Reassurance came, however, from Reverend Davies who told Madge and Vera as he passed through the wards on his hospital visits not to worry in the slightest because everything would just flow smoothly once the ceremony got underway. ‘That’s the way it goes with weddings.’
There was one thing, however, that was too awful to even consider: what if another of the demonstrations telling the British to get out and demanding home rule for India took place on the day? The campaign was becoming increasingly violent but they decided that a Gurkha guard of honour would be based outside the church and would escort the congregation back to the hospital complex for the reception in the main hall.
A few days before the wedding Basil took Madge to see This is the Life. On the way to the cinema he told her that he would be able to accompany her to the wedding because he had been assured of getting the day off from Movements HQ. One by one, a solution was found to each problem and by the time the big day came around, Madge could hardly wait.
The arrival of two camouflaged army three-tonners carrying friends of the bridegroom from their base heralded the start of the wedding day. Madge and Vera watched as the troops clambered off the vehicles and transformed them within minutes from dust and grime-coated old bangers into truly glorious wedding transport. The boys simply draped great big Union Jack flags over the lorries and somehow attached massive bunches of roses to the vehicles.
As Madge changed into her bridesmaid outfit she made two important decisions about the wedding. First, she was going to wear next to no make-up. The advice of the splendid old lady at the Welcome Ball in Bombay had proved 100 per cent right on numerous occasions and on what was already a sticky and humid day she mentally thanked her for the umpteenth time. The second decision had taken a lot more time and thought. On the one hand, high heels were always a plus because they added height. On the other, she knew they would play havoc with her feet and scrunch her toes if she had to stand for any great length of time. Then there was that walk from her basha up and down the hill that could be tricky even on a good day.
What would Mum say? Madge asked herself, and the answer came like a bolt from the blue. Madge was taking her favourite handbag anyway and both the nurses’ lace-ups and her high heels just about fitted in. So for the walk back to the big house and the first part of the day she would wear the lace-ups and then she would change into her high heels for the reception.
As luck would have it, Madge was more than happy with the shoe arrangement because there was a mix-up with transport to the church and the girls had to cadge a lift in one of the flag-covered army lorries. Madge watched as Vera tried to climb into the cabin in her high heels. She laughed as the men almost fell over themselves scrambling to help her up.
The little church in Chittagong was already filling up as they waited in the vestibule for the bride to arrive. Madge smiled as she looked to her left to see a group of soldiers that included handsome bridegroom Charles nervously puffing away on his last cigarette as a single man.
‘What a lovely old church this is,’ said Madge to Vera. ‘I didn’t even know it was here. That design with those lovely white spires makes me wonder if it was built by the Portuguese.’
Basil then arrived and couldn’t help but laugh when Madge walked over and asked him to look after her handbag, which by then contained her nurses’ lace-up shoes. She gave him a gentle but loving hug, followed by a welcome kiss and smiled sweetly. ‘Take my word for it, Basil, the bag matches your outfit!’
Just then the most magnificent maroon Humber Super Snipe driven by an Indian chauffeur with a black peaked cap came around the bend. The six-cylinder engine growled gently and the car sported a spare wheel alongside the bonnet. A spectacular chrome-plated emblem of a bird with a long silver beak gleamed in the afternoon sun and white-trimmed tyres made it even more special. It looked like something straight from a Pinewood Studios film. Madge almost laughed out loud when Vera whispered, ‘Where on earth did they get their hands on a car like that in a place like Chittagong?’
As Madge and Vera moved to help the bride alight, the aroma of expensive leather drifted from inside the vehicle. The girls embraced.
‘You look so beautiful, Sally,’ Madge said, standing back and admiring her long-sleeved, high-necked cream cotton gown and the full, silk veil that swept down to her waist.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, smiling, ‘but I’m feeling very nervous right now!’
If the car was impressive, the inside of the church was breathtaking in its beauty with lotus flowers everywhere. The sacred lotus is for Hindus a symbol of beauty, fertility and eternity; to the Buddhists of Burma the exquisite bloom represents purity and tranquillity. Sally had told Madge she had chosen lotus flowers in the hope they would finally bring her some good fortune.
The nervousness that both Madge and Vera felt as they waited in the vestibule was calmed in the gentlest of ways by the Reverend Davies, who greeted them as old friends and said how colourful and stylish their gowns were. He then proceeded to conduct a service of such tenderness that the congregation, who lived day to day on the fringe of infinite savagery, floated in a sea of very welcome tranquillity.
She glanced over to the bride. She really does look stunning, Madge thought to herself. A ray of light shone through a window high on the church wall to act almost as a spotlight to accentuate the delicate little freckles on the bride’s face that beamed with happiness.
Madge wondered what was coming when Reverend Davies said that they would take a moment to forget the turmoil through which they were living and think instead of three simple things that feature in Corinthians 13:13. When he began to read the passage from the New Testament she was so profoundly moved that she wished she had been sitting alongside Basil to share the moment.
‘If I speak in the tongue of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
‘If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
‘Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
‘Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’
The silence at the end of the reading was palpable and even the square-jawed troops from Comilla had to swallow hard.
There was one last hymn, which, quite suitably, was ‘Love Divine, All Love Excelling’, and marriage vows complete, the congregation filed out.
Madge had told Basil in their brief conversation before the ceremony about the transport hiccup and he had a car ready to take the two bridesmaids ‘and that handbag’ back to the reception in the main hall. Jeeps containing the Gurkha guard of honour were at the front and back of the convoy.
After a few cocktails on the veranda the two bridesmaids strolled back to find that the multitude of lotus flowers that had graced the church had already been transferred to the main hall, along with roses, frangipani, jasmine, hibiscus, giant sunflowers and the most incredible orchids. Waiters walked round with a tray of exquisitely displayed hors d’oeuvres that had been brought over from the kitchens. One of the servers recognised Madge as ‘the brave memsahib who fought with the devil bird’ and gave her a mischievous smile when he explained that he was so worried about being attacked like she was that he had put a big cloth over the food.
‘You cheeky boy,’ she said with a big grin.
Within an hour or so one of the two army lorries loaded up its passengers and was on its way back to Comilla, with the intention of arriving before darkness fell. It meant they missed the speeches, which were short but witty, and the fun and games that went o
n later with a drinking competition between visiting soldiers and the Chittagong-based boys as the reception became entertainingly raucous.
‘Watch this,’ Vera told Madge, as they stood chatting at the reception, and she smiled at the handsome best man, who burst out laughing when she gave him the most outrageous wink before slowly turning her back on him. Within seconds he was at her side!
‘Good evening, beautiful bridesmaids. My name is Robert Adam,’ he said.
‘Robert Adam what?’ asked Vera in her cheekiest manner.
‘Just Robert Adam,’ he replied. ‘It’s been a wonderful evening, hasn’t it? I would like to thank you both for having always been so kind to Sally. She told me and Charles all about you two,’ he said.
‘When did you meet her?’ asked Madge.
‘When she was nursing Charles at your sister hospital over the past weeks. We thought he was going to die, but she spent her every waking hour on the ward and helped bring him back from the brink.’
‘What was the problem?’ asked Madge.
‘Malaria,’ answered the best man, who then invited Vera to partner him once the first dance was over.
‘My pleasure,’ she said, before half turning to Madge and whispering, ‘I think that finally solves the mystery of Sally!’
The dancing began with the bride and groom leading a tribute to Glenn Miller. ‘What else could we start with here in Chittagong other than “Indian Summer”?’ said the master of ceremonies. Madge and Vera were standing talking about how moving the Padre’s reading at the wedding had been and overheard a couple saying what a terrible shame it was about the American.
‘I’m not sure I heard that right,’ said Madge, ‘but I get the impression that something has happened to Glenn Miller.’
A wedding guest chipped in to confirm that there had been reports before Christmas that a flight taking him from an airport somewhere near Bedford to Paris had gone missing over the English Channel. ‘That was some time ago and nothing has been heard of him since,’ the guest added.
Basil rejoined the group and eased Madge away by saying that the next record was going to be ‘Moonlight Serenade’.
‘I know it’s one of your favourites,’ he said, ‘so could I have the pleasure of the next dance?’ The overwhelming sadness that Madge felt over the singer’s death in the very waters she had seen every day as a child growing up in Dover was tempered by the warmth and security that came from being held in Basil’s loving arms and she thought how lucky she was to have found him.
Basil guided her gently from the throng on the dance floor out to the veranda to look up at stars twinkling and a new moon glimmering over an impossibly romantic scenario. Then they looked down to the flickering lights of the wards of 56 IGH where brave young men were fighting so valiantly to recover from disease and combat wounds. As the dulcet tones of the Glenn Miller classic drifted away on the evening breeze, Madge realised just how strictly her life, at just twenty-one years of age, was being governed by love and war.
20
Nursing the Japanese
Since she had arrived in Chittagong Madge had relied on the South East Asia Command for news about the war. This forty-thousand-circulation daily newspaper, which was published in Calcutta with the intention of keeping Allied forces in touch with events back in Europe, was understandably circumspect about progress in the Burma Campaign. It was always a treat to see the occasional copy of SEAC, but as the weeks passed, Madge had the sense that there was much more going on behind the scenes than any of them were aware of.
By the start of 1945, however, it was obvious that the tide had turned in favour of the Allies and early in the year the Japanese were being chased remorselessly back through Burma. They suffered unsustainable losses and ran out of ammunition, fuel and food as the Allies ruptured their supply lines beyond repair. As a result, Japanese POWs were being captured, some in need of hospitalisation, but treating them was not straightforward, as Madge would soon discover.
Atrocities by Japanese troops against hospital patients and Allied medical staff in Hong Kong began shortly before the crown colony’s surrender on Christmas Day 1941, when nurses were raped and murdered, doctors slaughtered, St John’s Ambulance men bayoneted and wounded soldiers tortured. Japanese forces had started their attack on the crown colony within hours of the 7 December raid on Pearl Harbor, which led to the US declaring war against Japan.
The garrison held out for seventeen days against overwhelming odds before the Governor General of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Aitchison Young, along with a group of colonial officials, formally surrendered. But the violence didn’t stop. The number of casualties on the morning of the surrender was impossible to confirm but of the nurses who were raped and murdered two were reported to be VADs. In addition, there were claims that more than fifty wounded Allied soldiers were executed as they lay in bed.
Then on 13 February, patients were murdered on operating tables and hundreds of injured troops and medical staff were executed at a British military hospital in Singapore. It was just after 1 p.m. when heavily armed Japanese soldiers were spotted advancing towards Alexander Hospital, where a British army captain held up his arms, clearly marked with red crosses, in surrender. A shot was fired at him and a grenade was thrown, but he escaped by jumping over a wall. A white flag waved from a window was met with an outbreak of rifle fire. By then the Japanese had marched into the hospital. The staff of a surgical unit, standing with their arms aloft in surrender, were bayoneted and a patient under anaesthetic was mutilated and murdered on the operating table.
By late afternoon the Japanese had trained their rifles and machine guns on a group of more than two hundred staff and soldiers whose arms were tied behind their backs. They marched their hostages to tiny huts, where they were held through the night without water or food. The wounded who failed to keep up or fell over on the short march were hacked to death where they lay.
The next day half the group were taken from the huts after being promised water and fresh air, but were systematically butchered. While the morning slaughter was taking place a stray shell loosened a door of one of the huts and several men escaped. The remaining prisoners were murdered before the Japanese accepted the surrender on St Valentine’s Day of Allied forces that totalled almost eighty thousand.
Details of the outrages that had taken place in Hong Kong and Singapore slowly began to emerge within the close-knit medical community that served throughout the Burma Campaign. Nothing official was ever revealed, but anger expressed by the boys on the wards over the beheadings and bayoneting in Singapore and Hong Kong left little to the imagination.
On a swelteringly humid morning in February 1945, the nursing staff were gathered and told that a casualty ward for Japanese prisoners of war was to be opened at 56 IGH. By lunchtime the new ward had become the focal point of heated and often tearful arguments that went on in the nurses’ mess for days as fierce debate raged over the rights and wrongs of British nurses being told to care for an enemy who beheaded and disembowelled our boys as a matter of course.
‘That came out of the blue. I wonder when the ward will be opened,’ said Madge.
‘I’m not sure what I think about it,’ said Phyl. ‘I know it’s our job to care for anyone who needs medical attention. But you have to ask if it’s right after the way our boys have been treated by the Japanese.’
‘What I would like to know,’ said Vera, ‘is what the powers-that-be in New Delhi really think.’ She was referring specifically to Jane Patterson, Chief Principal Matron and Director of Medical Services, and, of course, Gertrude Corsar.
‘I suppose the truth is that they have to do what they’re told like the rest of us,’ said Madge.
Rather than precipitating confrontation by arbitrarily listing everybody on the Japanese POW ward rotas, Matron Ferguson spoke to nurses individually but at the same time made it clear they would be expected to follow orders if they were assigned to duty there. Judging by the response in the mess, Madge though
t that was a wise move. One of the nurses refused point blank to have anything to do with the Japanese because she had a brother who had been taken prisoner during the defence of Singapore. The family simply didn’t know whether he was still alive. ‘I won’t nurse a single one of those people,’ she said.
One of the hardest-working and most dedicated nurses at the hospital had a first cousin who had died in the Battle of Kohima and said that she thought it totally unacceptable that the latest drugs, like penicillin, would be used to save the lives of people who tortured and mutilated Allied soldiers. Madge felt overwhelming sympathy for girls who had suffered such grievous and heartbreaking personal losses, but as a nurse she simply felt morally bound to help those in need and made her position known to Matron Ferguson.
‘I’m willing to do whatever’s required of me, Matron,’ she told her.
Matron Olive Ferguson eventually announced to a group of her nurses that Japanese prisoners of war were expected to arrive at the hospital early in March 1945. ‘Rest assured that security has been discussed in great detail,’ she said. ‘The POWs will be guarded day and night, with responsibility shared between British troops and Gurkhas.’
To ensure maximum security the guards would work four hours on duty and four hours off. Nurses would be accompanied at all times by two riflemen on guard duty as they treated the Japanese POWs. The Gurkhas, of course, much preferred their trusted kukri knives. Madge was surprised to hear that the ward would not be surrounded by barbed wire or by specially built security fencing. ‘From what I’ve been told our “guests” aren’t exactly going to be in good enough condition to go hopping over the main fence,’ said Matron.
Some of the nurses began to feel scared at the prospect of treating the POWs.
‘What if people come in to attack the Japanese and they attack us as well?’ asked one VAD during another intense debate in the mess one afternoon.
Some Sunny Day Page 18