Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (47 page)

On Boxing Day night, fortified by permission from the Matron, I went to the opera,
Madame Butterfly
, in Valletta with two medical officers and a Sister, who was not young and very far from beautiful. Even during the War quite tolerable performances were given, though most of the choruses had a Maltese tang and the progress of the opera was liable to be interrupted by ‘incidents’. On this very evening, the baritone in the midst of a passionate declamation was loudly challenged to a duel by an off-stage rival. He immediately interrupted his love-plaint to arrange time and place with the challenger, and returned amid the enthusiastic plaudits of the audience to resume his song exactly where he had broken it off.

As soon as the opera with its emotional music and heroic disturbance was over, the Sister, who had been confidently appointed my chaperon, and one of the medical officers - an ill-mannered individual remotely resembling the Kaiser, of whom I knew her to be hopelessly and inexplicably enamoured - disappeared completely for the rest of the evening. I was left to go home with the other M.O., a moustachioed middle-aged Scotsman whose presence was emphasised by a permanent aroma of whisky. He was evidently inspired - or had always intended - to emulate his colleague’s good fortune, for as we drove back in the
carrozza
along the dark road from Sliema to St George’s Bay, I found myself suddenly enfolded in a noxious embrace. I demonstrated my objection to this treatment with more vehemence than tact, and we arrived back in St George’s compound about 1 a.m., both of us sullen and speechless.

Long walks across the island, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of the older V.A.D.s who had not yet been stirred to indiscreet emotion by the coming of spring, seemed infinitely preferable to such unattractive company. Two of these women, one of whom came from Oxford and for years had played the violin in the Bach Choir Orchestra, went with me on half-day expeditions to Musta, to Dingli, to the V-shaped sandy beach at Ghain Tuffieha, to the crumbling megalithic temple at silent Hagiar Kim and to the far point of Melleha, where we looked across a dark-blue channel to the steep golden-brown rocks of Gozo rising sheer out of the water. At St Paul’s Bay we rowed in a hazardous green tub to the inhospitable rock on which the much-travelled Apostle was said to have been wrecked, and afterwards walked the six miles homeward along the stony road over the rocks, with the brilliant glow of the sunset behind us, and before us the swift star-studded darkness rising over the sea. I never felt quite at ease among those rocks; a strange silence pervaded them and a sense of being observed, as though age-old presences were watching our sacrilegious invasion with hostile, inhuman eyes.

Wherever we went the spring flowers, lovely and benevolent, mitigated the invisible antagonism of the rocks. Their colours, so clear, so delicate, so generous, smote our eyes with their candid beauty. I still remember the exquisite pang with which, after crossing a field carpeted golden and orange with oxalis and single wild marigolds, I suddenly saw for the first time the silvery pink of tall asphodels lifting their heads from the deep grass of a half-hidden glade. Between the boulders beside the road, giant irises waved their purple flags, and among the rocks a deep scarlet vetch grew from so shallow a soil that it seemed to spring from the very face of the stone, and created, quite startlingly, an illusion of spilt blood.

After describing the flowers in my letters home, I mentioned how much our comfort had lately been increased by the rather public erection of three bath huts on the high road running in front of St George’s and St Andrew’s Hospitals. No longer would it be necessary, I told my father, to rely for our major ablutions upon the tin foot-baths filled once a week from a stone vat in the yard.

‘Real hot water,’ I boasted, ‘comes out of a tap; it is worked by a geyser on a Primus stove . . . When the tents were first put up someone . . . made slits in the sides to peep through, but the damage has now been replaced and the scandal has died down! Of course you have to keep getting out of the bath to pump the Primus, which would otherwise go out, but that is a detail!’

As the bath orderly was above suspicion, and in any case had as many opportunities as he could wish of seeing the nurses standing in the main road awaiting their turn in the tent with their dressing-gowns blowing round their necks, we concluded that some of the numerous roaming Maltese males must for quite a long time have substituted for their usual evening amusements the entertainment of watching the English Sisters take their baths.

At the beginning of February I was moved from my domestic occupations in the Sisters’ quarters to the one surgical block, where none of the patients were seriously ill. Most of them had slight wounds, originally received in the campaign on the Struma, which owing to peculiarities of constitution or climate had obstinately refused to heal.

‘Our methods here . . . would cause the M.O.s and Sisters at the 1st London to hold up their professional hands in horror,’ runs one letter home. ‘It makes me smile to remember how there we had hot water that came sterilised out of the tap and so many annexes and wash-places carefully separate from one another - one sink for the dressing-bowls, one for the patients’ crocks, another for the Sisters’ tea-things, etc., etc. Here there is one (cold) tap and one sink, down which everything goes - lysol, dirty water, tealeaves, etc., and in which everything is washed up, from the dressing-bowls and soiled towels and bandages to our biscuit-tin and our soiled tea-cups! (Of course we don’t wash them all up together; we do draw the line at that!)

‘Edward and I both have recollections of the pride they took at the 1st London - not always to the comfort of the patient - in spotless, unruffled beds and beautiful white blankets. I wonder what they would think if they had to try and make comfortable beds out of rough brown Army blankets and mattresses of three ‘biscuits’ - which will never lie properly together - and counterpanes invariably dirty. Here of course you may dust and clean and shake, and shake and dust and clean till you are tired without ever making much impression, as the whole place is so dusty, and one warm gust of sirocco will undo half an hour’s work in half a minute.

‘Yesterday one man couldn’t have his bed made and had to lie between blankets half the morning, because it was the day for changing sheets and not quite the right number had come up (we only have the
exact
number). It is very complimentary to call them sheets, too; some are of the consistency of muslin curtains and others are more hole than sheet. However, Army equipment
is
Army equipment, and you have to hang on to the last thread of a sheet and the last prong of a fork, lest when the day of reckoning comes you should be found wanting. Equipment day is the bane of one’s life in the Army; it is a sort of periodic stocktaking, in which you have to produce everything (or the remains of everything) that has been issued to you in the equipment line. So if you break a cup or tear a sheet or burn a duster you have carefully to keep the fragments, partly to show that you really did have them, partly to prove that you have not absconded with them and put them to some illegitimate use, but chiefly because it is Red Tape, which is the most binding thing in this world and far more binding, it is to be hoped, than anything in the next.’

The leisurely life on this surgical block left plenty of time for reading the various newspapers sent to me from England. From one of these I learnt that the new President of the Board of Education, Mr H. A. L. Fisher, had lately written to the Principal of Somerville deprecating the departure of Oxford women students on war-service. The information left me unperturbed; it belonged to a life which seemed too remote and irrelevant to concern me any more. Some of the dons, I reflected, were doubtless glad to fortify unquiet consciences with such a pronouncement; if patriotic hankerings after war-service drove even the women out of Oxford, Othello’s occupation would indeed be gone, and his - or her - excuse for continuing a pleasant academic life in wartime would no longer exist.

My Classical tutor, I felt sure, would not be influenced by the Fisher declaration. At heart she was always a pioneer, an adventurer, who never accepted the limitations imposed by donnish standards, and later in the spring of 1917 she went to Salonika to act as orderly at one of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Her boat, she wrote to me after landing, had anchored for twelve hours outside Valletta, but she had not been allowed to communicate with me or to go ashore. She stayed in Salonika for some months, fighting summer heat and disease with her usual gallantry, and was there during the great fire which devastated half the town.

8

By the same mail as the newspaper from which I learnt that patriotism amongst Oxford women was now a discredited virtue, came a long communication from Edward, who described one of the characteristic problems of an acting company commander.

‘I . . . spent some time this morning writing a letter on the usual difficult subject: - I had a letter from an innkeeper in B——the other day saying that a certain Corporal S——in my company had an illegitimate child by a Miss J——, who is the innkeeper’s ward, and was not paying for its upkeep. Under such circumstances a man’s pay is compulsorily stopped to the extent of 4
d
. a day, as I expect you know. I interviewed the corporal, who is a very decent boy not yet nineteen and found that he was quite willing to marry the girl but couldn’t get his parents’ consent and didn’t want to quarrel with them and so get out of any inheritance there might be, etc. Of course he cannot get out to France until he is nineteen and I explained to him and he clearly understood where his duty lay, especially in the event of his being killed, because his parents will allow the marriage after the War. S——wrote to his father again for consent on Friday and got a negative answer and so asked me to write to him this morning, which I did . . . It is the old, old story, as old as the hills, but these things take up a company commander’s time.

‘Do you know, dear child,’ he went on, ‘that women are a great problem to me. I meet very few, of these I dislike almost all, and I don’t think I understand any of them. Of course I am speaking about girls of my own age. Most other officers of my age seem to know any number of fairly decent girls; now and again of course they seem to get hold of a rotten one and sometimes even a prostitute, but I never seem to meet any. Can you throw any light on the matter and do you think I shall ever meet the right one, because at present I can’t conceive the possibility? . . . I am inclined to think that my lack of knowledge of women is due to an incomplete upbringing. What do you think?’

On the island, as the work became still lighter and the weather still warmer, we too had our sex-incidents, and some of them were as crude, and as time-worn, as the one described by Edward. Only a few days before I received his letter, a V.A.D. and a naval officer had been surprised late at night in a disused tent beside St George’s Bay, but had managed to escape before the identity of either was discovered. The episode was followed at our hospital by a series of interviews in which every V.A.D. was individually catechised by the Matron, a gaunt, shy, benevolent woman to whom the whole affair must have been purgatory. These interviews, being ‘strictly private’, were naturally discussed afterwards with mutual enjoyment by all the interviewed, whose interrogations appeared very similar to my own.

‘I am asking you to tell me the truth, nurse.’

‘Yes, Matron; of course.’

‘We know it must have been someone either from this hospital or St Andrew’s.’

‘Yes, Matron.’ I resisted the temptation to ask how she knew, since all V.A.D. uniforms looked identical in the dark, and if any girl wanted to commit what was technically a misdemeanour, common sense would not seem to suggest a spot within a hundred yards of her own hospital.

‘I am putting you on your honour, nurse.’

‘Yes, Matron.’

‘You were not the person?’

‘No, Matron.’

I went out. So far as I know, her two hours of embarrassed questioning did not succeed in their object. I was not the culprit, for I was still too deeply and romantically in love with a memory to have any appetite for sexual unorthodoxies, but I am not sure that I should have owned up if I had been. To confess guilt would have meant being sent home under a cloud certain to eclipse the chances of further war-work, at a time when every intelligent person who had acquired the efficiency and staying-power only attainable after long experience was a strong link in the forged chain of active endurance.

In Malta we often envied the women doctors, whose complete freedom to associate with their male colleagues appeared to result mainly in the most determined chastity. At St George’s the staff included quite a number of medical women, since the War Office, having at last decided to employ them, evidently regarded Malta - where there was now so little serious illness - as a suitable place for such a desperate experiment.

One of these women, an elderly spinster whom everyone called ‘Auntie’, showed her determination to make herself felt by putting her patients on so many medicines that the V.A.D. who carried the medicine-basket round the block had a back-breaking half-hour after every meal. Another, a small brunette known to the nursing staff as ‘Kitty’, cultivated a flirtatious femininity, and appeared on her round as orderly officer in frilly evening dresses reminiscent of a four-year-old at a juvenile party. But most of them apparently belonged to the coat-and-skirt species, with an official manner and the traditional belief - which is fast being abandoned by more recently qualified women - that their wisest course was to model themselves upon their male predecessors, thus tending to repeat some of men’s oldest mistakes and to reproduce their lop-sided values.