Some Sunny Day

by Madge Lambert

  Madge pointed out that they had volunteered to serve in the Burma Campaign as nurses in the first place, knowing there would be risks involved. ‘There’s no point in being scared. In reality, it’s just another job and we’re going to be put on the rosters whether we like it or not. And they’ve put strict measures in place to make sure we and the patients are kept safe.’

  Later that evening Basil warned her not to expect the same gratitude from the Japanese for trying to save their lives as nurses got from Allied soldiers. ‘You must remember,’ he said, ‘that they feel enormous shame at being taken prisoners of war and would prefer death before the dishonour of being treated by the enemy.’

  Nurses were briefed about the arrival of the Japanese POWs and told what to do in the case of any emergency. It was made very clear that should an incident occur on the ward, the most important thing was personal safety. ‘Don’t think about being a hero. If you are attacked, get out of the way as quick as you can and let the guards step in. The greater the distance you can put between you and any attacker, the safer it will be, but if necessary, hit them as hard and as fast as you can with anything you can get your hands on,’ they were told by a security expert.

  ‘It is highly unlikely,’ he went on, ‘that one of the Japanese will escape, but in the event of that happening, remember the old motto that there is safety in numbers. The more of you there are together, the less likely it will be for one of you to be taken hostage.’ He ended by saying just how much he admired the nurses for the task they were undertaking. ‘You may think that these prisoners are seriously ill, but it is absolutely vital that you be on your guard at all times,’ he added.

  As they left the briefing, Madge said to Vera and Phyl, ‘Well, at least he told it to us straight so we know how to deal with anything that might happen. I suppose we’ll just have to expect the unexpected,’ to which the other girls nodded in agreement.

  The first two Japanese POWs were carried in on stretchers to 56 IGH on 3 March 1945. Within days the ward was full of demoralised Japanese soldiers suffering, in the main, from malaria, dysentery, dehydration and malnutrition. For those with combat injuries the length of time they spent at the hospital could vary, but the others were soon moved to purpose-built POW camps.

  Despite the evidence that the push against the Japanese was working to plan, the boys on the BOR ward, where Nurse Graves was on duty, were outraged and bewildered over what they described as ‘an un-bloody believable decision to mollycoddle the Japanese’. If debates in the nurses’ mess were heated, the arguments on the wards became increasingly fierce. One particular Lancastrian lance corporal insisted that it didn’t mean the Japanese POWs were being mollycoddled just because they were being treated as human beings. ‘We are a civilised nation and must not lower ourselves to their level,’ he insisted, but he was met with some even fiercer responses.

  In typical British fashion, however, they maintained their sense of humour. David, a patient from Cardiff who was recovering from a nasty shrapnel wound in his left shoulder, called Madge over and told her in a stage whisper that he knew the key to dealing with the Japanese. ‘Madge, my little lovely, even if one of these people has a sword hidden in the bed, remember you must keep your ’ead at all times!’ As the rest of the ward burst out laughing the cheeky Taff chuckled so much that his laughter turned into a yelp of pain.

  ‘Serves you right,’ Madge grinned, before walking on down the ward to check on another of the soldiers who had been brought in two days earlier with a very unpleasant bout of dysentery. He had a cast in his right eye and a rugged, dangerous look about him. He had said virtually nothing since arriving and she was worried he might also be suffering from shock. Out of the blue he told her, in a clipped accent, that he had something that would solve the chronic constipation from which the Japanese were said to suffer. Without further ado, he produced a hand grenade from under his pillow.

  Madge hadn’t been sure about this new patient but the utter shock, brilliantly acted as it was, on those scarred features as he dropped the grenade certainly didn’t fool the unflappable Nurse Graves. ‘Boys and their silly toys,’ she said with a shake of her head and a whimsical smile as she calmly placed it back under his pillow.

  He apologised profusely for the jape with the grenade which he said he’d won in a little wager with two gentlemen from the Land of the Rising Sun. ‘It has, of course, been defused,’ he added. ‘I just thought the boys on the ward needed a little fun in their lives.’ He turned serious for a moment and said, ‘You know, Nurse Graves, in a strange way I understand why this casualty ward for the Japanese prisoners has been opened. We’re British and it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?’ he added.

  Several men on the ward were on the edge of serious illness, but their laughter reminded Madge of the indomitable spirit shown by the wounded boys from the D-Day landings, when she was in Stoke Mandeville. They all knew that Madge would be in the Japanese POW ward the following morning so when she left at the end of her shift she gave them a huge smile and a few words from a Gracie Fields classic: ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye . . .’ The laughter and applause, along with shouts of ‘be careful’, rang in her ears as she headed towards her basha.

  Madge was going to be amongst the first on duty in the new ward. She had never actually set eyes on a Japanese soldier before, let alone nursed one, and she was interested to see what they looked like. She was still smiling over the day’s mischief that had taken place in the BOR ward when she met up with Vera for a late afternoon pot of tea on the eve of the big day.

  ‘Those boys,’ she told Vera, ‘are always up to monkey business, but they’re a lot of fun!’

  ‘I know, they are cheeky,’ Vera replied. ‘But they make what we do worthwhile, don’t they?’

  ‘They most definitely do,’ Madge agreed.

  That night Madge washed her hair and checked that her uniform for the following day had been ironed. She gave her lace-up shoes one last polish and thought about spelling out her thoughts in a letter home to Mum and her sisters, but decided instead to write after her first day on the POW ward. Normally one of the last things she would do before bedding down for the night was to scribble a few notes in the diary that she had restarted in Kirkee after disembarking from the Strathnaver in Bombay, but the security briefing she had attended about the arrival of the Japanese made her wonder if it was sensible to continue.

  Madge read back over some of her entries and decided that there wasn’t a single thing that would be of interest to anybody other than her sisters and Mum. There was a bit about a dog that she knew the family would enjoy, but couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a security risk. Sapper was a loveable, mischievous Alsatian with one blue and one brown eye and a floppy right ear. He was owned by the Mess Secretary of HQ Movements, known to all as Flossie Dirkin. Sapper’s greatest joy in life came after a dinner or dance at the mess because he always got a doggy bag full of juicy, meaty treats that he wolfed down within seconds. How could that cause problems? Madge asked herself. Nevertheless, she decided that with the enemy just a few hundred yards away she should discontinue her diary keeping. She’d just have to remember every detail so she could tell Doris, Doreen and Mum all about her adventures when she got home, whenever that might be.

  The following morning Madge was determined to look as pristine and efficient as possible for her first day with the Japanese so she checked her uniform and hair one last time before heading over to have breakfast with Vera, who had been earmarked for service in another ward that day. They discussed the order that these POWs must be listed as numbers only.

  ‘It seems almost inhuman,’ said Vera.

  ‘But there’s really nothing else we can do,’ Madge pointed out. ‘Nearly all of them are refusing to give their names.’

  After breakfast Vera and Madge walked together to their shift but were stopped in their tracks by a scene that was unfolding at the bottom of the hill around the POW wards. To the right, a squad of Brit
ish soldiers, rifles glistening in the early morning sun, marched in unison towards the troop of Gurkhas, who had been on duty through the night guarding the Japanese. The nurses were still a considerable distance away, but because he was so tall Madge instantly recognised Big Arthur in the British contingent, and she found comfort in the giant Yorkshireman’s presence. As they got closer they overheard the last few words of the troop’s briefing. Though they had gathered in a rugby-style huddle, Madge distinctly heard the term ‘court martial’ being repeated and knew that if the guards laid so much as a finger on the prisoners they could be in for the high jump.

  Vera attempted to relieve the pressure as they headed towards the ward by announcing that she had learned to speak Japanese and when Madge challenged her to say something in the alien tongue she indignantly replied ‘Tokyo!’ It was an awful joke, but both girls laughed before going their separate ways.

  ‘Eyup, Madge.’ Big Arthur, who was assigned to accompany Nurse Graves on her rounds, introduced her to his fellow guard, Joseph, a particularly tough-looking Scouser from Liverpool. Madge looked at her heavily armed bodyguards and felt reassured by their presence. Right, let’s do this, Madge said to herself. They stepped into the ward together.

  Already the temperature was over 85 degrees Fahrenheit and a thoroughly unpleasant smell was permeating from within the ward. The odour was so awful Madge initially thought it might be gangrene. Then it dawned on her that the smell was nothing to do with gangrene, it was just the stench of so many men stuck in the heat with the shutters closed.

  The ward was surprisingly quiet and she was keenly aware that twenty-eight sets of enemy eyes were monitoring her every step and movement. Big Arthur, hand resting lightly on the Lee Enfield rifle that was slung across his shoulders, stayed close to Madge as she got her bearings in a ward full of tiny and very emaciated Japanese prisoners of war. She found it difficult to associate the atrocities carried out by forces of the Japanese Empire with soldiers in such dreadful physical condition. Several appeared closer to death than life, but their eyes seemed to gleam with such pure hatred that Madge was glad that Big Arthur was never more than a few feet away from her at any time.

  Sets of medication had been laid out in the shade of the veranda and a quick check of the contents confirmed that the majority of the patients were suffering from malaria, dysentery, combat wounds, malnutrition or a combination of the afflictions. A doctor had spent considerable time on the ward over the past two days and diagnosed most of the illnesses, but even without his notes Madge would have identified the fact that patient number one was seriously ill with malaria. He was sweating profusely and shaking so much that she was reminded of the scenes with her father back in Dover. Inevitably she didn’t receive even a nod of the head in thanks after giving him treatment, but rather strangely she thought she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes.

  Madge moved on to the next bed whose occupant seemed to be little more than a human skeleton. The doctor’s notes said that he was suffering from dysentery and malnutrition and his little arms looked like sparrow’s legs. The noise of the guards clumping up in their British army beetle crushers woke him from what was the deepest of sleeps and for a moment it looked as if he was going to make a protest, but he simply didn’t have the energy. Instead he lay stricken as Madge administered large doses of medication.

  It had been the most glorious, sun-drenched start to the day when Madge walked down from breakfast with Vera from the nurses’ mess, but within an hour clouds had begun to gather, the wind had started to shriek and another downpour was threatening. The humidity was unbearable and as she continued her rounds the odour within the ward became so extreme it was a relief when the rain actually started.

  Madge’s next patient had an amputated arm in addition to a number of shrapnel wounds and a respiratory infection. He didn’t speak English and she didn’t speak Japanese, but Madge’s smile seemed to calm the somewhat agitated young man. Because beads of perspiration were standing out on his forehead she gently mopped his brow and helped him drink a glass of water. Next she prepared to administer a penicillin injection. When the inside of his one arm was swabbed and the needle was about to be inserted he turned his head away before flicking it back to very carefully spit in Madge’s face.

  All hell broke loose as the lethargic morning calm turned within seconds to a bear pit. Rain splattered on the roof of the basha and the shutters creaked and groaned in the howling wind. Madge stepped back and turned to the guards with green phlegm dripping from her eyebrow, across her nose and onto the white apron of her uniform. All the noise from outside failed to drown out the roar of anger that could be heard from inside the ward.

  ‘Disgusting! Utterly disgusting!’ roared Big Arthur.

  He had moved to protect Madge from any second assault and he let loose a stream of obscenities that could be heard the length of the hospital. Joe, a veteran of the Saturday night action that took place at throwing-out time in the pubs on Scotland Road, stood with his back against a wall, waving his Lee Enfield in a 180-degree arc to dissuade the rest of the POWs from getting involved. He had made an extravagant display of pretending to remove the safety catch.

  Both British guards had been warned that morning that they would face a court martial if unnecessary violence was inflicted on the prisoners and Big Arthur took exceptional care not to lay so much as a finger on the one-armed ‘little ****’, who had responded to Madge’s compassion in such a foul way. Instead, he kicked the underside of the bed with his size 12 British army boots with such enormous power that the bottom two legs became momentarily airborne. The patient squealed with fright. That started the other POWs shouting and yelling and there was bedlam. Only when a group of Gurkhas walked through, hands casually on their kukris, did it all calm down. Big Arthur was mortified that he had let the incident take place and apologised time and time again to Madge ‘for using such bad language in front of a lady’.

  ‘Nobody could have seen that coming and you are absolutely not to blame,’ she told him.

  Instead of retreating from the fray, Madge took a thirty-minute break to clean up and went back to the ward to nurse other POWs who had been committed to her care. Unfortunately it happened again and again but there was little that could be done to stop the practice, other than to be very watchful when attending her patients. It’s not much fun, basically being used as a spittoon, she thought.

  After such an awful day, Madge decided to have an early night and sat down to write a lengthy letter to Mum and the girls. She decided not to include a single word about the spitting so as not to worry the family. Instead the letter told how fond she was becoming of Basil and the fun they had at dances and dinners. Doris and Doreen would love him and I just wish you could meet him, Mum, she wrote.

  The following day Madge was called to a meeting with Matron Ferguson and other hospital officials to talk about the best way of dealing with the Japanese patients, who had again been spitting at nurses. It was generally agreed that Madge’s idea of wearing surgical face masks and tight-fitting caps was worth trying.

  That evening Madge met Basil in Chittagong for an early drink and she told him about the difficulties she and the other nurses had been having. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘The truth is, there’s no easy answer to the problem. For the Japanese it’s death before dishonour and they feel they’ve already let their country down by being taken prisoner. I don’t want to sound unsympathetic but the reality is that they don’t want to be kept alive, and I suspect that’s the reason for their behaviour. I’m afraid they’ll probably just carry on doing it for as long as they’re there. But don’t worry, we’ll be off on our holiday soon enough and then you can try and forget them temporarily.’

  Madge smiled. ‘Perhaps we’ll be able to forget that there’s a war going on at all.’

  Basil had to return to work, but escorted Madge back to the main gate of the hospital where she bumped into Havildar Bahadur, who said there had been more problems
with spitting on the POW ward and a nurse had gone off in tears.

  ‘There’s a lot more to cry about in the Burma Campaign than the Japanese spitting in your face,’ she calmly replied.

  But the POWs, and the war as a whole, seemed to slip from her mind as she wandered back to her basha thinking only of Basil and hoping that time would pass quickly until they could see each other again.

  21

  Holiday in Calcutta

  Madge, who was in charge of the couple’s accreditation documents for the holiday in Calcutta, spotted that Basil’s primary cholera immunisation was out of date. Thankfully they had driven less than a mile so she asked the driver if he would be so kind as to divert the short distance to 68 IGH, their sister hospital. As luck would have it, the first person they saw was a QA sister who also helped out at 56 IGH and they quickly explained the problem and how pressed they were for time. The QA smiled. ‘What else would you expect from a man?’ she joked, telling Basil to follow her.

  ‘Would you prefer it in your bum or arm, sir?’

  Basil laughed. ‘I’ll take it like a man in the arm.’

  Within minutes they were back en route to the Patanga airfield, some ten miles from Chittagong. The casual, laid-back charm of the American security officer belied the hawk-eyed efficiency with which their accreditation documents were scrutinised before access was granted. The official spotted that Basil had received a cholera booster that morning. ‘I hope it didn’t hurt too much but it sure is wise, buddy, with the way things are in Calcutta.’

  Madge thought the official was just being friendly and told him how much she was looking forward to the trip. ‘Neither of us have ever flown before,’ she said, the excitement clear on her face.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll have a ball then, miss.’

  With that they were escorted to a jeep and driven across the PSP (pierced-steel planking) runway to a DC-3 that was being loaded with crates, parcels and all sorts. It was their first surprise on what would be a very interesting trip.