Authors: Mary Hooper
‘Of course!’ said Poppy, thinking that she’d have met him at the gates of hell if he’d asked. ‘Yes to both things.’
The waitress came up with the bill on a silver tray and Freddie released Poppy’s hand, found a pound note in his wallet and paid.
‘Thank you for your attention,’ he said to the waitress.
‘Thank
you
, sir,’ she replied, smiling and looking at him from under her lashes. And then as an afterthought added, ‘And madam.’
Outside in the street it was growing dark and there was a high wind gusting down the street and making all the ribbons on the bay trees twist and flutter. Poppy had hoped that Freddie would walk back to the hostel with her but, suddenly struck with the notion that they might see someone from the hospital, said she would be perfectly all right on her own; he must go and prepare for his regimental dinner.
Would he kiss her, she wondered. Or maybe he wouldn’t think it was right to kiss in the street . . .
While she was still pondering this, they reached the bottom of the hotel steps, just out of view of the doorman, and he put both his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her nose.
‘Dearest Poppy,’ he said. ‘The prettiest flower in the field . . .’
The prettiest flower in the field
, Poppy repeated to herself dizzily. He
must
love her. She raised her face to his and closed her eyes in preparation for a proper kiss – when there came the sound of running footsteps.
‘Poppy!’ a voice called. They both turned to see Matthews, puffing and out of breath. ‘I didn’t know if you’d still be here!’
Poppy stared at her with surprise and a little alarm. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m so sorry to interrupt, but your ward sister sent a message to the hostel to say that your brother arrived on the last troopship and has been admitted to Netley with a foot injury. You weren’t around so the orderly passed the note to me.’
‘Billy?’ Poppy gasped. ‘Is it serious? Is he badly hurt?’
Matthews shook her head. ‘She didn’t say – just that he’d come in injured and you should go and see him.’
Freddie had already taken his hands from her shoulders. ‘Then of course you must go quickly,’ he said.
Poppy looked up at him, feeling quite desperate. ‘Thank you for a lovely tea. I’m so sorry I have to . . .’
‘I’ll write to you,’ said Freddie.
Then Matthews was taking her arm and hurrying her down the road towards the hospital.
‘I’m so sorry I had to interrupt you,’ Matthews said, ‘but I thought you’d want to know at once. Just in case he’s seriously injured and . . . well, you know.’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you. I’m glad you came,’ said Poppy in a distracted voice. She glanced behind them to the retreating figure of Freddie. Would he turn and look at her? If he really cared, he would. And yes! As he reached the corner, he turned round and gave her a wave.
‘How did it go?’ Matthews asked.
‘It was blissful,’ Poppy said. ‘I mean, it was all strange at first, and I felt so nervous I could hardly eat a
thing
, but he held my hand over the table and we just
looked
at each other and whenever we did my stomach turned over. He told me that this other girl I’ve been worried about is just a family friend and that there’s nothing between them.’
‘He’s very handsome.’
‘I know!’ Poppy said with a sudden surge of feeling. ‘He looks quite divine in his uniform. The waitress couldn’t take her eyes off him, and when he took my hand at the table she was absolutely goggling at us.’ She sighed, then gave her head a little shake as if to clear it and looked at Matthews with something approaching panic on her face. ‘Our Billy, though! How did Sister sound when she told you? How on earth am I going to tell Ma if he . . . if he . . .’
Matthews put her arm around her friend’s shoulder. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it until we know more. It may just be a piece of shrapnel or a broken toe or something.’
Poppy shook her head, knowing that Matthews was just trying to make her feel better, for both girls were well aware that minor injuries were dealt with at a field hospital close to the front. ‘No, not if he got a Blighty ticket for it.’
At the main reception desk of the hospital, it took quite some time for Private William Pearson to be located, and when the orderly eventually discovered that Poppy’s brother was in Hut 600, he gave her a strange look. A concerned yet slightly disdainful look.
‘Why did he look at me in that funny way?’ Poppy asked Matthews as they made their way across gravel and grass towards the higher number huts at the back of the hospital.
Matthews shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘He did look at me strangely though, didn’t he? Do you think it’s the hut assigned to those who are about to . . . about to die?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Matthews. ‘Look, we’re nearly there.’ As they approached the hut, she asked, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be on your own? You can say.’
‘No!’ Poppy said with some panic. ‘Please . . .’
‘It’s all right,’ Matthews said. ‘I’m happy to stay with you, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t intruding.’ She shone her torch beam on to the hut number. ‘Six hundred. This is it.’ She flashed the torch across the outside. ‘This is much smaller than our huts.’
‘And look!’ Poppy broke in. ‘It’s got bars on the windows. Why ever would they want to put bars on the windows?’
Matthews shrugged to say that she didn’t know.
‘I just hope the night staff will let me see Billy for a moment,’ Poppy said, tapping at the door. ‘Or at least tell me how he is.’
She had to knock twice more before someone came, and then it wasn’t a nurse or an orderly but an armed soldier who came to the door. Seeing him, Poppy sensed that something was seriously wrong and was too taken aback to speak, so Matthews spoke up instead.
‘Pearson and I are both VADs here at the hospital,’ Matthews said. ‘She’s heard that her brother’s been sent here injured, and she wonders if she could see him or at least find out how he is.’
‘Pearson, did you say? First name William?’
‘That’s right,’ Poppy said in a choked voice. She was terribly afraid of hearing something she didn’t want to hear – that Billy had died after being admitted or was undergoing a serious operation or wasn’t expected to last the night.
‘He’s got a foot injury – a gunshot wound,’ said the soldier. He spoke sharply, matter of factly, not at all like the way Sister and Nurse Gallagher spoke to worried relatives.
‘Is it bad?’ Poppy faltered. ‘Really bad?’
‘That’s all I can tell you. You’ll have to come and enquire in the morning. You can’t come in now.’
‘But why is he right out here? Is there something different about this ward?’ Poppy asked.
The soldier looked at Poppy sardonically. ‘You could say that.’
Poppy couldn’t frame the next question so it was left to Matthews to ask, ‘Can you tell us what?’
‘William Pearson is under arrest. He has a self-inflicted wound.’
Poppy stared at him. ‘
Self-inflicted?
’
‘Put it this way, rather than go into battle and fight alongside his pals, he chickened out and shot himself in the foot.’
Poppy swayed against Matthews, who put her arm firmly around her friend and glared at the soldier.
‘We’ll be back here tomorrow,’ Matthews said.
Poppy didn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep. How
could
Billy do such a thing? How could he let down his pals and shoot himself like that? What on earth would happen to him?
Sister Kay spoke to her about it when she arrived at Hut 59 the next morning. Taking her to one side, she said with some sympathy, ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for your brother.’
‘How bad is not good?’ Poppy asked.
‘I believe it depends on whether his company was under fire at the time. If he endangered other men’s lives by his actions, then his sentence could be a severe one.’ Sister added quietly, ‘Pearson, your brother could be facing a death sentence.’
Poppy stared at her, hardly able to take in her words. It was one thing for a boy to die in the service of his country – of course his family would mourn him desperately, but there was a sense that his death was a glorious sacrifice and comfort could be taken from that. But dying as a punishment for cowardice was something very different and terribly shameful.
Poppy had her regular duties to attend to in Hut 59. She did these automatically, hardly responding to the banter from the boys, and it wasn’t until after eleven o’clock that Sister could spare her to go across to Hut 600.
There were two armed guards on the door and Poppy had to fill in a form to be admitted. Inside the hut it was bleak – there were no cartoons or posters on the walls, no pictures of music-hall singers cut out of newspapers, no sign of card games, of board games, music or pot plants. There were only three men in the hospital beds and there didn’t seem to be any VADs to attend to them, just two burly male orderlies.
Billy was in bed, turned towards the wall, with a cage holding the weight of the blankets from his leg.
‘Billy,’ Poppy whispered.
The mound of blankets didn’t move and Poppy was reminded of the way young Thomas had been.
‘Billy!’ she hissed again. ‘I’ve only got ten minutes.’
After a moment, Billy turned in the bed, rolled back the blanket and looked at Poppy, misery etched on his face. He looked so pale and desperate that Poppy, who’d had every intention of speaking to him sharply and saying how disappointed she was, burst into tears. He might have behaved badly, but he was family – her little brother.
‘Billy!’ She put her head down on the bed and wept. ‘How
could
you? What will Ma say? It will break her heart.’
Billy cried too then, oblivious of the cold stares of the orderlies. When they’d both done nothing but sob for a minute, Poppy dried her eyes on the edge of her apron.
‘I have to go back to my ward soon,’ she said, ‘but before I do, I want you to tell me how it happened.’
Billy sniffed, wiped his nose on his pyjama sleeve. ‘I dunno . . .’
‘I need to try and understand. I got your letter and I know what you’ve been going through, but to shoot yourself like that . . . How could you do such a thing?’
It was a full two minutes before Billy could pull himself together enough to speak, and he did so with a tremor to his voice and many stops and starts. ‘It was like I wrote in my letter to you,’ he said. ‘Guns day an’ night, enough to drive you mad, and you couldn’t put your head above the parapet or you’d get shot at. An’ officers shouting at you, and water in the trenches, an’ nowhere to sit or lay your head, an’ . . . an’ . . .’ he paused and gulped, ‘. . . an’ the mates you’d gone out with ending up splayed on the barbed wire like they was target practice for Fritz, or getting a grenade lobbed at them and lying there on the mud with their guts spilling out or their faces half off . . .’
‘
Billy!
’ Poppy cried in horror, putting up her hand to stop him.
‘That’s what it was like. My mate Banksey ’ad both feet shot off and left half his stomach out there, and when they dragged him back he took six hours to die.’ Billy closed his eyes. ‘I could tell you more. I could tell you worse stuff about blokes with their heads blown off an’ rats eating their insides, but I don’t want you to have nightmares like I do.’
Poppy pressed her lips together, trying to control the wave of nausea sweeping through her body. ‘And so you . . . ?’
‘So the morning after Banksey died, when I was supposed to climb out of the trench and run towards Fritz with my bayonet, I just couldn’t do it. I got out my gun an’ . . . and shot myself in the foot and said a sniper had got me. And I’m not sorry I did it. At least I didn’t have to face the Jerries.’
‘Sshhh,’ Poppy said, glancing towards the orderlies. ‘But how did the officers find out?’
‘The officers bloody know everything, don’t they? You’d think amid all the stuff what’s going on they wouldn’t notice a stray shot, but they did. Anyway, the lieutenant was already watching me – I hadn’t exactly been the first up and over the day before. Had the shakes badly, I did, and a blinding headache, and I’d been vomiting.’
‘Wasn’t that enough to get you off?’
He shook his head. ‘They think you’re just swinging the lead.’
‘And are the other two men in here . . . ?’
He shook his head. ‘Dunno. We’re not allowed to talk to each other.’
‘And what will happen to you all?’
‘There’ll be a court martial first,’ Billy said huskily. ‘Then they reckon . . . well, we’ll be shot, that’s what they reckon. They take you out at dawn and shoot you like a rabbit.’
‘No!’
Billy put out a shaking hand and touched hers briefly, but Poppy’s shout had attracted the attention of one of the orderlies.
‘That’s time enough,’ he said. ‘We don’t usually allow visitors in here.’
‘Just a minute,’ Billy said. He passed her a postcard. ‘I’ve got this to send to Ma, but I haven’t told her what’s happened.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to say. Write what you like and send it.’