Arthur said that as there was no reply when he knocked on the kitchen door he gave it a little kick and it just sort of burst open. ‘There was nobody in the kitchens so I made it myself, love,’ he added, before resuming his lonely patrol. The corporal was staring at the ceiling when Madge walked in with the omelette and because his hands were still so painful she fed him a forkful at a time. After eating what was his biggest meal since arriving from the casualty clearing station Madge thought he would soon fall back to sleep.
Instead he talked, with a wistful look on those painfully distorted features, about his ‘sweet and beautiful girlfriend’ back home and how she had given up the chance of a place at university to become a nurse. She had even tried to get a posting to India to be near him, but had been turned down because she was just nineteen.
‘What will she think if she sees me like this?’ he asked.
Madge didn’t even need to think about what to say in response because the answer came straight from her heart.
‘If she’s a nurse, then she will love you even more.’
15
Letters From Home
The hours were awful, the heat and humidity were suffocating and the mosquitos were lethal, but Madge was happy because she felt needed and appreciated at 56 IGH. Yet one autumn Monday morning she woke up feeling down in the dumps and couldn’t work out what the problem was.
Depression could be a side effect of mepacrine but she had been taking it religiously for months so that wasn’t to blame. There was no food rationing or blackouts or doodlebugs or depth charges to worry about and the team spirit at the hospital was first class, but, Madge realised with a tug at her chest, there was no dear Mum, no Doris and no Doreen. For the first time since walking out of her twenty-first birthday in tears on the troopship Strathnaver Madge was homesick.
That day everything reminded Madge of home. The smell of newly baked bread wafted down from the kitchens of the big house and made her think of happy days as a child in Dover. The deep red roses on the veranda brought to mind the beautiful blooms in the back garden of the house in High Wycombe, and the sound of laughter in the nurses’ mess triggered images of her sisters Doreen and Doris joking together. Mum’s advice would be to put your shoulders back and get on with it, she told herself, and she tried.
There had been no letters from home, or indeed any mail at all, for weeks and Madge was so blue she certainly didn’t expect any that morning. However, Sister Blossom, who handed out the mail, had a little treasure trove for her that included a card from her cousin Ruby in Anerley and a big envelope from Auntie Bea in Dover, who had enclosed several pages from the Dover Express.
By far the pick of the bunch was a lengthy and funny letter from Mum saying how proud she was that Doris had joined the Women’s Land Army and was working on a farm near East Grinstead in Sussex. Madge could almost see the twinkle in Mum’s eye as she’d written about it.
Can you believe that one of the first things she learned to do was drive a tractor? My little Doris, driving a tractor! Although I told her that driving a tractor was better than driving me mad by coming home late from all those dances.
Mum also said that she’d caught Doreen dancing in front of the lounge mirror with the wireless on full blast as Vera Lynn sang ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover’.
Doreen looked so graceful and beautiful that I joined in and we had a lovely time. We just wished you could have been with us.
Lily’s words helped lift Madge’s spirits and she put the bundle of mail into her little bag and walked into the dining room for breakfast. Vera waved her over and couldn’t wait to say that she had a bit of gossip.
‘That’s very unusual for you,’ smiled Madge.
Vera blurted out, ‘Guess who’s coming to see us today?’ Without waiting for an answer Vera said she had been told that Gertrude Corsar would be visiting 56 IGH. ‘Apparently she wants to see all two hundred and fifty of us to make sure we’ve settled into our “arduous and testing new lives”. But I’m not sure what that means exactly,’ said Vera.
‘All it means,’ said Madge, ‘is that she’s trying to make sure that we are all OK and I take my hat off to her for that. She really is a good old stick.’
Madge went to her next shift feeling much cheerier than she had that morning. One of her patients, Adam, who had been very poorly with amoebic dysentery, was due to be released and returned to his unit, which he said was involved in heavy fighting in the Arakan.
Adam had told Madge that he sold flowers at Columbia Road market in the East End of London and the other lads in the ward nicknamed him ‘L.O. Flower’ because that’s what he always said to nurses who came to clean him up. He was the only patient she had nursed who survived on custard and cans of British army tinned fruit for a number of days before eventually returning to a normal diet.
‘I hate that bully beef stuff and my stomach is so upset I can’t eat nuffink else,’ he insisted in his Cockney twang.
Madge liked ‘L.O.’ and when he started to recover he helped out in the ward, happily fluffing up pillows, lending a hand to turn some of the bigger patients over to stop them getting bed sores and writing letters home for one soldier, whose right arm was heavily bandaged and in a sling. The nursing sepoys loved him
