‘There’s always the worry that one or two may be swinging the lead in a bid to get back to England,’ said Vera one evening as the girls were getting ready for bed. ‘You never can be sure, can you?’
‘That’s why we have to involve a doctor as soon as possible for troops with emotional problems,’ Phyl joined in. ‘At least they get to make the final call and we don’t have to.’
‘I find it all very difficult,’ said Madge, ‘because they’re so often vague about their worries. Not obstructive . . . far from it! They just don’t want to talk about what happened.’
‘You can’t blame any of them for that, though, can you?’ commented Phyl.
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Madge. ‘When you think what they go through in the jungle where the rustle of a leaf or twig cracking could mean the difference between life and death, the real surprise is that there aren’t many more being brought in suffering from battle fatigue.’
Madge, Vera and Phyl had been particularly impressed with the patience shown to emotionally troubled troops by Grace Padgett, a nurse they had always said hello to in Chittagong, but hadn’t socialised with much. Madge had become concerned about the stressed soldiers and, one day, asked Grace just how she coped with it.
‘Having three sisters and a brother and living on a farm in Yorkshire certainly helps . . .’ Grace then became serious and said the key thing was to try and get the boys to talk about their problems. ‘You need a lot of patience and time, which rather sadly we don’t have here in the CCS. But in my opinion it is a major breakthrough if you can get them to share their worries because it’s the first step, however tiny, on the road to recovery,’ she added.
Grace’s brother didn’t want to work on the land when he grew up so their father sent Grace to agricultural college with the aim of getting her to run the farm when he retired. She however, chose nursing rather than farming. Over the next few days, Madge discovered that she really was also a good listener and when Vera was in full voice Madge felt that was a very necessary blessing!
During one of the very few quiet periods in the whole of their tour of duty, Vera, Phyl, Grace and Madge enjoyed an extended lunch. The main topic was a long weekend in Darjeeling that Phyl and Vera had spent at the very same time that Madge and Basil were in Calcutta.
‘By far the best thing about the time Phyl and I spent there,’ said Vera, ‘was that it was full of men. Lots and lots of men!’
‘We had the time of our lives,’ laughed Phyl. Madge had heard her friends’ stories before but she saw the glow that remembering the trip brought to their faces.
‘The best day we had,’ said Vera, ‘started at two a.m. when we got up to watch dawn rise over the Himalayas. Then it was back to Darjeeling for an early breakfast, one or two pre-lunch gin and tonics, followed by a lengthy afternoon nap and then dinner and dancing in a nightclub until the early hours.’
In the end the VADs spent six weeks living under canvas, often waking to the sound of artillery units shelling the Japanese and the rattle of small-arms fire. They had also been drenched daily by endless monsoon rainstorms, but when the time came to leave the nurses were sorry their mission was coming to an end. Madge had seen first-hand what the soldiers had to put up with. There was no doubt in her mind, those boys were heroes.
The girls were thanked time and time again by patients, given bunches of divine-smelling jungle flowers and beautifully carved teak souvenirs. The finest compliment of all, however, came from a young corporal, barely out of his teens, who said he was going to let Madge in on a secret.
‘That sounds really interesting,’ said Madge. ‘I’ve got two sisters at home and neither can keep a secret. Now, what’s this one?’
‘We looked on you as our lucky mascots,’ he said. When she asked why, the reply was, ‘Because very few soldiers died from their wounds during the time you girls were nursing here. So we decided you really must be bringing us luck.’
The journey back took almost a day and a half. After weeks of being on duty round the clock the weary nurses, once safely back at 56 IGH, indulged themselves in the ultimate luxury – hours of blissfully uninterrupted sleep. The only thing that was even better for Madge was a long, lazy soak in a tub that she loaded with Coty bath cubes.
On her first afternoon back working at the hospital Madge wandered up to the nurses’ mess for a pot of tea and was given the warmest of welcomes by Sister Blossom, who rushed off to her office and reappeared minutes later with letters from Mum dating back to April, and one from Basil in Rangoon. Mum’s first was written before Winston Churchill announced the German surrender on 8 May and was full of optimism and hope that ‘once this is all sorted out we can get back to our own home in Dover’.
Happily the mail system from Rangoon to Chittagong had been re-opened for the first time in almost three years and the letter from Basil said what a marvellous job the Pioneer Corps had done in cleaning up the place. There had been no running water and little food, disease had been rife and the streets had been coated in filth
