Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Reunited with their colleagues, the nurses’ work began. Casualties were patched up and accompanied to the makeshift landing strip to be evacuated on Dakotas which were being used as air ambulances. In the early days Iris and her team sent 1,023 cases back to England. The unit kept close to the advancing forces, following them to Cussy, near Bayeux, then eastwards to Camilly, and they were often in danger. Their convoy was attacked; shrapnel fell on their tarpaulins, and a damaged aircraft nearly crash-landed on the tents. While in Bayeux, press photographers persuaded Iris and Mollie to pose for propaganda images, neatly dressed in skirts, giggling over the latest frivolous hats in a Bayeux shop window. The picture was staged, for consumption by a public who wouldn’t have relished the reality: tin hats, battledress trousers and the total exhaustion of nurses dressing burns, giving bedpans and tending injuries round the clock. Just 10 miles away the Battle of Caen was raging. Three days after the fall of Caen on 9 July Iris Ogilvie entered the city, where over a thousand people had been killed; ‘the smell of death was everywhere’.
*
QA Joy Taverner
was twenty-two years old when she too made the crossing from Portsmouth to Arromanches five days after D-day. She had been waiting for months to put her training into practice on the battlefield. Joy was a clever, self-sufficient, strong-willed young woman, but the experiences that war would throw at her over the next twelve months would test every fibre of her being.
The Taverners were a closely knit, talkative, working-class family, Irish by blood. Joy had grown up in the villagey atmosphere of Golborne Road, down the hill from Portobello market in west London. There her parents ran a successful newsagents and tobacconists shop. Her father – ‘the guv’nor’ – was a mason; Churchillian in his way, he would stand importantly at his shop-door, thumbs thrust into his waistcoat pockets, complete with fob watch and cigar. For Joy, it was a good Christian upbringing, a childhood surrounded with affection. Her mother kept house and cooked for the extended family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins who lived and worked there under one roof. From an early age Joy loved animals. There were chickens in the back yard, dogs and cats ‘of every kind’, mice in her pocket and, Joy’s favourite, Marmaduke the lizard. Her ambition was to become a vet.
War broke out when she was seventeen, and those dreams had to be abandoned. Instead Joy trained to be a nurse at Hammersmith Hospital, working there throughout the Blitz. Twice the hospital was hit. In 1943 she joined the QAs. That winter, along with fifty other recruits, she was sent to Peebles near Edinburgh to be drilled for conditions on the battle front: cross-country runs and gate-vaulting were the order of the day, until the nurses were considered fit enough to work alongside Monty’s boys. The QAs had officer status and had two pips on their shoulders.
In spring 1944 Joy was sent down to the Portsmouth area to await the invasion. Joy herself takes up the story:
Finally we were put on an LST
*
and tied up in the Solent for three days waiting for the Mulberry to be taken over and for troops to take over the beaches. Finally we went to the Mulberry and one of the trucks with all our kit and belongings went over the side into the sea!
Eventually we landed and were sniped at by Germans. One of our doctors was killed and an orderly was shot and we had to amputate his leg at the side of the road. We had to be careful because everywhere was mined. Notices (‘Achtung Minen’) were on the roadsides. Lots of dead bodies.
We went to St Lô and put tents up in a field as a front-line hospital. In the operating theatre for three days and nights – only having a few hours off. Polish men, Germans and Canadians came in – as well as our own troops. I had only the clothes I stood up in so washed my underwear – wrapped them in tissue paper and dried them in the camp oven!
As military personnel, the QAs had to demonstrate that they could cope with battle conditions. They were under constant shelling. No special arrangements were made to accommodate the nurses, but the soldiers were tolerant and agreed to stand armed to protect them if they needed to relieve themselves in the middle of a field. Some of the matrons regarded it as a question of honour to be able to drink the men under the table. By now, the romantic grey and scarlet uniform had been replaced by khaki battledress; Joy’s matron took it very much amiss when she heard that her nurses had been mistaken for ATS and insisted – absurdly, in Joy’s view – that the nurses wear their scarlet capes over their khaki slacks.
With new cases being trucked in constantly, Joy and the other nurses were surviving on cups of tea and sheer adrenalin. The mud was indescribable. The new wonder drug, penicillin, had just come in, and was being used for the first time. In August, the two German Panzer armies were caught by the Allies in a pincer movement at the Falaise gap. Many of the forces drummed up by Hitler at this point in the war were unfit veterans, Poles, ‘Osttruppen’ recruited from Soviet prisoners of war or very young conscripts. Joy nursed them all, often having to comfort wounded German teenagers calling out for their mothers. Many of such cases had lost blood, but if there happened to be an SS officer on the ward, they could be brutal. Fearful that the donor blood might come from Jewish sources, the SS forbade transfusions. Joy, outraged, made use of her own officer status to overrule such inhumanities.
Later, she tried to capture her feelings in verse. The lines she wrote stress the frustration she felt as a nurse, constantly confronted with suffering and yet so often incapable of giving help:
Day followed night and then another day
Of mangled broken boys.
Irish, Welsh and Scots
Jerries, Poles and French –
They cried in many tongues as needles long and sharp
Advanced.
Their blood ran very red and so they died.
Yet her uncomplicated faith in a loving God helped her endure the suffering she saw every day around her.
It was while Joy was on the road with the Allies that she fell in love. Captain Pip Knowles was a handsome surgeon doctor working in Joy’s field hospital. He was captivated by her pretty looks and chatty manners. The intensity of their relationship mirrored the intensity of the work they were both doing; the physical demands of caring for hundreds of casualties called upon all their reserves, and, not surprisingly, the strain was sublimated into feverish levels of emotion – the more so, since this was forbidden territory. Pip Knowles was married, with a child. Joy’s daughter now says that her mother’s religion and respect for family meant that she would never have made any claims on her lover, but there is little doubt that this man was the ‘big love’. When Captain Knowles was transferred to another hospital, Joy applied to go there too. The canny matron, rightly suspecting her young nurse of ulterior motives, turned Joy’s request down. The lovers wrote instead and snatched time when they could. Sue, Joy’s daughter, found the love letters after her mother’s death but felt that they were too private to read. ‘There are photos of them in a field, somewhere in Normandy. They look like blissful teenagers. She’s got her arms round his neck … there’s no doubt it was an intimate relationship.’ But the odds were stacked heavily against Joy’s affair with Pip Knowles. They parted, their great love derailed by a sense – on both sides, perhaps? – that it was sinful, illicit.
The Allies battled their way across northern Europe. News of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler boosted morale; surely, now, the end must be near? At the end of July the American army began to sweep across northern France, and on 23 August Paris was captured. 3 September saw the liberation of Brussels and on the 4th British forces entered Antwerp. In the army’s wake, military hospitals were set up. That autumn and winter Joy and her fellow nurses made their home in a converted convent in the small town of Eeklo, west of Antwerp. This, after living under canvas for months on end, was luxury. The nuns made them welcome. Belgium was a welcome respite from mud and horror. And it was while she was there that she literally bumped, in a snowstorm, into her future husband, Sergeant Ron Trindles.
In newly liberated Belgium there were pleasures for the taking.
Alcohol, clothes and perfume were plentiful, and the QAs were thrilled to rediscover their feminine side, shopping and partying. Joy at this time was on the rebound, and she had seen too much suffering to feel that life owed her anything. On the face of it Ron – good-looking and breezy, with a touch of the suave cavalier about him – seemed a good bet. He was a slick and able dancer, plus, he had no ties. And so they dated. As he twirled her around to the strains of Glen Miller, Joy failed to detect Ron’s severe and meticulous side. When it became apparent that her superior officer rank meant that he couldn’t go into her mess, she – unlike him – took it in her stride. For in reality, this was a man who cared deeply about rank and who, as a Supply Corps sergeant, liked everything in boxes. The army, with its rigour and clockwork precision, suited his character. From Joy’s end of things, Ron was a nice man who owned a fast car and was ‘a charming companion’. And now that the Allies seemed to be beating back the enemy, there was perhaps room to have a bit of fun, to take a glimpse into a happier future.
As it turned out, there was little time for dreaming, as the Germans counter-attacked against the Allied advance, taking advantage of their overstretched supply lines. In Eeklo, the QAs took in victims of the Ardennes Offensive, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with over 47,000 Americans wounded, and 19,000 killed.
But nothing could have prepared Joy Taverner for the ordeal still to come, as she and her fellow nurses continued to support the army’s inexorable advance into Germany.
9 No Real Victory
Dim-out
Brixton, south London, Friday 23 June 1944. For the last ten days,
Miss Florence Speed,
diarist, and author of
Blossoming Flowers
(1942),
Cinderella’s Day Out
(1943) and
Exquisite Assignment
(1944), had found it hard to concentrate on writing her escapist romances for the women’s light fiction market. Seven days after D-day, powerful explosions rocked south-east England. From launch sites in the Pas de Calais, the Germans had begun a bombardment which threatened to exceed the damage of the Blitz. South London lay directly in the path of these V1s, or ‘pilotless planes’ – soon to be christened buzz bombs or doodlebugs. Deafeningly noisy, the most sinister and impersonal aspect of Hitler’s mystery weapon was the way that its engine noise cut out shortly before impact. Round the clock, for most of June, there were to be approximately a hundred of these deadly explosions every day.
Since the beginning, Florence had been keeping a tally of bomb raids, numbering each one. In the early hours of that Friday morning she was woken by the sound of sirens. She picked up her bedside diary, and started to document the raids as they happened:
0210
The last notes of the sirens woke me fifteen minutes ago. Since then three of the flying bombs – no four, another has just gone off, – have just exploded …
Raid 732
A new type by the sound of them … one hardly hears them before they explode – It’s gone off. Six in a quarter of an hour.
Seventh audible. Going to be a nasty night.
Gone off.
0225
Very nasty near one & one scarcely heard the thing before it was down. There’s a 1000 lbs of explosive in each.
0555
All Clear going. In intervals of sleep counted 14 bomb crashes.
0655
Crump again but not so near.
0730
All clear
0755
Warning
Raid 755
. Crump …
Miss Speed got up and dressed. After breakfast she went shopping, but by 10 a.m. there had been another twenty raids. She got home and, with a rather shaky pen, recorded ‘
Raid 776
’.
1454
Siren.
Raid 777
1501
Crump.
Nuisance, as I was typing.
But can’t stay put under my great window. Ninety per cent of all air-raid casualties are due to flying glass.
1515
All clear.
1645
Sirens.
Raid 778
…
1740
Hearing another of the darned things coming … There was a terrific biff. The house shook … A great column of smoke was rising skywards from the direction of Camberwell …
1829
Raid 779
. Oh! What a joyful life …
2055
Warning
Raid 780
2100
A Crasher down already. Had been in bed only 40 minutes. Looks as if we’re in for a good night again.
2130
All clear.
2155
Raid 781
Had just dozed off & think I didn’t hear them.
2332
All Clear.
Across the south-east of England it was the same story: sleepless nights, air-raid warnings, streets deep in debris and broken glass. ‘
London is in a chastened
mood,’ wrote Vere Hodgson, describing the apprehensive atmosphere that pervaded the capital: