The Bannister Girls (24 page)

Within weeks they had become seasoned V.A.D.s, and thoughts of anything so light and frothy, anything so normal, as a stage show, was farthest from any of their minds. Green and Martin had been put straight into the surgical section of the hospital, having done some nursing in England. The Sister in charge told Angel and Margot to report to the recovery wards, where Doctor Lancing was expecting them.

‘What a bloody name for a doctor,' Margot stuttered. ‘God, I'm scared, Angel. And what about you? Why aren't they giving you an ambulance?'

‘I don't know! Why do you expect me to know everything?'

‘I was only trying to be helpful,' Margot said resentfully. ‘I thought that was why you came, to drive ambulances.'

They learned very quickly that they did as they were told. If there were weeping wounds to be dressed that didn't need expert attention, they dressed them. If there were sheets to be changed from the disgusting mess some of the poor devils made on them, they changed them. If there were heads to be held while wounded soldiers spewed blood and vomit into metal containers, they held them. If there were nightmares to share in the dead of night, they shared them.

They learned of more horrors of the Front from the babblings of delirious men than were ever reported in English newspapers. They heard young boys boast of the effectiveness of pissing on rags and pressing them to their noses to combat the awful gas attacks. They learned of the lice that crawled into a man's skin until he felt he was being eaten alive. They came to recognise the pungent smell of creosote as the endless stretcher cases were brought in from the trenches.

‘Kills the bloody lice all right, darling,' one of the remnants of Kitchener's army could still joke in the midst of appalling wounds. ‘They tell us it makes the trenches more hygenic, see? What a bloody laugh that is, when you're slipping and sliding in somebody else's shit. ‘Course, they forget to tell you the creosote brings you out in blisters if it gets on your skin or your clothes. Seen some of the blisters, big as ass-holes, have you?'

Angel nodded without expression, feeling the depth of the men's degradation that they could speak so freely and not notice.

‘You should do as I did, mate,' the man in the next bed guffawed. Angel found it hard to look at him because of the gaping hole in his face that was raw and livid. ‘The little bastards lay their eggs in the seams of your clothes, so you run a lighted candle up the seams. That soon gets the little turds hopping. You learn plenty of new tricks in a war.'

Angel and Margot were learning them too. They learned to close their ears to the interesting discussions between patients on the merits and demerits of ridding themselves of lice. They tried to ignore the scathing insults that passed between the genuinely wounded, and the despised S.I.W.s who had worked their passage home – their ‘Blighty one'. Cowards who were brought in with knowingly self-inflicted wounds were the lowest of the low.

They had to harden themselves to the terrible cries and screams that permeated the hospital walls, because if they didn't, they would never have been able to carry on. They shared the hazards of nursing to the best of their capabilities, and tried to hide their pity at the sight of the men in their torn and ragged blood-stained uniforms, and the disagreeable shock of finding some of the clothing alive with maggots and lice. They tried not to notice the nausea that came with the reek of ether and the appalling sickly-sweet smell of gangrene. They held the hands of the dying. They wrote letters home for men who had no hands to hold a pencil, or eyes to see the writing paper.

They were constantly ordered to take their time off and not waste it by doing extra duties. It was little enough, and the Ward Sister snapped at them that they would be less than useless to her if they dropped from sheer fatigue. They had borrowed bicycles several times and ridden in the direction away from the Front Line, where fields still grew green, and the wild poppies and daisies and waving cornflowers, still flourished despite a war.

In the cramped quarters they shared, they stretched out wearily every night on their narrow beds, generally too numb to move a muscle. As if to underline her resentment towards the Sister, Angel swore in the colourful phrases they heard daily on the wards. Margot grinned, leaning up on one elbow.

‘Sister's right, Angel. We should get away from here more than we do, if only for an hour or so. Where shall we go? Is
there a dance in town, do you think?'

Angel's eyes suddenly filled. A dance in town! It seemed years since she had even thought of such a light-hearted, frivolous thing. So long since she had been held in a young man's arms and teased in the meaningless way she had flirted with the young bucks in London, ardently professing true love if she would but spare them a kiss.

She looked at Margot. Both of them changed, older, having seen sights those other two girls could never have imagined. Young men's bodies had been exposed to them, all their dignity stripped, and neither they nor the men had felt shame or embarrassment. There was nothing but deep sorrowing pity for their plight, a reaching out of the senses towards all humanity. They were two different young women from the butterflies of pre-war days. Angel felt a brief sadness for those other two, and scrambled to her feet before it overwhelmed her.

‘All right, let's find something to do. There are cafés in this town. There must be music, if not dancing. Do you remember the accordions in the evenings at Montmartre?'

‘Piersville isn't Paris,' Margot said drily, but Angel's desperately gay mood was catching, and they changed out of their uniforms in a trice, wearing their own clothes and feeling the comparative softness against their skins.

They washed away the grime of the day and touched their mouths with lipstick, running combs and powder through their sweat-stained hair until it felt reasonably clean and fragrant. Feeling human again, and pushing away the guilt that they left behind them the broken bodies of the wounded still lying in agony on hospital beds. And holding on to Sister's stern words. What good would they be if they collapsed from sheer fatigue?

The evening was still warm as it should be in mid-June. It was a shock to realise they had been here so long. Days had merged into weeks, into months. There had been mutters of leaves due to them, but so far nothing had transpired.
Tonight, they didn't think about it. They had a little time to themselves before they tumbled exhausted into bed as usual.

They had gone out very little since arriving, but if there were any dangers of roaming around in a small French town near enough to the Front Line, they didn't consider them. Tonight, they could pretend they were tourists. The war didn't exist. Just for a few hours…

In the intimacy of a small crowded café where they drank cheap red wine and listened to the plaintive singing of a husky-voiced French singer, accompanied by an old accordion player, Angel felt her throat constrict. She spoke excellent French, and the words of the song told of lost love, of empty partings and sweet reunions, and shrieked to her of Jacques. She had deliberately kept him out of her mind of late, filling her days with her self-imposed tasks, letting the exhaustion of the nights take her into oblivion.

‘When are you going to try to find him, Angel? Isn't it what you came here for?'

Margot's soft voice broke through her dreaming. She had forgotten that Margot's French was as good as her own. Margot could read every expression on Angel's face, and know how brittle was the mask she constantly wore. There was no use denying where her thoughts lay, and she spread her hands as if in supplication.

‘I don't know. It's all so confusing –'

‘What's confusing? You love him and he loves you, and he doesn't even know you're in France. I think you're touched in the head. Have you read those letters your mother sent you?'

Angel shook her head. She and Margot had been diligent in writing home, and Clemence had posted a small packet of letters written in Jacques' familiar handwriting, and the temptation to rip open the envelopes had eluded Angel so far. There was so much Margot didn't understand. She didn't know that Angel began every letter home with the words ‘Dear Parents', unable to make any reference to her
father more personal than that. She mourned the loss of the old relationship with Fred, but she couldn't seem to break past the knowledge that Harriet was somewhere in the background, taking the love that belonged by right to Clemence and his daughters.

She was a prude, after all, Angel discovered bitterly. And with the knowledge came a closing of her mind to all that she and Jacques had been to one another. Even the sudden realisation that several Tommies in the crowded smoky café were eyeing her and Margot up and down appreciatively was sending cold shivers up and down her spine. God, I'm going to end up as frigid as Mother, she thought in a fright.

‘Read Jacques' letters, Angel,' Margot said calmly. ‘At least have some consideration for his feelings, wondering what the hell's happened to you. You owe him that.'

‘When I'm ready, all right? I'll know when. Let's get out of here, shall we?'

She scrambled to her feet, suddenly stifled by the atmosphere, the determination by everyone in the café to be bright and cheerful, when such a little distance away men were dying at this moment. The Tommies bragged of some big offensive to come. They hinted at July, only weeks away, and they spoke as if this was the last big push to finish it all.

And if it really was to be the final battle, then the Royal Flying Corps would certainly be very much involved in it. Jacques might be killed. The torment wouldn't let her be. She might never see him again, and she would only have a packet of unread letters as souvenirs…

Margot followed her out of the café into the cool dusk of the evening. They made their way back to the splendid portals of the Town Hall, magnificent as all French official buildings were, the little shops with their closed and shuttered windows more insignificant now by contrast. Piersville would once have been a sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere. It had assumed an importance now that it had never sought, and the erudite Town Hall stank with
the suppurating wounds of foreigners.

The town and its citizens bore it all with quiet dignity. British and French were inextricably bound together in the desire for peace, to live normal lives again. She and Jacques were bound together by love.

‘Are you taking your usual walk tonight, Margot?' she said huskily. Her friend had become a fanatic for exercise, wailing that she was getting fat, when they both knew that their meagre rations wouldn't put weight on a flea.

‘Of course. Green and Martin actually spoke to me today, and I offered to lend them an English magazine, since neither of them can speak the lingo. I'll take it along to their room.'

If she guessed that Angel had decided the time was right for reading Jacques' letters at last, to laugh and cry over them a little, she kept her voice steady and didn't betray it.

Green and Martin had become slightly less resentful of the two girls with the posh accents, since discovering that they worked as hard as the rest, and didn't flinch from doing the disagreeable jobs. Green sought out Angel and Margot while they were snatching a break for a cup of tea. It was the morning after Angel had finally wept healing tears over Jacques' letters. The girl waved a handful of papers at them.

‘We've got a week's leave. Replacements are taking over until we get back, before being transferred to their regular jobs. We've got passages booked on the hospital ship going home tomorrow.'

Angel had other plans for her next available day off. Green looked at her in disbelief as she said she wanted to stay.

‘Are you crackers? Who'd want to stay in this hell-hole when we can go home for a bit? Anyway, you've got no choice. We're to escort six stretcher cases to the ship and be responsible for them until we get to Blighty. Sister wants to see you, Bannister, and she's not looking too pleased.'

Angel marched off in a fury. She had just decided to pay Jacques a surprise visit, and now it seemed that she was thwarted…

She went to the office. Sister Yard was a stern, mannish woman, and her aggressive manner told Angel that she wouldn't relent over the enforced leave.

‘I understand that you can drive, Bannister?'

At Angel's nod, she spoke decisively. ‘Good. Two of our ambulance drivers have influenza, so you'll be responsible for getting the stretcher cases to Calais tomorrow. The other V.A.D.s will care for them en route. You'll be met at Dover by another driver, and be free to carry on with your week's leave. Think you can handle it?'

Angel gulped. She had no choice. But driving the familiar little Sunbeam, even to Scotland and back, didn't compare with driving a notoriously unreliable ambulance with six wounded men and three other women over unknown terrain…

Sister looked at her keenly. ‘I'm relying on you, Bannister. You've proved to be solid. Don't let me down. I may be able to recommend you for more ambulance duty when you return.'

Angel resisted the temptation to click her heels and salute. She mumbled her thanks and backed out of the office, leaning weakly against the outer wall for a second. She had proved to be solid. Coming from Sister, that was praise indeed, even if it did make her feel as unfeminine as a lump of lead.

Margot added her own praise. Margot's usual exuberance was returning in leaps and bounds at the thought of going home.

‘You'll be fine, darling!' she said boisterously. ‘Just remember to apply the brake when we get to the coast. I don't fancy swimming back to Blighty! I'm going to spend the entire week in a hot bath, and restoring my fingernails to their former perfection.'

‘Is that all?' It sounded comical after the way they had been spending their days and nights these past few months. How quickly the abnormal had become the normal, she realised poignantly.