by Marie Joseph
Shutting his mind to the indignity of it, feeling his throat spasm as the tube inched its way down, David choked, blinked the tears from his eyes and swallowed again.
‘Clever boy,’ Sister Margerison said, and propped him slightly on his pillows. She marched away, hugging the covered bowl to her chest.
The nights were the worst, for his feverish mind fought the sleeping pills, and each agonizing memory was awash with the evil smell of his own dark green bile.
He remembered the flak coming at them, tossing the air craft about the sky like a bucking bronco. One lot had burst so close that his skipper had been forced to jerk violently off course at the end of the bomb run.
‘Give me a course for home, navigator.’
Bending over his instrument table as if he were alone in a tiny office, David had replied: ‘Steer two-seven-eight.’
The burst of a shell beneath the belly of the aircraft had made it arch suddenly. The gunner yelled: ‘Christ! I’ve been hit!’
‘David, get back and have a look at Jock.’ His skipper’s voice had sounded quite calm.
So, leaving his table, David had moved as fast as he could to the turret at the back. Jock, a sturdy little Glaswegian, was obviously done for. Blood was spurting from his mouth, soaking his fur-lined collar and choking his moans. His eyes were glazed with pain.
‘Get the morphia! For God’s sake, get the morphia!’
David’s head had jerked back as the shrapnel tore at his shoulder, tearing an agonizing strip through his neck. He remembered the flames, then his mind exploded into a screaming torture. And that was about it.
There was the silent sound of his own cries in his head. There was someone holding him down. A woman in a white cap was bending over him. She had eyes that picked holes in his pain, and yet her hands on him were surprisingly gentle.
‘It’s all right, laddie. You’ve been dreaming. You’re quite safe. That’s right. Hold on to me.’
‘I can’t speak!’ David mouthed the words into the terrifying silence. ‘My voice has gone!’
Tearing at the tube taped to his cheek, David’s dark eyes were deep pools of terror. The smell of green slime was sickening his very soul. There was pain spilling inwards from his shoulder and neck, then as he felt a faint prick in his arm the face of Sister Margerison was blotted out, and the long ward obliterated in a descending welter of darkness.
On the anniversary of the last big raid on London it rained all day. With the tubes finally removed, David looked better, but the bandages swathing his neck and shoulder still forced his chin up, so that the shy way he had always held his head made him appear vulnerable and very, very young.
He ate a little, slept less, and existed from one painful dressing of his wounds to another. He had accepted the fact that he could not speak even if he had not begun to come to terms with it, but he used the pad and pencil placed at the ready by Sister Margerison only when absolutely necessary.
‘Will my voice come back?’ he wrote one day, then with his free hand scribbled fiercely over the words, not ready yet to face what might be the shattering truth.
She tried one day to bully him into writing a letter.
‘Your mother?’
‘Dead,’ David wrote firmly.
‘Father?’
‘Ditto,’ said the pencil, and David stared at the sister as if defying her to continue.
‘Girl friend?’ Sister Margerison was not one to give up easily. ‘Come on now, Mr Turner. Don’t come that attitude with me. You’ve had plenty of visits from your Air Force buddies, so you’re no hermit. A visit from a pretty girl is just what you need.’
‘I hate women,’ David wrote, the merest semblance of a twinkle in his eyes, and seeing that for the first time Sister Margerison went away with the feeling that if nothing had been achieved at least her patient had taken a short step in the right direction.
David came out of his apparently self-imposed trance the day he was helped to the bathroom for the first time and saw himself in the mirror. The burns to his face had been classified as not bad enough for plastic surgery, but one cheek was the colour of a ripe tomato, and the front of his singed hair was growing back into little spikes.
With the bandaged collar round his neck he looked, he told himself, for all the world like a man-made creature in a horror film, but the wound in his shoulder was healing. He could flex the fingers of his left hand, and when they took this ruddy collar off he would be fit to fly again.
‘Fly again?’ Tim Brazier, the pilot of David’s recent crew, smiled a smile that left one side of his face quite stiff. ‘Don’t be such a bloody fool, Turner. How many times do you think you can prang and get away with it? Christ, man, you’re a bloody miracle! You’ve been at it ever since the balloon went up in thirty-nine. Once you’ve got your ticket you can be away.’ He rubbed at the jumping tic in his right cheek, a legacy from a crash during his training days. ‘I must say your mug wouldn’t get you a job in Hollywood at the moment, but then you never were much of a pin-up, old man.’
David saw the way his old skip kept glancing away from the notepad and pencil placed on the turned-down sheet. Not once had Tim mentioned the loss of voice. He had sat there by the side of the bed and nattered on for all the world like a nannie talking to her charge who had merely fallen down and grazed a knee.
‘We’re on a milk run at the moment,’ he said. ‘A piece of cake.’ He got up to go. ‘A few minutes over the target, that’s all. Then home. Whacko!’
As he walked down the ward, jamming his cap back onto his curly head, David felt his heart begin to thump. He turned his head sideways into his pillow.
Tim had known something David didn’t know. Even discounting his twitch his old skip had been trying to tell him that his flying days were over.
The man in the next bed, a skull-cap of bandages on a head as round as a billiard ball, leaned sideways and said something, but David closed his eyes.
If they took flying away from him, what was left? Since before the war he had lived in his world of uniforms, camaraderie, uncouth humour bordering on the juvenile. It was his life! Damn it, it was all he knew!
As far as his actual job went, he was the tops. He could plot a course with unerring accuracy. The seasons came and went, each filled with the sound of planes rumbling, taxiing into position for take-off. Some came back and some didn’t, and those that came back often limped home with an engine missing, or more frequently, most of the tail. He was well into his third tour, only eleven operations to go. He was geared to night flying; the whole aspect of the war was hotting up. Before long the 500 German bombers that had almost flattened Westminster a year ago would be chicken feed compared to the retaliation which would surely come.
And if he was not to be a part of that, then where would he be? Where would he go? Shuffling into civvy street with his blood-red face, half his hair burned off, and his throat held together with strips of gauze.
‘Time for your bath, Mr Turner.’
The copper-haired nurse, a towel over her arm, his soapbox and flannel in her hand, touched him gently on his good shoulder, then blinked as the nice Mr Turner glared at her, his lips pressed tightly together as if holding in his fury.
Snatching the notepad and pressing so hard that the pencil made little holes in the paper, David wrote:
‘I can bath myself. Okay?’
‘Okay then.’ The copper head nodded twice before Sister Margerison’s training took over. ‘No more than five inches of water, mind, and don’t splash. Arm extended and wash up to the chest only. When you’re ready to come out you ring for me. We don’t want you slipping and adding a bruised bottom to what you’ve got to put up with already. Right?’
With his good hand David sketched a salute. As he made his way down the long ward, wobbling on legs as steady as lettuce leaves, the nurse sighed. That left hand of his wasn’t showing any signs of improvement. In spite of the exercises the fingers were as flabby as uncooked sausages, and the prognosi
s was that the hand might never recover its grip completely. She walked across to a bed in which a fighter pilot lay and tucked him in fiercely. The pilot, a mere boy, had been fished out of the sea at Lowestoft Bay with his spine broken. His days were numbered. The nurse tucked a strand of red hair beneath her white starched cap and sighed.
‘What day is it, nurse?’ the boy whispered.
‘Tuesday,’ she told him briskly, before walking soft-footed down the ward to spy on Mr Turner through a crack in the bathroom door. Her faint smile was of the humour-the-invalid variety, but her bright blue eyes were as watchful and caring as a mother indulging an adventurous toddler to find his independence.
Sitting in the shallow water and soaping his thin body with his good hand, David contemplated his future, facing it and then rejecting it almost at the same time. His future was an empty void, whereas his past was a series of incidents as clear in his mind as if each episode had been crowded into one long yesterday.
His insistence on leaving grammar school at eighteen with a good matriculation certificate, guaranteeing his entry into the Air Force as a potential officer. His mother wringing her hands and wailing that in doing so he was letting her down, and somehow even betraying his dead father’s trust.
The beginning of the war almost three years ago, and his years of training being immediately channelled into positive action. Those early spells of leave when he saw Sally Barnes change from a round-faced schoolgirl into a young woman of startling beauty. His blasted shyness whenever he met her walking down the road; the sweetness of her as she stared up at him, her grey eyes searching his mouth as she lip-read his abortive attempts at conversation.
The night he took her to the cinema and blotted his copybook with a thoroughness that put an insurmountable wedge between them. His heartfelt shame, and her obvious disgust. David stared at the wall, an ugly wall, painted garden-fence green at the bottom and a sickly yellow at the top.
The water in the bath was cooling, but he noticed nothing. Alone for the first time since his admission into hospital, it seemed important that his thoughts were caught and pinned down into some kind of pattern, like dead butterflies arranged for exhibition on a sheet of blank paper.
His home turned into a heap of rubble and him standing there poking around with a stick in search of – what? David stared down at the bath-water, his eyes narrowed into slits of concentration. The grave in the cemetery with his mother’s coffin being lowered into it by strangers. His lack of feeling as the sun warmed his back and Sally stood by his side in a flowered dress with short puffed sleeves. The loneliness eating at him as she ran away from him to catch the tram with her parents after her rejection of his awkward apology.
The crashing down through the trees in Belgium with Jack’s body swinging from a tree. The hayloft and Francine of the pale yellow hair lying in his arms, as close to him in that moment as if they had made love.
Good days back on the squadron, laughter-filled days in spite of everything. Knowing you could be dead tomorrow but relishing the fact that you were alive today. Barging into Sally’s house in a state of euphoria after his escape back to England, so sure that he had only to ask her to marry him for her to fall into his arms.
The unknown American with his crew cut and his reckless smile. David’s mouth twisted. He had never met him, but for God’s sake, the Yanks all had crew cuts and reckless smiles. And in all probability Sally would be married to him now.
David tilted his chin, his scarlet face and singed hair rising from the neck support as he sat there, very still in the ugly utilitarian bathroom, an incongruous sight to anyone with a warped sense of humour.
Sally had sent him a letter, just five lines long, congratulating him on his blasted gong. Very kind, very proper. And that was that. That was definitely, decidedly it. Finish. QED. Out of his life. For ever.
David turned his head awkwardly as the red-haired nurse bustled into the bathroom, noticing her half-smile as he covered himself decently with his flannel when she held out the towel.
‘Enjoy your bath, Mr Turner?’ she asked. ‘I knew you would,’ she added, just as if he’d replied.
On the Sunday it rained again. Sister Margerison, on her afternoon off, listened to the wireless in her tiny room and heard that the Americans had sunk Jap ships, ostensibly to save the Australians from invasion. German planes had been spotted over Northern Ireland, and it was rumoured that Exeter Cathedral had been hit. Remembering a long-ago visit there, the sister sighed. It was difficult to focus her mind on wider issues when her own particular battle was being fought right here in the huge grey hospital, with the shattered bodies of young men taking too long to heal, and shattered minds improving even more slowly.
Switching off the wireless, she sat for a while in the darkening room. Heavy rain dashed against the window-pane, and outside the trees swayed into nebulous shapes against the cold east wind.
The boy with the broken spine had died. The boy with the damaged skull had gone berserk twice in as many days. Because of an immovable piece of shrapnel, he was destined to move through what was left of his life in the doubtful sanctuary of one mental hospital after another, his pretty young wife spending endless hours travelling to visit him, their two children growing older as their father deteriorated year by year.
‘Waste!’ Sister Margerison got up from her chair and went over to the mirror to pin on her pleated cap. ‘Stupid, man-made waste! The war going on indefinitely without the end even remotely in sight. More broken bodies, more damaged minds.’
Securing the cap with kirby-grips, she stared at her reflection, her eyes as hard as flint, a woman coming up to middle age destined to walk her wards till she was pensioned off, anticipating that day occasionally with a dread that chilled her heart.
The first bed she approached as she went back on duty was Mr Turner’s. He was sitting on top of the covers staring straight ahead, clenching and unclenching his left hand round the rubber ball provided as exercise therapy.
‘You should be in the day room, Mr Turner.’ Sister Margerison gave the end of David’s bed an angry push, setting it into line with the others. ‘There’s nothing to stop you having a gentle little game of ping-pong now if you’re careful not to move your head too much. I can see you being discharged in a month or so. They’re sending someone to talk to you next week. About what you’re going to do,’ she went on firmly. ‘And stop looking at me as if I’ve gone loco! You’re a king to some of them in here. At least you’re alive!’
Not used to flinching, the sister blinked as the nice polite Mr Turner shot her a look spiked with what could have been taken for hatred.
‘You’ll be trained for something,’ she went on firmly. ‘A trained civilian can be worth even more than a trained flyer. You boys are so damn dedicated you put yourselves in the same category as the flamin’ Nazis! It’s all very well giving up your life for your country but there’s a damned sight more sense in living it in some less glamorous occupation.’
She was speaking so quietly that it was impossible for anyone but David to hear. Her plain face was suffused with colour as she tried to beat some reason into the quiet man staring at her in amazement.
‘All you do is sit there and gloom about not being able to fly any more, instead of thanking God that for you the war is over! You’ve made your sacrifice! So pull yourself together, Mr Turner, and get off that bed and go into the rest room! And communicate!’
Thrusting the notepad and pencil at David, she stood straight-backed watching him as he shuffled slowly down the ward, the cord of his dressing-gown trailing down at one side, his feet in the hospital slippers making little smacking sounds on the brown oilcloth. His back looked defeated, his faltering steps were those of a man drained of initiative, and she was sure that if his head had not been held up by the supportive collar it would have drooped too like that of a man in despair.
Sister Margerison turned away, her anger evaporating. She had exceeded her brief in speaking so forcibly an
d she knew it. But somehow, somewhere, there had to be the means of giving back that gentle lovely man his reason for living. No human being could be or ought to be as alone as that.
Appalled at her own vehemence she turned to march back down the ward, then suddenly as if her memory had been jogged she remembered the letter taken from Mr Turner’s pocket on the day he had been admitted more dead than alive. Against all the ethics of her profession, she knelt down and rummaged around in David’s locker.
Not for the first time Sister Margerison was going to take matters into her own capable hands. She might be going to stick her neck out. She could be walking down a blind alley, but, by George, Mr Turner wasn’t going to sink into a state of self-destructive apathy – not if she, Sister Irene Margerison, could help it.
Stuffing Sally’s letter into the starched bib of her apron, she set off down the ward, frowning at a patient who was furtively smoking a cigarette behind a copy of the Daily Mail.
Twelve
DAVID WAS STARING unseeingly at the open pages of a paperback book as Sally came through the swing doors into the ward.
The last time the boys had visited him they had let it drop discreetly that there was a big show coming up. It might be some time, they had said, hinting at an operation so vast and with so many aircraft taking part that the mind boggled at the thought of it.
‘We’ll blot the bloody sky out, the Yanks and us,’ Tim had said, talking too quickly as usual, his mouth moving and his eyes flickering anywhere but on David’s face.
‘Good show,’ David had mouthed.
‘A piece of cake.’ Tim had grinned his lop-sided smile. ‘I’ll be around.’
So on that rainy Sunday afternoon David kept his eyes fixed on his book, listening to the murmur of voices and the scrape of chairs as visitors settled themselves, depositing cakes made with dried eggs or a precious apple on the bedside lockers.