Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  Sophie stared at the old woman. She had spoken as casually as if she had suggested an afternoon tea.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alison more calmly than she might have if she’d had to organise a luncheon for twenty, six months ago. ‘Twenty-three bedrooms, and then there are the servants’ quarters. Eighty beds, perhaps?’

  ‘I think perhaps more than eighty beds are needed,’ said Her Grace quietly. ‘One must do one’s bit.’ She turned to the butler, who was setting the porringer straight behind her. ‘Blaise, would you be so good as to ask Mrs Bettersley to come and see me?’

  ‘Certainly, Your Grace.’ Blaise gestured to the footman to take the message to the housekeeper.

  ‘Mrs Bettersley will know what to do,’ said Her Grace.

  Mrs Bettersley asked, ‘Turn Wooten into a hospital, Your Grace? But His Grace would never —’

  ‘His Grace is doing his duty. He would expect us to do no less here.’ The dowager sat rigid-backed in her silk-covered chair.

  ‘I can have the rest of the beds made up, Your Grace. If the maids share rooms, we can find near seventy beds. But wounded men will need nursing, Your Grace. We’re short-staffed as it is.’

  ‘Two hundred beds,’ said Her Grace calmly. ‘See to it, Mrs Bettersley.’

  ‘But Your Grace …’ The woman seemed near tears. ‘How, Your Grace?’

  The old woman stared at her. She has been used to saying ‘See it done’ for the past twenty-five years, thought Sophie. Has she any idea what she is asking this woman to do? Sophie glanced at Alison. But she, too, seemed simply to expect the servants to fulfil orders.

  And they couldn’t.

  Sophie stood. ‘Your Grace, may I have a word in private?’

  Her Grace looked surprised. ‘Of course, Miss Higgs. Mrs Bettersley, if you will see to making up what beds we have.’

  The woman bobbed a curtsey and escaped.

  ‘Yes, Sophie?’

  ‘She’s never had to face anything like this before,’ said Sophie quietly.

  ‘Has any of us?’ For the first time the old woman’s lips trembled. How many of her friends’ sons are in France, thought Sophie, or grandsons or great-nephews? How many are dying for lack of a bed and nursing?

  How could a country spend decades preparing for war, but not preparing to treat the wounded?

  What would her father do, faced with the old woman and the young one, bewildered but desperate to do their duty?

  ‘Your Grace, Alison, will you forgive me if I am blunt? We need to make a list.’ The dowager pulled the bell. Blaise appeared, miraculously with pen and paper, ink and blotting paper, and a small escritoire on which to rest it all. ‘Thank you, Blaise. Beds … the army should be able to help us there, even if they are camp beds. Your Grace, do you have contacts in the forces?’

  A smile was growing on the lined old face. ‘The lieutenant colonel of the county should be sufficient.’

  ‘Tell him we need two hundred camp beds. It will be more efficient to have wards of many beds, especially if we don’t have many nurses. Possibly the great hall and the main drawing room could be used as the main ward, with more critically ill men in the smaller reception rooms on the ground floor. Camp beds are smaller than regular beds too, so we can fit more in. But we need to designate where the nurses and doctors will sleep as well — upper bedrooms might be best kept for them.’

  ‘And for the more senior officers,’ added the dowager. Her face held only relief, not resentment.

  It was as if her old life had peeled off like corsets, allowing her mind to breathe, to organise. Was this what Dad had felt when he began his empire? All she had absorbed, watching his business, planning for the Workmen’s Friendship Club, came together with a power and an energy she had never let free before.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace. Supplies … I’ll call Mr Slithersole, my father’s London agent. Flour, potatoes — I’ll see what Cook recommends for feeding lots, fast.’ She grinned. ‘At least we know we can get corned beef.’ Sophie scribbled as she spoke. ‘Bedpans, bandages, of course, buckets … Do you have any other suggestions? I suppose the kitchen has big cooking pots? Iodine, aspirin … Do we need a pharmacist to prescribe that?’ She wished her knowledge of nursing needs were better. Perhaps Dodders knew some more VADs, trained ones. No, the Red Cross, of course. ‘What Mr Slithersole can’t supply he’ll get.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Alison.

  ‘My father wouldn’t employ him if he weren’t efficient. Thank goodness he’s too old to enlist. Alison, would you mind going around the estate? We can’t take more men from the farmwork but ask if any daughters could be spared to work up here as nurses or maids, or in the kitchen — there’s going to be far more cooking and cleaning needed. My father will cover the wages,’ she added, then flushed. ‘I apologise, Your Grace.’

  ‘There is nothing to apologise for,’ murmured the duchess. She heaved herself to her feet. ‘I had better begin my task, had I not?’

  ‘Your Grace … have I been unforgivable?’

  ‘No. Merely your father’s daughter, for which I am profoundly grateful.’ The smile was warm. ‘Miss Lily did warn me what I was taking on. I said it would be a pleasure, and it still is. Alison, dress warmly before you go out. The wind has a bite to it. The telephone and the household are at your disposal, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘Thank you, Your Grace,’ said Sophie.

  The camp beds were delivered two mornings later, the army truck bumping and burping up the drive. A voice on the telephone, its owner describing himself as an aide de camp, suggested that isolated Wooten would be more suitable as a convalescent hospital than for urgent surgery cases. The first of Mr Slithersole’s supplies reached them that afternoon, in a more efficient truck, with Higgs’s Corned Beef on the side. Sophie immediately telephoned Mr Slithersole again: a truck of their own would be useful, and a driver too. ‘Could you have it repainted, Mr Slithersole? White, I think, with Wooten Hospital on the side.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘Mr Slithersole, you are wonderful. How do you manage it?’

  A pleased cough on the other end of the line. ‘It is my job, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘My father has a treasure in you, Mr Slithersole. And please remember me to your wife, and when you know, tell me how young Albert is doing in France.’

  She had just replaced the telephone, thinking that Miss Lily’s six steps worked on the Mr Slithersoles of the world too, when Blaise quietly entered the room. ‘Her Grace’s compliments, Lady Alison, Miss Higgs, but the men have reached the station.’

  ‘The men?’

  ‘The wounded men, miss. Her Grace believes that the household may be of assistance down there. She has ordered the carriage.’

  But we’re not ready, Sophie thought. The beds hadn’t even been made up, no soup had been cooked. But then, who in France or Belgium had been ready? ‘Thank you, Blaise.’ She hurried upstairs to change into whatever outfit Doris had deemed suitable for the occasion.

  The station was small, serving a branch line, with one platform; the train passed and then returned. The stationmaster raised Buff Orpington chickens, which ran about the lines between trains.

  The station courtyard had seemed small a few weeks ago. Now it seemed to have been magnified a hundred times.

  How many men could fit into such a space? Her Grace had said two hundred. How many more had the army crammed onto the train? Men on stretchers, men on blankets, others lying on the muddy gravel. Bloody bandages around men who seemed unconscious, not asleep, others muttering wildly. And these were ‘convalescent’?

  No, not convalescent. These were men who had been judged not worthy of surgery, either because they could survive without it, or because it had already been done, or because, surgery or not, they would die.

  How could they possibly get them to the Abbey?

  The driver helped Her Grace from the carriage. The old woman stood silent for a moment, then spoke to the driver. ‘Finchley? Please ret
urn at once. Tell Blaise to send to the Home Farm. I want every cart and every car in the district here, and every man. Haycarts — whatever they have. Bring blankets. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’ Finchley’s face was white. He flicked the reins. The carriage turned back and disappeared up the muddy lane.

  Sophie gazed at the men: I must think of each one. Feel what they are feeling, like Miss Lily said.

  No. If she did that, she’d be overwhelmed. She turned instead to the dowager and Alison, to find them looking at her. They want me to tell them what to do, she realised. Where to start …?

  She turned to the men. ‘Who is in charge here?’

  No one answered. She stepped between the bodies, through the waiting room onto the platform, trying to meet men’s eyes, to nod apologies, to see them still as human, not just ‘the wounded’. The stench was incredible: not just blood but also urine and faeces.

  No nurses. No one who looked remotely like a doctor, nor an officer in charge. No Red Cross, for this must be happening all across southern England. Men who might have been orderlies or the less badly wounded, their uniforms too crusted with blood to tell, held water bottles to men who reached out weakly.

  Sophie looked down at a man in front of her. He wore the purple uniform of a wounded man — someone had given him that, at least — but the wound on his leg was seeping blood. As she looked, something white crawled around in the blood.

  She had seen fly-blown sheep before. Never a fly-blown man. For a second she thought she was going to be sick, then glimpsed Alison sway behind her …

  ‘Your Grace, would you mind asking the stationmaster to send a telegram to your friend the lieutenant colonel? We need nurses, or at least one so she can tell the rest of us what to do. Alison, do you think you could go to the ladies’ washroom and rip up your petticoats?’ And be sick where none of the men can see you, she thought.

  ‘For bandages?’

  ‘No, to wrap strips around their arms to show which men must go to Wooten first.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Her Grace. ‘The most seriously wounded.’

  No, thought Sophie. The ones who look like they might live will go first. But she wasn’t going to say that in front of the men.

  And at last she caught the eye of one of them, saw an individual. They were all individuals, loved ones, lost ones, and she couldn’t bear it. But she would. She must. ‘Water,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll get the stationmaster’s bucket and whatever cups he has. At least we can give them water till the carts arrive.’

  A few months earlier at Windsor Castle she had seen that a palace was a fort. Now she realised an abbey could play the role of a gentleman’s home for generations, but then revert to its true essence: a place of refuge for the needy.

  They came from the station in trucks, in haycarts, in army vans. There weren’t enough stretchers or even blankets to lift the wounded onto. The ten-minute drive between the station and the Abbey became a two-hour nightmare. By the evening of the first day Sophie no longer tried to talk.

  For two days the road between the Abbey and the station held a solid procession, then it thinned, but kept on coming.

  Two nurses arrived on the next train, in starched white aprons despite the journey, with a note from Mr Slithersole: he had recruited them from a small maternity hospital. His apologies, but it was the best he could do. He had found one doctor, elderly and harried, who seemed to doze on every chair he passed, snatching a brief nap before he continued around the wards that only two days earlier had been drawing room, library, dining room, great hall.

  In the first forty-eight hours, Sophie managed perhaps four hours’ sleep. Then she let herself sleep for eight hours in the old tower she had chosen as her room: small and inconvenient and cold, but romantic. Less so when the steps seemed long and the way down all too steep and the world was spinning with her weariness.

  The newspapers had spoken of two thousand casualties, but at last count four hundred men had been delivered here — and this was only one of many temporary hospitals around the country. What was really happening over the Channel?

  Ours is not to reason why, she thought, misquoting Tennyson, from her lessons with Miss Thwaites. Ours is just to watch them die.

  Her Grace had ordered Sophie, Alison and herself special uniforms, nurse-like, from Worth the society dressmaker, neatly tailored to their figures, white with a high neck, a looser skirt than usual, and a veil. Now Her Grace stood in this uniform, pearls at her throat and ears, in the entrance hall directing new arrivals, with Blaise standing beside her softly countermanding her orders when necessary. Just as the Abbey seemed to have found its true form again, Her Grace seemed to fit her title: not with grace of form, perhaps — the bulk was undiminished — but with grace to give and keep on giving, as though there were nothing on her mind but to do her duty as long as she was able.

  One of the real nurses bent to a man on a stretcher, or rather to a head of bandages and bandaged hands too. Doris and the other personal maids had been set to scrubbing floors and lockers, to washing bandages and swabs. Sophie had a sudden vision of Doris’s hands reddened by soapsuds, and experienced a guilty sense of relief that scrubbing was not required of her.

  What am I supposed to do? she wondered. Pretending in a fake nurse’s dress. I can put the curate’s arm into a sling, or bandage a cut knee. It took months to train even as a VAD — nor could she abandon Wooten to do so. What in heaven’s name am I supposed to do here?

  A row of tidy beds and tidier patients, their sheets and bandages blinding white, along each side of the room. It would have been less frightening if they cried out, or thrashed around. Anything but the stillness and the silence.

  Sophie had thought blood was red. Most of the stains on these men were black.

  ‘What can I do to help?’ She tried to keep her voice calm. The memory of a paddock of lambs with their tails freshly docked came to her. She had almost fainted. Malcolm had laughed.

  The nurse avoided her eye, embarrassed at giving orders to a social superior. ‘Would you mind delivering meals?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  She did mind. Anyone could deliver meals. But meals must be delivered.

  Strange to be pushing a trolley of meals. All her life food had just appeared. She had never realised how many corridors and steps lay between dining or breakfast room and the kitchens. Suddenly she felt the sense of wrongness … no, the deep inefficiency … she had felt at the Workmen’s Friendship Club. Others could do this far better than she could — women trained as nurses, or even as maids. Am I an unnatural woman? she thought. Women are supposed to naturally know how to tend the sick, to smooth men’s fevered brows, to serve their food, but it bores me witless. Yet what else can I do?

  ‘Good evening,’ she said brightly. Too brightly, she thought. The sound of her voice seemed to crack the ward’s silence. ‘I’m Miss Higgs. Supper is served.’

  Two of the men looked at her blankly; two others seemed to be sleeping. Sophie hoped neither was dead. The face of one was bandaged, all except his mouth and a single, slightly purple ear.

  A fifth man murmured, ‘Good evening, Miss Higgs.’ A cage above his legs kept the bedclothes off whatever wounds he had there.

  Sophie took the cover off one of the dishes. The man reached for it. At least he seemed able to feed himself.

  Sophie approached one of the sleeping men. She touched his arm gently.

  He woke with a small shout. ‘What is it? What is it?’

  ‘Shh. It’s all right. I have your dinner here.’

  Both of his hands were bandaged. He lay back, obviously trying not to sob.

  ‘It’s lovely, er …’ She peered down. ‘Actually it’s rather horrible-looking prunes, custard and rice pudding. How could anyone put all three together?’

  ‘A Hunnish trick.’ That was the man with the bandaged face. Sophie looked at him gratefully and smiled, then realised he couldn’t see her expression.


  ‘Exactly.’ She gently touched the man with the bandaged hands again. ‘Do you think you could manage a few spoonfuls, though? Here comes the first one.’

  The man opened his mouth obediently, swallowed, opened again.

  The plates were cold by the time she got to the last man, the one with the bandaged face. She touched him softly on his hand to show him she was there. ‘Sorry it’s taken so long.’

  ‘No matter. Nothing better to do.’

  ‘Cold rice pudding is even worse than warm rice pudding.’ She hesitated. ‘It won’t hurt you to eat?’

  He began to shake his head, then gave a gasp of pain. ‘No.’ It was obviously a lie. ‘Better than lying here in a black night,’ he added.

  She hadn’t thought what it must be like, lying with nothing to see, nothing to hear but the mutters and cries of the injured. She made a sudden decision.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  She wondered if there was a smile under the bandages. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  Did she imagine a slight lightening of the room as she came back in? Better to wonder where I dashed off to than just lie here, she thought. She held up a bottle. ‘Whisky. It’s good whisky,’ she added.

  ‘How do you know?’ The bandaged man below her sounded genuinely curious.

  ‘Because it’s His Grace’s, and he likes whisky. I don’t know a good one from a poor one.’

  ‘Nothing but the best for the dying, then.’

  She gazed at him, startled. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know —’

  ‘Nay, I’m not dying yet.’ His voice had the trace of an accent again. ‘Not until these bandages come off and they send me back to France.’