by Maggie Holt
‘Nice to ’ave the money to do it. ‘S’easy enough to do good works if yer got the necessary,’ said Maud the cynic.
‘But Mrs Spearmann didn’t have to take on the Midway, did she? It was Mr Poole’s doin’ in the first place, gettin’ her interested – and yet I thought he was a hard man. Yer never can tell with people.’ Mabel spoke thoughtfully. She had not finally made up her mind whether to take up Olive Spearmann’s offer or not. It would be an opportunity for her to do some good and enjoy doing it, for it had always been her dream to look after childen in need of love and care.
But there was Harry who also needed her and, as Norah had hinted, they were not in a position to take on new commitments while their menfolk were fighting a war.
The examination results were published on the first of July and all the finalists had passed as general nurses. Five of them, including Nurses Court, Davies and McLoughlin, were also entered on the register of the Central Midwives Board.
But this news passed almost without comment at Booth Street. That first day of July was also the first day of the long-planned Somme offensive. While the nation held its collective breath for news, the reports that filtered through at first seemed to be encouraging; in fact, the first day was presented as a victory, and losses were described as by no means excessive.
THE BIG PUSH: A GREAT BEGINNING ran the headline in the Observer. The heroism and self-sacrifice of the men was extolled, and hopes ran high at home where families waited for news of their own sons, husbands and brothers taking part in the great conflict: until they had news of their own men they could not allow themselves to rejoice.
Within a matter of days the dreadful truth began to emerge with the casualty lists taking up whole pages in all the newspapers, national and local. Extra pages had to be added to make room for the thousands upon thousands of names in column after black column: the dead, the wounded and the missing. Whole batallions had been wiped out; complete units had been mown down in the advance on the German lines, for the enemy had not been dislodged by the week of bombardment upon their deeper, better organised dugouts. As the British soldier obeyed the order to move forward with his bayonet fixed, Jerry shot him dead.
Mabel frantically scanned the casualty lists under D, but found no Henry W. Drover among the twenty thousand British dead on that first day, or the forty thousand wounded; but among the fallen were the names of Arthur Hodges and Sam Mackintosh.
Chapter Twelve
MABEL COULD NOT remember nursing a more demanding sick child than five-year-old Timmy Baxter. He came into Women’s II from the Midway in a semi-comatose condition, with a high fever and a swelling behind his left ear that had been treated with hot poultices. The battle for his life dominated July 1916 and it took another two months before he was fit to be discharged; in time to come Mabel could never separate Timmy’s illness and recovery from the other events of that fateful quarter. As soon as he was admitted, the duty doctor sent for the surgeon who looked at the boy and gravely shook his head.
‘Abscess of the mastoid process and probably clotting of the lateral sinus – which means that the infection could be all over him by now. We’d better get it drained, though it’s probably too late – he could be brewing a brain abscess and meningitis, I shouldn’t wonder. Still, get him ready for theatre straight away.’
Mabel accompanied the porter who carried the boy in his arms to the operating theatre where his limp body was routinely strapped down on the table. Mabel held his hand and talked to him in a low voice while the anaesthetist sprayed chloroform on to a gauze and cotton-wool pad gripped in the metal cage of a handheld Schimmel-Busch mask. She knew that Timmy was unaware of her, or his surroundings, but she talked quietly just the same until he gave a choking moan and passed into merciful unconsciousness; the knife was inserted and a large quantity of pus under pressure was drained off; dressings and bandages were applied, and Timmy was returned to Women’s II with a small chance of survival.
He survived the next forty-eight hours, but then came days of agony that wore down the nerves of staff and patients alike. He screamed at the top of his voice for hours on end, and clawed at the bandages round his head and neck. His arms were splinted to his sides to stop him doing this, but Mabel could not bear to see him rendered so helpless, and she made tubes out of rolled cardboard to encase his arms, which meant that he could at least move them from the shoulder, though unable to bend his elbows. She fed him drinks from a feeding cup, but anything semi-solid was spat out, and he would not take the cup from anybody else. It was next to impossible to get him to swallow the bitter opium-based sedative that was prescribed for him, or the equally nasty-tasting syrup of chloral. An injection of morphia was ordered to be given at night, and Mabel felt treacherous as she dissolved the tablet in boiled water on a spoon and then drew it up into the glass syringe. The needle was jabbed into Timmy’s tiny buttock and his yell of pain caused every patient to wince.
‘Omigawd, can’t yer do anythink to shut ’im up, Nurse Court?’ pleaded the women, and Mabel would once again lift Timmy out of his cot and walk up and down the bare boards of the ward with him.
‘Hush, hush, Timmy, ssh-ssh, Mabel’s here, never fear,’ she would croon softly, over and over again until he fell into an exhausted slumber for an hour or two.
And slowly, slowly, his temperature began to fall and the foul-smelling discharge lessened.
Every day Mabel hurried to the dining-room for the post, but there was no word from Harry, and the Drovers had not heard from him either since the horrific first of July. Ruby Swayne’s anxiety for her brother was aggravated by her husband’s continued absolute refusal to take any part in the war, and he received more rough handling at the second tribunal before being sentenced to imprisonment in Dartmoor for the next five years.
‘I shall have to get work, Mabel,’ Ruby said. ‘I can’t look to my parents or the Salvation Army to support me and the boys for all that time. I shall have to give up our house and find somewhere smaller.’
In the event, she stayed at her home in Deacon’s Walk, and continued to work as a Salvation Army officer during school hours while offering emergency overnight accommodation for homeless women and girls when the Army called upon her services. She could have earned more money in a munitions factory, but this would have gone against all the ideals that Herbert was now upholding as a prisoner of conscience.
Doris Drover could not conceal her indignation on her daughter’s behalf. ‘How much more use Herbert could be as a non-combatant!’ she burst out in a moment of exasperation. ‘Our poor Harry could be in need of a stretcher-bearer and an ambulance driver while Herbert’s spendin’ his time breakin’ stones at a place too far away for his wife and children to see him – an’ his poor old mother breakin’ her heart, an’ them two poor little boys bein’ shunned at school – it’s too bad of him!’
Mabel sent a note of sympathy to the bereaved family at Rectory Grove in Clapham where the blinds were permanently drawn, expecting no reply and getting none. Maud Ling was very sorry for all that she had said about Ada Hodges and sent her flowers. It was from Olive Spearmann that Mabel learned of Ada’s pathetic state, the terrible wails heard by the neighbours when the telegram arrived; her parents moved in to look after her and the children, but Ada, whose third child was expected in September, took to her bed and turned her face to the wall, refusing to be comforted. A polite note arrived at the Infirmary from Mrs Clay, thanking Ada’s friends for their kind wishes to her daughter, but saying that Ada had been totally crushed by the death of Arthur and did not wish to see anybody.
‘His poor parents are also grieving, but they find some solace in our grandchildren,’ she wrote. ‘Ada will not take any interest in life, and we fear for her future and the unborn child.’
Mabel tried to imagine how it would be if she and Harry were married and had children – and then if he’d had to go to the war and been killed, as Arthur had, she knew without a shadow of doubt that his children would be
her greatest comfort; she thought of Timmy Baxter who would be waiting for her on Women’s II, his hollow eyes brightening at the appearance of his Nurse ‘Maby’ again. How much more would Harry’s child give her reason to go on living! Poor little Arthur and Jenny, deprived of both parents – and poor Ada, not to see where her consolation lay . . .
‘Hey, girls, let’s go to Charing Cross Station to meet the troop trains comin’ in!’ said Nurse Tasker. ‘Everybody’s buyin’ up all the flowers to throw at the war heroes!’
Mabel shook her head, but Norah had an afternoon off and agreed to accompany Betty to join the crowds of cheering Londoners who congregated at Charing Cross and Victoria Stations to meet the trains coming in with men who had landed at Dover and Folkestone.
Mabel settled on the bench in the central courtyard with several pairs of stockings to mend. She had always dreaded confronting the agony of the war wounded and when Norah returned her face confirmed Mabel’s worst fears.
‘Oh, ’twas dreadful, dreadful – ye should’ve seen the ambulances lined up to meet the train – a dozen of ’em at least. God in Heaven, Mabel, there never were so many fine young men laid low. Ye could hear the people sighin’ instead o’ cheerin’, an’ women were cryin’ out names, askin’ for their sons, wonderin’ if they were there, ’cause yer couldn’t see close up.’
Mabel shivered. ‘I’m thankful I wasn’t there, Norah – I was afraid it’d be like that. But surely there were some men walkin’ off the train? They can’t all’ve been stretcher cases.’
‘No, there were men walkin’ on their two legs, but ye should’ve seen ’em, Mabel – filthy they were, uniforms covered in mud, boots that looked as if they’d been on for weeks – and the faces of ’em, Mabel, that was the worst of all, their eyes. There was one young boy, must’ve been the same age as Albert, nothin’ wrong wid him as far as I could see, but his eyes were starin’ at somethin’ only he could see. His poor mother was there to meet him, but he didn’t speak a word, just went on starin’ at nothin’, God save him!’ And Norah McLoughlin burst into tears at the thought of one young man’s horror, while Mabel stared at her, thinking of Harry.
At the beginning of August Mabel was greeted on her entry into the staff dining-room with the longed-for news: ‘A letter for yer, Nurse Court – from France!’
She tore open the envelope with trembling fingers. The letter was brief, only half a page, and as she read it her heart sank and she put her hand to her mouth.
‘My dearest Mabel,’ said the uneven scrawl that was in Harry’s hand and yet seemed unfamiliar. ‘Pray for me and all of us here in the Hell.’ The word spelt with a capital H could have been Hell or Hill. ‘All the dear men of my platoon that were in my care are lost and their Blood is on everything I see everywhere. This world will never be again the same without them, LOST FOR EVER. I trust I shall see you again my Angel in the Land of the living. Pray for us all that He Who is All-Merciful will bring me up out of the horrible Pit the miry clay.’
Mabel recognised the jumbled quotation from Psalm 40, but the general tone of the letter was different from any she had previously received from Harry, and clearly reflected a mind in turmoil, if not torment. That evening she changed her plan to go to the cinema with Ethel Davies, and got on a Battersea bus, which dropped her at the end of Falcon Terrace, where she found that Ruby and her two sons were also visiting at number 8.
The Drovers had had no news, but on hearing that Mabel had a letter, Harry’s father at once asked to see it.
‘Oh, my poor boy,’ he muttered under his breath as he read the short scribble. ‘May the Lord help him, my poor boy.’
‘Let me see it!’ Doris practically snatched it from him. ‘Oh, Harry, my son! This can’t be from him!’ She began to cry. ‘He never wrote this!’
‘Yes, he did, Mother, but he’s badly shocked,’ answered her husband. ‘He tells yer there, he’s lost every one o’ the boys in his platoon, the ones he helped to train at Wandsworth. And he’s blamin’ himself; in fact, he says he sees their blood everywhere. The poor boy’s sufferin’ from shock.’
Ruby Swayne glanced at Mabel, then took the letter from her mother’s hand. On reading it through she looked up with tired eyes. ‘I think he was drunk when he wrote this,’ she said quietly.
‘How dare yer say such a thing!’ cried her mother. ‘My boy never touches a drop o’ that stuff, never in his life.’
‘But somebody might’ve offered him a drink and he’s not used to it,’ persisted Ruby, and John Drover sighed heavily.
‘Ruby may be right, Mother,’ he said. ‘These are terrible times and we can’t picture what it’s like over there. Thank yer for bringin’ it to show us, Mabel, and the best thing we can all do now is what he asks of us – to pray for him. Here, now, just where we are, let’s ask the Lord’s help for our son.’
In the little living-room the family knelt down, and Mabel fell on her knees with them. For a minute the only sounds were Doris Drover’s stifled sobs, then her husband cleared his throat and began to pray aloud for Harry and all those caught up in fighting a war they had neither sought or wanted. ‘If it be Thy will, O Lord, return our son to us in soundness o’ body and mind,’ he ended. ‘And now let’s join together in sayin’, “Our Father who art in heaven” . . .’
They all recited the Lord’s Prayer and Mabel realised that Drover had not once mentioned Herbert Swayne, now forced to labour from dawn to dusk in the stone-breaking sheds of the prison on the bleak moor. With hands sore and roughened, isolated from his loved ones, inadequately fed and labelled a coward and a traitor, his lot was not enviable, as she knew from Ruby. But he had clearly lost the sympathy of his in-laws.
Another brief letter arrived ten days later, in which Harry said he was on three days’ leave in France, billeted in a village some twelve miles from the front line. He and three other men were resting in the blessed quiet of the country, he wrote, adding that he did not join his companions on their trips into the nearest small town at night. ‘I look up at the sky at night where I see your face my own beautiful Angel.’
Reading between the lines, Mabel guessed that the oblivion offered by alcohol and available women was too great a temptation for most men to resist when the next week they might be lying dead in no man’s land. But Harry had his angel and the secret memory they shared.
Against all odds, Timmy Baxter overcame the ravages of a virulent infection and was pronounced to be out of danger by the time Mabel was due to go on her holiday. He was still pale and sunken-eyed, and would always have some loss of hearing in his left ear, but his life had been saved, and he could feed himself and play with the battered toys kept in the wooden box at the bottom of Women’s II. Mabel hated leaving him, but the surgeon praised her for her part in his recovery.
‘You saved his life just as much as I did, Nurse Court,’ he told her, and the Ward Sister remarked on her patience with the boy, the extra time she had put in to give him the care and attention he needed. And so said the women who had watched his progress.
‘Ye’re a brick, Nurse Court, a bloody marvel! ‘E’d’ve driven us all crazy – we’d’ve throttled ’im!’ they told her with alarming candour. ‘Nearly drove us orf our chumps, ’e did!’
But Mabel smiled and hugged Timmy Baxter, who had done exactly the opposite for her. Far from driving her mad, his demands had saved her sanity at a time of agonising worry over the fate of the man she loved.
‘Nothing’s the same any more, Mabel,’ said Daisy sadly. ‘Everybody’s busy with things to do with the war, but they won’t let me do anything. Aunt Nell and Alice go every day to help look after the men at Pinehurst, but I’ve got to stay here and help Cook in the kitchen and tidy the bedrooms and do the dusting because there’s only one maid, poor Margery with the harelip. It’s been the dullest summer holiday I’ve ever had.’
Mabel hardly knew how to answer her discontented younger sister. She and Daisy were sharing a bedroom at Pear Tree Cottage, and her aunts absolu
tely forbade her to visit Pinehurst while on her week’s holiday. The war had touched Belhampton since her last visit and a strange quietness lay over the countryside, now largely bereft of men. A group of young women had come to work on the farms, which had caused quite a stir among the locals. Mabel had seen the posters advertising the Women’s Land Army, showing a bonny girl wearing boots beneath her skirt and sporting a hat. The real ones wore men’s trousers tied round the waist with string and scarves round their heads. They drove the dairy herds down the lanes to and from milking, raked out cowsheds, stables and pigsties. In the evenings some of them went to the village inn and downed their mugs of ale alongside the older men.
‘They smoke cigarettes, too, and laugh out loud and don’t care what anybody says about them,’ reported Daisy, adding in a wistful tone, ‘I wish I could be a land-girl, Mabel.’
Thomas Somerton had to put in long hours at Chalcott Draperies, just like Ada Hodges’s father at Lipton’s, because of the absence of young men. Aunt Nell confessed to Mabel that she was worried about him. ‘He’s fifty-five, now, and gets so tired.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes he comes home looking quite grey-faced, and makes me think of my own dear father who was only a year older when he had that fatal seizure.’
Mabel sympathised and refrained from mentioning that old George Chalcott’s death had been blamed on her mother, Anna-Maria, his beloved youngest daughter who had run off with the improvident Jack Court and shamed the whole family.
‘We’ve had some very sad cases at Pinehurst lately, Mabel,’ went on her aunt one evening when they were alone. ‘Some of them are very difficult to nurse and Kate has had to employ women to sit up at night in case of disturbances. Some have terrible dreams, shouting out and sleepwalking; in fact, Kate’s had to get up herself in the night to talk to men who’ve broken down and wept like children because of their injuries, the loss of a hand or foot, you know.’