by Annie Groves
‘I can’t speak for Ian. I’ll tell him, though, of course, and needless to say I want to join. I think it’s really commendable of your mother to take this on, Tilly, but then she’s that kinda person, always wanting to help out where she can.’
‘I dare say she’ll rope in all of us at number 13. I can’t see Dulcie being keen, though. She’s already creating about having to do fire-watch duty at Selfridges. Oh, but you’ll never guess. The Misses Barker from number 12 got to hear about Mum’s plans – from Nancy, I suppose – and they’ve both said that they want to be involved.’ Tilly laughed. ‘That was definitely one in the eye for Nancy, although given their age I can’t image that Mum’s going to want them climbing on roofs or leaning out of attic windows so that they can spot falling incendiaries. They must both be in their sixties.’
Drew laughed too, but said, ‘No, but they will be able to help clear away any of the incendiaries that have fallen in the area. It will be team work that will keep Article Row safe, Tilly. Come on, we’d better make a move otherwise we’ll be late.’
‘Just one more kiss before we go?’ Tilly pleaded.
Not that she needed to plead very hard. She could see that from the look in Drew’s eyes.
Their train was predictably late in arriving at East Grinstead station. As George was meeting them at the station, Sally and Dulcie said their goodbyes to the others, who were all lodging within walking distance. As they queued to hand over their tickets to the waiting ticket inspector, Sally suspected that the majority of the passengers exiting the station had travelled to the small town to visit relatives at the hospital. With several young women amongst them, it looked as though there would be a reasonable number of partners for the men at Saturday night’s dance, which gave her all the more reason to regret that she had ever invited Dulcie to join her.
That feeling increased when they were still waiting for George fifteen minutes later, and Dulcie had complained about his tardiness for every one of those fifteen minutes. It didn’t help that it had started to rain, a fine miserable freezing drizzle that was slowly soaking through Sally’s knitted gloves.
‘If you was to ask me I’d say the best thing we could do is get on the first train back to London,’ Dulcie informed her in a sharp voice. ‘I don’t know why I ever let you talk me into coming here.’
A car was coming towards them, its headlights dimmed for the blackout. It pulled to a halt right in front of them. It was a very smart and expensive-looking car indeed, Sally recognised. When the driver’s door opened and George climbed out she could hardly believe it, simply standing staring at him in disbelief until he opened the passenger door and called out, ‘Come on and get inside before you get even wetter.’
This was more like it, Dulcie decided, having immediately settled herself in the comfortable front passenger seat and pulled the smart tartan car rug she had found there across her lap, leaving George to deal with her weekend case, and Sally with no alternative other than to climb into the back of the car. Sally’s boyfriend must be doing well if he could afford a car like this.
Only, as George explained once he was back in the driver’s seat and indicating to pull back out into the road, the car actually did not belong to him, but to his boss, the famous pioneering surgeon.
‘Mr MacIndoe said I could borrow his car to pick you up when he realised that our last op of the day had run over, and that meant I’d had to leave you both standing in the rain. He sends his apologies, by the way. Oh, and if you don’t mind I just want to drive back to the hospital before I drop you off and see that you’re settled in, just to check that my patient is comfortable. He was still pretty much out for the count when I left him.’
Before Dulcie could voice what Sally knew would be objections, she assured George quickly, ‘Of course we don’t mind. It’s a treat to be chauffeured in such a lovely car, isn’t it, Dulcie?’
‘So where’s this dance being held then?’ Dulcie demanded, not vouchsafing an answer.
‘At the hospital. We have a room there that we can use and it will be more comfortable for the men. Although the townspeople here are marvellous about not making the men feel self-conscious about their injuries, some of the patients are pretty reluctant to leave the hospital. That’s why Mr MacIndoe is so keen to have these social events. He believes that it’s as important to get the men back into living normal lives as it is to deal with their physical injuries. The mental and emotional trauma they suffer is every bit as bad as the physical stuff, although, of course, some of them handle it better than others. Those with families – wives and girlfriends who rally round – do the best, although we do get some who hate what has happened to them so much that they refuse to see them. We have to remember that most of these men are RAF – young, strong, good-looking men who had the world at their feet before they were injured. Men that other men envied, men who girls always looked twice at in their smart uniforms and because they are heroes, instead of because of the severity of their injuries. Now, here we are …’ George told them as he swung the car into the road that led to the hospital, its bulk outlined as a dark shape against the slightly lighter sky by the thin moonlight escaping through the clouds.
‘I shouldn’t be too long,’ George told them as he brought the car to a halt. ‘I’ll have a word and see if I can get you each a cup of tea whilst you wait for me.’
‘Would it possible for me to go with you, George?’ Sally asked. ‘Just out of professional curiosity. That’s if Ward Sister will allow it.’
Sally knew from George and her previous visit that the nursing care provided to Mr MacIndoe’s patients was rather different from the ordered routine of Barts Hospital. Mr MacIndoe had a rule that the nurses smile at their patients at all times and, indeed, that they actually teased them and flirted with them a little, to help boost the men’s confidence.
‘Sister won’t mind – she’s an old Barts nurse,’ George assured her, as he got out of the car, opening the rear door for Sally first and then going round to help Dulcie out of the front passenger seat.
The minute they entered the hospital Dulcie wrinkled her nose against the fiercely pungent smell of clean linoleum and disinfectant.
‘I’ll leave you here in reception,’ George told her. ‘I’ll ask someone to bring you a cup of tea. We won’t be very long.’
Ten minutes later, growing increasingly bad-tempered, Dulcie wasn’t best pleased, having stopped a nurse who was going off duty to ask her where her cup of tea was, when the other girl said she didn’t know and then added, ‘Your stocking seam’s gone and run all over your leg.’
A quick look over her shoulder showed Dulcie that the nurse was right and that her carefully applied eyebrow pencil ‘stocking seam’ had run with the rain.
‘Where’s the nearest toilet then?’ she demanded.
‘Down the corridor, turn left, then right and it’s halfway down that corridor on your left.’
She was gone in a swirl of her cloak before Dulcie could say anything more. Showing off, Dulcie thought crossly. Not that she’d got any reason to do so, not with those thick ankles of hers.
Down the corridor. Well, that was easy enough. ‘Turn left, and then right, and it’s halfway down the corridor on your left.’
The other girl might have said just how long the corridors were, Dulcie thought indignantly when she finally found the ladies’, and was able to inspect the damage to her ‘seams’ by standing on the lavatory lid with the door open so that she could see the back of her legs in the slightly spotted mirror above the washbasin.
Ten minutes later, her seams fully restored to their original smartness, and her handkerchief rather the worse for wear, having been used as both a flannel and a towel, Dulcie set off back to the reception area.
Down the corridor and then turn into the other corridor and then … Had she come this way? Dulcie wasn’t sure, and the corridor she was in now seemed to go on for miles.
It never came easily to Dulcie to admit that she was wrong
– about anything – but even she was beginning to feel that she was going to have to turn round and retrace her steps when, to her relief, up ahead of her she saw a pair of double doors. Hurrying towards them, she pulled them open and then came to an abrupt halt.
She was in a ward. It was filled with men – men sitting or lying in bed, men seated in chairs, men leaning against walls and talking to other men, men in uniform, men in pyjamas, men talking, men smoking, and men simply lying silently in their beds swathed in bandages. Tall men, short men, men with dark hair and men with fair hair. But men who all had one thing in common – the severity of their injuries.
Other young women might have turned away, unable to bear the evidence of what war could do to the human body, but Dulcie wasn’t like that. She lacked that delicate female sensitivity and imagination that made most of her sex so aware of the pain of others. On the other hand, she wasn’t the sort to shrink from such things either. It simply wasn’t in her nature. She had grown up in the poverty of the East End. In that world there had been adults who had rickets as children and as a result had weak and twisted limbs, men who had lost limbs during the Great War, a little boy three houses down from where Dulcie had lived had suffered horrendous burns when he had pulled a pan of boiling soup over onto himself.
Now, instead of turning away from the sight of young men with badly burned faces and missing limbs, she simply stared curiously at them.
One of the men who had been standing closest to the door, smoking a cigarette, put it out and called out, ‘Hey, boys, look. We’ve got a stunner of a pretty girl come to visit.’
Immediately all the men who were able to do so turned towards her.
‘Who are you looking for?’ the young man who had spoken up asked her.
‘No one,’ Dulcie replied. ‘I got lost on my way to reception.’
Confident by nature and toughened by her upbringing, Dulcie felt no self-consciousness at being the only young woman amongst so many young men. Their obvious interest in her she took as no more than her due. Flirtatious comments and tributes to her prettiness were something she took in her stride, preening herself like a queen amongst her courtiers as she accepted them, whilst privately thinking that it was just as well that she had reapplied those rainwater-damaged ‘stocking seams’.
‘Well, reception’s loss is our gain,’ one of the men told her appreciatively.
This was Dulcie’s favourite milieu – being at the centre of male attention – and whilst it was true that these men bore the scars of their injuries very openly, they had enough confidence and enough youthful verve despite their bandages for her to decide that tomorrow’s dance might be good fun after all. And it would just serve Wilder right if she did have fun after the way he had let her down. In Dulcie’s opinion he should have made much more of an effort to see her tonight.
‘Going to the dance tomorrow?’ asked one of the young men, who had limped over to her. He was rolling a cigarette with one hand, the stump of his other, missing arm heavily bandaged, like almost all of the left-hand side of his face.
‘I might be,’ Dulcie responded coquettishly.
‘There’s no way that Mr MacIndoe is going to let you go dancing tomorrow night,’ one of the other men warned. ‘You’ve got surgery on Monday.’
‘All the more reason to have a good time on Saturday,’ the young man responded.
The doors at the other end of the ward opened to admit a pretty young nurse, accompanied by George and Sally.
‘Dulcie, what are doing in here?’ Sally asked.
‘You were gone so long I thought I’d have a look round,’ Dulcie fibbed. She wasn’t going to make herself look daft by admitting she’d got herself lost.
Sally gave the ward sister an apologetic look. It was typical of Dulcie that she’d managed to find her way into the ward that contained in the main those men who were reaching the final stages of their treatment and rehabilitation before being discharged, and who were therefore far more likely to react as high-spirited young men in her presence than very sick patients.
Since George had come into the ward with the ward sister only to check up on another of his patients, Sally pointed to the doors through which she and George had just come, and told Dulcie, ‘We’re going back this way.’
George had finished checking up on his patient and was waiting for them to join him. As they did so, Dulcie glanced casually at the man George had been examining and then stopped, moving closer to exclaim in astonishment, ‘David!’
It was David James-Thompson, the dashing barrister who had married Dulcie’s arch-enemy from Selfridges – the posh daughter of one of Selfridges directors.
How Dulcie had enjoyed flirting with David and encouraging him to pay attention to her as a means of getting at the snooty Lydia, who had made it so plain that she looked down on her. David had wanted to take things further than the mild flirtation Dulcie had instigated, but Dulcie had refused. If she’d been the type to allow herself to fall in love, which she wasn’t, then falling in love with a man like David – a man who would one day inherit a title and whose mother had chosen his wife for him – could only lead to heartache. But even though she knew that she had made the right decision, standing here looking at him was making her heart thud in a most un-Dulcie-like way – something that Wilder had never been able to achieve.
David’s handsome face was exactly the same, even if the amusement and the confidence had gone from the familiar hazel eyes. It was very rare for anything or anyone to wrong-foot Dulcie or catch her off guard. But right now something had.
David wasn’t looking at her. He had turned his head right away from her so that he didn’t have to look at her, turning his body away from her too, and that was when Dulcie recognised from the movement of the bedclothes that David no longer had much of a body; that in fact beneath the bedclothes where the outline of his legs should have been there was nothing. David has lost his legs. And most of one of his arms, she realised as she looked properly at him. She had been so surprised to see him, so taken off guard by the sight of his familiar handsome face that initially she hadn’t looked beyond that face.
Sally’s hand on her arm was drawing her away, George coming to stand on the other side of her, both of them almost walking her out of the ward so that she was through the doors and in the corridor beyond it before she could think to object.
David watched her go. Seeing Dulcie had affected him in a way that he had truly believed was no longer possible. Not sexually – that was impossible, thanks to his injuries from the Messerschmidt bullets, which had ripped apart his lower legs and his groin as well as damaging his arm. No, seeing Dulcie had brought back to life, if only briefly, his war-numbed emotions. Seeing Dulcie had reminded him of a past that in its way had been every bit as bleak as the only future he could now look towards.
He had been very young when he had recognised that his mother didn’t even like him, never mind love him, absorbing that knowledge as a truth without any need for it to be put into words, as young children do. Later, using his legal brain to try to rationalise his mother’s attitude to him, he had decided that initially her antipathy toward him sprang from the loss of her own elder brother toward the end of the Great War. His mother had worshipped her elder sibling; she talked about him all the time. Her private sitting room had been filled with silver-framed photographs of him where it had been bare of photographs of both David and his father. David had never been allowed to touch those precious photographs, his small chubby baby hands smacked hard whenever he tried to reach for them when his mother was holding them.
David could still vividly remember his mother’s excitement on her brother’s rare visits, even though he had been very young at the time. No one had been allowed to interrupt them. His mother had wanted her precious brother to herself. Apart from these rare glimpses, David’s visual memories of his uncle came from his mother’s photographs. These had shown a thin and delicate man, as befitted the poet he had been. A poet who, according
to David’s mother, had made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.
Perhaps things might have been different for David if he had taken after his mother’s side of the family and physically resembled his dead uncle, but he did not. David had the strong muscles and the height of his father’s family, and that had been another reason for his mother to reject him. His father’s family were good country stock but not anywhere near as blue-blooded as his mother’s family, with its earldom at the top of their family tree. At the top of the family tree and far out of the reach of his mother’s branch of the family until the Great War had scythed through its younger branches, resulting in the deaths of the three male cousins, their deaths putting his mother’s brother, Eddie, in direct line to inherit the earldom on the death of the then current earl.
He had been a child still when his uncle had been sent home from the trenches, suffering from the gas poisoning that had killed him. A child with scarlet fever, whose mother had therefore been banned from going to nurse her sick brother, the sick brother who had died, whilst he … the naughty child, whose illness had meant she was unable to see her brother, to nurse him, maybe to save him, was then the cause of the whole family losing the earldom and the status and riches that went with it. His mother had never forgiven him for that, and David knew that she never would.
His marriage to Lydia had been the price his mother had demanded from him as mere interest on the debt she believed he owed her. Lydia would ultimately inherit a very good fortune indeed and Lydia’s family, with their connection to trade through the great-grandparents from whom that fortune came, had been keen to cement their progress up the social ladder by marrying their daughter to a young man who would ultimately inherit from his own great uncle and then his father the title of Sir David and the pretty Oxfordshire manor that went with it. Not that his mother, forced to accept his father’s proposal when the Great War had left so many young women of her generation without prospective husbands, thought very much of his father’s family title. A mere baronetcy could after all hardly compare with an earldom; good stout hearty beefy English county blood could not match the purity of blue blood that for centuries had never been mixed with anything other than more blue blood.