Madge had her usual simple breakfast of tea and two slices of toast, covered with the merest scraping of butter. How she longed for the day when rationing was over and she could have a real slathering of butter. Madge tried to calculate the last time she’d had such a luxury and worked out it had to be more than four years ago. The first round of rationing had come in January 1940, and now it was April 1944.
When she was finished, she walked the short distance from the nurses’ home to the hospital reception area, where she had arranged to meet her friends Vera Clark and Phyl Irvine, who would be joining her on the early train from Aylesbury station to Marylebone. Madge smiled as her two fellow nurses, who were rarely punctual, surprisingly arrived bang on time. Vera was dark-haired, outspoken and proud to be a northerner. Phyl was fair-haired and quieter. Once the trio got to Marylebone the plan was to make their way to the India Office in Whitehall for their day-long test.
As the minutes ticked by, the three young women became increasingly worried. The green six-seater van that masqueraded as official hospital transport was notoriously unreliable. Madge was the first to hear it come coughing and wheezing round the corner.
‘Thank goodness you’re here, William!’ she said to the driver.
‘The ignition again! Sorry, girls. Squeeze in.’
‘What do you think our chances are?’ Madge asked the other girls as they set off for the station.
‘I heard it’s a jolly hard test,’ said Vera. She looked uncharacteristically edgy, but still kept her sense of humour and pretended to snap at the driver when he cheerfully said she sounded like a Geordie.
‘William, that is absolute heresy. I’m from Sunderland and we’re Macams, not Geordies,’ she said with a grin as she winked at the other girls.
The bit of fun encouraged a very nervous Phyl to chip in. ‘I’ve never even been to Whitehall!’
The train was a good twenty minutes late, but Madge had wisely allowed an extra hour in case of emergencies and it gave the girls time to chat about the questions they might be asked at the India Office. All three had responded to a plea from Lord Louis Mountbatten for nurses to bolster the overworked and understaffed Allied medical units in the Burma Campaign of the Second World War.
Mountbatten, since his appointment as Commander of the South East Asia Command in 1943, had made repeated requests for more nurses but was still getting nowhere until he enlisted the help of his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, Superintendent-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Firebrand Edwina organised a conference of the relevant authorities at the very same India Office where the nurses’ interviews were to take place and circumvented any further objections by having a quiet chat with an old friend, Winston Churchill. Sure enough, Lord Louis promptly received word that approval had been granted for the first 250 VAD nurses to travel to India.
Pamphlets were sent to hospitals nationwide and when Phyl saw one on the nurses’ noticeboard at Stoke Mandeville Hospital she had a quick conflab with Madge and Vera, then arranged for them to go to a cafe on Aylesbury High Street to talk further.
‘Things are so quiet at the hospital, it’s definitely worth considering,’ said Vera.
‘All we do is clean the wards, make beds and prepare cotton wool swabs,’ Madge chimed in.
‘Exactly!’ Vera went on. ‘So all things considered, it’s worth having a go.’
The girls laughed at the memory as they stood on the platform, but the conversation had dried up and the longer they waited, the more worried they became about the reason for the delay. Eventually the train arrived and the girls piled into their carriage, and for a while at least, their trepidation over the test that lay ahead was replaced by excitement.
‘This feels like a real adventure!’ Phyl said as they made themselves comfortable for the journey.
A number of trains and many miles of track in and out of London had been damaged in enemy air raids, but luckily the Aylesbury to Marylebone line had been spared so far. An entertaining conversation, whispered as it may have been, took place as the train approached London about the number of smartly dressed little penguins they could see from the carriage window waddling around in bowler hats. When the three young nurses spotted the India Office as they walked down the smart street of Whitehall they were almost overwhelmed by the vast three-storey building.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Vera. ‘It looks like a French chateau!’
‘It’s definitely imposing,’ Madge agreed. She stared at the building, pleased to have something to help take her mind off the barrage of questioning they were about to face.
There was little time to enjoy the equally impressive interior of the building because the girls were quickly directed by a portly steward with his jacket sleeves overhanging his knuckles to the interview rooms, where their details were taken by a sympathetic, matronly secretary, who did her best to ease their increasing nervousness.
The young nurses had just enough time to wish one another good luck before they were taken individually to different rooms on the same floor.
‘I see from the notes here that you nursed in the services section of Stoke Mandeville,’ said one of the doctors who was interviewing Madge. He walked with a pronounced limp and had a hint of grey round the temples, but was very charming and relaxed.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she answered, before they
