The Girl from Simon's Bay

by Barbara Mutch

  He presented his chits and the quartermaster checked his records and counted out Piet’s wages and marked them in a book. ‘Don’t spend it all at once!’

  ‘Not me, sir. Saving for a rainy day.’

  He gave the man a loose salute.

  Next time, he’d set aside a small fish, wrap it in newspaper and take it across on Wednesday, say, when the man wasn’t busy with weekly wages. Tell him he couldn’t promise it every week, but that he’d try.

  He hung back from the crowds heading home and leant against the fence by the railway station. A train was working up steam. The guard was inspecting travel papers at the entrance to the platform before allowing passengers on board. At the back of the train, a second guard was checking crates and baskets against a list in his hand and then heaving them aboard the goods carriage. Doors slammed and the whistle blew. The engine gave a wheeze. A last sailor dashed on board. The train began to pull out.

  Piet turned away and headed along St George’s Street, past the gleaming walls of Admiralty House. The biggest challenge was the two railway stations: how to smuggle a private crate past the guards here, and then past the checkpoint at Cape Town station. It wouldn’t be possible for Piet to accompany his fish each time because you needed a permit to get back into Simon’s Town and someone would get suspicious: why was this fisherman going all the way into Cape Town when his fish were quite happy in their ice and would be picked up at the other end and find their way into the stomachs of the troops without his help? It made no sense.

  Maybe, Piet grinned to himself, he was being greedy.

  Maybe he needed to scale back.

  If he only went into Cape Town every two weeks or so, when there was a particularly rich catch, it would work. He could say he was being diligent, keeping an eye from time to time so that there was no funny business, no black market stuff going on. The navy would be pleased, they would say it showed ‘dedication to the war effort’.

  Piet began to trot past his old school, where Sheila Ahrendts used to panic about bad men eyeing her daughter in the lane nearby. A group of sailors crowded into the noisy Ratings’ Club, accompanied by a huge dog they called Just Nuisance. He, Piet, would never be welcome in such places, but then he, Piet, didn’t have to go out in ships and get shot at.

  He bounded up Quarry Road.

  He must start straightaway, travelling once every two weeks with the fish into Cape Town. Make friends with the guards, with the military police, with the permit inspectors. Be patient, do it enough times so it seemed a regular thing, so even Abie and Trev got used to it – even were grateful to him for taking the trouble? And then, only then, do it for real. After all his groundwork, it wouldn’t be too hard to confuse the guards about the number of crates, or that he or they had made a mistake.

  Why, if he got to know the guards well enough, there could be a fish in it for them, too.

  And if he got caught, he could claim innocence, or a lack of arithmetic in the adding up.

  The admiral would forgive him because the navy needed his fish, in fact they needed more fish than he or Abie or Trev could ever pull out of the water. And the sea didn’t care where its fish were going. This was not robbery, it was redistribution.

  Piet stroked his weekly pay, the coins satisfyingly solid beneath his rough palm.

  Everybody kept saying how the war was the making of Louise.

  Why couldn’t it be the making of him?

  And if he didn’t get caught, it could be the making of them both, together.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Number three, as Sister Graham referred to him, was Lieutenant David Horrocks DSO, gunnery officer. Emergency appendectomy transferred from HMS Dorsetshire, Sister announced. Reached us just in time.

  I scanned the bed letter and glanced at the patient.

  Handsome, thirty-one years old, scar on the temple, wary blue eyes, fair hair tinged with grey. In this war, you didn’t need to be old to be grey. I readied the dressing tray. Antiseptic, cotton swabs, dressings, tweezers. I’d have to be quick. It was already eleven o’clock and the ward floor still had to be scrubbed, but the sick berth ratings were down at Medical Stores’ tallying stock. I’d need to get on with it alongside the VAD, if she could be pried away from sorting Christmas decorations. Sister would be generous with her criticism if it wasn’t done by noon.

  ‘Good morning, Lieutenant. Are you feeling better today?’

  ‘Yes. No more nausea, thank goodness.’

  He wore a carved gold ring on his left hand, and spoke quietly. A quietly spoken gunnery officer. I nodded and set down the tray on his bedside table. The poor man had been intermittently sick for two days after his operation. I’d been finishing my night duty roster on his first post-operative night when he woke the ward with his screaming. I grabbed my torch and a bowl and raced down the row of beds.

  ‘Ssh,’ I held him gently and wiped his sweating face and unravelled the twisted sheets. ‘Do you want to be sick?’

  ‘What?’ he muttered, wincing at the pain of his wound. ‘Nott? Tompkins?’

  ‘You’ve had an operation, sir. You’re going to be fine.’

  He fell back on the pillows. The distant boom of waves rolled through the open window on the back of an onshore wind, layering a briny sharpness over the usual smell of disinfectant. I held his hand while his breathing returned to normal. The other patients turned over and went back to sleep.

  ‘Do you live here, in Simon’s Town?’ he asked two days later as I lifted his wrist to check his pulse before changing the dressing. I don’t think he recognised me from the night.

  ‘Yes.’ I laid his hand back on the covers. Pulse normal. Skin cool. At least he was easy to understand, and didn’t mangle his vowels as some of the other sailors did from the northern parts of their island. ‘I was born nearby, just along the mountain.’

  A gust of wind rattled the windows. I bent over his wound. His torso tensed.

  ‘Hold still, please, Lieutenant.’

  I began to ease the old dressing off. He flinched as it tugged on the stitches.

  ‘Did you live by the sea, sir? Is that why you joined the navy?’ This to be polite, but also to distract him from the painful business at hand.

  ‘No …’ his hands were gripping the bed covers.

  The corners of the dressing came away and I concentrated on removing the whole of it without opening the wound. It peeled off, revealing a livid, weeping scar. I reached for the antiseptic and dripped it onto a cotton square. He must have much to think about besides getting well again. His next ship, for instance. Dorsetshire had already departed without him. No officer felt comfortable being unassigned. Pa kept me privately up to date on my patients’ ships. So did Vera, who was always on the lookout for a new admirer apart from Abie, who smelt too much of fish, she said.

  ‘I joined the navy to escape.’

  I looked up, startled. Officers were not inclined to confide, even when ill; unlike the ordinary seamen who wanted to hold my hand or spin me a story whenever Sister’s back was turned. ‘Never should ’ave done it, Nurse. But just for the sight of your pretty face …’

  I glanced down the ward. I wasn’t supposed to engage in personal conversation with patients. Sister had ears in the back of her head.

  ‘What were you escaping from?’

  He gave a rueful smile, but didn’t reply.

  I focused on the puckered flesh, and reapplied a fresh square. The skin was healing, but rather slowly. It hadn’t been helped by the retching. Or the disturbed sleep.

  He averted his eyes from what I was doing and gazed out of the window to where the navy flag snapped above Admiralty House and the waves rode towards Long Beach in glistening ranks. When the wind was blowing from the east, the muezzin’s call often drifted faintly into the ward.

  ‘If I lived somewhere like this, I’d never want to leave,’ he murmured.

  I felt a curious spark of indignation. Surely it ought to take a while for a place to get under yo
ur skin? He hadn’t fallen in love with this particular sea as a child like I had, or the fynbos-cloaked mountains, or the seagulls that cruised the southeaster searching for their air perch.

  ‘All done,’ I said. ‘It’s getting better, the skin is starting to knit.’

  ‘Thank you, Nurse. You’re very kind.’

  He took a week to reply to my impulsive question. By that time, I assumed he’d chosen to ignore it. The night staff continued to report his nightmares, but he was an easy patient by day. Quiet, undemanding, and grateful even though the regular changing of his dressing continued to be painful, as the skin tightened and wept and tightened further.

  It was during that week that I realised I’d heard of him.

  Some of my former patients, transferred to the RNH from the Falklands, had served on Achilles when he won his medal. ‘No panic, miss, just got on with it. Saved Nott’s leg. If it wasn’t for the lieutenant, we’d all have been cooked.’

  Pa confirmed it was the Battle of the River Plate, when Graf Spee was sunk. The gun director tower had been hit, but he kept on firing – alle wereld, what bravery, Pa marvelled – despite being wounded by an incoming shell.

  ‘Good morning, Lieutenant. How are you today?’

  ‘Less sore, thank you, Nurse. I can sit up and look out more easily.’

  I smiled. He liked our sea. Intermittent whitecaps were freckling the bay beyond the ward windows. Down on Long Beach, Piet and his fellow fishermen would be dragging their boats across the sand, sniffing the breeze and squinting at the sky, and arguing about the particular spot of ocean where the snoek and the stockfish might best be lured into the navy’s nets. Piet was increasingly transformed by his navy contract. Money seemed to breed confidence and was even tempering his demands. But it didn’t change the decision I’d made, though I was struggling to tell him. The last time I tried, at the beach with the water lapping coolly about our feet, he interrupted me and said I didn’t need to explain it again, and that I’d be ready soon enough. The war, he shrugged. It makes you rich, but it upsets your plans.

  ‘You asked why I joined the navy.’

  I nodded and reached for the tweezers. Piet often brought fish for Ma and Pa. He was trying …

  ‘I love the sea and I wanted to serve. But it was also to escape from my future.’

  I stopped, my hands in mid-air, struck by the seeming lightness of Lieutenant Horrocks’s voice and simultaneously aware of a line being tested. A line that not even the lower-ranked patients, for all their familiarity, were willing to cross.

  Sister Tutor’s stern warning from training echoed in my ears.

  ‘No fraternisation, nurses! Hard work and compassion – nothing more.’

  In the bed on the right, Lieutenant Roche was asleep. Across the way, Petty Officer Talbot was in the bathroom. I stared at my fingers as they went about their task of removing the old dressing, checking for infection, cleaning the wound. It would be better to say nothing, better to avoid those wary blue eyes and give him no encouragement.

  But, my hands slowed once more, imagine if I was to cross that line?

  And tell him the secret I’d told no one yet?

  It was often easier confiding in a stranger.

  It began a week before the lieutenant arrived, on a day when the air hung hot and breathless over the docks and the regular theatre sister was suddenly taken ill. A day, initially, like any other: admissions at 08.30, rounds soon after, linen changing, cleaning and stacking of porringers while the hammering of steel-on-steel in the dockyard floated up the mountainside … interrupted by a request, delivered urgently, after an ambulance screeched to a halt outside.

  ‘But I have no theatre experience, sir!’

  And, I wanted to add, you know I was only assigned here to cover for the shortage of British nurses. When they found I was useful, they decided to keep me on quietly when the new ward opened. So, although I’m valued for my nursing skill, I’m not officially here, Doctor.

  ‘No matter, we’ll manage,’ the surgeon commander flung over his shoulder as he supervised the unloading of the patient from the ambulance. ‘Seaman Lincoln may die unless we operate now. Get scrubbed up. Now, steady with that stretcher—’

  I hurried to the theatre, my mind racing to identify the lancet, clamps, suture needles.

  ‘Good work, Staff Nurse,’ he said afterwards with an approving nod, stripping off his bloody gloves as I gathered the instruments for sterilisation and hoped my hands had been steady. ‘You did well.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  It was a sign. Surely? Like in the dockyard?

  Or, at the very least, an opportunity.

  And if Matron agreed, it could cement my place at the RNH, while lifting me beyond the petty tyranny of Sister and onto a fresh path.

  Later that night, I drafted the second secret application of my life.

  Dear Matron, it began, each line carefully blotted before proceeding.

  I was asked by the surgeon commander to assist in an operation today when Sister Hargreaves was ill. It was a perforated ulcer and the patient was in a critical condition when admitted.

  I was not nervous, and I found that I was able to fulfil the surgeon’s commands accurately and quickly. While I have not had theatre experience apart from a period during my initial training, it is a specialisation that has always interested me, and where I believe I could make a contribution.

  Since my secondment last year, I have been honoured to serve at the Royal Naval Hospital. While I continue to enjoy my work on the ward, I am keen to learn a new skill. If it would be possible, I would like to train to be a theatre nurse and then a theatre sister. I am prepared to work extra hours to do so.

  I have no family commitments at this time, or in the future.

  Yours faithfully

  Louise Ahrendts (Miss) Staff Nurse

  I have no family commitments at this time, or in the future.

  There it was, in black and white, the decision I’d taken in my heart but failed, yet, to say out loud. Piet would be livid. He’d see it as a treachery far worse than his own, earlier, deceit. Ma and Pa, for their part, would be horrified at my spurning of family. Only Vera might approve. ‘Poor Piet! But more money as a sister!’

  I darted a keen glance at the lieutenant but he was preoccupied with the view outside the sash window, entranced by the play of sunlight on choppy water. He seemed forever captivated by the outdoors, by the clouds, or the wind that rattled the shutters and defied the draught excluders knitted by our occupational therapy patients. He never spoke of home, despite the gold ring.

  If I shared my secret with him, I’d be guilty of the fraternisation Sister Tutor had banned.

  I glanced at him again, more clinically, noting the jagged scar near his hairline that marked the DSO wound, surely the spur for his nightmares.

  ‘It does bad things to them, Lou,’ Pa said of gunners in general. ‘Not just because they sit in a closed turret waiting to be hit. They fire on other young men just like themselves. Now that,’ Pa wagged a finger, ‘is what bothers you later. It never goes away.’

  Perhaps the chaplain could visit him, especially with Christmas coming.

  Up on the mountain the guinea fowl started their regular chant, kek, kek, kek …

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk one day, when you’re better?’

  Oh God, why speak out? Why take such a risk in my position? And he’d probably think I was being forward, like Vera with her red lips and her turned-out foot …

  ‘I only meant, if you have nothing else to do—’

  I brushed my apron, glanced round, but Sister was otherwise occupied.

  The lieutenant was smiling at me, his eyes no longer guarded. He had regained colour in the last week, although his face was still too thin.

  ‘I’d like that very much.’

  I seized the dressing tray, and hurried away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There was an open-air verandah in front of the ward
and, once he was mobile, David Horrocks liked to sit there in the mornings while the ward cleaning was going on. A tiny jewelled sunbird would bury its beak in a flowering shrub nearby – although shrub was far too pedestrian a word to describe the plants that rampaged through the hospital grounds. Even the local word, fynbos, struggled to describe a vegetation topped with flowers more feathered than petalled, in which squadrons of long-tailed birds fought one another over the nectar. Between the boisterous foraging, it was just possible to monitor the movement of ships to and from the naval dockyard below. Certainly he could never have recovered in time to rejoin Dorsetshire, but now he found himself watching the warships from the verandah with something approaching greed. He hated being out of it.

  Actually, if he was honest, his decamp was due to Sister’s officious attitude towards her nurses and orderlies: he preferred not to have to watch Louise Ahrendts on her knees scrubbing the floor round his bed—

  ‘Attention!’

  David turned. A braided uniform was marching through the ward. A moment later Matron and the senior naval officer in Simon’s Town, closely followed by Sister and more languidly by a man in a dark suit, stepped onto the verandah. David made to get up but Commodore Budgen waved him back.

  ‘At ease, Lieutenant! Thank you Matron, Sister. Well now, Lieutenant, on the road to recovery?’

  ‘Yes thank you, sir.’ David held himself upright. ‘The surgeon commander says I’ll be discharged in a few days.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  David waited. In the naval scheme of things, SNOs did not go around visiting obscure Lieutenants, even obscure lieutenants with DSOs.

  ‘Now,’ the SNO spotted two chairs and drew them up, ‘a word, if I may.’

  This appeared to be the signal for the man in the suit. He shook David’s hand but did not introduce himself, then reached out and closed the verandah door behind him with an apologetic smile at Sister, who was hovering on the threshold.