Authors: June Gadsby
‘Do it now,’ he said and when the sister started to object he yelled at her: ‘That’s an order, Sister!’
An icy current of air swept through the hospital as orderlies brought in the newly arrived consignment of wounded. Once more the place was ringing with the sound of men’s voices, cries of agony, moans, delirious ramblings, sobbing for their mothers and calling out for their wives.
Alex swallowed, took a deep breath, then marched forward, issuing sharp orders to orderlies, medics and nurses alike. Already, they feared and respected him enough not to disobey, for he had proved that he was capable of doing all that they could do and more. He saved lives, and to those he could not save he gave as much comfort as was in his power to give. There was no time, either for grief or for prayers. He would leave that up to the hospital chaplain.
W
HEN
Mary first donned her FANY uniform she thought she had never felt or looked so smart as she did in the snug-fitting,
tailor-made
, khaki barathea tunic and skirt, with a Sam Browne belt and buckle, and buttons that had to be cleaned daily to a meticulous shine.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this,’ Iris complained on the second day when she spilled a tin of Brasso over her jacket and got a scolding from their training officer, a poker-faced individual who took everything so seriously.
‘It’s not so bad, really,’ Mary said, glancing around at the bunch of girls they were training with. ‘Everybody’s very friendly. I just wish the training was over and we could do things for real. At least I’d feel as if I was helping.’
Iris raised her eyebrows and nodded. ‘Yes, it’s not as if we don’t know how to drive and both of us can cook.’
Mary laughed. ‘The pair of us would do well driving a canteen on wheels, wouldn’t we? They used to do a lot of that in the First World War, apparently, as well as nursing, though I think it was just helping out, rolling bandages and such.’
‘Handing out sticking plasters and Aspro tablets,’ Iris added with a giggle.
‘Holding a fighter pilot’s hand and stroking his brow,’ Mary said, dreamily.
‘Lovely,’ said Iris. ‘I’ll settle for that.’
‘Not if I see him first!’
‘Mary West, you’re engaged. What about poor Walter?’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot about him,’ Mary sighed, glancing down at the ring on the third finger of her left hand and then, on seeing Iris’s shocked expression: ‘Just joking. How could anybody forget Walter?’
But to herself she had to admit that Walter was not exactly uppermost
in her mind. She had been on the verge of breaking off their engagement, but she had put it off, thinking it would be cruel to do it just then, and especially at Christmas time. Then, of course, he had been spirited away by the Army to Catterick and was now, like Alex Craig and so many other British servicemen, located somewhere in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.
Only part of the girls’ FANY training was to be here at Penn House in York, where they spent a day in the kitchen cooking for around
thirty-five
people, but it was fun. They did quite a bit of driving, too, going from York to Newcastle and very often further afield, transporting anonymous personnel to meetings. Both Iris and Mary were adept drivers, but it was Iris who got most of the driving jobs because of her navigational skills, Mary was given lessons in handling radio equipment and learning about radar tracking, but she wasn’t exactly the best in her group.
‘Do you know, Iris,’ Mary said one day, after she had spent the
afternoon
coding and decoding mysterious messages. ‘It’s all a bit cloak-
and-dagger
, if you ask me.’
‘Don’t complain,’ Iris said with a huffy sniff. ‘You get all the
interesting
jobs. Me? I get to deliver medical supplies, transfer patients from hospital to hospital and play chauffeur to anonymous individuals who can’t be bothered to pass the time of day with me. And all without lights or signposts.’
‘We’re not supposed to be chatty,’ Mary reminded her. ‘You never know who you’re chatting to. It could be a spy.’
They stared at one another for a long second, then fell about laughing. Neither of them found it easy to take things seriously. It was like playing at being soldiers and neither of them was any good at parading in step. Iris invariably turned right when she should turn left and Mary had bother concentrating, so she often ended up marching into the back of the girl in front.
After a month, they were transferred to Camberley where the training was more intense as they learned how to handle bigger vehicles, then it was back to Yorkshire to await their postings. It was while they were
waiting
, in their billets, a small lodging house in Redcar, that life became more interesting.
As soon as they had some free time Mary and Iris had decided to take a stroll along the beach, sucking in the bracing sea air as if it were nectar. The hard winter was now behind them, but it was still chilly. Dodging the wavelets rippling up the corrugated beach and swirling around the lines
of concrete tank traps, the girls were relaxed for the first time since
leaving
home. That was, until the air-raid siren went off, filling the air with its deafening, heart-stopping wail.
‘Oh, lor’!’ Mary shouted as they both covered their ears and looked about them for a place to take cover. ‘The Germans aren’t great on timing, are they?’
‘No, they always like to spoil our fun,’ Iris agreed as they joined hands and ran full pelt towards a dark hole in the cliff face, well known to the locals as a place where pirates of old stored their plunder from ships wrecked on the rocks.
The cave was deep and they ventured in as far as they dared, hoping that the expected enemy plane wasn’t planning to bomb that particular stretch of coastline today. However, it wouldn’t be the first time an enemy plane had bombed the Yorkshire coastline. The girls were getting used to dealing with the real thing. The false alarms and practice drills had soon become a part of the past. So far, however, bomb damage had not been too extensive.
‘You do realize, Mary,’ said Iris, as they hid themselves among the rocks, ‘that if they do drop a bomb here, we could be buried alive.’
‘I’ll take my chances on that,’ Mary said, wishing she hadn’t because her stomach turned over the minute her words were out of her mouth. The sound of plane engines humming, then growing loud like angry hornets, grew closer.
‘Blooming heck!’ Iris exclaimed breathlessly, moving closer to Mary. ‘It sounds like the whole of Hitler’s air force is coming.’
‘I think it’s only two or three,’ Mary told her, listening carefully, her hands cupped behind her ears. ‘Let’s hope that one of them’s ours. Yes, listen to that.’
The sound of gunfire, probably from a British Spitfire, went on and on and then there was a moment before the awful dying note of an aircraft could be heard diving into the sea. The girls continued to huddle together, listening to the second aircraft’s departing drone.
‘I’m not moving until I hear the all-clear,’ Iris whispered fearfully.
‘No,’ Mary agreed. ‘That was as close as I ever want to be to armed warfare.’
She tried to laugh, but her heart was pounding too much and she could hardly breathe. How ridiculous, she thought. Here she was, wearing the uniform of the brave, stiff-upper-lipped First-Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and she felt like an absolute coward.
Just as the all-clear blasted out its welcome call, another sound made
the girls freeze and hold their breath. The heavy resonance of an engine vibrated the ground at their feet, then it was right there with them in the cave in a gritty spray of sharp, damp sand, and a choking smell of oil and petrol fumes.
Mary froze and Iris screamed before they saw what was the cause of the commotion. A full-sized motorbike with what appeared to be a child riding the broad saddle roared into the cave. At least, it looked like a child until the rider stopped the engine and hopped agilely off.
‘Well, who’d ’ave effin’ believed I’d find you two hidin’ in a cave down here at Redcar? Gawd, ye look so scared I bet ye’ve both dropped yer buckets and spades and wet yer knickers.’
‘Effie Donaldson!’ Mary cried out with relief. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Same as youse two. I’ve joined the FANYs. I’m in the motorcycle unit. Now, where’s the action, eh?’
‘They let you in!’ Iris burst out, then spluttered as Mary dug her painfully in the ribs.
‘We thought you were part of the enemy action,’ she said, then laughed helplessly because the whole situation was so ridiculous.
‘What’s so funny?’ Effie’s face creased into a disgruntled frown and she looked ready for a fight.
‘You are,’ Iris said, joining in with Mary’s laughter, tears running down both of their faces.
‘Aw, I get the message,’ Effie said, struggling to turn her bike around. ‘Just cos I talk common, like, ye think they wouldn’t want us, eh? Well, I can tell ye that it don’t matter no more, cos they need everybody they can get … even the likes of me. Anyway, I can afford to pay me way.’
‘Really?’ Iris said, receiving a second nudge from Mary.
‘Aye, I can an’ all. Anyway, can either of youse ride a motorbike, eh?’
‘You’re right, Effie,’ Mary said as all three of them emerged into the afternoon sun and shaded their eyes, scanning the seascape for the fallen German plane.
‘Look! Over there!’
As Mary pointed to a cloud of smoke and some floating wreckage, a fishing boat zoomed in on the scene.
‘They’re not goin’ to rescue the bliddy Jerries, are they?’ Effie swore and threw a pebble into the sea with so much vigour it skimmed the waves and bounced before plunging down out of sight like the plane itself must have done.
‘I think there are two planes down,’ Iris said, squinting through her
glasses, and Mary, whose eyesight was better, concurred.
‘Poor sods,’ said Effie, revving up the engine of her bike and starting off along the beach. ‘See youse back at the base.’
And then she was gone in a puff of smoke and more sprayed sand, and the two friends were left gazing after her with open admiration.
There was a buzz of excitement in the training centre that night that could hardly be contained. One of the girls, Kate Holland, had been in the CO’s office when an important telephone call came in. She had been immediately dismissed, but had hovered curiously behind a door that she hadn’t quite closed.
Just as everybody was getting ready to sleep, she burst into the long Nissen hut that housed the unit’s dormitory of twenty pallet beds. Some of the girls were already in their pyjamas and warming themselves around the cast iron stove at the far end of the building, prior to jumping between the cold sheets.
‘Everybody gather round!’ Kate shouted as she banged the door shut behind her. ‘I’ve got news!’
‘Well, don’t keep it to yourself, Holland. Spit it out, girl.’
‘Yes, Holland, don’t stand on ceremony. We could all do with a bit of jollying up.’
‘Well….’ Kate approached the stove and held her hands out towards it, shivering because the night was cold and wet. ‘I only heard one side of the conversation, but it sounds like our postings have arrived at last.’
‘By telephone?’
‘No, apparently by that dreadful creature on the motorbike, but the CO in London was checking to make sure she’d got here safely with them.’
Mary and Iris exchanged glances. Neither of them had dared open her mouth when they first arrived, for fear of encountering snobbery, but these young women who, for the main part, came from wealthy,
middle-class
backgrounds had not minded their northern accents. However, Effie spoke broad Geordie with a thick, guttural accent that turned the English language into something resembling a foreign tongue. Especially when she was roused, which she seemed to be most of the time.
‘Do you mean to say that common trollop was trusted with highly important documents,’ Sally Ferguson tossed her bobbed blonde hair and made a “tch” sound with her tongue. ‘How bizarre!’
‘Well, she is a messenger,’ Mary said, feeling she had to defend poor Effie. ‘And she’s been riding motorbikes since she was about fourteen,
which is more than any of us can claim.’
‘That’s true,’ said Alice Leatherby, the mild-mannered daughter of a Wiltshire clergyman. ‘And she certainly knows how to control the thing. The way she rode in here today frightened the life out of me.’
‘She swears like a trooper,’ Kate said, wrinkling her nose, ‘but I suppose, in a state of war, we can’t be all that choosy about who does the dirty work.’
‘What makes you think she’ll get the dirty work to do, Holland?’ Mary asked, suddenly incensed and ignoring Iris’s warning jerk of the head. ‘Unless you mean stripping down engines? Donaldson’s pretty good at that too, I hear.’
‘Oh, leave it, West! Just because she comes from your neck of the woods, you don’t have to stand up for her all the time.’
‘Know where we’re all going, then, Holland?’ one of the other girls called out loudly; and happily, the question acted like oil on troubled waters.
‘No, of course not, but I think we’ll get to know tomorrow morning.’ Kate Holland grimaced. ‘Oh, and there’s another thing. A new
lance-corporal
’s
just arrived. I gather she’s going to be in charge when we do move out. I’ve met her. She came into the dining hall as I was helping clear away the dinner dishes.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I suppose you could call her pretty.’ Holland was enjoying her
importance
as news bearer. ‘Blonde pageboy, tall, slim … and definitely in love with her own power. She had the cheek to make me mop up the floor again because she said she could see muddy footprints on it.’
‘God, not one of those iron maidens!’
‘I wanted to tell her that the mud was from her own shoes, but I thought I’d leave it until we know what we’re dealing with. She might be the CO’s niece or something.’
‘What’s she called?’
‘Beasley. And I think she’s connected.’
Mary smiled at that, though she wasn’t sure that Anne’s presence in the ranks was going to be a pleasant experience for any of them.
‘She is, actually,’ she told them and all eyes were riveted on her. ‘Her father’s a brigadier, and her brother’s a captain in the Northumberland Fusiliers.’
‘Lord, West, you’re full of surprises! How do you know that?’
‘Anne and I spent most of our childhood together.’
‘You were
friends
?’
‘Sort of …’ Mary frowned, because although she had spent most of her childhood at Anne Beasley’s side, she had never truly felt that they were friends. There was always that feeling that they belonged to two very different worlds, and Anne made sure that their worlds never really met. Just overlapped a little.
‘So, she’s not a snob, then?’ Sally Ferguson asked quite innocently.