But one morning I was off-duty, and I ran into him again. So then we went out for a while. It was on and off because we were in different places. But I ended up with marrying him … which was rather stupid of me. He was different then, obviously.
War had seemed to justify spontaneity. What place did caution have in a world where nothing could be anticipated? But by 1947 Mary had left her abusive and alcoholic husband and was back in Britain.
Heat and Sand
Nevertheless, Barbara Cartland would be among many who concluded that the Americans’ presence added more than it subtracted from wartime Britain:
Believe me, I know what I am talking about when I say that the American airman and soldier is in general a well-behaved, decent-living, fine-principled boy. He is not sophisticated, he is not polished, he is very often adolescent in his outlook and knowledge, but his heart is all right.
As the tone of her remarks suggests, Cartland took a patrician and parental view of the GIs, but it was a forgiving one, and above all a deeply grateful one. The American soldiers’ presence proclaimed the good faith of President Roosevelt who, together with Churchill, in February 1942, had established the Combined Chiefs of Staff to co-ordinate the Allies’ war effort, ‘and to provide for full British and American collaboration with the United Nations’. British people knew that the war could not be won without American help. And, failing an imminent Second Front in occupied Europe, that summer Roosevelt also reached agreement with the British chiefs of staff to mount Operation Torch, the landing of a combined force in French North Africa.
The backlash against Rommel was coordinated by troops on the ground in Libya, Morocco and Egypt. But from early in the war the island of Malta had been of key importance in controlling the sea route across the Mediterranean, vital to maintaining Axis supply lines. This Allied base was a thorn in the side of the German command: ‘Without Malta the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa,’ said Rommel. Throughout 1941 and the first half of 1942 the Luftwaffe bombed Malta remorselessly. Air raids were almost constant; the island was in a state of siege and in danger of starvation.
Corporal ‘Mike’ Morris’s strong-minded and courageous approach to everything she did was never more in evidence than when she determined to go to Malta early in 1942. Mike’s value as a fluent German-speaking member of the ‘Y’ Service had been proved during the Battle of Britain, intercepting transmissions between German bombers and their bases. But when bomber activity over Britain started to slacken, she took a new posting in Egypt, monitoring aerial threats to the troops in the desert. It was here in January 1942 that she received the news – which at first she took to be an error in decoding – that she had been awarded the MBE. It was a huge boost to her confidence. In February she marched off to see Group Captain Scott-Farnie of Special Signals Intelligence and explained to him that she had to go to Malta. As she saw it, the monitoring staff on the island were insufficient and under-trained in dealing with the quantity of radio/telephone message traffic from the numerous German bombers now threatening it. There were QAs at the military hospital, but there were no WAAFs working there, or any other servicewomen; indeed women were now being evacuated from Malta. Mike knew that she had better experience in this vital work than any of her male colleagues. But Scott-Farnie did not see things her way. Her sex, in his view, disqualified her. ‘I’m sorry but it is out of the question,’ he said. And nothing she could say would persuade him.
I went on arguing but it was to no avail. Finally, choking with rage and frustration, I picked up my heavy German dictionary and hurled it at him. It missed, and that only made me even more angry, so I stormed out of the office. If I did get killed, was that so serious? Was it not better that I, a single girl, died, rather than a married man perhaps with children? The all-important thing was that German R/T was being heard in Malta.
Later, however, she sought him out and apologised for her outburst. But, having thought things over, Scott-Farnie too had been looking for her. He had been to see the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Tedder, and Tedder, more enlightened, had given her his blessing to go.
Before departing, Mike went to see him. He was, she recognised, most rare and unusual for a man. ‘There was no quibbling about my being a woman. He appreciated that I could do the job and there it ended.’ But with military terseness Tedder warned her that Malta was now ‘pretty uncomfortable … I hope you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?’ Mike stressed that she felt she could help. As she left, he called after her, ‘Take your tin hat – you’ll need it.’
Mike quickly discovered that Tedder’s advice was in earnest. She arrived in Malta on 13 February in the middle of a heavy air raid; the flying-boat from Cairo was escorted by British fighters. Quickly, she settled into her work; a receiving station had been set up at Kaura Point to monitor transmissions from German bomber traffic based in Sicily to the north. Soon after her arrival she was returning to her hotel in the company of one of the airmen when they both confused a Messerschmitt 109 flying low over the sea with a British fighter in trouble. It was nearly a fatal mistake. The fighter aimed a volley of machine-gun fire at them – ‘ “Christ!” yelled the airman … “He’s a bloody Hun,” ’ as they hurled themselves flat on the ground behind a wall. It missed them, and careered on, firing over the airfield. Shaken and swearing, Mike’s escort picked himself up and asked whether she was all right. ‘ “No, dammit, I’m not,” I replied. “I’ve wrecked my stockings, and I’ve only got one more pair with me.” ’
Despite her concern for female accessories, Mike found she was accepted as ‘a moderately decent type’ and permitted to dine in the all-male mess. This also spared her the nightly journey – dodging bombs and shrapnel and picking her way across the rubble – from her safe lodgings in a labyrinth of tunnels for her evening meal at the hotel. The island was being pulverised – ‘it was difficult to determine when one air-raid ceased and the next began’ – though one that stuck in her mind was a direct hit on a neighbouring house. Mike and her hosts heard the occupant screaming in agony as the bombers droned overhead, followed by the chillingly sustained wail of a grief-stricken woman.
The gallantry of the airmen, ground crews and gun crews on Malta was extraordinary; equalled only by Mike’s determination to use her skills to support their heroism. It was vital to glean any information possible about enemy movements. Under her guidance, Mike’s Maltese unit was working unbelievably long hours to ensure round-the-clock monitoring; she and her German-speaking eavesdroppers could warn of impending attacks, advise on targets, alert fighters when they had been spotted, listen in on weather reports, determine the strength of enemy formations and contact threatened shipping convoys.
In the short time she spent in Malta, Mike Morris demonstrated – as she had during the Battle of Britain – a cool-headedness and intellectual grasp that materially aided that stricken island. But early in March Scott-Farnie told her that he wanted her back in Cairo; Messerschmitts were attacking our North African airfields and harbours, and the 8th Army in the desert needed all the support they could get. She agreed to leave on 9 March, her twenty-fourth birthday. After a farewell party she set out for Luqa airfield, joining a group of women and children who were being evacuated to Egypt. It was midnight, ‘there was the usual raid in progress’, and Mike and the evacuees embarked on two Wellingtons. They started to taxi along the blacked-out runway; suddenly without warning a third aircraft, about to take off, hurtled into one of the Wellingtons, instantly starting an inferno. The pilot of Mike’s plane yelled at his passengers, ‘For Chrissakes, get to hell out of here. There are mines on board that kite.’
There was no ladder. Clutching her briefcase (‘filled with secret documents’) Mike leapt for the ground; one of the aircrew grabbed her, shouting ‘Move!’ Ammunition was bursting past them; they dived for cover, face down, only to realise that they were underneath a petrol bowser. Seconds later the mines on the Wellington blew up, with a deafening explosion. The airma
n seized Mike’s briefcase and rammed it forcefully on to the back of her head, just in time. He saved her life; heavy flying shrapnel drove deep scars into the leather. Her jaw was injured. Guided by the firework display, the German raiders were now having a field day over the airfield. When the din and chaos finally abated Mike and the airman staggered, covered in mud, to the control room, to be greeted with relief by the air officer. Mike’s reaction was stoical: ‘What a way for a girl to spend her birthday,’ she grimaced. ‘I really do think someone could have done better than this.’
A few days later she was on her way back to Cairo.
*
As WAAF Mike Morris resumed her interception work in North Africa, the SS Highland Monarch was embarking from Bristol destined for Cape Town. With the Mediterranean closed, this was the only route for services to reach the Middle East. On board were 5,000 troops and fourteen VAD nurses bound for Suez; one of these was twenty-two-year-old Helen Vlasto.
A startlingly pretty debutante, Helen was in the latest generation of an immensely rich Anglo-Greek banking dynasty; her father was a successful doctor. ‘I was … not motivated in any particular direction,’ recalled Helen; but her money, looks, charm and fluency in three languages would have qualified her as premium goods on the 1939 marriage market. A ‘proper’ education or job therefore wasn’t thought necessary. Instead, by day she volunteered at the West London Hospital in Hammersmith, while by night she appeared in glimmering gowns at the West End hotels and grand houses of London’s most glamorous hostesses: ‘I felt I was living a double, and somewhat unworthy, life.’
When war was declared Helen applied to become a mobile VAD and in November 1940 was sent to Haslar Royal Naval Hospital near Portsmouth. Here she helped to set up the country’s first blood bank. But six months in, despite putting her ‘heart and soul’ into this worthwhile project, Helen was engulfed by ennui. Longings for a boyfriend were beginning to surface:
‘Oh my darling,’ (I prayed inwardly to myself), ‘do please manifest yourself. I need someone to love right this very minute.’
And he did. Manifest himself, I mean!
The answer to her prayer appeared in the form of handsome surgeon Lieutenant Aidan Long, who joined the Transfusion Service as Medical Officer in March 1941. Aidan met her parents, and everything seemed just perfect until, with only twenty-four hours’ warning, he was drafted to Iceland. They would not meet again for four years.
Aidan sent her a silver and pearl pin, and they wrote to each other. Helen continued to work in the transfusion unit, but she was impatient to return to hospital nursing, and there were rumours that she would be posted abroad. Eventually, in May 1942 Aidan was due back in England. He arrived on the 7th – but it was the very day that Helen’s ship sailed: ‘His bird had flown.’
As the Highland Monarch was tugged away from the dock the men on the decks were waving and singing ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’. Helen listened with a swelling heart. She found herself incapable of joining in, for yet again her feelings were overflowing into an involuntary prayer:
‘Please, please, dear God, may it please You to spare as many of these fine men as is possible – under the circumstances that is – though obviously we’ve simply GOT to win this Middle East war.’ And, selfishly, – ‘Please, if it’s at all possible, spare me to return safely home and find all well there.’
The Highland Monarch was two months at sea. Finally, on 26 July 1942, after travelling 15,000 miles, the troop ship’s gangplanks were lowered in Suez.
Helen arrived at the 64th General Hospital, Alexandria, at a time when British fortunes in North Africa were at a low point. Rommel had inflicted heavy losses on British forces, and in June he had captured Tobruk. By early July Axis forces had pushed the British back to within 70 miles of Alexandria. The ensuing battle brought about 13,000 casualties, resulting in an uneasy stalemate, and the dismissal by Churchill of General Auchinleck. General Bernard Montgomery was now appointed to command the 8th Army.
The 64th was a base hospital designated for serious cases. Helen found the medical wards full of patients with dysentery, typhoid, sandfly fever and acute enteritis; there was also a serious epidemic of diphtheria. Many of the invalids had desert sores, caused by terrible swarms of flies that settled on and infected any exposed wound.
Hers was an orthopaedic ward; these patients, casualties of the Auchinleck retreat, seemed to have brought half the desert back with them. Sand was all-pervading. It got into the sheets, the dressings, into all the interstices of their bodies, between broken limbs and the plasters that encased them. No matter how often the nurses bathed their patients, yet more grit seemed to emanate from overlooked cracks and crannies. Soft-hearted as she was, Helen found it hard to stay detached from the often terrible plight of the men under her care. One of these was a jokey and stalwart Canadian Hurricane pilot, Mike Reece, who had been shot down; his burns were so dreadful that there was never any chance he would survive. It took an hour to change Mike’s dressings, and his cheery, flirtatious courage so incapacitated her that she often had to flee to the basin in tears – ‘I wasn’t getting any better at it.’ With his arms pinioned to his sides in bandages, he would blithely call on a mate in one of the neighbouring beds to drop something on the floor, so that the next passing nurse would have to bend over and pick it up, thus rousing the other patients to wolf-whistles at the sexily angled view of her bottom. Out of pity, Helen and the others never minded colluding in this simple diversion.
The night Mike died, she changed his drip and sat by his bed. He asked her to get his wallet out of the locker. She pulled out the photographs and held them up for him – his home, his parents, his beloved young brother – and talked about them for a long time. After he had gone she wrote to his parents, ‘[to] tell them how things had been with him, and how his thoughts and talk had been all of home’.
Montgomery was rallying his army. On 22 October, Helen had been on night duty. When she came off, she went to get some sleep, but had only managed an hour or two before she was called back on duty. Orders had arrived from General Headquarters in Cairo that morning that the 64th was to be converted into a casualty clearing station. The Allies were about to attack.
All that day preparations at the hospital were carried out ‘in a state of awesome exhilaration’. The beds were remade with army blankets, vast drums were packed with dressings and taken to be sterilised, stretchers stacked, glucose drinks prepared, splints, bandages and medicines piled ready for use.
Montgomery attacked at 21.40 on a still and moonlit night. The roar of 800 guns broke the silence and marked the beginning of the Battle of Alamein.
It was a sound to chill the marrow in one’s bones, and we hugged one another and held tightly to each other’s hands, and a spine-chilling feeling came over us as we heard this great roar of gunfire, which lasted continuously for the first twenty minutes of the battle.
The sky to the west was like a gigantic firework display, lit by winking flashes all along the horizon, as the Eighth Army moved forward.
Casualties started to arrive before dawn on the 24th. Strapped in hasty bandages, grimy and encrusted in blood, they were sent from the first aid posts at the front, back to the 64th, where the staff did their best.
It was a night to remember for the rest of one’s life …
Not for the first time … was I to sit at the side of a bed, mute and useless to the end, tormented by the knowledge that someone other than I should have been there at such a time.
The survivors turned to nurses like Helen for sympathy, skill and a listening ear. She heard of horrors: tank crews trapped in burning vehicles, dreadful maiming by mines, piles of bodies pulverised into the sand. In the ensuing days the stockpiled dressings began to run low; used ones were washed and rewashed by the nurses and laid out to bleach in the sun. Back in the fly-infested ward, Helen had to contain the urge to retch at the overpowering stench of burned, gangrenous flesh, while wounds daubed with gentian violet t
urned the mangled, blistered, bodies into macabre spectacles from some medieval picture of Hell. Bed bugs tortured nurses and patients alike. Helen sat through the desolate, homesick night duty on a stiff-backed chair draped with a white sheet, on which the insects could be easily spotted. ‘If anyone were going to die, it would surely happen during those lonely hours.’
She saw it as her duty to give comfort where she could. As a woman, nursing made calls upon her that exceeded the confines of physical care. All too often an anxious man, fearfully mutilated, would call upon her to boost his male self-respect: ‘What d’yer think the wife will say when she sees me looking like this? … Could yer fancy me, the way I am now? Be honest.’ Nothing of this nature shocked Helen now. She was a woman; she was clean, fragrant, kind and pretty. And if he wanted a cuddle, if he needed a kiss, why deny it? Aidan was not forgotten, but these men needed succour of a kind that was in her power to offer. ‘I gave many such kisses with all my heart, and found it no hardship to do. I reckoned it was all part of the service.’
Day and night, ambulances brought in more wounded. The nurses were working flat out, with wounds to dress, temperatures to take, pillows to plump, medicines to administer, every bed and every locker kept tidy for inspection. Twelve hours a day the hospital broadcast music programmes through the wards. As often as not it would be the bright tones of Vera Lynn singing ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’, or ‘Yours Till the Stars Lose Their Glory’ on Forces Favourites. And as fast as the patients in the 64th recovered, their places were refilled by casualties from the Desert Army’s advance.
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