Survivor

by Lesley Pearse

  If she hadn’t been in pain, and so close to tears, she might have laughed. ‘I did, until I realized that you are a cold fish and dominated by your parents,’ she said. ‘Please go, Edwin, there is nothing to gain by stringing this out. Goodbye.’

  He went then. If he’d had a tail, it would have been between his legs.

  Morgan came to see her soon after Edwin had left, and found her with a red blotchy face.

  ‘You’ve been crying,’ he said. ‘Is your leg hurting?’

  ‘It does ache, but no worse than usual,’ she said.

  ‘So what were the tears for?’

  ‘Disappointment, I guess,’ she said ruefully. ‘Edwin came to see me. I sensed he wanted out, so I showed him the way. But it would’ve been nice to see him put up some sort of fight.’

  Morgan just put his hand over hers in sympathy. ‘Better that he showed his true colours now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s true, and I’m not broken-hearted, I knew he wasn’t right for me. But –’ she broke off, unable to say what was on her mind.

  ‘You are afraid no one will ever want you again?’

  She looked up at Morgan, and her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘That’s how I felt too,’ he said. ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re a fine pair,’ she said, and attempted to laugh.

  As her body healed, the need to sleep all the time soon lessened, and then the time really dragged. She found herself dwelling on how difficult life would be with only one leg, fearing she would never marry and have children, and remembering the joy she used to feel running up the path on the cliff top at Sidmouth. She wished she’d realized then that her days of running were numbered, so she might have appreciated what she had a little more.

  By eight days after the amputation, she felt she might go mad with boredom. It didn’t help that she kept picking at the scab which was Edwin. Should she have tried to conform and become the kind of woman his type married? Was she foolhardy agreeing to go to France on the secret missions? Should she have just said nothing about any of it until she was on the mend?

  Yet, however she looked at her relationship with Edwin, it always came back to the same thing. He hadn’t loved her enough to overcome any problems that presented themselves. And while she was scrutinizing things under a microscope, she could see that just maybe she had fallen for the image of a fighter pilot from an illustrious family, not actually for Edwin himself.

  Facing up to her new status was painful. She’d always imagined going back to New Zealand on the arm of a handsome and wealthy husband, looking sophisticated, beautifully dressed, and with a wealth of experience behind her that she could use to dazzle her old friends.

  But she would be going back alone, poor, badly dressed, and her experiences were ones no one would want to hear. To top all that, she had a missing leg. She would never again be able to leap into a boat wearing just a swimsuit, leaving the men of Russell goggle-eyed.

  ‘I am not going to succumb to self-pity,’ she muttered to herself, whenever such thoughts came to her. ‘I may never be able to leap again, but I can learn to get about under my own steam.’

  To this end, she insisted on trying a wheelchair, and once she’d mastered getting about in that, she asked to try out crutches. She was urged by the physiotherapist to take it slowly, but she didn’t listen. Crutches were harder to master than she’d expected, and she had a couple of tumbles.

  ‘You will do yourself a serious injury, if you don’t listen to what I tell you, Miss Carrera,’ the physiotherapist said wearily. ‘It takes time to adjust to your body weight being unevenly distributed now. You have to learn to balance, just the same as you did when you were a child and learned to stand and hop on just one leg. Ten minutes a day, for now, is more than enough.’

  Mariette knew her stump had to be completely healed before she could even be measured for a prosthetic leg, and it would then take weeks to learn to walk with it. But patience was not one of her strong points. She wanted to go back to work in Sidmouth because she missed the banter of working behind the bar. Or, failing that, she intended to find a job here, in Southampton, so she’d be close to the hospital.

  But the reality of it was that no one was going to employ a one-legged woman.

  When Sybil had last visited, even she had joked that a barmaid on crutches was about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. She wanted Mariette home, but she’d pointed out that, realistically, Mari would have to accept that she could only sit in the bar and talk to the customers.

  Mrs Harding brought Ian and Sandra to see her one day. Even though Mariette made out to them that she was fine about everything, was enjoying being in hospital, and had lots of people to talk to, she suspected she didn’t really fool them.

  Sandra hugged her, when she was leaving, and whispered, ‘We like you just as much with only one leg. And so will everyone else.’

  It was strange that a child could pick up on her real fear – of not being liked, or being ignored, or even being treated differently. She remembered there had been a girl at school who had a club foot, and no one really wanted to be her friend. Her family had moved to Auckland eventually, and Mariette could remember one of the bigger girls saying it was because she had no friends in Russell.

  But she reminded herself that she did have a friend in Morgan, and he came to see her every day, even if he could only spare a few minutes.

  ‘You’ve got to use all this spare time productively,’ he told her, when she had moaned that she was bored. ‘You can’t expect people to entertain you, just as when you get out of here you can’t expect people to wait on you hand and foot. They’ll have a lot more time for someone who makes an effort to do things for herself. Believe me, I know.’

  She took note of what he said, and she did try to pass the time productively. She wrote letters home, she read a great deal, and she started a cross-stitch tapestry that another patient had brought in and then left behind when they went home. She even asked the nurses to give her little jobs to do.

  But sometimes it was just too hard to be sunny-natured, optimistic and never to grumble about her lot. She would think dark thoughts about how unfair it was that people like Miss Salmon, who had talked her into training for the rescue missions, sat in safety in an office all day. The woman hadn’t even come to see her in hospital to ask if she needed anything!

  It wasn’t so much that she wanted to see Miss Salmon, but she did want to know about the children she’d rescued that last night, and maybe get an address to write to them. She was worried too about Celeste and the other links in the chain in France; the dead soldier must have caused problems for everyone. Yet what made her really cross was that Miss Salmon and her colleagues had spoken so often about the need for humanity in this war, but now that she was hurt, and of no further use to them, the word meant nothing to them.

  But at least letters to and from home were getting through faster these days. By using the special envelopes and lightweight paper, they went by plane now, and often they were delivered within ten days of writing. The day she got the letter from her mother about Uncle Noah leaving his house in Marseille to her parents was a real red-letter day. She forgot her aches and pains in her glee at imagining how angry that must have made Jean-Philippe.

  Her father had written to someone he knew well in Marseille to get a report on the condition of the house, to find out if it had been requisitioned. His plan was to find someone who could act as caretaker for him until the war was over and he could sell the property.

  Mariette hoped that something really unpleasant would befall Jean-Philippe before too long. His wife running off with someone else would do nicely, or his house being flattened in a bomb blast and him losing everything he owned. Maybe it wasn’t very nice of her to be thinking such things. But then, he had been so evil towards her.

  Finally, after almost four weeks in hospital, Mr Mercer came to see Mariette and said he was recommending that she be moved to a co
nvalescent home in Bournemouth. He said that it specialized in fitting prosthetic limbs and helping the patient to use them well.

  ‘Bournemouth!’ she exclaimed. She was about to say she didn’t know anyone there. Why couldn’t she stay in Southampton, or go home to Sidmouth? But then she realized Mr Mercer was doing what he thought was best for her. ‘Oh, that will be lovely,’ she tagged on, and hoped she sounded as if she meant it.

  ‘I know you’d probably like to go back to your friends in Sidmouth,’ he said. ‘But it’s my experience that family and close friends do too much for those with missing limbs. You must become independent. Anyway, Bournemouth is very nice. And with spring around the corner, you will enjoy it there. I did hear a whisper we’re going to invade France before long. Maybe one more year and the war will be over.’

  She liked Mr Mercer; he had kind grey eyes and a very gentle manner. He was the sort of man anyone would want for a grandfather. Morgan had told her how good he’d been to him too, encouraging him to learn to read and getting him into nursing training. ‘I do hope so.’ She sighed. ‘Everyone has suffered more than enough now.’

  ‘You must use the year ahead to master your new leg and be ready for a different kind of life in peacetime. I bet your family in New Zealand are longing to see you?’

  ‘Yes, they are. And for my two brothers to come home safely. They are in Italy with their regiment now. From what I’ve read in the newspapers, the Allies appear to have the Italians on the run.’

  ‘So I believe,’ he agreed, and smiled broadly. ‘God knows, we need it to end.’

  Mariette was taken to Stanford House, in Bournemouth, by a volunteer in a private car, and Morgan went with her.

  The volunteer was a middle-aged woman in tweeds – a hearty ‘county’ type – and her car was a Riley, which Morgan was very excited about. ‘Not just a day out of the hospital with pay, but also a ride in my favourite car!’ he said.

  ‘You have good taste, young man,’ the lady owner boomed out. ‘If you behave yourself, I may let you drive on the way back.’

  The woman’s name was Mrs Dykes-Colman, and she told them she had four boys. One, an airman, had been shot down over France and was now in a POW camp in Germany, the next was a lieutenant in the navy – she said he was somewhere around Gdan´sk – the third was in the RAF, but on the engineering side, and the youngest was a Royal Marine, serving out in the Far East.

  ‘Their father died in 1922, of lung disease after being gassed in the trenches of the Great War,’ she explained. ‘Such a waste, as he was a wonderful man. His boys are like him, thank heavens, and I’m praying I get them all home in one piece.’ She glanced round at Mariette and Morgan, and a cloud passed over her face. ‘That was a little tactless of me. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We survived, that’s lucky,’ Morgan said. ‘And we knew each other before the war and met up again at the Borough. So that’s pretty lucky too. Can you tell us anything about Stanford House?’

  ‘I can, indeed, as I go there most days to help out,’ she said. ‘They have very dedicated staff, all experts in their field. You are fortunate, Miss Carrera, that you’ve been sent there. They’ll have you mobile before you can say Jack Robinson. Now, young man, if you want a bed for the night when you come visiting Miss Carrera, I’d be happy to put you up. I live close by, and it’s always nice to have someone in the house.’

  Morgan looked at Mariette and raised one eyebrow. ‘Do you want me to visit you?’ he asked.

  ‘You know I do,’ she said. She was actually afraid he wouldn’t keep in touch, and that would really hurt. ‘But only if you get time. I know you’ve got your nursing exams soon.’

  He took her hand in his and squeezed it. ‘I’ll always have time for you,’ he said. ‘But you are going to meet lots of good people at Stanford, so you won’t need me.’

  A week later, Mariette thought of what Morgan had said about meeting good people at Stanford. He’d been right. The other seventeen patients, and around eight staff, were all good. But they were good as in grateful, worthy, sincere, optimistic, dedicated and enthusiastic. Lovely – but, like a diet of chocolate, it was getting rather sickly.

  She wanted someone like herself who couldn’t see anything good in losing a leg, who would grouse about it, curse the world, yet also see the funny side of it. No one did that here, not even those who had lost two limbs. They were constantly saying how humbled they were by all the help they were getting, how miraculous prosthetic limbs were, and how grateful they were that, in a few short weeks, they would be able to go home and take up their old life.

  Only eight of the men were soldiers; all had lost a limb in some kind of explosion. They’d been brought here, rather than Netley, because it was believed they would benefit from the specialist care at Stanford.

  The other ten people – six women, including Mariette, and four men – were civilians. Two were policemen, another was a farmer who’d got his arm torn off in a threshing machine, and one man had fallen while trying to cross railways tracks and been hit by a train. The women, with the exception of Mariette, had all sustained grave injuries during bombing raids, and later infections had resulted in amputation.

  She didn’t feel guilty that she wasn’t as grateful as the rest of them, because she was not convinced they were as happy and content as they purported to be. How could they be? It was pie in the sky to think they could go back to their old life, as if nothing had happened. The two policemen wouldn’t be able to go back on the beat, and the farmer would find it hard to drive his tractor with a false arm. As for the man who had been hit by the train, Mariette was convinced that he’d actually intended to kill himself, but when he survived, he was too ashamed to admit it, so he made up a different story.

  The women all had husbands who were soldiers. She soon realized their motives for appearing so calm and grateful was because they had small children. These children were either with relatives, or in care, and the women knew that they had to learn to walk again if they wanted to get home to them. Any grousing might see the women returned to the care of a general hospital, where there was no expert to help them. Yet Mariette couldn’t understand why they didn’t indulge in a private whinge, now and again. She thought it would be good for them.

  She wasn’t fooling herself that she’d be able to swim and sail, as she had done before – although she intended to, if it was humanly possible. For now, she was satisfied with being nifty in a wheelchair, and being able to climb stairs on crutches while she awaited the arrival of her new leg.

  And she kept a diary of how she was progressing.

  A diary wasn’t perhaps the right name for it, because she aired all her grievances against those who were irrepressibly cheerful, the ones who lectured her on taking courses on everything from dressmaking to electrical work, and those who were grateful for just being alive. She enjoyed ridiculing them on paper, made herself laugh as she painstakingly described them. Her diary would be as dangerous as a bomb, if anyone found it and read it, so she carried it around with her most of the time.

  Luckily, she shared a room with Freda, who was neither a reader, nor a nosy parker. She was a quiet, rather frail-looking woman of twenty-eight, with watery blue eyes and hair the colour of old sacking. She was always knitting for one of her two children and, when she wasn’t practising walking on her new leg, she spend a lot of time gazing at a photograph of them.

  ‘Do you think all children are embarrassed by people with an artificial leg?’ she said suddenly one afternoon.

  Mariette had just returned from the preliminary fitting of her prosthetic limb. ‘If they are, they need a clip around the ear,’ she said. ‘Why? What makes you ask?’

  Freda’s children, Alice and Edward, were with her elder sister in Salisbury. Freda had previously said, in passing, that they’d only been to visit her here once because the weather had been so bad.

  ‘My sister said in a letter that she thought it was wrong to embarrass them,’ Freda said. ‘She’s suggesting th
at it’s better for them to stay with her.’

  ‘It is always better for children to be with their mother,’ Mariette said firmly, thinking of Sandra and Ian and how they still spoke longingly of Joan. ‘You are coming on a storm with that leg, you can cook, do the washing, everything a mother needs to do. I can’t imagine what your sister is thinking of.’

  ‘She loves my children, and she hasn’t got any of her own,’ Freda said in a small voice. ‘She pointed out that they’ve got used to living in a much bigger house, in a nice safe place with fields at the end of the road. We were in two rooms in Southampton, down near the docks. And I haven’t even got that since I was bombed out.’

  ‘Why isn’t she inviting you to live with her?’ Mariette asked. ‘Surely that’s the answer? She’d still have the children there, and she could keep an eye on you too.’

  Freda didn’t respond for a little while. She was biting her lower lip, as if she thought she shouldn’t be talking about her family to a comparative stranger.

  ‘Well?’ Mariette prompted.

  ‘She wouldn’t want me there. I’d show her up.’

  Mariette was astounded that Freda’s sister could be so callous. ‘If you aren’t good enough for her, then neither are your children,’ she said forcefully. ‘She’s proved to you that she has no heart, and therefore she should have no permanent place in your children’s lives. You’ve been very brave with your leg; now you must be braver still and stand up for yourself. And I’m going to help you!’

  33

  ‘I understand you’ve been motivating some of the patients to stick up for themselves,’ Dr Hambling said as he examined Mariette’s stump for blisters and sore places.

  She’d finally got her prosthetic limb three weeks earlier. But instead of taking it slowly, as she’d been instructed to do, practising in short bursts, she immediately went at it like a mad bull. Dr Hambling knew she was surprised by how difficult it was to learn to walk with her new leg. But she had the idea that, if she just kept on and on, she would get the hang of it more quickly. The result was some sore places. But luckily, he’d managed to slow her down before she did herself any real damage.