Chapter Three
Three
The morning reveille had sounded and the sun rose over étaples.
Shadows stretched from huts and tents, and Isolation Road was already busy with vehicles and footfall.
It was the end of my first week on the German ward and Iso had a couple of hours before her own work began.
She was carrying her sketchbook and pastels and her little folding stool and I wondered if she planned to sit outside the German ward to capture its details.
As we approached, I tried to see it from her perspective. It was just one of many long hospital huts and from the outside there was nothing to distinguish it. I told her it was the same as any other ward, but she disagreed. The details, she told me, would be different.
She reminded me of Helen, and thinking of Helen reminded me of the journal.
All these years later I still think of Helen. She is a ghost but not a haunting. She asked me to stay but knew that I wouldn’t. Our love was incompatible with our situations and I wonder now if knowing love was barely possible made it more intense – with her, then, later, with him.
Would I have loved either of them so much if I’d been allowed to?
The journal is in the Red Cross box, beneath all the other reminders. I lift it out like it’s an antique, fragile and precious. The leather is worn soft from handling and it looks like something that has gone to war – it is scarred and the endpapers have come unstuck.
I remember the day Helen gave it to me.
Her girls were asleep and we were sitting in the bow of their narrowboat on the Oxford Canal.
It had been a short visit and I wanted to stay longer, but I never told Helen that.
She pushed the journal into my hand. It was leather-bound and it could have sat neatly among the Greek classics she kept in the small shelf of books by her armchair.
I stroked it and turned it over. The leather was navy blue, like their narrowboat, and unadorned.
I knew she had bound it, that the leather was scrap from the press where she worked.
I opened the cover and felt the thickness of the paper.
I imagined her folding it and trimming it.
The edges were rough – she’d cut them by hand. There was an inscription.
Tilda
Remember the details
Helen x
I’ll remember what’s important, I’d told her, I don’t need to write it down.
But she’d known better. We don’t always know what will be important until long after it has happened, and then we wish we’d recorded every detail,’ she’d said.
She knew she was dying, but I did not. She didn’t tell me or her girls until it couldn’t be denied, and then there was no time to write down the details and nothing good I wanted to recall.
Though that isn’t true. There were exquisite moments every day, but I couldn’t see them at the time.
When she was gone I struggled to even remember the colour of her eyes.
Brown, I’d say now, if anyone asked. They were more than that but I can’t say how and it kills me.
When I packed for étaples I included the journal. But those first months were overwhelming and the details were unfamiliar – I had no words for them, and the journal remained blank. It wasn’t until the German ward that I began to record them. It was Iso who encouraged it.
I made lists at first, all the ways the German ward was unique (fewer supplies, colder food, a lack of visitors, the sound of Germans talking), and all the ways it was the same (the injuries, the illnesses, the rounds, the sound of men moaning and dying).
Then I began to record other details, things that followed me from the ward to my hut and played on my mind until I’d pinned them to the page.
I fan through the journal now and a third of its pages are blank. I knew they would be: when it was all over, there seemed little point to my record keeping and I put the journal down. I didn’t want to remember, so it stayed closed for two decades.
But now, his letter. It is unopened, but memories, once stirred, are hard to settle.
I turn to the first page of the journal and there he is, among the lists. Day 1: I saw a German on his knees. A doctor, it turns out, with no words to spare. No more than that sentence, because how could I have known?
I turn to the next page and a week has passed.
Matron discussed the rules. That’s all I’ve written, but I remember Iso walking with me.
I remember she said something about painting it.
When she offered to come in I might have discouraged her.
I remember she headed back the way we had come.
Her day would be spent at the Anzac camp, where Gordon Hut was being prepared to welcome a new batch of recruits.
As I write this, I realise my memories of Iso are composites, fragments that have been placed where I think they fit.
She existed in that place like a wallflower and during that time was always on the edge of my vision.
Too rarely did I focus on her – it is just one of my many regrets.
But I will not take all the blame. It was Iso’s nature to observe and mine to be admired; if she comes across as an impression that is part of the reason.
The truth is, she may not have accompanied me to the German ward that day and I am just placing her there because it is convenient.
But it is not a lie. She would have been there the next day or the day after that.
It eventually became her habit to walk with me to the ward, to come in when she had the time or visit when there was a break in her day.
Some details were so ubiquitous I never wrote them down and can’t hope to distinguish them, but do I need to?
The story remains the same regardless of where I place this detail or that.
My shift was a few hours in when Matron arrived.
‘You’re getting on, I hear. You have the guts for it.’
‘I stopped retching months ago, if that’s what you mean.’
‘It wasn’t what I meant, but I’m glad to hear it.’
She sat at the nurses’ desk, patient notes in front of her. She’d made a pot of tea and considered it brewed. She poured it weak and passed me a cup. I was standing and she didn’t suggest I sit.
‘Sister says the Hun don’t bother you.’
Hun, I thought. It did not suit the men in those beds; it certainly did not suit the many boys.
If they were crazed it was with pain, not hatred.
And yet I’d been unnerved just that morning when one grabbed my wrist and shouted.
But did he shout? His words were incomprehensible and to me sounded harsh.
I’d heard them one way when he might have meant them another.
He saw my panic and let me go, turned his head away.
I had been on the German ward for a week and could not relax. Pretending to was exhausting.
‘What is there to be bothered about?’ I said. ‘They’re helpless.’
‘Not all of them, and before they came here…’
‘I think I can handle them, whoever they were before they came here. Whatever they’ve done.’
My assurance suited her and I realised there were few others who would willingly take my place. She added half a spoon of sugar to her tea and stirred. When she did not offer me the bowl I reached across the desk and helped myself.
She leaned back in her chair and considered me. ‘You were one of Pankhurst’s women, weren’t you?’
‘I might sit, if that’s alright with you, Matron.’
She sipped her tea. ‘Of course.’
I took a chair from beside one of the beds and sat down opposite her. I sipped my own tea. Dishwater. Disappointing. I didn’t let it show.
‘A loyal foot soldier of the Women’s Social and Political Union, for the most part,’ I said.
‘For the most part?’
‘We had a disagreement.’
‘About?’
‘Feathers.’
‘And before this disagreement, what did you do?’
‘Are you asking if I broke any rules?’
She just looked at me, nothing changing in her demeanour. I would come to recognise it as a strategy, her way of creating space for you to incriminate yourself. But at the beginning, I was unaware.
‘I broke rules,’ I said. ‘But mostly I was a mouthpiece for the cause.’
‘You have a talent for it, I hear.’
‘Breaking rules or making speeches?’
She did not clarify.
‘Have you found this life difficult?’ she asked.
‘I’m no debutante.’
‘I’m not talking about chapped hands and the occasional cold shower.’
‘What then?’
‘The rules, Nurse Taylor.’
What to tell this woman? She was different from others I’d known in authority.
Despite her uncompromising manner, she didn’t want blind obedience or ironed collars, she wanted honesty.
She wanted to know what she had to work with so she could make the most of it.
An opportunist, I thought, so I told her the truth.
‘Most are easy enough to follow.’
She waited.
‘Others are easy enough to get around.’
It was hard to tell if she disapproved.
‘Without the rules, Nurse Taylor, we are lost. Following those that seem inconsequential conditions us to follow those that matter.’
I thought about the box of supplies she’d pilfered from 24 General; there were always exceptions. ‘And what kind of rules matter, would you say?’
‘Rules that guide decisions about life and death, right and wrong.’
‘I would have thought I could rely on my conscience in such cases.’
‘That is where you are wrong, Nurse Taylor. In a hospital ward, as in war, our sense of right and wrong can become confused, and a clear conscience can undermine the greater good. Some rules are there to protect us from ourselves.’
‘Have you ever wanted to break a rule that mattered?’ I asked her.
Her eyebrows arched. ‘It is not for you to ask the questions, nurse. This is not a conversation.’
‘Of course you have,’ I said. ‘We all have.’
She didn’t respond. She just took another sip of her tea and watched me.
‘I wonder if you broke it,’ I mused, sipping my own.
She put her teacup on the tray.
‘And I wonder if you have regrets?’ I continued.
‘Regrets?’
‘About the rule you may or may not have broken.’
She took a deep breath. ‘There are always consequences, nurse, no matter how you proceed.’
‘That isn’t an answer.’
‘This isn’t a conversation.’
I was dismissed back to my duties. When she left the ward an hour later I was hunched over a man’s thigh with a magnifying glass and tweezers, removing tiny bits of shrapnel and fabric from a wound.
I felt her heavy tread on the boards and expected her to pause, but she did not bother with the pleasantry of a goodbye.
She blurred past, then the ward doors opened and closed behind her.
I heard an exchange of voices just outside – Matron’s rang like a bell.
‘By all means,’ I heard her say, and the ward doors opened again.
The visitor didn’t announce herself and I didn’t look up from my work or turn towards the doors, but I knew it was Iso. I could smell her. She used rosewater lotion for almost everything – hair, face, chapped hands. She had no idea of the gift she brought whenever she walked onto a ward.
I guessed she had stepped out of the way of things and was holding her small sketchpad on her left forearm with fingers curled over the top of the page, like a clamp on an easel.
I continued with my work so she could make her sketch – her study, as she would call it.
A gesture, nothing more. It is easier, she once told me, when her subject is oblivious to her gaze.
It is preferable, if she is to capture the truth of something.
So I pretended I was oblivious. But I was vain, I still am, despite the sag and the grey.
If I knew Iso was observing me I would stand taller or bend with more grace.
I’d push my tongue to the roof of my mouth to tighten the softness below my jaw.
I knew how to make it look natural and I wanted the lines she drew to flatter me.
I would have hated her to capture the entire truth; no one wants that.
Removing shrapnel and fabric from a wound was a frequent task and I remember the ache in my back those first weeks in étaples, the agony of it and the shame of feeling it among all those broken bodies.
By the time I was on the German ward I’d learned to ignore it.
I could have kept going for another ten minutes, another twenty, but Iso was waiting, I knew, for something more distinct than my hunched back.
I put down the magnifying glass and dropped a piece of metal into the kidney dish.
It gave a little tinkle. Then I stood and stretched.
Hands in the small of my back, chest out, neck extended.
My head tilted back and my eyes closed. A performance, perhaps, but I knew it was doing me good.
I moved my head from one side to the other.
I rolled my shoulders and shook out my arms. Then I sat back down beside the bed.
I took up the magnifying glass and the tweezers and I returned to the mess of metal and fabric that had implanted in the man’s upper thigh.
When Iso put her hand on my shoulder, I acted surprised.