Call Nurse Jenny

by Maggie Ford

  He was about to say he might think about having a crack at it when Ronnie Clark burst into the barrack room like a tornado. Unable to take in quite what he was blabbering about, those absorbed in reading tatty paperbacks, writing letters, darning socks, looked up.

  ‘Who’s bombed what?’

  ‘The Japanese. They’ve gone and bombed Pearl Harbor.’

  ‘Where the bloody ’ell’s Pearl ’Arbor?’

  ‘It’s an American naval base in Hawaii,’ Matthew supplied, which had Farrell sneering across at him.

  ‘’Ark at bleedin’ know-all.’ But Matthew ignored him. His heart was already filling with a kind of animal fear, nameless and undefined, having nothing yet to draw on, just an instinct of some threat looming from a totally unexpected direction.

  ‘Where did you hear this?’ Bob was demanding.

  ‘Over the radio.’ Ronnie Clark had been on duty all morning in the communications room. ‘A few minutes ago. They’ve bombed Singapore too.’ He looked significantly towards Jeff Downey whose thick lips had dropped open in awe. ‘Bet you’re glad we didn’t go there as you wanted to.’

  ‘The Yanks’ll come inter the war now, won’t they?’ Eddie Nutt said.

  ‘Bugger the Yanks!’ someone snapped. ‘What about us? Us fighting bloody Jerries, bloody Ities, and now bloody Nips. It ain’t fair! Just as we’re getting the best of the Jerries in North Africa an’ the battle of the Atlantic’s goin’ our way and everyone’s goin’ on about us openin’ up a second front, now we’re inter another bloody war. Ain’t it just fair!’

  It was Sergeant Pegg who put it all into perspective for them. ‘What you lot worrying about them short-arse little monkeys for? Most of ’em wear glasses. Planes tied up with string, like them bloody toys they export to us. I’d sooner fight an ’undred of them than a dozen of Rommel’s lot. The Yanks comin’ in, all we’ll see of them boss-eyed, bow-legged little yeller bleeders’ll be their backsides. The Yanks comin’ in’ll shorten the war in Germany too.’

  It all seemed logical and heartening even when days later they were moved on to the transit camp at Deolali; from Deolali station a horrendous three-day train journey across the Indian continent began, to Calcutta, Assam, and on to Rangoon in Burma to join Burmese and Indian brigades there.

  Matthew’s letters home had been written in fits and starts. Susan’s had been delayed because those to her were always precious and needed thinking about, dreaming over. Now there was no time for dreaming. What he had written would have to be sent off as it was. He hadn’t heard from her yet, but with all this sudden moving out, hers must still be catching him up. He would get it sooner or later, but it was hell not hearing.

  ‘Knowing the Army,’ Bob said as they strolled through the paved courts of the ancient Shwe Dagon pagoda on their first off-duty sightseeing trip, the hot spicy smells of India now replaced by the milder flowery ones of Burma, ‘our mail will all come in one batch.’

  ‘And wait another couple of months for the next lot,’ Matthew agreed. Pensively he gazed up at the scores of lesser pagodas that surrounded the great stupa, of the Shwe Dagon, its graceful curves clad in pure beaten gold.

  His ears filled by the soft slap of bare feet on warm tiles, the low murmur of devotees at prayer, the droning intonation of Buddhist monks, the twitter of birds and the gentle tinkle of tiny bells, he watched a group of Burmese women at their labour of devotion, sweeping the smooth paving with flat, fan-shaped brooms. In crisp, straight blouses over colourful skirts, longyis, that wrapped tightly around their legs, their shining black hair pulled into a bun at the back of the head and secured by a gaudy flower, they looked sleek and clean, a far cry from the ragged denizens of Bombay.

  ‘I wish my Susan could see all this,’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes, a regular Cook’s tour, and not costing us a penny,’ said Bob appreciatively. ‘Just look where we’ve been at the expense of the Army. We’ve stopped off at Gib, West Africa, Cape Town, Bombay, Deolali and now Rangoon. Wonder where we’ll end up next?’

  ‘This is as far east as I ever want to go,’ Matthew said, his mind on their newest enemy. Short, bow-legged, short-sighted they might be, but they still had guns and shells and mortars, and could kill. He didn’t fancy Susan becoming a widow just yet.

  Taffy had joined them, coming from a side street with a wide grin of self-satisfaction. Matthew gave him a disparaging look. ‘Not in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.’

  Taffy’s grin widened even more. ‘Best time for it, isn’t it? Make you pretty thirsty, mind.’ He eyed one of the many water-sellers squatting on a corner beneath the shade of a tree, clinking a metal cup against a container with a loud urgent rhythmical clatter.

  ‘Wouldn’t risk it,’ Matthew warned. ‘Wait till you get a beer from the mess instead.’

  He paused by an ancient crone squatting under a large spreading tree near some open-fronted shops. Surrounded by several of her family and a few onlookers, she leered up at Matthew, her few remaining teeth stained red by betel-nut juice.

  ‘Tell fortune, soldiya?’ she croaked in English. There had been a British garrison here long enough for those like her to have a passing knowledge of their language. Dusty feet splayed from beneath a rusty longyi, the old fortune-teller beckoned with clawed hands. ‘You want know of long life, soldiya, love, ha?’

  ‘Go on, give it a go,’ Bob urged.

  ‘What about you, Taff?’ Matthew asked. ‘Might find out you’re going to turn over a new leaf and find yourself a decent wife. Put a stop to all that whoring of yours.’

  Taffy’s handsome face was full of injured pride. ‘There’s nice! You just leave me be to find me own wife when I’m good and ready.’

  Matthew laughed and glanced again at the crone with her vermilion grimace. On impulse he squatted in front of her, extending his hand, but the woman waved it away. ‘You pay. You pay.’

  A couple of coins dropped in her palm quickly appeased her and the old witch grabbed his hand to scrutinise it. Tracing the lines of his palm with a piece of indelible pencil until most of them were linked in mystical triangles and trapeziums, she studied the results, her voice a cracked sing-song.

  ‘See baby. See lady. Lady has your heart, soldiya.’

  ‘I bet she says that to everyone,’ Taffy interrupted with a chortle.

  Matthew was about to ask, what baby? But the woman went on: ‘One more lady has heart for you.’

  ‘Two?’ Taffy gave another chortle. ‘And you talk about me, boyo?’

  ‘Lady with bright hair,’ went on the crone.

  ‘No, dark,’ Matthew corrected.

  The black eyes like polished jet glittered angrily. She glanced round and pointed at the distant Shwe Dagon pagoda glinting like a gold nugget in the sunshine behind the low buildings.

  ‘Bright.’ She waggled her old head lest her prediction be contradicted again. ‘Like Shwe Dagon.’

  He let her have her way. After all it was only a bit of fun. But the old woman’s eyes had gone dark. She regarded him narrowly. ‘See bad thing here. Binding rope. Bad thing.’

  ‘The ball and chain, that is,’ laughed Taffy. ‘Don’t need your hand read to know that, do you?’

  Matthew resolutely kept his palm upwards. ‘What do you mean, bad thing?’ Was she referring to Susan? Was everything all right with her? The questions came even as he derided this odd belief in the woman’s words.

  But the crone had dismissed him, already casting about for other clients. Nor, strangely enough, would she take his offer of any more money.

  ‘A baby! Ye gods, she was right.’ Matthew stared at the letter that had at last caught him up. He waved it in Bob’s face. ‘That old bird who told me my fortune said she saw a baby and Susan says here that she’s pregnant.’

  For hours last night he had lain beneath his mosquito net studying his palm in the glow of a pale shaft of moonlight through the high barrack-room window, trying to make sense of the marks of the indelible pencil. Now had come Susan’s
letter. It was uncanny. ‘I’m going to be a father.’

  Bob, a father of three, regarded him as an old dog might a boisterous puppy. ‘Well, if she’s pregnant, obviously you will be. You’re not unique.’

  ‘I feel unique. God, I feel …’ There was no way to describe how he felt. Susan, his sweet timid Susan, to be a mother. He thought again of that old crone. Binding ropes she had said. Of course, a baby was binding, tying him and Susan together. Of course. Last night that prediction had worried him, he had been unable to pinpoint any of it. Now it all came plain. ‘I’ll never doubt a fortune-teller again,’ he announced. Bob grinned.

  ‘A shot in the dark. Their stock in trade – make it enigmatic enough and you can read anything you want into what they tell you.’

  ‘Two shots in the dark? No, there is something in it, Bob.’

  While Bob chortled, Matthew returned to reading the rest of his letter. It said she was two months pregnant. The letter was nearly three weeks old, so it had happened on his embarkation leave. She would be having the baby around June or July time.

  ‘We might all be home by then,’ he said to Bob, roughly calculating the date. ‘With the Yanks in the war now it could shorten it considerably.’

  Bob’s unprepossessing features were wreathed in smiles of joy for him. ‘Could be. One never knows. I tell you what, we’ll have a drink tonight to celebrate you being a prospective father, wet the baby’s head. Drinks on you of course.’

  ‘Thanks very much!’ Matthew chuckled, but Bob corroborating his own certainty of being home by next summer heartened him even more.

  In this frame of mind he began on his reply to Susan. But it wasn’t easy to put into it all he felt. He was in danger of writing a load of drivel and finally had to put it away until the next morning when he might be able to collect his thoughts better. It was the twenty-second of December, with Christmas and its panto, in which he’d got himself into the chorus, not sure if he even wanted to bother, three days away. The next morning the bombers came.

  Throughout Christmas and into the early days of 1942, Rangoon continued to be bombed. Detailed to help supervise hordes of terrified refugees pouring out of the city, helping to fill in at the docks now forsaken by hundreds of Indian dock workers who’d also taken to the road, hoping to get back home to India, Matthew’s letter to Susan lay unfinished.

  His main concern in that letter now was to allay her fears for his safety as news was relayed to England about the fall of Hong Kong and the air attacks on Rangoon. That city would surely be next to fall. Any time Matthew had he scribbled words of reassurance. Above all else, Susan, pregnant, must not be alarmed. He assured her that the bombing had been minimal no matter what the wireless said, but whether some censor would allow that piece of information in his letter to get through was out of Matthew’s hands, though he felt better having put it in.

  By the middle of January the Japanese were reported to be already concentrated on the Siam-Burma border, the speed of their movements stunning everyone. Matthew’s troop found themselves suddenly attached to an Indian brigade very much in need of a signals unit and ordered forward to establish a line of defence just east of the Sittang River which ran into the Gulf of Martaban some eighty miles away.

  Gathering up their kit, boarding trucks, they had no time to send last letters home even if they had been allowed to. By the time Matthew was able to scribble a page to Susan, Moulmein to the south was in enemy hands, so fast had the Japanese moved through what had been thought impenetrable jungle.

  Two weeks later the letter still lay in his shirt pocket, darkened by sweat, as he crouched by the side of a dirt road passing on crackling coded messages over his field radio, his nerves jumping, his eyes alert to any movement from the dim jungle on either side of the road.

  As yet they had seen no action, the enemy being busy around the Bilin River fifteen miles away. But everyone knew by now just how swiftly that enemy could move through this tangle of rainforest, how adept it was at easing around a battalion, small lightly equipped figures appearing out of the greenery in front of their prey like spectres, cutting off whole battalions without warning. It had happened more than once these last few weeks and no one wanted to be caught napping. Orders had come to withdraw to the railway bridge over the Sittang, to guard it until all transport and equipment was safely across. Then the rest were to cross prior to its demolition to prevent any enemy advance upon Rangoon itself.

  As Matthew moved back along the road with his platoon, a staff car passed him, empty but for the Indian corporal driving it. Remembering his letter, Matthew frantically hailed the man and as the car slowed he pulled out the letter and waved urgently at the driver.

  A slow gleaming smile split the dark aquiline features. There was no need for any exchange of words; the beseeching look on the taut face of the English corporal brandishing his stained envelope spoke volumes in any language. Stretching out a hand, the driver took it, nodded understanding, and tucking it into his uniform sped off westward in a cloud of dust.

  *

  Three months she had been here. Three months and still a guest, not one bit a part of Matthew’s family, and she wondered if in fact she wanted to be.

  Yes, of course Mrs Ward looked after her, saw she wanted for nothing and was apparently very happy with the knowledge of her son’s wife bearing his child. It was the way she went about it, the way she always conducted herself, that made Susan feel like an outsider.

  She yearned for home, for the noise and laughter, for her father’s uncouth manner and her mother’s brassy warmth, the sharp quarrelling of her sisters and the tormenting of her younger brothers, neighbours coming in and out as free as they liked. Their own doors too were open to anyone who wanted to come in for a chinwag and a cuppa. Three months here and she knew none of the neighbours, except Jenny Ross. But she looked for her in vain to unburden her troubles on. It seemed Jenny Ross was too taken up with her work nursing, her own friends and no doubt some young man, to come home at all the right times. Susan had seen her only once since that time they had spoken together, but it had been cold with a threat of more snow when she had glimpsed her entering her house, head down, glad to be out of the bitter wind and Susan had felt it too much an imposition to go across and make herself free as she might have done at home, especially as it was obvious Jenny Ross was eager to get indoors and relax.

  Life, with winter closing in, the sounds of the world deadened by the first snows, was turning into a gaol, her gaoler a well-meaning but dictatorial Mrs Ward whom she couldn’t bring herself to call Mum. Susan merely cleared her throat should she need to gain her attention, which was as seldom as she could get away with. Mr Ward, whom she did feel she could happily have called Dad except that she couldn’t address one in-law that familiarly without the other, was so different. He had the same way of looking at her as Matthew had, as though concealing some joke. He said little, but possessed a sort of warmth his wife did not have, and for Susan any tiny port in a storm was a haven. When the weather had been more clement she’d been able to take a walk down to his shop and spend her time there helping a bit, making tea or serving customers with small items or talking to him in the back room when things were quiet. Now that the weather had turned foul, she was stuck here with her mother-in-law, yearning desperately for her own mother. But her mother was far away and in no way could Susan find courage enough to make an excuse to leave and go off to live up there.

  In her own way Mrs Ward was kind enough, but Susan could not master her awe of her. And when she’d found herself pregnant, she also found herself practically in close confinement, watched over night and day by a woman with the eyes of a hawk watching its prey, or so it seemed.

  ‘You must stay in bed longer in the mornings. Don’t go out of the house without first telling me where you are going. Don’t try lifting that on your own, it could be too heavy and cause the baby an injury, I’ll do it for you. Don’t upset yourself so about Matthew – it’s not good for you in your
condition. Try to content youself more, my dear – there’s plenty of books to read. If you need to go to the library, tell me and I will accompany you. Is it not time you started knitting for the baby? That would help you. We could get some wool and you can make a start.’

  And this when she’d only been two months gone. No better, in fact worse, now she was four months. What would it be like by the time she was seven or eight months? Life threatened to become unbearable.

  Early Sunday morning, the fifteenth of February, came, with little to do but sit indoors all day as with most Sundays, and probably get on with her enforced knitting. Mrs Ward inspected it every now and again, helping her with dropped stitches, advising her on how to keep the knitting even: ‘You knit far too tightly, my dear. That’s because you’re too tense. Then when you relax, you knit looser. The result is an uneven garment. Try to remain relaxed all the time.’

  But how could she? She hated Sundays. She wished Matthew was here. But he was thousands of miles away, in a sunny climate, enjoying himself. Jenny Ross had told her, when she’d got into a panic over the news of war opening up in the Far East, that Pearl Harbor and Singapore which had been bombed at the same time were far far away from him. Mr Ward had confirmed that, adding – she suspected to make her feel better – that Matthew was probably living it up in India. Not that she didn’t want him to enjoy himself, wasn’t glad he was in no danger from this distant war; she just wanted him back here, a buffer between his mother and herself.

  This Sunday she was feeling particularly desperate. It was the baby, beginning to twitch ever so slightly, already seeming to be pushing out the walls of her stomach. She needed to get out of the house without Mrs Ward there to hold her firmly by the arm, like some sergeant major.

  That woman, why did she behave as if she had to be responsible for everyone else’s well-being? Was it because she herself lacked something, was nursing a sense of inferiority, deep inside, needing to combat it by bossing everyone about? Perhaps it was a way of proving something to herself. But could anyone visualise Lilian Ward as ever having lacked self-confidence? Susan could imagine her at four years old, bossing all the kids about, even then managing everything for them; could imagine her in her crib consciously manipulating her mother with a cry, a squeal, a smile. Lilian Ward had been born managing. But she wasn’t going to manage her!