No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  The trees in the avenue shook out new leaves and around the camp the young oaks glowed briefly golden before turning green; the may trees and the elders flowered together and as the serene spring weather slid into a serener early summer, trees and hedges were white with blossom. Cow parsley fringed every ditch and grass verge, red and white candles burnt triumphantly in the chestnuts. In our Mess garden, in the flower beds between the paths and tennis courts, the lilacs were in bloom and the camellia bushes were Victorian bouquets of white waxen flowers. On free evenings from five, or after duty finished at eight, aching feet and backs were forgotten as the weather was perfect for tennis and a ‘confined to camp’ order had come into force.

  The camp’s officers were still allowed to use the tennis courts and grounds, and for a short, timeless spell, every evening from about six onwards, the young men strolled up to our Mess singly, or in pairs. They wore uniform jackets over white flannels or white shorts, carried racquets in one hand, trailed tin hats, respirators and loaded revolver cases in the other. All officers had then to be armed at all times, and officially all VADs had always to carry respirators and tin hats. But still, unless our Commandant was present or it was the C.O.’s inspection day in our hospital blocks, most of our respirators and tin hats resided in our bicycle baskets or under our beds.

  One of the roads into the camp ran parallel with the two tennis courts outside the ballroom. The outer court was divided from the road by a low, hedgeless green bank, as the iron railings formerly edging the grounds had long gone to make scrap metal. Often in those evenings a Dispatch Rider would roar to a stop in the road, hitch his motorbike to the edge of the bank and stomp over to interrupt a game either with a message or by removing a player. ‘So sorry, partner! I say — Nigel — carry on for me? Fifteen-thirty, two-one, your serve.’

  The little groups sitting watching and chatting on the green between the path and first tennis court, or on the steps of the French windows would mutter, ‘Jolly bad luck. Just getting his serve in.’ From a portable wireless inside the ballroom or on the path, tuned softly not to disturb the players, Vera Lynn singing Yours, or the BBC Dance Orchestra playing Scatterbrain, Somewhere In France, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, or the everlasting South Of The Border. Gentle tunes that matched the local tennis club mood and fulfilled the urgent need to cling – as small children cling to parents on the first day of school – to the pretence of normality in ‘Who’s on next?’, in white plimsolls playing discreet ‘footy’, in young eyes exchanging discreet ‘come hithers’. Behind the pretence the recent memory of the disaster at Narvik, the growing number of British men and ships lost at sea, the strange, disquieting rumours trickling back from the BEF (British Expeditionary Force). Rumours that buzzed round the camp grapevine within hours, if not minutes, of some regular soldier’s return from France on an instructor’s or other specialized course and dropping in for a chat with the lads in his old unit, or the chaps in his former Mess.

  Behind the soft thuds, twangs, ‘Good shot, Partner!’ on the courts, the distant rattle of carrier convoys, rumbles of tanks, the staccato barking of machine guns, the ugly deep-throated belch of heavy artillery. ‘Not to worry – just practising!’ On the green sward, men with short back and sides hair-cuts, girls with permanent waves, or rows of tight curls over the forehead, or for those with hair as long as mine, tucked up in ribbons or bootlaces to frame the face with a massive roll. All the faces blank with youth, all the conversations carefully avoiding two subjects; the war and the future. And at our feet, scattered on the green grass, tennis racquets, boxes of spare balls, khaki jackets, tin hats, service respirators, and loaded revolvers in polished leather holsters.

  Almost imperceptibly, another sound became a remorseless thread in the background of our lives. The sound of the military band that always escorted regiments moving out to Active Service in France. I dreaded the hearty martial music and thought of Danny Deever. I knew the men being marched out had not come from a hanging, but every time I heard a military band that summer, unsought, unwanted, the final lines of the poem ran through my mind:

  For they’re done with Danny Deever, you can ’ear the quickstep play,

  The regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away;

  Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer to-day,

  After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.

  Chapter Four

  The rumours from France became a sea that, from the second week in May 1940, was composed of rogue waves each one too bizarre for credulity.

  ‘My dear, get this gen! Jerry’s crossed the Dutch and Belgian frontiers …’

  ‘You’ve got it, miss, nuns! Thousands! All paratroops togged up as nuns and raining down on them Dutch, but them Dutch pulled their thumbs out their dykes and drowned the lot!’

  ‘Lucilla, this is pukka gen. Jerry’s flattened Rotterdam. The Dutch have had to pack it in.’

  ‘From what the lads are saying, miss, that Leopold’s turning yellow…’

  ‘Heard the latest, Miss Andrews? Froggie’s thinking of asking for his cards.’

  ‘The French want to pack it in? Staff-Sergeant, no! Can’t be gen – is it?’

  ‘No telling seeing the wireless and papers don’t tell us nothing. No surprise to me if the lads are right. Froggie mutinied in the last do, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did? I never knew that. Of course, you were in the last war.’

  ‘That’s right. And a right mucky do it were – if you’ll pardon my French.’

  ‘And you think the French’ll pack up. Staff, if they do, what – what about the BEF?’

  ‘Reckon the Navy’ll be busy, like. Very busy, like.’

  I thought of the men I knew in France, and the thousands I did not know but had seen marching away to Danny Deever. Normally, as the official war news in the newspapers and on the wireless seemed days behind camp news, I seldom bothered to listen to the BBC news, or glance at more in the papers than the headlines and Jane in the Daily Mirror. (Jane, an engaging, nubile blonde, figured in the enormously popular strip-cartoon that bore her name, daily had difficulty keeping on her clothes and at intervals lost the lot. As the war progressed it was another cherished soldier-patients’ legend that on any day Jane appeared starkers the entire British Army advanced on all fronts.) But that evening after talking to the Staff-Sergeant, when I got back to our Mess I collected all the daily papers lying about, read the war reports in detail and noticed the constant repetition of ‘strategic withdrawals to previously prepared positions’. Momentarily, I stopped reading, thinking I could hear a distant drum. Later that night, in one of the growing store of threepenny exercise books I kept in the suitcase under my bed, I wrote, ‘It wasn’t a drum, it was my pulse banging against my ears.’

  Some evenings later I was off five to eight but late getting away as the afternoon had been unusually hectic in my block. Just after lunch our M.O. had returned unexpectedly, done a second complete medical round with Sister and precipitately either transferred to other blocks or discharged back to barracks two-thirds of our patients. Mrs S and I had been alone with Sister, and whilst the latter and our M.O. had spent the rest of the afternoon at the dutyroom desk submerged by the sea of forms that had to be filled in, in triplicate, for every man being moved, Mrs S and I had crossed and re-crossed the square to the Pack Store, returned blues, reclaimed service uniforms, stripped vacated beds, carbolized the bedsteads with carbolic solution, re-made the beds, scrubbed all the empty lockers and swept the whole block twice as once was not enough to remove the blanket fluff. No one had explained to us or our patients the reason for the exodus. The patients were convinced they were moving to make room for casualties from some unreported big battle in France. Mrs S told me privately she doubted this. ‘For a major inrush of serious casualties they’d empty the acute blocks, not us. Probably just another almighty flap.’

  It was after six when I got back to our Mess. The ballroom was deserted an
d the only four girls off with me were playing doubles on the nearest court. The other court was empty, the net lowered, and no watchers sat on the green sward, or young men strolled up the path. It was another glorious summer evening. The sun was still too high for the dance of the midges in the open French window doorways or the birds’ evening chorus, but somewhere near, a blackbird was singing like a nightingale. I kicked off my shoes and too tired to remove limp cap or crumpled apron flopped full length on my bed and fell asleep listening to the blackbird. About twenty minutes or so later, I was woken by repeated shouts from the tennis players. Reluctantly, I yawned my way to one of the French windows. ‘What’s up? I’m having a kip.

  They had stopped playing and were sitting on the low bank by the road. From the fading rumble a convoy had just gone by and into the camp. ‘Come over here! Come and see! Here comes another!’

  I smoothed my hair and cap perfunctorily and joined the girls on the bank as the first lorry in the second convoy rattled by. ‘Why the flap—’ my voice stopped abruptly. I said no more for quite some time.

  That convoy of heavy lorries was followed by others, and all were unnaturally identical. Army lorries and Army drivers, but all crammed with airmen. Airmen slumped like old sacks, with grey, unshaven faces, with Army greatcoats, red hospital blankets, multi-coloured crochet shawls, draped over sagging shoulders, with what was visible of their RAF uniform filthy, untidy and torn. As each lorry went by, the men in the back stared at us, dumbly as sacks. Four girls in white Aertex shirts and white tennis shorts, one in a nurse’s indoor uniform, but instead of the normal shouts, cat-calls and wolf-whistles from any passing load of young servicemen, only silence. Exhaustion made the airmen’s faces look old, but the faces belonged to young men.

  The summer dust at last settled back on the road and remained undisturbed. We sat on, waiting, but the road stayed empty. None of us spoke. In the silence I heard the blackbird still singing. Having a mind that thrusts up lines of poetry as easily as it frames newspaper headlines, I found myself mentally quoting a verse from Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle.

  The blackbird sings to him, ‘Brother, brother,

  If this be the last song you shall sing

  Sing well, for you may not sing another;

  Brother, sing.’

  That night was very hot even when all French windows were open. The sky was navy blue and starlit, the tennis nets were cobwebs floating across the courts. The clean country night air was scented with warm grass, hay and lilacs, until another in-coming convoy rumbled by and the smell of petrol, exhaust fumes and hot tyres drowned the warm grass, the hay, and the lilacs. In the morning there were no military patients left in N.D.K., every one of the seven wards had doubled its number of beds, and a disgruntled cookhouse orderly, dumping down double rations of porridge and eggs for boiling, told me his lot had had to turn out at midnight to make room for two hundred airmen.

  In our wards, sitting or sprawling on every bed, unshaven airmen with wary, tired, eyes and faces painted by fatigue with the pallor of fungi. ‘No, nurse, we ain’t Scotch Mist. Just a surprise packet for you.’

  It was their guns that most shocked me. All weapons were forbidden in military wards, yet every man seemed to have one. The greater majority had rifles, but more than a few, astonishingly, had officers’ revolvers. ‘How’ve we kept ’em, nurse? Not patients, see. When you got to pull out you got to let the rest of your kit go, but you holds on to your weapons.’

  ‘You – er – you mean the RAF’s pulled out of France?’

  A crowd of men had come in from the other wards. Momentarily, the crowd was quiet and the quiet, deafening. Then, ‘You’ve said it, nurse.’ Then for the first time the words I heard over and over and at each time as if dragged from the speaker’s throat. ‘May as well know it, nurse – we’ve been on the run.’ After another pause. ‘Six days we had of it. We’d start building a runway in this field, see, but before we’d half the job done, along comes Jerry dropping his load, so we moved back, starts another in another field – and back comes Jerry. Days, nights, we kept at it, and Jerry kept on dropping his loads and wherever we was, Jerry knew and he was there. We got shoved so far back we run out of fields, and seeing as you can’t build runways on the sea, here we are. What you got to say to that, eh nurse?’

  I did not know what to say to those angry, weary, men, hugging their damaged pride as plainly as they hugged their weapons. Instinctively, as always when emotionally shocked, I took refuge in trivialities. ‘That all of you obviously need good breakfasts and to get off those beards and have baths – if we can swing it with the block Sister upstairs as we haven’t baths down here, but I expect you’ve discovered that. By the way, I suppose none of you are any good at lighting fires with green twigs – that wretch in the duty-room’s just died and we haven’t any other firelighters.’

  In one of the most extraordinary moments of my life, the crowd gaped at me. Suddenly the whole atmosphere altered. Within minutes the fire-lighting party was at work in the duty-room, whilst other self-organized parties dealt with washing and bath queues, beds, sweeping, bumpering, lockers and brasses. N.D.K. rang with, ‘Give us that bit of shammy you scrounged off that dead Jerry, Bert … Spit on it, mate! Only way to get a proper shine … So it’s a cutthroat not a safety! All right? Not asking you to cut your throat with it, am I? … Now you listen to me, mate, you can have it soft-boiled hard or hard-boiled hard – can I say fairer?’

  Two hours later the block was spruce enough for a C.O.’s inspection, one hundred and forty men loaded the nursing staff with souvenirs in the form of cap badges, buttons, bits of shrapnel and empty cartridge cases, and paraded in the square, shaven, clean and tidy airmen.

  An army N.C.O. on crutches winked without humour as we watched the airmen march away. ‘Trust the Brylcreem Boys to save their skins first. You know why they’ve been shifted smartish, don’t you?’

  ‘To make room for the Army?’

  ‘From what I hear more like to stop our lads having a go at ’em.’

  I heard much the same in the days that followed from the first of the returned, and mostly walking-wounded, soldiers. ‘You say you had the RAF here, nurse? You mean we GOT a RAF? Get away! Oy! Bill, Tom, Shorty, Jock – you hear what the nurse says? We GOT a RAF!’

  ‘You’re having us on, nurse! You got to be having us on! Aren’t the RAF the lads as meant to fly planes? No kidding, nurse, only planes we’ve seen are Jerry’s – and he’s got enough of ’em, he has. Them Stukas – wheeeeeeeeeee—’ the scream of a dive-bombing Stuka was endlessly mimicked and invariably followed by ‘rat-tat-tat-tat-tat – you should’ve seen the b-basket, nurse! You’d not credit how he’d spray them refugees. All along the roads they were, see – every road – miles and miles of ’em – old women, mums with nippers in prams, kids on bikes – and Jerry, he’d come down low on the lot and you couldn’t get along the road in battle order (single file) for the arms and legs and heads all over the shop.’

  In the last few days of May and first few of June the river of returning soldiers burst both banks, swamped hospital and camp. Impossible to remember names and numbers within seconds of copying them from sweat, sea-stained and often blood-stained identity tags strung on dirty cords, tapes, or metal chains round sleep-sagged necks. Tags that in another time in those same beds had been happily exhibited by untried civilian soldiers. ‘This ’un don’t burn and this ‘un don’t sink. Army’s making sure it’ll not lose me, eh, miss?’

  Now: ‘Sorry to wake you, soldier. What’s your unit?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your unit. What unit were you with, soldier?’

  The answers, a roll-call of the British Army. Guardsmen, privates, troopers, gunners, sappers, drivers, medical orderlies: names of great regiments that echoed Corunna, Lucknow, Waterloo, Balaclava: names of county regiments that covered the map of Britain. Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, and all oblivious in sleep to the oil and grime on their bodies and the relativ
ely minor wounds that brought them into our block. Until the dirt and beards were scraped off, all the sleeping faces looked the same: all on waking briefly asked the same, ‘Froggie got his cards yet, nurse?’

  ‘Haven’t heard. Have a little of this soup before you go back to sleep. I’ll hold the mug and your head. Sip it, soldier – swallow it, soldier – sip, swallow – fine …’

  Men too tired to remember to swallow a mouthful of soup or keep their eyes open, but not to mumble, ‘Thanks, nurse … ta, duck … that’s great, hen … grand, luv … I say thanks awfully.’

  Off-duty rotas forgotten or ignored when remembered. Day after day of washing from the bodies of exhausted men the sand of Dunkirk, the grime of St Malo, of Brest, of Cherbourg, the oil of wrecked ships, the salt from the Channel. Often the hot water in my washing bowl needed three changes before the ether soap dislodged the oil glued into pores. When the soap exposed the flesh wounds hidden beneath the filth, beads of black oil bubbled on the mens’ upper lips and foreheads. Not infrequently after lathering with the soap, the colours of the men’s hairs altered dramatically. Dark brown turned flaxen, or sandy, or the ubiquitous pale English brown. The hair of one very tall young Scottish Highlander under my hands changed from black to bright red. He told me his unit had spent some days on the beaches at Dunkirk, but could not remember the exact number as one day was so like another. ‘It was the noise that was being the worst.’