Meal times were probably the most relaxing because the patients were too busy eating to continue their meditation, which often included endless chanting. Normally they fell asleep quite quickly after being fed, especially after dinner. It was the noise late at night that was the problem. At first it was entertaining with some chanting away at the top of their voices, and others happily talking to themselves and humming. In the small hours, however, it could be a worry, especially when the noisy ones were told to be quiet by patients desperate for sleep.
In the main, problems on the ward were few and far between, until patients began to complain to nurses and doctors that they were not being given enough to eat. There were even claims that on some nights they were given nothing at all. When the complaints began to increase Madge went to Matron Ferguson to first inform her of the situation and then ask for advice.
‘It’s not simply a case of “please, sir, can I have some more”,’ said Madge. ‘From what these patients are saying there are some nights when they are given nothing at all for dinner.’
Matron said how much she appreciated Madge’s good sense in bringing the matter into the open, and because it was an unusually quiet day invited her to be her guest for afternoon tea. She explained that the province of Bengal had not long recovered from the effects of a famine ‘of Biblical proportions’ and food was still a very touchy subject indeed.
‘I wasn’t suggesting there’s a famine,’ said Madge, and Matron nodded.
‘Depending on which set of figures you believe, an estimated three million people died from starvation and disease after the winter rice crop of 1942 yielded way below what it normally does,’ Matron sighed. ‘And then the Japanese invaded Malaya before taking control of Burma, and, quite frankly, things just went from bad to worse.’
Between the end of the Great War and the outbreak of war in 1939, she explained, Burma had been one of the biggest exporters of rice in the world and huge amounts went to Bengal and other parts of India. Once Japan controlled Burma it meant exports to India were stopped instantly. Then a cyclone, followed by tidal waves, endless rain and floods damaged more than three thousand square miles of land and harvestable crops.
What started out as food shortages quickly turned into a truly dreadful famine which, in the view of many Indians, was caused by the British, and there was still lingering resentment. Whilst this was just ‘a minor hiccup’ the last thing needed at 56 IGH were rumours over new food shortages. ‘Let’s nip this in the bud, Nurse Graves.’
The solution to the potentially tricky little problem virtually fell into Madge’s lap when she went for a stroll outside the basha wards just before dinner that evening in the brilliant sunshine. Half a dozen ward-boys had carried canisters of curry and rice from the kitchen and thought they were hidden from view on the unobserved side of the bashas. Instead of ladling the curry and rice onto plates they were happily scoffing handfuls as fast as they could. Madge had caught them literally red-handed, but rather than create a scene she just walked over, nodded and pointed to the wards. They stopped eating and started carrying the food canisters towards the wards as she stood there trying not to laugh at the sight of the boys’ right hands covered in bright red curry sauce. Little did she realise, however, that while a potentially troublesome little problem had been laid to rest she had made a mistake that had put everything else in the shade.
Much as she liked the cheery ward-boys Madge had little sympathy over the pilfered food because the soldiers in the DI ward were in need of nutrition to help them recover. She went to bed that night more than a little pleased at sorting things out and looked forward to telling Olive Ferguson all about it.
Madge didn’t have long to wait the following morning because rather than starting her shift there was an instruction to report to the Matron’s office, where she got a slap on the wrist rather than a pat on the back. She was confronted by a different Miss Ferguson to the woman who had invited her for afternoon tea and talked about the Bengal famine.
‘Thank you for solving the mystery of the missing food,’ Matron said, but then shook her head. ‘How is it that what was a minor problem has now been turned into a far more serious one? What do you have to say for yourself, Graves?’
A somewhat bemused Madge replied that she had caught the ward-boys helping themselves to the rice and curry and indicated that she wanted the food taken straight to the wards, which was what she thought they had done.
‘Well, it doesn’t look as if they quite did that,’ said Matron, whose response left Madge more than a little bewildered.
Far from taking the canisters into the wards, the ward-boys simply carried everything back to the kitchens and told the cooks that they would not be serving anything to the patients because the food had been made inedible.
‘There was nothing wrong with the food when they picked up the canisters,’ said Madge. ‘So I wonder if they carried on eating it?’
She still didn’t understand what the problem was, until Matron, with another shake of her head, explained that when she walked over to the ward-boys her shadow had fallen on the canisters. Once the shadow of a non-believer fell on food
