A Hospital Summer Read online

  ‘Yes, Sister. How is Mrs Ellis?’

  Her eyes smiled over her mask. ‘It looks as if she’s going to do. And don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. According to all the books she should have died a couple of hours ago. I don’t know why she didn’t, either. Now get on and get that tea. The poor woman needs it.’

  While I made the tea I thought over what Mackenzie had said. She might not know why Mrs Ellis was still alive; I did. I had never read a midder text-book, but I knew I was right. Mrs Ellis was alive because Mackenzie had kept her alive. It was as simple as that. I thought about Best and her Mrs Sinclair. Mrs Sinclair had managed to survive that second raid. I had not read any books on cardiac diseases either, but I knew enough from remembering what my father used to say about his heart patients to know how people who have had one coronary thrombosis are well advised to avoid any form of shock. Possibly, according to the books, Mrs Sinclair should also have died a couple of hours ago. She had not died; in fact, Best had told me, when she came down to the shelter to collect her women after the last all-clear, that her patient ‘wasn’t doing too badly at all. She’s been marvellous, Dillon. She just hung on to my hand and never turned a hair.’

  I wondered how many hairs Mrs Sinclair would have turned had she not had Best’s hand to hang on to?

  On my way back upstairs with the tea-tray I noticed the grey early-morning light filtering through the cracks in the stairwell black-out. It was as well the stairs were not lighted at night, or that P.A.D. major would have been up the wall about the stair windows too. Having delivered the tray to Mackenzie, I began removing the corridor black-out. It was quite light outside; I looked at the dawn and the camp dispassionately. I felt as if I had no part in either, I was a spectator, a killer of cockroaches, a maker of tea, a lighter of wet wood fires, an unskilled amateur among skilled professionals, doomed to a lifetime of taking down black-outs ‒ if the War lasted my lifetime. Or my lifetime lasted the War? Physical weariness and lack of sleep combined to make me light-headed and vague. I should have been preparing the babies’ baths; laying out clean woolly clothes and napkins; switching on sterilizers and teat saucepans. Instead I remained by one open top-storey window and looked out at the camp. I did not see the camp; I saw suddenly Joe’s face in memory; I heard him ask scornfully, ‘Why not learn to do the job properly?’

  Joe. I grinned foolishly. There were a lot of ‘why’s I wanted to ask about Joe. There were also a lot of things I wanted to tell him. One of those things was that this morning, making tea just before dawn, I had discovered myself at a personal cross-road, and now that it was dawn I saw quite clearly which way I must walk.

  Chapter Nine

  I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

  I rang up Mary after breakfast next morning. She was too busy to talk to me. Sergeant Stevens, who answered my call, said the Stables was in the process of being emptied of A.T.S. and filled with semi-convalescent soldiers from the main hospital. ‘These men are to be moved out to-morrow. We’re going to be a Casualty Clearing annexe. We’ve got two Sisters down here already, and Mrs Frantly-Gibbs said I was to tell you her reign is over, and she’s very pleased. She says she’ll drop in at the night house to see you as soon as she gets an evening off. She says she’ll make it evening, not to disturb your sleep.’

  ‘She won’t do that, Sarge. I’ve lost the knack of sleeping by day. Thanks for the message. Give her my love and tell her to ring me at Families to-night, if she can. Oh, yes. Tell her something else. Tell her I saw three babies being born last night.’

  ‘You did?’ Sergeant Stevens clucked disapprovingly. ‘Who’d be a nurse! What ‒ was it like, Nurse Dillon?’

  I hesitated. ‘Messy ‒ and fantastic. One moment there was one person there ‒ and then the next there were two. And, Sarge, the babies are sheer heaven! They shout their heads off and look frightfully wise. Like little old men.’

  ‘It’s a wonder you could hear them shout with all the noise that was going on last night.’

  ‘They drowned the noise. We forgot the raid was going on.’

  ‘Come, come, Nurse! You don’t expect me to believe that? No one could have forgotten that shocking row last night. I suppose you felt rather out of it in your quiet little Families hospital? I expect you were quite glad to have those three babies to give you and the Sisters something to do.’

  I did not argue with her. There was no point. ‘I expect we were. Thanks, Sarge, for giving me the message. Give my love to Merrick and Blakney.’ I rang off and made a face at the receiver. I was not surprised by her attitude because my fellow V.A.D.s at breakfast had had the same attitude. They had all commiserated with my spending such an exciting night in an unexciting backwater.

  ‘I bet,’ they said, ‘you were aching to come over and join us. We were admitting all night, and some of the men are in a pretty bad way, but not as bad as that first afternoon raid, as everyone’s now much more sensible about taking cover fast.’

  They also said that on one occasion the rumour that Families had had a direct hit had shot round the main hospital. ‘Did you realize you had a couple of very near misses, Clare?’

  ‘Strangely enough, my loves,’ I retorted bitterly, ‘we weren’t sleeping all that heavily in our quiet backwater. We did just hear a faint sound of a bomb falling in our back yard.’

  The post was late that morning, but it was worth waiting for as far as I was concerned. My mother’s letter enclosed one from Luke, who was now back at sea, and I had one from Charles. I went out into the garden of the day Mess to read them; we took breakfast and supper in that Mess, the night house having no dining-room. We had two suppers on night duty; one at seven-thirty and another at any time in the middle of the night. From force of habit I drifted through the Drawing-room and out of one of the windows. I was surprised to see how many strange photographs now stood on the orange-boxes in that room; the V.A.D. staff was changing constantly, as more girls were being called up and others being transferred to hospitals farther inland. At breakfast the girls had been full of the rumour that the whole hospital was shortly going to be closed as a base hospital and kept open only as a C.C.S. ‘The camp’s getting too hot for the sick, Dillon. Night Sister was saying that if we have any more nights like last night she’s certain the G.O.C. will order us all out. She thinks they’ll keep a skeleton trained staff here to cope with casualties, and bung us all inland.’

  I thought about the rumours as I opened my letters. I thought about them with detachment; they did not seem to concern me at all. The three letters from my family only added to my sense of detachment. I dropped them in my lap and gazed at the empty tennis-courts and thought how impossible it was to believe that my mother or the boys really existed. They had become vague figures in my mind, far more vague than my father, even though he was dead and they were living. At least, as far as I knew, they were still living. I took up the letters again; Charles wrote: ‘I had a charming letter from Great-Aunt Charlotte last week. The old girl seems in great form and wants me to visit her some time. I think the prospect might be amusing.’ His letter told me he was in Egypt and enjoying life, since in the private code of likely theatres of war we had worked out before he sailed, Great-Aunt Charlotte stood for Egypt. Reading between the lines in Luke’s letter, it was obvious that he was convoying in the Atlantic. I gathered this because he wrote, ‘The chaps are much amused with my eyelash-curlers. Tell Clare I’ll deliver them on my next leave home.’ Those eyelash-curlers were an American product I had once seen in a glossy American magazine, and Luke had promised to buy me some if he ever reached the States. That message meant he must be on his way back.

  I might have been convinced of my mother’s existence had she not lived on the south-east coast. Those bombers that attacked us last night must almost certainly have come in from the south-east. She could not know that we had been their target, so she could not know how close had been the odds last night against my being alive this morning. And I could not be sure, until the day was over,
if she was alive this morning. There was, I discovered, a saturation point to anxiety. You had to reach that point and pass beyond it to retain your sanity. Before Dunkirk I had been in a flat spin with worrying over Charles; then I discovered that I had been worrying about the wrong person. Possibly, even had my father not been killed, I would have grown detached; it was my only defence, and not only mine, but the defence of everyone else. There was now no future in worry, because there was now no future over which to worry. To-day I was alive; to-morrow I might be dead. The prospect did not frighten me; it was just something that was on the cards for everyone. Perhaps if I had not been so perpetually tired I might have been frightened. I was far too weary to bother with fear ‒ death at least would be restful, and mean one could sleep.

  My head jerked forward sharply. It was warm in the garden, so I lay back on the grass and decided to snooze for a little while before I went back to the night house. I thought of Joe as I relaxed; I would much rather not die; I wanted to see Joe again. There was so much I had to tell him. So much; and I still did not know where he was. Sleep was drugging my mind and the sun above was warming my body. I yawned. I would think about it all later. Not now.

  Two hours later Miss Moreby-Aspin woke me by shaking me firmly, ‘Dillon, m’dear. You ought to be in bed, child. You can’t sleep out here. There’s a raid going on. Come in at once. You’ll have to wait until the all-clear and then cycle to the night house quickly.’

  I followed her indoors with my eyes half shut. Somewhere far off I heard gunfire and the sound of aeroplanes. I was not interested in any raid. I was off duty, and it was no concern of mine. I sat on one of the chairs in the sitting-room and went back to sleep. Again I was shaken to temporary wakefulness. ‘Dillon, m’dear. Where’s your tin hat? And where is your respirator? Get both at once!’

  ‘Sorry, Madam.’ I did as she said, then, having collected both from the hall, looked round for the nearest seat. There was a wooden high-backed bench in the hall. I lay full length on it, hanging my feet over the end; I sat my respirator on my chest, put the wretched tin hat on my head, and fell asleep again. I slept undisturbed until lunch-time as Madam was too occupied to notice me. Polly, the Home V.A.D., woke me with a cup of tea.

  ‘Polly, you are an angel! Thank you so much.’ I lifted my feet, and she sat down beside me.

  ‘What it is to be young, Dillon! How you can possibly sleep upon this hard bench with the noise we’ve had I cannot imagine.’

  I drank the scalding tea gratefully. ‘Was it a very rowdy raid?’

  ‘Nothing like last night, but more exciting to watch. They stopped the ack-ack, as we had dog-fights going on overhead. Don’t tell Madam I was watching, but really it was thrilling. I’ve never seen ’planes fighting before. The Spits were marvellous. They were here, there, and everywhere.’

  ‘The boys from Upper Weigh?’

  ‘I expect so. Seems as if we’ve got a R.A.F. after all. You should have seen them!’

  ‘No doubt I will some other time.’ I stretched my arms. ‘Your tea’s put new life into me, Polly. I’d better make tracks for the night house while this quiet lasts.’

  ‘Don’t fall asleep on your bike. You don’t look awake to me yet. And don’t let Madam see you. Your apron’s a wreck, and your cap looks as if you’ve been through a bush backwards.’

  I smoothed my apron skirt ineffectively, removed my cap, combed my hair, and put on my tin hat. ‘If anyone stops me I’ll say this is the new outdoor uniform for V.A.D.s. So long as I don’t run into Madam, I’ll get away with it.’

  Mary rang me in Families that night. We could only talk for a few minutes because of an alert that proved to be a false alarm, and after that telephone call it was over a week before I saw her again. She came round to my room one evening to tell me she had had no success at all with her father-in-law.

  ‘And to crown it, I’ve been posted. I’m going to the Rangmere C.C.S.’

  I thanked her for her help. ‘I hate your going. The old firm’s breaking up.’

  ‘You’ve not been posted, have you, Clare?’

  ‘No, but I’m not staying. I’m going to remuster, like Agatha. I think she’s done the right thing. I’m going to apply to Matthew and Mark’s.’

  ‘Clare ‒ are you serious?’ She sat on my bed. ‘What about Joe?’

  ‘What about him?’ I looked at her. ‘He’s still lost in thin air. And I’m still busy asking questions about him, but no one’s got the time to find out the answers for me. There’s another thing ‒’ I told her my thoughts in the nursery the night before last. ‘I think it’s time I did something about it.’

  ‘It’s a big step,’ she said. ‘Real nursing can hardly be called a game.’

  ‘And is this?’

  She sighed. ‘No. I see your point. Why Matthew and Mark’s? Because of your father? Because of Agatha? Or Thanet and Mackenzie? It’s considered the strictest training school, Clare. They take life very seriously in that hospital, I’ve heard.’

  ‘I think that’s a good thing. If Thanet and Mackenzie are typical examples of what they turn out I think Matthew and Mark’s must know what it’s doing. If they accept me I’ll be very bucked. Mary ‒ I’m sick of fumbling in the dark, I’m sick of not knowing what to do ‒ apart from cleaning. Boy, can I clean! But I want to know more than how to clean. I like this job, I like nursing, and I want to learn how to do it. I don’t want to spend the War fiddling round from post to post, and, as Agatha said, getting no place fast. If I’m going to nurse I’ll go the whole hog, and become an S.R.N., and an S.C.M. if necessary.’

  ‘And would all this be to help you get Joe out of your system?’ she asked quietly. ‘You’re choosing a pretty drastic method.’

  I said, ‘I don’t want him out of my system. The way I feel now he’ll never be out of my system. If he really feels the same about me I can take that. I don’t say I’ll enjoy waiting years and years ‒ if we have got years and years in which to wait.’

  ‘You think he’ll recover sooner?’

  ‘I think we may both be blown to Kingdom Come before the years have passed. But we might not be. People do survive wars. We’ve survived most of this summer; why shouldn’t we survive the rest? If we don’t ‒ well ‒ at least there’s no harm in trying.’

  She said, ‘Clare, you sound more assured than I have ever heard you sound. You’re talking like an adult.’

  ‘I’m that all right.’ I smiled at her. ‘You’ve always said we were all growing up too fast. I’m a big girl now, love. I have looked on death and birth and cockroaches. And the cockroaches frighten me much more than the other two.’

  She walked to the dormer window. ‘The leaves are turning early this year. It must be the lack of rain. Summer’s not over yet.’

  ‘It can’t last much longer. It’s September already.’

  She peered downward. ‘What are all those soldiers doing in your garden?’

  ‘Are they lying on their stomachs and crawling about on their elbows?’ I asked, without getting up.

  ‘Yes. How did you know that?’

  ‘Because they are always doing it these days. It’s called deploying. I don’t know why they have to deploy round our house; they just do. Doesn’t David deploy?’

  ‘If he does he hasn’t told me.’

  ‘How is David?’

  ‘Fine. Far as I know. Thanks.’ She turned round. ‘He’s got a Staff job now. In Cairo, from what I make out from his letters.’ She grinned affectionately. ‘Imagine poor darling David on the Staff. Heaven help the Army now!’

  I said I was delighted he was on the Staff. ‘He’ll probably end this war as Major-General. You wait and see.’

  Agnes banged on my door. ‘You up, ducks? Gentleman wanting to talk to you on the telephone downstairs. Gentleman from your home. A Dr Anthony, he says he is.’ I must have changed colour, because she added quickly and kindly, ‘You don’t need to fret, dear. The gentleman said to tell you it wasn’t bad news about your mum. He just
wants to talk to you.’

  I stared at Mary. ‘It’s Uncle Michael.’ I leapt out of bed and ran downstairs in my pyjamas.

  Uncle Michael’s voice sounded as clearly as if he were in the camp. ‘That you, Clare? Sorry to get you out of bed, lass, but I’ve news for you. Your mother’s well and sends her love. I’m calling about your letter. This chap Slaney you asked me about. I’ve found where he’s hospitalized.’

  ‘Uncle Michael ‒ you’re wonderful! How did you find out?’

  ‘Quite easily, lass. If you were so bothered why didn’t you ask me before? I dropped a line to Tom Lomax. He was in your father’s year at Matthew and Mark’s. I explained who I was and why I was asking, and I had a short note from him to-day. This fellow Slaney is in one of the civilian sanatoria. It’s roughly a hundred and ten miles from you. Here’s the address …’

  ‘There! Uncle, don’t I know it? Didn’t you and Father go fishing there sometimes?’

  ‘In that direction. This place is in the hills above the river. It’s reasonably high for England. Good spot. Good sanatorium. That all you wanted to know?’

  I said slowly, ‘I suppose you can’t find out how badly he’s got it? How ‒ long ‒ and so on?’

  ‘Clare!’ he laughed. ‘Are you asking me to divulge a professional confidence?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you were doing. Well. I’ll see what I can do. I didn’t ask Lomax, naturally, but I rang up the place for you to discover who is the Medical Superintendent. It’s a man called MacArthur. D. B. MacArthur. I used to know a Dennis MacArthur who was reading medicine at Cambridge. Might be the same man. I left my name and qualifications and asked him to call me back. If he is the man I know he may be able to help. If not, at a pinch I can tackle Lomax again. He seemed to remember your father very well, and said some very pleasant things about him in his note. I’ll show it to you when you next have leave. Any idea when that’s to be?’