by Maggie Ford
‘’Alf asleep was we, Corp’ral?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, I suggest yer get yer finger out a bit more sharpish, next time, an’ stop bloody daydreamin’. Fine example you are. Whatever’d ’appen to us if you ever got a commission? The day you do, my arse’ll turn into a bleedin’ pumpkin, that’s wot. Now keep yer mind on yer job or I’ll ’ave them stripes orf yer before yer can say, “Oh bloody my!” ’
For twenty minutes Matthew kept his mind on his job, the sound indicator booming and roaring, amplifying every sound of any plane overhead, pinpointing its direction. On one occasion his searchlight trapped a plane, prompting others to sweep over and join it in a perfect star of beams, the ack-ack guns in a nearby sandbagged pit consequently opening up in an energetic earsplitting barrage. The plane swopped east, then north, finally managing to evade the deadly nucleus of light by slipping behind a low cloud and no doubt veering off to rejoin its fellows over Coventry.
One by one the searchlights were doused. Matthew’s radio went quiet. Bob and the rest of the crew fell to rolling cigarettes.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, his tone low and confidential, recalling the sigh Matthew had given earlier and interpreting it correctly as only a gentle, perceptive soul could. ‘Why don’t you propose to this girl of yours? In a letter. See what she says.’
Matthew looked up with a frown from the cigarette he too was rolling. On a corporal’s pay, packet cigarettes ran away with money and he did his best to discourage his parents sending cheques; telling them in no uncertain terms that it made him look bad before his hut-mates and that he was managing adequately enough.
‘I’ve only known her two or three months. I can’t go mad.’
‘If you feel about her the way you appear to me to, I would say you wouldn’t want to lose her to someone else. Better now than never.’
That was true. But marriage. Matthew gave Bob a nod to placate him and told himself he’d have to think about that one. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed it was what he wanted. He remembered having the same feeling about Jenny, strange little twinges of excitement in the pit of his stomach when he thought of her, but Susan had come along and the sensation had transferred itself to her, fourfold. He knew now who he wanted, that it was Susan for whom he would further his career, making her proud of him. Perhaps he’d take Bob’s advice, re-apply to the selection board. A man should do all he could to support his intended.
Sitting on his bed, a book on his knee for support, he absorbed himself in putting down on paper all he wanted to say. But reading it back, he cringed. The worst drivel he’d ever read – she’d laugh her head off. Better to tear it up before he did any damage and made a complete fool of himself.
But he didn’t tear it up. Instead he folded the flimsy wartime paper and laid it carefully inside his pay book. Finding a fresh sheet of paper he penned another letter, full of the things he normally wrote to her, his hut-mates, their doings, the smelly Eddie Nutt whose socks stank the place out every time he opened his locker, the lecherous clown Taffy Thomas, the foul-mouthed Bert Farrell, Bob and his family, Sergeant Pegg, the rotten food, the hard beds, how much he looked forward to seeing her again and hoped it would be soon, and how was she, and what had she been doing?
‘Ward, M.L.C. 092.’ Matthew shouldered through the waiting men to receive two letters. Perched on a wall in the weak sunlight of the November morning that threatened rain, he put aside the one from his parents and opened the other with its large childish handwriting.
The letter was short, two small ruled pages, laboriously written, with several words misspelt, which evoked a surge of compassion … no, more one of tenderness. It was little more than an outline of her activities since he’d last seen her – pictures with a girlfriend, a dance or two. A twinge of panic smote him that she could so easily meet someone else during one of those dances, someone more conveniently to hand than he.
‘Damn this bloody war!’ he uttered so vehemently that Bob looked up and grinned.
Hastily scanning the second page of writing which didn’t quite reach to its foot, it was the last line that brought relief flooding through his chest in a hot glow: ‘I’ve been worried you might get fed up of riting to me. I cant wait to here from you.’ A thousand words penned by the world’s greatest poet could not have conveyed as much meaning as he read into that one artless sentence.
Life took on new meaning; time was a most precious commodity. But it was one the Army seemed perversely set on spinning out into an eternity of misery, for just as he was settling down after his day’s duty to write to her the beefy bulk of Sergeant Pegg appeared to announce that the whole unit was on the morrow being sent to the wilds of Wales on an exercise, duration not divulged, all passes cancelled. Matthew, who had planned on wheedling a few hours’ pass for himself, suffered an intense sense of loss hardly to be borne.
‘Damn this bloody war!’ he uttered for the second time that day as he fought to rush off a letter to Susan.
The Blitz was a tyrant. Begun in September and still going strong, there was no chance for Jenny to be at home for Christmas or New Year. Her mother had either to spend both on her own or go to her sister in Leicester. That she wouldn’t do, fearing to travel alone. Daddy had always done everything and she, used to following him around like a small puppy, had still not learned independence.
‘Can’t you try to get away, dear,’ she asked when after the sixth or seventh attempt Jenny got through on the telephone to the couple next door – well, the girl next door now that her husband had been called up.
Her mother sounded out of breath from hurrying into the other house, shouting down the mouthpiece as though distance made this obligatory although there’d not been a lot of static crackling over the wires.
‘I’m on duty, Mumsy. I can’t just get time off. It’s terrible here. So many people being brought in injured.’
‘I don’t like us being apart.’ The voice filled with consternation. ‘I’ll have to spend all night Christmas down the shelter all on my own. We’ve had a bomb come down near here. Some of the tiles are off. It’s only a matter of time before this place is hit. I wish you were here. I feel so … so … isolated. Can’t you come home?’
‘They need every nurse they can get here at the moment, Mumsy.’
‘Well, it’s terrible. They should allow you home for New Year at least.’
‘German bombers don’t worry about holidays, Mumsy. They’ll drop them whatever day it is.’
‘I don’t think I can stand being here all on my own.’
‘Can’t Joan next door come into our shelter with you?’
‘I couldn’t ask her that, dear.’ Her mother’s voice had dropped to a whisper lest the girl overhear. ‘I couldn’t open my house to strangers.’
‘She’s not a stranger. You’re in her house right now. Now she’s on her own too, you could both become quite good friends and help each other. We need to help each other these days.’ The Blitz had made everyone conscious of the need for people to help each other.
‘She won’t be here at Christmas or New Year. She’s spending the holiday with her family or her husband’s family.’
Jenny tried not to let her sigh echo down the line. ‘Well, I can’t come home. The hospital’s bulging. There are even beds in the corridors. And during an air raid we have to get as many as we can under the beds or down into the basement. It’s like another hospital down there.’
‘If you asked them nicely, they’d let you have just one day?’
‘I can’t, Mum.’ She’d not been listening. ‘This line’s going funny. I’ll have to ring off.’
‘But Jenny …’
‘I’ll try to get home for a few nights after New Year, but it’s impossible at the moment. You’ll be all right, Mumsy.’ She wanted to say that her being at home wouldn’t stop a bomb dropping on it. ‘I’ll get time off eventually. I shall need it to get over all that we’re going through here.’
‘What, dear? What?’ The crackling was growing noisier; impossible to hear anything now. And her time was almost up, her money running out. Moreover, she knew she was taking liberties during work time.
‘I’ve got to ring off, Mumsy. Love you.’
‘What?’
‘Love you, Mumsy. I must go.’ A sturdy, starched blue figure was approaching. ‘I’m on duty. I’m wanted. Try to get home as soon as I can.’
She replaced the receiver on its hook, goodbyes cut short by the glare from the stone-grey eyes of Miss Grenville, approaching with a few attendant senior staff.
‘Have you not enough to do, nurse?’ The question was quietly authoritative. Jenny’s reply was hasty, unrehearsed.
‘My mother, Matron, asking if I’d be spending Christmas with her.’
In truth she had no real wish to go home. Christmas here would be far more exciting if she could believe what the nurses who’d been here last Christmas told her: wards decorated with paperchains fashioned from whatever coloured paper they could get hold of, spending any off-duty hours in each other’s rooms to make them; going round the wards on Christmas Eve, their blue capes drawn close around them as they sang carols in muted voices, each nurse holding a lit candle; later sitting in the nurses’ quarters all cosy and warm by a fire while others piled in to roast chestnuts and eat the mince pies someone’s mother had sent, swapping jokes and stories of latest conquests with junior doctors.
That had been last year’s. Jenny looked forward to this year’s but wondered if it would have changed since the Blitz started. But anything was better than just sitting at home with Mumsy, even if there was an air raid on Christmas Day itself. She wouldn’t even put that past the enemy.
She had been transferred to the London Hospital from her teaching hospital in October, a month after the Blitz had started. Eight weeks on and night bombing was still going on, not a single night free of it, remorseless, dominating all else. As darkness fell, she, like everyone else, merely prepared herself for the wail of sirens, the drone of bombers, and the horrible tearing sound and crash of falling bombs when the very air shook and dust drifted in from everywhere. The sky turned lurid to the mad clanging of fire engines, ambulance bells that heralded another stream of casualties. She and everyone felt it would go on until the war was finally won, all steadfastly refusing to imagine it could be Britain who might lose. Such a prospect remained so preposterous it was unthinkable.
Jenny stood aside for Matron’s entourage to pass, waiting to make her escape back to her ward, but the woman halted, eyes fixed on her. ‘If you are on duty, nurse, then you should know that telephone calls are not permissible. If you are not on duty, then you are off limits. I shall see you in my office at six thirty.’
‘Yes, Matron.’ Jenny watched miserably as she and her staff moved on. Six thirty. Well planned. Two days remained before Christmas and the evening had only just grown dark because of the introduction of British Summer Time. Clocks were now kept one hour forward the whole year round to confuse an enemy whose own time remained as it had been prior to hostilities. The bombers would not arrive for a couple of hours yet. Plenty of time was left for civilians to get home from work, eat and get into shelters, and for her to endure a formal and uncomfortable dressing-down from Matron.
She had been through the drill before, standing in the centre of Miss Grenville’s office, Miss Grenville walking around her with measured steps, quoting hospital rules to her in quiet tones as measured as her walk. No punishment had been meted out: humiliation constituted punishment enough. Jenny found herself almost wishing the bombers would come early, requiring her duties to take precedence over any visit to Matron. But that would come sooner or later.
The all clear sounded just before dawn; while the people of the East End sank back to pick over lost homes, grieve lost loved ones, or just feel glad that they had escaped unscathed, the doctors and nurses of the hospitals all around toiled on, endeavouring to repair often irreparable injuries. For Jenny, exhausted by morning, her talking-to from Matron was just added torture. She fell thankfully into her bed in the nurses’ quarters to forget about everything for a few hours until night came again. A week of that and then it would be days, spent mopping up the dregs from the previous night.
By February, freezing and cheerless, it was a wonder there were any buildings left to be bombed. Even some already flattened received a second direct hit. Yet, emerging for a breather in the cold light of dawn, she was always amazed so many still stood, windowless, battered sentinels. How this hospital had got away with just glancing blows so far seemed a miracle. How those who worked within it kept going was a miracle. Exhausted nerves stretched like rubber bands, they remained professional amid unbelievable chaos. As for herself, she was just an efficient puppet in a starched apron; obedient, mechanical, quietening some hysterical parent while nearby a terribly injured child seemed far more in need of her help; a mind trained at last to say, ‘Walk, nurse,’ when the sight of a woman with broken legs going into labour screamed for her to run, maybe knocking someone over in the process. It was frustrating, while the injured poured in still, covered in dust and blood, to be required to make tea for overstrained doctors. Though often essential, keeping them going, more often than not the tea remained untouched. It was hard at times to be obedient.
She recalled resentment when, wanting to stand by for the injured to arrive, she’d be required instead to help transfer geriatric patients to the basement. Coaxing the frail and sometimes perverse elderly into wheelchairs to be trundled to safety could test obedience to breaking point and struck a poor second to the business of tending victims of bomb-blast and fire.
‘I feel more like a maid-of-all-work than a nurse,’ she complained in early March, the night bombing still going full blast, as they carried a dear old soul back up a flight of stone stairs after the all clear had sounded. The lift was again out of order. O’Brien gave a tinkling laugh.
‘Dear Mother o’ God, isn’t that what we’re here for?’
O’Brien was small, dark and Irish, a bundle of smiles and dedication whose upbringing had endowed her with the unquestioning obedience of a nun. At times Jenny envied as well as admired her. When it seemed impossible the hospital could continue after broken gas mains cut off the cooking facilities and all they had to cope with was a portable paraffin stove, O’Brien’s tranquillity as they fought with the thing reduced Jenny to a state of humility. With no running water for days on end, O’Brien took it all in her stride, emptying bottles of disinfectant into basins of cold water for washing hands after each dressing until the liquid turned cloudy grey, all the while praising God for the blessings of disinfectant.
At these times, Jenny yearned for the smooth routine of that teaching hospital in Basingstoke. She had learned her skills there, but East London was the acid test of a nurse’s stamina. Here, controlling fatigue meant overcoming not the simple weariness of a few nights’ lost sleep but the perfidious wearing down of her mental faculties, creeping up on her like a hooded assassin. The only hint of anything amiss would be a second or two of apparent sleep, yet coming back to herself to find she had accomplished her task as though she had been wide awake all the time.
More alarming were those longer moments of forgetfulness, as when she had taken a pile of bedpans, not to the sluice, but straight through the doors of an operating theatre without any recollection of how she had got there. Beating a hasty retreat, she had felt flustered and very much awake.
Much more recent had been that strange hallucination when she had looked up from taking a blood pressure to see a haggard and terribly emaciated young man standing at her elbow.
She remembered saying, quite loudly, ‘I’ll be with you in just one minute,’ and wondering vaguely at the astonished look from her female patient. She had turned again to find the young man was not there. He never had been. Recognising her mistake for what it was, a figment of total exhaustion, it had taken a while to shake off a belief that it had been a premonitio
n of some sort, for what really alarmed her was that every time she thought of it, the young face hovering before her seemed to be that of Matthew Ward.
It left her wondering for days how he was, where he was. In fact she could hardly wait for her next time off duty and she sacrificed a night out with the girls to pop home instead. The air-raid sirens hadn’t yet sounded and after sitting for a while in the back garden with Mumsy in the improving April weather, she wandered down to the shops in Mare Street where Mr Ward had his electrical shop, with the precise aim of casually asking how his son was doing.
‘Stationed in Wales at the moment,’ she was informed as he handed a customer a repaired radio. Such things these days were either repaired or second-hand, most things not on ration having vanished from sight.
‘He was near Birmingham,’ Mr Ward went on. ‘But like always, being trooped all around the country.’
‘He’s okay then?’ she pressed, still unable to get her hallucination out of her mind. At least he hadn’t been sent overseas.
‘Fine. Had a letter from him a few days back.’ How like Matthew he spoke. ‘Found himself a girl. Don’t know how serious it is, but he seems smitten by her. That’s how it goes. In the forces, you meet all sorts. His mother’s not pleased. Says it probably won’t last as she’s in Birmingham and he’s in Wales.’
And Jenny’s heart had sunk as she smiled and left, although it had been inevitable he would meet someone. She thought of herself, out of sight and out of mind. She should stop thinking about him and get on with her own life. But at least he was safe.
In no mood to go home just yet to have Mumsy defining the bleakness she knew must show on her face, she wandered down to St John’s church. She needed time to think. Of what, she had no real notion, but she had to sort out her thoughts of the future. It was imperative to stop dreaming of Matthew and get on with her own life.
St John’s stood closed on this early Saturday evening but did not look quite so isolated and remote as it once had behind its tall iron railings. They had gone now, as had all iron railings, to be melted down into guns and tanks in the fight for victory over the enemy. It now stood amid the open space looking slightly vulnerable, its sooty brick bathed a dirty gold from the slanting sun, its once-proud stained glass windows now war damaged and mostly boarded up, no longer reflecting back the golden glow.