I was not surprised; from the first moment that I saw Geoffrey, I found in his baffling, elusive abruptness an indefinable attraction. He hated war, and though the role of poor curate would probably have made him as happy as anyone of his Franciscan temperament could be in a materialistic and self-seeking world, as an officer with the trenches in prospect he became uncertain of his own courage and felt profoundly miserable. Perhaps his most surprising quality was his beauty, which I cannot remember having seen equalled in any young man. Over six feet tall and proportionately broad, he had strongly marked, rather large features, deeply set grey-blue eyes with black lashes, and very thick, wavy brown hair. Owing to the appropriate sequence of his initials, he and Edward were known to the battalion as ‘Brit and Gryt’.
‘Public opinion has made it,’ I remarked to Roland, ‘a high and lofty virtue for us women to countenance the departure of such as these and you to regions where they will probably be slaughtered in a brutally degrading fashion in which we would never allow animals to be slaughtered . . . To the saner mind it seems more like a reason for shutting up half the nation in a criminal lunatic asylum!’
The very term in which I had gone up to Somerville and Edward had spent his few weeks in Oxford, Geoffrey had been due there at University College. After following the progress of the new Allied expedition to Salonika, and studying with mixed feelings the competitive journalistic outbursts over the shooting of Nurse Cavell, the three of us read, rather sadly, in The Times of October 15th, the customary account of the opening of the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, and speculated whether we should ever again see as students the grey walls clothed in their scarlet robes of autumn creeper. Would Roland, I wondered, read the article in France, and share both the poignancy of our regret and the bitter obstinacy of our determination to go on repudiating the life of scholarship that we had once chosen with such ardent enthusiasm?
On the following day, as if to justify my decision to remain away from college, my orders came from Devonshire House, telling me to report at the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell, on Monday, October 18th. Simultaneously a card arrived from Betty to say that she too had received orders to go to the same unit. Twenty-four hours later, in the midst of the rapid clearing-up and packing to which I was to grow so tediously accustomed during the next three years, I walked up and down the familiar roads, bidding a hurried good-bye to all the places made dear to me, even in Buxton, by association with Roland. It might be a long time, I thought, before I saw them again, and I was not mistaken, for I have never revisited the town since that Sunday afternoon. The leaves were falling fast, and a misty twilight quenched the autumn tints into greyness. Now that the moment of departure had come, I felt melancholy and a little afraid.
The next morning, soberly equipped in my new V.A.D. uniform, I took for the last time the early train to London, and turned my back for ever upon my provincial young-ladyhood.
5
Camberwell versus Death
TRIOLET
There’s a sob on the sea
And the Old Year is dying.
Borne on night wings to me
There’s a sob on the sea,
And for what could not be
The great world-heart is sighing.
There’s a sob on the sea
And the Old Year is dying.
R. A. L. 1913.
1
After the solid, old-fashioned comfort of the Buxton house, it seemed strange to be the quarter-possessor of a bare-boarded room divided into cubicles by much-washed curtains of no recognisable colour, with only a bed, a washstand and a tiny chest of drawers to represent one’s earthly possessions. There was not, I noticed with dismay, so much as a shelf or a mantelpiece capable of holding two or three books; the few that I had brought with me would have to be inaccessibly stored in my big military trunk.
As soon as I had unpacked in the cold, comfortless cubicle, I sat down on my bed and wrote a short letter to Roland on an old box-lid.
‘I feel a mixture of strangeness and independence and depression and apprehension and a few other things to-night. Though I am really nearer to you, you somehow feel farther away. Write to me soon,’ I implored him. ‘London - darkest London - sends you its love too, and wishes - oh! ever so much! - that it may soon see you again.’
Now two insignificant units at the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell - the military extension of St Bartholomew’s Hospital - Betty and I had reported to the Matron that afternoon. We were among the youngest members of the staff, we learnt later, only two of the other V.A.D.s being ‘under age’. The nucleus of the hospital, a large college, red, gabled, creeper-covered, is still one of the few dignified buildings in the dismal, dreary, dirty wilderness of south-east London, with its paper-strewn pavements, its little mean streets, and its old, ugly houses tumbling into squalid decay. Formerly - and now again - a training centre for teachers, it was commandeered for use as a hospital early in the War, together with some adjacent elementary schools, the open park-space opposite, and its satellite hostel nearly two miles away on Champion Hill.
To this hostel, as soon as we had reported ourselves, Betty and I were dispatched with our belongings. Our taxicab, driving through Camberwell Green over Denmark Hill and turning off the summit of Champion Hill into a pleasant, tree-shaded by-road, deposited us before a square, solid building of dirty grey stone, with gaping uncurtained windows. Closely surrounded by elms and chestnuts, tall, ancient and sooty, it looked gloomy and smelt rather dank; we should not be surprised, we thought, to find old tombstones in the garden.
At that stage of the War the military and civilian professional nurses who had joined Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service or the Territorial Force Reserve were still suspicious of the young semi-trained amateurs upon whose assistance, they were beginning to realise with dismay, they would be obliged to depend for the duration of the War. Only about a dozen V.A.D.s had preceded the batch with which I was sent, and the arrangements made for our reception were typical of the spirit in which, as a nation, we muddled our way through to ‘victory’.
It still seems to me incredible that medical men and women, of all people, should not have realised how much the efficiency of over-worked and under-trained young women would have been increased by the elimination of avoidable fatigue, and that, having contemplated the addition of V.A.D.s to the staff for at least six months before engaging them, they did not make the hostel completely ready for them before they arrived instead of waiting till they got there. But in those days we had no Institute of Industrial Psychology to suggest ideal standards to professional organisations, and a large proportion of our military arrangements were permeated with a similar unimaginativeness. On a small scale it undermined the health and even cost the lives of young women in hospitals; on a large scale it meant the lack of ammunition, the attempt to hold positions with insufficient numbers, and the annihilation of our infantry with our own high-explosive shells.
Each morning at 7 a.m. we were due at the hospital, where we breakfasted, and went on duty at 7.30. Theoretically we travelled down by the workmen’s trams which ran over Champion Hill from Dulwich, but in practice these trams were so full that we were seldom able to use them, and were obliged to walk, frequently in pouring rain and carrying suitcases containing clean aprons and changes of shoes and stockings, the mile and a half from the hostel to the hospital. As the trams were equally full in the evenings, the journey on foot had often to be repeated at the end of the day.
Whatever the weather, we were expected to appear punctually on duty looking clean, tidy and cheerful. As the V.A.D. cloak-room was then on the top floor of the college, up four flights of stone steps, we had to allow quarter of an hour for changing, in addition to the half hour’s walk, in order to be in time for breakfast. This meant leaving the hostel at 6.15, after getting up about 5.45 and washing in icy water in the dreary gloom of the ill-lit, dawn-cold cubicle. After a few grumbles from the two eldest of the room’s fi
ve occupants, we accepted our unnecessary discomforts with mute, philosophical resignation. When the rain poured in torrents as we struggled up or down Denmark Hill in the blustering darkness all through that wet autumn, Betty and I encouraged each other with the thought that we were at last beginning to understand just a little what winter meant to the men in the trenches.
Many chills and other small illnesses resulted from the damp, breakfastless walk undertaken so early in the morning by tired girls not yet broken in to a life of hardship. After I left I heard that a V.A.D. living at the hostel had died of pneumonia and had thus been responsible for the establishment of morning and evening ambulances, but until then no form of transport was provided or even suggested. Neither, apparently, did it occur to the authorities who so cheerfully billeted us in a distant, ill-equipped old house, that young untried women who were continually in contact with septic wounds and sputum cups and bed-pans, and whose constantly wet feet became cumulatively sorer from the perpetual walks added to the unaccustomed hours of standing, required at least a daily bath if they were to keep in good health.
At the hostel, to meet the needs of about twenty young women, was one cold bathroom equipped with an ancient and unreliable geyser. This apparatus took about twenty minutes to half fill the bath with lukewarm water, and as supper at the hospital was not over till nearly nine o’clock, and lights at the hostel had to be out soon after ten, there was seldom time after the journey up Denmark Hill for more than two persons per evening to occupy the bathroom. So temperamental was the geyser that the old housekeeper at the hostel refused to allow anyone but herself to manipulate it. While the tepid water trickled slowly into the bath she would sit anxiously perched beside the antique cylinder, apparently under the impression that if she took her eye off it for a moment it was bound to explode.
Any gas company could probably have installed an up-to-date water-heater in half a day, but it had not occurred to anybody to order this to be done. As several Sisters also slept in the hostel the V.A.D.s had seldom much luck in appropriating the bath, so in the bitter November cold we did our shivering best to remove the odours and contacts of the day with tiny jugfuls of lukewarm water. Later a second bathroom was installed, a process which, as I told Roland a few weeks afterwards, ‘for some reason or other requires the cutting off of the entire hot water supply . . . It is rather an amusing state of affairs for the middle of London.’ Never, except when travelling, had I to put up with so much avoidable discomfort throughout my two subsequent years of foreign service as I endured in the centre of the civilised world in the year of enlightenment 1915.
Much subsequent reflection has never enabled me to decide who was really responsible for our cheerless reception. Probably, in the unfamiliar situation, responsibility was never formally allocated to anyone by anybody, and, human nature being incurably optimistic and fundamentally hostile to assuming any work not established as its own by long tradition, each person who might have shouldered the task of organisation hopefully supposed it to have been performed by one of the others.
Organisation and regulation of another sort existed in plenty; it was evidently felt that, without the detailed regimentation of their daily conduct, amateur intruders would never fit into the rigid framework of hospital discipline. We went on duty at 7.30 a.m., and came off at 8 p.m., our hours, including three hours’ off-time and a weekly half day - all of which we gave up willingly enough whenever a convoy came in or the ward was full of unusually bad cases - thus amounted to a daily twelve and a half. We were never allowed to sit down in the wards, and our off-duty time was seldom allocated before the actual day. Night duty, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. over a period of two months, involved a twelve-hour stretch without off-time, though one night’s break was usually allowed in the middle. For this work we received the magnificent sum of £20 a year, plus a tiny uniform allowance and the cost of our laundry. Extra mess allowance was given only on foreign service, but at Camberwell the food, though monotonous, was always sufficient.
Those of us whose careers survived the Denmark Hill conditions gradually came, through the breaking-in process of sheer routine, to find the life tolerable enough. We all acquired puffy hands, chapped faces, chilblains and swollen ankles, but we seldom actually went sick, somehow managing to remain on duty with colds, bilious attacks, neuralgia, septic fingers and incipient influenza. It never then occurred to us that we should have been happier, healthier, and altogether more competent if the hours of work had been shorter, the hostel life more private and comfortable, the daily walks between hostel and hospital eliminated, the rule against sitting down in the wards relaxed, and off-duty time known in advance when the work was normal. Far from criticising our Olympian superiors, we tackled our daily duties with a devotional enthusiasm now rare amongst young women, since a more cynical post-war generation, knowing how easily its predecessors were hoodwinked through their naïve idealism, naturally tends to regard this quality with amusement and scorn.
Every task, from the dressing of a dangerous wound to the scrubbing of a bed-mackintosh, had for us in those early days a sacred glamour which redeemed it equally from tedium and disgust. Our one fear was to be found wanting in the smallest respect; no conceivable fate seemed more humiliating than that of being returned to Devonshire House as ‘unsuitable’ after a month’s probation. The temptation to exploit our young wartime enthusiasm must have been immense - and was not fiercely resisted by the military authorities.
2
Most of the patients at Camberwell were privates and N.C.O.s, but the existence of a small officers’ section made me dream of fascinating though improbable coincidences.
‘I wonder,’ I wrote to Roland, ‘if some fine morning I shall come on duty and hear indirectly from a friendly V.A.D. that a certain Lieutenant L. of the 7th Worcestershires came in with the convoy last night . . . But it’s too good to think of. It is the kind of thing that only happens in sensational novels.’
My first ward was a long Tommies’ hut in the open park, containing sixty beds of acute surgical cases. The knowledge of masculine invalid psychology that I gradually acquired in my various hospitals stopped short at the rank of quarter-master-sergeant, for throughout the War I was never posted to a British officers’ ward for longer than a few hours at a time. Apparently my youth and childish chocolate-box prettiness gave every Matron under whom I served the impression that if I were sent to nurse officers I should improve the occasion in ways not officially recognised by the military authorities.
When I began to work in the long hut, my duties consisted chiefly in preparing dressing-trays and supporting limbs - a task which the orderlies seldom undertook because they were so quickly upset by the butcher’s-shop appearance of the uncovered wounds. Soon after I arrived I saw one of them, who was holding a basin, faint right on the top of the patient.
‘Many of the patients can’t bear to see their own wounds, and I don’t wonder,’ I recorded.
Although the first dressing at which I assisted - a gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid bare - turned me sick and faint for a moment that I afterwards remembered with humiliation, I minded what I described to Roland as ‘the general atmosphere of inhumanness’ far more than the grotesque mutilations of bodies and limbs and faces. The sight of the ‘Bart’s’ Sisters, calm, balanced, efficient, moving up and down the wards self-protected by that bright immunity from pity which the highly trained nurse seems so often to possess, filled me with a deep fear of merging my own individuality in the impersonal routine of the organisation.
‘There is no provision,’ I told Roland in one of my earliest letters from Camberwell, ‘for any interests besides one’s supposed interest in one’s work. Of course I hate it. There is something so starved and dry about hospital nurses - as if they had to force all the warmth out of themselves before they could be really good nurses. But personally I would rather suffer ever so much in my work than become indifferent to pain. I don’t mind anything really so
long as I don’t lose my personality - or even have it temporarily extinguished. And I don’t think I can do that when I have You.’
It was perhaps fortunate that I did not know how inexorably the months in which I should have to do what I hated would pile themselves up into years, nor foresee how long before the end I too, from overwork and excessive experience, should become intolerant of suffering in my patients. Even without the bitterness of that knowledge I felt very desolate, and as much cut off from what philosophers call ‘the like-minded group’ as if I had been imprisoned in one of the less ‘highbrow’ circles of Dante’s Purgatorio . My first experience of convoys - the ‘Fall in’ followed by long, slowly moving lines of ambulances and the sudden crowding of the surgical wards with cruelly wounded men - came as a relief because it deprived me of the opportunity for thought.
‘I had no time to wonder whether I was going to do things right or not,’ I noted; ‘they simply had to be done right.’
But afterwards the baffling contrast between the ideal of service and its practical expression - a contrast that grew less as our ideals diminished with the years while our burden of remorseless activities increased - drove me to write a puzzled letter to Roland.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 23