Across the Mersey (32 page)

Jean had started to tremble. Even though Luke was safe, the pictures Sam was creating inside her head were sharply shocking and painful.

‘Three days it took them to reach Dunkirk, and then another two waiting to be taken off, all that time with no food and only the water they’d brought with them.’

Sam sighed. ‘Our Luke was only a lad when he left us, Jean, but he’s come back a man. They were dive-bombed by the Germans over and over again, and Luke said that you never knew when it was going to happen but when it did you didn’t dare leave the line in case you lost your place so you just had to throw yourself down in the sand where you were and hope for the best.

‘He said that the captain, the same one that had threatened to shoot his own men, had to put a bullet through a poor lad who’d been that badly wounded he couldn’t have survived. Then, when
they finally got their turn to get onto one of the boats taking the men out to the ships, it almost capsized and the three men last on had to get off again. Luke said he saw a ship bombed and set ablaze from stem to stern, men jumping off it in all directions.’

‘Oh, Sam, it just doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Maybe not, love, but it has to be thought about, because if we don’t think about it then we won’t fight ruddy Hitler and he won’t be stopped. We need to stop him, Jean. We need to stop him, and we ruddy well will.’

Grace had never seen the area inside the main entrance to the hospital as busy and crowded as it was today. Everywhere she looked there seemed to be men in uniform – mainly the walking wounded, who had been told to report to their nearest hospital once they reached home, and also, of course, the close relatives of those who had received far more serious injuries and who had been brought to the hospital by ambulance.

She just had time to dash outside and have a quick word with Teddy before she was due back on her ward, to reassure herself that he was not overdoing things, and she was squeezing past the crowd in the doorway when she heard Luke calling her name.

By the time she had turned round to look for him Luke had reached her and her relief at seeing him uninjured made her hug him tightly and blink back her tears.

‘Come and say hello to Teddy,’ she begged him. ‘He’ll want to hear everything. We’ve read such dreadful stories in the papers.’

A quick look at Luke’s face told her that the reality had been even more terrible than the stories.

‘I’ll catch up with Teddy another time,’ Luke told her. ‘I was hoping that Lillian might be on duty. I wanted to tell her myself that I’d made it back. She’s the loveliest girl and very special to me, Grace.’

Grace’s heart sank.

‘She is, and she’s on Women’s Surgical, but I doubt that you’ll be able to see her. The sister on that ward is a real dragon. Luke …’ She wanted to warn him not to expect too much. She had no idea what Lillian might have said privately to him, of course, in the letters they had been exchanging, but she did know that Lillian had been going out with other men, and that she did not in any way consider herself committed to him.

‘At least Charlie’s safe. He sent us a telegram to tell us.’

‘Did he say when he was coming home?’ Bella asked her mother. Every returning BEF man who did not require hospital treatment had been given an extended period of home leave.

‘He says that he isn’t. He feels it’s his duty to help one of his friends who had a bit of a bad time so he’s going to be staying with him in London.’

Bella yawned in the afternoon sunshine of her
parents’ garden. Being pregnant was so dreadfully tiring. All she seemed to want to do was sleep.

Teddy had been as pleased about Luke’s safe return as Grace had known he would be, and Grace’s heart was light with relief as she made her way back to the ward. The four empty beds were now occupied, along with the small private side wards. An army officer, his own arm bandaged, was touring the beds, accompanied by Sister.

‘We’ve got six new patients down from surgery, Campion,’ Staff Nurse Reid informed Grace crisply, ‘two who are very poorly and in the side wards; two with amputations and two with shrapnel wounds. Go and collect the necessary bowls and start with these two in beds twelve and fourteen.’

The bowls were for the patients to be sick in after they recovered from the anaesthetic, and beds twelve and fourteen held the less seriously injured shrapnel-wounded patients who would come round properly first.

The young soldier in bed twelve retched gratefully into the bowl, looking embarrassed when he had finished, and Grace wiped his face and then allowed him a small sip of water.

‘Eee, Nurse, I feel that helpless, just like a baby,’ he told her.

‘Well, you aren’t a baby; you’re a very brave man,’ Grace comforted him, ‘but you must try to lie still. We don’t want all Mr Leonard’s nice stitches coming out, do we?’

The grin he gave her told her that she had hit
the right note. And Grace smiled at him as she took his temperature and then noted it down on the chart at the bottom of his bed.

It was normal, which was good, because hopefully that meant that his wound was infection free.

He was already closing his eyes and relaxing into sleep as she moved from his bed to the next one.

Its dark-haired occupant was lying with his face turned away from her, his shoulder bandaged.

‘I dare say you’ll be feeling a bit poorly,’ she began as she walked round the other side of the bed, but the automatic words she had now learned by heart remained unspoken when she recognised him.

‘Seb … Sebastion.’

His eyes had been closed but now they opened and he focused on her. When he had told her how important it was that she went ahead with her nurse’s training, Grace knew that neither of them had really imagined that those words would have such a real and personal meaning.

‘You …’ He was frowning now and Grace suspected he was having difficulty remembering her name. Any chagrin she might have felt was quickly set aside by her training and professionalism as she recognised that he was in pain and still very much under the influence of the anaesthetic.

‘Yes, it’s me, Grace Campion,’ she told him calmly. ‘You’ve had an operation to have some shrapnel removed from your shoulder, and I dare say you’re
feeling a bit poorly right now. You may want …’ Just in time Grace thrust the bowl under his chin.

Unlike her first patient, Seb had a temperature a bit higher than it should have been. She made the appropriate note on his chart.

It had given her quite a turn at first to see him lying there. She’d certainly make sure she gave him the best nursing she could to thank him for what he had done for her.

She told Teddy about the coincidence of having Seb on her ward as they shared a cigarette together after she had come off duty.

‘I’m so glad that Luke is all right. Mum will be over the moon. He’s her favourite, although she’d never admit it. He told me that two of the men in front of him in the queue for the boats were killed when they were dive-bombed. Those poor boys, Teddy – from what I’ve heard they’ve been through so much. It’s a miracle we’ve got as many of them back as we did, but Luke said he reckoned there were a lot that didn’t make it.’

‘Aye,’ Teddy agreed, ‘and a lot that did make it that are in a bad way. We brought some back from Lime Street with injuries that bad you wonder if they’d have been better off if someone had finished them off,’ Teddy told her bluntly.

‘We’ve got two boys on our ward in a terrible state,’ Grace agreed. ‘Mr Leonard’s done his best but one poor boy has half his face missing and the other’s lost his mind. He still thinks he’s on the beach. It’s pitiful, Teddy.’

He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a brief hug. ‘You’ve got to be strong for them, Grace, otherwise you won’t be able to do your job. They’ve done their bit for us, now we owe it to them to do ours.’

‘Luke said that the worst thing to bear was feeling ashamed because they’d had to retreat. He said they couldn’t believe it when they were on the train and they saw so many people at every station they passed through waving to them and cheering them on.’

‘That’s because it weren’t their fault … I’ve been down to the Odeon today and booked us tickets for that
Gone With the Wind
you said you wanted to see. I thought it might cheer you up a bit.’

Grace had almost forgotten about the film that had taken America by storm and which had now premiered in London.

‘Oh, Teddy, you are kind,’ she told him gratefully.

‘We could have a bit of summat to eat first, if you like, p’haps at Joe Lyons?’ Teddy suggested.

‘I’d like that,’ Grace agreed, stifling a small yawn.

It had been a long and very tiring day, and the relief of having Luke safely home on top of so much hard work had left her feeling drained.

‘You look half asleep on your feet,’ said Teddy. ‘You’d better go in and get some kip.’

‘Yes, I must,’ Grace agreed. ‘Sister warned us before we came off duty that we’re going to have to make up more beds in the morning because more troop trains are due. We may even need to put beds in the corridors.’ She stifled another yawn.
Britain might be on daylight saving time and it was still light outside, but Sister was a stickler for routine and rules, so that on her ward, the blackout curtains were put in place at ten p.m. promptly, and her patients expected to go immediately to sleep.

Seb, though, could not sleep. He had refused the morphine he had been offered by the very efficient-looking senior nurse who had come round after Grace had gone off duty, and now his shoulder hurt like hell, far more so than it had done before he had had the shrapnel removed. Quite a coincidence, being nursed by Grace …

Lying here surrounded by injured men from Dunkirk reinforced the enormity of what had happened, and the battle that now lay ahead of them if they were to have any hope of winning this war. So many thought that they could not win it.

The man in the side ward who had lost his mind was reliving the hours he had spent on the beach, sobbing and screaming as he pleaded to be saved.

The solder in the next bed to his own muttered, ‘Poor sod. Every time I close me eyes all I can see is me mate lying there next to me with his legs blown off, and saying he was worried about getting in one of the boats because he couldn’t swim. We had to leave him there on the beach. Best not to think about it, though, otherwise you’d go as mad as him over there. Then ruddy Hitler would have won, wouldn’t he,’ cos he won’t be doing no more fighting. I will, though, and when I do, and when I aim that gun, it will be me mate I’ll be thinking
about. I can’t bring him back but I can sure as hell make them pay for what they did to him.’

The screaming had stopped now but the sobbing continued. Seb thought of Marie. There didn’t seem much chance of the French and those British who had been left to fight alongside them holding back the Germans for very long.

The Germans would deal ruthlessly with anyone who opposed them, and Marie was so bloody patriotic and proud of it that she would stand up to them and put herself in danger. He had never known anyone like her. Being French had been more important to her than anything else, including being a woman. She put many men he knew to shame, including himself. He could quite easily have imagined her in a different age, storming the Bastille and demanding liberty for the people and death for those who oppressed them. But knowing that could not take away the guilt he felt at leaving and being safe, whilst she and her family were not.

‘They have their work and you have yours,’ his commanding officer had told him. ‘That is the nature of this work. You have done your bit with them in the field, now you are needed here to work on something else.’

‘Have you heard the latest?’ Hannah asked Grace as they walked to their rooms together. ‘Lillian’s found herself that medic she was wanting; one of the new housemen, that one who caught her when she fainted. Doreen says he’s besotted with her and she’s like a cat with a full bowl of cream.
What’s wrong?’ she asked when she saw Grace’s expression.

‘Luke, my brother, came to see me this afternoon. He was at Dunkirk and lucky enough not get be injured. I did try to warn him not to get too keen on Lillian, but she’s obviously still been writing to him and he seems to think that they’re an item.’

‘Oh, what rotten luck for him,’ Hannah sympathised. ‘She’ll have to tell him, of course. Let’s just hope that she lets him down lightly.’

‘Yes,’ Grace agreed hollowly.

Seb watched as Grace approached his bed. He hadn’t slept very well and the wound in his shoulder was throbbing painfully.

The men who had been on the ward for the greatest length of time had been quick to fill in the new arrivals on the ward’s routine and its nurses. Grace, he had learned, was well liked by the patients, who considered her to be kind and compassionate as well as a good nurse.

‘A lovely-looking lass,’ an all,’ one of the men had said. ‘Walking out with one of the ambulance drivers, she is, so I’ve heard.’

Seb wasn’t surprised, of course, that a pretty girl like Grace was walking out with someone.

He remembered very well how tempted to kiss her he had been himself. The Tennis Club dance seemed to belong to another life now, one he could hardly relate to any more. He tried to move and stopped as pain shot through his shoulder.

Immediately Grace was at his bedside, smiling calmly as she fluffed up his pillow and poured him a fresh glass of water.

To his embarrassment his body was responding to the thought of kissing her in a way it had no right to at all. To stop it he said to her, ‘It’s not just a nurse’s uniform you’ve got now, from what I hear. You’re going steady with an ambulance driver as well.’

Grace looked over her shoulder to make sure that Sister wasn’t watching them. They weren’t supposed to talk about their private lives to the patients.

‘If you’re meaning Teddy, then him and me aren’t going steady, we’re just friends,’ she told him with great dignity.

Seb was surprised at how much that pleased him.

‘I’ve just got to take your temperature now,’ said Grace, determined to be professional, ‘and if you could use this …’