by Daisy Styles
It seemed like she’d only just closed her eyes when suddenly she was woken by the loudest explosion she’d ever heard. Thinking she was having a nightmare, Gladys buried her head deeper under her blankets, but a voice yelling ‘Everybody out!’, followed by a shrieking siren, forced Gladys to open her eyes and grope her way out of bed.
‘What’s going on?’ she mumbled blearily.
As the ground quaked and trembled beneath her feet, Gladys had to clutch her bed to stop herself from losing her balance.
‘Into the shelters!’ yelled a woman’s voice.
As the sleeping women staggered to their feet, Gladys followed blindly in their wake, not having a clue where she was going or what she should take.
‘Grab your gas mask, love,’ a girl beside her said. ‘And a dressing gown too: it’s bloody freezing down in the shelters.’
Yawning and rubbing her eyes, Gladys mumbled, ‘Can’t we just stay here?’
‘You could do, if you want to meet your maker,’ the girl replied. ‘I wouldn’t risk it myself.’
Feeling rather pathetic for asking such a stupid question, Gladys obediently followed the girls, who were herded by traffic wardens into the nearest Underground station, which was quickly filling up with local families holding tired, frightened children and furiously wailing babies. ‘Find a spot and park yourself,’ the friendly girl advised. ‘I’m Ethel, by the way.’
Gladys clung close to Ethel, who seemed to know her way around. ‘I’m Gladys, just arrived.’
‘Poor you, what a bugger of a night to arrive,’ Ethel commiserated. ‘Keep down, sweetheart,’ she warned as another explosion went off.
‘That sounded close,’ said Gladys with a shudder of terror.
‘Jerry seems to like bombing anything near the River Thames, bastard! We get it a lot,’ Ethel said as she lit up a Woodbine, then offered one to Gladys, who politely declined.
‘Is it like this every night?’ Gladys anxiously asked.
‘Can be – we get a run of them, until Jerry turns his attention elsewhere, but he always comes back, like a bad penny!’ she joked.
Feeling like her eyelids were as heavy as lead, Gladys wondered how anybody could remain as cheerful as Ethel, who, in between the ear-shattering explosions, chatted to her neighbours and cracked jokes until the all-clear siren went off. Then, staggering to their feet, they left the shelter of the Underground and emerged, blinking and shivering in the cold morning light. ‘Innit gorgeous, bombs or not?’ Ethel mused as she pointed towards the rising sun turning the Thames crimson-red. ‘I wouldn’t bother going back to bed, Gladys,’ Ethel advised as they re-entered the nurses’ quarters. ‘If you’re on a morning shift, you’ll be expected on the wards by seven.’
Gladys nodded and thanked Ethel for all her help.
‘Anytime, my sweetheart,’ Ethel replied as she blew her a goodbye kiss.
After changing out of her nightdress, Gladys washed in the communal bathroom, where she threw cold water on to her face in an attempt to wake herself up. ‘I look like the living dead!’ she groaned as she brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth, then set off for her first day shift at St Thomas’.
Nothing could have prepared Gladys for the days that followed. After being given a much smarter uniform than she was used to, she and the other trainees were addressed by a nurse who made Sister Atkins sound like an archangel. Gladys and another girl were assigned to the amputees’ ward, which was crowded with soldiers suffering from severe wounds. The ward sister quickly told Gladys and her colleague that the men would have originally been treated at casualty clearing stations at the Front. ‘Our first job is to clean them up in order to assess the extent of their wounds,’ she explained. ‘You’ll work alongside an experienced senior nurse, whom you’ll learn from and co-operate with. Off you go.’
Assigned to a Staff Nurse Andrews, Gladys donned a clean apron, which within an hour was covered in blood and pus. Moving along the line of beds ranged on both sides of the ward, the nurses bathed their patients’ wounds and removed their filthy dressings. When it came to changing her first stinking gangrenous dressings, Gladys actually thought she might faint. ‘Take a break, Nurse,’ Andrews said sharply. ‘And breathe through your mouth; you smell less that way.’
Covering her mouth, Gladys hurried into the staff toilets, where she was violently sick. Washing her face and wiping her mouth, she fought back tears; these poor men, lying limp on their hospital beds, had been through hell; wounded by enemy fire, they’d been shipped home like cattle and now they were waiting patiently for somebody to clean them up and get them better. It was enough to make anybody weep, the resignation in their eyes, combined with their sadness and fatigue. How much had these men gone through before a stray bullet hit them, shattering bone, ravaging tender flesh? ‘At least I’m alive,’ she’d heard a few say. Not like the friends they’d left behind on the battlefield. Just thinking of their brave selflessness made Gladys grit her teeth; if these soldiers could bear the pain, she could damn well do what was expected of her – and do it to the very best of her ability.
‘All right, Johnson?’ the senior nurse enquired.
Gladys nodded. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Turning to her patients, Gladys said with her most radiant, heart-stopping smile, ‘Who’s next, gentlemen?’
‘Over here, sweetheart, come and bat those big blue eyes at me and I’ll forget all about the pain,’ a cheeky soldier joked.
Gladys turned towards the soldier, whose amputated hand was oozing noxious yellow pus. Maintaining a stiff upper lip, Gladys did as she’d been advised; she breathed through her mouth and with infinite care she gently unwound the man’s bandages and washed clean his festering wound.
Gladys never knew how she got through that first week on the amputees’ ward, nor how many clean aprons she replaced for the bloodied ones she left in the sluice room. The days were a blur of gangrenous images, surgical dressings, tea trolleys, meal trolleys, record charts, thermometers, bedpans and once a trip to the morgue, pushing the body of a soldier no more than a boy who had died of blood poisoning in the night. Her shifts never seemed to end; when wounded soldiers from the Front were dropped off by the Red Cross, the nurses on duty were expected to work until they dropped. When Gladys finally slumped on to her bed (deranged by lack of sleep), there was little hope of rest. Sirens shrilled out almost every night, and, though she would willingly have stayed in her bed, even risked a bomb falling on her, she was dragged complaining into the Underground, where she learnt to sleep with her eyes open.
It was on one such night, slumped in the dirty, dusty, packed Underground shelter, that the all-clear sounded as usual around dawn. Gladys dragged herself to her feet, wondering whether she’d have time to snatch a round of hot toast and some tea before she started her shift. She trudged along the line of yawning people exiting the Underground in various states of disarray. Wishing she’d grabbed her nurse’s cape instead of her grubby dressing gown, Gladys pressed herself into the surging crowd, hoping nobody would comment on her nightwear. As she did so, she was passed by a tall, dark-haired man in a stained white doctor’s coat who was mounting the Underground steps two at a time. There was something familiar about the ease with which he moved, the way his black hair curled at the base of his neck and the attractive slant of his strong broad shoulders. Involuntarily Gladys’s skin prickled and her pulse raced. Surely it couldn’t be him? Reggie Lloyd couldn’t possibly be back in England? Shaking her head, as if she was delirious, Gladys returned to the nurses’ quarters to prepare for work, but her hands trembled as she dressed. Just the sight of a tall, dark, elegant doctor in a white coat had reduced her to pulp. Was she EVER going to get over Dr Reggie Lloyd?
20. St Thomas’ Training Hospital
Thanks to Ethel’s help, Gladys was becoming used to the stresses and strains of London life and being attacked by German Messerschmitts almost every night. Ethel, a born-and-bred Londoner, took events in her stride; familiar with frequent German air-
raids since the start of the war four years ago, she was matter-of-fact about getting into the Underground shelter as soon as the sirens sounded. She always remembered her gas mask and her packet of Woodbines, and she kept up her own spirits and those of her neighbours by singing, chatting and joking all through the night. ‘I don’t know how you keep it up,’ Gladys yawned as Ethel burst into yet another rendition of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.
‘You get used to it, sweetheart,’ she retorted as she gave Gladys a dig in the ribs. ‘Our lucky night,’ she added. ‘The WVS ladies are joining us, so we’re sure to get a cuppa or, better still, a nice bowl of soup and a piece of bread.’ Gladys followed Ethel’s gaze and saw the Women’s Voluntary Services ladies set up their tea stall in order to raise the spirits of the weary souls destined to another night of rough sleeping.
Ethel couldn’t advise Gladys on her daily workload – she was on orthopaedics, whilst Gladys was on a male surgical ward – so generally their paths inside the hospital didn’t cross very much. Luckily, Staff Nurse Andrews was a fine professional to work alongside, and she had the grace not to bark at Gladys when things went wrong. One of Gladys’s regular duties was to assist Andrews in prepping amputees for theatre; sometimes Gladys had the gruesome task of having to shave various parts of the men’s bodies, which she initially found mortifyingly embarrassing. However, as time went by, she became accustomed to the task, as she did to so many other onerous duties. There were two well-designed theatre suites with teams of surgeons operating on wounded soldiers around the clock. As Gladys wheeled one groaning patient after another back to the ward, she was always aware that when these poor men were back on their feet they’d be returned to the battlefield, where the whole ghastly business would start all over again. The waste of life and the agonizing suffering the troops endured made Gladys endlessly sad, and she yearned for the day when peace was declared and the bloodshed would stop.
There was quite a frisson among the nurses when they encountered any of the good-looking young doctors who manned the operating theatres. There was also fierce competition as to who should escort their patients to theatre, which was the best place to eye up the new doctors. Luckily for Gladys, she and Staff Nurse Andrews didn’t need to compete: Andrews was married and had eyes only for her sailor husband, so it was Gladys who wheeled sedated patients on a trolley to theatre. One afternoon, feeling bleary-eyed with fatigue after yet another sleepless night in the Underground shelter, Gladys made her way to theatre, not knowing that Dr Reggie Lloyd was awaiting his first patient of the day. He too had had a tough night in the air-raid shelter, but like the true professional he was, Reggie was focused on his work and on the poor buggers recently arrived from the casualty clearing stations on the front line. God! He thought he’d seen some grim sights in his working life in Naples, when he was serving with the British Naval Fleet, but the injured men he operated on day after day after day were in some cases quite literally shot to bits. As he tied his sterilized gown around his waist and started to scrub up, he firmly centred his thoughts on the cases awaiting him and the medical procedures expected of him. As the pretty blonde theatre sister he’d been dating for a few months tied a mask around his face, Reggie winked at her, then turned to receive his patient, presently being wheeled in by a nurse he’d not seen before. Tall and slender with gorgeous legs and a sway to her hips that even a nurse’s uniform couldn’t disguise, Reggie was sure he recognized her. When he saw a lock of dark brunette hair escape from her starched white cap to settle on her shoulders, he was certain the nurse was no other than Gladys Johnson – the woman whom he’d first seen singing on stage in a slinky red dance dress.
He’d asked a couple of friends if they knew anything about her sudden disappearance, but nobody seemed to know any more than he did. ‘It was all very odd,’ Reggie thought to himself, feeling again the pain and hurt of her departure, and the rumours that had reached him about Captain Miles. Shocked to see her here, he managed to pull himself together as he cast a final look at Gladys’s trim backside before the doors of the operating theatre closed behind her. It seemed she hadn’t recognized him, so he had a little more time to gather his thoughts before he saw her again.
Reggie did indeed see Gladys several more times as she dropped off patients before hurrying back to her ward – once he thought she had recognized him, but an anaesthetist treating his patient got between them and when he looked again she’d gone.
As for Gladys, she was beginning to think she was seeing things: first she imagined she saw Dr Lloyd leaving the Underground shelter early one morning; now she was convinced she’d seen him in theatre. The handsome face that had looked so familiar was hidden behind a surgeon’s mask, so she couldn’t be sure. But his stunning blue eyes, which were staring hard at her, were clearly visible, and hard to mistake. Gladys began to dread delivering and picking up her patients from theatre – what would she say if it really was him and he approached her? How could she explain why she’d run away? God only knew what he must think of her! Little flirt, typical ENSA girl, out for a good time.
It was only when Reggie called the ward and Gladys picked up the phone and recognized his deep, smooth voice that she knew for sure that he was indeed one of the doctors in the operating theatre. Reggie, on the other end of the line, hadn’t a clue which nurse he was speaking to; he was merely phoning the ward to request that a patient be collected from the recovery room. Breaking into a sweat, Gladys half muffled the phone as she answered, ‘Yes, right away.’
In a panic, Gladys hurried out of the nurses’ station to ask Staff Nurse Andrews if she would be kind enough to pick up the patient, but she refused. ‘That’s your job,’ she said curtly.
Gladys’s heart sank. She didn’t want to see Reggie, especially not like this, blood-stained and weary. But duty called: her patient had to be collected. And hopefully, she rapidly reasoned, by the time she arrived Reggie would surely be back at work in the operating theatre. Keeping her head bowed, Gladys scuttled into the recovery room, where she found her patient semiconscious on a trolley. Grabbing the trolley, she quickly pushed it towards the double doors when a familiar male voice behind her called out, ‘Let me help you, Nurse.’
‘Oh, no!’ thought Gladys. ‘It’s him!’
In a blind panic she rather ungracefully bolted for the doors, but Reggie sprang forward to heave them open, and when he turned he was face to face with Gladys. Blushing furiously and completely lost for words, she could only stare at him.
‘Are you working on D4?’
Completely tongue-tied, Gladys could only gulp and nod.
‘Men’s surgery?’ he asked.
Wishing he’d stop asking questions, she blurted out, ‘Yes, I’m a trainee on the ward.’
‘I thought I recognized a back view of you the other day,’ he commented, which made Gladys blush even more as she recalled how he used to compliment her on her shapely backside. His eyes swept up and down her soiled uniform. ‘How long have you been a nurse?’
‘I, er, oh, not long,’ she flustered. ‘I started my training in a small hospital up North; they sent me down here to widen my experience,’ she said, knowing full well she was babbling.
Intrigued at her change of career, Reggie couldn’t stop himself from asking, ‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘Yes, yes …’ she answered directly. ‘Very much.’
Gladys’s patient groaning in pain as he regained consciousness mercifully interrupted their conversation. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she gasped as she all but ran back to the ward, where she completed the rest of her duties in a daze.
When her shift was over, Gladys hurried back to the nurses’ dormitory, where she sat on the side of her bed pretending to read a magazine, but all the time thinking about Reggie Lloyd. She truly believed when she left Naples she would never see him again, but fate had drawn them together in the most bizarre twist of circumstances. If it hadn’t been for her allergic reaction to cordite, she’d never be retraining as a nu
rse. As the night wore on, Gladys reasoned that she was making a mountain out of a molehill; so they had a brief romance, but it didn’t amount to anything more than a kiss and a cuddle.
He was without doubt one of the most handsome young men she’d ever seen; she was sure there’d be nurses lining the hospital corridors to date him. Why would he hold a flame for her, she asked herself, when he was surrounded by eager young women? Anyway, she reasoned as she blushed with shame, he’d probably heard Captain Miles bragging to his chums in the officers’ mess about his conquest. ‘That brunette saxophonist, she couldn’t get enough of it!’ she could almost hear him say. Feeling sick at the thought of the odious officer gossiping about her, Gladys was sure that none of his pals would have suspected that Miles had forced himself on her. ‘My God! What must Reggie have thought if he heard Captain Miles boasting about her in the bar?’ Only nights before the rape, she’d been in his arms, kissing him as they stood on board his ship, watching the smoke curling up from Vesuvius. No wonder Reggie had been so cold with her when she bumped into him in theatre. Thank God her stint at St Thomas’ was a short one; she’d soon be back in Pendleton, miles away from London, safe and sound in the cowshed with her own darling Rosa.
Just as Gladys was brushing her teeth in readiness for bed, the air-raid siren shrilled out.
‘Christ! Would you bloody believe it?’ cried Ethel as they both grabbed their nurses’ capes and gas masks. ‘Here we go again.’
Halfway through the evening, with babies bawling all around them and an old man in slippers playing an accordion, Ethel turned to Gladys and said, ‘What’s up with you, gel? You’ve got a face on you like concrete.’
‘I’m tired,’ Gladys said, which was true.
‘And …?’
‘I bumped into an old boyfriend.’