In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Miss Ivens took the kettle from the fire and as she made the tea, the kitchen filled. Bids good morning were muted; it was too cold for more. Violet was the last to arrive, in her boots and striped flannel pyjamas, her blonde hair falling loosely over her shoulders. “My friend’s,” she’d said of the pyjamas the night before. “Warm as toast.” As I learned later that day, she’d also brought his coat, his driving goggles, his glasses, and his cigarette case. Must be a good friend, I said. Past tense please, Violet said. He’s been moved on now.

  Miss Ivens called us to order. “We have beds of a sort, a working kitchen, and seven hours each day in which we have enough light to work. We must all muck in on the first task, which is cleaning.”

  After a quick breakfast—bacon and eggs with toasted bread; I don’t know how Quoyle managed—Miss Ivens told me to go with Berry and address the plumbing problem. “It’s the drain,” she said. “There’s a blockage.” When I tried to protest that I wouldn’t be much help, she just smiled. “You’re from a farm,” she said. “Initiative.” She asked the doctors to stay behind for a few moments and dismissed the rest of us. I went upstairs for more warm clothes. I walked into the room just as the sun reached the long windows. The light came across the stone floor suddenly. I stood there transfixed once more by the beauty of the place, until others came in the door behind me and broke my reverie.

  Boarding school had accustomed me to dressing in front of others, but I felt strangely shy with these women. Their mattresses were neatly folded, their things packed up, all except for Violet’s and my bed, which was a mess of her clothes and the jumpers and coats we’d slept under. I tidied up—Violet was still in the kitchen finishing her breakfast.

  Just as I was about to go downstairs, she came in. “Let’s make sure we work together today,” she said. “I don’t want to be with Cissy Hamilton. Oh Iris, you made the bed. Aren’t you a darling girl? It’s a bit early for me.” She stretched and let out a long yawn. “I’d like nothing more than to get back in and sleep for a few more hours. But we can’t have that, can we? After all, we’re women, we do things,” she said, in her perfect Miss Ivens.

  “I have to go and meet the plumber first,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Apparently, growing up on a farm qualifies me in drainage. I’ll find you.” I went to the tap downstairs in the kitchen, the only one in the abbey that was working, and splashed my face with the freezing water. I met Mrs. Berry in the foyer. She’d dressed and washed before breakfast.

  Miss Ivens had sent me along to interpret, but the plumber who arrived soon after turned out to be English, married to a Frenchwoman. “Don’t tell Frances he speaks English,” Mrs. Berry said to me when he went out to get his tools. “She’ll be down in a shot.”

  “I think she’d want to be here,” I said.

  Mrs. Berry looked sternly at me. She had those large brown eyes and long thick hair parted exactly and pulled back loosely so that it was like two sides of a heart coming off the part. “Just trust me, Iris. Frances is wonderful. We love her to death, but if you are to help her, you must know her strengths.”

  “And what are they?” I said, surprised at her frankness.

  “She’s good at what matters,” Mrs. Berry said. “She’s an inspired doctor. I’ve never worked with anyone who has her gift with patients. And she’s a good leader for us, the medical team, but she doesn’t know about the drains. Do you understand?” I could hardly run and fetch Miss Ivens now without angering Mrs. Berry. On the other hand, if Miss Ivens found out the plumber, who had climbed down into the drains to see what was happening, was English, she’d be furious that she hadn’t been told. She nearly came with me anyway, on the basis that I could interpret. But then Dr. Savill was complaining that Cicely had ordered the wrong equipment and Miss Ivens had gone to calm her down. Even so, Miss Ivens told me I needed to provide a report.

  “I’m afraid you will have to trust me on this one, Iris,” Mrs. Berry said.

  In the event, Miss Ivens was as wrongheaded as a human being could be about the plumbing. There was no blockage in the drain, as she claimed, and all my attempts to put her view to the plumber were met with a gentle smile, rather like one might bestow on a small child who is not managing a drink of milk. He might be retired, he said, and not much good for anything, but the one thing he knew was grease traps. He and Mrs. Berry got along famously, sharing an interest in matters sanitary—Mrs. Berry had specialised in public health—going down together into the drains. “It’s the trap,” Mrs. Berry said when she emerged. “Just as we thought. They’ll have to dig.”

  I duly reported to Miss Ivens that the plumber said the grease trap was not working and it would take at least a week to repair. She had no choice but to accept his opinion but she still asked me what I thought. “I thought him an excellent plumber,” I said. Mrs. Berry, standing behind Miss Ivens, smiled warmly at me. Miss Ivens said very well and didn’t mention the problem again.

  Miss Ivens had a meeting with the architect. Before he arrived, she took me on a quick walk through the building to show me what she was planning. The theatre and X-ray would be on the first floor, she explained, and a large room on that floor, originally the monks’ library, would be a ward. It had deep windows to the north overlooking the cloister and the south overlooking the abbey vegetable gardens. The other ward would be set up in two rooms directly above us on the second floor. When she asked me what I thought, I said the first-floor room was beautiful but those on the second floor would be a long way from everything else except the pathology laboratory. “Well, yes they are, Iris, but where else can we go?” she said. We had been through several other rooms on the first floor but she’d ruled these out because they were filled with the detritus of years, not just furniture but heavy masonry and other building materials. I could see why Miss Ivens came to the decision she did and I had made my point. I didn’t think it was my place to make it more strongly.

  When the architect saw the rooms Miss Ivens had picked on the second floor for a ward, he laughed out loud. Too far from the rest, he said, and they’re not as well ventilated. When she told him she didn’t have a choice, he looked at her above his spectacles. “My dear woman,” he began.

  Miss Ivens, whose spoken French was as appalling as she claimed, understood the sentiment if not the words when it came to dear women. “Tell him I am a surgeon who needs to run a hospital. If he cannot provide us with what we need, we will find an architect who can.”

  The architect was a gentle man with soft grey eyes and cared-for nails who reminded me of our parish priest at home. Perhaps because of this I couldn’t be stern with him. He could no more understand Miss Ivens than she him and not just because they spoke different languages. And he would do good work, I felt. I couldn’t repeat word-for-word what Miss Ivens had said. “Miss Ivens really feels we ought to do our best to make this area work,” I said. “Logistically, this is an ideal place for the laboratory.”

  “Is that what she said?” the architect asked me with a wry smile.

  “Roughly translated,” I said.

  After we finished with the architect, Miss Ivens said I could go and help Violet, who we’d seen working in the large room on the first floor Miss Ivens had selected as a ward. “We’ll name it for Blanche,” Miss Ivens said to me after the architect left. “We’ll call it Blanche de Castille.” The second ward, on the floor above, would be called Elsie Inglis, for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals foundress.

  By the time I got back to the room, Violet had been joined by a couple of orderlies who were clearing out the junk while she scrubbed the floor. I set to work on the large windows, using a tea chest as a ladder. Layers of dust covered dirt and grime and I must have cleaned those windows three times. Later in the afternoon, warm from our work, Violet and I sat down on the floor to take a break. The sun emerged from behind a cloud and shone through the windows suddenly, revealing in all its glory the stone Violet had been scrub
bing all day, bringing the whole room to life.

  “Look, Violet,” I said, for we too were quite suddenly clothed in gold.

  Violet smiled. “You could almost believe in God,” she said.

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “Oh Iris, you are quaint. Of course not. God’s a ridiculous notion.”

  “Violet, you mustn’t speak like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll go down for blasphemy.”

  “God God God,” she said. “If that’s all it takes to get to hell, I’m already there. You surely can’t believe in God, Iris.”

  “Of course I do. If there’s no God, who made all this?” Just as I spoke, the sun disappeared behind the clouds and the room dimmed.

  “The Cistercians,” Violet said drily.

  “Well, what do you believe in?” I said.

  “I don’t believe in anything,” she said. “It’s all codswallop.”

  “Oh Violet, we’ll have to work on that,” I said. “I couldn’t stand you going down. I like you too much for that.”

  “How do you know you won’t be keeping me company there?” She sighed heavily and threw her dishtowel into the bucket of water. “No, I don’t suppose you will go to hell. You’re too good.” She lit up a cigarette and walked over to the window. “Unlike me. So what have you decided about your brother?” She stood looking at me, smoke surrounding her head like a silver halo.

  “I thought I’d write him and find out where he is first. It’s not going to be easy.” Even if I found Tom, I’d realised, he wouldn’t come home willingly. Tom was belligerent sometimes. Daddy always said it was because he’d been so small for so much of his childhood, only shooting up in the last year or so. I thought but didn’t say that it was more likely inherited. Daddy himself could be belligerent on occasion and Tom took after Daddy. “I rushed over here because my father was so worried. But now, I don’t know what to do,” I said to Violet. “I’m not sure my father really understands the war and why we must help. Australia’s so far away. I mean, the Germans invaded France and I believe it’s our duty to do our bit to stop them. Maybe it will be good for Tom to think he’s been part of that. I just don’t know.”

  “How old is he again?” Violet said, blowing perfect smoke rings.

  “Fifteen,” I said.

  She whistled. “How did he get away?”

  I remembered Daddy’s words. “You’ve no idea what you’ve done, Iris.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped Tom,” I said to Daddy, trying at defiance. “He’d made up his mind.”

  Daddy looked at me. “I’d have shot your brother in the leg to keep him here, Iris. You’re too young to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I’m going to get him back.”

  And that’s how it went for days until I got the idea that I not Daddy should go. He agreed, because it would be easier for me to find Tom as I was a nurse and would have a legitimate role to play. And Daddy and I both knew that if anyone could have stopped Tom, it was me. But I’d not only failed to stop him; I’d helped him go.

  It was the twenty-third of September and Tom and I were going home to Stanthorpe on the train from Brisbane. I remember the date because it was the weekend of the show and Al was with us. He was in his last month at the Mater and things between us had become difficult, from his side not mine. There was a girl back in Sydney. He’d never lied to me about her but for him our friendship was becoming more than friendship and he felt he needed to make a decision about what he wanted. You couldn’t have two sweethearts, as Matron had told him when he’d asked her. I only knew Matron had said this because she told me later, over a cup of tea in her room. She also told me to stay away from Al while he sorted himself out and that if I played my cards right, I’d land myself a doctor. Don’t fall for the old line, though, she warned me. It’s what doctors do best. She smiled and I saw the gold fillings in her teeth. I had no intention of playing my cards in any way at all. Al and I were friends and I truly believed we would remain so whatever happened with this girl in Sydney. I worried about the talk among the nurses—they kept asking me if we were promised to one another—but I wasn’t sure what I wanted.

  The thing that had attracted me to Al when we first met was his quiet but sure nature. Al was Al no matter who he was with and no matter what they thought of him. We met in the operating theatre at the Mater and the surgeon that day, a difficult little man from England named Jonathan Barton, loved nothing more than to belittle trainees. He criticised everything Al did, although anyone could see Al had a gift for surgery. Daddy always said Al could have been a pianist if anyone had thought to put a piano under his hands. Dr. Barton rode Al that day, told him to use the long knife and then told him he got the wrong size, told him he was fumbling when he wasn’t, told him to hurry up. Al apologised when Dr. Barton told him he’d done the wrong thing, looked squarely at Dr. Barton as Dr. Barton became increasingly exercised. This infuriated the surgeon, who wanted to crush Al, to reduce him to a snivelling mess or make him lose his temper. But Al did neither. He just kept on in the same even way he’d begun. In the end, Dr. Barton was yelling, “You’ve got no idea what you’re doing, you young fool. You think you’re better than me? Let’s see you find your way through this gut without help,” and stood back, so Al was left to do the operation—I can’t remember what it was—all by himself. This he did with the same quiet confidence.

  Afterwards, Al had seemed brave to me and I realised only much later that it wasn’t bravery. He was simply without guile. He could no more change his nature than a leopard could change its spots. He told me years later that he was terrified of Jonathan Barton but that he’d kept his eyes on me. I was smiling at him, apparently, and it made him feel he could do anything. I really think he made that up because I don’t remember him looking at me at all, much less us smiling. I was more frightened of Dr. Barton than anyone and dreaded being in the theatre whenever he was on. And we were all wearing masks, so how Al could see a smile was beyond me.

  “What about this war business?” Tom said to Al on the train.

  “What about it?” Al said over his glasses. He was reading the paper.

  “They’re calling for volunteers.”

  “And?”

  “Are you going?”

  “No,” Al said. “You look tired, love,” he said to me.

  “They want doctors,” Tom said.

  “They’ll get doctors,” Al said.

  “Not you?”

  “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not interested.”

  “You scared?”

  “Yes and no.” Al took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and then replaced the glasses, a gesture he used his whole life to give himself time to think about a thing. “If none of us go, they’ve no one to fight.”

  “And then the Germans take over,” said Tom.

  “Not if the German people refuse as well.”

  “I think I’ll go,” Tom said. Al and I both laughed at this, a terrible mistake I realised later. Tom’s face fell. “Why shouldn’t I go? Not everyone’s a coward,” he said. His voice had started to break and he lost the last part of coward, had to repeat it. He looked straight at Al, who to his credit understood, in a way I didn’t, how foolish we’d made Tom feel, how young.

  Al didn’t rise to Tom’s challenge. Instead he looked at Tom seriously. “It’s one of those things each man must decide for himself. You do have courage in spades, Tom. But you mayn’t have your chance this time around, in any event. They’re saying it will all be over by Christmas.”

  I looked over at my brother and remembered when he first started school. He cried when I left him at the door of his classroom. I thought he’d settle in but by lunchtime, he’d created such a commotion that his teacher sent for me to come and sit with him for the afternoon. By the time I got there he was so
bbing in between sharp panicky breaths.

  “Oh Tom Crane, what’s the matter with you?” I’d said to him. He ran to me and grabbed on, not caring a fig what the teacher or the other children thought of him. I stayed with him that day and the next and the next.

  “Afraid of his own shadow,” his teacher said to me after the second week.

  “He’s only young,” I’d said to her. “Just give him time to get used to it all.” And now, here he was, wanting to run off to war and fight.

  “You don’t have to be of age,” Tom said to Al. “There’s a seniors boy who’s gone. You can just lie about your age.”

  Al shook his head. “Then you’d be a young fool, and if you came home, that is if you didn’t die there, you’d still be a young fool.”

  Tom wasn’t his usual self that weekend, easily offended, quick to anger. On Saturday afternoon, he broached the subject with Daddy. We were out on the western boundary mending the fence that the neighbour’s cows had come through again. “I’m big for my age,” Tom said. “Robert reckons they’d take me no worries.” The two older Carson boys had already gone off, with Robert, a year older than Tom, planning to follow them as soon as he could. Mr. and Mrs. Carson were all for it.