Chapter Thirty-Four
I had a stash of coloured papers, square and made especially for folding.
I gave the last of them to the boy in bed four.
He’d asked Hugo if he could help and Hugo had said yes.
The papers were orange and yellow, apple green and sky blue.
They were thick in a way that the forms and inventories and diet sheets were not.
He learned the folds quickly (as children do, I think now) and his stars held their shape in a way that ours couldn’t.
On Christmas Eve, Iso and I walked through the darkening camp dragging a sapling pine we had cut down in the woods and shouldering pillowcases with gifts and decorations.
We were greeted with cheer by everyone we passed, all of them imagining the hospital ward we were heading towards and the joy we might bring to its patients.
None of them thinking the patients would be German.
We paused on the road near the prisoner camp.
‘Daubs of light,’ I said, imagining the night as one of Iso’s paintings. ‘There are more of them than usual.’
A tent, not far from the road, was all aglow. There was a sentry guarding the entrance, at ease, and its occupants were like shadow puppets. We observed them for a minute. Iso thought they were playing cards; I guessed they were passing a flask.
‘A Christmas treat,’ I said, and she agreed. I had to wait while she sketched it.
We arrived at the German ward a half-hour before my shift was due to start. We dragged the tree inside and propped it against the wall beside the door.
‘You’re early,’ Alison said.
‘Nowhere better to be.’ I put my pillowcase on her desk. ‘Just pretend we’re not here,’ I said. ‘By which I mean, don’t ask me to change any sheets or wash any bedpans. We have a little decorating to do.’
Her eyes rolled, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her. Permission, I decided, and I emptied the pillowcase of decorations onto the desk.
Iso and I strung up the stars we’d threaded together in the hours between shifts.
When we were done, they hung between each bed and around the desk and the medicine trolley.
We placed stars on the lockers beside each patient, and to those I thought might believe it, I whispered, ‘Beschützen. It will protect you.’
I stood on a chair to attach a star above the ward door and was nearly knocked off it when two Redcaps arrived with Hugo.
‘Sorry, miss.’
I looked down and a young Redcap looked up, his hand still on the chair that had threatened to topple.
‘Very festive,’ he said, and his smile was nostalgic rather than mocking, as if he’d grown up with decorated Christmases.
‘Cut the chit-chat,’ said a deeper voice. ‘It’s not a social call.’
The other Redcap, older, was somewhat familiar from previous deliveries. He shoved the younger so he was out of the doorway and forced to let go of the chair. I quickly stepped down to avoid being felled.
The older Redcap pushed open the door and the chair scraped on the boards. He held his prisoner by the upper arm and did not let go until they were well into the ward. When he looked around, at the stars on lockers and strung between beds, at the unadorned tree, he scoffed.
‘And a merry Christmas to you too,’ said Alison, her voice strong.
The older Redcap ignored her. He motioned with his head to the younger to leave, and the younger obeyed. Just before the ward door closed behind them, I saw another shove. A reprimand, no doubt. That is how it happens, I thought. The younger will soon find someone of his own to push around.
Hugo saw the tree leaning beside the door. We all looked in that direction and I was disappointed by how small it was, how spindly. It looked exhausted. But Hugo smiled and went to the storeroom for a bucket of water.
‘We will need stones,’ he said.
I went outside and took three from the whitewashed edge that marked the road.
Hugo positioned the tree in the bucket and arranged the stones to hold it in place. He stepped back. It stayed upright. ‘Wunderbar,’ he said.
But it barely came to my chest. ‘A bit forlorn,’ I said.
‘An understatement,’ Alison offered.
Iso draped it in yarn, navy blue and kinked from being unravelled from the scarf it once was. Hugo added a few stars, floppy and pale. I added a few more. When I asked Alison if she’d like to add something, she shook her head.
We stood back to admire it and my heart sank. The navy yarn and anaemic stars gave the impression of a Christmas tree with all the life drained out of it. I turned to Iso. She was frowning.
‘It’s missing something,’ I said.
‘Joy,’ Alison said, barely looking up from her desk.
Iso went to the boy in bed four and they spoke.
She opened the drawer of his locker and took out all the stars he had made during the week.
There were six: two orange, two yellow, one apple green, one sky blue.
She put them gently in the pockets of her skirt then helped him out of bed.
He leaned on her and slowly they made their way towards the tree.
Iso placed a star in each of my hands and each of Hugo’s, the last two she held herself.
We stood, as if for inspection, and the boy chose the finest of his creations.
Iso helped him get closer to the tree so he could place the star on top. It was yellow and it seemed to shine.
I have it still, in the Red Cross box, crumpled but still bright.
Joy, I thought, when the boy turned and saw our reactions.
He motioned for us to come forward. He took each of the stars we were holding and arranged them on the lower limbs of the tree.
‘Daubs of light,’ I said. ‘They do make a difference.’ I squeezed Iso’s hand and she squeezed mine back. The boy on her arm began to cry. He was so quiet about it we pretended not to notice.
‘And what, may I ask, is in the other pillowcase?’ Alison enquired, when the boy had been returned to his bed.
‘Gifts,’ I said.
She raised her eyebrows so I reached in and made a show of rummaging around.
‘For you.’ I put a small jar on her desk and watched her face screw up.
‘Is that…’
‘Herring,’ I said.
‘I thought so. I hate herring. I used to like it, but étaples stinks of it half the year and now I hate it.’
I continued to bring jars of pickled herring out of the pillowcase.
‘How many are there?’
‘Too many, probably, given the number of patients who are on restricted diets. But Germans love herring and Iso and her sister have put a lot of effort into pickling them.’ I gave Alison a stern look, my brows raised as high as I could manage. ‘We are going to be grateful.’
‘Yes, nurse,’ said Alison. She picked up her jar and called to Iso. ‘What a treat,’ she said, with too much cheer. Iso smiled and returned to whatever she was drawing. It was something for the boy and I never saw it.
There was nothing artificial in Hugo’s pleasure. We were closer than we should have been, the herring our excuse.
‘Bismarckhering!’ he said as I passed him his gift. ‘This is what I dream of when I am in my cot.’
I bit back a smile while he opened the jar and popped one in his mouth. His face transformed with the pleasure of a familiar taste. I held his gaze until he had to look away.
‘Are you staying?’ I asked Alison. My shift had started and hers was supposed to end.
‘Nowhere better to be,’ she said.
I’ve thought about that night so often and wondered if any nursing was done at all.
I don’t remember doing any. I don’t remember hearing any groans or smelling anything other than pickled herring.
If bedpans needed emptying or sheets needed changing, someone must have done it.
But who? When I look around the German ward in my mind, they are all there.
Iso, Alison, Hugo. The boy with his folded stars.
The Christmas tree grows an inch or two every year and I find myself looking up to admire the star on top. A shining yellow, lightening the dark.
The boy who’d folded the stars was the one who started singing.
‘O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
Wie treu sind deine Bl?tter!’
His voice was small but tuneful and the quietness of him made us stop what we were doing. It made us listen, as if for a heartbeat. Even Alison stopped what she was doing.
‘Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,
Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.’
When the carol was over, there was a pause. The moment held more than the final note. A confusion of sadness and all our hope. Then Alison began to clap.
‘Hard to believe they’re murderous Huns,’ she said, quite seriously.
It was our turn and we sang ‘The First Noel’.
Alison, Iso and me. Until that moment I’d had no idea either of them could sing, and they didn’t know that I could.
(When had any of us wanted to break into song?) We sang two verses, in harmony, and when we were done, the boy in bed four responded.
He sang ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen’. I didn’t know it then, but I do now: ‘Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming’.
Others joined in, Hugo among them, and they became a choir.
We exchanged our songs like gifts. When we sang ‘Silent Night’, Hugo began to hum, then the boy in bed four began to hum, then they all began to hum a melody they knew so well, and that is how this memory ends. Their voices and ours, in perfect harmony.
At least it should end there, and I want it to, but in all the years that have passed I’ve been unable to make that happen. I have to remember it all or I’ll remember nothing, Hugo once said.
Smashing glass sounds like wind chimes, when you are not expecting it.
A stone, whitewashed like the stones I’d collected to hold the Christmas tree, landed on the bed of a boy with nothing below his knees to feel the impact.
It lay there like a splodge of paint, and glass glittered in the boy’s hair and on his shoulders.
‘Don’t move,’ Alison shouted. ‘Nicht bewegen,’ Hugo repeated. They were at his side in an instant.
I raced out of the ward.
There were five of them, drunk, but that is no excuse. They saw me and began singing ‘Silent Night’ in exaggerated German accents.
‘Go home,’ I said. I stood beneath the broken window of the ward. They stood in the middle of Isolation Road, behind the line of stones, whitewashed and moonlit and glittering with a fragile frost. I began to shiver.
‘If only we fucking could,’ one of them shouted.
He bent and picked up another of the stones, and my eye was drawn to the gap it left, and the gaps around it.
Like missing teeth. He and I had done that.
He balanced the stone in his hand, a great paw of a thing.
I imagined it around my neck and stood taller.
‘Go home,’ I said again. But his mates kept singing, the first verse again. Too drunk or too stupid to recall the second, their accents less convincing. One of them stayed silent, stood awkwardly. But it wasn’t enough. Coward, I thought.
When the stone was thrown I didn’t move. I didn’t have to, but I didn’t know that until I heard the split of timber a little to my left. He might have been a thug at a suffrage rally – it felt the same – and any fear I had turned to disdain.
‘Hun whore,’ he shouted.
I froze, but they couldn’t have known. Then Alison was there, telling them we all had a job to do, whether we wanted to do it or not. They stopped their singing.
‘We should fetch the Redcaps,’ I said to her.
‘I’m sure the Redcaps won’t be necessary,’ she said, loud enough for them to hear. The effect was clear. They hated the Redcaps almost as much as they hated the Germans. ‘Just a bit of harmless fun.’
I stared at her, incredulous, and she stared back.
‘Return to your duties, nurse.’