Softly Grow the Poppies Read online

  The perfume of the wild flowers was heavy and sweet and she breathed in deeply. Dear Lord, let me have a letter soon or I shall run mad, she said out loud but Will was rolling in the grass with the dogs and nobody heard her. She had written to Harry only last night, telling him of the enormity of her love for him, of the future that she prayed for to a God she was not sure existed because would a loving God allow the massacre and maiming of so many men, the agony they suffered, the pain she herself felt in her desperate worry over Harry. Her love was strong, steady, the love of a mature woman, patient and honest as she had always tried to be, and she would wait for him until the end of her life. It was not romantic, a dazzling emotion felt by the young boys and girls who were caught up in this war. It was enduring, indestructible, a love that filled her heart and mind and would never change. She had told him so in her letter, begging him to write soon. She knew he was busy; busy? What a word to describe what he was doing, but if he could just send her a line, a postcard, to let her know he was still – she hardly dare think the word – alive.

  She shook herself from her morbid thoughts, or tried to, opening the field gate and calling to Will who was crawling through the long grasses with the dogs barking and jumping all over him. He stood up and ran towards her, the dogs at his heels and when they entered the stable yard Tom was there sitting in the sunshine smoking his pipe. He stood up at once, flustered, for he felt guilty that he, the last man left, apart from the boy, Jossy, to tend to the gardens and even the parkland and wooded areas of Beechworth, should be found lolling about.

  ‘No, Tom, stay there and finish your pipe. You deserve a rest with all the work you do. I don’t know where we would be without you what with all the young men at the front.’

  ‘Aye, tha’re right, Miss Rose, and gerrin’ a real pastin’ by the sound of it. Eeh, wharra’ waste o’—’ He suddenly remembered that Miss Beechworth’s young man was one of those getting a real pasting and he clamped his lips firmly over his pipe. First young Mr Charlie getting lost, though thankfully he was found again, and Sir Harry fighting for his Liverpool Regiment and his life in the thick of it.

  Will addressed Tom in his own particular way which they all seemed to understand and the gardener listened intently.

  ‘Me come wiv you, Tom. Will come wiv you. That there grass needs cutting,’ he told him, using an expression, one among many, that he picked up among the servants. He nodded his head sagely.

  ‘Nay, Master Will, tha’re right there and termorrer thi’ an’ me’ll ’ave a go at it.’

  ‘Can Will push, Tom?’ meaning the ancient lawn mower.

  ‘Aye, I don’t see why not but Sparky’ll give us a pull.’ Sparky was company for Sir Harry’s hunter in the paddock to the side of the house. Though the lad often held him up Tom didn’t mind. If it helped Miss Rose and Miss Alice that was something.

  It was three days later, just as Rose was passing it, that the telephone shrilled out. For a moment her heart missed a beat for that was what the machine did to you. It was probably the hospital authorities looking for beds since they all knew by now that a battle had recently been fought in which many wounded had been reported but nevertheless they hated the damn thing. It was known as a ‘candlestick’ model with the earpiece hanging from its side and with some trepidation she put it to her ear and spoke into the receiver.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered briefly.

  ‘Is that the Beechworth House Hospital?’ a masculine voice asked politely.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again.

  ‘Ah, may I speak to Miss Beechworth?’

  ‘This is Miss Beechworth.’ And though she was expecting the call to be about wounded soldiers and any space she might have for them, her pulse raced and she felt the need to sit down.

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, Miss Beechworth, but it’s Tom, Sir Harry Summers’s friend.’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry to distress you but I work at the War Office and I have just heard—’

  ‘Please, oh please, don’t tell me . . .’ She wanted to scream at him, to swear but she leaned against the wall and did her best to hang on to her fading senses.

  ‘I’m afraid Harry has—’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me he is . . . is . . . please . . .’

  ‘He has been wounded, Miss Beechworth, but not fatally. A leg wound. I should not be giving you this information but Harry asked me particularly to let you know if—’

  ‘Where is he, for God’s sake, where is he? Not still at the front . . .’ for she had seen wounded men who came straight from the fighting and the condition they were in.

  ‘No, he is in a hospital in London where he is to be operated on—’

  ‘Not . . . not amputation?’ She slowly slid down the wall until she was crouched on the floor.

  ‘I can tell you no more than that, I’m afraid. Wandsworth, you know it? But if you could get up here—’

  ‘I’ll be on the first train, tell him.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell him that but—’

  But she had hung up and was screaming down the hall towards the kitchen where Dolly and Nessie and Polly stood huddled together as though their proximity to each other gave them courage. They all had their hands to their mouths.

  ‘Dolly, oh Dolly, it’s Harry; no, not dead, wounded in London and I’m off to the station to get the first train.’

  ‘Oh lass, whatever next? As if we haven’t got enough wi’ Mr Charlie and . . . and . . . see, get a bag packed an’ go. Me an’ Nessie an’ Polly’ll manage. We’ll see to Master Will. Miss Alice’ll have to give a hand here an’ you know how good Tom is with that little lad. Eeh, I dunno, will this damn war ever be over?’ She put her apron to her eyes and rubbed them furiously then gave herself a shake and was her old self. She had looked after this family, Rose’s mother and the miscarriages she had suffered and she’d not let the lass down now even though she did feel that the good Lord was laying too much of a burden on her old shoulders.

  She sighed as she heard Miss Rose thunder up the stairs and drag a suitcase to the floor, packing it hurriedly with clean underclothes, a nightdress and odds and ends she might need, though what could they be, for goodness sake. She wasn’t going gallivanting. She was going to the man she loved who lay in a London hospital where they would do everything they could for him. If it was not too late. The dread of gangrene pierced every one of them who had nursed wounded men. The muck they picked up as they lay where they had fallen and even Dolly who had never nursed a wounded man knew that was what frightened those who had.

  The station at Lime Street was a seething mass of soldiers and their loved ones who had come to see them off, or to meet them as they came home. Many of those who had come from the battlefields just stood, with the accoutrements of war they were forced to carry everywhere they went hanging about them, waiting for someone to tell them where to go, waiting for orders since that’s what they had been doing for three years.

  She could have wept for them, these poor bits of flotsam who were going home for what should have been peace but whose confusion was reflected in their gaunt faces.

  It was the same on the train that she eventually boarded but these men were going back, knowing what to expect and obliging death and wounds as they had been instructed. The sadness in her for them was mixed with the worry that was infecting her for the man she loved.

  Dear sweet Jesus, let it stop soon, she begged, as the man in the shell-hole with Harry had begged.

  14

  He was lying flat on his back gazing at the ceiling when she entered the ward.

  ‘Are you a relative, Miss Beechworth?’ a harassed nurse asked her as Rose enquired at the desk for Captain Summers. ‘It is not visiting time, you know.’ She looked Rose up and down as though to find some reason why she should not be allowed to enter the hospital, never mind the ward where the wounded officers lay.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose lied. ‘His mother cannot come since she is not we
ll so I offered to visit Captain Summers in her place. He is my . . . cousin. I have just made a long journey from Liverpool where I am a VAD at a nursing home and cannot go back to her to tell her you would not allow me to see her son.’

  ‘I am not saying you may not see him but visiting hours are—’

  ‘I must see him at once, Nurse. I have a job to do at the hospital which you of all people must understand and I must get back to it as soon as possible. The wounded from the last battle are pouring in and we can barely manage; surely you must realise how important our work is?’

  The officious nurse relaxed, for she was worn to the bone nursing the sick and wounded who flooded not just into her hospital but others all over the country and this woman whom she was certain was not a cousin of Captain Summers knew exactly how she and her fellow nurses and VADs worked round the clock. She nodded her head towards the stairs and turned away and without a word Rose sped up the stairs heading for the ward where Harry lay.

  He lay completely still under his bedsheets except for his hands which moved restlessly, pulling at something as though he hauled at a fishing net. Careless of the men who lay in their beds, some asleep, others unconscious, she almost ran along the ward until she reached the last bed where he lay. He continued to stare at the ceiling and seemed unaware of her presence until she knelt beside him and took his twitching hands in hers, bringing them to her lips in an outpouring of love. She folded them gently in her warm grasp. Silently she spilled out the endless current of her love and when he turned his head and looked into her eyes she bent and kissed his mouth. He was gaunt, sunken-eyed, the lovely chocolate brown of his eyes flat and unfocused as though he were still back on that battlefield where he had stepped on poor Joe Turner’s fallen body.

  ‘Harry, Harry, my love . . . what . . .’ She did not know what to say. ‘How are you? How badly are you wounded? Does it hurt? What happened?’ all seemed so stupid, puerile, as though the wounded man, who stared at her as if he wasn’t sure who she was, was a fool for he wouldn’t be here if his wound were not serious.

  ‘I don’t know what to say except how glad . . .’ Glad! What a stupid word to describe the way she felt, the joy that was running through her at the sight of him, of knowing he was alive, wounded, certainly, but alive and back here in England. She had lived a life of worry, with an agonising, ever present expectation that he would vanish as so many of them had done. The unknown was a spectre that stared her in the face day after day after day. Even asleep she had been troubled by dreams of him festering in the muck and mud that Alice had inadvertently told her about. She had not meant to hurt her, to drive her mad with anxiety but Alice had been unable to hold back her own knowledge of the horrors that faced the men who fought ‘over there’. And here he was back within reach of her eager hands, arms, lips, but there was something wrong with the beloved man she had known. He seemed confused, uncaring of who she was and yet she knew he loved her as she loved him.

  ‘Harry, my love, I am here. Look at me, sweetheart. I am here to take care of you, perhaps to bring you home if they will let me. Charlie is found, did you know? And Alice is back with us. The boy, their boy – dearest, look at me, please, and say you know me, that you love me still . . .’

  His face spasmed as though in sudden pain and she gripped his hand, turning to search for a doctor or a nurse. She wanted to know the precise details of his injury but the nurse was bending over another bed, giving a soldier an injection, she thought, and she did not like to interrupt.

  ‘Rose . . .’ Harry’s voice quavered and with a gasp of relief she turned back to him.

  ‘Yes, my love, I am here.’

  ‘I stepped on poor Joe Turner’s body. I didn’t mean to but he . . .’ Again his face spasmed and she realised it was not with pain but with anguish. He was remembering the last battle in which he had fought and though this man – Joe Turner – must have been dead, the fact that he had stepped on him seemed to have made more impression on him than any other memory of that terrible day. Among the many hundreds who had fallen under the first rain of bullets and who scattered the ground like leaves from the oak trees at Summer Place in the autumn, this one soldier obsessed his mind. His spirit seemed to have been broken but if she could just get him home to those who loved him she was determined it would be mended.

  ‘Darling, don’t.’ She didn’t know how to comfort him, to expunge from his mind this one moment of horror when he himself had been injured. What was there beneath the cage that covered his legs? Not – oh sweet Jesus – not amputation, not the horrific damage to the life of this active man who had already given so much of himself since the beginning of 1915.

  She stood up decisively and placed Harry’s hand on the bed where it lay like an upturned leaf, then started again with its drawing in of a net, and walked the length of the ward barely aware of the smell of suffering, of the antiseptic used, the carbolic soap with which everything was scrubbed, a smell with which she was very familiar. She patiently waited until the nurse had finished ministering to the soldier and spoke harshly to her as she left the ward though she did not mean to be harsh.

  ‘Nurse, please, can I speak to a doctor? I have come from Liverpool to . . . to be with my . . . cousin but he seems unable to tell me what has happened to him. He is wounded in the leg but in what way? I work in a hospital and I am used to wounds but if you would tell me where I might find—’

  The nurse, not a VAD but a trained nurse, did her best to brush by her agitated visitor. ‘The doctor, all the doctors are run off their feet, miss, and have not the time to—’

  ‘To tell a relative what has happened to a loved one! I cannot believe it. I must know what has happened to Captain Summers so I may return and reassure his . . . his mother that he will recover from what has happened to him. The captain seems unable to communicate.’

  ‘He is very ill, Miss . . . Miss . . .?’

  ‘Beechworth.’

  ‘Miss Beechworth. He was unconscious when he was brought to us—’

  ‘When was that?’ Rose rudely interrupted her, then was sorry, for did she not know herself how hard these nurses worked, overworked, and hardly had time even to speak to each other, let alone to anxiously demented visitors.

  ‘I’m sorry to plague you when you are so busy, really I am, but perhaps you can tell me the extent of Captain Beechworth’s wounds. He has not had his leg . . .’ She could hardly bring herself to speak the word. It seemed to stick in her throat, choking her and the nurse relented, putting a gentle hand on Rose’s arm.

  ‘He still has two legs, Miss Beechworth, though it has been touch and go. He was trapped in a shell-hole, I believe, and the wound was not tended to for a couple of days. A shrapnel wound that tore through his thigh, just missing his . . . and, perhaps I should not tell you this but you say you have had some nursing experience.’

  ‘Yes, I have. I shall stay here with Harry, if I may. I promise not to get in the way but I should like to speak to a doctor regarding the possibility of taking him home and nursed in the hospital where I work.’

  The nurse looked doubtful. She was obviously also eager to be away. From somewhere on the lower floor there was some kind of commotion and with a shake of her head and a long sigh she began to move hurriedly towards the head of the stairs along with other nurses who had appeared from different wards and a group of orderlies.

  ‘More of them, I’m afraid. There must have been another battle.’

  Rose followed her down the stairs, watching the long line of ambulances come from Waterloo station straight from the hospital train proceeding slowly up the drive, the first one stopping at the bottom of the steps. Stretcher-bearers, well used to the drill now, ran to the back of the ambulance and gently lifted the stretchers carrying the sighing, moaning, murmuring wounded and carried them into the hospital. One of them screamed as the orderly jogged the stretcher on which he lay, a pathetic bundle of a blood-stained, mud-stained uniform. Doctors were here and there, hurriedly studying the
tags tied to the men denoting the seriousness of their wounds and for the next few hours it was confusion, and out of the confusion came order. Rose Beechworth, calm and steady, was there to help where she could and where she was needed and nobody seemed taken aback to see a woman – not dressed as a nurse but wearing an enormous white apron she had been given – in the midst of it.

  When she returned to the ward where Harry lay she was not surprised to see the beds there pushed even closer together to allow for the extra ones on which the newly arrived wounded lay. There was barely room between each bed. Harry seemed oblivious to it all.

  She knelt awkwardly again by his side, taking one of the twitching hands in hers and he became still.

  ‘I stepped on Joe Turner, you see,’ he said in a conversational tone as though describing a walk in the gardens he had once known. ‘He had been hit in the stomach and his insides were hanging out. He had done his best to hold them in, his insides, his hands were . . . a gaping hole in which I stepped but the rest of us crawled back to the trench as best we could though some of them didn’t make it.’ He mused for a moment or two on the terrible circumstance through which he and his men had lived, slithering across the bodies of their mates, some still horribly alive and crying for water, for their mothers, for Elsie or Maggie and the event seemed to have affected him more than the rest of his experiences of war.

  ‘Darling, try and rest. Joe would not have blamed you for stepping on him,’ wondering at the same time how he had come to step on a comrade when he had just told her they had crawled back to safety.

  But now as they fought in the Third Battle of Ypres in August Captain Summers had managed to stand despite his wounds, doing his best to rally his men before collapsing again on to the still and sometimes squirming bodies of those who had ‘gone over’ first. As she did her best to soothe him into healing sleep she said a silent prayer to whoever had brought this about that he was out of it now, please, please, God.