‘I say – jolly decent of her.’
‘What’s your name?’
He began mechanically repeating his surname and number. I stopped him, ‘I meant your Christian name?’
Suddenly shyly he told me and asked mine as if we were meeting at a party. I did not answer immediately. From my Red Cross lectures and Training Manual I had learnt that never, in any circumstances, should a nurse reveal her Christian name to a patient. Neither lectures nor Manual had taught me what to say now. ‘Awful mouthful. Lucilla. Awful bind at school.’
The exposed half of his face twisted. It was a smile. ‘Get called Lulu?’
‘Yep. And Lucy, Lu and Lucilita. I sometimes get called that at home as it means “little Lucilla” in Spanish. My mother’s called Lucilla. She’s Spanish. She’d call you Juanito.’
His face twisted again. ‘Rather fun. My sister’s got a long name – rather pretty like yours – odd – can’t remember her name.’
I said I kept forgetting names and then he began talking about his school and some master who never remembered the boys’ names. His voice sounded peculiar, seemed to come from his chest not his throat and had an odd rattling note. As he went on talking he started talking nonsense, at first only occasionally, then most of the time. He kept asking my name, if I knew his sister and sometimes he thought I was his sister. Sometimes, for a few seconds, he was quite coherent. In one lucid spell I asked if he was comfortable.
‘Yes, thanks, except for this bandage thing over my face. Bit sort of tight. Could you sort of loosen it?’
I looked round for advice but all the Sisters in sight were busy with other patients and the senior Sister seemed to have vanished. I could not see a VAD in the ward and the two M.O.s present were dealing with blood transfusions. Then, as I did not think it would do any damage to loosen the gauze bows, I let go of his hand, stood up, undid the first and, as the sterile towel beneath slid off and jerked aside the towel above, very nearly fainted on his bed. The right half of his face and some of his head were missing. I had consciously to fight down waves of nausea and swallow bile, wait until my hands stopped shaking and dry them on my back before I could retie the bow. Mercifully, he had slid back into confusion before I flopped back on to my chair.
The confusion increased, his breathing grew louder, more laboured and sometimes rattled as his voice earlier. But he seemed to know I was holding his hand, as whenever I slightly altered the position of my cramped fingers, his cold, stiff fingers as slightly tightened their grip. His eye had been closed for some while when it suddenly opened and stared at me. Before I realized what he was about to do, with a tremendous effort he flung himself upwards from the waist and towards me. I had to wrench free my hand as I leapt up and caught him in my arms to stop him falling out of bed. He was so heavy that to keep my balance I sat instinctively on the side of his bed. He dropped his head on my shoulder and sighed. I thought he was unconscious and was relieved for his sake, but too frightened to lay him back in case the towels fell off and I had to see his wounds again. I wholly forgot I was committing the unforgivable nursing crime of sitting on a patients bed.
As suddenly the senior Sister was beside me. She said nothing about my sitting on the bed, but gently uptilted his head from my shoulder. ‘Poor boy. Put him down, nurse.’
I only understood when she closed his one eye. An M.O. had appeared. He helped her straighten the boy’s arms and legs, roll his body in a grey blanket and lift the roll on to the waiting stretcher that had appeared on the floor. The M.O. took one end, an orderly the other, and before they were out of the ward the Sister had whisked off the under blanket, straightened the long red mackintosh sheet, tucked on a cleaner under blanket. Then she noticed me standing behind the chair. ‘Go and wash that blood off your face and neck, at once, girl! It’ll upset the patients. Move, nurse! Can’t you see how busy we are?’
All I saw through the curtain of shock was a hideous forest of dead, white leafless trees heavy with repulsive crimson and yellow fruit and long thin red tentacles reaching down to uneven grey mounds that reeked with the sickly-sour smell of fresh blood. I wanted to run away from the ward, the hospital, the Red Cross, and nursing for ever, but I could not run as my legs were stuffed with heavy cotton wool. It was not like one of those nightmares where one wants to run from danger and cannot, it was far worse, as I knew I was awake and this nightmare was present reality.
Somehow I got out of the ward and into the nearest sluice in time. Several minutes later as I washed my face under a cold tap, one of the younger Sisters came in. ‘Been throwing up? Poor kid. Always used to when I was a pro.’ She chucked me a clean hand-towel. ‘You’ll feel better now. Anyone using you? Then I am. I’ve got to have some more hotties. It’s no use your going round the other blocks as they’ve sent us all their spares. I’ll be two wards down. Have a rootle round and find me some – and don’t forget all the dead haven’t been moved out. Look round their feet.’ She read my expression and added briskly but not callously, ‘Stiffs don’t need hotties, kid. The living do. Get weaving!’
Unable to sleep that night, in the small hours I went out into the garden and as there was a moon and I might be seen from a window, spread my grandfather’s carriage rug in the shelter of the camellia bushes. I was glad the camellias had stopped flowering as the moon was bright enough to transform even the roses into waxen flowers for the dead. The night was very quiet but I waited, tensed, for the rumble of the next convoy, the next duet of guns and aircraft. None came, but every few minutes the long fingers of the searchlights swung over the sky like some fussy house-wife searching for invisible cobwebs. The night air was warm and probably scented with warm earth, grass and roses. All I smelt was blood. The smell clung to the back of my nose and throat and no amount of washing had got it off my hands. I wondered, as I was so often to wonder as a nurse, how ever again I would eat anything touched by my bare hands. At the very late supper no one around me had wanted to eat, all I had managed to swallow was some bread and cheese eaten with a knife and fork. I thought of the bread and cheese, and only then, very slowly, of the men who had died since lunchtime and the boy who died in my arms. I wished I could weep. Usually I wept easily. I learnt then, for the first time in my life, how it felt to be too sad for tears. The feeling was agony.
As was the necessary routine:
‘Nurse, get all these into orderly packs, check and then label each name and number against this list.’
I did not know how to make an orderly pack out of the torn and bloodsoaked uniforms removed from the dead. I made each set into a bundle tied with string. ‘Do I take them to the Pack Store, Sister?’
‘Not now. Their C.O.’ll need to see them. He’ll be back, shortly. Just stack them in a tidy row on one of the metal stretcher-trolleys – or you may need two trolleys.’
I did.
Chapter Five
My stay in ‘A’ was short. On one of the C.O.’s weekly inspection mornings I forgot the time. The C.O.’s party arrived in my allotted ward to find all the beds out of line and away from the walls, one of the two orderlies new that morning, bumpering, the other shaving one of the three patients on the Dangerously Ill List, two other patients shaving themselves and myself standing on a locker-top washing a lampshade. The following night I started the first of my twenty-eight consecutive nights as sole VAD on the night staff in the camp’s Military Families Hospital. The Battle of Britain was then at its height though to me merely of nuisance value as, when any of the neighbouring airfields to our camp were under attack, we had air-raid Alerts that put me behind with my ward routine work. But shortly after I went on nights the night air attacks started and on many nights on another long metal stretcher trolley I stacked new-born babies bundled in shawls and cot blankets.
Families stood across the Ordnance railway line from the men’s hospital. It was an independent establishment, built, I think, as a hospital, and had three floors. Maternity on the top; general medical and surgical wards in the mid
dle; and on the ground, various offices I never saw used at night, the one kitchen for the hospital, and an operating theatre only used at night during my shift as an air-raid shelter.
Every night before beginning my pre-midnight routine – i.e., hot drinks and bedpans all round; helping the two Sisters on nights to settle the patients; changing and feeding babies; I ‘set for raids’. First I checked that an empty stretcher-trolley, unlit hurricane lamp in good order and box of matches, waited against the wall by the nursery door opening into the top corridor. Further along that corridor were the stairs, one lift-well, and doors to the labour and maternity wards. Always I dumped my tin hat and respirator on the empty trolley before charging down the stairs to transform the theatre into a shelter. The operating table, anaesthetic machine and other equipment trolleys had to be covered with clean sheets, a pile of cushions heaped on the floor against one wall, a line of portable canvas cots set up against another, folded blankets stacked on the covered operating table, three more hurricane lamps set in specified places on the floor, each with a box of matches, and near the cushions, a stack of women’s magazines. The strongly built, windowless theatre made a good shelter and its outer walls were sandbagged. It had its own portable self-powered lights, but at night we took these up to the labour ward. Often during, or immediately after, raids our electricity failed for minutes or longer. Consequently, habitually, I carried a small torch in one dress pocket, spare matches and two candles in the other. I never needed the candles. In 1940, in normal circumstances, seventy-five per cent of all British babies were born at night. Every wartime midwife and obstetrician I met agreed that nothing so swiftly induced a baby as the sound of a falling bomb.
One morning as I pushed my bicycle back to our Mess for breakfast, I was stopped by Mrs S. ‘What’s up with your bike? Tyres don’t look flat.’
‘They’re fine. But I keep falling asleep and falling off.’
‘Poor girl. Not surprised you’re whacked. Nights are tough enough without Jerry making extra work.’
I leant on my handlebars. ‘At least he wakes me up.’
‘Expect he does. How’re you liking it amongst the women and babies?’
‘Much more than I expected. The women are jolly nice, the babies cute, and the two Sisters are so sort of normal I keep forgetting they’re QAs.’
‘Who’ve you got? … Oh, those two glamour girls! Aren’t they both newish in from their teaching hospitals? Who’s your M.O.? … Old – who – my child? Kindly remember he’s ten years younger than myself! Still, as well he’s old enough to keep his head with the beauty chorus on the Families night staff. Trust the Army always to cloister the youngest and best-looking Sisters and VADs behind Families’ convent walls. Quite a compliment being posted there.’
‘Not for me, it wasn’t, Mrs S. I suppose you’ve heard of the black I put up in “A”?’
She smiled not unkindly, ‘I can’t pretend the story hasn’t gone all round with improvements. I suppose one of your patients didn’t actually chuck his shaving brush at the C.O.?’
‘No.’ I had to smile though still very perturbed by the episode. Betty, Joan, and other girls had tried to console me with reminders of the blacks they had put up, or invented putting up, if not under the eyes of the top brass. I had pretended to shrug it off, but sensed uneasily that my error was important. (Instinct, as always in my experience, was right. For good and bad, that posting to Families was later to alter the entire course of my life.) ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I think he dropped his shaving brush on the floor in horror and someone – I think the R.S.M. – picked it up, but I was too petrified to be sure. Think I’ll ever live it down?’
She looked up at the sky. ‘The Army’s got one or two things on its mind to keep it from being too browned-off with you. Not again?’ The Alert was sounding. ‘I’ll ride back with you and see you don’t fall off.’
The guns had started before we reached the Mess. It was late for breakfast and most of the other night VADs had already left for the Night Home. Whistles were blowing, shutters being slammed, and I stretched out unnoticed on one of the long benches in the nearby empty dining-room, my respirator on my chest, tin hat over my face and that was the last I heard of that or any other daylight raid whilst on nights. A couple of hours later someone shook me and said I should be in bed. ‘All Clear? Went ages ago.’
The VAD Night Home was some way off and for a reason I never fathomed presided over by a youngish woman civilian whom I loved for giving me my first bedroom to myself and as this was an attic, for always calling me last in the evenings. The attic was tiny, had a sloping roof, dormer windows, bare floorboards, and the only provided furniture was an army bedstead, biscuits and bedding. I turned my suitcase into a dressing-table, made a hanging cupboard by sticking two nails into one sloping wall and connecting them with strong twine. Such luxury was my delight and the envy of my friends. ‘How’d you swing this, Lu?’ I did not know and had been long enough in the Army not to ask in case it was a mistake. My only regret was that I spent too much time asleep to properly enjoy the privacy.
I had been tired before in hospital, but never before reached and remained at the pitch of fatigue consequent on working twelve-hour nights, seven nights a week. In the mornings I fell into bed as if pole-axed and stayed unconscious until violently shaken. ‘Wakey, wakey! Rise and shine! Ten past seven and it’s the second time. Third and I strips your bed! Show a leg there!’
Then came the conscious fight to surface through the smothering waves of sleep. A fight that had to be continued in the bath, getting into uniform, riding to the Mess for supper, on to the hospital, and for the first few hours on-duty. A fight that made sense of the strict rule forbidding us to sit down on-duty at night, unless feeding or special-nursing a patient, or in our half-hour night meal break. Whenever I broke the rule when alone in Families kitchen and sat on the lid of the huge bread-bin, instantly I went to sleep, fell onto the floor and only then woke as I was so scared of the kitchen cockroaches. My lowest ebb came around midnight – this ebb varied for other night nurses – but once midnight was over I breathed out, knowing ahead lay the clearheadedness of the small hours, then the predawn euphoria that seemed to hit all night nurses alike before exhaustion returned with the rising sun.
As far as I had become concerned, the war only happened at night. I had no clear idea of what was actually happening in that war. I was sufficiently aware other parts of southern and eastern England were having air raids, that the RAF was being kept pretty busy, that everyone seemed to assume the raids were the opening gambit of the long-awaited invasion, to be very relieved our parents, John, and our dog Dopey moved temporarily to stay with relatives in Yorkshire at the end of July.
After the fall of France, Government posters appeared in towns on the Channel coast asking all non-essential civilian residents, particularly all schoolchildren, mothers with young children, the aged and infirm, pensioners, and the retired on private incomes, to arrange to move themselves (at their own expense) to other parts of the country, but not to East Anglia, Kent or Sussex. From father I heard the voluntary evacuation had reduced the combined population of Hastings and St Leonards from sixty thousand to approximately twelve thousand, the beach in front of both towns was mined for its length, the promenades covered with rolls of barbed wire, and the activity of the ‘tip and run’ raiders had caused a growing rash of boarded-up windows and ruined houses. The ‘tip and runs’ were German planes that flew over in the five minutes or so it took from the French coast, dropped a load of bombs and flew back immediately and generally too low over the sea for the coastal ack-acks. Our parents wrote regularly, but as letters were often delayed days, or lost, or destroyed by enemy bombs in the post, and civilian trunk calls either meant hours of waiting or could not be put through, frequently in that August and September our parents in Yorkshire seemed as distant as when they were in Suez.
One early afternoon I heard there had been an unexpected, temporary lull in the daylight ra
ids, from a St Leonards girl who shook me awake. She was a VAD in one of the smaller camps several miles away and had hitched a lift in an ambulance sent to collect medical stores. She had called at our Mess, and as Betty was on-duty, borrowed a bicycle and ridden up to the Night Home. She said the dame downstairs had said she could come up and she was sorry to wake me, but no one at her dump had a clue what was going on and why had Jerry packed in the daylight raids and did it mean he’d changed his mind about invading or had he arrived?
‘If he has, no one’s told me.’ I was very peeved at being woken and too sleepy to care had she said Jerry had just surrounded the Night Home.
She was peeved. ‘I thought you’d have the gen! You do have your troops in bed long enough for a natter. If ours need more than a couple of A.P.C.s or lick of flavine, our M.O. shoves them into you.’
‘Not me. I’m in Families.’
‘How’s your family?’
‘OK, P.G. Haven’t had a letter – oh – about ten days. Maybe more. How’s yours?’
She thought her parents were all right as she had managed to speak to her mother on the telephone yesterday. Her parents were still in St Leonards and knew all the local news. Peter, Martin, Ronald, all RAF pilots and all dead before their twenty-first birthdays. She said, and kept on saying, ‘I can’t believe those boys are dead, Lucy. I just can’t believe they’ve died.’
Though stunned by the triple tragedy, in a kind of frozen distress I discovered I could believe it. Before I saw and felt death, even my anxiety for the AIF and the marching men earlier had been cushioned with her present incredulity. Still, death had been an unmentionable mystery that happened to the old, to my unknown elder brother and relatives, to millions in the war before I was born and whom I had tried unsuccessfully to visualize when buying poppies, and singing ‘Oh God Our Help In Ages Past’, or trying not to shuffle my feet in the Two Minutes’ Silence on Armistice Day (11th November). I had wept over Journey’s End, Tell England, and Hollywood war films, without genuinely believing the dead had died, because through the gauze filter over my imagination’s lens I saw death as sleep. That poets and prayer books labelled the sleep eternal, had never convinced me as I believed literally in the resurrection of the dead, had learnt neither biology nor chemistry, and thought of decomposition only in connection with garden compost heaps. There had been no resemblance to sleep in the harsh, cold, stiffening reality of those dead soldiers in ‘A’; no later answer to the nagging thought, how could a man with half his face and head missing, literally, rise from the dead. In one afternoon that particular cushion of ignorance had been removed for life.
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