An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War

by Patrick Taylor

  “I don’t fancy a bout of the skitters, Doctor O’Reilly,” Willie said, “but I suppose just about anything’ll be better than this here pain.”

  “I’ve one more thing up my sleeve,” O’Reilly said. “If you do start to have diarrhoea before the pain goes away, I can give you one of the steroids, prednisolone, and…” He added more inky spider marks to the prescription. “I’ve given you a wheen of lint and bandages and some lotio opii et plumbii, which is opium-and-lead ointment for putting on the joint.” He handed the script and a government form to Willie. “You’re going to be off work for a week so I’ve given you a sick line too, so you can get your benefits.”

  Willie managed a weak smile. “Right enough, I’ve been paying my premiums long enough. It’s time I got a bit back, so it is.”

  “When we get you home, Willie, I’ll nip round til the chemist’s and fill your scrip,” Alan said.

  “Good man-ma-da,” O’Reilly said, “and, Willie, I’ll arrange for you to be seen by the dieticians at the Royal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are some foods—and drinks—you should avoid. They’ll explain that to you.”

  “Like what?” said Willie suspiciously.

  “I’m no dietician, but I think you’re probably going to have to cut back on red meats and offal.”

  “Willie Dunleavy without his liver and onions and steak and kidney pie? No sweetbreads? No tripe? That’ll be something to see. You think he’s bad-tempered now—” Alan said.

  “Houl your wheest, Hewitt,” Willie said.

  “I’m afraid it gets worse,” O’Reilly said. “No beer either.”

  Willie’s face took on the demeanor of a disappointed bloodhound. “Och Jasus, Doc,” he said. “It’s like thon ould joke when the doctor cuts your man off all the good grub and drink and cigarettes. ‘And will I live forever if I do?’ says your man. ‘No,’ says the doc. ‘It’ll only feel like forever.’” At least he was now trying to force a smile.

  “Sorry about that, Willie, but we have to get rid of the pain for you,” O’Reilly said. “And I want you to drink five pints of water every day to flush out stuff called urea through your kidneys.”

  “Water?” said Willie. “And me a publican? What’ll my customers think?”

  “What they already think, Willie Dunleavy,” Alan said. “That you’re a sound man and they’ll be sorry for your troubles.”

  O’Reilly nodded. “For the long term, Willie, you’ll have to take sodium salicylate three times a day. It’s made from wintergreen and is a relative of aspirin, but we’ll not get you on that until the pain’s over.” He smiled. “It’ll be no difficulty for me to drop in and see you at home. See how you’re getting on.”

  “And when you do, sir, the pints’re on me.”

  “Fair play,” said O’Reilly. “I’m sorry I don’t have a wheelchair to get you home.”

  “Never worry,” said Alan, “I’ll go and get Lenny Brown. He’s in having a jar—the Yard’s shut for the Twelfth Fortnight. He offered to help bring Willie over here but I thought mebbe he’d be going straight til hospital so I told him not to bother. But he’ll be happy to lend us a hand on the way back.”

  “I’d not mind having a word with Lenny either,” said O’Reilly as a thought struck. “You and Lenny mates, Alan?”

  “Aye. We are indeed. We go til the grues together.”

  O’Reilly had never understood why Ulstermen referred to racing greyhounds as “grues” or “grue dogs.” He nodded and said, “And have you told him about how well Helen’s doing?”

  Alan flushed. “I have that,” he said. “All it took was for her til get an education and now look at her.”

  “Mmm,” said O’Reilly. “Mmm. Off you trot, and Willie will be ready to go when the pair of you get back.” And if O’Reilly and Connie Brown couldn’t persuade Lenny that Colin should sit the Eleven Plus, another word from Alan Hewitt might. It was certainly worth a try.

  As Alan left, O’Reilly turned to Willie and said, “Come on then. I’ll give you a hand to get dressed.”

  Willie blew out his cheeks. He bent forward. “I can put on my left sock and shoe if you’d just hand them til me, sir.”

  As O’Reilly passed them he heard the phone ringing. Kinky would answer it. “I’m sorry,” he said to Willie, “that medical science can’t cure gout completely, but with a bit of luck we’ll be able to keep you pretty much pain-free, and when Alan’s at the chemist’s get him to pick up some Panadol as well. You’ll not need a scrip, but it’ll make you a bit more comfy until the colchicine starts to work.”

  “I appreciate that, sir—” was as far as Willie got.

  Kinky rushed in. Her face was flushed. “That’s Miss Hagerty, the midwife, on the phone, sir. Says it’s urgent.”

  “Right,” said O’Reilly, running to the phone in the hall.

  “O’Reilly here. Yes, Miss Hagerty. I see … Yes, all right, I understand. You can hardly be in two places at once. I’ll see to it. Good-bye.” He hung up and roared upstairs, “Kitty, come on down here. I’ve to go out to the district to do a delivery and I could use a trained midwife’s help.”

  He barely heard her agreement as he dashed into the surgery and grabbed the midwifery bags. “Sorry, Willie. Got to go.” He ran into the hall to meet Kitty coming downstairs. “Doreen Duggan’s having contractions every three minutes and Miss Hagerty is tied up with another delivery. Are you ready to bring a wee one in the world with me, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

  Kitty smiled, took one of the midwifery bags from him, and headed for the door. “I can’t think of a better way to spend my Thursday half day, Fingal O’Reilly, so get a move on.”

  35

  The Rockets’ Red Glare, the Bombs Bursting in Air

  Sailed late this evening, Sunday, July 7, 1940, for Malta to escort two convoys from there back to Alex. Warspite in company with two slower battleships, Malaya and Royal Sovereign, as well as HMS Eagle and her seventeen torpedo bombers, five light cruisers, and seventeen destroyers.

  Fingal blotted the ink and, still holding his war diary, pushed his chair back from the table in his cabin. How, he wondered, would this present sortie differ from their earlier, relatively uneventful one when he’d seen the great guns being fired? There’d been no serious action since Warspite had come to Alex, but things were very different now.

  Italy had declared war on June 10. The British could now expect hostile attention from some fifty Italian U-boats said to be at sea, Italy’s naval surface vessels, including two modernised battleships, and Alex was in range of airfields in Italian Libya and their Regia Aeronautica bombers.

  Matters had moved apace since the gunnery practice cruise a month ago, but—he smiled to himself—only on the war front. He’d assidiously avoided the Sporting Club since that evening with Elly Simpkins. He could smile at it—now—but it had been a near-run thing. Now he could enjoy the erotic frisson without the need to feel guilt. Well, not much guilt. And somewhere out there among the destroyers of the screen was HMS Touareg, Chris Simpkins’s ship. Not for the first time Fingal wondered how long the Simpkinses’ apparently “open marriage” could last.

  He flipped back a few entries in his diary. There had been more dramatic developments, few of them good, in Europe and all over the Med.

  June 12. Cruiser Calypso sunk west of Crete. June 15. Malta maintaining antisubmarine patrols with destroyers and Sunderland flying boats.

  The ungainly-looking four-propeller planes were made, he knew, by Shorts Brothers, whose headquarters was in Belfast. He sighed, felt the familiar leap in his heart at the thought of home and Dierdre, and continued reading.

  Malta is under constant air attack. Fourteen obsolete biplanes, Sea Gloster Gladiators, are the only available air defence. Being sent up in flights of three.

  He lit his pipe.

  Night of June 20th, 21st. Combined Anglo-French fleet successfully bombards Italian fortress at Bardia in Italian Libya. June 24. Terrible news
. France signed an armistice with Germany two days ago. The war in Continental Europe is over. Britain and the Empire are all that now oppose Hitler and Mussolini. Crew paradoxically seem to be relieved because we are on our own without any hindrance, as they perceive it, from foreign allies. Can’t say I feel the same.

  He let go a puff of smoke. The thought of Europe completely in the hands of the Nazis was sobering. For many reasons, not the least of which was his own personal—and selfish—concern. Would this mean I’ll not be able to get home to Haslar and to Deirdre? He glanced at her framed photo beside his cot. I miss you, girl. Richard Wilcoxson hadn’t been sure about Fingal’s chances of going and the best he’d been able to do was suggest that Fingal try to be patient. It wasn’t easy. Not one bit when his gentle, laughing girl with the soft deep eyes and warm lips was three thousand miles away and having to be patient too.

  He read on.

  June 28. Three enemy subs reported sunk. Boost to morale. About time.

  A new page.

  July 1. Much going and coming by our Admiral Cunningham and his staff and the French Admiral Godfroy in charge of the Alex-based French ships. July 4. All the negotiations have culminated in an agreement for peaceful decommissioning of the French vessels. We were lucky. Tom Laverty says it could have been ugly. We might have been forced to open fire in the harbour here on our recent allies the way HMS Hood and her accompanying ships had to bombard the French fleet in Mers-el-Kebir (Oran), Algeria, on July 3 to stop their warships falling into German hands.

  He closed the book and put it back in a drawer, trying to block out what must have been a horrific scene, but as usual his vivid imagination kicked in and he shuddered. He put his pipe down and lay on his bed fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. He had the morning watch, from four A.M. to eight, and knew he should grab a quick zizz before heading to the sick bay. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. Who knew what the day might bring?

  * * *

  “Morning, Fingal. Paddy.” Richard Wilcoxson, precisely on time as always, stuck his head into the space in the sick bay that served as the office.

  “Och,” Paddy O’Rourke said in his best stage Irish, “top of the morning to ye, sir.”

  “And,” said Richard, “I believe the correct response to a bogtrotter like you would be, ‘And the rest of the day to yourself,’ CPO O’Rourke.”

  Paddy chuckled and said, “Saving your presence, your honour, but you’re the only man on the ship I’d let call me that.”

  “Morning, Richard,” Fingal said, laughing at his colleagues’ good-natured teasing. “Not much to report. The watch has been pretty quiet and the sick bay’s empty. No customers.” Which wasn’t surprising. Standard in-harbour routine in Alex was to transfer any serious cases to the base hospital. Only two days ago Fingal had had to arrange the admission of a chief petty officer with a suspected ruptured amoebic liver abscess. It had taken quite a struggle to persuade the senior sister at Queen Alexandria’s Royal Navy Nursing Service to disturb a senior medical officer taking his ease in the mess. Fingal smiled. That was one personal battle he’d enjoyed winning, particularly as the patient was now doing well.

  “Not much doing on deck either,” Richard said. “With a bit of luck we may have—”

  The Tannoy’s tinny tones squawked: “We have just had a sighting report from one of our submarines, HMS Phoenix. Two enemy battleships and four destroyers two hundred miles east of Malta are steering south, possibly covering a convoy to Libya. They will be shadowed by Sunderland flying boats out of Malta. Our fleet will steer northwestward at twenty knots and try to intercept. That is all.” Click.

  The three men looked at each other in silence until finally Richard said, “So, you’re not going to get the rest of the day to yourselves, gentlemen. There is just a possibility that things might get interesting a little later and we could be very busy. So you two nip off and get a bite.” He stuck his head round the curtain and yelled, “You there, Ronnie?”

  A Cockney voice answered, “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Barker’s just come on watch. He and I will keep an eye on things here. Take sick parade in the dispensary as usual. No need to go to our action stations yet so off you trot.”

  Paddy headed for’ard to the CPO’s mess and Fingal aft to the wardroom.

  He was almost there when the air-raid warning gongs clanged, followed by the bugle call to action stations. He knew he should hurry back to his post in the ship’s bowels, but was within feet of the doorway to the open upper deck. He could feel the compelling pull of curiosity mixed with apprehension tugging at his insides. They’d not miss him below for ten minutes. He let himself out, dogged the watertight door shut, then stood beside the gunhouse of X turret. It was a glorious Mediterranean summer day. Except where it was being churned by the wakes of the great ships in the central column and their escorts steaming on all sides, the sea was that enamel-blue, barely rippled by a light breeze that was less than the wind of their twenty-knot passage.

  Overhead a few high wispy clouds drifted, and near the sea the smoke from the funnels of the fleet made dirty dark smudges. Land had dropped astern and the air was so clear that when Fingal looked to the horizon he had no difficulty seeing the curvature of the earth.

  It was a nearly perfect day for cruising, but sadly a truly perfect day for enemy aerial observation. There were no rain squalls or fog banks for the fleet to hide in.

  The smell of fuel, the roaring of the ship’s turbines, and the thundering of her propellors assailed his senses. Holy Mother of God. Involuntarily he ducked as he spotted, coming in from ahead, a series of regularly spaced dark dots. Around them the air was becoming pockmarked with black puffs that materialized from nowhere, drifted, and were dispersed by the slipstreams of the oncoming aircraft. Now he could hear the continuous drum rolls of the antiaircraft fire from the escorting vessels, the thrum of aero-engines.

  One of the dots, closer now so he could recognise it as a twin-engined monoplane, staggered, dropped a wing, and recovered for a moment. Fingal barely recognised that he was holding his breath. A fiery tail was dragged from one engine, and the nose of the Italian plane dipped, steeply, more steeply, then the whole machine began to spin and gather speed. He could hear the crescendo of the scream of its dive until one wing was ripped away and the rest hit the sea in a welter of high-thrown spray. The wreck and even the ripples of the splash had soon vanished into an unmarked watery sarcophagus. Fingal exhaled. He’d not seen any parachutes. Poor young bastards. He took no consolation from recognising that their end would have been quick.

  Now the enemy bombers were nearly overhead and Warspite began her own defence. He could see the aftermost Oërlikon gunner, his weapon’s barrel pointing nearly vertically, blazing away in an almost continuous stream of fire that flashed from the muzzle. From all over the ship came the single barks of her four-inch, high-angle weapons, the continuous pom-pom-pom-pom from her eight-barrelled two-pounder “Chicago pianos,” and the chattering of other singly and doubly mounted Oërlikons. Clapping his hands over his ears barely lessened the row, and nothing could prevent his nose from being filled with the acrid stench of burnt cordite.

  The explosives and lethal metal shards would cut through flesh and bone, arteries and nerves as mindlessly as they would chew into the thin metal skins of the bombers. And all the rounds that were being poured in torrents from Warspite were also being hurled in an equal or lesser degree by every ship in the fleet as soon as enemy aircraft came within range. The sky was darkened by the smoke of exploding shells.

  He continued to watch the oncoming flight of the enemy squadrons, now reduced by two more aircraft that had hurtled down leaving smoke trails in the sky. Another, he guessed, must have suffered a direct hit to its bomb bay because it flared like a bright sun and then simply vanished. Those unlucky bombers had been insects swatted down by the behemoths below, enraged by the pests’ attempts to sting. Yet not another plane had deviated from its alotted bomb run. How did the ai
rcrew find the courage to press on when every atom of self-preservation must be screaming, “Get the hell out of here!” Their cockpits must reek of the smell of fear, but still the planes came on.

  He glanced at the lone, unflinching Oërlikon gunner aft. And was that man’s courage any more or any less, standing there nakedly unprotected from machine gun strafing and bursting bombs?

  What men did for “duty’s sake” amazed Fingal, humbled him, and never on this great ship had he ever heard from any officer or man sentimental drivel about “For love of King and Country.” He could hear the voice of his father, the late professor of Classics and English Literature, quoting Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” “How sweet and right it is to die for one’s country.” The hell it was, although Professor Connan O’Reilly could perhaps be forgiven for being sentimental about warfare. He’d tried to volunteer in 1915, but had been judged to be too old. He’d never seen firsthand the carnage in the trenches, and for what? So the heroes’ sons could fight a second round with Germany and her allies? Madness, insanity, and Fingal imagined the Italian airmen, stolid and practical, stifling their fears and getting on with their jobs. It was, as far as Fingal O’Reilly was concerned, bravery of the highest degree. He admired both sides, just as he would treat the wounded without concern for nationality.

  He saw a neatly spaced line of bombs exploding in the sea close to a cruiser. The water, filthy from the stain of the explosives, rose in towering columns high, high, above the bridge of the targeted vessel before crashing back into the tumbled ocean and over the decks of the ship under attack.

  Warspite shuddered stem to stern from the recoil of her own weapons and the underwater shock waves spreading out from the exploding bombs. She heeled to port. Her captain must have ordered a defensive change of course.