One could not, he said, continually reflect upon the material and spiritual waste involved whenever that highly trained product, a man in the prime of life, was instantaneously killed by a stray bullet, or life at the front would be one long misery. Yet nothing, he curiously concluded, had depressed him so much in France as the Crucifixes which were occasionally to be seen still standing in desolate shell-swept areas. The horror of the one intensified a hundred-fold that of the other, and the image of the tortured Christ struck him as ‘an appalling monument to the personification of Utter Failure’.
Three weeks afterwards he wrote again to tell me that he had ‘not yet seen War’. He was perpetually haunted, he added, by the fear of not coming up to scratch in an emergency. ‘I tell you it is a positive curse to have a temperament out here. The ideal thing to be is a typical Englishman.’
As Christmas approached I was moved from the eye and malaria block, in which I had worked since October amongst semi-convalescent patients, to the Sisters’ quarters, where I became a combination of assistant housekeeper and head parlourmaid. This work, which every V.A.D. had to do for a month, was even less congenial to me than nursing, and I found the supervision of the Maltese maids no light occupation. ‘If you don’t keep everything - even half a jug of diluted milk - either locked up or directly under your eyes,’ I recorded, ‘you needn’t inquire where it has gone when you can’t find it.’
There was compensation, however, in the New Year flowers - golden oxalis and white arabis and red campions and miniature celandines - which were already springing up on the patch of rocky ground in front of the Sisters’ quarters. Here, I noticed, the lords-and-ladies were striped brown and terra-cotta, ‘like one curly petal of a tiger lily’. More frequent visits to Valletta, too, were possible, and were always potentially exciting, for Malta, that little dumping-ground of the nations, was full of unexpected meetings. I nearly ran into a boy from Buxton one afternoon as I was hurrying to take the ferry from Valletta back to Sliema, and the very V.A.D. who now shared my room was the daughter of the ‘little’ greengrocer with whom we used to deal in Macclesfield during my childhood.
The Indian and Egyptian markets in Valletta, with their silk shawls, embroidered kimonos, Maltese lace, grass-lawn tablecloths, rich crêpe-de-Chines, Chinese embroideries, sandalwood boxes, painted fans and black cigarette-cases inlaid with gold, had already tempted me to spend all the pay and allowances that I could rake together upon Christmas presents of every kind, and with these I sent home two small water-colours purchased in Naples.
‘They are for my study at Oxford if ever I get there again,’ I told my mother, ‘and even if I don’t I can’t imagine myself without a study if I am alive. I would rather do without a bedroom and sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room than without a room to myself where I can have a fire of my own and not be interrupted by anyone . . . Your remark about the War lasting five (more) years makes me wonder if I shall ever go there at all. If it really does . . . I should think we should all be dead by then, but if I am not I shall only be twenty-seven, and it would still be worth while . . . It seems very hard that we should be the generation to suffer the War, though I suppose it is very splendid too, and is making us better and wiser and deeper men and women than our ancestors ever were or our descendants ever will be. It seems to me that the War will make a big division of “before” and “after” in the history of the world, almost if not quite as big as the “B.C.” and “A.D.” division made by the birth of Christ . . . Sorry you see me in spirit in my V.A.D. hat; can’t you try to think of me in something more becoming? I am always glad Roland never saw me in it, so that if he has taken any memory of me into the next world, it isn’t of me in that hat . . . Tell me more about Oliver Lodge’s Raymond.’
When Christmas preparations began in earnest, and I was set to decorate the mess-tent with palms and streamers, and to make jellies and huge fruit salads for the men’s special teas, the memory of the previous year, with its similar activities so blindly and cheerfully performed in the very hour of Roland’s death, came back like the dull ache of an old shattering wound. In the middle of the bright, noisy kitchen, with the Home Sister issuing orders in her harsh, melancholy voice, and the Maltese maids around her chattering like monkeys, it was sometimes difficult to prevent an inconvenient tear from falling into the pail of fruit salad.
‘I wonder where he is - and if he is at all,’ I soliloquised in my diary, for there was now no one within several hundred miles to whom such personal speculations could be expressed. ‘I wonder if he sees me writing this now. It’s absurd to say time makes one forget; I miss him as much as ever I did. One recovers from the shock, just as one gradually would get used to managing with one’s left hand if one had lost one’s right, but one never gets over the loss, for one is never the same after it. I have got used to facing the long empty years ahead of me if I survive the War, but I have always before me the realisation of how empty they are and will be, since he will never be there again.’
A letter from Edward which came just after Christmas told me that I had not really been alone during those days of recollection; as usual, he had shared my thoughts with that peculiar intimacy which is supposed to exist only between twins. He began, however, by describing his investiture at Buckingham Palace on December 17th.
‘There were 3 C.M.G.s, about 72 D.S.O.s and about 30 M.C.s, so it was a fairly small investiture. We were instructed what to do by a colonel who I believe is the King’s special private secretary and then the show started. One by one we walked into an adjoining room about 6 paces - halt - left turn - bow - 2 paces forward - King pins on Cross - shake hands - pace back - bow - right turn and slope off by another door . . . The King spoke to a few of us, including me; he said, “I hope you have quite recovered from your wound,” to which I replied “Very nearly, thank you, Sir” and then went out with the Cross in my pocket in a case. I met Mother just outside and we went off towards Victoria thinking we had quite escaped all the photographers, but unfortunately one beast from the Daily Mirror saw us and took us.’
He concluded with a paragraph which showed that no Military Cross, no Royal congratulations, no uproarious welcome from his successors at Uppingham, could alter his estimate of Roland as a lost leader whose value to the world was so far in excess of his own.
‘I know it is just a year and you are thinking of him and his terrible death, and of what might have been, even as I am too. This year has, I think, made him seem very far off but yet all the more unforgettable. His life was like a guiding star which left this firmament when he died and went to some other one where it still shines as brightly, but so very far away. I know you will in a way live through last year’s tragedy again, but may it bring still greater hopes for “the last and brightest Easter day” which you and I can barely conceive, let alone understand . . . How happy I could be to see you meet again.’
In my reply, just after the New Year, I told him, alone amongst my correspondents, of a small but strange happening that occurred just after I had written my diary on the anniversary of Roland’s death.
‘It seems rather curious that on the night of December 23rd I was kneeling by my bed in the dark thinking about him and that night last year when suddenly, just before 11.0, at the very hour of his death, the whole sky was lighted up and everything outside became queerly and startlingly visible. At first I thought it was just lightning, which is very frequent at night here, but when the light remained and did not flash away again I felt quite uncanny and afraid and hid my face in my hands for two or three minutes. When I looked up again the light had gone; I went to the window but could see nothing at all to account for the sudden brilliant glow. A day or two after I heard that there had been a most extraordinary shooting star, which had lit up the whole sky for two or three minutes before it had fallen . . . (Someone suggested it was the Star of Bethlehem fallen to earth because it could no longer shine in the dark hour of War.) Just coincidence, of course, but strange from my point of view
that it should have happened at that hour. I remember one day last winter how Clare pointed out to me a star, which shone very brightly among the others, and said “Wouldn’t it be strange if that star were Roland ?” ’
7
As 1917 came in, bringing warmer winds to Malta and a riot of brilliant flowers to the rocks, I realised that, for the time being, I was certainly having the best of things. One after another, my mails from home emphasised the shortage of food, of money, of domestic help, the cost of eggs and butter and the difficulty of buying them, the struggle to disregard minor illnesses and keep on at work. Each letter was grey with growing depression, but grim with the determination to ‘carry on’, ‘keep a stiff upper lip’, or whatever special aphorism appealed to the writer. The winter, too, was excessively cold in England and France, and its bitter discomforts added to the general gloom and the sense of endurance strained beyond its limit.
‘My work in town is daily getting heavier,’ wrote my uncle in the midst of an attack of bronchitis, ‘and last weekend and this I have felt more like a beaten dog than anything else. Just at present of course the War Loan is giving us an enormous amount of work . . . The past fortnight has been intensely cold, 18 and 20 degrees of frost in Purley and as much as 36 degrees in other parts of England. Coal is of course very short and very expensive but there is some to be had at round about 40s. a ton and gas is plentiful though the price of that has gone up 50 per cent since the War.’
In his first letter after January 19th, he dropped the sombre tale of domestic misery to give me an account of the Silver-town explosion.
‘On Friday evening we were working quietly away in the office when there was a most appalling bang, and the whole building shook visibly and windows were shattered. We first thought a Zeppelin was overhead and had just missed us, but there was no repetition so we went out to investigate. There was not much news that evening - but we since learnt it was a great explosion about 10-12 miles way east of London . . . I should think it is the worst accident we have had at all on munitions work.’
Years afterwards a journalist friend told me that on the evening of this disaster she was working in her room in Bayswater when the drawn blind suddenly lifted without a sound, remained horizontal in the air for a moment or two, and then slowly dropped. There was no wind and she had heard no noise. She said it was the most terrifying experience that she had ever been through.
In Malta the nursing was now very light; most of our patients were convalescent, and off-duty time was plentiful. Many of the V.A.D.s and the younger Sisters, whose work on the blocks no longer exhausted their vitality, began to find scope for superfluous energy in circumventing the Army regulations which, even in the atmosphere of comparative reasonableness that prevailed on the island, forbade the nursing and medical staffs to mix except after elaborate permission had been obtained, and chaperonage, which was hopefully supposed to be effective, provided. Whispered conversations and outbursts of giggling all over the Sisters’ quarters proclaimed the existence of numerous minor intrigues. At many of these I could guess, but I did not join them, for my one experience, so far, of mixed parties had not tempted me to desire a repetition.
On Boxing Day night, fortified by permission from the Matron, I went to the opera, Madame Butterfly, in Valletta with two medical officers and a Sister, who was not young and very far from beautiful. Even during the War quite tolerable performances were given, though most of the choruses had a Maltese tang and the progress of the opera was liable to be interrupted by ‘incidents’. On this very evening, the baritone in the midst of a passionate declamation was loudly challenged to a duel by an off-stage rival. He immediately interrupted his love-plaint to arrange time and place with the challenger, and returned amid the enthusiastic plaudits of the audience to resume his song exactly where he had broken it off.
As soon as the opera with its emotional music and heroic disturbance was over, the Sister, who had been confidently appointed my chaperon, and one of the medical officers - an ill-mannered individual remotely resembling the Kaiser, of whom I knew her to be hopelessly and inexplicably enamoured - disappeared completely for the rest of the evening. I was left to go home with the other M.O., a moustachioed middle-aged Scotsman whose presence was emphasised by a permanent aroma of whisky. He was evidently inspired - or had always intended - to emulate his colleague’s good fortune, for as we drove back in the carrozza along the dark road from Sliema to St George’s Bay, I found myself suddenly enfolded in a noxious embrace. I demonstrated my objection to this treatment with more vehemence than tact, and we arrived back in St George’s compound about 1 a.m., both of us sullen and speechless.
Long walks across the island, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of the older V.A.D.s who had not yet been stirred to indiscreet emotion by the coming of spring, seemed infinitely preferable to such unattractive company. Two of these women, one of whom came from Oxford and for years had played the violin in the Bach Choir Orchestra, went with me on half-day expeditions to Musta, to Dingli, to the V-shaped sandy beach at Ghain Tuffieha, to the crumbling megalithic temple at silent Hagiar Kim and to the far point of Melleha, where we looked across a dark-blue channel to the steep golden-brown rocks of Gozo rising sheer out of the water. At St Paul’s Bay we rowed in a hazardous green tub to the inhospitable rock on which the much-travelled Apostle was said to have been wrecked, and afterwards walked the six miles homeward along the stony road over the rocks, with the brilliant glow of the sunset behind us, and before us the swift star-studded darkness rising over the sea. I never felt quite at ease among those rocks; a strange silence pervaded them and a sense of being observed, as though age-old presences were watching our sacrilegious invasion with hostile, inhuman eyes.
Wherever we went the spring flowers, lovely and benevolent, mitigated the invisible antagonism of the rocks. Their colours, so clear, so delicate, so generous, smote our eyes with their candid beauty. I still remember the exquisite pang with which, after crossing a field carpeted golden and orange with oxalis and single wild marigolds, I suddenly saw for the first time the silvery pink of tall asphodels lifting their heads from the deep grass of a half-hidden glade. Between the boulders beside the road, giant irises waved their purple flags, and among the rocks a deep scarlet vetch grew from so shallow a soil that it seemed to spring from the very face of the stone, and created, quite startlingly, an illusion of spilt blood.
After describing the flowers in my letters home, I mentioned how much our comfort had lately been increased by the rather public erection of three bath huts on the high road running in front of St George’s and St Andrew’s Hospitals. No longer would it be necessary, I told my father, to rely for our major ablutions upon the tin foot-baths filled once a week from a stone vat in the yard.
‘Real hot water,’ I boasted, ‘comes out of a tap; it is worked by a geyser on a Primus stove . . . When the tents were first put up someone . . . made slits in the sides to peep through, but the damage has now been replaced and the scandal has died down! Of course you have to keep getting out of the bath to pump the Primus, which would otherwise go out, but that is a detail!’
As the bath orderly was above suspicion, and in any case had as many opportunities as he could wish of seeing the nurses standing in the main road awaiting their turn in the tent with their dressing-gowns blowing round their necks, we concluded that some of the numerous roaming Maltese males must for quite a long time have substituted for their usual evening amusements the entertainment of watching the English Sisters take their baths.
At the beginning of February I was moved from my domestic occupations in the Sisters’ quarters to the one surgical block, where none of the patients were seriously ill. Most of them had slight wounds, originally received in the campaign on the Struma, which owing to peculiarities of constitution or climate had obstinately refused to heal.
‘Our methods here . . . would cause the M.O.s and Sisters at the 1st London to hold up their professional hands in horror,’ runs one letter
home. ‘It makes me smile to remember how there we had hot water that came sterilised out of the tap and so many annexes and wash-places carefully separate from one another - one sink for the dressing-bowls, one for the patients’ crocks, another for the Sisters’ tea-things, etc., etc. Here there is one (cold) tap and one sink, down which everything goes - lysol, dirty water, tealeaves, etc., and in which everything is washed up, from the dressing-bowls and soiled towels and bandages to our biscuit-tin and our soiled tea-cups! (Of course we don’t wash them all up together; we do draw the line at that!)
‘Edward and I both have recollections of the pride they took at the 1st London - not always to the comfort of the patient - in spotless, unruffled beds and beautiful white blankets. I wonder what they would think if they had to try and make comfortable beds out of rough brown Army blankets and mattresses of three ‘biscuits’ - which will never lie properly together - and counterpanes invariably dirty. Here of course you may dust and clean and shake, and shake and dust and clean till you are tired without ever making much impression, as the whole place is so dusty, and one warm gust of sirocco will undo half an hour’s work in half a minute.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 35