by Philip Paris
Fiona left without a word and Giuseppe sat down, his previous elation swept aside by seething anger.
However, about five minutes later Fiona returned, stepped over Kemp’s outstretched legs before he could speak and held out a mug of steaming coffee to Giuseppe. He stretched out his hand to take it and in doing so his fingers rested on hers. Neither of them moved. Kemp couldn’t see the touch, the look, the moment of intimacy.
‘You’ll burn your hand,’ she whispered eventually.
‘I don’t care.’
She moved the mug around so he could take the handle, but for a few moments longer she let two fingers remain wrapped within his.
‘Thank you,’ said Giuseppe. Private Kemp thought the comment was for the coffee, but Giuseppe and Fiona knew it was not.
She turned, took a few steps to the door and stopped, refusing to step over the soldier’s legs a second time. Private Kemp looked up at her only briefly before quickly moving his legs out of the way, mumbling an apology.
The memory of Fiona filled Giuseppe’s mind for the rest of the day, but when he woke the next morning he wasn’t totally convinced he hadn’t imagined her until he was ordered, after roll call, to return to the hospital. The guard was one of the older men. Giuseppe thought they might vary on every visit so that different men got a trip off the island, which was a greatly sought after prize. This time they walked to the pier and caught the first boat returning to the mainland, before thumbing a lift on an army lorry.
The guard chatted to anyone who would listen, but ignored Giuseppe, which suited him. He was totally preoccupied with plans on how to spend time alone with Fiona. She came out from behind the desk as soon as they approached and Giuseppe’s face exploded into a smile that froze when Fiona totally ignored him, instead taking the guard’s arm as if he was her favourite brother.
‘How was your journey? You must be exhausted. I bet you could do with a good cup of tea. I’ve even brought you some home-made scones. They’re waiting for you with today’s newspaper in one of the quiet rooms so you can put your feet up for a while.’
She said this almost without pause for breath, giving the guard no opportunity to speak. As she talked, she led him away from Giuseppe, who stood watching the scene, his expression changing into one of astonishment.
‘I can’t leave the prisoner, miss,’ said the guard at last, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ll have to stay with him throughout.’
‘Oh no, that’s quite unacceptable. You’re in a hospital now and so hospital rules apply.’
‘But …’
‘No buts. Patient confidentiality comes first. Anyway, the other young guard didn’t stay with him.’
At that moment the young nurse appeared who Giuseppe had seen the previous day and took the guard’s other arm. Giuseppe knew then that no matter what tactical manoeuvres or fighting experience the man might have, he was no match for these two women.
‘Doctor’s orders,’ said Fiona, when the guard looked like he might make once last stand. She had let go of his arm and was actually waving at him as the nurse led him down the corridor, like a small boy whom someone had taken by the hand. Fiona turned, walked briskly back to Giuseppe, roughly grabbed his arm and frog-marched him in the other direction.
‘And you’re only here to do some translating so don’t think you’re going to get up to any of your funny foreign business.’
Giuseppe played the part of defeated prisoner, even hanging his head as he was taken away, muttering that he was ‘very sorry.’ This time they entered a different door, and he found himself in a small empty kitchen.
‘You were marvellous,’ said Giuseppe with admiration. ‘I can’t believe you just did that. Did you really make home-made scones?’
‘Well, my mother made them and they were getting a bit stale, but it was worth it to get him out of the way. Ailsa and I have been working out a plan of action since first thing this morning.’
She looked at him and found she wanted his approval.
‘We don’t have long. Doctor McClure will be doing his ward round in less than an hour. You need to be by your friend’s bed before then and I can’t expect the other girls on reception to cover for too long.’
‘The doctor seems a good man.’
‘He is. He lost a leg in the first war but you wouldn’t think he was injured at all from the amount of energy he puts into this place. Here, I’ll make us some coffee. This is the nurses’ kitchen. No one will bother us while we’re here. I’ve brought some scones from home … some that I made.’
Fiona took two scones out of a tin and put them on a plate, which she pushed towards him. She blushed, realising she was walking a path that was completely alien to her and potentially scandalous. She put the kettle on to boil and retrieved two mugs, washing one again to give her hands something to do. It suddenly seemed unbelievable to her that she had actually made scones the previous evening, or that she had spent a large part of the morning planning how to distract the guard. Ailsa thought it all a great game, but she was young and Fiona was a woman of twenty. And it was not Ailsa who was trying to spend time alone with an Italian prisoner of war. It was not her reputation at stake.
What was she thinking of? He was the enemy and a man she had met for only a few minutes the previous day. Giuseppe was as much a stranger as he could possibly be. And yet that was not quite true. There was something about him, in the way his fingers had wrapped around hers, as though he wanted to protect her.
‘The kettle’s boiling,’ said Giuseppe, sensing the sudden turmoil within Fiona. ‘You were deep in thought.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ailsa … she’s the young nurse?’ asked Giuseppe, moving the conversation along.
‘Yes. We’re conspirators together in lots of things,’ said Fiona, pouring water into two mugs.
‘I don’t think many people would win an argument against the two of you.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank you. Thank you for wanting to see me again.’
They fell silent again. This time it was Giuseppe who wondered if he had been too forward and overstepped a boundary by saying the wrong thing.
Fiona studied him over the rim of her mug. Giuseppe was a neat man. Everything about him was tidy, including his carefully trimmed moustache and dark, wavy hair. He wasn’t big, but years of working at the forge had given him muscle and strength that were not apparent when he wore his uniform.
He smiled, revealing neat even white teeth. She found herself automatically smiling back.
‘What’s it like, in the camp?’
‘The camp is not so bad, but the work is hard and the weather is …’
‘Unpredictable?’ she offered.
‘Challenging. But the summer has been good. Almost like Italy. Have you ever been?’
She shook her head and Giuseppe found his eyes being drawn to her hair. He had never seen a colour like it.
‘Tell me about your farm.’
‘It’s more of a big smallholding.’ She laughed at his confused expression. ‘A very small farm. We have a few cattle and grow some crops. It’s all we can manage, but we do other work because it doesn’t earn enough to support us. Do you know about farms?’
‘No. I know about forging iron.’
‘Well, you would be very handy. There are plenty of barn doors falling off their hinges and things that need repairing. Perhaps I should ring the commander at the camp and ask him to send you over.’
For a fleeting moment Giuseppe thought she meant it and even when they both smiled at the suggestion, he felt certain she was not entirely joking.
‘We’re too busy building barriers, to stop the Germans from entering Scapa Flow, like they did before. I heard they sank a ship. Do you know what happened?’
A flicker of fear crossed her face and the smile in her eyes was gone in an instant.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Giuseppe. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
She didn’t answer straight away and when she did her voice wavered.
/> ‘No. It’s not your fault. I haven’t spoken to anyone about it, that’s all.’
‘Then don’t now, if it causes you distress.’
Fiona’s whole body seemed to sag with the weight of some past event and she looked down at the floor for several moments in silence. When she raised her head Giuseppe was shocked at the transformation. He found it hard to believe that a memory could alter someone so drastically. All the joy and sparkle had suddenly been taken away.
‘It happened three years ago last October. I’d been working at the hospital for only a few months when the phone rang at home in the middle of the night. The girl at the other end was frantic. Something had happened and I had to get there as quickly as possible.
‘When I arrived, men sat or lay everywhere. In the reception, down the corridors, in the waiting room. More were coming in every few minutes. I could see they were sailors so I knew a ship had been damaged. Some were suffering from hypothermia and shock, while others had swallowed oil or been injured during their escape.
‘We had practised for an emergency that resulted in high numbers of people arriving at the hospital, but it was apparent immediately that we weren’t going to be able to cope. For nearly an hour I rang every doctor and nurse in Orkney, including those who were retired but still active enough to help. Some turned up wearing coats on top of their pyjamas.
‘By that time they had started to bring in the burnt men. They were screaming and screaming and we didn’t have enough medical staff to treat them. We didn’t have enough of anything. I didn’t know what to do. I wandered into the ward and when I saw a figure all alone on a bed I went over. He was just a boy. His face was untouched but his arms and chest were … and the smell … I still wake up at night and have that smell in my nostrils … oil and seawater and burnt flesh.’
Fiona’s voice was becoming more strained, her breathing rapid.
‘Fiona. Don’t,’ said Giuseppe aghast at what he had started by his innocent question. But he had unlocked a door that had hidden a secret for over three years. Fiona was beyond stopping now.
‘I had no medical training so I sat by the bed and talked to him. He didn’t seem to be in pain. He told me something of what had happened, how some men had been incinerated in their bunks by flash fires. How men had cried out as they slid down the side of the hull because the barnacles ripped their flesh. How men had gone down deeper into the ship because they thought they were being attacked from the air. They couldn’t believe it was from a submarine. Not inside Scapa Flow.
‘He raised his arm and laid his clawed fingers on top of mine and I wanted to cry out with the horror of it…but I couldn’t move. I just kept talking and talking, even though in the end I was saying nonsense just to make a noise. Then a man appeared by the bed and pulled a sheet over the body. He’d died and I hadn’t realised.’
Giuseppe put down his mug and took a step nearer. Tears were falling freely off her chin. She dropped her mug, the remains of the coffee going over her shoes, but she carried on without noticing.
‘When I pulled my hand away, bits of his burnt flesh stuck to my skin and I screamed. I ran to wash it off, but I couldn’t find anywhere because there were men in the kitchens and men in the bathrooms and I couldn’t get it off. I just couldn’t get it off.’
She buried her head in her hands and Giuseppe took her in his arms. He had never heard anyone sob with such anguish.
He didn’t say anything but held her tightly for a long while, until eventually she started to go limp in his arms.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You needn’t apologise to me or anyone else. You did what you could and I know the boy would have been grateful he didn’t die alone.’
She pulled away from him slowly. His face was a blur through her tears.
‘You have kept this deep inside you for too long. Perhaps … perhaps now the nightmares will stop.’
9
As she lay in bed that night, Fiona asked herself why she had waited all this time to unburden such a terrible secret to someone she hardly knew. Maybe it was because he had asked her a direct question about what happened that night, when no one else ever had. In her mind she went over the other part of the story; the part she hadn’t told him.
The day the Royal Oak had been torpedoed, Fiona had remained at the hospital, talking to the men, helping them wash oil from their shivering, filthy bodies, hugging more than one young man who was shaking and crying. She couldn’t remember how she got home that evening, but she assumed she must have cycled. Her sister Rebecca had screamed when she staggered into the kitchen, while her parents had jumped up from their chairs at the sight before them.
Fiona’s ashen face was streaked with dirt, her dress covered in oil, blood and other stains. There was a smell they couldn’t identify but which made their stomachs turn. However, the look of shock on her face had frightened them the most.
‘Dear God above girl, what happened?’ asked her father, walking over to take hold of both of her arms as he thought she was about to collapse.
Fiona stared ahead in silence. Her mother, a practical nononsense Orkney woman, was the first to regain her wits and issued a stream of orders to both her husband and younger daughter, which set them scurrying to throw more wood on the fire, boil water and fill the tin bath. She led Fiona over to sit by the fire, poured a generous measure of brandy into a glass and gave it to her.
When the bath was full, Fiona’s mother undressed her as if she was a small child and with the help of Rebecca eased her gently into the hot water. Fiona meekly did what she was told without comment or acknowledgement of their presence. Rebecca knelt on the floor and washed Fiona’s hair while her mother tenderly sponged her body. It was only when Fiona was sitting in her dressing gown, Rebecca standing behind the chair drying her hair with a towel, that she spoke and then it was only to mutter two words. Her father was picking up the clothes still lying on the floor.
‘Burn them,’ she had whispered.
She said it with such an expression of despair her father thought his heart would break. He carried the clothes out into the yard and threw them on to a pile of rubbish. There was nothing left of them by the time Fiona woke late the next day. Her parents had decided they wouldn’t ask questions, a point that had to be instilled severely into fourteen-year-old Rebecca. The sinking of the Royal Oak was in that day’s newspapers so it was easy to piece together at least some of the events.
Fiona returned to the hospital the following day to find most of the sailors had been taken away, the injured to the Dinard. The uninjured had been transferred to other ships moored within the harbour. Doctor McClure looked as if he had hardly slept. A few sailors had been left in the wards because it was considered better not to move them.
Fiona had never talked about that day but the nightmares had never gone away. She hoped that telling the kind Italian might help.
Giuseppe lay in his bunk in Camp 60. He had been greatly affected by Fiona’s distress but also by the fact she had chosen to unburden herself to him. Why? What was he to her?
By the time they had left the nurses’ kitchen, Fiona had composed herself sufficiently and Giuseppe arrived at Lorenzo’s bed just before Doctor McClure entered the ward. The doctor, who was also the hospital surgeon, was going to operate on Lorenzo’s stomach ulcer the next morning. Giuseppe was told he should return the day after.
He spent the following day working in the quarry, locked within his own world; taking apart and analysing each moment spent in the kitchen with the striking island woman, and wishing away the time so he could return to the hospital. However, the next morning, as he clung to the side of the liberty boat that was making a nauseating journey between Lamb Holm and mainland Orkney, it was not Fiona who filled Giuseppe’s thoughts. It was Mussolini.
A rumour that Italy’s Prime Minister had been dismissed from office had spread rapidly throughout the camp earlier that morning, sparking violent arguments as tempers flared bet
ween those who believed the news and those who were adamant it was untrue. Guards had rushed in more than once to separate fighting men. There were plenty who didn’t know what to think. Certainly, no one knew what it meant for Italy, or for them, if it was true.
When they arrived at the hospital it was obvious the guard had heard about the tea and scones because he went off with Ailsa without a comment. Giuseppe walked silently with Fiona down the corridor. He thought she looked tired. As soon as the kitchen door was closed she turned to face him.
‘Have you heard the news about Mussolini?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but many men think it’s just British propaganda and isn’t true.’
‘It is,’ said Fiona, taking a copy of that day’s Daily Mirror out of a drawer. She had hidden it for Giuseppe to see.
The front page headline announced ‘MUSSOLINI IS SACKED’. Italy’s king had taken over the Italian forces and Marshal Pietro Badoglio had replaced Mussolini.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked when he had finished.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Mussolini took Italy into the war and if he’s gone …’ Giuseppe shrugged his shoulders. ‘He had many supporters … perhaps civil war? It’s a terrible thought. I’m not sure how it will affect us on Orkney. We’re still prisoners of war, whatever happens.’
They were silent for a while. Fiona walked over to the sink.
‘The other day …’ she began, facing away from him.
‘I’m glad you told me.’
She turned. There was a flicker of a smile on her face, the first since they had last met.
‘So am I. I hadn’t realised there was so much pain and hurt, waiting to surface, but I’m grateful you were here.’
This time her smile reached her eyes and he smiled back.
‘I’ll make us some coffee,’ she said, putting on the kettle. ‘We haven’t much time. One of the girls on reception is off sick and I can’t expect the other one to cover alone.’ She saw the look of disappointment on Giuseppe’s face. ‘Your friend’s doing well. Doctor McClure is very pleased.’ She opened a tin. ‘Here, two scones for your coffee.’