Authors: Virginia Nicholson
There was no ladder. Clutching her briefcase (‘filled with secret documents’) Mike leapt for the ground; one of the aircrew grabbed her, shouting ‘Move!’ Ammunition was bursting past them; they dived for cover, face down, only to realise that they were underneath a petrol bowser. Seconds later the mines on the Wellington blew up, with a deafening explosion. The airman seized Mike’s briefcase and rammed it forcefully on to the back of her head, just in time. He saved her life; heavy flying shrapnel drove deep scars into the leather. Her jaw was injured. Guided by the firework display, the German raiders were now having a field day over the airfield. When the din and chaos finally abated Mike and the airman staggered, covered in mud, to the control room, to be greeted with relief by the air officer. Mike’s reaction was stoical: ‘What a way for a girl to spend her birthday,’ she grimaced. ‘I really do think someone could have done better than this.’
A few days later she was on her way back to Cairo.
*
As WAAF Mike Morris resumed her interception work in North Africa, the SS
Highland Monarch
was embarking from Bristol destined for Cape Town. With the Mediterranean closed, this was the only route for services to reach the Middle East. On board were 5,000 troops and fourteen VAD nurses bound for Suez; one of these was twenty-two-year-old Helen Vlasto.
A startlingly pretty debutante,
Helen was in the latest generation of an immensely rich Anglo-Greek banking dynasty; her father was a successful doctor. ‘I was … not motivated in any particular direction,’ recalled Helen; but her money, looks, charm and fluency in three languages would have qualified her as premium goods on the 1939 marriage market. A ‘proper’ education or job therefore wasn’t thought necessary. Instead, by day she volunteered at the West London Hospital in Hammersmith, while by night she appeared in glimmering gowns at the West End hotels and grand houses of London’s most glamorous hostesses: ‘I felt I was living a double, and somewhat unworthy, life.’
When war was declared Helen applied to become a mobile VAD and in November 1940 was sent to Haslar Royal Naval Hospital near Portsmouth. Here she helped to set up the country’s first blood bank. But six months in, despite putting her ‘heart and soul’ into this
worthwhile project, Helen was engulfed by ennui. Longings for a boyfriend were beginning to surface:
‘Oh my darling,’ (I prayed inwardly to myself), ‘do please manifest yourself. I need someone to love right this very minute.’
And he did. Manifest himself, I mean!
The answer to her prayer appeared in the form of handsome surgeon Lieutenant Aidan Long, who joined the Transfusion Service as Medical Officer in March 1941. Aidan met her parents, and everything seemed just perfect until, with only twenty-four hours’ warning, he was drafted to Iceland. They would not meet again for four years.
Aidan sent her a silver and pearl pin, and they wrote to each other. Helen continued to work in the transfusion unit, but she was impatient to return to hospital nursing, and there were rumours that she would be posted abroad. Eventually, in May 1942 Aidan was due back in England. He arrived on the 7th – but it was the very day that Helen’s ship sailed: ‘His bird had flown.’
As the
Highland Monarch
was tugged away from the dock the men on the decks were waving and singing ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’. Helen listened with a swelling heart. She found herself incapable of joining in, for yet again her feelings were overflowing into an involuntary prayer:
‘Please, please, dear God, may it please You to spare as many of these fine men as is possible – under the circumstances that is – though obviously we’ve simply GOT to win this Middle East war.’ And, selfishly, – ‘Please, if it’s at all possible, spare me to return safely home and find all well there.’
The
Highland Monarch
was two months at sea. Finally, on 26 July 1942, after travelling 15,000 miles, the troop ship’s gangplanks were lowered in Suez.
Helen arrived at the 64th General Hospital, Alexandria, at a time when British fortunes in North Africa were at a low point. Rommel had inflicted heavy losses on British forces, and in June he had captured Tobruk. By early July Axis forces had pushed the British back to within 70 miles of Alexandria. The ensuing battle brought about 13,000 casualties, resulting in an uneasy stalemate, and the dismissal by Churchill of General Auchinleck. General Bernard Montgomery was now appointed to command the 8th Army.
The 64th was a base hospital designated for serious cases. Helen found the medical wards full of patients with dysentery, typhoid, sandfly fever and acute enteritis; there was also a serious epidemic of diphtheria. Many of the invalids had desert sores, caused by terrible swarms of flies that settled on and infected any exposed wound.
Hers was an orthopaedic ward; these patients, casualties of the Auchinleck retreat, seemed to have brought half the desert back with them. Sand was all-pervading. It got into the sheets, the dressings, into all the interstices of their bodies, between broken limbs and the plasters that encased them. No matter how often the nurses bathed their patients, yet more grit seemed to emanate from overlooked cracks and crannies. Soft-hearted as she was, Helen found it hard to stay detached from the often terrible plight of the men under her care. One of these was a jokey and stalwart Canadian Hurricane pilot, Mike Reece, who had been shot down; his burns were so dreadful that there was never any chance he would survive. It took an hour to change Mike’s dressings, and his cheery, flirtatious courage so incapacitated her that she often had to flee to the basin in tears – ‘I wasn’t getting any better at it.’ With his arms pinioned to his sides in bandages, he would blithely call on a mate in one of the neighbouring beds to drop something on the floor, so that the next passing nurse would have to bend over and pick it up, thus rousing the other patients to wolf-whistles at the sexily angled view of her bottom. Out of pity, Helen and the others never minded colluding in this simple diversion.
The night Mike died, she changed his drip and sat by his bed. He asked her to get his wallet out of the locker. She pulled out the photographs and held them up for him – his home, his parents, his beloved young brother – and talked about them for a long time. After he had gone she wrote to his parents, ‘[to] tell them how things had been with him, and how his thoughts and talk had been all of home’.
Montgomery was rallying his army. On 22 October, Helen had been on night duty. When she came off, she went to get some sleep, but had only managed an hour or two before she was called back on duty. Orders had arrived from General Headquarters in Cairo that morning that the 64th was to be converted into a casualty clearing station. The Allies were about to attack.
All that day preparations at the hospital were carried out ‘in a state of awesome exhilaration’. The beds were remade with army blankets,
vast drums were packed with dressings and taken to be sterilised, stretchers stacked, glucose drinks prepared, splints, bandages and medicines piled ready for use.
Montgomery attacked at 21.40 on a still and moonlit night. The roar of 800 guns broke the silence and marked the beginning of the Battle of Alamein.
It was a sound to chill the marrow in one’s bones, and we hugged one another and held tightly to each other’s hands, and a spine-chilling feeling came over us as we heard this great roar of gunfire, which lasted continuously for the first twenty minutes of the battle.
The sky to the west was like a gigantic firework display, lit by winking flashes all along the horizon, as the Eighth Army moved forward.
Casualties started to arrive before dawn on the 24th. Strapped in hasty bandages, grimy and encrusted in blood, they were sent from the first aid posts at the front, back to the 64th, where the staff did their best.
It was a night to remember for the rest of one’s life …
Not for the first time … was I to sit at the side of a bed, mute and useless to the end, tormented by the knowledge that someone other than I should have been there at such a time.
The survivors turned to nurses like Helen for sympathy, skill and a listening ear. She heard of horrors: tank crews trapped in burning vehicles, dreadful maiming by mines, piles of bodies pulverised into the sand. In the ensuing days the stockpiled dressings began to run low; used ones were washed and rewashed by the nurses and laid out to bleach in the sun. Back in the fly-infested ward, Helen had to contain the urge to retch at the overpowering stench of burned, gangrenous flesh, while wounds daubed with gentian violet turned the mangled, blistered, bodies into macabre spectacles from some medieval picture of Hell. Bed bugs tortured nurses and patients alike. Helen sat through the desolate, homesick night duty on a stiff-backed chair draped with a white sheet, on which the insects could be easily spotted. ‘If anyone were going to die, it would surely happen during those lonely hours.’
She saw it as her duty to give comfort where she could. As a woman, nursing made calls upon her that exceeded the confines of physical care. All too often an anxious man, fearfully mutilated, would call upon her to boost his male self-respect: ‘What d’yer think the wife
will say when she sees me looking like this? … Could yer fancy me, the way I am now? Be honest.’ Nothing of this nature shocked Helen now. She was a woman; she was clean, fragrant, kind and pretty. And if he wanted a cuddle, if he needed a kiss, why deny it? Aidan was not forgotten, but these men needed succour of a kind that was in her power to offer. ‘I gave many such kisses with all my heart, and found it no hardship to do. I reckoned it was all part of the service.’
Day and night, ambulances brought in more wounded. The nurses were working flat out, with wounds to dress, temperatures to take, pillows to plump, medicines to administer, every bed and every locker kept tidy for inspection. Twelve hours a day the hospital broadcast music programmes through the wards. As often as not it would be the bright tones of Vera Lynn singing ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’, or ‘Yours Till the Stars Lose Their Glory’ on
Forces Favourites
. And as fast as the patients in the 64th recovered, their places were refilled by casualties from the Desert Army’s advance.
By early November the international newspapers on sale in the Alexandria streets were proclaiming: ‘AFRIKA KORPS IN FULL RETREAT’. On 8 November Eisenhower’s troops landed on the Moroccan and Algerian coast, as from its front page the
Egyptian Mail
shouted: ‘ALLIES ATTACKING ON ALL FRONTS’.
*
On Remembrance Sunday
Clara Milburn listened
to the bulletin:
Sunday 8th November
Great news today! American troops have landed in North Africa at several points …
This is all very heartening … May we keep it up.
while
the London diarist
Vere Hodgson seized on a domestic simile to describe her excitement at the rush of events:
The Desert army is sweeping Rommel along the coast like dust before the broom.
Monday 9th saw the end of a long day at Morrisons’ factory in Croydon.
Kathleen Church-Bliss
made a short entry in the diary she shared with her friend Elsie:
Monday 9th November
News still thrilling from Egypt and Africa …
Elsie’s job is still taking all the vitality out of her and she comes back worn and white.
Frances Partridge hardly
dared hope that now the tide might be turning. She reflected on events in an entry dated 11 November, twenty-four years after the Armistice that had ended the cruelty and slaughter of the previous war:
Prospects of peace suddenly loom closer. Next year perhaps? The agitation of the news has brought back the hateful waiting-room atmosphere; so far as mental or intellectual life exists the fire is nearly out, spiritual dust lies on everything and I sit gazing in front of me, wondering ‘What next?’
On the 29th, cautious but still celebratory, Churchill broadcast to the nation: ‘
Two Sundays ago
all the bells rang to celebrate the victory of our Desert Army at Alamein … We have been brought nearer to the frontiers of deliverance.’ In Barrow-in-Furness
Nella Last listened
to him as she sat embroidering a cute face on to a stuffed rabbit, to be sold in aid of the WVS. But the uplift in Churchill’s words failed to bear her along with it:
I listened to Churchill with a shadow on my heart … I thought of all the boys and men out East. How long will it be before they come home? It’s bad enough for mothers – but what of the young wives? I felt my hands go clammy and damp, and I put my toy rabbit down. I looked at his foolish little face, such an odd weapon to be fighting with. I never thought my dollies and soft toys could be used in my war-time scheme of life.
For Nella, compassion got in the way of jubilation, and even hope. The war was far from over. What had this so-called victory achieved? Out there in the desert, many thousands had died horrible deaths in violent destruction wrought by angry men, their vandalism abetted by the women welders and machine operators and makers of ailerons and piston rings. Nella turned to her needlework. He was ‘an odd weapon’, the little rabbit; but making him was a task that spoke of gentleness, and peace, and motherly virtues. An act of generous creativity, it seemed one small, kind gift to offer to an afflicted world.
7 Sunny Intervals
No Tears Left
Any day, any time, tragedy could ambush you. Women in the forces were particularly exposed.
WAAFs like R/T operator
Pip Beck endured helplessly as the men they loved failed to return from missions. With the Battle of the Atlantic continuing to claim lives, Wrens who got romantically involved with naval servicemen often had to confront the loss of their boyfriends.
Wren Pat Bawland
watched in horror as a trainee Fleet Air Arm pilot nosedived into the runway at her Somerset base. He had married one of her fellow Wrens eight weeks earlier, and the girl was pregnant: ‘I’ll never forget seeing the searchlights at night trying to dig that plane out and get to his body.’ Nobody was invulnerable. The North Africa campaign was bloody; in the Far East prisoners of war died by the thousand.