The War Nurses Read online

  ‘Yes, he probably waited until I was out of the room… that would be just like him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you sorry?’

  Suddenly there was a banging on the cellar door, the kind that you can’t ignore. Shot leapt to his feet, barking loudly. Elsie got up too, shouting fiercely: ‘Who’s there?’

  She had just leapt to the top of the stairs when the door flew open by itself and Tommy fell in, onto her, his brilliant white T-shirt now covered in blood.

  ‘Sniper,’ he whispered. ‘I lit… cigarette…’

  ‘Tommy, I’ve got you,’ Elsie said firmly. From the steel in her voice, you’d have absolutely no indication of the stricken expression on her face.

  ‘Sorry to be of trouble, ladies.’

  ‘Hang on, Tommy. We’re here.’ Elsie guided him down. I couldn’t speak for shock.

  ‘Tell Mum—’

  ‘Oh Tommy, my darling boy, I will,’ promised Elsie as she held him against her.

  * * *

  The next morning, out near the road, I was confused to find what at first looked like hair lodged between some bricks. It was fur, the fur of a darling brown teddy bear. Madeleine’s bear? It felt like another miracle. Every time something truly awful happened, some sign would be sent to me.

  I decided it was only because of what happened with our dear Tommy that I had found it.

  ‘Is this to sell?’ Elsie said when she spied it.

  ‘No!’ I felt quite offended. ‘I… I… found it.’

  ‘We don’t have room.’ Elsie looked shocked.

  ‘It doesn’t take up much space. Anyway, I can sleep on top of it.’

  ‘Don’t let Shot at it.’

  ‘I won’t.’ I’d already had an undignified tussle with Shot and was determined that he wouldn’t get near it again.

  Coming closer, Elsie peered through the gloom at my stash.

  ‘What the devil is it all anyway?’

  ‘Madeleine’s things.’

  She looked at me the way we had started to look at some of the soldiers who’d been in the trenches too long. You’re not making sense.

  ‘Who is Madeleine?’

  ‘The little girl who lived here before, look.’

  I showed Elsie all the things – not only the bear, but the book, a ribbon, a half-deflated ball.

  Elsie didn’t even want to look at them. She was the least sentimental person I had ever met. I said, ‘There’s no harm in it, Elsie.’

  She paused. ‘I suppose not.’ She was about to say something else but changed her mind. ‘Don’t put it on my side, the last thing I want is to wake up to those frightful button eyes staring at me!’

  I explained I was storing it away for when the family returned. Whenever she complained after that, I told her the same story. ‘It’s for Madeleine, Elsie, remember?’

  She never took much interest.

  Perhaps those things reminded Elsie too much of Kenneth. Over time, in my imagination, Madeleine had become my secret little girl who just happened to be far away. I saw her as mine, much in the same way as Kenneth was Elsie’s son.

  12

  Later that month, while Elsie was out driving some injured men up to Ghent with Paul, a soldier dragged himself into the cellar. He had been shot in the leg and he was almost delirious with pain. Somehow, he managed to open the trapdoor before collapsing on the stairs.

  The first thing I noticed about him was his enormous black beard. English soldiers tended to be fastidious about shaving; even if they’d just narrowly cheated death, many were frantic about getting rid of the five o’clock shadow. Not the French or the Belgians though. This man looked like a great big bear. His beard was dark and curly. A bird’s nest. Young chicks could get lost in it.

  I bandaged his wound and made him comfortable with a blanket in front of the stove. He was hardly aware of anything. His leg was a mess, I told him cheerfully, but I doubted they would have to amputate.

  He startled at that. ‘Amputate?’

  ‘No, I mean I doubt they will. They won’t. You will recover.’

  He finally permitted himself a laugh. ‘I understand.’

  His English was good, he just hadn’t heard clearly. His name was Harold and he explained he had been shot just as he got back from a scouting mission.

  Harold seemed most annoyed that it happened when he was back, supposedly ‘safe’, not when he was in the danger zone. I had heard this before and knew there was a mixture of pride and humiliation in it.

  He knew you had to keep your wound wet for fear of infection and in panic he had poured his own coffee all over it.

  ‘Wasn’t boiling hot, was it?’

  ‘It’s never boiling hot, is it?’ he said, ‘but it was a damn waste of coffee.’ Then he promptly fell asleep.

  * * *

  Harold was one of the few wounded soldiers who came to us unaided. Most we picked up and carried, dragged or tipped down to the cellar. Maybe that was what made everything feel different about him…

  Still, chores had to be done. Most mornings, after the trench visits, I did the logbooks: this soldier was the 387th we’d seen. The number seemed impossibly high – I could never have imagined we’d be so in demand.

  I checked, logged and reorganised our supplies. I did some washing. I didn’t mind menial tasks. When I was peeling turnips in Ghent I had railed against them, but here, there was something uncomplicated about the repetitive jobs. Sometimes, I could almost forget what was going on outside.

  Our latest patient slept so quietly that for a few moments, I forgot myself. I began to sing. I must have been singing for about ten minutes and was building up to quite the crescendo when Harold rose up on one elbow and cried out, ‘Love you forever!’ before promptly falling back asleep.

  I stared at his beardy face. It was the strangest thing. He must have meant those words for someone else, a wife or a girlfriend perhaps, but still…

  * * *

  It wasn’t until Elsie had warmed herself by the stove for some time that she realised we had acquired a new patient. She peered at Harold – or the brown bear, as I regarded him.

  ‘You’ve done a good job with the leg, Mairi, but couldn’t you have sorted out his facial hair?’

  I smiled weakly. For once, I couldn’t help wishing she hadn’t returned so quickly. What other things might Harold say in his sleep?

  ‘What’s he like?’

  I told her what he had said about the coffee and she chortled as I thought she might. ‘He sounds like fun.’

  He wasn’t as much fun as Elsie hoped though, because he slept all that day and all that night and he didn’t call out again. The next morning he was asleep as we went out to do our trench visit and he was still asleep when we came back.

  Paul was doing the weekly drive to Dunkirk that afternoon to pick up supplies. We decided that if Harold was strong enough for the journey, Paul could drop him off at the hospital on the way. They could operate on his leg if they deemed it necessary.

  ‘I’ll load him up,’ Elsie said. ‘Would you wake him, Mairi? I don’t want to give him a fright.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ I wasn’t just being polite.

  I gently tried but Harold slept on, snoring peacefully.

  ‘Goodness, so this is the sleep of an untroubled man!’ Elsie laughed. ‘Look at Sleeping Beauty.’

  I continued trying to get him to stir, but Elsie decided I was taking too long and shook him to. Why ask me to do it, if you’re just going to take over? Usually those woken abruptly, especially with an injury, come to in a cloud of complaining and groaning, but Harold woke smiling, his arms outstretched like a pope performing a blessing.

  ‘I had heard about the nurses doing battlefield rescue. I didn’t know you were actual angels.’

  ‘We’ve heard that one before.’ Elsie winked at me.

  He pulled himself up and looked around him as though he were seeing the cellar for the first time. He was so amazed his mouth fel
l open.

  ‘I thought I was in heaven.’

  Elsie snorted. ‘You are at Pervyse. A Poste de Secours Anglaise.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw the flags in the distance and kept on walking. I’m glad I made it.’

  How we must have looked to him, with our short hair, gaunt faces and our old dirty clothes, I couldn’t imagine!

  ‘How long have I—’

  ‘Been asleep? About one day and one night.’

  Harold hauled himself to his large feet, refusing our help and wincing only slightly. He smiled at Elsie.

  ‘I thought I heard singing.’

  ‘That was her.’ Elsie pushed me forwards. I stumbled but corrected myself.

  He bowed at me. ‘A sweet tune and an even sweeter voice.’

  Perhaps that was the moment we both noticed that despite his injury, his beast-like hairiness and his blood-stained clothes, there was something of good quality or breeding about Harold.

  Elsie smirked. I was embarrassed.

  ‘I thought you were fast asleep. I wouldn’t have sung otherwise.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I thought it would embarrass you.’

  Elsie looked at the two of us. She slid her fingers along the table.

  ‘Mairi sings nicely,’ she said, for the first time ever. I looked at her, checking whether she was teasing or not. She continued, ‘Sadly, singing is one of the few things I don’t excel at.’

  ‘And maybe German?’ I retorted. Elsie could still make neither head nor tail of that language.

  ‘Oh, but even that’s improving nicely, nein?’

  Elsie explained to Harold that we had arranged transport to a hospital for him. He looked relieved, then mystified.

  ‘But where will you go?’

  ‘We stay here.’

  ‘Here?!’ The word bounced off the cellar walls. Elsie and I both laughed at his astonishment. ‘This is no place for you!’

  We shrugged. Elsie was touching her lips contemplatively.

  ‘Don’t you get shelled?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sniped at?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What if the Hun break through the line?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘But… but…’

  Not many of our patients were interested in what we were doing here, beyond saving them. It was unusual to have someone be curious about our lives, but Harold seemed instantly at home with us.

  ‘How do you afford to run this place?’ he asked.

  ‘We manage,’ Elsie retorted. In my head, I added just.

  ‘You are always here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I intervened. ‘At least one of us is.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll know where to come back to thank you ladies properly.’

  Elsie helped him sit down, for he had begun to wobble. ‘There’s no need. We don’t do properly here.’

  Harold grinned at her. ‘How about if I bring boxed sweets?’

  ‘Oh, in that case… Mairi would sell her brother into slavery for a sniff of a marron glacé.’

  ‘Elsie!’ Categorically, this wasn’t true.

  ‘Then Mairi’ – he bowed and for a moment, we could have been in a ballroom celebrating some duke’s birthday – ‘I will hunt the whole of Belgium for a marron glacé for you.’

  I blushed. I couldn’t forget what he had said when I was singing: was it the morphine? Did he not remember at all?

  Harold smiled, then turned to Elsie. ‘And you? What do you like?’

  ‘I’m afraid that I abhor most sweet things.’

  ‘What a pity,’ he said. He looked closely at her. Their faces were only inches apart. I thought, was this like the first meeting between Charlotte Brontë and the handsome tutor Mr Héger?

  ‘You… have remarkably pretty eyes: like sunflowers.’

  * * *

  When Elsie came back from helping Harold out to the car – they ‘didn’t need my assistance’ – she was much cheered.

  ‘He’s a baron, don’t you know!’ She imitated his voice, ‘You sing so beautifully. I thought I was in Tipperary.’

  I imitated him too, although mimicry was not a talent of mine as it was Elsie’s. ‘You have very pretty yellow eyes!’

  Elsie laughed. ‘He’s lucky he’s got a leg to stand on.’

  Something stuck in my throat as I asked, ‘Another Gilbert for you, Elsie?’

  The more I thought about his voice, and his curly black beard, the more peculiar I felt.

  ‘He’s more your type, I would have thought,’ Elsie said, scratching her head frantically.

  Of course Elsie would notice. I wasn’t sure what to do. I looked at the indentation on the blanket where he had been.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said finally.

  She shrugged. ‘You’d make a fine couple.’

  I had to say something. ‘Do you want me to brush your hair, Elsie?’

  ‘Please…’

  A few days after Harold’s visit, I went out to hunt. There were rabbit holes every three feet or so but I didn’t see a single inhabitant. Perhaps the war had frightened the rabbits off too. I damn near sprained my ankle as well. It was my poorest shoot in memory until I turned my attention skyward and picked five sparrows out of an unguarded nest. I felt absurdly elated at the flutter of the feathers and the panic I caused. But who knew small birds had so little meat on them? It turned out to be a most pointless exercise, although Martin admitted they gave his stock an ‘earthy’ flavour. I said that was odd, because they weren’t of the earth, more of the air. He blinked at me.

  Food wasn’t even our biggest priority. We needed medicine, petrol and blankets. I didn’t know where we would get the money from, and I was certain that Elsie, for all her talk, didn’t know either. We had got by so far on a wing (Elsie’s) and a prayer (mine).

  ‘Shouldn’t we ask the Red Cross or the army for help?’ I asked Elsie over sparrow soup.

  ‘They’d only send us away from the front,’ she replied spiritedly. ‘We don’t want to see out the war in some blessed hospital while everyone else is in the thick of it, do we?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Approximately one week later, my mother wrote that Uilleam’s marriage was not going to go ahead after all. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the convoluted story told over six pages (a record for my mother, who usually had some urgent flower arranging to oversee), but reading between the lines, the fiancée had called off the engagement, due to some ‘ridiculous rumours’ about ‘Uilleam’s suitability’. ‘What these have to do with her, I don’t know!’ wrote my mother, mystifyingly.

  Mother’s parting lines were clearer:

  We need you to go to Uilleam in Trinidad and to patch things up between them for the sake of the Chisholm name.

  I wrote straight back explaining that Uilleam always had my support but things were decidedly tricky out here. Perhaps Mother had read in the newspapers what we were up against? Didn’t she understand that I was living in a cellar only one hundred yards from the Western Front? That we were doing our best to cope with hundreds of injured and dead soldiers? From these small seeds, my resentment flowered.

  So when the post-boy brought me my mother’s next missive three weeks later, I took it from him as though I were receiving something not at all to my taste.

  ‘Miss M?’ He smirked.

  ‘Thank you.’

  This time, Mother had written:

  He’s your brother, Mairi. A good marriage would benefit us all. It’s all very well helping foreigners on the Continent, but your duty is to the Chisholms. You have to sort this out. For once in your life, don’t be so selfish.

  I couldn’t bring myself to write back.

  ‘Nothing to go out, Miss Mairi?’ asked the post-boy when he next came.

  ‘Not today.’ I tossed him a silver coin anyway. Elsie had taught me to always treat those who helped us as best we could.

  ‘Shame!’ He winked at me. I felt a rising redness and was ann
oyed at myself.

  Eagle-eyed Elsie also noticed I wasn’t writing home as usual. I didn’t want to reveal anything at first – I didn’t criticise my parents to anyone (not even Uilleam) – but I couldn’t hide anything from her. Tears in my eyelashes, I told Elsie that my mother expected me to abandon my work in order to go halfway around the world to arrange my brother’s love life!

  I added that she seemed most agitated that we were helping Belgians of all people.

  Elsie laughed, which made me feel slightly better. It was a little funny, I supposed.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, are you, Mairi?’

  ‘No!’ This was my vocation. If we could just ease the poor boys’ suffering by so much as an inch it was worth it.

  ‘Good,’ she joked, ‘because I need you to sort out my love life! There has been a distinct shortage of Gilberts lately.’

  I wondered if she included Harold in that.

  ‘I am disappointed that my mother…’ I began. I couldn’t say how much it hurt to be called selfish. Elsie stopped joking and put her hand on mine as I continued speaking, ‘…thinks so little of me.’

  Elsie said, ‘Sometimes people don’t do what we want them to do or think what we want them to. Especially family, I have found!’

  ‘So… how… how do you cope with that?’

  ‘Accept that sometimes even good people get it wrong.’

  I scowled. I felt terrible for thinking it, but I wasn’t sure my mother should even be included in the category of ‘good people’.

  ‘But, they make me feel so…’ I paused, unable to find the word at first, ‘…alone. I wish I belonged somewhere.’

  ‘In that case find a family of people who do understand you,’ Elsie advised. ‘There are plenty who think a lot of you, Mairi.’

  Did she mean she thought a lot of me?

  ‘Is that what you had to do after your husband passed?’

  ‘Well—’ she paused, ‘When I was widowed… I had to start again. It was painful, it wasn’t what I expected, no one does, but it can be done, I promise.’