Madge went out on the veranda to be on her own and read and read those last few words time and again. Oh dear. How silly, she said to herself, after letting a little tear of joy drop on the letter which she carefully blotted dry.
Her happiest minutes since returning from the CCS came to an end when she heard an excited Sister Blossom asking, ‘Has anybody seen Nurse Graves?’ She was waving a little blue envelope in the air and as Madge appeared in the doorway of the veranda simply beamed with delight as she added, ‘You’ve got another letter. It’s just arrived and I think it’s from Basil!’
Oh no, thought Madge, another one so soon just has to be bad news. She thanked dear old Blossom before returning to the veranda for a little privacy, her tummy turning over with worry. She took a deep breath and with very shaky hands opened the letter that looked so short at first glance that it worried her all the more.
Dearest Madge, it began. After the wonderful time we enjoyed together I would love to have told you this face to face . . .
She could hardly bear to read on and lifted her gaze to see a new group of Japanese soldiers, with Gurkha guards either side, being stretchered down to the POW ward.
Her chest pounded as she lifted the letter up again and continued from where she had left off.
. . . but circumstances deem it otherwise. I even tried to phone you without success. There has been absolutely wonderful news from home and because you are the most important person in my life I wanted to share it with you.
Madge’s mood turned in an instant from the verge of despair to sheer joy and she was delighted to hear from Basil that all his brothers and his sister had survived the war. Not entirely without incident, but all were alive and well.
Bill got a nasty head wound in France, but has made a full recovery, and all the others have come through unscathed. It turns out Beryl was working at Brooklands, which was bombed by the Germans because Wellington bombers were being built there.
Young Bob is also OK after joining the Air Cadets and serving at Brooklands. Later in the war he moved to Fairoaks airfield at Chobham, where he helped repair Bristol Beaufort fighters and even went up on a couple of test flights. The Germans also had a go at the airfield but without much success.
I just wish we were together to celebrate this wonderful news.
Love Basil
Madge also wished that, more than anything else in the world.
The CCS nurses were given a forty-eight-hour pass to recover from the exhausting return journey to Chittagong but after that they were put on Matron’s roster once again. Madge was listed for duty on the DI ward. Vera was on the Japanese POW casualty ward and said that the prisoner turnover was dozens every week.
‘It’s even busier than before because so many are on the brink of starvation when they arrive,’ she told Madge over a pot of afternoon tea. ‘But at least this group haven’t yet started the usual spitting.’
The respite from being used as a human spittoon was more than welcome for Madge, who had been assigned to nurse one of the sixty-two Japanese POWs who had arrived late the night before. To her astonishment, it was a woman. Lieutenant Colonel Whittaker noted in the war diary of 56 Indian General Hospital (C) on 16 June 1945, that one of the Japanese POWs ‘was a female . . . GSW back’. She was placed in a specially partitioned section of the DI ward that was as far from the Japanese POWs as possible.
She was suffering from a gunshot wound in her back which meant she had to lie face down on the bed. In spite of the constant pain she managed the sweetest of smiles at Madge’s efforts to pronounce her name, which was something like Miho.
‘She’s beautiful and speaks passable English,’ explained Madge to Vera and Phyl later that day, ‘and always says please and thank you. She told me she is a journalist and learned to speak a bit of English on a holiday in New York. Her newspaper in Tokyo sent her to Burma and after a week with a Japanese unit somewhere in the Arakan she realised that they were desperately short of food, fuel and ammunition and actually retreating from our troops. When she tried to discuss the problems with an officer to obtain background information to write a story he went straight to the unit commander who issued orders for her to be taken from their camp into the jungle and shot.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ said Vera. ‘That’s horrendous.’
‘All she remembers,’ Madge continued, ‘is waking up on a stretcher being carried from what was meant to be her jungle graveyard by two English soldiers and then being flown to Chittagong.’
‘Well, she had a very lucky escape if you ask me,’ added Phyl.
Over the next few days Madge spent as much time as possible with the lonely, frightened and badly hurt Miho, who apologised repeatedly for being such a burden. Madge washed her beautiful raven hair, cut and filed the nails of her elegant hands, and spoon-fed the perfectly mannered and quietly spoken woman at meal times.
Miho had been placed as far away as possible from the Japanese POW casualty ward
