Authors: Maggie Ford
Jenny stood aside for Matron’s entourage to pass, waiting to make her escape back to her ward, but the woman halted, eyes fixed on her. ‘If you are on duty, nurse, then you should know that telephone calls are not permissible. If you are not on duty, then you are off limits. I shall see you in my office at six thirty.’
‘Yes, Matron.’ Jenny watched miserably as she and her staff moved on. Six thirty. Well planned. Two days remained before Christmas and the evening had only just grown dark because of the introduction of British Summer Time. Clocks were now kept one hour forward the whole year round to confuse an enemy whose own time remained as it had been prior to hostilities. The bombers would not arrive for a couple of hours yet. Plenty of time was left for civilians to get home from work, eat and get into shelters, and for her to endure a formal and uncomfortable dressing-down from Matron.
She had been through the drill before, standing in the centre of Miss Grenville’s office, Miss Grenville walking around her with measured steps, quoting hospital rules to her in quiet tones as measured as her walk. No punishment had been meted out: humiliation constituted punishment enough. Jenny found herself almost wishing the bombers would come early, requiring her duties to take precedence over any visit to Matron. But that would come sooner or later.
The all clear sounded just before dawn; while the people of the East End sank back to pick over lost homes, grieve lost loved ones, or just feel glad that they had escaped unscathed, the doctors and nurses of the hospitals all around toiled on, endeavouring to repair often irreparable injuries. For Jenny, exhausted by morning, her talking-to from Matron was just added torture. She fell thankfully into her bed in the nurses’ quarters to forget about everything for a few hours until night came again. A week of that and then it would be days, spent mopping up the dregs from the previous night.
By February, freezing and cheerless, it was a wonder there were any buildings left to be bombed. Even some already flattened received a second direct hit. Yet, emerging for a breather in the cold light of dawn, she was always amazed so many still stood, windowless, battered sentinels. How this hospital had got away with just glancing blows so far seemed a miracle. How those who worked within it kept going was a miracle. Exhausted nerves stretched like rubber bands, they remained professional amid unbelievable chaos. As for herself, she was just an efficient puppet in a starched apron; obedient, mechanical, quietening some hysterical parent while nearby a terribly injured child seemed far more in need of her help; a mind trained at last to say, ‘Walk, nurse,’ when the sight of a woman with broken legs going into labour screamed for her to run, maybe knocking someone over in the process. It was frustrating, while the injured poured in still, covered in dust and blood, to be required to make tea for overstrained doctors. Though often essential, keeping them going, more often than not the tea remained untouched. It was hard at times to be obedient.
She recalled resentment when, wanting to stand by for the injured to arrive, she’d be required instead to help transfer geriatric patients to the basement. Coaxing the frail and sometimes perverse elderly into wheelchairs to be trundled to safety could test obedience to breaking point and struck a poor second to the business of tending victims of bomb-blast and fire.
‘I feel more like a maid-of-all-work than a nurse,’ she complained in early March, the night bombing still going full blast, as they carried a dear old soul back up a flight of stone stairs after the all clear had sounded. The lift was again out of order. O’Brien gave a tinkling laugh.
‘Dear Mother o’ God, isn’t that what we’re here for?’
O’Brien was small, dark and Irish, a bundle of smiles and dedication whose upbringing had endowed her with the unquestioning obedience of a nun. At times Jenny envied as well as admired her. When it seemed impossible the hospital could continue after broken gas mains cut off the cooking facilities and all they had to cope with was a portable paraffin stove, O’Brien’s tranquillity as they fought with the thing reduced Jenny to a state of humility. With no running water for days on end, O’Brien took it all in her stride, emptying bottles of disinfectant into basins of cold water for washing hands after each dressing until the liquid turned cloudy grey, all the while praising God for the blessings of disinfectant.
At these times, Jenny yearned for the smooth routine of that teaching hospital in Basingstoke. She had learned her skills there, but East London was the acid test of a nurse’s stamina. Here, controlling fatigue meant overcoming not the simple weariness of a few nights’ lost sleep but the perfidious wearing down of her mental faculties, creeping up on her like a hooded assassin. The only hint of anything amiss would be a second or two of apparent sleep, yet coming back to herself to find she had accomplished her task as though she had been wide awake all the time.
More alarming were those longer moments of forgetfulness, as when she had taken a pile of bedpans, not to the sluice, but straight through the doors of an operating theatre without any recollection of how she had got there. Beating a hasty retreat, she had felt flustered and very much awake.
Much more recent had been that strange hallucination when she had looked up from taking a blood pressure to see a haggard and terribly emaciated young man standing at her elbow.
She remembered saying, quite loudly, ‘I’ll be with you in just one minute,’ and wondering vaguely at the astonished look from her female patient. She had turned again to find the young man was not there. He never had been. Recognising her mistake for what it was, a figment of total exhaustion, it had taken a while to shake off a belief that it had been a premonition of some sort, for what really alarmed her was that every time she thought of it, the young face hovering before her seemed to be that of Matthew Ward.
It left her wondering for days how he was, where he was. In fact she could hardly wait for her next time off duty and she sacrificed a night out with the girls to pop home instead. The air-raid sirens hadn’t yet sounded and after sitting for a while in the back garden with Mumsy in the improving April weather, she wandered down to the shops in Mare Street where Mr Ward had his electrical shop, with the precise aim of casually asking how his son was doing.
‘Stationed in Wales at the moment,’ she was informed as he handed a customer a repaired radio. Such things these days were either repaired or second-hand, most things not on ration having vanished from sight.
‘He was near Birmingham,’ Mr Ward went on. ‘But like always, being trooped all around the country.’
‘He’s okay then?’ she pressed, still unable to get her hallucination out of her mind. At least he hadn’t been sent overseas.
‘Fine. Had a letter from him a few days back.’ How like Matthew he spoke. ‘Found himself a girl. Don’t know how serious it is, but he seems smitten by her. That’s how it goes. In the forces, you meet all sorts. His mother’s not pleased. Says it probably won’t last as she’s in Birmingham and he’s in Wales.’
And Jenny’s heart had sunk as she smiled and left, although it had been inevitable he would meet someone. She thought of herself, out of sight and out of mind. She should stop thinking about him and get on with her own life. But at least he was safe.
In no mood to go home just yet to have Mumsy defining the bleakness she knew must show on her face, she wandered down to St John’s church. She needed time to think. Of what, she had no real notion, but she had to sort out her thoughts of the future. It was imperative to stop dreaming of Matthew and get on with her own life.
St John’s stood closed on this early Saturday evening but did not look quite so isolated and remote as it once had behind its tall iron railings. They had gone now, as had all iron railings, to be melted down into guns and tanks in the fight for victory over the enemy. It now stood amid the open space looking slightly vulnerable, its sooty brick bathed a dirty gold from the slanting sun, its once-proud stained glass windows now war damaged and mostly boarded up, no longer reflecting back the golden glow.
For a while Jenny stood there, contemplating whether she should go back home now, but she let her feet carry her towards the church itself and into the neatly laid out gardens behind it, still known locally as Barmy Park from the asylum for the insane that had once stood there. Sinking down on a bench with the low sun full on her, she watched people wander past, their thoughts most likely on enjoying a little fresh air before consigning themselves to the communal shelters and Bethnal Green Underground to await the arrival of the night bombers. All these people were passing yet she saw herself as quite alone, not because they ignored her but because she wanted it, so that she could think in peace of Matthew, of herself, of how she stood with him and he with her. Once again she decided to stop thinking about him and get on with her own life.
With that in mind, she got up and resolutely turned her face towards home. A voice hailed her as she passed the church again. Louise Ward ran up to her, slightly out of breath, cheeks flushed, her mousy hair rolled up primly in a style known as a victory roll, unflattering for anyone with the broad jaw line which she had inherited from her mother.
She looked excited. ‘What’re you doing here, Jenny? I thought you were nursing.’
‘I’ve got a day off,’ Jenny supplied but Louise could hardly contain herself.
‘I’m only home for the weekend. Guess what, Jenny, I’ve gone and joined the Wrens.’
‘You’ve what?’ Jenny stopped walking.
But nothing could diminish the enthusiasm shining on Louise’s face. She looked transformed. Gone was the prudish strait-laced mien. This girl glowed, and Jenny recalled the exact look on her brother’s face when he’d come to say goodbye that cold winter day. It was like looking at a bird newly released from a cage and she realised that Louise, for all she would never have admitted it, had been as trapped as he had been once she blossomed into her teens. Without warning she had broken loose from all the old ties that had bound her. Because of the war she was suddenly her own person. ‘I’m eighteen now, eligible to join up. I signed on and they took me. I had a medical and I passed A-one. I want to see the world.’
See the world. Perhaps dangerously so. Jenny eyed her dubiously. ‘Did you tell your parents what you intended to do? What do they think?’
Louise gave a giddy laugh. ‘Mother was shocked rigid. Dad hasn’t said much. I sprang it on them. If I had told them what I was going to do Mother would have stopped me, I know. It took me being evacuated … well, not exactly evacuated but more or less … to give me a taste of what could be had. So I signed on for the WRNS. I’m leaving next week for Portsmouth.’
Walking home with Louise chatting incessantly at her side about her medical, how girls were needed to relieve Royal Navy personnel from office duties, how she had been told that they could be sent anywhere in the world and all the countries she might see, Jenny found it impossible to broach the subject of her brother’s involvement with the anonymous Birmingham girl and if she thought it could be serious. Yet again she told herself to put it out of her mind, that their lives had gone their separate ways. But how nice it would be had it been otherwise.
The coming of spring found Matthew still crouching in ditches in the wet wilderness of Fforest Fawr in the heart of Wales, trying to keep a crackling field radio dry under a gas cape.
‘One thing’s obvious,’ he muttered to Bob Howlett beside him. ‘She’s no letter writer.’
In four months he had written Susan one letter a week as regularly as clockwork, each one several pages long. In return he had received just five letters from her, each hardly more than two sides of a piece of Woolworth’s notepaper. Her bad spelling, he understood, perhaps made her slow to reply, but if she had any feelings for him, surely she’d write more frequently.
‘She’s lost all interest in me,’ he said miserably. ‘Bound to happen, she there and me here, and Birmingham full of uniforms.’
‘Is that what you think?’ Bob asked, scanning the rain-soaked peaty moorland. ‘That she’s just uniform crazy and nothing else?’
‘No, of course I don’t. But no girl is going to wait for months.’
‘Lots do, in wartime. They’ll wait for years.’
‘Yes, if they’ve been going steady long enough. We hardly met above a couple of times. I wouldn’t blame her.’
Beside them, Taffy Thomas shifted his uncomfortable position on his haunches. A Welshman he was, but from sunny, civilised Aberystwyth on the coast. This part of the country with its sopping heather wasn’t his cup of tea at all.
‘What you need is to get it out of your system, boyo. A bit of diversion. Two sisters I know of. Real beauties, the pair of ’em. Met ’em a week or two ago. One for me, one for you, eh? Make you forget your poor broken heart, that will.’
‘No thanks, Taff,’ Matthew murmured. Taffy looked mildly spurned.
‘There’s a terrible waste. Just have to do the best I can with both of ’em, then, won’t I?’ Grinning, he went back to scanning the horizon and misty forms of men scurrying about on manoeuvres, what could be seen of them through fine rain and the smoke of the thunder flashes going off.
Returning to camp, Taffy was off to the farmhouse where the sisters apparently lived; their father was in the Army, their mother working late in some nearby town. He returned later that evening, a little the worse for wear and very triumphant.
‘Missed a treat, you did,’ he stated, flinging himself on his camp bed in the tent he shared with Matthew and Bob. ‘Damned stupid, you, mooning after a girl that don’t want to know, as far as I can see.’
Having spent the entire day trying to put Susan out of his mind and annoyed that she refused to go, Matthew allowed his curiosity to arouse itself, if only moderately. ‘What’s she like then, this sister?’
Taffy let out an odd sound that passed for a knowing laugh, rather like a lion grunting. ‘Big. Would eat you for breakfast, boyo. Put the blood back in your veins for you though. I could take you next time, if there is a next time. And if you was to get a letter from your girl, then no need to tell her, is there?’