Or maybe I could train as a nurse in London, I thought vaguely. I could do something useful. Train to help young men like Jay.
I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.
London. France. Boston. My future, for the present, lay in a place far from Egypt, far from Gallipoli.
But I’d be back. I’d return to Cairo, and Fa and I would live in the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith and we’d continue with our work, uncovering more and more knowledge about ancient Egypt. I’d visit, sometimes, the boys who lay in the cemetery in Cairo.
Maybe, one day, I’d even visit Gallipoli.
Author’s note
A long time ago, because I like reading history, I picked up a non-fiction book about Australian army nurses, Guns and Brooches, by Jan Bassett. It tells the story of Australian army nurses from the Boer War to the Gulf War. At the time, I vaguely thought that the experiences of nurses in World War I would make an interesting novel: I was thinking Gallipoli as seen from behind the lines (though some nurses on the hospital ships weren’t far behind the lines at all), and from a female perspective. It was one of those ideas that hangs about in the back of your mind.
Then, I happened to be at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, researching a very different book (When the Hipchicks Went to War, about entertainers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War). I had some spare time, so thought I’d have a look at what material the AWM had on World War I nurses in Egypt. They had heaps – but what I also found, what really grabbed my imagination, was an entirely different story. Cairo’s story.
How the city was in crisis in 1915, overwhelmed with the wounded from Gallipoli. How civilians volunteered and worked together to assist the exhausted, overburdened medical staff. How every likely – and unlikely – building was taken over to serve as a hospital. An amazing story!
In 2015, it will be one hundred years since Gallipoli. I thought that this would be the perfect time to tell the story of civilian volunteers in Cairo. There are many accounts of the work of nurses, but I had to search to find stories of civilians. In particular, because I write for young adults, I wanted to tell a story of a young volunteer. What could a sixteen-year-old girl do to help, in Cairo in 1915? The more I read, the more I found a girl could do.
Flora’s story is fiction, but the novel is based on fact. There were volunteer rest and recreation centres in the Ezbekieh Gardens. Shepheard’s and Groppi’s were the focus of social life, and they still exist today. There really was a riot in the Wozzer. The house that I’ve based the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith on is the Gayer-Anderson Museum, a magical house once lived in by Major RG Gayer-Anderson Pasha, who left his collection of Egyptian art and antiquities to the nation. You can visit, sit on the roof terrace, and hide in the secret balcony above the hall.
As the nurses and Flora did, I’ve explored inside the pyramids, spent hour upon hour in the Cairo Museum and visited ancient tombs on the Giza plateau. I only regret that Luna Park no longer exists. It must have been quite a place.
Throughout the novel, I’ve used the units of measurement in use at the time.
1 yard = .9144 metres
1 foot = .3048 metre
1 mile = 1.6093 kilometres
100 degrees Fahrenheit = 37.77 degrees Celsius
Money: there were twelve pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound. One shilling equals ten cents, and ten shillings equals one dollar in today’s money, but a shilling in 1915 would have bought far more than ten cents would today. Australian soldiers were paid six shillings a day, and this was considered good money; it was more than British soldiers were paid.
Many thanks to my publisher Paul Collins at Ford Street Publishing, the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust for research time, and my agent Pippa Masson and all at Curtis Brown. And of course my family, without whose support and encouragement this book would – as always – have been finished in half the time.
Bibliography
Barker, Marianne, Nightingales in the Mud: the Digger Sisters of the Great War 1914-18, Allen& Unwin, Sydney 1989
Barrett, Lieutenant Colonel James W and Deane, Lieutenant PE, The Australian Army Medical Corps in Egypt, HK Lewis& Co Ltd, London, 1918
Bassett, Jan and Egan, Bryan, ‘Doctors and nurses at war: No.1 Australian General Hospital, Cairo 1915’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial no. 22, April 1993
Bassett, Jan, Guns and Brooches: Australian army nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War, OUP, Australia 1992
Deacon, L.A., Beyond the Call, Regal Press, Tasmania
Holmes, Katie, Between the Lines: the letters and diaries of First World War Australian nurses, Honours thesis, History Department, University of Melbourne, 1984
Rae, Ruth, Jessie Tomlins: an Australian army nurse World War I, thesis, The University of Sydney, 2001
Rees, Peter, The Other Anzacs: nurses at war 1914–18, Allen& Unwin, Crows Nest, 2008
Robinson, Gwen, The Forgotten Women: personal accounts of Australian nurses abroad in World War I, Mt Gravatt 1989
Diary of Sister Daisy Donaldson Richmond 25/11/14 – 6/11/1919, Australian War Memorial
Flora's War Page 18