No Time For Romance

by Lucilla Andrews

  The Battle of Britain had ended, but London was still being blitzed. I did not argue the point. I was far too tired. When the Blitz ended the battered Londoners must have been even more tired. I only worked twenty-eight consecutive nights, but for fifty-seven consecutive nights London was under attack by an average of two hundred enemy bombers every night.

  As with our initial posting, the war ended, and I had long left the Army, with the Army still owing me four, un-sorted-out nights off.

  Chapter Six

  The Government posters urged us to DIG FOR VICTORY, DO YOUR BIT, BE LIKE DAD – KEEP MUM, remember CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES, IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOU and to ask ourselves IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? And every other person I met reminded me THERE’S A WAR ON and none more fervently than those without personal experience of air raids.

  In the new, specialized military hospital housed in a former women’s college, the medical and senior nursing staff were almost exclusively civilians in new uniforms. ‘Nicer for the patients as they’re treated as civvy patients,’ explained an older VAD, ‘that’s the only way our civvy M.O.s and QAs know how to treat patients. But apart from the rare old hag like myself who was in the last show, none of them have the faintest idea how to treat VADs or what we’re supposed to do. To be fair, last time we used to say only God Almighty knew what a VAD was, but as we worked hard, were damned useful – as we knew and the Army just occasionally reluctantly admitted – we had roughly officer-ranking and quite a bit of respect.’

  ‘Rather like our last posting.’

  ‘Then you girls were lucky. Don’t expect that here. Not on days. Nights aren’t too bad as on nights we actually do some nursing. On days, my dears, you won’t need lamps, you’ll need scrubbing-kneelers and strong muscles. You’ll spend most of your days scrubbing floors, baths, lavatories, sinks, sluices, lighting fires, toting coal bins, emptying dustbins. Don’t waste breath lodging official complaints. You’ll only be told we’re here to take the place of men – and there’s a war on.’

  Shortly after our arrival another contingent of VADs arrived from another large permanent military hospital in southern England. A girl from the second contingent, nicknamed Ollie, was sent on day duty to the same officers’ ward as myself. When we discovered that our work did indeed consist of nearly non-stop skivvying, we were as shocked as our fellow VADs in the ward were shocked by our reaction.

  ‘If the army wants us to lug those dirty great galvanized iron bins down two flights, out to the yard, fill them with coal and heave ’em back up, why aren’t we issued with fatigues (boiler suits)?’

  ‘Don’t bind! We can cope!’

  ‘But it’s daft as we’ve got orderlies!’

  ‘Ours not to reason why, Andrews!’

  ‘Why not? When it’ll wreck our aprons and backs for the day and the orderlies do it better as even if they are C3s they’ve still got stronger arm and back muscles than we have. Look how they shift loaded stretchers and if you think that’s easy let me tell you I once had to carry stretchers and …’

  ‘For goodness sake! No line shooting! We’ve far too much to do. If you want to be on a mutiny charge, I don’t!’

  ‘If the army could put me on a charge for binding, it would have to put the whole flipping British Army on one. If a soldier wants to mutiny, he’s got to fling down his rifle on parade and say, “Do what you will, I will soldier no more!” Says so in K.R.R.s.’ I did not in fact know if this were true, having only learnt it from a barrack-room lawyer in N.D.K. ‘When I mutiny – and it’ll be any day now unless someone lets me stop skivvying and do some nursing – I’ll march into Matron’s office with bucket and scrubbing brush, fling down both and say, “Do what you will, I will skivvy no more!’”

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Andrews,’ she announced as people do when about to say something they hope one will mind like hell, ‘but you lot from the south aren’t making yourselves too popular. You seem to think having worked down south sort of makes you different to the rest of us. Can’t imagine why’

  I did not attempt to explain. It was impossible to convince anyone without first-hand experience of enemy action of the cathartic effect of that experience and its subsequent legacy of blazing impatience with we’ll-cope-ers and muddlers-through still under the illusion that the war was a game to be played and won with a scrubbing-brush and amateur enthusiasm. I had seen that the war was an ugly and serious business and experienced the utter helplessness of the amateur, no matter how willing, when confronted with situations only the trained professional could handle. I remained haunted by that afternoon in ‘A’; that night in the labour ward; and the icy fear I had dared not acknowledge until the raid was over, that Sister Maternity would be killed and I left alive with those women and they and their babies would die because I would not know how to save them. I could not discuss this, even with Betty or other VADs with similar experiences, but I had written these experiences down in great detail in the hope of writing them out, as on occasions I could write out disturbing scenes and emotions. Not those. In bed at night I longed for time to hurry up and erase them, as if time were some handy indiarubber. I had yet to learn the only reliable antidote to old sorrow is new sorrow and to old pain, new pain.

  It was in those weeks spent on my knees that I began seriously to consider the idea of a general nursing training. Pre-Families, when I found I liked nursing, I had thought this was mainly because I liked the troops. In Families I had liked the women and babies, but at the same time become increasingly interested in the profession of nursing, particularly as practised by the two Sisters. In retrospect more than in the event, I was amazed how successfully those two young women ran that entire hospital at night with no more medical help than the Major’s brief nightly rounds. But to acquire their skill would take roughly four years. I could not – would not – believe the war could last so long. I wanted to be a nurse only as long as the war lasted, and then, as ever, a writer. The day the war ended, so would my nursing life, and as that day must come before I finished a general training, it seemed pointless to start something I must leave unfinished.

  ‘You – VAD – whatsyename?’

  ‘Andrews, Sister.’

  ‘NURSE Andrews, when talking to a Sister, girl! How much longer are you going to moon over this floor? Stop day-dreaming over ye boyfriend and put some guts into it!’

  ‘Yes, Sister. Sorry, Sister.’

  ‘Not half as sorry as ye’ll be, my girl, if I catch you dawdling again! Do that and I’ll have ye guts for garters!’

  Ollie’s seat and bucket backed out of a bathroom door a few feet away. She sat back on her heels and jerked up two fingers at our Senior Sister’s ample back retreating down the long, ward corridor.

  ‘Ollie, is that really a masonic sign?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Well, Peter, Dick and Sammy keep making it at each other and when I asked why they said it was a secret masonic sign and I mustn’t do it as I’m a girl and girls can’t be masons.’

  When she stopped spluttering she explained. Peter and Dick were Spitfire pilots injured during the Battle of Britain, Sammy was a subaltern injured in the first days of the still continuing London Blitz. ‘Don’t let on to them that you know, Lu. Their language may be worse than any trooper, taste in girlfriends restricted to dumb bosomy blondes with necklines to the waist and skirts two sizes too tight, but underneath they’re nice types. Shock the living daylights out of them to know you know.’ She took another look down the corridor. Sister had vanished into her duty-room. ‘Old bitch out for your blood again?’

  ‘And me guts. She wants to wear ’em for garters.’

  In that moment, Sister Blood-and-Guts was christened.

  She had only recently joined our ward and the Army after working for many years as a senior ward sister in one of London’s Big Five. (St Thomas’s, St Bartholomew’s, Guy’s, St George’s, and the London Hospital.)

  Ollie said, ‘If you do decide to train, f
or God’s sake don’t go to Blood-and-Guts’s alma mater.’

  ‘Over my dead body! Rather than risk meeting more like her, I’ll stay a VAD on me benders for the duration.’

  ‘Benders’ was another of Sister Blood-and-Guts’s favourite expressions. ‘Get down on ye benders, girl, and give that floor a good scrub and I mean scrub! Put some guts into it!’

  She was a large lady with an outsize jaw, no lips, a loud voice, shoes that could have doubled as army boots, and according to Peter, Dick and Sammy, they had only survived her nursing because they were too bloody terrified of her to die.

  Peter and Dick had beds on one side of their three-bedded ward. Dick’s bed was turned the wrong way round to let him face Sammy and see out of the window as he had to lie on his stomach until the grafted skin on his flayed back healed. Peter watched room and view through the two mirrors suspended at special angles over his head, as he had to lie on his back immobilized in a spinal plaster. Sammy, the illest of the three, was only allowed to lie down at night. The car in which he had been driven with a senior officer had been buried by a falling building. The two other occupants had been killed outright and Sammy thought dead when he was dug out of the wrecked car. ‘M-m-m-moved in the m-m-m-morgue, n-n-n-nurse.’

  I liked all three but especially Sammy with his gentle, stuttering and sometimes faintly slurred voice, unfailing good humour, and extraordinarily sweet smile. He no longer had to wear a cranial cap bandage as the hair was starting to grow again over the long puckered and still bright pink seams in his scalp. Sister Blood-and-Guts never gave us medical reports on the patients, but one afternoon a junior, temporary, relief Sister on loan from the operating theatre told me beneath the skin of Sammy’s scalp was more metal than skull bone. ‘Sure to God, we’d to build him a new skull. It’s a wonder the poor boy’s alive at all.’

  ‘He’ll be all right now, won’t he, Sister?’ She just looked at me. ‘He seems to be so much better.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘That’s how he seems.’

  ‘It’s glad I am to hear it. There’s no doubt at all it was a grand job the Colonel did on him, but seeing himself had to pick up the poor boy’s brains and pack them back in, as himself would say, there’s no telling at all. Too early for that. Maybe this rally’s a good sign. I’ve known it happen. The once or twice. How long’ve you been here? Was it in the south you were before? Working now in the city must make a great change for yourself.’

  ‘Makes a change, Sister.’

  The biggest changes were in the atmospheres in the crowded hotel restaurants, pubs, shops, ’buses and the local citizens’ attitudes to service uniforms and specifically women in uniform. The form of conscription for young women between 19 and 23, unless exempt as the mothers of young children, or five or more months pregnant, or for other stringent physical or compassionate reasons, that later obtained throughout the country, had only just started. Later in the war it often looked as if the entire population under fifty was in uniform, but not where women were concerned in an English inland city in the late 1940. We were still a minority group and my few friends in the ATS and WAAF said VADs were dead lucky to have small red crosses on the gold badges on the front of our pork-pie outdoor uniform caps, ‘Takes a right bastard to accuse anyone wearing a red cross of being a tart, but we get it all the time. “Know why you’re in uniform, don’t we…”’

  My red cross notwithstanding, often when shopping or with other girls in uniform trying to find a table in restaurant or café, I recalled with a new empathy Tommy Atkins.

  For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’

  ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’

  But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the

  guns begin to shoot;

  An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’

  anything you please;

  An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet

  that Tommy sees!

  The city had never been raided, and whilst on clear nights the firework display in the southern sky provided a continuing reminder of the London Blitz, as the threat of invasion was already forgotten history, aside from the tradesmen enjoying unprecedented prosperity from the thousands of service men and women either billeted in their midst or stationed in nearby camps and airfields, the local civilians seemed to me to see the war as a cross between an impertinent imposition and personal insult.

  ‘Too awful, my dear! We just have to have these two nurses. Of course, we fought against it, but as it was either them or evacuee kids – anything rather than kids. Have you heard about poor Susan? My dear, four cockney guttersnipes – wet beds every night – and what she says about their table manners I daren’t repeat over this phone! … Our Two? No, not too ghastly as they don’t have to eat with us, thank God, and aren’t in much … I simply had to put my foot down about baths! Well, I said, if you both insist on one every day, I’m afraid five nights a week you’ll have to make do with cold. I can’t provide hot water for more than two a week each. Frankly, I don’t believe these girls have any idea what we’re all having to put up with. Take this morning! I was positively exhausted after queuing in every shop – and dropped into the Copper Kettle dying for a coffee. Not a table? Not a SEAT! Whole place packed out by the RAF and WAAF. Really, I should have thought they’d have some work to do in the mornings …’

  Several other VADs were billeted in private houses and from their accounts, Betty and I had one of the best landladies. ‘Doesn’t go through your drawers when you’re out, read your letters, and never comes in without knocking? God, are you lucky! My old bitch is always on the hunt, never remembers to put things or even letters back in the right places. I used to lock my writing case, but from the scratches she’s tried to force the lock so often I now leave it open as I don’t want it busted. I think she thought I kept the gin in there.’

  ‘Where do you keep it?’

  ‘In a half-open packet of STs, of course. She never scrabbles amongst the STs. She’s got a nice mind. She’s always telling me so when she binds about my language. Would it soften-up old Blood-and-Guts if I took the gin on-duty and gave her a slug in her tea? With my bosom I could easily camouflage a half-bottle in the billows under my apron bib.’

  ‘The only thing that just might soften up Blood-and-Guts is a Panzer Division. Why can’t they post her to Africa? The whole ruddy British Army’s out there, rows of Sisters who arrived since her have gone out – but she stays on.’

  ‘Maybe Mr Churchill has decided to keep her to defend the UK?’

  ‘Then, God help Jerry – and us.’

  A new VAD was listening. It was her first week after call-up. ‘What puzzles me is the way all the Sisters tell one to do things in different ways. They even make beds differently. Is there any way of coping with them?’

  ‘Sure! Just do things the way they do, even if that’s three different ways for three beds in a row with different Sisters. Only two things hold for the lot; cups of tea and M.O.s. At every opportunity present them with the former and avoid the latter, on-duty – and off, unless you go for married men.’

  ‘Are all ours married?’

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent as they were specialists in civvy street and civvy patients like their specialists to have wives.’

  Ollie asked, ‘Mummy tell you never to go out with married men, Lu?’

  ‘Yes, and wasn’t she right. All dripping wet. They all get me in a corner at parties, tell me I’m different and that’s what they like about me and their wives don’t understand them.’

  The new girl was still puzzled. ‘Surely, decent married men don’t make passes?’ She was shocked when Ollie and I begged her to tell us stat. when she met a decent married man.

  ‘Stat.’, we explained helpfully, ‘is short for the Latin statim, and is the medical term for “at once”.’

  That same evening she and I were making Sammy’s bed together when the closed door was suddenly flung open by a very large Pilot Officer w
ho glared round the room, then for a couple of seconds at Sammy, muttered ‘Christ!’ and vanished slamming the door without explanation. The new girl blushed, ‘I just detest blasphemy!’

  ‘D-d-don’t f-f-f-flap, n-n-n-nurse. N-n-n-not b-b-blas-phemy. M-m-merely m-m-mistaken i-i-identity.’

  Sammy was the first very ill patient with whom I became emotionally involved. I found that first experience of the full strength of the patient-nurse bond acutely disturbing. Later I experienced it with dozens, if not scores, of other equally ill patients, women and children as well as men. Whilst this continued to disturb me, by then I had realized that it was impossible for me to nurse certain patients with the professional detachment that, in general, was essential if the nursing and medical staff were not to crack under the constant mental strain of working amongst the sick and moribund.

  Sammy was transferred to a local civilian hospital especially equipped to provide some new treatment I did not understand, but gathered might help him. He asked me to visit him. ‘L-l-love t-t-to s-s-see – i-i-in – p-p-pretty d-d-dress.’

  We were forbidden to wear mufti off duty and I had none with me. I bought a sky-blue dress with a frilly collar and blue glass ear-rings shaped as large daisies to match, having long discovered that the average young Englishman’s idea of a ‘pretty dress’ was blue and frilly. One half-day I booked a taxi, and in it removed the greatcoat and cap camouflaging my dress and donned the ear-rings. It was a cold day. The sympathetic taximan thought I would get pneumonia.

  Sammy had a single side-ward on the private floor. The youngish, muscular, Sister looked me over. ‘Are you a relative, Miss Andrews?’

  ‘No. Just a friend. He asked me to come and see him.’

  Her eyes gave me another X-ray. ‘Is your name Lucinda?’

  ‘Lucilla.’

  ‘All right. For a few minutes.’ At Sammy’s door, she hesitated. ‘He’s not too well.’

  Sammy had so shrunk that his cheek and wrist bones looked in danger of breaking through the shiny surface. His speech was almost unintelligible, but eyes and smile remained coherent. I was glad I had bought the blue dress and ear-rings.