by Robert Ryan
Heavier-than-air machines. Perhaps something else the world was not yet ready for.
TWELVE
Staff Nurse Jennings had already departed when Mrs Gregson awoke, even though it was not yet seven. Her cot was empty, the bed made with admirable precision. She must have moved like a wraith. The air in the tent was freezing and Mrs Gregson’s breath rolled over the blankets like ground mist on a meadow. She kicked away the now cold ceramic cylinder of the hot-water bottle and shuffled up onto the two thin pillows. Alice, she noted, was still fast asleep, not quite snoring, but snuffling, as if in the throes of a dream.
Your secret is safe with me.
She regretted her reaction, now. Jennings’s arm must be quite bruised. Perhaps it was an attempt at friendship by the nurse, something they could both share and keep from the outside world? It wasn’t a secret, she reminded herself. It was public knowledge. If you knew where to look. She had nothing to be ashamed of. It was simply part of her previous life, the life before Alice Pippery and motor cycles, nursing and war, when there was a Mr Gregson and a household to run and she only ever saw blood when she pricked her finger with a needle. Not the gallons she had seen since.
She knew she should get up and make some tea. Alice would have. But she gave herself another few minutes in the warmth. She would make peace with Jennings. Although she still wanted her silence. It was a multi-layered story, one that would not please Alice one little bit. And she didn’t want to lose her.
She must have drifted off because Sister Spence’s voice made her start.
‘Ladies.’ She was standing at the foot of Miss Pippery’s bed, arms crossed, looking as if she had slept for fourteen hours on a feather mattress.
‘Sorry, Sister,’ Mrs Gregson said. ‘What time is it?’
‘Seven thirty. Jennings has been on ward for an hour.’
‘We were just getting up,’ said Miss Pippery, her sticky eyes giving the lie to that. She rubbed them clear and threw back the covers.
‘Dr Watson has some other duties today, and so I was wondering if I might avail myself of your services.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ they replied in unison.
‘Once you have had your cup of tea.’
‘Thank you, Sister,’ said Miss Pippery. ‘Do you have any task in mind?’
‘I do,’ said Sister Spence. ‘I just wondered how handy you two are with a paintbrush.’
THIRTEEN
An intemperate rain squall was battering the old monastery. Rivulets of water ran down windowpanes – many of which displayed the concussion cracks of artillery fire from the days when the lines were more fluid – and gutters rattled and overflowed. The water was pounding sills and parapets so hard it had a milky opaqueness.
As they walked through the corridor to the officers’ ward – a walkway that smelled strongly of fresh paint – Myles explained why he had asked Watson to dress in civvies. ‘The men like my rounds because when Major Torrance does them, any junior rank who can manage it is obliged to stand next to his bed. A lot of them who shouldn’t, make the effort. They bust stitches, shift dressings. Me, I like things informal.’
They entered what had once been a chapel, although it had been stripped of any religious symbolism and was now the officers’ surgical ward. The high roof and soaring stone walls made it chill and a brace of large paraffin heaters were working overtime. There were twin rows of closely packed steel bedsteads facing each other, some with screens around them, behind which, Watson had no doubt, wounds were being washed or irrigated. The smell of Bay Rum was overwhelmed by a riot of familiar medicinal odours. Two territorials, one of them Staff Nurse Jennings, and a brace of orderlies were clearing up the last of breakfast. Jennings looked over and permitted herself a fleeting smile that segued into a more formal inclination of the head.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Myles bellowed. Many of the patients returned the greeting. Others, lost behind dressings or adrift in their own world, made little or no acknowledgement. ‘This, gentlemen, is Dr Watson, who will be assisting me today. Treat him as you would me. Only better. Right, I’ll take the left. If you would care to inspect the right?’ He dropped his voice. ‘We keep them here longer now, instead of passing them down the line. Orders. Too many officers getting out of the war with relatively light injuries. Now, we let them rest up, see if they are fit to return. So don’t be too keen to move them along. Nurse!’ It was Jennings who came over. ‘Brief Dr Watson on the patients, will you?’
‘Of course, Dr Myles. Did you sleep well, Major?’
‘I did. And you, Staff Nurse Jennings?’
‘Well, thank you.’ The dark crescents under her eyes suggested a few more hours wouldn’t go amiss. ‘Although your VADs are not the quietest of company. Shall we start with Captain Morley here?’ She indicated the nearest patient. ‘Came to us ten days ago. PWSB. Penetrating wound by a secondary body.’ This usually referred to items driven into the body by a blast, often the contents of the victim’s pockets.
‘A couple of teeth in my chest,’ the captain explained. ‘They weren’t even mine.’
‘We are seeing this a lot, now,’ interrupted Staff Nurse Jennings. ‘Shells are throwing up fragments of bones, animal or even human, from the earth.’
Watson stepped closer to the captain. His skin had a strange hue. The eyes, too, showed a tinge of pigment. He put a hand on the forehead. It was cool to the touch.
‘Lucky man,’ said Watson as they moved on. ‘Could easily have become a gas gangrene case.’
‘He was, Maj— Do I call you Doctor or Major in those clothes?’
‘Whichever feels most comfortable. His colour, though? Jaundice? Gallstones?’
‘Apparently not.’
Watson halted and pondered for a moment. He half expected to hear that imaginary voice, but it kept its counsel. This was, after all, his field of expertise. ‘What do Percy Shelley and George Bernard Shaw have in common, Nurse?’
Jennings looked flustered. ‘Writers?’
‘Indeed. But some men would see another connection beyond literature.’
Watson swung back and retraced his steps to the captain. He asked the question again.
‘Vegetarians,’ said Morley enthusiastically.
‘Precisely. Two famous vegetarians,’ said Watson. ‘Show me the soles of your feet.’ Watson impatiently tugged the expertly tucked blankets and sheets free. ‘There, Staff Nurse Jennings. Orange. Where do you keep the carrots?’
‘My batman makes up a drink each morning.’
‘Always carrots?’
‘And asparagus if we get it. Haven’t had much luck sourcing any of late. Hardly the season.’
‘And you’ve been drinking it over here?’
The captain raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, of course. They hardly cater for men of my persuasion in the British Army,’ he said. ‘Or indeed in its hospitals. Sorry, Nurse. My mother sends over a hamper of vegetables from Harrods every so often. I share them out. Keep the carrots for m’self, mind.’
‘Carotenaemia,’ said Watson. ‘Harmless. But if you aren’t to start looking very oriental indeed, you need to cut out the carrots, vary the diet. I’d prescribe a meat and malt wine beverage stock, but . . . do you have Marmite, nurse?’
‘Yes.’
‘Two cups a day. And cod liver oil. And no carrots.’
The captain squirmed. ‘Doctor, I hate Marmite—’
Watson had already moved on. ‘Check him again for diabetes, just in case,’ he said softly. ‘The carotenaemia can have an underlying cause.’
The next bed contained a cheery amputee – one leg below the knee, one arm above the elbow – who was happy at the thought of going home. He was due to enter the final section of the evacuation chain later in the day, so all Watson could do was wish him Godspeed. He had a feeling, though, that the day would come when his euphoria would sour. He had a tough lifetime as an invalid ahead of him.
The third patient was in a screened bed. ‘Second Lieutenant Marsde
n is in there,’ said Jennings. ‘Perhaps you had better go in. It’s an SIW.’
A ‘self-inflicted wound’. Men shot themselves through the foot or hand, hoping to get a Blighty. The cleverer ones, so he had heard, did it through a can of bully beef, to mask the powder burns. It often went hideously wrong, however, when the meat was driven into the bullet hole and festered. The wags called them Fray Bentos wounds.
Steeling himself, Watson pulled back the curtain and stepped into the cubicle. The lieutenant, a lethargic-looking boy with large spectacles balanced on his nose, was sitting up, reading a copy of Lord Jim. Both hands looked to be intact. Must be the feet, thought Watson.
‘What kind of wound have we here?’ he asked.
‘Genital, doctor,’ said the lieutenant gloomily.
‘Genital?’ That was a new form of self-mutilation to him. Few were driven to that extreme.
‘Went over the top in an estaminet when I got here.’ An estaminet was a local bar that sometimes doubled as something more. ‘Bayoneted the young girl, you might say. If you get my meaning.’ He gave a weak smile.
‘All too clearly, Marsden. I am meant to find that amusing?’
The lad flinched at the change of tone. ‘No, sir.’
‘Did you wash yourself afterwards?’
‘Face and hands, yes. Thoroughly.’
Watson rolled his eyes.
The façade of insouciance the young man was affecting cracked and crumbled. ‘There’s to be a court martial as soon as I’m better, apparently.’ He looked close to tears at the thought. ‘I didn’t do it deliberately. But nobody here believes me.’ He lowered his voice to a rasp. ‘They spit in my food.’
‘I doubt that.’ Syphilis, Watson surmised, and a dose of a persecution complex and self-pity with it too. Venereal disease was classed by the army as a self-inflicted wound, an attempt to be repatriated. ‘And how are you feeling now?’
‘Weak. Sick. Shocking headaches. It was a maison de tolérance. A bloody blue lamp.’ A brothel for officers; red indicated a place for other ranks. There was a popular rumour – at least among the other ranks – that once a girl had any form of pox, she was instantly demoted down to a red-lamp house.
‘Hold on a moment.’ Watson stepped outside. The curtains were to shield the lad from the others, he now understood, not because of any hideous wound but his pariah status. SIWs of any kind were not well received by officers nursing genuine wounds. For every soldier who deliberately maimed himself, there were scores of young men who faced up to doing their duty. Understandably, the latter felt aggrieved when the former were shipped home.
Of course, it could be that this young man was unfortunate in contracting the disease; but there were infected women who would nevertheless sell themselves as a ticket home for a windy soldier.
‘What treatment have you given the lad?’ he asked the nurse.
‘Injections and inunctions of mercury, Doctor.’
‘Mercury? Don’t you have Salvarsan?’
‘Not here.’
‘I have some in one of my medical kits. Whose patient is he? Dr Myles’s?’
‘Major Torrance’s.’
Mercury injections were crude and the inunctions – the application of mercury ointments – messy and largely ineffective, but the newer drugs had been slow to catch on among the more traditional doctors and he could imagine supplies being difficult to source.
Across the room, Myles was guffawing with a patient who had two stumps in place of legs. The paraplegic soldier was laughing along with the man who had removed his legs. Myles slapped the officer on the shoulder and moved along. Watson felt slightly envious of Myles’s unforced and jovial bedside manner. He had been taught to keep a distance from the patient, even in civilian life. To be detached, analytical and professional. Ah well, the man was from a different country. And a different generation, too, he supposed. Which was almost the same thing.
‘What’s through here?’ he asked Jennings when he had seen the last man, pointing to a thick curtain over a large doorway that had once held wooden doors, judging by the twisted hinges still lolling from the stonework. The door itself had probably been looted for firewood.
‘NCOs mostly,’ she said, changing the dressing on the weeping stump of a young artillery officer.
‘May I?’
‘Of course, Major. I’ll finish up here. We’re going to have you shipped along very soon, aren’t we, Lieutenant Walsh?’
The artilleryman smiled, showing he had lost several teeth as well as his right arm. Watson watched her admiringly for a second, fussing with the amputee’s bed and carrying on a stream of light chatter designed to make him forget, for the moment at least, just how diminished a man he would be when he returned home.
The wall was streaked with a grey-greenish mould that had colonized the brick beneath a leaking gutter. The gutter had been repaired, but the wall itself, part of the Big House’s kitchen block, still looked scabrous. Sister Spence had asked for it to be whitewashed and then for the greenhouse to be ‘freshened up’ .
‘I’d like to freshen her up,’ Mrs Gregson said, when she had gone. She had asked for overalls, but Sister Spence did not want any women on her CCS in trousers. She had found them some smocks that made them look like a pair of Humpty Dumptys. An orderly had brought two pails of water and a bag of lime and left them to it.
‘I think we should scrape that green off first,’ said Miss Pippery.
‘Why?’
‘Well, the wash won’t stick properly. It will flake off within a fortnight.’
‘And where will we be in a fortnight?’ Mrs Gregson asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I do. Somewhere else other than here.’ She bent down and tore open the top of the bag of lime. She ripped a fingernail and let out a curse.
‘Hello, ladies. Need a hand?’
He was a second lieutenant, a touch gangly, but not unattractive either, with a fastidiously neat moustache and clear green eyes. He also had two balls of embarrassment glowing on his upper cheeks.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ Mrs Gregson demanded.
‘Oh, not long. I was just getting some fresh air. Bit stuffy on the wards.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, yes, you’d know all about that, I suppose. Bit rum getting you girls to paint, isn’t it?’
Mrs Gregson rolled her eyes.
He looked at the bag of lime and the two buckets at their feet. ‘But you must mix the lime in at the right proportion, you know. Over-thickening is very common. And you must give it a good old stir.’
‘Must we?’ asked Mrs Gregson.
‘Yes.’ He examined the wall and pointed to the mould. ‘And you’ll have to scrape—’
‘Can you fetch us a stick?’ Mrs Gregson asked, not wanting another lecture. ‘To stir the mix.’
‘Oh. Right-o.’ He began to look around ineffectually.
‘Unless you want to loan us that one.’ She pointed at his swagger stick.
‘I . . . no . . . I’ll be right back. My name’s Metcalf, by the way. James Metcalf.’
As soon as he had gone, Miss Pippery spoke. ‘He’s after something.’
Mrs Gregson agreed. ‘You can’t usually get an officer to fetch sticks quite so easily. Usually takes a few sessions.’
Metcalf returned with a broken broom handle and, as Mrs Gregson poured in the lime, he proceeded to rotate it in the pot with a practised vigour, mixing the contents without spilling or flicking.
‘The thing is, ladies, I am here to see some of the men. Wounded men.’
‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said Mrs Gregson. ‘We’ve got hundreds.’
‘No,’ he corrected solemnly, speaking as if the VADs were particularly dim-witted. ‘These are men, you see, under my command. They were hurt in some shelling. The thing is, I have been asked by some of the officers in my battalion to set about organizing a dance. We’ll be in the area off and on for the foreseeable future, yo
u see. And we thought, while we are out of the line . . . To be honest, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone.’
The women exchanged glances.
‘I mean, while I am here visiting the men, I could ask some of the nurses if they would enjoy the company of officers.’
‘We have plenty of officers here, Lieutenant. Whole ones for a change, do you mean?’ Mrs Gregson asked.
‘I suppose I do, after a fashion. Golly, that sounded cruel.’
‘We’ll think about it,’ said Miss Pippery. Mrs Gregson nodded her agreement. ‘On one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
Miss Pippery flashed a coy smile. ‘You help us paint this wall.’
Mrs Gregson shot her friend an admiring glance. She couldn’t have put it better herself.
‘What? When?’
‘Now.’
He looked down at his once pristine uniform, now lightly floured with lime dust. He brushed at it ineffectually.
Mrs Gregson tutted. ‘Oh, I’m sure we can find you something to cover that. You can paint?’
‘I’ve done my share,’ Metcalf said cautiously, wondering how much manual work a gentleman should admit to. ‘And you’ll think about it? The dance? Perhaps ask some of your chums.’
‘We said we would. And Miss Pippery here, Alice, is the very best fox-trotter you have ever seen.’
Metcalf’s face brightened at the thought. ‘Really?’
‘She was taught by Harry Fox himself.’
Miss Pippery’s eyes dropped to the floor, in what could have been mistaken for bashfulness.
‘Good Lord. Really?’
‘At the Jardin de Danse on the roof of the New York Theatre.’
As Metcalf began to unbutton his tunic, ready to roll up his sleeves, Mrs Gregson and Miss Pippery were careful not to catch each other’s eyes, for fear of collapsing into giggles.
It was shortly after they had finished the wall and were about to move on to the greenhouse that they heard the sound of a man sobbing.