‘She is concerned for you,’ said Maggie. ‘As I am,’ she added quite truthfully.
‘I am well enough,’ Charlotte told Maggie. ‘Better than I thought I might be. Our family doctor has given me something to help. But it is difficult, especially at night.’
‘Yes,’ said Maggie, thinking of her own house at night, where she sometimes awoke to the sound of her mother crying. Often her own grief made her unable to sleep and she would lie in the dark remembering her loved and loving brother. ‘I don’t know if it helps to talk …’
Charlotte stopped on the path, and clenching her hand she placed it just below the base of her throat. ‘Just here,’ she said, ‘is lodged a large lump of ragged glass. I carry it with me always. It occupies my mind and body. I am conscious of it as I breathe, eat, speak, think. Sometimes it presses so hard within me, I think that my heart might stop.’ She turned her large grey eyes to Maggie. ‘I did not know that grief could take on an actual physical form.’
Maggie went and stood close to the younger girl. Charlotte leaned her head on Maggie’s shoulder. Neither of them cried. Maggie’s own manifestation of grief was stunning numbness. Her own life had become locked into the day of John Malcolm’s last letter, when she had known that he was dead, days before the telegram had arrived.
‘There is a Sister Bateman at the hospital,’ said Charlotte. ‘Her fiancé was killed at Mons. When I first started working in the city hospital she was dreadful to me. Now she is helping me complete my Nursing Certificates.’
‘Everyone tries to be kindly,’ said Maggie. ‘Customers in the shop, my friends in the factory. It is so difficult just to go about and do the things of the day, but I find the activity of demanding work helps.’
‘So, we manage,’ said Charlotte, ‘because we have to.’ She took Maggie by the arm as they walked on among the trees where the leaves were already dappling to gold and auburn.
Apart from work and friends, Maggie found relief from her mourning from an unexpected source. When the first short letters arrived from Francis Armstrong-Barnes she had read them quickly and written back from a sense of duty; a promise that she had made and must keep. But as time went on and he completed his officer training and then moved from England to France, she found that she was reading some of his letters more than once, and taking more care with her own replies. She told herself that it was due to the approaching winter and letter writing was something to do by the fire in the dark evenings. His letters had become longer and slightly disjointed, written at different times over several days. She found them thoughtful and interesting, and finally had to acknowledge to herself that she looked forward to receiving them.
He had added at the end:
To begin with Maggie had no idea what to write in reply. Francis did not ask for anything, neither home news nor items to be sent, so in her first letters she confined herself to comments about the weather. But as Francis’s letters arrived from abroad they seemed to need more, demand an attention that was almost personal. She had an inkling of how much their correspondence meant to him by one letter she received.
Maggie looked at the last sentence, You will have read his work. Francis obviously had read Kipling, and assumed that she had too. But she hadn’t. There was little time for her to read books, and not much point either, unless it was a recipe or an account. She had been destined to work in the shop until she married. Now she knew that she had missed out in some way and her lack of knowledge meant that she could not adequately respond to Francis.
There was a library in Springbank close to the munitions works. After work the next day Maggie crossed the road and went inside. It was the first time she had been in a public library. She cautiously asked for anything by Rudyard Kipling, and was given two books. It seemed frivolous to be reading fiction at all and even more so reading poetry. But now she was more content, she could write back to Francis telling him that she had borrowed from the public library and very soon she would send him her comments on Kipling’s work.
Chapter 19
ONE NIGHT IN October when dinner had been eaten, Maggie cleared and washed up and then sat down at the kitchen table with pen and paper before her. A letter had come from Francis that morning, and she needed to think carefully before she replied. He was now on a second tour of duty at the Front and enduring all the hardship involved in active service there. She thought of one of her brother’s last letters home, where John Malcolm had cheerily talked about the lice which appeared to be endemic.
He had added at the end:
This last sentence was a saying her mother and father used frequently. Maggie recognized it, and when she read it she at once knew her brother’s state of mind. Reading Francis’s letters was always more challenging. She sometimes struggled to grasp his thoughts as he had put them on paper. Occasionally they contained references that she did not fully understand. But although it gave her difficulty, she felt pleased that he wrote to her in this way, neither watering down his experiences, nor addressing her as a child, the wag men frequently did to women. Letters from Francis took longer to get through and it helped to read them more than once, yet she found them all the more satisfying because of that. The letter she had received today made grim reading. It did not begin ‘Dear Maggie’ but with a quote which Maggie recognized from Macbeth, a play her teacher had read with them in her last year at school.
At this point Maggie had to stop reading. She took her handkerchief from her pocket and held it to her mouth.
The letter was unsigned as though Francis had been unable to continue.
Along the bottom he had scrawled:
Maggie read and reread the letter. It needed a reply, and quickly. Francis’s way of writing out this black tragedy had overtones of despair which frightened her. The intensity and mocking humour reverberated within her. She was utterly convinced that he wrote to no-one else like this, and she knew therefore that she must take great care with her reply. This man would not be fobbed off with any easy form of words, consoled with trite remarks. If she wrote to him in that manner it might only serve to deepen his isolation. She had started her letter two or three times before she concluded there were no comforting words that she could give him, for there was no comfort at all to be given.
The only thing to do was to write the truth. Maggie took a fresh piece of paper, picked up her pen and began again.
Then, without any deliberation on her part, rather than writing ‘Maggie Dundas’ as she had done in her previous letters, Maggie signed this letter ‘Maggie’.
A week later she received her reply.
Along the bottom of the letter Francis had written a PS:
In the factory all that day Maggie had a smile on her face.
Chapter 20
CHARLOTTE, ON MAGGIE’S insistence, had taken to calling in at the shop on her way home from the hospital. Maggie had told her that it would be good for her parents to see Charlotte and speak with her, although Charlotte rightly suspected that Maggie’s purpose was also to help her. Whether her visits helped John Malcolm’s parents was something Charlotte could not clearly assess. His mother’s pain of loss was burnt into her face. She was abstracted, and found it difficult to keep her place in any conversation that she attempted. His father, in tight control, would say a few words and then keep himself busy in the shop long after closing. It was Maggie and Alex that Charlotte saw most, and talking to them did help her pass some of the bleak time of each weary evening to be endured. She became friendly with Alex, and was forever patient with his endless questions about her work at the hospital. He wanted to know every single thing that the soldiers said to her, and gave her lists of questions to ask them on his behalf, telling her it was special schoolwork that he had to do. The wounded men were amused by this, and, as hospital life was boring for them, were quite willing to write out notes which Charlotte relayed back to Alex. He had asked her for anything of interest, and she, thinking he had thoughts of becoming a doctor, brought him one of the small surgical in
formation books relating to war wounds.
Alex had no intention of studying medicine. He was methodically garnering every scrap of information that might be of use to him in avenging the death of his brother. After he had gone to bed one night Maggie picked up from the kitchen table the book on treating war wounds.
Treating war wounds needs an elementary knowledge of the agents which cause them, she read, rifle, revolver, machine gun, shell, trench mortar, bombs and grenades. Her eye ran down the page … Shell wounds in particular cause great damage. Clothing, equipment, and earth can be driven deep into the body, causing complications of infection spreading from the wound. Farming soil in particular bears organisms, thereby increasing the chance of severe sepsis leading to fatality.
Maggie put the book down and stared ahead. It was something that she had not considered at any length. The actuality of death in war. Here it was, carefully explained, cause and effect. A bullet travelling faster than the velocity of sound, over distance does not always offer a clean drilled hole. Complications of wounds occur as the missile can turn in the air, ricochet, strike bone …
The truth of the words allowed no contradiction, needed no embellishment. To tell in this plain way the violence of the act showed it as the obscenity it was.
This book with its graphic illustrations of mutilated bodies and the effects of gas gangrene had a profound effect on Maggie. She had an image in her mind of the despatch depot in the factory where rows and rows of sullen shells stood awaiting shipment abroad. She thought for a time about the medical facts placed before her, and then she thought of the consequences to herself of having acquired this knowledge. She wished perhaps that she had not read Charlotte’s book, but she had, and now she knew that she must alter her life.
She wrote to Francis.
Maggie was surprised by the answer she received from Francis.
Maggie frowned and reread this paragraph. Francis was being very guarded in what he was saying, no doubt for fear of the military censor. Why should he be frightened now when his own letters contained such open criticism? Why would he be so concerned? She remembered him talking about the Military Tribunal that had refused his exemption. His father’s cousin had told him that his reasoning was dangerous. What did that have to do with her?
His letter went on.
Maggie read and reread this part of the letter but could make no sense of it. She glanced up to where Alex sat at the kitchen table doing his homework. Her younger brother was quicker to learn than her twin had been. John Malcolm had struggled with his schoolwork, and had often copied from Maggie so that he could finish quickly and run out to play with his friends. Maggie, who had only helping her mother with housework to look forward to, had always taken longer with her school homework and made more effort. Even in childhood there was injustice within one’s own family, Maggie thought. She gave Francis’s letter to Alex.
‘You are good at puzzles. Solve this one for me, for I can make neither head nor tail of it.’
Maggie sat down at the table with her younger brother. Not so young, she realized as she watched him read the letter. He had grown in the last months, and had the beginnings of hair on his face.
Alex read the letter and then began to count with his pencil marking the lines. ‘Safe,’ he said, and he underlined the word Francis had written.
‘What?’ Maggie came across and leaned over Alex’s shoulder.
‘He’s pointing out the word “safe” to you. Lots of soldiers send coded messages in their letters. They sometimes use it to let their families know whereabouts in France they are.’
‘Show me,’ said Maggie.
‘The bit that doesn’t make sense is the clue. At the end he says a “nineteen shillings and nine pence, or rather not”. If you count nineteen lines down and nine words across then you come to the word “safe”. And then he says “or rather, not”. So what you wrote in your last letter wasn’t safe.’
‘But he writes quite openly to me,’ said Maggie. ‘Why is he concerned about what I write to him?’
‘Officers are trusted to censor their own mail,’ said Alex. ‘Some even have special coloured envelopes which are not opened. But the mail he receives might be inspected before it reaches him.’ He looked at Maggie curiously. ‘What did you write?’
Maggie picked up Francis’s letter. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. Her hand shook slightly as she folded the letter and put it in her apron pocket. She knew why Francis was concerned for her, and why he was going to destroy the letter she had sent him. What she had written could be considered treason.
Alex waited until Maggie sat down again by the fire before he bent his head over his own work. He carefully slid his school exercise book to the side. Underneath he had a sheet of paper where he had traced a map of England showing the main east coast railway line to London. On it he was marking the headquarters of different army regiments. He had obtained the information via Charlotte from her various soldier patients. ‘Careful planning is the key to success.’ His brother had written to him that his training sergeant had told him this. Alex intended to plan very carefully indeed. He knew that he must avoid London. It would be the first place they would look for him. Every policeman and army officer would be on the alert. He needed a regimental recruiting office in or near a town with a railway station. It would have to be fairly big, busy and crowded with people so that a person on his own would not be noticed. His finger traced the line of the railway from Edinburgh to London; along the coast, over the border and then the big towns, Newcastle, Durham, Darlington, York, Doncaster, Peterborough … He spread out the notes that Charlotte had brought back from the hospital. On them the soldiers had written their answers to his questions. Alex kept one finger on his map. Now he had to match one of these towns to a regiment with a particular type of battalion.
Chapter 21
Maggie pencilled a question mark beside Lord Chesterfield’s letters. She had begun to make little notes on Francis’s letters to indicate points to look up in the library. She had no intention of troubling Francis’s mother, and on her next visit to the city library she asked the librarian if Lord Chesterfield’s letters had been published. He knew of the book but did not have it in stock and suggested she try a bookshop nearer the city centre.
On the bus home Maggie sat in a state of curious delight and fear. Using money from her wages, without first giving them to her mother or father, and then waiting to receive some allowance from them, she had bought something in her own right as a person. And it was not a necessity, such as a hat or shoes, nor even a luxury item like butter or sugar. When she returned home, for some reason she felt that she should not openly read the book she had purchased in front of her parents.
Maggie read the letter again. As with all of Francis’s letters there were words she had never seen before. She placed her finger under one of them, vestiges. From the rest of the sentence she thought she knew what it might mean. She went to the press in the kitchen where the family’s collection of a few books were kept. The basic spelling and grammars that Alex still used didn’t help. Maggie resolved that she would visit the bookshop again, and buy herself a proper dictionary.
Maggie wrote back,
How confidently she could talk of humanity now. Over the last week or so her life had completely altered, both mentally and physically. It was as though she had stepped from behind a curtain, and the world she now occupied was so far removed from her previous one as to make the former unrecognizable. She devoured the books that both Francis and the librarian recommended: biographies, history, travel, letters, fiction, classical and contemporary. She read them on her journey to and from the hospital. Any idea she might have had that nursing would be easier than the munitions factory was soon dispelled. The wards were busy all day. The wounded now arrived via a single line track which had been laid so that trains could bring them directly to a railhead in the hospital grounds. The staff told her things were easing off, as the major battles had been fought in the summer. H
ow ashamed Maggie felt now of her condescending manner to Charlotte in the past. Only those who nursed the seriously ill, the horribly wounded and the dying could know what suffering meant. The effects of unquenchable pain, of gas, of gangrene, and shell shock, made men piteous and pitiable creatures.
‘Why did you not ever speak to any of us of this before?’ she asked Charlotte.
‘Why give others your own burden to carry?’
‘They say, “A trouble shared is a trouble halved”,’ said Maggie.
‘Do you believe that, in these circumstances?’ asked Charlotte. ‘How could I tell Annie or my mother any of this?’
Maggie thought of her own family at home. How her mother or her father would react if she came home and cried out as to how awful it was to change the dressings on a nineteen-year-old boy burned to raw flesh from forehead to feet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see.’ Her experiences, and those of Charlotte and many of the other nurses, women from differing backgrounds, had distanced them from their own families.
But in addition to Charlotte and the other nurses, there was one person whom Maggie could speak to openly. And it was now that she imagined she experienced a little of what Francis felt in writing to her. To have someone that you could be honest with, a person to tell of your fears and nightmares, brought comfort and release. She wrote of this in her next letter to Francis and he wrote back at once.
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