Softly Grow the Poppies Page 8

  Dr Smith had gone downstairs to see if he could get hold of his wife on the telephone, for he had been at Summer Place all night and most of the day. He found Miss Beechworth in the hall clutching the telephone in her hand, for the moment her usual resourcefulness seeping away from her like water from a cracked jug.

  ‘They’re coming, Doctor,’ she managed to say in a quivering voice.

  ‘Who are coming, Miss Beechworth?’ His voice was impatient, wondering where the wonderfully efficient young woman who had helped in what had been a difficult delivery had gone to.

  ‘The wounded.’ She handed the receiver to him or rather he snatched it from her hand.

  ‘What wounded?’

  ‘They’re coming here at this very moment and we’re not ready.’

  Dr Smith, though he was not young, was quick to grasp a situation. You had to be in his profession. He had no idea how long it would take the impending arrivals to get here but with the help of Miss Beechworth’s stable men and gardeners they must at least clear the rooms that were to be made into wards.

  ‘They’ll need to be scrubbed down with carbolic, Miss Beechworth. How many rooms have you available?’ forgetting for a moment that Miss Beechworth was not mistress here. The real mistress was lying in a coma-like state unable to help herself, never mind dozens of wounded men.

  ‘I think about twenty bedrooms and then the drawing room and . . . I’m not awfully sure but—’

  ‘Get them all cleared of furniture, Miss Beechworth. An operating theatre will be needed, a sluice, rooms for the nurses, the doctors—’

  ‘An operating theatre?’ Rose quavered.

  ‘Come now, Miss Beechworth, pull yourself together. This house has been found suitable and I presume you and Mrs Summers have discussed it?’

  ‘Yes, but it has come so suddenly and this is not my house, Doctor. I can’t just move furniture . . . and to where? I don’t know if—’

  ‘Miss Beechworth, as you know, Mrs Summers is not capable at the moment of making any sort of decision so it is up to you. Good God, woman, these men need your help. Gather all the men and women you can in the area and start right away. I’m sure they will be more than willing to help. These poor wretches will be at the gate any minute. Let us try to be ready.’

  Dr Smith was himself exhausted but with Miss Beechworth’s men and women hastily summoned from the farms they had all the ground-floor rooms cleared, the furniture stored in attics, in rooms over the stables, in fact any place where there was an empty spot was soon filled. The farmers’ wives had rallied round and were on their knees with buckets of water and carbolic soap, vigorously scrubbing the acres of floor, the miles of skirting boards, windows to be leathered, even the two farmer’s wives whose sons were over in the mud of France climbing ladders to reach the high walls of the once lovely rooms – breakfast, dining, drawing room – but leaving Harry’s study for the doctors as it was. They would need somewhere to write up notes, to give orders and simply to rest when there was a moment from their gargantuan task. The nurses and VADs were allocated temporary bedrooms on the first floor and when at last the convoy drove up the long drive they were more or less ready.

  Under the directions of the doctors and nurses, the iron cots were hastily erected, simple beds that were put up in a minute, and the wounded men carefully placed on them. The sounds of the suffering men had most of the women in tears and Polly fled to what had been the butler’s pantry which was to be turned into a sluice. Mrs Philips and Nessie were in the kitchen boiling water for the tea women thought was the answer to all life’s problems. Polly, crying silently so that her tears fell in her bucket, was scrubbing down for the second time because she could not bear it, she said. Nessie was sorry she had brought her, she kept saying to Mrs Philips, since she was as much good as a chocolate teapot but she was sorry later when she saw the girl doing her best to comfort a man – man! He was no more than a lad in long pants – crying for his mother.

  They were all non-commissioned men from all walks of life, the wounded officers going elsewhere. Staff Nurse Long had twenty years of nursing behind her, Nurse Heron slightly less, but with fifty wounded men to attend to and the VADs, who had a first aid certificate, they managed admirably. Rose hovered round them, taking orders and performing the most onerous and dirty jobs, for none of the men could get themselves to a toilet, should there have been enough to accommodate them. Dolly stayed with Alice who had not spoken a word since the news about Charlie had been hesitantly given her, taking no notice of the lovely little boy who lay at her side.

  ‘That babby’ll die if he’s not fed soon,’ one of the farm wives told Rose as if they weren’t already prepared for it. ‘My lass ’as just had one, ’er fourth. She’s enough milk for two babbies. Give ’im ’ere an’ I’ll tekk ’im across,’ for his fretful wailing was undermining everyone’s strength, everyone except Alice who seemed impervious to anything.

  So Charlie’s son who had not yet been given a name was taken to Ashtree Farm where Elsie Jones’s daughter-in-law gave him his life back. They decided he might as well stay there instead of ‘lugging’ him backwards and forward as Dan Herbert’s wife said. He slept peacefully by the side of young Jane Jones who shared her mother’s breast with him.

  Rose found that she had a talent for nursing; well, perhaps not a talent but at least she did not flinch from some of the tasks the nurses were beginning to ask her to take on. She was learning all the time as those first days were got through, standing at the elbow of Staff Nurse Long or Nurse Heron while dressings were changed, injections given and wounds cleaned. One of the men, a sergeant, had a terrible injury to his leg which Dr Roberts had confessed to the other nurses he thought might have to come off because it had turned gangrenous.

  ‘Please, Doc, don’t tekk me leg off,’ the sergeant begged, and Rose wanted to weep for him, since she knew he was a farm labourer with four children to support and what good was a one–legged farm labourer?

  ‘I’m sorry, old man, but if I don’t it will spread and even kill you.’

  ‘I’d rather be dead,’ the sergeant said. ‘’Ow can I work and keep four kids an’ a wife?’

  ‘I’ll give you work, Sergeant,’ Rose told him. ‘If you let Dr Roberts amputate you could have a false leg fitted and there will be work for you then.’

  ‘’Ow long’ll that be, miss?’ the sergeant asked hopelessly. And as though he had given up he allowed his leg to be amputated but died on the operating table.

  ‘Can I see you in my office, Miss Beechworth?’ Dr Roberts asked her politely, leading the way in to what had been Harry’s study. She remembered the night she and Harry had sat there, friends but with something already blossoming between them. They had been discussing the war and he had treated her as though she was an intelligent woman instead of the usual ‘you’re a woman, dear, and wouldn’t understand’ which was the attitude so many men took. Where was he now? Dear Harry, where was he now? After seeing some of the terrible injuries the soldiers suffered and hearing their cries of pain, seeing the way they watched as the nurses approached them, starting their work of suction treatment on suppurating wounds, the employment of irrigation with bacterial fluids, making their agony worse, she had this scene in her head of Harry somewhere in a hospital such as this suffering what these men suffered, or, worse still, lying in the muck and muddle from which these soldiers had come.

  Some men had stood for days in hastily dug trenches without a chance to remove their boots, ankle deep in tainted water, some of them with gangrenous feet. A soldier who had been wounded would make his way, or be carried to the regimental aid-post in the line. From there, after his wound had been hastily dressed, he would be taken to a field dressing station and with luck then taken by ambulance further back to a casualty clearing station. Then there would be a train journey to a base hospital to be shipped directly home across the Channel. It was an admirable scheme but when a wounded man had been days with the soil and dirt of the battle festering in hi
s wounds his chances of survival became slimmer and slimmer. Even then, if there were no room at the hospitals in the south they were taken to hospitals such as Summer Place, another long and pain-ridden journey.

  ‘Sit down, Miss Beechworth,’ the tired doctor told her, which she did.

  ‘I know you mean well, my dear, but you cannot go up and down the wards offering jobs to men with no legs, who are blind or mutilated and it will get worse, Miss Beechworth. Some men, not here at the moment, have such horrific wounds to their faces that their own mothers cannot bear to look at them. You must learn to be dispassionate, detached. I know, I know it is hard but it is something a good nurse learns no matter what is in her heart.’

  ‘Dr Roberts, I cannot—’ she began but he cut her off.

  ‘Then I cannot allow you to help on the wards. You will be kept scrubbing and polishing and working in the sluice. There is always more washing of bed linen than your women can keep up with and . . . well, your friend who has had the baby needs you. She has lost her husband and lies in her bed staring at the ceiling all day. Even her baby has been taken away.’

  ‘She cannot feed him, Doctor,’ Rose said passionately. ‘Do you want the child to die?’

  ‘There you go again, Miss Beechworth. You feel things too much and perhaps if more effort had been made to put the child to Mrs Summers’s breast she would—’

  ‘Really, Doctor, I find your words very insulting. Mrs Summers is my dearest friend. I would die for her.’

  The doctor sighed. ‘Then go to her and instead of nursing the men, try to get her up out of that bed and into the spring air. Try to interest her.’

  ‘We do but she is grieving for her lost husband. We are to christen the baby next Sunday and I am trying to get out of her what she is to call him. She has not spoken and unless she does I am left to choose the name for the poor child.’ She looked round her desperately as though seeking inspiration.

  ‘You must choose his name then, Miss Beechworth,’ Dr Roberts replied.

  ‘How can I possibly?’

  ‘Had you and she not discussed it before . . . before all this?’

  ‘Well, my father and grandfather were both called William and—’

  ‘She liked it?’ He looked wearily at her for he had enough problems without what to him seemed a trivial thing, the naming of the child of a missing – perhaps dead – soldier. At this very moment he should have been in his bed while Dr Cartwright took over, since there were thirty wounded soldiers needing attention.

  ‘Yes, she was—’

  ‘Then you must do it because I believe Mrs Summers will not be well enough by Sunday to attend her son’s baptism.’

  He stood up and passed his hand over his thinning hair. He had been about to retire when this war came upon them and had felt it his duty to continue his doctoring until it was over. The trouble was they had not expected so many wounded or for the war to thunder on as it was doing. The ‘lull’ or the stalemate was well and truly over and everywhere men like him and women like Miss Beechworth had stood up to the horrendous task set before them. He looked out of the study window and could hardly believe the beauty of the gardens that surrounded the house. It seemed almost obscene when over the Channel it was a charnel house. A mist of bluebells carpeted the woods on the far side of the garden, and a mass of daisies grew round the small lake on which two swans glided side by side, impervious to what the world was up to. In the lawn, which needed mowing, were more daisies and against the wall with the gate to the stables was a great splash of orange, marigolds he thought. At the side of the house a conservatory contained an explosion of colour, trailing ivy and ferns, all very overgrown. White wrought-iron chairs, which his idle mind thought would do nicely for men as they convalesced, were positioned around the lawn, and beyond that the trees were heavy with pink blossom. What a wonderful world this was until men smashed at it with greedy fists.

  Then he became aware once more of the young woman behind him who was, after all, doing her best. He turned sharply. This was a pleasant room. A man’s room with a big desk, leather-topped with a heavy silver inkstand, deep, comfortable leather chairs, a side table on which Sir Harry Summers would have kept his decanters and glasses and a French window through which came the smell of the country – grass, mayflowers, the smells of spring. And on the walls, pleasing to the eye were old prints of hunting dogs and horses. A typewriter and a telephone sat on the desk, a couple of rugs lay on the oak floor and a clock ticked on the mantelshelf above the fireplace where a cheerful log fire burned.

  ‘Miss Beechworth, you do some good work on the wards and are a great help to the nursing staff but may I ask you to promise you will not give false hopes to the men, those who have lost limbs or their sight. Some of them may recover and be well enough to be sent back to the battlefields so—’

  ‘Good God, Dr Roberts, you mean to return these poor men to that . . . place after what they are suffering, have suffered? I cannot believe—’

  The doctor sighed again. ‘There you go again, Miss Beechworth. I really must beg you to—’

  ‘I will not stay out of the wards, Doctor, and I will not promise that I can stop myself from sympathising with them. They need someone to talk to, to pour out their pain and anguish; so many of them are terrified you will report them fit to return to duties they cannot cope with. This is not my house but while Mrs Summers is incapacitated I am in charge of it and you have no authority over me, nor my women. One of them has already lost a son in the trenches; oh yes, we have had a terrible description of the trenches and two of the women who are helping here know that their sons are still there and what is happening over there. My own . . . I have a person who . . . means a lot to me –’ she gulped and reached for a chair back to steady herself – ‘and I can only hope that if he should find himself as some of these men do there will be a woman who will help him, not just physically but emotionally. He is . . . he is very dear to me . . .’ She dashed a hand across her eyes and turned to the door, fumbling with the handle to open it. As she moved into the passage that led from the study into the main hallway, Dolly was stumbling down the stairs, her face like chalk and behind her was Polly who had just taken a tray up with some delicacy to tempt Miss Alice, as most of them still called her, to eat a little something.

  She still carried it but her eyes were filled with her easy tears.

  ‘What – God in heaven, what?’ Rose stammered, clutching Dolly’s arm, for she thought she might fall.

  ‘It’s the lass . . .’ Dolly hung on to Rose, showing every one of her sixty-odd years.

  ‘What, Dolly?’

  ‘It’s Miss Alice. She’s gone.’

  7

  The man in the bed opened his eyes. His head was swathed in bandages that came down to below his eyebrows and he could barely see. He turned his head, doing his best to get a better view of exactly where he was. There were other beds with men in them all lying very still, and what he supposed were nurses bending over them. Where the hell was he? His brain did not seem to be functioning as it usually did. How had he got here? Why was his head bandaged? It ached abominably and he groaned with the pain of it and as one of the nurses heard him she came across to him from where she had been attending to another man.

  She smiled and said something to him but he couldn’t understand what she said. His heart missed a beat for he believed he was in hell. He hurt all over, his head the worst, but even worse than that was that he could remember nothing. What had happened to bring him to what looked like a hospital ward and . . . and . . . who was he? For some frightening reason he couldn’t remember his own name!

  The nurse, who was dressed in a snow-white apron and a handkerchief headdress, spoke to him again, laying a comforting hand on his and for a brief moment something she said made sense to him. Just a word or two but it was in . . . in German he thought.

  ‘Guten tag,’ she said, which he understood. He must have learned the language at school, he supposed, for though he could remem
ber nothing else, he knew he was English. How did he come to be here? he asked himself again. What the devil was he doing in what was obviously a German hospital? his tired brain begged to know but he couldn’t recall, try as he might.

  She smiled again, a pretty smile that brought dimples to her rosy cheeks and for a flash lasting a mere fraction of a second he caught the end of another smile, just like this one, from other lips, then it was gone and he was really frightened. Had he been in an accident? Was he on holiday when he had had an accident? Oh God! What the bloody hell was the matter with him that he must fight so desperately to understand his situation? It had made his head ache more violently than ever so he closed his eyes hoping that when he woke again it would all become clear to him. That someone would speak to him in his own language, explain how he came to be here with his head in a bandage and the worst bloody headache he had ever had.

  When he opened his eyes again the nurse with the pretty smile was talking to a man in a white coat further down the ward. The men in the other beds which were arranged neatly on either side of the ward were very quiet, not moving beneath their tightly made bedclothes. One or two, like him, had bandaged heads and at the far end there was a screen round a bed. Some other poor sod who was so ill no one was to see him, he supposed, though why he should think that he could not imagine. He had never been on a hospital ward before so what had brought him to this one? The bandage on his head must mean it had been hurt in something, an automobile, a . . . a motorcycle, perhaps he had even fallen off his horse; a horse . . . a horse: that had chinked its way into his empty brain – something to do with horses? The man – was he a doctor? and the nurse with the pretty smile were both looking at him and began to walk towards him. The man took his wrist in his hand, glancing at a watch as he did so. He spoke to the nurse and nodded then spoke to him in the same language as the nurse. Again he caught a word or two but not enough to give him a clear understanding of what the doctor was saying.