For my husband, Basil –
I love him as much today as when we
first met during the Burma Campaign
— Madge Lambert
This book is dedicated to the finest
generation in British history
— Robert Blair
Contents
Prologue
1 The India Office
2 Friday Meant Steak and Kidney Pudding
3 War is Declared
4 Becoming a Nurse
5 Rules and Regulations
6 The Journey Begins
7 Passage to India
8 Life Jackets and Pith Helmets
9 Arriving in Bombay
10 Chittagong, Here We Come
11 56 Indian General Hospital
12 Learning About Indian Life
13 Madge Goes Dancing
14 The Gurkhas’ Holy Man
15 Letters From Home
16 Captain Basil Lambert
17 Christmas in Chittagong
18 Auld Lang Syne
19 A Moonlight Serenade
20 Nursing the Japanese
21 Holiday in Calcutta
22 A Painful Goodbye
23 The Casualty Clearing Station
24 The Himalayas at Sunrise
25 The Japanese Surrender
26 Homeward Bound 318
27 Wedding Bells 334
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
BURMA, SPRING 1945
Madge felt as if she’d only just dropped into an exhausted sleep when the rustle of the tent flap jerked her awake again.
‘Good morning, girls. It’s time for duty. We’ve got a very busy few hours ahead of us,’ the staff sister said, her flickering hurricane lamp held high.
Operating on autopilot, Madge pulled the single sheet free of her camp bed and opened a gap in the heavy-duty mosquito net, before bending to turn her shoes upside down to ensure tarantulas or snakes hadn’t snuck in during the night. Finally she slipped on her khaki nursing uniform. She could hear the other nurses around her doing the same, everyone quietly getting ready to face the new day.
The nurses were staffing a casualty clearing station in Burma, close to the front line, where Lieutenant General William Slim’s 14th Army were involved in brutal hand-to-hand combat as they forced the Japanese back south towards the capital of Rangoon.
It was two hours before dawn but it was already humid as Madge and five other nurses carefully picked their way down the slope on which their tent was pitched. The Arakan jungle surrounded them, the trees looming black shapes in the darkness. They were headed for the operating theatre – another tent housing two large trestle tables on which weary doctors performed daily miracles on Allied troops, who often suffered horrendous, life-changing injuries.
The faintest of movements deep in the shadows of the valley caught Madge’s eye as the nurses approached the tent. Soldiers ran from their camouflaged guard posts to help the exhausted bearers, who came into sight carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher.
The injured man was taken straight into the tent, where Madge helped cut his blood-soaked clothes away and cleaned him up in preparation for surgery. She recognised the severe shrapnel damage caused by a Japanese shell exploding. Goodness me, that left arm doesn’t look good, she thought to herself as a drip was inserted in the other arm to counter the effects of dehydration.
The operating team carefully removed embedded metal fragments and fought long and hard to save the damaged limb, but they soon became resigned to the fact that the young soldier would have to spend the rest of his life with just one arm. The amputation took place shortly before dawn. Minutes later the sombre silence that had engulfed the operating tent was broken by the thunder of the 14th Army heavy artillery pounding forward Japanese positions.
‘When he starts to come round, I want you to take extreme care that he doesn’t accidentally discover he’s lost his arm,’ the surgeon said. ‘The shock to the system could be very damaging. I will tell him myself when he’s in a fit state to take it in.’
Madge knew that within forty-eight hours the patient would be taken to a landing strip and flown by a DC-3 to one of the military hospitals in Chittagong or Calcutta.
On the other operating table there was a lance corporal who had been hit by a bullet that seemed to have gone straight through his shoulder. Madge didn’t know whether to laugh or weep when he gave her a cheeky wink just before the anaesthetic took effect.
‘The bravery of these boys is amazing,’ Madge whispered to her friend Vera.
Eventually the nurses were ordered to get something to eat and grab a few hours’ sleep. They had been on duty for almost twenty-four of the previous thirty hours.
When Madge was working, she was too busy to think about the danger she was in or what would happen if the Japanese overran the camp. Now, as her head hit her pillow, she was too tired to worry. Images from the shift ran through her mind – the shrapnel fragments clunking into a waste container, the young soldier’s arm being amputated. She pushed them to one side and thought instead of her mother and sisters back in High Wycombe, wondering what they would be doing now.
Nurse Madge Graves was twenty-one years of age and a very long way from home.
1
The India Office
Madge woke with a knot in her stomach. Today her future would be decided. She got out of bed in her tiny room at the nurses’ home at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and instantly began worrying about the questions she would be asked at the interview in London later that day. She leaned across her ageing bedside cabinet to pull the curtain back and open the window to let the fresh spring air into the little box room where she had slept since starting as a trainee in 1941, almost three years earlier.
As she made her way along the corridor for an early morning bath, Madge smiled at two fellow trainee nurses whispering anxiously together. Perhaps they’re going to London for the interviews too, she wondered. They look as worried as I feel. Back in her room, she brushed her short fair hair until it shone, opened her excuse for a wardrobe and put on her freshly laundered nursing uniform. Make-up was banned when the nurses were on duty in the wards and for that reason she decided not to wear any for her interview, not even the slightest trace of lipstick. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, she said to herself, before strolling to the spacious whitewashed dining hall and sitting down at one of two long trestles which served as tables. Senior staff like Matron and the ward sisters sat at one trestle, along with experienced nurses from the Emergency Medical Service. Madge, who was a junior, sat at the other table with the trainees.
Madge had her usual simple breakfast of tea and two slices of toast, covered with the merest scraping of butter. How she longed for the day when rationing was over and she could have a real slathering of butter. Madge tried to calculate the last time she’d had such a luxury and worked out it had to be more than four years ago. The first round of rationing had come in January 1940, and now it was April 1944.
When she was finished, she walked the short distance from the nurses’ home to the hospital reception area, where she had arranged to meet her friends Vera Clark and Phyl Irvine, who would be joining her on the early train from Aylesbury station to Marylebone. Madge smiled as her two fellow nurses, who were rarely punctual, surprisingly arrived bang on time. Vera was dark-haired, outspoken and proud to be a northerner. Phyl was fair-haired and quieter. Once the trio got to Marylebone the plan was to make their way to the India Office in Whitehall for their day-long test.
As the minutes ticked by, the three young women became increasingly worried. The green six-seater van that masqueraded as official h
ospital transport was notoriously unreliable. Madge was the first to hear it come coughing and wheezing round the corner.
‘Thank goodness you’re here, William!’ she said to the driver.
‘The ignition again! Sorry, girls. Squeeze in.’
‘What do you think our chances are?’ Madge asked the other girls as they set off for the station.
‘I heard it’s a jolly hard test,’ said Vera. She looked uncharacteristically edgy, but still kept her sense of humour and pretended to snap at the driver when he cheerfully said she sounded like a Geordie.
‘William, that is absolute heresy. I’m from Sunderland and we’re Macams, not Geordies,’ she said with a grin as she winked at the other girls.
The bit of fun encouraged a very nervous Phyl to chip in. ‘I’ve never even been to Whitehall!’
The train was a good twenty minutes late, but Madge had wisely allowed an extra hour in case of emergencies and it gave the girls time to chat about the questions they might be asked at the India Office. All three had responded to a plea from Lord Louis Mountbatten for nurses to bolster the overworked and understaffed Allied medical units in the Burma Campaign of the Second World War.
Mountbatten, since his appointment as Commander of the South East Asia Command in 1943, had made repeated requests for more nurses but was still getting nowhere until he enlisted the help of his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, Superintendent-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Firebrand Edwina organised a conference of the relevant authorities at the very same India Office where the nurses’ interviews were to take place and circumvented any further objections by having a quiet chat with an old friend, Winston Churchill. Sure enough, Lord Louis promptly received word that approval had been granted for the first 250 VAD nurses to travel to India.
Pamphlets were sent to hospitals nationwide and when Phyl saw one on the nurses’ noticeboard at Stoke Mandeville Hospital she had a quick conflab with Madge and Vera, then arranged for them to go to a cafe on Aylesbury High Street to talk further.
‘Things are so quiet at the hospital, it’s definitely worth considering,’ said Vera.
‘All we do is clean the wards, make beds and prepare cotton wool swabs,’ Madge chimed in.
‘Exactly!’ Vera went on. ‘So all things considered, it’s worth having a go.’
The girls laughed at the memory as they stood on the platform, but the conversation had dried up and the longer they waited, the more worried they became about the reason for the delay. Eventually the train arrived and the girls piled into their carriage, and for a while at least, their trepidation over the test that lay ahead was replaced by excitement.
‘This feels like a real adventure!’ Phyl said as they made themselves comfortable for the journey.
A number of trains and many miles of track in and out of London had been damaged in enemy air raids, but luckily the Aylesbury to Marylebone line had been spared so far. An entertaining conversation, whispered as it may have been, took place as the train approached London about the number of smartly dressed little penguins they could see from the carriage window waddling around in bowler hats. When the three young nurses spotted the India Office as they walked down the smart street of Whitehall they were almost overwhelmed by the vast three-storey building.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Vera. ‘It looks like a French chateau!’
‘It’s definitely imposing,’ Madge agreed. She stared at the building, pleased to have something to help take her mind off the barrage of questioning they were about to face.
There was little time to enjoy the equally impressive interior of the building because the girls were quickly directed by a portly steward with his jacket sleeves overhanging his knuckles to the interview rooms, where their details were taken by a sympathetic, matronly secretary, who did her best to ease their increasing nervousness.
The young nurses had just enough time to wish one another good luck before they were taken individually to different rooms on the same floor.
‘I see from the notes here that you nursed in the services section of Stoke Mandeville,’ said one of the doctors who was interviewing Madge. He walked with a pronounced limp and had a hint of grey round the temples, but was very charming and relaxed.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she answered, before they began a lengthy discussion about how to deal with bullet and shrapnel wounds.
Eventually he asked, ‘So, Nurse Graves, do you have experience of nursing abroad?’
Madge, smiling, replied, ‘Not yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed!’
Yet still the questions came. Would she be prepared to nurse Indian soldiers? What were the early symptoms of gangrene? What was the cause of and treatment for malaria and had she read about the sterilisation of medical equipment in field-hospital conditions? Had she any experience in the use of the new wonder drug, penicillin?
After four hours of intense questioning, another particularly stern interviewer with a big, bushy moustache nodded to Madge that she could return to the waiting room. Phyl and Vera were already there, along with three other unknown nurses, who were all sitting next to one another on the hard wooden chairs looking quite stunned. Madge gave Phyl and Vera a nod as she sat down. The whole room was silent as the interviewees reflected on the past few hours. A secretary brought in tea and biscuits as they waited to hear what their fate would be.
As Madge nibbled on a bit of shortbread, she began to wonder if she was doing the right thing after all. It dawned on her all of a sudden that if she was successful, she’d soon be leaving England for the first time, moving away from her family. She’d already let Stoke Mandeville know that she was applying, and in addition had promised her sisters Doris and Doreen her winter clothes when she left because she had the strangest of feelings that she would not be returning to England any time soon, if at all. She was too young to really believe that she might die, but still she vowed to keep a diary of her adventures abroad for her sisters so they would have something to remember her by if she didn’t make it back.
Madge thought the interview had gone well, but as the minutes turned to an hour she started to fret. At last the door swung open and every nurse in the room sat bolt upright as a woman with immaculately coiffed hair, scarlet lipstick and a sharply pressed St John Ambulance Brigade uniform walked in. Madge gave an audible gasp as she realised it was Lady Mountbatten! She had seen photographs of her in magazines but she was far more striking in person. The nurses watched, starstruck, as Lady Mountbatten took her place at the imposing desk, her pristine white gloves placed neatly alongside a leather-embossed folder. The regulation St John Ambulance black-and-white hat was worn at a jaunty angle and the white epaulettes sewn to her jacket’s shoulders stood in vivid contrast to the immaculately tailored black uniform. She smiled kindly at the young nurses in front of her.
There was a twinkle in her eyes as the society beauty hesitated for a moment, almost as if she was gently teasing them, but then announced, ‘Congratulations, ladies, you’ve all passed the selection test.’ Vera had her hand in front of her face to try and stifle the tears of joy. Phyl simply beamed from ear to ear and Madge was elated – could this be real? But her thoughts were interrupted by Lady Mountbatten, who fixed them each with a serious face and announced rather sternly, ‘Be sure to ask yourself, ladies, if you will be able to stand the heat.’ Madge was somewhat puzzled. She hadn’t been north of Watford, let alone overseas, so she couldn’t begin to imagine what the heat would be like in the Far East. On a good day in Dover, where she had lived until starting work at Stoke Mandeville, it was possible to see Calais, but a long journey was a bus ride to Folkestone and the sun was never more than warm.
Lady Mountbatten shook hands with each of the girls and they were escorted down a level and along the corridor to the Military Department of the India Office to sign a set of papers. An unsmiling official handed Vera her documents and then gave Phyl hers. Madge looked at him expectantly but he just peered o
ver his circular, black-rimmed glasses and said without a hint of apology, ‘You are not legally eligible for service overseas because you have yet to reach the age of twenty-one. Permission is refused.’
‘But . . . But . . .’ Madge stammered as her stomach dropped.
‘I’m afraid that’s final, miss,’ the official said, before pointedly turning back to his filing.
‘Oh, that’s too bad, Madge,’ Vera said sympathetically, while Phyl gave her arm a squeeze. Madge willed herself not to cry.
As they made their way back to Stoke Mandeville she gave the matter some thought. On the one hand, when Mountbatten’s plea was issued, life at Stoke Mandeville Hospital had been very quiet and that had been a major factor in her decision to volunteer for service overseas. On the other hand, there had been huge troop movements for weeks. Nurses and doctors alike were muttering that the ‘big one’ was coming and that they needed to be ready. Perhaps, Madge thought, she’d be able to help just as much at Stoke Mandeville. And at least that way she’d be able to stay close to her family.
All the same, during dinner, Madge struggled to keep a smile on her face, and that night as she snuggled into bed she had to try her hardest to convince herself that staying in Britain was the best thing after all.
After a sleepless night, a somewhat dispirited Madge made the short walk from the nurses’ home to the hospital to begin her 8 a.m. shift. Even on that five-minute stroll numerous people asked how the interview had gone. She had a late lunch with her two friends who were understandably buzzing about the exciting, brave new world that beckoned. Phyl said she had looked at an atlas and couldn’t believe just how huge India was.
‘It’s such a shame you’re not coming with us,’ she told Madge. ‘That horrid old man in the Military Department of the India Office shouldn’t be allowed to make such ridiculous decisions.’
The kindness and support of both Vera and Phyl left Madge in somewhat of a quandary. She loved the fact that Mum and her sisters were just a short bus ride from the hospital, but she also felt that the way she had been treated was totally unfair.
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