After the Storm (51 page)

Sam Short came in by field ambulance, his leg blasted away below the knee and tourniqueted, his liver gone. He died while she held his hand.

‘Get out,’ he whispered before he died but no nurses were leaving yet, only civilians. She closed his eyes and wished she had taken him to the club while she could.

The rains were sheeting down one day here and one day there and it was humid beyond belief. Prue’s roots were showing and Annie had not known she was a bottle blonde. It was better to concentrate on bleach than the queues stretching past the go downs, past the customs houses to the boats which daily took people away to safety but not them. I wish I was going, my love, she called to Georgie as she sponged another body with shaking hands and tried not to listen to the cries and groans from all around.

Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day but the nurses had a turkey and champagne since food was still plentiful. Dancing took place every night in the Centre.

Three nurses were killed when they were caught in a raid down by the docks. The sun was not visible now during the day; it was hidden behind the smoke which hung over the city. Mavis Anderton hosted a garden party on her lawn but it was spoilt by the rumble of guns all around Singapore. Finally trenches were dug at the cricket club but not the golf greens.

The Palm Court Orchestra continued to play and, one night, she and Prue danced at Raffles but not on New Year’s Eve for, while the Fancy Dress Ball was held into the early hours, they bathed injured troops who were covered in layers of black grime from the bombed oil dumps they had tried but failed to save over by the Causeway.

The Chinese shopkeepers refused European chits now and would only accept cash and at this the rush for the boats became intense because traders always knew the truth.

The Causeway was blown on the last day of January, Sarah’s birthday, but Annie was too tired to do more than nod as she handed a scalpel to the doctor. Neither of them jumped as a
plane crashed near the cathedral and made the operating-theatre shake. Her uniform was never clean now, her hands never still. When they were at rest there was still the trembling, still the blood, still the boats, the ships leaving without them. Prue cried all through her three hours off one night and Annie held her and told her it would be all right, she would make sure it was, bonny lass. Her headache was too bad to think, her veins stood out on her hands and Prue felt thinner in her arms.

The humid heat dragged at her feet and each new day the injured increased, uniforms were everywhere. Matron sent Prue, Monica and Annie to the cathedral which was taking the overflow and they went from stretcher to stretcher soothing, calming but unable to do much without facilities. A sip, bonny lad, she would say and pour a little water past split and swollen lips.

‘How much longer?’ groaned Prue as she staggered to her feet and handed a soiled bandage to Annie and then, in February, she had her answer. Malaya was lost and so was Singapore. On 15 February, the surrender was signed and Annie walked amongst the men and wondered what in God’s name would become of her patients now, what would become of the women and what had all this been about anyway?

Two days after Valentine’s Day, Raffles Place was crowded with British, Australian and Indian troops, heads hung with weary confusion. It was strange not to hear the sound of gunfire.

In the cathedral, dust lay thick on the pews. The stretcher cases continued to arrive and lay inside and outside the building. Smoke still hung over the city. Small Rising Sun flags had appeared overnight and more were hung even as she looked from windows. Japanese staff cars roared past, their klaxons sounding raw in the square, soldiers in small tanks ground their way past. The flame trees still glittered and the breeze still rattled the palm trees and her fear was still stark. The troops were given until the next day to assemble at Changi prison and Annie cried as she remembered the building they had passed with the Andertons. And where were the Andertons now?

Annie and Prue with Monica and their contingent of nurses picked their way back to the nurses’ home, packed up what
belongings they could carry and returned to find their wounded moving out.

Later it was dark and cool in the cathedral and Annie stood by the altar, watching the sun as it came in through the window and caught the dust which was leaping in its beam, as it had done when she was last in the shed at Gosforn.

She touched the wooden altar rail and thought for a moment she could smell chrysanthemums and feel the coolness of the convent chapel. Prue was kneeling in the front pew and Monica was down at the font. Three other nurses were sitting quietly behind Prue.

Fear was making her breathing difficult and tiredness was making her head feel apart from her body. Her hands were wet and she wanted to cry, to run and hide, go to Georgie and make him hold her and not let them get her but she could hear their feet outside the big doors coming closer and closer and then they were there, framed in the doorway, their bayonets fixed and their language harsh. Annie made herself move from the rail to Prue who would not look up as the Japanese moved down the aisle towards them, their bayonets catching the sun as they passed each window.

‘Come on, bonny lass,’ she said as she reached down for Prue’s hand. ‘It’s time for us to go.’ Her voice was trembling so much she wondered if Prue could understand.

Tom received the letter from Georgie on Monday, when he came in from the pit.

November 1942

India.

Dear Tom,

I was there when the Japs took Rangoon but got away with my platoon and some stragglers. We walked back through the jungle. Thirty started, ten got back.

It was bloody, Tom. Kraits, the shoelace snake, got some of the men and the cobras too. Then there were the Japs, but worst were the flies and the butterflies which ate their bodies. I can’t bear butterflies now, they were like a moving tablecloth on my men. It was so hard, lad.

She didn’t get out you know. Where is she, Tom? Is she alive? Have you heard anything? Oh God, she must be alive.

I’m back in the Central Provinces. We’ll be going back to retake the Burma Road when we’re ready. God help us.

Georgie.

Tom replied that night.

February 1943

Dear Georgie,

She’ll be all right, bonny lad. Don’t you fret. I know she’ll be all right. If anyone comes through, it will be her. If I hear, I’ll let you know straight away but you concentrate on keeping your head down and staying alive until she comes back.

We’re all well here. The rationing is keeping us fit. Don is still at the depot and Maud is living with her ma and da. I’m still in the pits so nothing changes. I’ll write again but look after yourself and get through to the end. She’ll need you then.

Tom.

Tom told Grace he meant every word he had written about Annie but sometimes in the dark of the night he would clench his fists and be unable to sleep.

The miners had gone on strike as they had threatened and very soon after that the government had agreed to introduce a ballot system to give pitmen a chance to get out of the mines and fight in the services. Reluctantly a minimum wage was also agreed which would enable the miners to have sufficient money to keep up their strength for six working days each week.

Tom liked the boy who was seconded to their team. He was from Surrey and had been to public school and was called Martin St John. He wrote poetry and hummed to himself on the first day as he helped to push the trolley. None of the boys were pleased that their number had been picked and that they were to spend their war as Bevin Boys and the miners thought they would probably be more trouble than they were worth but it was better than their sons automatically taking the pityard walk.

In the summer, Martin kept his head when Tom’s uncle stumbled while shovelling the coal into the trolley and had two fingers shorn off at the root when the trolley was pushed forward on to his hand. He’ll do, his uncle had said as he was taken to the surface. Production had been good that day.
Martin had been quieter than usual as he and Tom had walked back through the main seam after they had watched the cage screech up the shaft but had retrieved the short putter’s shovel and laboured on with no outward sign of disturbance.

The boy had really wanted to go into the air force, Tom had told Grace that evening as they ate Woolton Pie, which they knew as potato and pastry. His back still stung from the scrubbing Grace had given it because she had not seen the graze down the length of it until it was too late.

Tom was too tired to go to the allotment again that night, like so many other nights. His foot and back hurt so much each day that his face was always white and drawn once the coal-dust had been washed away and there was grey hair at his temples. He was 26.

His days were blurred. He rose at four in the morning on six days a week, freezing in winter and still chilled in summer as he walked down past the same terraced houses each day until the seventh when he limped to the allotment with Bob and pulled some carrots or whatever had been coaxed out of the soil and then called in for a watered beer at the pub. Sometimes he and Grace went to Betsy for lunch, sometimes Bob came to them and would tell them of the
Daily Worker
which had been banned for the reportage of the air raids or that attitudes to trade union negotiations would be different after the war because Russia was in on our side and people no longer feared the Bolshevik menace.

As 1943 changed to 1944, he would struggle home and lie on the bed, too tired to paint, too tired to talk politics with Bob, too tired to notice that Grace was dark beneath the eyes and feeling sick. She was four months pregnant before she told him and that was only because a tip and run raid had scored close to their house and the floor had felt as though it was about to tilt them down into rubble and dust. My baby, she had screamed, and he had wanted the bombs to stop for just a minute to grasp what had just been said.

He had then wanted them to stop forever, more than he had done before or for Grace to stop work at the munitions factory and go to the country or to Val’s but she would not leave him or her parents. They need the money, she had said, and anyway the raids are very few now. He wished now that he had taken
the money that Annie had wanted to give him before she went, but he hadn’t, so that was that.

He would look at Grace. Quiet nights and restful days, was that too much to ask, were the thoughts that spun in his head, and he knew that it was. He would turn on the radio and listen to familiar voices while he waited for the fire to take and the kettle to boil. Listening to the news made him feel that they had come through another day and so had the rest of the world.

He kept chickens in the yard, foregoing his dried egg ration in return for some chicken meal so that she had at least one egg every two days and Val gave them eggs and honey when he took Maud and Grace over to Gosforn having managed to get some petrol. Sometimes Don would meet them there when he could arrange leave from the depot and they would sit in the living-room while Val sat in Sarah’s chair pouring tea.

Tom would sit back and smooth down the arm covers, listening to the fire as it crackled. They would talk of victory in Africa, the Russians fighting hard and the need for a second front. They talked of days gone by, of the old cock they had eaten last Christmas and how cross Annie would have been to miss it, but he would never let the silence fall, the faces tense, because she was alive, he would say. And coming back. One day she will be back.

In February 1944, he worked on the pit face with a new mechanical cutter which the government had thought would increase production and it looked as though they were right. It also increased the dust and his eyes became raw much earlier and his throat dry as though it had been rubbed with sandpaper. As he worked, he remembered the fair, the hammer you could whack down and ring a bell. He thought of Annie’s mother and the legs near the stall and the voice that had destroyed Annie’s smile that evening and for so long after. He remembered her father and how he had done much more than remove her smile. That man had bitten as deeply as the cutter was doing and the jagged sore was still there. Tom knew it was there, because Annie hadn’t married Georgie.

This week the team was still on the bad seams and he was still crouched and angled while his uncle and Martin shovelled and pushed the trolley back through the dark damp tunnel which was too meandering to install an automatic conveyor.

The owners had planned the route to avoid Squire Turner’s
land and the royalties he demanded for mining beneath the surface of his land. And so it was, bugger the workers, Tom cursed, but think of the profits, you bastards. He attacked the coal, his eyes almost shut as the dust exploded into his face while his uncle worked close to him, still one-handed because the pain lingered in his damaged hand. The noise of the cutter tore at his head and he could no longer listen for falling dust or creaking pit-props and it made him anxious. He knew that the coal was there pressing down above him, each day denser somehow. Martin was thin now and no longer hummed and it wasn’t just because the machine cloaked all speech; it was because the noise and the dark choked all thought, all the poetry in his head.

His uncle’s sinews gleamed with black sweat in the light from Martin’s lamp as he pushed the trolley to the end of the tunnel and returned with another that was empty and the lad shovelled again. Henry’s hand seemed easier today, his lips were not drawn so thin. Tom eased his back as he looked at them over his shoulder and stopped the cutter; he could taste the dust between his teeth and he was thirsty.

He pointed to the flasks; his hand was still shaking from the vibrations of the cutter and his ears were ringing. He shook his head to clear it as Henry nodded, but the boy continued shovelling for a while longer since he wanted to get this last load done. Tom sank on his haunches. The tea was refreshingly cold and he spat into the darkness where the slag was heaped against the sides. Coal-dust swirled in the beam from their lamps and his uncle squatted next to him while Martin flopped to the ground.