‘Yesterday one man couldn’t have his bed made and had to lie between blankets half the morning, because it was the day for changing sheets and not quite the right number had come up (we only have the exact number). It is very complimentary to call them sheets, too; some are of the consistency of muslin curtains and others are more hole than sheet. However, Army equipment is Army equipment, and you have to hang on to the last thread of a sheet and the last prong of a fork, lest when the day of reckoning comes you should be found wanting. Equipment day is the bane of one’s life in the Army; it is a sort of periodic stocktaking, in which you have to produce everything (or the remains of everything) that has been issued to you in the equipment line. So if you break a cup or tear a sheet or burn a duster you have carefully to keep the fragments, partly to show that you really did have them, partly to prove that you have not absconded with them and put them to some illegitimate use, but chiefly because it is Red Tape, which is the most binding thing in this world and far more binding, it is to be hoped, than anything in the next.’
The leisurely life on this surgical block left plenty of time for reading the various newspapers sent to me from England. From one of these I learnt that the new President of the Board of Education, Mr H. A. L. Fisher, had lately written to the Principal of Somerville deprecating the departure of Oxford women students on war-service. The information left me unperturbed; it belonged to a life which seemed too remote and irrelevant to concern me any more. Some of the dons, I reflected, were doubtless glad to fortify unquiet consciences with such a pronouncement; if patriotic hankerings after war-service drove even the women out of Oxford, Othello’s occupation would indeed be gone, and his - or her - excuse for continuing a pleasant academic life in wartime would no longer exist.
My Classical tutor, I felt sure, would not be influenced by the Fisher declaration. At heart she was always a pioneer, an adventurer, who never accepted the limitations imposed by donnish standards, and later in the spring of 1917 she went to Salonika to act as orderly at one of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Her boat, she wrote to me after landing, had anchored for twelve hours outside Valletta, but she had not been allowed to communicate with me or to go ashore. She stayed in Salonika for some months, fighting summer heat and disease with her usual gallantry, and was there during the great fire which devastated half the town.
8
By the same mail as the newspaper from which I learnt that patriotism amongst Oxford women was now a discredited virtue, came a long communication from Edward, who described one of the characteristic problems of an acting company commander.
‘I . . . spent some time this morning writing a letter on the usual difficult subject: - I had a letter from an innkeeper in B——the other day saying that a certain Corporal S——in my company had an illegitimate child by a Miss J——, who is the innkeeper’s ward, and was not paying for its upkeep. Under such circumstances a man’s pay is compulsorily stopped to the extent of 4d. a day, as I expect you know. I interviewed the corporal, who is a very decent boy not yet nineteen and found that he was quite willing to marry the girl but couldn’t get his parents’ consent and didn’t want to quarrel with them and so get out of any inheritance there might be, etc. Of course he cannot get out to France until he is nineteen and I explained to him and he clearly understood where his duty lay, especially in the event of his being killed, because his parents will allow the marriage after the War. S——wrote to his father again for consent on Friday and got a negative answer and so asked me to write to him this morning, which I did . . . It is the old, old story, as old as the hills, but these things take up a company commander’s time.
‘Do you know, dear child,’ he went on, ‘that women are a great problem to me. I meet very few, of these I dislike almost all, and I don’t think I understand any of them. Of course I am speaking about girls of my own age. Most other officers of my age seem to know any number of fairly decent girls; now and again of course they seem to get hold of a rotten one and sometimes even a prostitute, but I never seem to meet any. Can you throw any light on the matter and do you think I shall ever meet the right one, because at present I can’t conceive the possibility? . . . I am inclined to think that my lack of knowledge of women is due to an incomplete upbringing. What do you think?’
On the island, as the work became still lighter and the weather still warmer, we too had our sex-incidents, and some of them were as crude, and as time-worn, as the one described by Edward. Only a few days before I received his letter, a V.A.D. and a naval officer had been surprised late at night in a disused tent beside St George’s Bay, but had managed to escape before the identity of either was discovered. The episode was followed at our hospital by a series of interviews in which every V.A.D. was individually catechised by the Matron, a gaunt, shy, benevolent woman to whom the whole affair must have been purgatory. These interviews, being ‘strictly private’, were naturally discussed afterwards with mutual enjoyment by all the interviewed, whose interrogations appeared very similar to my own.
‘I am asking you to tell me the truth, nurse.’
‘Yes, Matron; of course.’
‘We know it must have been someone either from this hospital or St Andrew’s.’
‘Yes, Matron.’ I resisted the temptation to ask how she knew, since all V.A.D. uniforms looked identical in the dark, and if any girl wanted to commit what was technically a misdemeanour, common sense would not seem to suggest a spot within a hundred yards of her own hospital.
‘I am putting you on your honour, nurse.’
‘Yes, Matron.’
‘You were not the person?’
‘No, Matron.’
I went out. So far as I know, her two hours of embarrassed questioning did not succeed in their object. I was not the culprit, for I was still too deeply and romantically in love with a memory to have any appetite for sexual unorthodoxies, but I am not sure that I should have owned up if I had been. To confess guilt would have meant being sent home under a cloud certain to eclipse the chances of further war-work, at a time when every intelligent person who had acquired the efficiency and staying-power only attainable after long experience was a strong link in the forged chain of active endurance.
In Malta we often envied the women doctors, whose complete freedom to associate with their male colleagues appeared to result mainly in the most determined chastity. At St George’s the staff included quite a number of medical women, since the War Office, having at last decided to employ them, evidently regarded Malta - where there was now so little serious illness - as a suitable place for such a desperate experiment.
One of these women, an elderly spinster whom everyone called ‘Auntie’, showed her determination to make herself felt by putting her patients on so many medicines that the V.A.D. who carried the medicine-basket round the block had a back-breaking half-hour after every meal. Another, a small brunette known to the nursing staff as ‘Kitty’, cultivated a flirtatious femininity, and appeared on her round as orderly officer in frilly evening dresses reminiscent of a four-year-old at a juvenile party. But most of them apparently belonged to the coat-and-skirt species, with an official manner and the traditional belief - which is fast being abandoned by more recently qualified women - that their wisest course was to model themselves upon their male predecessors, thus tending to repeat some of men’s oldest mistakes and to reproduce their lop-sided values.
My reply to Edward’s letter described accurately enough the limitations characteristic of most middle-class girls before and during the War.
‘So many people are attracted by the opposite sex simply because it is the opposite sex - the average officer and the average “nice”31 girl demand, I am sure, little else but this. But where you and I are concerned, sex by itself doesn’t interest us unless it is united with brains and personality; in fact we tend to think of the latter first and the person’s sex afterwards. This is quite enough to put you off the average “nice” girl, who would neither give you what you want nor make the
effort herself to try and understand you when other men, who can give her what she wants, are so much easier to understand . . .
‘I think the old saw about young women being so much older than young men for their age, has always been very untrue and since the War is more so than ever. Women “grow up” in a certain sense (that of finishing their education just when they ought to begin it) much sooner than men and so get a sort of superficial “grown-upness” due to mixing with people and going out in a way the boy of the same age doesn’t. But in the things that really count it is the boy who is grown up; he has had responsibilities which under the present benighted system of educating women she has never had the fringe of . . . The boy of eighteen or nineteen has probably - and since the War certainly - had to cope with questions of morality and immorality whose seriousness would astound her if she understood it, and deal with subjects of whose very existence she is probably ignorant. Of course a man doesn’t mind the superficiality of inexperience if all he asks of her is her sex, but you . . . are different . . . I have noticed occasionally a slight suspicion of patronage in your dealings with women; I don’t really think this is because you think their sex inferior so much as you realise their inferiority (as it probably is) to you in personality and brain. I, conversely, feel the same, with many men! But it is necessary to be rather more careful in dealing with women, as if a man patronises a woman she always thinks it is because of her sex, whereas if a woman patronises a man, he (if he is cute enough to notice it, which he generally isn’t) never puts it down to his! I think there’s every hope for you in time to come from some woman several years older than you are now.’
9
By the middle of March the sunny afternoons had become as hot and sleepy as an English July. In Gargar Ravine, a deep valley where the greenest grass in Malta was strewn with grey boulders of incalculable age, scarlet anemones and a dozen varieties of vetch - yellow and mauve and cerise and orange and purple - sprang up beneath the old stumpy trees, with their dry, hollow trunks and dark, smooth leaves. The ravine must have been an ancient watercourse, for maidenhair fern grew in the damp crevices of the rocks and between the stones of the steps leading upwards to cultivated fields. The asphodels and oxalis were now over, but heavy masses of magenta clover, four times the size of the English variety, covered the ground, and mauve and pink gladioli held their slender, spiky heads erect in the warm, scented air.
Now that Edward, who had been ordered to take two successive officers’ courses, was safely in England for a few more months, I should have been drugged into comfortable peace by the calm, drowsy weather and the lovely, serene flowers, had not my letters from France continually sounded a note of apprehension, a warning yet again of approaching calamity. Geoffrey wrote ruefully that leave was remote, and a course for which he had hoped to be sent to the Base had been cancelled, while Victor deplored his lack of a consoling religious philosophy, and regretfully described himself as ‘an awful atheist’. He only wished, he confessed, that he were not, for in the New Army soldiers were made, not born, and with the knowledge of a coming ordeal in the near future, a man required something more to fall back upon than self-manufactured ideals. Not only, he said, were those ideals liable to be insufficient and unpractical, but even so they were hard enough for ‘unsoldierly natures’ like his to live up to. ‘If I only had a tenth of such a personality as Roland’s, I should have no anxieties about the future.’
Towards the end of the month I was put on night-duty in the eye and malaria block where I had started work at St George’s. Here I was in sole charge except for the occasional visits of the night-superintendent and the ‘co-operation’ of an orderly, who slept soundly for about ten hours out of the twelve. He explained to me his own theory of night-duty the first evening that I appeared on the block.
‘What I always says is, Sister, when a man asks you for a drink in the middle of the night and you gives it ’im, you wakes ’im up thoroughly. If you don’t take no notice, ’e just goes off to sleep agen.’
During my first week I came in for a new series of stormy nights, and had to walk up and down the verandah continually because the voice of any patient who called to me was drowned by the noise of the sea crashing on the rocks below.
‘There are no moon or stars, so it is pitch dark,’ I told my mother on March 19th. ‘There are occasional gusts of rain, distant rumbles of thunder and frequent flashes of lightning . . . It is eerie and very lonely to stand on the open verandah with the rain blowing against you, looking into absolute pitch darkness and listening to the sea roaring . . . with a hurricane lamp which the wind keeps blowing out. (Have just been round the block to see if any of them are frightened of the storm.) Do you remember how afraid I used to be of thunder when I was little? Now I feel quite a “Lady of the Lamp” marching along with the thunder crashing and the lightning - such lightning as you never see in England - flashing around us, to see if other people are afraid.’
After the coldest of cold blue dawns had leapt into sudden flame each morning with the swift up-rushing of the sun from behind a low turret-crowned hill, we retired to bed in our lovely night-quarters at the far end of the compound. The stone-floored room which I shared with Betty and another young nurse was only a few yards from the sea. Outside our windows the far purple distance - in which, on the clearest days, the snow-capped summit of Etna appeared as dimly as the dream of a white cloud - blended through shades of cobalt and sapphire into the brilliant turquoise of sea and sky. The door opened on to a fringe of short green grass; beyond this the golden rocks met the white crests of miniature waves which swung rather than broke against the shore. Before going to sleep in the early morning we usually read or talked for an hour, sitting in dressing-gowns and pyjamas on the grass or the rocks. From my bed I could watch through the open door the white-sailed Gozo boats floating with spread wings a hundred yards out to sea, and the tiny painted dhaisas passing like lethargic green and red beetles along the water’s edge.
Although we were at the opposite end of the compound from the Sisters’ quarters, the medical officers’ block was next to ours on the extreme point of the peninsula. This convenient contiguity made pleasantly possible some unofficial afternoons of tennis and conversation without much likelihood of discovery by the Matron. Now that the warm weather was really beginning, long walks had become less attractive; the best of the flowers were over, and fleas and mosquitoes had taken their place. So Betty and I and our room companion, with an appearance of great virtue, went to our beds directly after breakfast. About three in the afternoon we hurriedly dressed ourselves in the white blouses and skirts and panama hats which were the nearest approach to mufti that we could devise, and cautiously crept over with our racquets to the officers’ quarters.
Agreeable teas, with vermouths and whiskies at the officers’ mess, followed these stolen games. Quite what would have happened had we been found so blatantly breaking the sacred rule of segregation, I never troubled to inquire. The medical officers were not, upon closer acquaintance, a collection of earth-shaking personalities, but the pleasant, normal afternoons that we spent with them saved us from the neuroses that spring from months of conventual life, and gave us a vitality which was well worth the sacrifice of our afternoon sleep.
The brief hours in bed seemed sufficient because the nights were so placid. On C Block I had nothing to do but dress a few eyes four-hourly, make half a dozen beds, and give hot drinks to wakeful patients. Only once was this smooth serenity interrupted, when a twenty-year-old orderly, who had been isolated in an empty ward, died from convulsions in the early hours of the morning. As an infectious case he had been under the care of an R.A.M.C. ‘special’, and I had merely to report progress to the Night Superintendent.
One evening I came on duty to find him rolling his eyes and choking in continuous grotesque paroxysms, with ‘Auntie’, a dignified embodiment of superb inactivity, supervising his death-bed. The young man suffered, I was told - though never straightforwardly - from v
enereal disease, and had been precipitated into this convulsive condition by a hypodermic injection. Soon after midnight a final paroxysm finished him off, and when the orderlies had removed him I had to spend several hours in disinfecting the ward.
‘There was a brilliant moon that night,’ I wrote home afterwards, ‘and it was very solemn and impressive to watch the orderlies carry him across the compound on a stretcher to the mortuary, with the Union Jack over him and the moonlight shining on all - it is a queer moonlight in these places, very black shadows and startling outlines; everything is transfigured. The orderlies marched in that special slow order - I don’t know what its name is - that they always use when carrying a corpse.’
Less eventful nights slipped away in the laborious creation of a scarlet kimono from a length of vivid silk purchased in Valletta. Often, when my incompetent needle refused, as it has always refused throughout my life, to collaborate with my intentions, the kimono was abandoned for such scanty literature as I had collected from home - Thomas Hardy’s poems, John Masefield’s Gallipoli, numerous copies of Blackwood’s Magazine, and the recently published Report of the Commission on the Dardanelles.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 36