Daughters of War

by Lizzie Page

  ‘Matron, I’m sorry. Do you want to go back home?’

  ‘I am home,’ she said with such finality that I didn’t dare cross the invisible line to her. I stood stock-still.

  ‘Very well. If there’s anything I can do…’

  * * *

  Early February, Louis and I travelled south to the Dordogne for one night to stay with his oldest friends. He had hinted that their place was grand, but he hadn’t explained it was a chateau. When we arrived, I could only call out ‘Oh!’ in astonishment and delight. It looked like something out of a picture-book. The empty swimming pool in the garden gave the scene a slight air of abandonment but this only added to the atmosphere of faded beauty. We were staying in one of the chateau’s towers, where a circular stairway led to a circular room, a room for a princess to let down her hair. I have been fortunate in my life to see some splendid places, but I had never been anywhere so lovely as this. To be here with Louis was like some fabulous dream.

  Our hosts were Pierre and Mathilde. He was short, stout and jolly, Mathilde was a slim, aristocratic beauty. I only rarely suffered from jealousy, but I nearly did when I saw her. Everyone who met her must have fallen under her spell. She greeted us warmly. My French might have been better than her English, but she was determined to speak English. It was incredible to be in a place untouched by war, it felt like we were in a bubble here. ‘Money insulates,’ Louis always said. But I soon found out they had been blighted too.

  ‘My little brother,’ Mathilde told me impassively. ‘In the Somme.’

  I wondered where he had died: on the fields, in the dressing station, with us – or had he made it to the hospital? So many stages, so many parts to the chain. Not that it made much difference to those picking up the pieces at home.

  ‘Thank you for trying,’ she said. Her hair fell like curtains over her face, so I couldn’t see her expression. ‘Louis told me you were there. The nurses are formidable.’

  I told her that everyone involved in the war effort was formidable.

  I learnt that Mathilde was a volunteer in a bandage centre in the village. The volunteers went out in the countryside, collected moss and wrapped it at the local school to turn into bandages. She mimed the ravelling with her hands. I knew Elizabeth had done this in England too; I had heard it was back-breaking work. Mathilde wasn’t just a wealthy (and beautiful) face and I was sorry I had dismissed her as such. I, of all people, should have known better about judging a book by its cover!

  It was a happy and carefree evening, eating venison with grilled vegetables, and I was delighted to discover Louis loved a mouldy cheese as much as I did! We even managed to talk about things other than the war, although not much. The war crept in everywhere. At midnight, Mathilde and Pierre looked at each other, then rose from the table as one.

  ‘Don’t hurry up in the morning,’ Pierre said kindly. ‘What is the English phrase? Lovebirds?’

  Louis laughed loudly while I could only blush.

  * * *

  What a joy it was to be alone with my Louis. ‘Such impropriety!’ as Matron would say. We took our hosts at their word and were still in bed at eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning, smiling at each other, deliriously.

  ‘We should go down for breakfast,’ Louis said eventually.

  ‘We’re too late, lunch maybe?’

  ‘But I’m hungry…’

  ‘I’ll take your mind off it, darling.’

  ‘Again?!’

  As we went down the spiral staircase to the kitchen Mathilde came in from her vegetable garden, where she had been watering tomatoes. Even in her gardening clothes, she looked immaculate. She smiled knowingly at us: ‘Quite the romance.’ She tore baguettes and put them in a basket. She collected butter from the windowsill: ‘Eat,’ she ordered, ‘you need your strength.’

  Pierre took Louis to admire his tractor. When we were alone, I wanted to ask Mathilde if Louis had brought anyone here before, but I couldn’t bring myself to. She would think Americans were mad. She might have been right – I was crazy when it came to him.

  The coffee Mathilde made was better than any I had drunk in a long time. While we were chatting, Mathilde mentioned children. I realised she had assumed – naturally, I suppose – that I didn’t have any.

  ‘Oh, I have two,’ I said quickly, ‘two daughters. In England.’

  ‘Of course.’ It’s hard to shock the aristocratic French. ‘I didn’t think you were old enough.’

  ‘I’m thirty,’ I told her.

  ‘Still young,’ she said, as I confess I had hoped she might.

  She asked about them and I told her fragments: Joy and her art. Leona and her sports. One hobby each was manageable. It was too beautiful a day for the sad story of my separation, and I didn’t want to be pitied. She seemed to appreciate my role as a volunteer nurse and I feared she might lose respect for me if she knew what the real me was like.

  Mathilde complimented me on the brooch Louis had given me. She was so captivated by it that I took it off so she could examine it more closely. After she turned it over and over in the palm of her hand, she eyed me closely and said:

  ‘I have never seen Louis as besotted as he is with you.’

  I liked the sentiment, but I didn’t like the word ‘besotted’ – with its undercurrent of transience – and I hoped it was just that something had been lost in translation.

  42

  Sometimes, in the morning, the sun was so bright it was almost as if the rays were dropping on us like rain. Our tents were drenched in heat and brightness. You couldn’t usually sleep through it and if you did, you’d wake up dry-mouthed and with an aching head. And that’s how it was, that morning, I woke stupidly early, bathed in white light. I would usually lie there with my eyes closed, thinking of my daughters, thinking of Louis, thinking of all my mistakes, but I didn’t that morning because there was a quiet. Impossible to describe exactly, but it was that suspicious kind of quiet, like when a dog stops barking and you know he’s got something he shouldn’t have.

  Matron was too quiet. I sprang from my bed over to hers. Panic was a frequent bedfellow in those days, but I had learnt to swallow it, to de-tremble it, to calm it, to plough through it. Now, though, I was overcome with it. I shook her. Then I hauled her up. She looked terrible: her skin tone, the shape of her mouth, everything was wrong.

  My head didn’t know what it was, but my instincts kicked in fast.

  ‘What did you take?’ I scrambled around on my hands and knees. Under the bed. Unlike my side, with its abandoned socks, snake-like stockings, half-written poems and letters, hers was normally spotless. But not now. That morning, a whisky bottle lay beached on its side. Boxes of pills from the hospital tent. She was delirious, dozy, she wanted to sleep. No.

  Please Kitty or Bonnie, someone help me.

  I tried to make her sit upright, but she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. Her body was repulsively soft and bouncy in her nightshirt, fleshy where I had only known her rigid and starched.

  ‘Matron,’ I kept whispering. I was torn between wanting to screech and wanting to preserve her dignity. I slapped her face – I didn’t know what else to do. The slap did nothing. I had to make her sick. I stuck my fingers in her mouth, like I was trying to disarm a dog. She whimpered, she fought against them.

  She forced my fingers out but she had understood: she replaced them with her own. She jammed her fist in, down her throat, choking, at last, vomit coming up. I held the bucket for her. The noises made me feel ill.

  Thank heavens, Gordon ran in. Later, he told me, he had suspected something. A tiny feeling, an intuition of doom, the kind that can so often be wrong. Then, just as he was getting up, he heard the distinctive sound of a struggle.

  ‘Allow me,’ Gordon said. He took the bucket and gratefully, I backed off.

  * * *

  I was so angry with her, I was almost shaking in my fury. When I’d slapped her, it was half to rouse her, half from that fury. People dying when they are not wanting to
and here you are, bloody killing yourself. You don’t deserve this precious thing, this precarious life.

  Lunchtime in the canteen, Kitty and Gordon came to sit with me. Kitty spoke so softly, I had to strain to hear. ‘It must have been horrendous, May.’

  I didn’t want to talk about that, though. I wanted to understand. How? How could she be so stupid?

  Kitty and Gordon looked at each other.

  ‘She doesn’t know how to look after her parents and her husband’s parents anymore.’

  My fury wouldn’t dissipate. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She has to provide for them all.’

  ‘But the pension,’ I asked uncertainly, ‘his pension will keep them, surely?’

  Kitty shook her head.

  They looked at each other again. Then Kitty whispered the truth. It turned out Matron’s husband, her Willy, had been a deserter: he had been caught fighting in the crew. He complained to the doctor his head hurt. It’s on record. He told him, ‘I’m going out of my mind here. Do something.’ But what could the doctor do? Wasn’t everyone going out of their minds? Certainly, all the sane ones were. So, Willy ran away. They don’t know how exactly. One moment he was there, the next he was gone, slipped away, disappeared. He was caught trying to board a boat at Boulogne; there were a few of them apparently. Traitors. He was shot in the back of the head against a wall outside the city hall in Poperinghe.

  ‘Matron, this is not your fault,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening to me. She stared straight ahead, her haughty chin hardened. ‘We will find a way through.’

  She closed her eyes.

  I loathed myself. I felt like everything George had ever said about me was right. How could I not have spotted this? I considered myself a good nurse, I saw myself as a loyal friend, yet last night, I had lain down next to Matron, called out ‘Goodnight’ and then extinguished the lantern, without a care in the world.

  I tried to go back over the last few days to see what I had missed. We had cycled to the bakery, exchanged words about Farmer Norest – the chickens were laying.

  Matron had written letters; we had eaten apples. We had picked wild flowers. I pressed them for my girls and she had done the same – for her parents, I had assumed. We read newspapers. Matron told me again that a cousin of hers had been on the Titanic and survived. All fairly mundane. We had been getting on better than ever.

  How had I been so angry with her? I, who knew what despair felt like? I was appalled and ashamed that I had judged her. If someone who had felt despair could not be sympathetic, what chance did we all have? I asked Gordon if there wasn’t a way Matron could have a pay rise. Hadn’t she been a most loyal and hard-working nurse? Hadn’t she endured the very worst of humanity? He sighed. It was a nice thought, but there were scales, lengths of service; how would it look?

  That evening, I told her I had money for her. It would be my present. She was horrified by this; she was shaking her head so much that I feared a relapse. I changed my wording: it became a loan arranged over several years at low interest. Finally, she acquiesced. She pumped my hand: ‘I will pay you back, May, I promise, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank my grandmother, Leonora,’ I said, and she nodded, tears in her eyes. She gripped my fingers so tightly, I had to ask her to loosen her grip. Apologising, she did. I laughed, ‘At least your strength is coming back.’

  * * *

  Gordon and I sat out on Little Big Rock, sharing a cigarette. It was always easy with him, we didn’t have to talk. The crimson sky reminded me of Percy’s paintings. I knew now they were more prescient than I had realised and better than I had given him credit for. I remembered the spikes, the jagged edges.

  I thought of the man who shot Matron’s husband Willy. The one who cocked the pistol, fired at his own men. Surely he knew Willy was no enemy? Did he go back to his quarters, did he sit back and drink his tea, write a letter to his wife or his ma? But then, what choice did he have either? We were all just cogs in this great big terrible machine.

  For several weeks after that, I dreamt about firing squads. Wondered how it felt to be him, to line up there, waiting for the final blow. Whether it was a relief or not. Matron wouldn’t talk about it. The shame. The shame. Those poor men facing their end, waiting for the moment of oblivion. Thinking of their mothers, or their wives or their girlfriends. Did they long for another chance, or did they just wish it was over?

  43

  Louis was supposed to pick me up at two for my half-day off, but his car didn’t roll up. We had planned to go for a picnic. I didn’t hear anything from him all afternoon. I spent my break in my tent with my stomach in a frightful knot. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to the others about it. I felt myself swinging between anger and fear: one moment Louis was dead in a field in Lens, his uniform soaked in blood, the next he was in Poperinghe, flirting with Ginger or slow dancing with nurses less complicated than me.

  I couldn’t stand it. I washed and cleaned. I wrote letters. At four, although I was not due on, I reported to Matron and she let me back to convalescence, where injured soldiers told me their life stories and I could lug out pails of old bandages until midnight.

  The other nurses were already feeling sorry for me, and I couldn’t have that; I made my expression extra jolly. Hearty-faced May. Inside, my heart was breaking. The longer I didn’t hear from him, the more it was decided: he was dead, he was dead, he must be dead. I just had to wait for confirmation from the telegram.

  * * *

  He came the next day at two. I had just left the dressings tent for my break when I saw the car pull up. I was thrilled to see him, determined to playfully scold. ‘A whole day late!’ But once I saw his expression, I knew something wasn’t right. He was unsmiling and rigid, far from his normal soft self. Something had happened. I wanted to crawl inside his coat and nest there. Instead, I grabbed his hands and found they were lead weights in mine.

  ‘What is it? Is it Winston? Pierre? Mathilde?’

  No, it was none of them. He told me to sit down on our favourite rock, yet he did not sit but stood, his hands clasped behind his back, like he was talking to General Pétain.

  He said he wasn’t going to see me anymore.

  ‘What? Why?’ A part of me wondered if this was another of his bad jokes.

  He cleared his throat. ‘No particular reason.’

  I tried to make sense of it. I tried to see what he was saying but I couldn’t. Nothing made sense. I felt hot and humiliated, my cheeks burned, but at the same time, I felt sure it was a misunderstanding.

  ‘I need an explanation, Louis,’ I said, as coolly as I could muster. He wouldn’t get away with this with General Pétain and he wasn’t going to get away with it with me. ‘What has changed?’

  He just stared at the ground. I couldn’t read his expression. The sparrows that usually reflected back our happy chatter now seemed mocking. What had I done wrong? We had been happy in the Dordogne, I was sure of it. We had been happy all our time together. We were lovebirds, weren’t we? I suddenly remembered Percy’s visit and Louis’ concerned face. The way he’d kept his hands buried in his pockets in the canteen.

  ‘Is it… it isn’t something to do with Percy Milhouse?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The artist who came? Is it – you thought he and I were… together?’ I was shaking with disbelief. This was horrible, horrible.

  Something changed. His eyes were unreadable, guarded. He shook his head barely imperceptibly but at the same time, he said, ‘Yes, that’s what it is.’

  ‘But I told you it was nothing. You have to believe me, Louis.’

  ‘May, accept it. I don’t want to see you again.’ He didn’t say anything else. After all we’d shared, he just turned away and strode back to his car.

  The sparrows continued to sing. I sat on Little Big Rock unable to take it in: he wasn’t dead, he just didn’t want me.

  * * *

  When I relayed the conversation to Kit
ty, it made even less sense. She was as confounded as I was; in a way that was a comfort because it suggested I hadn’t missed something obvious, he really had presented to me and the world that he was in love. But it was also infuriating: Kitty kept saying, ‘That doesn’t sound like Louis’ or ‘I never thought Louis would do something like this…’ and it reminded me how fooled I had been.

  I remembered him saying, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ I had said yes. I’d had no reason to suspect that was the wrong answer. I had been completely blindsided. I couldn’t trust my own instincts anymore. I clutched the brooch he had bought me, I remembered the feeling on my skin where he had touched me.

  I would have done anything to have my Grandma Leonora hold me then. To whisper, ‘There, there. It’s a terrible shock,’ into my ear. I had never felt so let down.

  * * *

  Work was the only thing that stopped me from falling to pieces. Nursing was my tonic. The war was my distraction. Just as swimming and Elizabeth and Percy had filled the whacking great holes in my life in London, so did each trembling patient and each repetitive task here. I had to get up, I had to keep going, I had to perform my duty every day. I couldn’t let down the men or my team.

  I can’t lose you all, I thought. Not the girls AND Louis, that was just too much. I had to concentrate on getting my girls back for now. As for Louis, my fathomless grief at losing him would just have to wait.

  List of things I love by Leona (age ten years and two months)

  Winning tennis matches.

  Singing, but not choir.

  Dancing. Always.

  Buckets and spades at the seaside.

  Mummy’s laugh.