The Bannister Girls

by Jean Saunders

  With her mother and the other helpers with their trolleys and tea urns and vast quantities of cigarettes, Angel waited quietly, but with nerves suddenly on edge as the train slowly approached the platform, hissing steam and enveloping all those who waited in its damp hazy cloud.

  One moment the platform was half empty save for the stalwart ladies and the ambulance people. The next, it surged with noise and swarmed with nurses and pathetic figures clad in blood-stained khaki. Some of them seemed barely human. Some had their entire faces covered in bandages, with not even slits in the cloth for the eyes to see as they were led gently away from the train like children.

  Others were pushed along the platform in wheelchairs, with nothing beneath the seat of the chair where their legs had been torn or shot away in battle. Some had armless jacket sleeves hanging pathetically by their sides, and the gaunt, haunted eyes of shell-shock. Others had weeping sores on their faces or showing through their torn uniforms, the result of being too long without proper medical attention.

  There was an endless trail of stretchers being carried along the platform from the rear carriages. The sweet sickly smell of gangrene quickly permeated the air and the overall stench was enough to make Angel want to gag. She suppressed the feeling with a huge effort.

  Angel lost count of the grasping hands that reached out for hers for a moment of comfort. She thought that her head must surely throb for days with the sounds of groaning, the muted sobs and the occasional scream that was all the more terrible because it was wrenched from a man’s throat.

  A man … but these were mostly boys, she realised in shocked horror. A year ago they were probably still at school … a swift vision of Margot’s little brother, Edward, surged into her mind. Oh God, let him see sense, she prayed. He was still a baby, and too young for sights like these … she suddenly felt much older than her own eighteen years.

  She caught sight of her mother gently holding a tin cup of tea to a soldier’s lips, and then put a lighted cigarette into his mouth, and knew a sudden fierce admiration for Clemence, who had risen above all the distaste she must feel, to give succour and comfort where she could. How vapid Angel must have seemed in the past, by dismissing the so-called Good Works. And how ashamed she was now, as she too bent to hear a soldier’s weak words from his cracked lips.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, girl. Best thing I’ve seen since I left the trenches. God bless you, angel.’

  Her eyes smarted. He didn’t know her name, but those words were to be repeated time after time.

  ‘God bless you.’ ‘God bless you.’ ‘You’re a bloody angel, begging your pardon, Miss.’ ‘God bless.’

  And yet she did so little. She gave them a cup of tea and a cigarette and a comforting word. But she cared. Right now that was all that mattered. If Jacques was ever wounded, she prayed that somewhere, some caring woman would offer him a word of comfort too … Jacques … until this moment, she had never really thought about him being wounded too, and it was enough to make her heart beat painfully fast.

  Angel bent her head to the next soldier eager for a squeeze of her hand, knowing that her eyes were blurred, and hoped that her silent prayer for Jacques’ safety wasn’t totally selfish. Like Rose Morton, she embraced everybody in the prayer, and no longer found the idea faintly amusing. And then she heard a thin quavering voice that she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Miss Angel, is that you?’

  She blinked, startled by the poor wretch on the stretcher. The blanket had been pushed away from his body by his restless clawing in the air. He had no legs below the thighs, and his head rolled from side to side as if eternally trying to see or hear something beyond his reach. His eyes were swollen and bloodshot and glazed in his parchment face, and the orderly with him shook his head slightly at Angel, who reeled back with absolute shock.

  ‘Oh – Hobbs! Oh my God – oh Hobbs, it’s you!’

  Her voice was high and choking and filled with anguish as her mind almost refused to believe what she was seeing. Such a little while ago Hobbs had left their employ, to go chirpily to war, bragging about all the French mamselles he was going to charm. Now he was no more than a broken shell of a man, and clearly with so little time left on earth. And Angel just couldn’t bear it … she just couldn’t…

  ‘Hobbs, how simply wonderful to have you home again,’ Clemence pushed past her. ‘You’ll drink a cup of tea, won’t you?’

  Her mother knelt down in the dust so that her face was level with Hobbs’ beside the stretcher. She gently held up the chauffeur’s head with one hand while touching the cup to Hobbs’ lips with the other. She did it all with as much finesse as though she dispensed tea from their own silver teapot, ignoring the fact that most of the tea dribbled instantly down Hobbs’ chin as tremors shuddered through him.

  ‘Where will he be taken?’ Clemence asked. The orderly lifted his shoulders as if to say it really didn’t matter, and the Bannister women watched their chauffeur being carried away, knowing it would be the last they ever saw of him. Angel felt her mother’s hand grip her shoulder.

  ‘There are others who need help, Angel,’ Clemence said quietly, and turned immediately to the next man. Angel saw the strength in her mother’s elegant shoulders, and somehow smothered her own terror to carry on.

  The afternoon had been a revelation to Angel. Had she once imagined blithely that she could be a nurse? She had never given a single thought to what it really entailed. She had perhaps romantically visualised for a few moments the glory of tending a patient, of receiving adoring glances and smiling thanks from those she had helped to heal.

  She had never once considered the open suppurating wounds or the recurring nightmares after the terror of being gassed, the cauterising and disposal of amputated limbs. She hadn’t known before the appalling sweet heavy smell of blood … There was so much she didn’t know, and never before had she felt so ignorant nor so helpless.

  Louise stormed into Meadowcroft while Angel and her mother were still recovering after the afternoon’s ordeal. She burst into her tirade before she had even removed her hat and gloves, and stood like an indignant schoolmistress having caught a small boy up to mischief.

  ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve just seen, Mother!’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to tell me, won’t you, dear?’ Clemence was in no mood for guessing games. The whole world was turning upside down, and sometimes dear Louise came out with the most fatuous and inconsequential statements.

  ‘I’ve just seen Ellen with a group of the most impossible people up on Durdham Downs. They were holding some kind of demonstration, and from the look of it the crowd was just going to see them off. She was holding a placard, and so was the man with her –’

  Clemence gave a heavy sigh. ‘Oh dear. I thought she had forgotten all that suffragette nonsense –’

  Louise sat down abruptly, careful to unbutton her coat as the daughter of a good textile man should.

  ‘It’s more serious than that, Mother. It’s dangerous. The placards were calling for Justice For All, and from the shouting that I could hear, it was quite obvious that Ellen’s got herself involved in some of this pro-German campaigning. It’s perfectly disgraceful, and she must be stopped at once. My Stanley’s fighting for King and Country, and Ellen’s parading about the city wanting the Germans to have fair treatment –’

  She was stopped by the sudden sound of hysterical laughter coming from her youngest sister. Angel couldn’t stop herself. If she was acting in the same shocked way that Rose Morton had done on the day that Mr Strube was killed, then she just didn’t care. Tears streamed down her face, and she could hardly speak at the sight of Louise’s astonished expression.

  ‘Oh, Louise, you’re unbelievable!’ she managed to choke out. ‘Stanley has done nothing more than drive about in official cars in the South of England for the last three months. He’s no more than a factory inspector in uniform! If you have any real complaints about the Germans, you should have seen our poor Hobbs coming
home on a stretcher with no legs and probably no more than hours to live. That would have really turned your stomach and might even have made you as human as the rest of us.’

  The hysteria dissolved in a bout of weeping that racked her body. Clemence held her tightly to control the paroxysm and told a white-faced Louise to fetch Angel some brandy from the decanter, and that they would discuss the question of Ellen when her father came home from Yorkshire that evening.

  Why was it that Fred was never there when a family crisis arose, Clemence thought angrily? But this time Ellen had gone too far. This new craze must be stopped at once, before Ellen put herself and their entire family in danger.

  At that moment, had she known it, the Justice For All group was reluctantly coming to the same conclusion. Most of their members had already departed on their bicycles from Peter Chard’s farmhouse where the impromptu meetings had been held after the atrocity to Mr Strube. The driver of the van was the last to go, moving awkwardly towards the door.

  ‘I’m sorry, you two, but I’ve got my family to think of, and I need my van for my living. If it gets spotted too often –’

  ‘It’s all right, Ralph,’ Peter said calmly. ‘I think we’re all agreed that as from this moment, we’re officially disbanded. We tried and we failed. Plenty of folk can’t even say that much.’

  He and Ellen sat gloomily together in the old farmhouse kitchen when the man had left. It was very quiet in the countryside two miles south of Meadowcroft. No one would ever guess that a war was going on elsewhere. Outside, birds sang in the afternoon air, and hens clucked noisily. In the distance, a church clock chimed the hour.

  ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea, Peter?’ Ellen glanced at her watch. She would have to be getting back soon, to change before dinner. Countries might fall, but Clemence still observed the niceties of life, and her father would be home from Yorkshire in a little while.

  Peter nodded, his thoughts far away. As she passed him, Ellen tweaked a white feather from his shoulder, finding her eyes smart with indignation as she did so. It was all so unfair. Peter was the most fearless man she knew, and only she guessed how much he resented the fact that he too couldn’t join the brave soldiers in France.

  An accident with some farm machinery several years ago had left his leg weakened and permanently scarred, but it hadn’t affected his brain nor his ability to know that there were those who wondered why a young virile man like himself couldn’t put his farm in an older person’s hands for the duration and go off to fight like all the other courageous boys.

  He felt the touch of Ellen’s hand on his shoulder, and his fingers reached up to capture hers in his own. Her hands were square, like her strong handsome face, the compassion in it quickly hidden, because she knew how much he despised pity.

  ‘What will you do now, my Ellen?’ he said roughly, knowing that she must have a cause in her life.

  She answered airily, because if she didn’t, she would probably break down. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ll have to do something. I can’t just stay here and stagnate. I did a commercial course at college. I dealt with the accounts and administration in my branch of the movement in London, although my parents never knew quite how deeply I was involved! I could always take up secretarial work with some boring solicitor or something, I suppose.’

  ‘You could always come and work for me.’

  Ellen began to laugh. ‘Doing what? Mucking out pigsties and milking cows?’

  Actually, it didn’t sound so bad. Not the filthy parts, of course, but tossing hay about in the summer into those dear little ricks and things, might be quite fun … She wasn’t as prissy as her sister Louise, but one had to remember one’s background, Ellen thought with a glimmer of humour as she imagined her sister’s voice saying the words.

  ‘This is a working farm, Ellen. I employ people. At harvest time, it seems as though half the village lends a hand. I have to keep accounts. If food rationing comes, as it must if the war goes on much longer, it will be even more important to keep things in order, and I’m hopeless at paperwork.’

  She looked at him suspiciously. She didn’t think he’d be hopeless at anything. Was he creating this job just to stop her from being bored? Or even just to keep her around…?

  Quickly, she took her hand from beneath his, suddenly aware that it had been there too long. Her fingers felt cold without Peter’s clasping hers, but she felt an odd nervousness, and moved away from him to fill the kettle with cold water at the stone sink.

  ‘I’ll have to think about this, if you’re really serious, Peter.’ She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Of course I’m serious. Did you ever know me say anything I didn’t mean?’

  It was true, but he realised that he didn’t always say everything that he was thinking. What would she say, his straight-backed Ellen, if she had been able to read his mind seconds ago? It had been on the tip of his tongue to say to blazes with looking for a job for which she might be totally unsuited. That there was a perfectly good job for her here. She should marry him and become a farmer’s wife.

  Thankfully, the words had remained inside his head. He admired her tremendously. They got on well, and the sparks that sometimes flew between them only added a piquancy to their relationship. But they were worlds apart. She was a city girl, born into a rich family, and he was a Somerset farmer, with all the uncertainties which that kind of living brought.

  If he once tried to bring romance into their relationship, he had the feeling that she would panic and fly, like a moth about to be caught in a flame, and he couldn’t bear to lose her. He knew the limitations between them. They were better as they were. And he could go on adoring her from afar.

  Chapter 8

  Dinner that night was fraught with tension. Fred knew something was up the minute he stepped inside the house, but he forestalled Clemence by insisting they had dinner first, and talk later. He was tired after the long drive from Yorkshire. It would be so sweet never to have to come all this way to be met with the usual build-up of family problems … but that would be shirking his responsibilities, and Fred had never been one to do that.

  So it was not until they were in the drawing room drinking coffee out of the ridiculously tiny cups that Fred hated, and through whose handles he couldn’t get even his smallest finger, that he allowed Clemence to come out with it. And once she began, he felt as though he was being hit by a torrent of words. He was bruised by the battering, but knew he could do nothing to stop it until she had had her indignant say.

  Startled, he stared in disbelief at Ellen. The village murder had been a bloody affair, of course, but he thought his middle girl would have more sense than to condone the presence of Germans in England so brazenly. She had a great compassion, but this was going too far.

  Louise said nothing, sitting almost smugly beside her mother, while Angel looked distressed on Ellen’s account. Fred reacted at once.

  ‘Your mother is quite right, Ellen. I will not allow you to endanger the rest of your family in this way –’

  ‘I’m not endangering anyone!’

  ‘Yes you are, my dear.’ Fred tried to be patient, whilst longing for his bed. ‘Once the national fanatics get their claws into you, do you think they’ll believe your family thinks any differently from you? Before we know it, our house will be daubed during the night, windows will be broken, and we’ll suffer the same fate as the poor wretches being hounded out of their homes and businesses through no fault of their own.’

  ‘You do agree with me in principle, then?’ Ellen ignored the rest for the moment.

  ‘What I think has nothing to do with the wider implications. But since I know you’ll never be satisfied with such an evasive answer, then yes, I agree with you. I think it’s appalling that the poor devils have to be shipped off to a neutral country or sent to prison or risk being murdered in their own beds, but it’s a risk they take. If we lived in a country at war, we’d make damn sure we got out of there pretty quickly, wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t you?’r />
  Ellen was sullen. ‘I suppose so.’

  Clemence was tired of all this discussion in which Fred seemed to be more in sympathy with Ellen than dictating to her.

  ‘The point is, Frederick, what’s going to be done about it?’ She spoke smartly.

  Ellen gave her a glimmer of a smile. ‘I’m to be smacked on the hand like a naughty little girl, Mother, and made to promise never to do such a thing again. Is that it?’

  ‘No, it is not.’ Fred’s voice hardened. ‘You will find some sort of gainful employment, Ellen, to keep you out of mischief. I paid good money to educate you girls, and I expect you to do something useful with your lives. I shall see about finding you a position in some worthy organisation –’

  Clemence hated this sordid mention of money. Education was their right, not their father’s sacrifice.

  ‘Why not take her to Yorkshire with you, and set her up in an office up there?’ she said shortly, failing to notice how Fred blanched beneath his robust colouring. Having any of his girls in Yorkshire was the very last thing he wanted.

  Ellen suddenly jumped to her feet, her own face blazing. She hadn’t really considered her future at all, but now it was perfectly clear-cut.

  ‘None of you need worry in the least about finding me a position, not that I shall embarrass you again. Since you’re so determined that I shall work for my living, you may as well know that I’ve already found employment.’

  For a moment she almost enjoyed the little cries of consternation. Clemence’s face was comical, clearly wondering what Ellen was getting into now. Louise’s glance said much the same. Angel was merely anxious that Ellen shouldn’t rush from one disaster to another, while Fred’s eyes glinted.

  ‘Without my approval? What kind of employment, may I ask? If it’s not respectable, I shall forbid it completely, Ellen.’