by Lizzie Page
While we were regrouping and rebuilding the cellar – bricks had been ordered, sandbags were on their way – the Germans didn’t break through the line, but they did manage to launch a gas attack. It seemed they still believed they would win this.
I remember Shot’s desperate barking that night, how I had dismissed it – ‘Quiet, Shot, naughty boy!’ I remember everyone waking and the spread of the sleepy, contaminated panic.
I remember the arrival of the green stench – airborne, the uninvited guest. I staggered upright, slammed against the side, then fell bang, slap, wallop, delirious on the low table. I could hear the terrible crunch of my own bones as I fell face-first onto my jigsaw. Goodness only knows where my hands were, but they didn’t save my fall.
This is bad. Don’t go down, less chance of making it. Gas is heavier, get up, get up, get up! Where’s Shot? Where’s Elsie? Where is everyone?
I’ll never know how Elsie got us up those steep stairs and out. Some people described it as a miracle.
Sick herself, she managed to drag us to the ambulance, then to hurl us in the back. I came to lying down inside, gulping, desperately struggling to breathe, my throat on fire, blood from the fall all over my face and clothes. Suddenly, I was sitting up and looking around, not sure where I was. The roar of the ambulance was incredible and I could feel every bump, every shell hole, in the road. I opened one eye and there was Martin opposite, mask still on, vomit on his shirt, clutching a fur hat on his lap. No, it wasn’t a fur hat, it was Shot draped across his thighs. Unlike Martin, Shot looked fine.
‘Shot,’ I whispered, but the dog didn’t flicker.
‘No,’ I said. ‘NO!’
Martin couldn’t even look at me.
* * *
By one of those wartime coincidences that don’t seem to happen half so often in peacetime, Dr Munro had that very moment turned up for duty at Furnes and, according to Elsie, he hauled us out the ambulance ‘so fast our feet never touched the ground’. Credit also to the nurses and doctors who saw to us as quickly as they could.
But it was Elsie who had saved my life. Of course it was.
32
I was put in a small sunlit room with two English boys. The nurses apologised that I was in with men but they had never had a female patient before. They said that if I insisted they might find me my own room, but these young fellas were miles from their homes and their families… If I stayed here, not only would it be better for me (that was questionable!), it would be helpful for them.
That swung it, of course.
I asked a nurse what was wrong with me. She examined the chart at the end of my bed.
‘Broken ribs and a sprained ankle. Gas. And nervous exhaustion.’
‘I’m not nervous or exhausted,’ I argued.
‘Well then, just the other stuff.’ She shrugged.
At first, blisters in my throat and weakened lungs made it difficult to breathe, but I had escaped without any real damage. Humiliatingly enough, it was my stupid fall that had done the most injury, landing on our table face-first. My nose was also broken, my eyes were black, my cheek was yellow and purple. I felt as though my face was ruined, yet if Elsie hadn’t been there, I would have been exposed to the gas for so much longer – and my bloodied and bruised face wouldn’t have seen daylight again.
My Bible had been lost, but one of the nurses hunted out a New Testament for me. I believed, like Harold’s, it may have been another of those that my mother’s circle had so optimistically circulated. There were tiny holes in its cover, made by a needle or a protractor perhaps. Certain sections had been underlined, which was a distraction. I tried to ignore it, but somehow my predecessor’s choice of passages always drew me in. My predecessor was interested in Mary Magdalene.
It was strange to be back here where I had been a nurse three years before. It would have been better if Lady D was still nursing here – but she was hard at work in the mud-hell of Passchendaele. I never could bring myself to ask Dr Munro about her.
To my right was a boy so injured that virtually his entire body had been bandaged up. They gave him drinks through a tiny horizontal gap in his wrappings. He didn’t speak and no one knew his name. He was in terrible pain and couldn’t sleep: every time he finally nodded off, they woke him to administer more painkillers.
‘He’s so stoic,’ everyone said, or ‘Look what he endures!’
It felt like they were telling me to shut up. You think you’ve got problems, Mairi!
One of the nurses, Clara, read to him from the book he had when he was brought in. Clara was from the West Country. She had spent only six months in Furnes – she was just a newborn in war terms. She came out after she got the telegram that her fiancé, Patrick, had been killed in Gallipoli. ‘What was the point of staying at home?’ she asked philosophically. ‘I wanted to find out what war was like.’
I didn’t ask her what she had found. She had a pretty accent, so whenever she read, I would listen to her too.
To the other side of me was Edward, or ‘poor Edward’, as the nurses called him. He was in fine physical condition; you probably couldn’t imagine a stronger, more classically masculine specimen than him. If the boy on my right was like a mummy in the British Museum, then poor Edward was like a statue by an Italian master. Six foot tall, with a well-developed jaw, healthy blond hair and a very long golden beard.
Before I arrived, apparently one nurse had tried to shave poor Edward but he went wild at her, so they let him grow his beard even though they were uncomfortable with it. He mostly roamed around in baggy pyjama bottoms. He didn’t wear a top, so you were confronted with that fine, rippled chest all day long. Mentally, Edward was in a terrible place. He was in the foetal position when I woke and he was in the foetal position when I went to sleep. ‘Clitter-clatter,’ he often repeated, ‘clitter-clatter.’ It took me a while to work out what that reminded me of: the sound of toy soldiers falling in a tin box. He made a biting motion, like a rabid dog. It put everyone off him. He didn’t respond well to Munro, Clara or the other bustling nurses – especially the one who came at him with the razor. Fortunately, he mostly ignored me.
For most of the day, he scampered around the room, cowered in the corner or darted to the window to try to break out. The nurses said he was making a nuisance of himself, and he was.
Meanwhile Clara read The Jungle Book to the bandaged boy:
‘For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack… The reason the beasts live among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.’
Clara looked over to me. I was pleased she had stopped wincing at the sight of me. I wasn’t sure if it was my bruises healing or if she’d got used to my appearance.
‘I’ll have finished it by the weekend at this rate. Do you have anything I could read to him?’
‘This?’
I waved my Bible at her. Clara wrinkled up her pert nose.
‘I don’t think he’ll like that.’
I felt pathetically offended. ‘How do you know he likes that one then?’
‘His bandages move so I think he’s smiling, and sometimes, tears come out here,’ she pointed to the corners of her eyes, then added haughtily. ‘It’s his book anyway. Why wouldn’t he like it?’
Feeling foolish, I wanted to make amends. ‘I like listening to it too.’
‘It’s the best thing I’ve ever read!’ Clara said enthusiastically. She was still enthusiastic about everything though, so it meant less from her than if it had come from a more cynical person. ‘A real escape.’
* * *
In the hospital, days crept past abominably slowly. If they didn’t let me back to Pervyse, I decided, I would go to the Caribbean. Yes, it was hard to cross the Atlantic since the sinking of the Lusitania, but I could do it. Look at the things I had survived! Oceans were nothing to a girl who had been gassed.
Uilleam and I would reunite on a beach, h
ot sand under the soles of our feet. A hammock between two trees. A coconut drink.
I found it hard to believe that Uilleam could be a genuine homosexual. And in any case, why shouldn’t he marry the girlfriend anyway? Uilleam was from a good family: he could be a little undisciplined, but he was a darling, everyone knew that.
Now that Jack was gone, I had decided that I was not meant to become a parent in this life, but there was no reason I couldn’t be a special aunty. Imagine Uilleam having a baby! A tiny baby I would carry about and let rest on my stomach in the sun. I would feed it little lumps of our family sugar.
I didn’t need to become a parent anyway, because I had my Madeleine. Madeleine, such a good-natured, sunny girl; she wouldn’t be jealous of my niece or nephew, and she would visit us in the Carribean when she was old enough. An international education for her – I would show her the world. I pictured Madeleine’s father and mother proudly waving her off from Ostend. Of course they would trust me after I had fought for their house. Madeleine would arrive, wearing one of those sailor dresses she liked so much. Hair neat but not prissy in a plait. Knee-high socks. ‘How did you grow so tall?’ I would ask. And ‘Where did those freckles come from?’ All those ludicrous phrases that kindly aunts come out with. We would take care of Uilleam’s baby together, and I would teach Madeleine everything I had ever learned.
She would be a kind of daughter to me.
Once Elsie had been a kind of sister.
* * *
Shot was buried outside. Shot, who gave up his life so we could live, suffered no more. They did it pretty much as soon as they reached the hospital. I was too ill, and so was Paul, but Elsie and Martin gave him a good send-off. I promised myself that when I was better, I’d pay my respects to our lovely boy.
They’d put the window pole under the bandaged boy’s bed (an ill-thought-out hiding place) and it had caught Edward’s ever-roving eye. He grabbed it and swung it around the room like he was in a jousting tournament. Clara ran away or for help, I couldn’t be sure, leaving just me and the bandaged boy behind.
‘Edward,’ I warned. ‘Enough is enough.’
He advanced. I could picture the pole clattering down on my head, splitting it open (I have seen a head split in two several times before).
‘Put it down.’
He started jabbing it towards me like it was a bayonet and I was a German. He shoved it until it was only five inches or so from my stomach. He pointed it directly at me, taunting me; we were like children, trying to make each other blink.
‘I don’t want it,’ I said.
I just felt so tired with it all. I didn’t care about anything, so I just pushed that stupid pole away, turned my back to it and sat heavily on my bed. I began to cry. Proper gulping, snotty tears. He stared at me for a moment, twisting the pole uselessly. Then he walked over and stood over me, before dropping the pole on the floor. It made a terrific boom. He sat on my bed next to me.
I put out my hand and his fingers locked onto mine. ‘Clitter-clatter, clitter-clatter,’ he repeated.
I began to sing softly.
I'm Gilbert the Filbert the Knut with a K,
The pride of Piccadilly the blasé roué,
Oh Hades, the ladies, who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert the Colonel of the Knuts.
Poor Edward curled up on my bed next to me and I stroked his hair, like I had stroked the hair of so many boys. Not long after that, both he and I were asleep.
After that day, Edward tried constantly to get in my bed. He liked to grip my thumb. He liked me to sing to him (so there, Father. I didn’t have such a bad voice after all).
Dr Munro asked, ‘Does he bother you?’ and ‘Do you want me to do something about him?’ but I said it was all right. Dr Munro said Edward had the ‘two-thousand-yard stare’, which meant he looked at everything but didn’t see anything. Dr Munro said he was getting more cases like him but who could be surprised?
He was trying to get the long-term boys to try meditation or yoga stretches but they were never able to focus long enough on anything to do that.
‘When he feels better, I’ll get him to do some basket-weaving upstairs,’ he said, as though basket-weaving would make any difference.
I let Edward cuddle up to me in the day, but thought it best to persuade him back to his own bed at night. He would only stay there if we could stretch out and touch palms. I thought of the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Was this something the Italian painter could ever have envisaged?
‘Clitter-clatter.’
I prayed for poor Edward to recover, for the unnamed bandaged boy to get better and I thanked God that Jack was dead and didn’t have to suffer like these two.
Edward went to sleep in his own bed, but somehow, silent as gas, in the early hours of the morning I would wake to find he had moved across into mine.
The autumn moon was visible from my bed, the same moon Helen had admired as she wrote her stories. The moon that was the last thing the boys in the trenches saw. And when I saw the moon, I was reminded once again of God – he was here, this was his presence. We needed to remember him and draw back into his arms. He could save us – if we only would follow his designated path, we would find peace and love and comfort.
That wasn’t so difficult, was it?
One morning, about three weeks after we’d arrived, I woke up with Edward in my bed, and even though my eyes were still closed, I realised someone else was in the room.
‘Morning, Clara,’ I muttered, half asleep.
But it wasn’t Clara, it was Elsie. She was sitting at my bedside, looking grave.
She had a new satchel on her knees. I just knew it must have been a present, for it was Harold’s taste not hers.
‘Are you awake, Mairi?’
Too late to pretend.
‘Umm, just.’
‘Good.’
I sat up. Edward snoozed on, Adonis on the pillow.
Elsie’s face was contorted with concern. ‘And who’s your… friend?’
‘Um, Edward.’
‘Good-looking fella…’ she said awkwardly, but just then poor Edward jumped up and started his biting and his gibberish, swiftly disabusing Elsie of any notion of a love story. Elsie’s expression lightened. It seemed odd that she would be worried about me fraternising with men, but there we were. It had occurred to me lately that all this talk of her Gilberts had disguised the fact that she was the world-weary Gilbert, the one for whom nothing was important any more.
‘You’re looking better.’
‘Really?’ I didn’t believe her.
‘Mm. You had me worried back there.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes, when you went crashing down. Oh, I didn’t worry for long. I know my pig-headed Mairi is a trooper.’
I nodded at her.
‘Cool as a cucumber, eh?’
It was like our argument had never happened. Perhaps this was how you made peace. You swallowed down all the hurt. But I wasn’t sure I could do it. She said she had been staying with the engineers, just for the duration. And she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.
‘Have you no ill-effects, Elsie?’
‘I still have the nightmare of all headaches,’ Elsie admitted. She poured me some water from the jug.
Edward embraced me then. It’s silly, but I was proud that he liked me more than anyone else. He gazed at Elsie like she was an animal in London Zoo.
‘He’s English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want a smoke?’ Elsie asked him. I was surprised when he nodded keenly, cliter-clattered and bit and then smiled at her. I should have known by then that Mrs Knocker was irresistible to the male of the species. Even the mad ones. I suppose I should have rejoiced that she never got to get her claws into Jack.
Elsie gave Edward a cigarette, then threw him her pocket lighter. He was a surprisingly deft catch. I bet he was a cricketer once, back in the day. He had the right frame fo
r bowling. I imagine he spent long Sunday afternoons on the green.
‘What times are these,’ Elsie said, which reminded me with a jolt of Harold. ‘What times we are living through.’ She nodded at Edward. ‘Where’s he from?’
‘England. I told you.’
She sighed. ‘Where exactly?’
‘Oh. They say Home Counties.’
The bandaged boy on the next bed made whimpering noises as though disagreeing with me on Home Counties. Was he perhaps from somewhere else? Had anyone ever asked?
There was a creeping smell of burning. Smoke. Flames.
Edward had set his beard on fire.
Elsie leapt up and threw water from the jug over him. He stood there, furiously howling at us like a werewolf. Clara and Dr Munro raced in at the noise, and stood in the doorway looking at us, open-mouthed.
‘Well…’ Elsie said, pragmatic as ever and dusting herself down. ‘My fault. I should have anticipated that.’
* * *
That night, I fell asleep thinking of the fruit Madeleine and I would eat with Uilleam in the Caribbean. Pineapples as big as pigs’ heads. Melons and coconuts from silver platters. We would picnic by the sea and watch the men on the fishing boats draw in their nets. And perhaps, one day, we would get ourselves a dog, a dog like Shot, a real-life dog. For what young girl doesn’t love a dog? We could call him Shot Two. No, we would call him whatever Madeleine wanted him to be called. That would be the kindest thing to do.
33
Dr Munro told me he’d done a bit of digging about what had happened to Uilleam.