For my husband, Basil –
I love him as much today as when we
first met during the Burma Campaign
— Madge Lambert
This book is dedicated to the finest
generation in British history
— Robert Blair
Contents
Prologue
1 The India Office
2 Friday Meant Steak and Kidney Pudding
3 War is Declared
4 Becoming a Nurse
5 Rules and Regulations
6 The Journey Begins
7 Passage to India
8 Life Jackets and Pith Helmets
9 Arriving in Bombay
10 Chittagong, Here We Come
11 56 Indian General Hospital
12 Learning About Indian Life
13 Madge Goes Dancing
14 The Gurkhas’ Holy Man
15 Letters From Home
16 Captain Basil Lambert
17 Christmas in Chittagong
18 Auld Lang Syne
19 A Moonlight Serenade
20 Nursing the Japanese
21 Holiday in Calcutta
22 A Painful Goodbye
23 The Casualty Clearing Station
24 The Himalayas at Sunrise
25 The Japanese Surrender
26 Homeward Bound 318
27 Wedding Bells 334
Epilogue
Glossary
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue
BURMA, SPRING 1945
Madge felt as if she’d only just dropped into an exhausted sleep when the rustle of the tent flap jerked her awake again.
‘Good morning, girls. It’s time for duty. We’ve got a very busy few hours ahead of us,’ the staff sister said, her flickering hurricane lamp held high.
Operating on autopilot, Madge pulled the single sheet free of her camp bed and opened a gap in the heavy-duty mosquito net, before bending to turn her shoes upside down to ensure tarantulas or snakes hadn’t snuck in during the night. Finally she slipped on her khaki nursing uniform. She could hear the other nurses around her doing the same, everyone quietly getting ready to face the new day.
The nurses were staffing a casualty clearing station in Burma, close to the front line, where Lieutenant General William Slim’s 14th Army were involved in brutal hand-to-hand combat as they forced the Japanese back south towards the capital of Rangoon.
It was two hours before dawn but it was already humid as Madge and five other nurses carefully picked their way down the slope on which their tent was pitched. The Arakan jungle surrounded them, the trees looming black shapes in the darkness. They were headed for the operating theatre – another tent housing two large trestle tables on which weary doctors performed daily miracles on Allied troops, who often suffered horrendous, life-changing injuries.
The faintest of movements deep in the shadows of the valley caught Madge’s eye as the nurses approached the tent. Soldiers ran from their camouflaged guard posts to help the exhausted bearers, who came into sight carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher.
The injured man was taken straight into the tent, where Madge helped cut his blood-soaked clothes away and cleaned him up in preparation for surgery. She recognised the severe shrapnel damage caused by a Japanese shell exploding. Goodness me, that left arm doesn’t look good, she thought to herself as a drip was inserted in the other arm to counter the effects of dehydration.
The operating team carefully removed embedded metal fragments and fought long and hard to save the damaged limb, but they soon became resigned to the fact that the young soldier would have to spend the rest of his life with just one arm. The amputation took place shortly before dawn. Minutes later the sombre silence that had engulfed the operating tent was broken by the thunder of the 14th Army heavy artillery pounding forward Japanese positions.
‘When he starts to come round, I want you to take extreme care that he doesn’t accidentally discover he’s lost his arm,’ the surgeon said. ‘The shock to the system could be very damaging. I will tell him myself when he’s in a fit state to take it in.’
Madge knew that within forty-eight hours the patient would be taken to a landing strip and flown by a DC-3 to one of the military hospitals in Chittagong or Calcutta.
On the other operating table there was a lance corporal who had been hit by a bullet that seemed to have gone straight through his shoulder. Madge didn’t know whether to laugh or weep when he gave her a cheeky wink just before the anaesthetic took effect.
‘The bravery of these boys is amazing,’ Madge whispered to her friend Vera.
Eventually the nurses were ordered to get something to eat and grab a few hours’ sleep. They had been on duty for almost twenty-four of the previous thirty hours.
When Madge was working, she was too busy to think about the danger she was in or what would happen if the Japanese overran the camp. Now, as her head hit her pillow, she was too tired to worry. Images from the shift ran through her mind – the shrapnel fragments clunking into a waste container, the young soldier’s arm being amputated. She pushed them to one side and thought instead of her mother and sisters back in High Wycombe, wondering what they would be doing now.
Nurse Madge Graves was twenty-one years of age and a very long way from home.
1
The India Office
Madge woke with a knot in her stomach. Today her future would be decided. She got out of bed in her tiny room at the nurses’ home at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and instantly began worrying about the questions she would be asked at the interview in London later that day. She leaned across her ageing bedside cabinet to pull the curtain back and open the window to let the fresh spring air into the little box room where she had slept since starting as a trainee in 1941, almost three years earlier.
As she made her way along the corridor for an early morning bath, Madge smiled at two fellow trainee nurses whispering anxiously together. Perhaps they’re going to London for the interviews too, she wondered. They look as worried as I feel. Back in her room, she brushed her short fair hair until it shone, opened her excuse for a wardrobe and put on her freshly laundered nursing uniform. Make-up was banned when the nurses were on duty in the wards and for that reason
