was fine by me – I loved writing. Sometimes, if we had time and if the patients were that way inclined, I would steer them towards romance. When I admitted this to Doctor Collins, or Gordon as he let us call him off-shift, he burst into laughter.
‘Think about it, May. One day our poor lady gets a letter saying, I miss you and the flowers in your hair, the next day Bonnie writes, and she gets the tea is flavourless and the porridge is even worse. She won’t know where she is.’
I laughed but it didn’t stop me from pushing the men to a sweeter style. After all, it was what I would have liked to receive.
Gordon admitted himself that he should not have fraternised with us lowly female volunteers but he said wearily, ‘I was at all-boys school for years and years – I’ve had enough of all that…’
* * *
I had only been in France for approximately two and a half weeks when I was called into the canteen for a meeting before my seven o’clock shift. It had been another bad night, with lots of noises of explosions, whistling shells and screeching vehicles. The air that morning was thick with dust. There were lots of people in there who I recognised and many I didn’t. Some looked like they had dressed in a hurry. I could tell something bad was happening by the hushed whispers. I joined Kitty and Bonnie on a bench and waited – it felt like we were in church.
Gordon spoke quickly: ‘I’m afraid I have something disturbing to report. A young VAD was shelled in her tent last night, not one mile far from here.’
He told us her name was Elle Harcourt, she was nineteen and she had only been out here a few weeks herself. We might have come out on the same transport. The short length of her service shouldn’t have made the news worse, but somehow it did. She hadn’t even had her chance to make her contribution. Her family wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing that she had done her bit.
Gordon continued. I could tell he didn’t like what he was having to say.
‘It’s very sad news,’ he said, ‘but it also spells out to us how vulnerable we are here. We are in a dangerous position and these are dangerous times. We do our utmost to keep you all secure, but don’t ever be deluded into thinking we are safe so anyone who wants to go, please let me know today. I don’t mean to go home necessarily, I mean we can look for a new placement for you – a hospital further back along the line maybe, where there is less chance of shelling.’
‘Will you be staying here, Doctor Collins?’ Bonnie called out, and someone from the other team said, ‘And you, Matron?’
Those in charge looked at each other.
‘Yes, the hospital will be staying here…’ He paused. ‘But please think about it.’
Bonnie, Kitty, and all us VADs and nurses nodded at each other. Sybil defiantly put out her hand and we all shook it. ‘We’re none of us skivers here,’ she called out. ‘We’re staying.’ Gordon looked pained but said that he was glad.
I swallowed hard. I had known in my head it was dangerous but now my heart felt it too. As I lined up with the others to leave the tent, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You can change your mind any time, Nurse Turner,’ and I flushed that he had singled me out. Was it because I was new or did he think I was weak?
Later that day, Matron and Kitty left with daffodils pinned to their coats for the funeral of Elle Harcourt. RIP.
* * *
Other than work, and my free time spent in the canteen, it was the mail that gave shape to my days those first few months in France in 1915 (spring term, as I thought of it).
Elizabeth sent funny postcards with tales from committees.
‘I am spending too much time with my mother,’ she wrote. ‘This is never a good idea.’
She wrote about driving across the country to find somewhere that would admit women for her early-morning swims – she was up to a gruelling one hundred lengths now. She wrote about her Belgian students. She was compassionate about their situation, although she became exasperated with some of the slower learners. ‘But don’t worry, May, I am very tolerant to their faces.’ She wrote that she was growing sick of porridge and occasionally, she wrote about the exploits of Tiggy and Winkle. Delia, the black sheep/cat, featured only rarely.
From Percy I heard nothing, which was a relief – I had half-expected frantic love notes to arrive at camp – although maybe it was just a question of him not having my address.
Joy’s letters came infrequently, as they had done in England – and each was a long, laborious account of the escapades of other girls. Joy positioned herself as the aloof, disapproving friend. I adored heari
ng from her and would read her letters over and over again, imagining her writing them. I slept with them under my pillow. Leona’s letters, like her, were sunny and sweet and would often be accompanied by tiny gifts: A pressed flower. A chocolate thumbprint. A wavy golden hair. ‘Kisses for the best mother in the world,’ that sort of thing. George did not write, fortunately, but he did forward mail from America, even though I’d expressly asked him not to. It was always horrible to read my mother’s methodical character assassinations of me. I shouldn’t have read them, but I couldn’t help myself.
Elsie wrote occasionally, but her cards were so infuriatingly slim they made Leona’s missives look like The Iliad. I sometimes wondered if they were worth the stamp.
When it’s busy you will long for tedium! or Keep your head up, May. Better than mooching around Percy’s apartment, waiting for life to happen.
I wrote cheerful, upbeat letters to my girls, Elizabeth and Elsie. I didn’t feel I had the right to grumble – complaints wouldn’t be well received by anyone. It’s not that I had many complaints as such (besides the concrete mattress), only small grumbles, which I saved for my diary. Or sometimes for Kitty.
‘Who knew there’d be so much cleaning?’
‘What on earth did you expect, May?’
‘I don’t know, I just imagined something a bit more…’
‘Glamorous?’ laughed Kitty, her hair scraped back, her nursing cap askew. Her apron ripped where she’d caught it on a scalpel. ‘I can’t imagine anything less glamorous.’
Soldiers’ favourite songs
‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’