Survivor (48 page)

She giggled then, covering her mouth
with her hand.

Morgan laughed too, and soon both of
them were hugging and laughing, more from the relief of getting an awkward subject
out of the way than because it was truly funny.

‘So are you glad I’m coming
to the Borough?’ Mariette asked a little later.

‘You haven’t said what you
are going to be doing there,’ he said with a grin. ‘If it’s just
to check up on me, I might not be so pleased.’

‘Administrative work,’ she
said. ‘Typing up requisition lists, writing letters, that sort of stuff. But
as Dr Hambling told them I was very good at listening to people’s problems
here and helping to find solutions, I will also be working with the
almoner.’

‘Good luck with that one!’
Morgan raised one eyebrow. ‘Miss Wainwright is a real fire-eating dragon. I
don’t think she actually listens to anyone with problems, she just shouts them
down.’

‘Maybe I’ll be able to tame
her,’ Mariette said.

‘If anyone could, it would be
you,’ he said. ‘Have they found you some accommodation?’

She nodded. ‘I’ve got a room
in the nurses’ home. Mr Mercer apparently suggested that. I’ve been
lucky that I had him and Dr Hambling on my side.’

‘How about Sybil and Ted? Are they
disappointed you aren’t going back to them?’

Mariette pulled a face. ‘I
don’t think Sybil approves at all. I think she’d like to baby me and
display me as her private war trophy. But I don’t want that, and I want to be
near you.’

‘We
won’t see much of one another when the invasion begins,’ Morgan said.
‘I’m hoping there won’t be as many wounded as there were at
Dunkirk, but it could possibly be worse.’

It was a general assumption that the
Allies were going to invade France during the late spring or early summer of 1944
because of the vast numbers of troops arriving all along the south coast, but
especially in Portsmouth and Southampton. Mariette never went into the centre of
Southampton, but she often heard the nurses talking excitedly about the sheer
numbers of American soldiers there, and arranging to go to dances to meet some of
them.

As spring turned to summer, there was a
palpable buzz of expectation as people thought the invasion was imminent. But no one
knew anything for sure – not the date it would start, or which part of France would
be targeted. Around the start of June, a rumour flew around that it was going to be
through the Pas-de-Calais. But that turned out to be false information, leaked so
that the German generals would send the bulk of their troops there to defend it.

Yet it was obvious that the invasion was
about to start when people reported 2,000 naval ships lying in the English Channel,
barrage balloons flying to protect shipping from enemy fighter planes, and countless
minesweepers clearing enemy mines. On 5th June, hundreds of Allied bombers roared
off overhead, and the muffled sound of heavy bombing could be heard coming from the
coastal towns in France.

Everyone had theories, and many claimed
to be ‘in the know’, but it was generally thought the invasion must take
place on 6th June. There would be a full moon that night and
a very high tide on the beaches of Normandy, which would
get the boats over the traps the Germans had set on the beaches to rip out the
bottom of any landing craft.

At all the hospitals along the south
coast, nurses, doctors and other staff were poised for the inevitable casualties. At
the Borough as many wards as possible had been cleared in readiness, though the bulk
of the wounded would go to Netley Military Hospital, which had been taken over by
the Americans.

Morgan had passed his final nursing exam
with distinction, and doctors at the Netley had asked for him to be sent over there
to help them. They felt he had special abilities; he had been a soldier himself,
severely wounded, and he was known to be extraordinarily knowledgeable about battle
wounds. Although Mariette was very glad his talents were being recognized, it was
ironic that he was to be whisked away from her just as she had got close to him and
was seeing him every day.

But she had more than enough work to
keep her busy, taking dictation from senior personnel and typing out their letters
and notes. So far Miss Wainwright hadn’t allowed her to talk to any of the
patients who came to the almoner’s office with problems or questions. All she
would let Mariette do was type up reports and file them. Morgan had been right about
her: she was a dragon, rude to patients, insensitive to their problems and very
high-handed. But then, she was going on for sixty, and she’d been at the
Borough for eighteen years so had made the job her own.

Despite Miss Wainwright, Mariette loved
her new job. It wasn’t difficult, and after being so bored for so long it was
a pleasure to be busy and needed. She already knew a few of the nursing staff from
when she’d been a patient at the hospital, and she soon made new friends too.
She didn’t feel like
a freak
either. Perhaps it was because the staff in a hospital were used to seeing all kinds
of injuries and disabilities, but they didn’t stare or, even worse, avoid eye
contact. She was often asked how she’d lost her leg and how she felt about her
prosthetic limb, and she found she preferred openness to awkward silence.

Her room in the nurses’ home,
which was a detached house in the hospital grounds, was tiny, so small that some of
the nurses called it a cupboard. But she had so few belongings that it didn’t
matter. And she only slept in there, as there was a communal sitting room downstairs
where all the off-duty nurses gathered in the evenings.

On the evening of 6th June, everyone
dropped everything to gather around the wireless and listen to the news. They heard
how there had been a pre-dawn drop of paratroopers into France who had cut telephone
and power lines. At 6 a.m., tens of thousands of soldiers had gone ashore in
amphibious vehicles or landing craft on four different beaches in Normandy. The
navy, which had been bombarding the coastal area with heavy fire, kept it up for an
hour after the landings.

There was jubilation and awe in the
voice of the newsreader. Jubilation, as it seemed all the many plans to deceive the
enemy into thinking the invasion would be at Calais had worked, and the German
troops in Normandy had been caught napping. Awe, as the huge scale of the operation
was revealed, a magnificent show of brilliant organization, sheer power and
guts.

But even as the nurses were cheering and
hugging each other – because this invasion would surely bring the Germans to their
knees and bring an end to the war – they all knew that within twenty-four hours they
would be tending the first wave of hundreds, maybe thousands of casualties. It
was a sobering thought too that many of
the men who had jumped so bravely from their boats and other craft, and waded ashore
ready to fight, would have died on those Normandy beaches.

As far as Mariette knew, her brothers
were still in Italy, although there were New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians
fighting alongside the American and British soldiers in France. She could imagine
how fearful her parents would be when the news of the invasion reached New Zealand.
They would be remembering the horrors they had both been through in France in the
last war, and they couldn’t be certain that Alexis and Noel weren’t in
the thick of it.

Sometimes Mariette wished she was home
so much that it made her cry. She longed to feel her mother’s arms around her,
to hear that trill of laughter that was so instantly recognizable as Belle’s.
But more than anything she would like to sit down with her mother and really talk,
not idle gossip about what the neighbours were doing, or the latest fashions, but
about the experiences Mariette had lived through in England, and about her
mother’s life when she was a similar age. She wanted to know the real Belle,
not the mother, but the girl, and to understand all the forces that had shaped her
and made her the woman she was now.

Her father too. He was a tough, strong
man – sometimes a touch scary – who had taught her to sail, swim and fish, but could
comfort a small child just as well as any woman. Even as a small girl she’d
always sensed there was more to him than papa, fisherman and sailor. Noah had hinted
at things in her father’s past, and Mariette wanted to know about them.

And then there was Mog. No one had ever
really explained how Mog had come to be like a mother to Belle. Mariette knew Mog
came from Wales, but she’d never said what happened to her family, or even if
she had ever gone back to see
them.
She’d always just been a grandmother figure – loving, sweet-natured – a
fantastic needlewoman, and the person Mariette had confided in.

Nearly six years was too long to be away
from them. She ached for family dinners around the kitchen table, evenings spent
playing board games, and sitting with them all by the fire in the winter. It was
funny that she’d had to go to the other side of the world to see what
treasures she had back home. She felt that when she finally got back to Russell, she
would never want to leave again.

But, however much she wanted her home,
she wanted Morgan too. With him being moved to Netley, she’d had no time to
work on him. And even when he was here, it was almost impossible to be alone. She
couldn’t walk far over fields and rough ground, and Morgan wasn’t keen
on going into pubs or cafés where people were likely to stare.

Would it always be like that? And if
there were always barriers, how would she ever find out for certain if Morgan was
the man she really wanted to spend the rest of her life with?

On the evening of 9th June, the first
casualties of D-Day, as everyone was calling the invasion of France, arrived at the
Borough. They had received emergency care at dressing stations and on the ship that
brought them back to Southampton, but some were very seriously injured.

Mariette happened to be going past the
emergency treatment room and saw one man with half his face blown away. She was told
later by Julia, a nurse she’d become very friendly with, that there were
spinal wounds, eye injuries, legs and arms blown off, and that many of these
soldiers would never walk again.

The following morning, Miss Wainwright
told Mariette that she was to go and get the personal details of the injured.
Each of them had to be listed and their
families contacted, if they weren’t able to do it themselves.

Miss Wainwright was a bully, a
sixty-year-old tyrant with iron-grey hair and a sour expression who had managed to
keep her job as almoner because, although unsympathetic to patients, she dealt with
them in an efficient manner. Mariette wanted to laugh when she realized she’d
found a chink in the woman’s armour. She was squeamish! That was why she was
sending Mariette to do a job she should be doing herself.

‘Don’t take all day about
it,’ the almoner barked at her. ‘You’ll find the forms we use for
this in the stationery cupboard. And mind you get all their details.’

‘What do I do if they are
unconscious and can’t tell me?’ she asked.

‘Then get the details recorded on
their dog tag,’ Miss Wainwright said irritably. ‘As long as we know
their name and regiment, that will suffice for the time being.’

As Mariette walked into the first ward,
with twenty-four men lying there, some with heavily bandaged heads and chests,
others with cages under their blankets or arms already amputated, she thought of her
mother. Belle had once described her first day at the Brook War Hospital in London,
where she had been a volunteer. She said the horror of it was almost too much to
take in, with the sight of blood-stained bandages, white faces etched with the pain,
the smells and the low moans of pain the men couldn’t control.

Mariette saw all that now, and more,
especially how young some of these soldiers were. Her heart swelled with compassion
as their eyes turned to her, silently begging for her help.

She had seen so many injured civilians
whilst she was in the East End, and that had been heart-rending, but these men made
her think of her brothers who might, for all she
knew, be lying in a hospital bed somewhere, afraid,
hurting and feeling very alone.

All the men on this ward were English.
Mariette supposed that the Americans had gone to Netley. She did as she’d been
told and got the forms filled out, but she didn’t leave it at that. She asked
each man how he was feeling. And if he wasn’t married, she asked if there was
someone special, other than his parents, that he wanted to send a message to. She
told them all how proud their families would be of them, and how proud England was
of her brave boys.

Some cried, held her hand and sobbed out
how terrifying and confusing it had been on the beach at Normandy. One told her that
after he was wounded, he ran along the beach trying to find his platoon, but he was
afraid he would be accused of desertion. Another told her that his best friend had
his head shot off right in front of him. He needed to talk about it, and Mariette
didn’t care if Miss Wainwright took her to task for taking so long, she was
going to listen.

It was late in the afternoon when she
returned to the almoner’s office with the completed forms. Miss Wainwright
looked as if she’d spent the day sucking lemons.

‘And where have you been?’
she said.

‘Collecting all the
information,’ Mariette said.

‘And why, pray, did it take so
long?’

‘Because some of them wanted to
talk, and I listened,’ Mariette retorted.

‘You are not here to take the
place of a relative or psychiatrist. You are merely here for clerical duties. And
now you’ll have to stay late to type the letters for those unable to do it
themselves,’ she said.

‘I was intending to do that
anyway,’ Mariette said. ‘And, with respect, I believe that it is
everyone’s duty to support
and
help those who have fought for our country. If listening helps, then I will do
it.’

‘You insolent little
baggage!’ Miss Wainwright exclaimed. ‘This is my department, and I will
have it run my way.’

Mariette was tired, her leg was aching,
and it had been a long and distressing day. She had done what she thought was right,
and she wasn’t going to lie down and let this woman walk all over her.

‘And you, Miss Wainwright, are an
apology for a human being. You are more suited to being a wardress in a prison than
an almoner.’

The woman got to her feet and looked
like she was going to strike Mariette. ‘How dare you speak to me like
that!’ she snarled. ‘I shall speak to Matron and get you
dismissed.’

‘Good luck with that.’
Mariette shrugged. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to
do.’

Miss Wainwright picked up her handbag
and her cardigan, and swept out of the office. Mariette sat down at her desk and
began typing an address on an envelope. There was a special preprinted letter to be
used to inform relatives when a member of their family had been admitted here. No
details were ever given at this stage; the relatives had to telephone or visit to be
told. Mariette had no intention of going against the rules, but she did have the
addresses of two sweethearts that the men were afraid wouldn’t be
informed.

Some of the injured men came from the
north of England. As she typed the addresses, she wondered if anyone would be able
to come to see them. She remembered how low she had felt while in hospital, and how
much she would have liked to see someone from her family. If it hadn’t been
for Morgan, she didn’t know how she would have coped.