The Silver Locket (10 page)

Maria smiled ruefully. ‘Rose, these forgeries are excellent. You’ve missed your vocation. You should have been a criminal or a fence.’

‘I was always good at lettering and drawing,’ murmured Rose. ‘When I was a child, I loved making treasure maps. I used cold tea and coffee or soot from up the chimney to make them look authentic.’ She glanced up from her forgeries. ‘Do you think I’ll pass for twenty-four?’

‘I expect so,’ said Maria. ‘You look so self-assured, which always helps, and you’re quite tall.’

‘How old are you, Maria? You don’t look more than twenty-one to me.’

‘You obviously need spectacles.’ Maria signed a form. ‘I’m twenty-six. The men on Essex Ward are going to miss you.’

‘They’re going to miss you, too.’

‘But you’re their special sweetheart. You’re the one they ask to write their letters, you’re the one they tell about their wives and girls and children. You’re the one they love.’

‘I love them, too,’ said Rose. ‘Maria, they’re so brave, so uncomplaining. I don’t know how they stand it, when we have to change their dressings and clean their wounds with saline. It must be agony. But they never grumble or make any fuss.’

Rose, Maria and four more volunteers from St Benedict’s crossed the storm-tossed Channel the following February, in a battered pre-war steamer now being used for ferrying troops to France.

As they went on board at ten o’clock that rainswept Wednesday evening, an officer directed them towards the first-class lounge. ‘Make yourselves at home,’ he told them, briskly. ‘You won’t be disturbed. This deck is out of bounds to officers and men.’

‘A pity,’ murmured Julia Neale, as the officer left them there to look at one another.

‘We’re not allowed to fraternise with soldiers,’ said Amy Ward regretfully, as they watched the endless lines of khaki march aboard and pack into the lower decks. ‘Sister Hall says discipline is very strict in France.’

‘We’re not to look at anyone directly, or speak to anybody from the army unless he speaks to us and it would be rude not to reply.’ Lucy Wallis grimaced. ‘Matron told me any nurse who so much as smiles at a soldier will be sent home straight away.’

‘Do you think they’ll give us any supper?’ asked Katie Smead, as she stared round the empty lounge from which all the furniture and fittings and even the carpet had been stripped.

‘I’ve got some ham rolls and bars of chocolate,’ said Maria, and took them from her bag.

‘I have a flask of coffee and some cakes,’ said Amy Ward.

‘I have biscuits and some home-made gingerbread.’ Rose produced a grease-proof paper parcel, packed for her by Mrs Pike and presented as a parting gift.

The other nurses brought out half-sized bottles of medicinal brandy, slabs of fruit cake and brown paper bags of sausage rolls and meat paste sandwiches. ‘Excellent,’ Maria said, as she surveyed the contents of the heaped-together picnic. ‘We can have a feast.’

‘We’re nearly there!’ cried Lucy Wallis, shaking Rose’s shoulder and rousing her from a brandy-sozzled slumber on the bare wood floor. ‘Come and have a look.’

As Rose was stumbling over to a porthole, the troopship nosed into the ferry port. The first thing to catch her eye was a green hill rising in the distance. It was covered with rows of bell-shaped tents.

‘We’re going to have to live in those,’ said Julia Neale, shuddering. ‘Rose, I hope you’ve brought your woollen drawers?’

‘But my cousin’s living in a hut,’ objected Katie. ‘She’s got a stove and running water, and a wardrobe – everything’.

‘Then she’s flipping lucky.’ Amy grinned at Rose. ‘We’ll be living in those wigwam things they’ve pinched from the Boy Scouts, with buckets for the necessary, if you get my meaning.’

‘Yes.’ Rose sniffed the air that drifted through the open porthole. She could smell hot fat and frying crepes, the yeasty tang of beer, the sourer undertones of oil and sewage, and it all added up to something new, exciting, strange. She grinned and hugged herself. She’d made it – she had arrived in France.

‘So remember, ladies. You’re on active service now,’ said the RAMC officer who’d met them at Le Havre.

He’d marched them to a tiny, cluttered room behind an officers-only Red Cross café. But he failed to offer them any breakfast and, while they were tormented by the smell of roasting coffee beans and hot, fresh bread, he lectured them for half an hour.

They should wear full uniform at all times, because civilian dress was not allowed. They should not fraternise or form associations with officers or men. They were not
in
the army, but they were attached to it. So if they committed any crimes they would be tried by military courts.

The officer looked down at his list. ‘Miss Courtenay and Miss Gower?’ he barked.

Rose and Maria stood up.

‘You are to report to Colonel Streatham, the officer in charge of ambulance trains. He will explain your duties. I hope you ladies don’t get travel sick?’

‘You lucky things!’ Katie Smead grinned up at Rose. ‘You’ve fallen on your feet! I dare say I’ll be living in a wigwam, peeing in a bucket, and–’

‘Silence, ladies!’ The officer glared angrily at Katie, asked for her name, then wrote it down. ‘Miss Courtenay and Miss Gower, you are dismissed. Your driver is outside.’

But Colonel Streatham wasn’t in his office. The adjutant said he had no orders for Maria or Rose – in fact, he didn’t know anything about them. ‘I’m sorry, ladies,’ he continued, shrugging. ‘It appears you don’t exist.’

He sat down at his desk and had a riffle through some papers. Then at last he glanced up at the driver, and grinned as if inspired. ‘I suggest you take these ladies to the CCS at Arlescourt. Then, when a train comes in – and if it turns out they
are
expected – they’ll be on the spot.’

The journey to the casualty clearing station was through pretty countryside lightly dusted with a silver powdering of snow. But as they went further east, the landscape grew more desolate.

‘Look,’ whispered Rose, as they passed an ancient church whose tower lay in ruins.

‘Over there, as well,’ Maria murmured, as they drove through the village.

The inhabitants must have died or fled, thought Rose, leaving their burnt-out homes and packs of hungry dogs who howled at them mournfully as the car sped past.

The roads grew rutted, and the fields on either side were full of weeds and thistles. The land had not been ploughed in autumn, and would not be ready for the spring.

Then they heard the guns. At first the sound was muted, a series of dull thuds like distant thunder, as if a storm were breaking miles away. Then the noise intensified. It became continuous and much more threatening. A few miles later, a rocket screeched menacingly overhead, then exploded in a nearby wood.

‘Blasted things,’ the driver muttered, and Rose saw his knuckles were clenched and white upon the wheel. ‘But don’t worry, Sisters. They don’t usually get this far behind the line. The CCS is just a couple more miles down this road. I dare say they’re expecting you.’

The casualty clearing station was a clutch of wooden huts a mile behind the line. Sick or wounded soldiers walked or were carried there from first aid posts, either for further treatment or to await evacuation.

Rose saw the huge white crosses painted on the flimsy roofs. She hoped the German aeroplanes she’d seen flying overhead did not regard the crosses as so many targets.

The railhead was a hundred yards away and, as Rose and Maria got out of the car and dragged their luggage from its boot, a train came chugging down the track towards the wooden buffers.

‘Miss Courtenay and Miss Gower?’ A harassed-looking RAMC major came striding from the nearest hut. ‘You’re late. You should have been here yesterday.’

‘But we only arrived in France this morning,’ Rose began.

The major glared at her, then scowled down at his sheaf of papers. ‘You will be Miss Courtenay – or Miss Gower?’

‘Miss Courtenay, sir.’

‘Well, Miss Courtenay, let’s get one thing straight. We don’t need nurses who give cheek to their superior officers. So if you can’t keep a civil tongue, the best thing you can do is bugger off back to Blighty.’

As Rose blushed red, Maria spoke. ‘Where will we be billeted, sir?’ she asked the major calmly and politely.

‘I beg your pardon?’ The major looked as if he’d have a fit. ‘You and your delightful friend have both been posted to the ambulance trains, God help us all. You will be escorting men from the clearing stations to the general hospital at base, and you’ll be billeted on the bloody train.’

‘That was Dr Callaghan, he’s always rather irritable,’ a young Queen Alexandra nurse told Rose and Maria. She took them on to the empty train and showed them where to stow their kit, in a sleeper carriage in the middle of the train. Here the nurses, orderlies and doctors had their cramped but warm and draught-proof quarters.

‘You two are being thrown in at the deep end,’ grinned an orderly, who was walking past with piles of blankets.

‘So I hope you’re fit.’ The QA nurse shoved Rose’s Gladstone bag into a luggage rack. ‘We heard this sector’s had a dreadful battering these past weeks, so I dare say the men we’ve come to fetch will be in quite a state.’

She glanced out of the window. ‘Look, here come the stretcher-bearers now.’

It took two hours to load the train with wounded, broken men. Some were clean and in the regulation blue pyjamas, but most still wore their mud and blood-streaked uniforms.

‘We’ll get them settled first,’ the QA nurse told Rose. ‘The stretcher cases can go on the floor, and we’ll get the others into bunks. Pack the pillows and blankets round them, so they won’t feel the jolting of the train.’

As the train moved off, the orderlies were lighting primus stoves to boil up water for hot drinks and to wash the men. Rose set to work, and soon she realised this would be no picnic.

St Benedict’s had been a modern hospital where there’d been running water and every possible facility. But here she was working in a badly-lit and tiny space, trying to undress and wash exhausted, filthy men crammed into bunks like narrow bookshelves, and all the time the train was jolting, lurching, swaying from side to side.

‘Thank you, Sister.’ The corporal whose gashed and mangled arm she’d washed and bandaged awkwardly managed a feeble smile of gratitude. ‘I know you’re busy, but could I have a drink?’

‘Of course.’ Rose packed the blankets round him. ‘I’ll ask the orderly to bring you something.’

The soldier braced himself against the side of the couchette. ‘Harry Liston, down there on the left,’ he whispered, pointing. ‘He’s got a bullet in his brain, and they think he’s going to lose his sight. So go and let him feast his eyes on you, and he’ll die happy.’

It was dark and snowing heavily when at last the train came shuddering to its final halt. Now the staff would help the stretcher bearers get the wounded off, then strip all the bunks, clean up and get the train all ready to go off again.

Rose peered into the darkness and saw lights. Suddenly there were dozens of men in RAMC uniform, opening the doors and working with a calm, methodical efficiency as the sick and wounded were unloaded and taken to the waiting ambulances, to be driven to hospital or shipped home to England.

‘Poor thing, you look all in.’ The QA nurse who’d shown Rose where to put her luggage smiled. ‘I dare say you’re hungry?’

‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ Rose yawned and rubbed her aching, bloodshot eyes.

‘When did you last eat?’

‘When we were on the boat.’

‘Last night?’ The nurse looked horrified. ‘Look, we’ll be here for an hour or two at least, while they change the engine and we sort out the train. So fetch your friend, then go and have a decent meal in the Red Cross canteen. You’ll find it at the end of Platform 2. Miss Courtenay?’

‘Yes?’

‘I kept my eye on you. I saw you were nervous, and occasionally you weren’t sure what to do. But you didn’t keep asking. Instead, you used your gumption. You did very well.’

‘Thank you, Sister.’ In spite of her fatigue, Rose smiled. She’d done very well, and it was going to be all right.

The spring came slowly to the blasted land, furtively clothing it with green and hiding all the wounds inflicted that appalling winter, but with the warmer weather came new military offensives. Maria and Rose spent March and April as relief staff on the ambulance trains, constantly being ordered from one sector to another, never knowing where they’d end up next.

They trudged along endless pot-holed country roads, hitching lifts in lorries or squashing into the back seats of military cars. They rode in London buses, half a dozen of which had been transported to the front to ferry troops around.

‘I don’t understand these orders.’ One April morning, Rose pored over the long list of badly-typed instructions they’d received from the sister in charge a minute or two ago. ‘It’s the seventeenth. We were supposed to be in Aix-les-Givres yesterday.’

‘Then we’d better shift ourselves.’ Maria shoved the last few bits and pieces into her carpet bag.

Later that same evening, several lifts and lots of walking later, they were alone and stranded somewhere deep in rural France, having been assured their destination was a few yards up the road.