Daddy was shy, pulled at his hat, couldn’t seem to get his big hand around Veronica’s to shake it, then couldn’t seem to let go. Back at home, the trip punctuated by Veronica’s chatter and Daddy’s meagre responses, he couldn’t make tea in the pot or get the bread cut for sandwiches. He kept dropping things and forgetting what he was doing. He’d set up a camp bed in my room so that Veronica could have his bed and he managed to tell her so. She told him not to be silly. “I’ve come to see them, Jack,” she said. “At least let me share their room.” And so my aunt slept in the room with Tom and me and it was the best month of my young life.
For here was another kind of woman altogether, different from Mrs. Carson and the nuns and the whole sex as I’d known it to that date. I wondered was this what my mother had been like. Veronica didn’t care a hoot what anyone thought of her and when I told her what Mrs. Carson had said, that she was a sufferist, she laughed for a full minute before she said, “That’s a good word for it. I’m a sufferist.”
The sufferist brought gifts, a little Eiffel Tower for Tom she’d picked up in Paris, some drinking chocolate from Belgium for me that tasted heavenly when you whipped it up with fresh milk and put extra sugar in, toys for both of us that were just perfect.
“I have met a suffragist,” I told Violet now. “My aunt from Scotland was in the movement.”
Some of the suffragists at Royaumont wore trousers like my aunt Veronica. Some smoked pipes and acted like men. Violet made fun of them, had to explain to me so I’d get her jokes. Dykes, she said, after the boy who put his finger in one, and giggled. They like each other the same way you like your Al. How do you mean? I asked, although I understood immediately. They sleep together, do things with their hands. I giggled. What things? I’ll leave that to your imagination, my dear.
When I thought about it, I’d met girls like these before, at school, in nursing. At Royaumont they were more open about their relationships. I wanted to ask Miss Ivens about them but I was too shy. Was it normal? Did she know before they came? Mostly both had jobs, one as driver, the other as orderly, one as doctor, the other as nurse. Was it sinful? On this last count, I’m sure it was. Most things I wasn’t told about were sinful, I often later learned.
They fascinated me, these women, the way they strode about like men, the openness of their smiles, like they’d found the secret of life. I wanted to be like them, or to be a boy, with a boy’s straight body and a boy’s easy laugh. For some of them, especially the doctors, it might have been a convenient arrangement. How could a woman have a husband, even the most understanding husband, and lead the kind of life a doctor of Royaumont led? There would be children and then what would she do? For others, though, it was the only way they’d live. These were the ones I admired most, the women who had chosen this life because they wanted it. It was their courage, their certain knowledge that they were not wrong, just misunderstood, that I loved in them. I suppose it came from having had to be different, likely suffering jeers from others, shunned by some. They were truly brave, I always felt.
When I told Violet that I felt admiration for and even an affinity with these women, she didn’t, as I feared she might, recoil. “Who wouldn’t be a boy given a chance?” she said. “That’s the country where all the real living is, after all.”
Veronica had been staying with us for a week when I heard her talking with Daddy late one night. Tom and I were in bed, him fast asleep, me listening intently.
“He has your sister’s temper,” Daddy said. He was talking about Tom, who had our father’s temper as far as I was concerned.
“Then he’ll get along just fine as soon as he learns how to use it properly.”
“Well, Sarah sure knew how to use hers.” They both laughed. There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Daddy said. “He lost his mother and I haven’t been enough. If it weren’t for Iris . . .”
“He’s a boy, Jack, and boys are forgiven much. I wouldn’t worry about Tom but I think you need to do something for Iris.”
“Iris? She’s a brick.”
“Exactly. She’s eight and already she acts like a mother, chasing after Tom. She needs more support. I’d like to take her back to Europe with me.”
My stomach went to butterflies. I couldn’t imagine leaving Daddy and Tom, but Europe, where the chocolate had come from, the Eiffel Tower, the Europe where it snowed for Christmas morning, that would be amazing.
“No,” said Daddy. “She’s needed here. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair? Listen to yourself, Jack. She’s a child but she’s like a wife and mother. Talk about fair. It could be just until after Christmas and then I could bring her back.”
“I said no,” Daddy said. “And that’s the end of it.”
I don’t believe Daddy said no because he felt he needed me. He and Tom would have managed. I think Daddy was afraid I wouldn’t come back. Whenever I did well at school or noticed something Daddy had missed, he’d say I was clever just like my mother. She’d been a zoology student, interested in the monotremes, Australia’s strange egg-laying mammals. Daddy had met her when he was hired to show a group of students the bush around Canungra, south of Brisbane, whose creeks were populated by platypuses. She and Daddy fell in love and married and that was the end of her research career. She’d always been more interested in the platypus than in Daddy, Daddy said to us, despite his best efforts. Mostly when Daddy said I was like her, I knew he was proud of me. But she was also headstrong, he gave me to understand, and he could say you’re just like your mother and mean it in a different way. And now I’d seen her sister Veronica, this wild woman from the north of Scotland. These were the women I came from. I wouldn’t say I was proud exactly, but I situated myself differently, realised I came from different people from my father’s people, and I might be different too.
I lay in my bed, Tom’s breathing slow and even in the bed beside mine. I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved that Daddy had refused to let me go, and perhaps I was a little of both.
A few days later, I was trying to change a bandage on Tom’s leg. He’d come off his go-cart and a branch had made a deep gash. Really it needed stitches, but Dr. McLeod’s wife was sick after their fourth was born and no one liked to call him out unless it was an emergency. Tom didn’t much like me changing the bandage. He liked to do everything himself and I had to keep him still so he didn’t bump the wound. “No!” he yelled, and ran away, the bandage trailing along behind him. I caught up with him and dragged him back. He was pinching me and pulling my hair. It wasn’t that hard a job—I’d had to do much more difficult things—but his resistance and the sight of the wound, puckered red with what might be infection—I just felt hopeless all of a sudden, completely incompetent to the task. I think I was yelling at him when Veronica came in. “What’s the matter, Iris?” she said, and her voice was so kind I felt even more angry, as if she were pitying me.
“Nothing.” I was barely holding back tears. “I’m just trying to do this.”
“Here,” she said, “let me help, Tom.” He was watching me carefully, terrified I think that he’d finally sent his sister mad. He became perfectly quiet now, of course, and let Veronica reapply the antiseptic and gauze and rewind the bandage without a peep. I could have killed him for making it so easy on her.
The next day Veronica took me to Brisbane on the train. We went to T. C. Beirne in the Valley and she bought me a frock in a beautiful blue gingham with a satin sash and a matching ribbon for my hair. We had tea and scones at a teahouse. I’d never been in a teahouse before and I remember being amazed that they made the scones; you didn’t have to bring them yourself. We stayed in a hotel in the city and in the morning we had breakfast on a tray with starched linen napkins and little pieces of crisp toast in a silver holder.
I kept that first gingham dress Veronica gave me and I wore it every chance I could. By the time I put it away for good, wrapping it in ti
ssue and cheesecloth and packing it in a box, it was faded to grey and the sash was the only thing still bright. To me, the dress still looked as it had when new.
When Veronica went home a week after our shopping trip, it left a gap something like the gap left by my mother’s death. I suppose my aunt had reawakened in me some notion of what a mother might be like. Not that she was motherly; a much better aunt, with her expensive tastes and indulgences, than a mother. But it was true what Mrs. Carson had said, when she visited the first time after Mummy died, that a girl needed a mother figure especially in those between years, and if I ever wanted to talk, well, Mrs. Carson had her own daughter, and was more than willing to do her best to fill the breach for me. I had to ask Daddy what the breach was, and he said it was the hole left when two things were torn apart. And that made sense. But Mrs. Carson could never fill that breach, whereas in her way Veronica already had.
A year later, Daddy solved the problem of how to manage his children by marrying Claire. It did take a load off me for a time, although I always felt responsible for Tom, a responsibility I certainly wasn’t willing to give up to Claire. But even after Daddy remarried and for the rest of my young life, Veronica sent me clothes, every Christmas and every birthday. Beautiful clothes, enough of them so that I would never feel out of place among the other girls. When I think back now, it was such an act of kindness on her part, suffragist or not.
“Were you in the Cause?” I asked Violet now.
“Goodness me, no. I don’t care about voting. Governments don’t change my life. And as if women would ever vote as a bloc. I’d rather have other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’d rather not feel I’m being watched all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, just that men watch us. I don’t like it.”
“Oh Violet,” I said. “If you don’t like it you’ll have to stop being such a flirt.”
“Not that sort of watching,” she said. “Waiting for us to do the wrong thing so they can blame us. Don’t you feel it?” I shook my head no but I knew what Violet meant. At Royaumont, where we didn’t have a man in charge, where we had Miss Ivens, it was different, as if we’d all breathed out a sigh and could relax.
Towards the end of that week the casualties we’d been waiting for started to flow in, slowly at first and then like a river. I was back on the ward again—we were constantly short of staff—and when I finished my fourth night in a row after the first influx, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. So I got dressed and went up to the roof. I sat overlooking the cloister and watched the sun ease into the sky over the poplars of Lys. And I felt such simple joy, the same joy I felt as a girl when I’d see Tom dressed and ready for school, his trousers pressed, his lunch packed, his hair combed. Necessary is what I felt. Useful.
I’d told Matron I’d come back later in the morning, so I went downstairs and washed and went out to the cloister tables for a quick bite before going back to the ward. Cicely Hamilton was sitting at a table by herself. She looked upset and I went over and asked if I could join her. I’m not sure I did so out of concern for Cicely, I’m afraid. More likely, I looked forward to telling Violet some bit of gossip. I was fairly sure Cicely had been crying. The iron maiden crying? as Violet might have said. She ought to watch she doesn’t rust.
“Where are you working?” she said, pleasantly enough.
“Blanche.”
“How many in?”
“We’re full,” I said, “with seven still waiting downstairs for a bed. They’ve finished in the theatre for now though. More expected later today. It’s the big push, they say, that will end the war.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” Cicely shook her head slowly. It wasn’t like her to be circumspect. She was normally all efficiency and bustle. I noticed an envelope in front of her, postmarked from England. She had tea and toast she hadn’t touched.
“Have you news from home?” I said.
“My mother died,” she said flatly.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.” She forced a smile.
“Why ever not, Cicely?”
“My mother,” she started, then stopped. She looked up and away to the left, her mouth clamped shut, tears threatening.
“Let’s take a turn around the grounds,” I said. “I could do with a walk to shake off last night.”
To my surprise Cicely acquiesced. We collected our raincoats—the clouds were heavy and looked likely to give forth—and crossed the cloister to the back lawns. As I’d hoped, the movement of walking made it easier for her to talk and talking was what she needed to do.
Cicely’s mother had been excitable, or that’s the word Cicely had heard used to describe her mother’s strange behaviours. To Cicely, of course, her mother was just her mother. If she stayed up all night baking for one of the children’s birthday parties, ran around decorating the house and cleaning in a frenzy, only to tell all the other children to go home almost as soon as they’d arrived for there wasn’t enough food, Cicely thought nothing of this. She had no mothers to compare her own to, so this was what mothers did, she supposed. “Looking back now, I think we were too much for her,” Cicely said. “She wasn’t frail exactly. It was just that she experienced too much of everything. She was too open to it all, if that makes sense. Like the whole world was in her head.”
“What was your father doing?”
“My father was in the army—is in the army. He was away most of the time. And when he came home, it was like having a boarder.
“My mother made my life difficult,” Cicely said. “She came to school and told my teacher that someone was stealing my things. She described shoes I’d never owned, a pair of mittens, a necklace. I stood there and let her do it and never said a word. I don’t think the teacher suspected, not then. But when the visits continued—she was sure someone put nits in my hair, she’d found a dead rat in my school bag—my teacher began to understand. She asked me to stay behind one afternoon. Your mother’s worried about things, she said. Sometimes, yes, I said. You’ve no idea, Iris, how you lie for them. No matter what they do, you defend them because the alternative, that they could somehow be wrong, is unbearable. Is everything all right? this teacher said and she put her hand on my shoulder. Of course everything’s all right, I said. The next day I went to her and said, Miss Jenkins, you must understand that my mother is excitable, and when someone’s excitable you just have to know which parts are true. She nodded. That’s very wise, Cicely, she said.”
Cicely’s mother was taken from her children in Cicely’s thirteenth year, not long after her conversation with Miss Jenkins. It wasn’t Miss Jenkins who acted, though. It was Cicely’s father, who came home and found their mother had shaved the children’s heads and shredded their clothes, searching for the nits that continued to elude her. The next day she was gone, no tearful good-bye, not even strong-armed orderlies in white manhandling her into a black car, at least not in Cicely’s view. Cicely’s view was her father’s eyes narrowing, sweat beading on his forehead as he told the children, in a line, that their mother had gone on a nice holiday. One morning they’d woken and their mother was there. The next she was gone. They were going on an adventure, their father said, and he divided them up, three boys and three girls, and sent them off to charitable institutions. He sold the house, moved into the barracks, and never saw his children again.
We’d walked twice around the outside of the abbey and our pace was slowing now. “I saw my mother once,” Cicely said. “I found out where she was from my grandmother. It was an asylum in the country not far from my school, strangely enough. She’d loved beauty, but the light had gone out of her. She was wearing a stained nightdress with her breasts on show. She didn’t know who I was.
“I can’t help but think that there was something I didn’t do that I should have. I used to
go and sleep in her bed if she was scared, and I think sometimes if only I’d gone to her bed that night, I’d have stopped them coming, she might have been saved, mightn’t she?”
I was naïve in the extreme, I see now, with no understanding of how guilt worms its way into a heart and festers there. “You can’t blame yourself, Cicely,” I said stupidly. “You were young.” As if the reality of Cicely’s youth or her poor mother’s condition could possibly compete in Cicely’s mind with her mother’s warm body in the bed and her thirteen-year-old sense of responsibility for it. “Poor Cicely,” I would say now that I have lived my life. “What a cross to bear.”
For two weeks, we had a constant stream of wounded. I was working sixteen-hour shifts, having a four-hour break and then working again. At some stage, the ward sister told me to go off for eight hours and I went up to the room and fell into bed without changing or washing. The ambulances had been back and forth from Creil all through that day and the night that followed. I came to dread the sound of the porter’s horn. It haunted my dreams. I’d wake thinking I’d heard it and fall back into a fitful sleep only to wake minutes later. No sooner did we clear the front hall of patients than another load arrived. I worried about Violet.
The stories the men told beggared belief. The shells had made deep holes in the trenches. The soldiers were living in mud up to their knees and now it was impossible to see where the deeper holes were. One man told me he fell up to his chest and waited five hours to be pulled out. Another man right next to him drowned. And we were all terrified by the new weapons of war, the horrid gas that poisoned eyes and lungs and for which we had no treatment. We watched them die in slow agony and any of us who had once thought the war was righteous knew that what was happening to these men and boys could never be related to justice. Now there wasn’t a woman in Royaumont who spoke in support of war. No one thought the kaiser had done right, but when you saw the soldiers on both sides, for we treated German prisoners, you knew it should stop. All we could do though was keep treating them. We had no power to intervene in any other way.
In Falling Snow Page 22