When the Sunday morning before departure came round, Madge went for a walk, had a couple of lunchtime drinks at the Boat Club and spent the afternoon packing because all luggage was to be collected by 5 p.m. That meant she could write to Mum, Doris and Doreen, wash her hair, get that new dress out and look forward to dinner at the Ordnance Club for the last time. Unfortunately things didn’t quite work out that way because instead of romantic, farewell dinner dates under a starlit night, or an evening of partying with friends as Madge had planned, every single one of the 250 VADs who caught that train at King’s Cross station back in July were confined to barracks on the Sunday night.
The girls were hit with a stark realisation – the party was over.
10
Chittagong, Here We Come
If ever there was a reminder that the good times were over, it came when the Bombay Monday morning rush hour slowed to a crawl and then a halt when a sacred cow ambled into the middle of the road. The 1,500-mile journey across India from Bombay to Chittagong by bus, train, lorry and boat started for Madge with a 7 a.m. breakfast of her favourite scrambled eggs on toast. Roll call followed at 7.45 a.m. in the relative cool of a cloudless September morning at Kirkee Hospital and at 10 a.m. coaches arrived to take the VADs to Bombay.
The nurses disembarked from their ramshackle fleet of coaches along with more than 500 cases and trunks at the magisterial Victoria Terminus. The Gothic station was originally named Bori Bandar in the 1850s but was redesigned, rebuilt, renamed and re-opened in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee after becoming the most expensive building to be erected in Bombay.
The magnificence of the station took Madge’s breath away. It looked unlike any of the stations back home – a splendid, mock-Gothic building complete with gargoyles. Inside, huge volumes of commuters crowded the concourse and platforms. Outside, disabled and deformed beggars bowed constantly as they held out withered arms and hands and homeless vagabonds slept soundly on pavements in the morning sun. The station seemed to epitomise the polarised wealth and poverty that Madge had seen so far in India.
‘It’s quite a contrast,’ Madge said to Vera. ‘Look at those poor beggars over there.’
‘I was told to expect the two extremes,’ replied Vera, ‘the haves and have-nots. But it’s still something of a shock.’
Madge didn’t have long to ponder this, though, as movement control officers soon guided the VADs to the platform where they boarded an ambulance train and by the time the three girls had settled into their carriage they all agreed one thing – it was very hot and very sticky. Little did they know that the next four days it would only get hotter and even stickier. The train had two first-class carriages with air conditioning in the form of a ceiling fan, but the Stoke Mandeville girls, who had sailed in relative luxury on the Strathnaver, weren’t so lucky this time and they ended up in a compartment with only a window for ventilation. Just as they settled down a familiar head popped round the door and everybody burst out laughing.
‘Come in, Sally. Where on earth have you been?’ asked Madge. ‘We saw hardly anything of you in Kirkee.’
‘It’s a bit of a long story,’ she replied, ‘but can you put up with me again? I promise not to be a nuisance.’
‘Of course we can, we’d love to have you with us,’ said Vera, who slipped her shoes back on and started clearing space for the shy, lonely, but very likeable Sally. She added, ‘You’re a bit of a mystery, though.’
‘Not really,’ Sally said with an unhappy smile. The sadness in her eyes stopped Vera from asking any more questions.
The carriage soon settled down again and the girls sat in silence for a little while. It was the first moment of quiet they’d had in weeks and Madge’s mind couldn’t help but hark back home.
Phyl must have had the same thoughts because she asked, ‘Has anybody heard any real news from home? Not just happy family gossip, but how things are going in the push towards Germany?’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ said Vera. ‘I wonder if London is still getting hit by rockets?’
No one answered and Madge realised she didn’t have a clue what was going on in the UK either. She hadn’t seen an English newspaper for weeks, radio news reports were heavily censored and so it was like living in a news blackout. She couldn’t imagine it would be any better way out in Chittagong.
There were Mum’s letters, of course, and, pulling them out of her handbag, Madge decided to pore over them once again to see if she’d missed anything. Not having much luck, she decided instead to take another look at the advice they had all been given in the original contract from the India Office.
The first thing to catch her eye was a section on ‘Train Journeys in India’ which warned about the problems that can arise over tipping. The document said: ‘If you employ your own coolies to help with your bags, note their numbers otherwise you will get relays of coolies clamouring for pay, and you will never know whether you are paying the correct coolie or not. The usual pay for a coolie is one anna, equivalent to one sixteenth of a rupee, per journey and that figure is printed on their badges.’
The next section made it abundantly clear that to leave a carriage unguarded was simply asking
