Some Sunny Day

by Madge Lambert

  Basil had arrived at Southampton to a dry if somewhat chilly spell, but by the middle of January 1947 it had turned into the coldest winter of the twentieth century with heavy snow, and blizzards in the Channel. A month later there were three-foot-deep snow drifts and it became officially the coldest ever February, with March being the wettest.

  Snow was the biggest worry in Kent, which was particularly badly affected, and because Madge and Basil could meet only every other weekend travel was a major problem. But whenever they were able to spend time together, the couple made the most of it, going on real dates where they talked and spent time getting to know each other in a normal environment, and during this time their love really began to blossom.

  In a bizarre twist of events, however, an opportunity arose in which they would end up staying under the same roof. It happened when Basil was being medically examined at Aldershot Garrison in connection with his discharge from the army. He was told that if he wanted an A1 discharge to show on his demobilisation papers, he needed to have his infected tonsils removed, otherwise it would be B2.

  His biggest problem, however, was that he couldn’t find a doctor to carry out the operation. A specialist surgeon connected to the maternity home in Birchington, where Madge was nursing, said he would remove the tonsils if he could use their medical facilities. The result was that Basil had his tonsils out in the maternity home’s main delivery room, and because of a complication he wasn’t released for ten days, much to Madge’s delight!

  Dr Bowie, the anaesthetist, told Basil the day after the operation that he had had such a problem getting him under that he had left the theatre and asked if anybody had a mallet! What he had actually done was to drip ether directly onto the mask.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be able to spend time together after so many months apart?’ said Madge, who had slipped away from her duties for a quick chat with her beloved.

  ‘I’m far from a pretty sight, though, aren’t I?’ laughed Basil, who then winced in pain. The ether in the general anaesthetic had burned his lips and he had ended up with a big and very painful red ring around his mouth. ‘I’ve been told all I can eat for the next ten days is ice cream, but I suppose that’s no real hardship,’ he said with a wink. He couldn’t help thinking of the last time he’d been hospitalised, not long after arriving in Chittagong. He had been treated for malaria and diphtheria in 68 IGH, where he found that patients like himself, who were able to get out of bed, were put to work polishing and sterilising the lino-covered floors in their ward. On reflection, being looked after in the maternity nursing home was more his cup of tea!

  The bitter and brutal winter was replaced by the most glorious of summers, with temperatures reaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the first three days of June. On the evening of 2 June, Basil took Madge to a Burma reunion concert. The heat in the Albert Hall was so extreme that the audience couldn’t help but be reminded of the jungle conditions in which they had fought in the Far East.

  ‘I just hope there’s enough beer for everybody,’ General Sir William Slim joked.

  The show’s line-up included Jack Warner, Lynn Burnett, Noël Coward and Tommy Handley, who paid moving tributes to the Forgotten Army. The performer who caught Madge’s eye, however, was the fourteen-year-old daughter of Ted and Barbara Andrews who stole the show. Madge laughed when she reminded Basil that the girl’s mother had actually asked the audience if it would be OK for her young daughter to sing.

  ‘Remember the name because I think we are going to see a lot of that young lady,’ she told Basil, as she praised the enchantingly pretty and talented Julie Andrews.

  The headline act was forces sweetheart Vera Lynn, who received a standing ovation after several encores, which included many of the favourites she had sung to the troops in Burma.

  ‘That was an evening I will never forget,’ Madge told Basil as they left the concert hall.

  ‘It certainly brought back memories,’ agreed Basil, who told Madge he had had the privilege of attending a Vera Lynn concert in Chittagong in 1944. ‘She’d flown from London and even brought her own pianist and piano! Watch these steps, they’re quite steep,’ he said, as they walked hand in hand from the Royal Albert Hall.

  ‘It was only two or three months before you arrived in Chittagong,’ said Basil, ‘and she wore khaki trousers and a long-sleeved shirt because the mosquitos were such a problem and it was an open-air concert. She sang non-stop for more than two hours, encore after encore. The whole audience kept chanting “We’ll Meet Again” in an effort to get Vera to sing one more time, and hot and exhausted as she must have been, she nodded to her pianist and off they went again.’ He smiled at the memory.

  ‘Just like this,’ asked a smiling Madge, who quietly began to sing, ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day.’

  ‘Bravo,’ said Basil.

  Madge’s life had settled into a happy routine. She was thrilled to find out, weeks later, that owner Hetty was so pleased with the way she and Grace had organised the maternity home she told them she had a surprise.

  ‘This is my way of saying thanks to you girls,’ said Hetty, as Madge and Grace stood wondering what on earth she was talking about. ‘I know you’re both still young but I don’t think you will ever get the opportunity again in your lives to see a future Queen of England being married. I’m giving you the day off so you can be part of the celebrations.’ Madge and Grace clapped in excitement.

  Not only did Hetty give them the day off to travel up to London for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip, she also paid for return train tickets and a hamper full of goodies for their special day. They didn’t really see a lot when the royal procession went past because there were such huge crowds, but Madge thought the atmosphere was amazing. It reminded her of that exciting week in London before the journey to Chittagong.

  On the train back to Birchington, Madge asked Grace if she remembered the problems with trying to buy those three pairs of shoes in Darjeeling.

  ‘I certainly do,’ she replied.

  ‘Well, just the other day I had a letter from a Darjeeling solicitor saying that I’m going to be sued for refusing to pay and I’m going to be arrested if I don’t attend the court case!’

  ‘Heavens above!’ said Grace. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Madge said she was so upset she had asked the advice of a wily old lawyer who acted for the maternity home. ‘He told me not to worry because he would write on my behalf saying that I would be only too happy to comply with the court ruling. All they had to do in return was send funds for my air fare. Oddly enough, neither I nor the solicitor have heard another word from them!’

  The next day, Madge received an invitation from Basil to join him for a family weekend in Woking. He had settled quickly into his new job with Vacuum Oil in London. The invitation was just what Madge needed because she was concerned they weren’t seeing enough of each other, even though they had had a vague discussion about a future together in the capital.

  Oh, the thought of another weekend together has really cheered me up, Madge said to herself.

  Basil told her there was going to be a big family dinner on the Saturday night and as it was going to be a special occasion, she decided to take her favourite dress from Poona.

  ‘It looks so elegant and I love those stripes,’ said Basil’s Auntie Mabel. ‘I haven’t seen anything like it. Did you buy it in London?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ smiled Madge, as the evening drew to a close.

  The following night there was a knock at the door of the single room where Madge was staying.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, and there was Basil with two cups of tea on a tray. He put the tray on the dressing table then turned and handed her a beautifully wrapped little parcel with a pink bow on top.

  ‘Will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’ he asked. Madge had half opened the present but was puzzled because it certainly didn’t fee
l like a ring and she began to wonder what on earth was actually in the delicate velvet bag. She shook the contents into her hand and out came three glittering diamonds. She placed her other hand over her mouth in surprise before beaming with joy.

  ‘Basil . . . This is the most romantic and thoughtful thing that’s ever happened to me,’ she said. ‘It would be a privilege to become your wife.’

  Madge decided that there must be many, many wives who wished their fiancés had done exactly the same thing instead of being given rings that they secretly didn’t like. But Madge was able to choose the setting that she really wanted.

  A wedding date was set for the following October at St Mary’s, an old Anglican church in Horsell, Woking. Stringent clothes rationing was still in force and there had even been a reduction from sixty coupons to forty-eight, but even when you had enough coupons clothes were difficult to buy. It was no secret, then, that everything was borrowed. Madge was loaned a beautiful, full-length wedding gown of white crepe with a figure-hugging bodice and a long lace veil with real camellia flowers that accentuated the elegant A-line skirt. Her sisters Doris and Doreen won admiring glances in their borrowed fuchsia-coloured bridesmaid’s dresses. (When Madge and Basil returned from their honeymoon they decided they wanted to keep the dresses, in remembrance of their wonderful day, and paid their kind benefactor for them.)

  Madge was hopelessly nervous as she approached the altar on the arm of Basil’s father Herbert, who was giving her away. As she knelt alongside her bridegroom, Basil turned to her and said, ‘You look absolutely beautiful, Madge. Do you know, I was just told about one of our wedding presents. Can you believe we’ve been given six green beer mugs from George Woodman!’ It was a strange thing to say at the altar, Madge thought, but it made her smile and the jitters started to disappear.

  When the reception was underway Madge’s ‘new dad’ Herbert gave a speech in which he expressed great pride in the way Madge and Basil had served their country in the Burma Campaign.

  ‘Madge’s father Charles served in India in the Great War,’ said Herbert, ‘and had he been able to see his eldest daughter married, he would have said the same thing.’ Basil’s father was far too modest to mention his own wartime service in France but continued by saying that he and his wife Alys were equally proud of the way every one of their children had rallied to the cause. ‘And it goes without saying that we are profoundly grateful that Bill, Buster, Beryl, Basil, Brian and Bob have all come home to us.’

  Madge changed into a two-piece black bouclé suit, for which she had been saving clothing coupons for months, under which she wore a pale blue roll neck, long-sleeved sweater that she had knitted herself. She had splashed out on new black shoes when she and Basil had had that vague discussion about living together in London.

  ‘You look just as stunning as you did in your wedding outfit,’ exclaimed Grace. Sadly, Vera and Phyl had not been able to make the wedding because of travel complications.

  ‘Oh, doesn’t she just,’ Doris agreed.

  ‘Talk about something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,’ said Doreen. ‘You’ve got the lot!’

  Basil had also switched from his Moss Bros morning suit and waistcoat and changed into his Montague Burton double-breasted demob suit.

  ‘I love that navy blue colour on you,’ Madge whispered to him. ‘You look ever so smart.’ She took her new husband’s hand and gave it a squeeze as they both smiled at each other affectionately.

  As they left the Yorkshire Restaurant to catch the train from Woking to London for the first leg of their journey to Brighton, where they were going on honeymoon, they were hit with a blizzard of multi-coloured confetti. Just as they attempted to shake it all off on the platform, the whistle sounded and they hurriedly got into their compartment.

  The train very quickly started to pick up speed as Basil tried to open the window in the hope that the draught would blow away the confetti that seemed to appear every time they moved. The window, however, was jammed so he decided to open the train door just a teeny-weeny bit to get rid of the confetti once and for all. It worked, but in doing so the train’s emergency braking system was triggered and the Woking to Waterloo express screeched to a bone-shaking halt.

  A moment later an irate guard was stumping through the train carriages to see who had caused the problem. Fortunately when he saw Madge and Basil, who were obviously newly-weds, he simply gave them a very cheery wave as he walked past and searched elsewhere for the culprit. Basil waved back and Madge blew him a kiss before resting her head on Basil’s shoulder.

  ‘Hello, husband,’ she said, looking up at him with a smile.

  ‘Hello, wife,’ he replied, smiling back.

  Then they fell into a contented silence as they gazed out of the window at a country no longer at war.

  How different things are now from when Basil and I first met, thought Madge. But whatever life may throw at us in the future, at least we will always have each other.

  Their life together was just beginning.

  Epilogue

  Nothing could have prepared Madge for the extraordinary events she would experience after she responded to Lord Mountbatten’s appeal for nurses to serve in the Burma Campaign. She didn’t even know if she would make it back to England, but many years later, as she celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday on 24 July and her sixty-ninth wedding anniversary on 16 October 2017, she said there was a very simple reason why she would do it all again.

  ‘If I hadn’t gone to Chittagong, I wouldn’t have met Basil. We wouldn’t have had such a long and wonderful marriage and we wouldn’t have had Carolyn and Angela, our two beautiful daughters.’

  Madge left the Birchington maternity home soon after the start of the National Health Service in July 1948 and worked in the commercial world until the arrival of Carolyn, her firstborn, in 1951. Angela followed in 1953. It was only after a plea in 1958 from a close friend to help in an area branch of the National Health Service in Woking that Madge agreed to return to work – ‘but just for a few months’. In a remarkable coincidence the office to which she reported was actually in the six-bedroomed home in Horsell that Basil’s mother and father had sold when they downsized after their family of six children had grown up and flown the nest.

  Madge was hard at work one morning when a secretary asked if she had a moment to step into what had been the lounge of the Lambert home. Workmen had been removing the fireplace when one had found an old Christmas card that had fallen behind the back of the mantelpiece. It was a card to Basil, Brian and Bob from a lady who had been their nanny in the late 1920s!

  The ‘couple of months’ Madge promised to work for the NHS soon stretched to years and she became a key figure in organising school vaccinations and inoculations. She eventually retired from the NHS on 24 July 1988.

  Basil joined Provincial (now United) Newspapers in 1948 and then in 1951, during the Cold War with Russia, he enlisted in the Army Emergency Reserve with the Royal Engineers, based at Longmoor Camp in Hampshire. He continued his annual camps until retirement in 1970 with the rank of major. His military awards include: the 1939–45 Star, the Burma Star, the Defence Medal, the 1939–45 War Medal, SE Asia 1945–46 and the Army Emergency Reserve Decoration 1951–70 with two Long Service Clasps.

  In 1985, after thirty-five years during which time he became an executive on the management side, he took early retirement from United Newspapers. The next decade of Basil’s business life was spent with Network Security, who dealt in corporate fraud, and whose retirement gift was slightly different from most. It was a round-the-world trip for two which enabled Madge and Basil to undertake a three-month journey down memory lane, to retrace the steps of a love story that had survived a war of unspeakable brutality. For both, the first port of call on their original journey had been Bombay, which had a population approaching 1.7 million. When they returned in 1994, Greater Bombay had grown to almost 13 million.

  From Bombay they flew to Calcutta, where o
nce again they made a point of seeing the good and the not-so-good. First, they were taken on a conducted tour of the poorer areas, which Madge found to be every bit as sad as it had been fifty years earlier. The hustle and bustle, kindness and courtesy hadn’t changed, but there was one major disappointment. Firpo’s was no longer a fashionable restaurant but had become a goods storage centre! The Grand Hotel was now the Oberoi Grand, but was still a haven of perfection. Last but not least, there was the wonderful sight of the Victoria Memorial, restored to its Taj Mahal-style white marble. At dinner the night before they left Calcutta Basil asked the pianist if he would be so kind as to play Madge’s long-time favourite ‘I’ll Be Seeing You (in all the old familiar places)’.

  There was certainly nowhere more familiar than Chittagong, the next stop on their journey. Madge and Basil found the small town they had left at the end of the Second World War was unrecognisable. From being an area of enormous natural beauty with lush green forests and white sandy beaches Chittagong District had grown into a city with a population of more than 5.5 million. The one or two cafes on the main shopping street where Madge and Basil had spent those tender and precious hours had long since been blown away on the winds of change.

  One thing which hadn’t changed in the half century since they had left was the natural courtesy and kindness which they remembered with great affection. When the manager of their hotel said it would be safer if he drove them in a conducted tour the offer was gratefully accepted. When they eventually got to the grounds of the old Governor General’s residence there was a major surprise. The big house had been turned into a museum but it was closed on the day of their visit so they never did see inside. The grounds which had contained the basha hospital complex had been turned into playing fields and Madge said she was certain that every patient who had passed through the hospital would have approved.