Green for Danger, page 3
The relieving V.A.D. was glad to see them. “The Orderly Officer hasn’t made his round yet, Linley. Sister says when he comes will you ask him for some morphia for the two hernias and the appendix that were done to-day, and to say can he give you something for the asthma in number seven. She’s gone down to St. Cat’s ward.”
“Oh, all right; thank you, Jones. I’ll tell him.”
“Blast these air-raids,” said Jones cheerfully, struggling into her ugly blue outdoor coat for her dash across the grounds to the safety of her shelter. “They keep the men awake.”
The ward was on the ground floor, opposite the main operating theatre; a long, high room, the tall windows now blacked out for the night; fifteen beds were ranged down each side, with an aisle down the centre, its narrow tables denuded of their bowls of flowers. The open lockers were tidily packed with the little miscellaneous possessions of the men; on the lower shelves their uniforms were folded into precise, square bundles and their overcoats and caps hung on hooks at the bed-heads. A corner of the ward, near the door, had been partitioned off into a small square ‘bunk’ for the sister, furnished with a desk and some chairs; here notes were kept, reports written up, discussions held with the medical officers, endless cups of tea consumed, and a good deal of more or less surreptitious entertainment carried on. A large pane of glass had been let into the side facing the ward, so that all that went on there could be seen from the bunk. It frequently escaped the attention of the occupants that, especially when the light was on in the bunk, everything that went on there could be seen from the ward.
The air-raid was becoming very heavy. The droning of aeroplanes overhead was incessant, and the building shook and shuddered with the thundering of the guns in the neighbouring fields, and now and again with the sickening thud of a bomb. The men moved uneasily in their beds and made foolish, defiant little jokes. “Cor that was a near one! Nearly scraped me ’air off, that one did! They’ve ’eard about the pudding we ’ad to-day, nurse, and they’re trying to kill the cook!” The hospital humorist sat up in bed and every time a bomb fell tapped himself on the back of the head and made his false teeth shoot out.
“You have no business to have all these lights on,” said Freddi severely, and went round clicking them off.
Night Sister appeared in the doorway. “Oh, Nurse Sanson—are you here?”
“I said I’d stay on and help Nurse Linley, Sister, if that’s all right?”
“Yes, of course. I expect she’ll be very thankful. I shan’t be able to help you much to-night, nurse; we’ve got four bad casualties in St. Catherine’s.… However, if you need anything you must send for me at once. They’ve just rung through from Reception and there’s a man coming in with fractured femur; get him into bed, will you? and just keep him quiet and warm; don’t do anything about the leg. Major Eden will be along in a few minutes to see him. Let me know if he wants me.” She hurried off again.
“What a flap!” said Frederica calmly, watching her go.
Two civilian stretcher-bearers appeared, carrying a grimy bundle on a canvas stretcher. “Is this right, Miss? The old gent in Reception asked us to bring him straight down here, as he hadn’t got any orderlies to send with him.”
“Yes, that’s right: this corner bed, please. Esther, will you deal with this, while I get the rest of the ward settled? I think that’ll be the best way to manage it.”
The stretcher-bearers helped to lift the man on to the bed. “Wouldn’t they take him in the resuscitation ward?” asked Esther, rather surprised at his condition.
“No, it seems they’re filling up there, and he wasn’t as badly shocked as some of the others. They’ve had two deaths there already. Never should have taken ’em in, really, but we thought there might be half a chance. The A.R.R Centre’s been hit, and a pub out at Godlistone, and various other places. They’re still digging one chap out. Rescue squad they was, waiting to go out on a job. Looks as if he’d needed a bit of rescuing himself!” said the stretcher-bearer cheerfully. He put out his hand and pushed the damp hair off the man’s forehead, with the rough, crude gentleness of all his kind. “Poor old boy!” he said, and picked up his stretcher and, whistling softly, went away.
Poor old boy. He lay pathetically still under the blankets, packed in with hot-water bottles, his hands lying loosely at his sides, his eyes closed, his face covered with dirt and dust and grime. His leg was bandaged to a long wooden splint. His boots had been torn off by the blast and his clothes were cut to ribbons, but she made no attempt to undress or wash him till the warmth and rest should have strengthened his pulse and brought back depth to the flickering respirations. She put her hand to his mouth, however, to feel the cold breath on her knuckles, and he must have been unconscious of the gesture, for he moved his head a little, laying his grimy cheek against her forearm with a gesture of trust and dependence, infinitely touching. Tears filled her eyes. “Don’t worry. Just lie still. It’s all over now. You’re safe now. You’re going to be all right.”
He opened his eyes and she turned away her head, for she knew all too well the expression she would see there. It was only six months since her mother had died. For two days and two nights she had waited in anguish while men toiled unceasingly at the mountain of rubble that had once been a tall block of flats; had torn with her own helpless hands at the beams and girders and concrete that, having proved so frail a shelter, now heaped themselves into so deep a tomb. At the end of the second day, a foreman had come to her and wearily wiping the filth and sweat from his face, had broken it to her that it was useless to go on; at any moment the building would collapse, burying his men with those already dead. The following day the systematic demolition of the building had begun, and after another day and night they had brought her mother out. As they carried her past, she had turned her head very slightly on the stretcher, and her eyes had met Esther’s; there had been no smallest gleam of recognition in their depths: only pain and bewilderment and terror and—could it be?—reproach! And so she had died, Mummy who had been so pretty and sweet, so gay and funny, whose little faults of selfishness and petulance had endeared her to a selfless heart, immeasurably more than nobler qualities might have done. Alone in the world, she had gone like an automaton through the heartbreaking details of identification and burial; had sought ease for her aching remorse in the hard, rough, satisfying toil in the wards at the hospital; it was through these first bewildering days when she walked through her work in a dream of hideous unreality and lay, sleepless and haunted through night after endless night, that Woods and Frederica had first come to be her friends; against Freddi’s passionless sanity no less than Woody’s fond, maternal clucking, she had dashed out the first agony of her mother’s death.… “But I was a fool to come back here,” she thought, standing with the old man’s cheek against her arm. “I was a fool ever to think that I could forget the way she looked, when I see it again and again in the faces of strangers.…” In her heart, she reverted unconsciously to the formula of her childhood prayers. “Poor old man. God help him and make him get well.”
Frederica came down the ward. “Esther, it’s nearly ten and I’ve just realised I haven’t had anything to eat. Could you possibly hold the fort for another ten minutes or so, while I rush out and get something? It’s all such a muddle to-night, and the orderly’s helping with stretchers, and I probably shan’t get another chance and I shall be starving by morning?”
“Yes, of course, darling. Don’t hurry. I can cope.”
Freddi departed. Gervase Eden, who was Surgeon on Duty, came into the ward. “Sister here, nurse?”
“No, she’s on one of the other wards. Shall I go and get her?” Outside the hospital, Eden was Gervase to Esther and Freddi and Woods, but she added the regulation ‘Sir’.
“No, never mind. She’s probably snowed under with casualties. Major Moon’s just admitted a man …”
“Here he is, sir, in the corner bed. The Emergency Post label said, ‘fractured pelvis’; he was given a morphia injection two and a half hours ago while they were digging him out. They don’t give his name; I suppose they haven’t found out yet who he is.”
“You haven’t cleaned him up?”
“Well, he was still very shocked when they brought him in, so I left him to warm up. That was right, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, perfectly right,” said Eden. He bent over the man’s body, feeling with short, thin fingers deep into the flesh and muscle and down to the bone. The man shrank and groaned. “It’s all right, old chap. It won’t be long now, and then we’ll give you another dose of something and send you off to sleep. It isn’t very serious. You’re going to be all right.” He straightened himself and moved away from the bed. “Fractured his femur all right. Everything else seems to be intact. There’s no internal injury.” Sister arrived while he was washing his hands in the lavatory outside the ward. “I don’t think we’d better touch him to-night,” he said, explaining the state of affairs to her there. “He’s too badly shocked, and anyway we’ve got all we can cope with. They’ve fixed him up with a splint at the Emergency Post and I think we’ll leave him undisturbed and have him up to the theatre in the morning. He’ll have to be X-rayed first …” He consulted a list. “Major Moon’s doing a duodenal ulcer at half-past nine; could you have him ready after that?”
“Yes, sir, of course; it’ll just give the X-ray people nice time.”
“Well, that’s what we’ll do then. Leave the leg as it is, nurse; clean him up a bit, but don’t worry him; and then you can give him a shot of morphia and I’ll see him again in the morning.”
“Put a couple of screens round him, nurse,” said Sister, “so that the light doesn’t disturb him; I’ll leave out the morphia for you. Oh, and Major Eden, will you let me have something for the appendix Major Moon did to-day, and those two hernias? And the man in seven, Captain Newsome’s cartilage, you know, he’s developed a very troublesome asthma …” She drifted away with him, towards the bunk.
2
Frederica returned, still swallowing the last crumbs of her meal. “It’s too heavenly of you to have stayed on like this, darling. Have you coped all right?”
“Yes, nothing’s happened except a visit from Gervase.” She repeated the gist of his instructions. “I’ll stay and finish this fractured femur for you. You carry on; I’m perfectly all right.”
Frederica whisked off up the ward. The lights flickered with the thudding of the guns. A bomb fell somewhere close. The old man stirred and groaned, “Bombs! Bombs! The bombs!”
“No bombs,” said Esther reassuringly. “Only guns; not bombs.”
He lost even his feeble interest in the bombs. “The pain!”
“Just bear it for a little bit longer,” she said, her hand on his wrist. “Just while I get your clothes off and clean you up a little bit; and then you shall go off to sleep and forget all about it.” Standing with the basin balanced on her hip, towels over her arm, she looked down at him pityingly. Poor old boy; poor, frightened, broken, pitiful little old man.… She wrung out a piece of gauze in the hot water, and began gently to wash his face.
3
Night Sister had left out four quarter-grain tablets of morphia on a tray in the little bunk. Frederica looked up the prescriptions book. “Three ‘stat’ and one ‘s o s’. Will you give them, Esther? One to your man, and one each to the hernias; the appendix seems to be dozing off, so we’ll leave his s o s till he seems to want it. I’ll deal with this asthma question. Yes, all right, Wilson, I’m coming!”
Esther lighted the tiny spirit lamp, dropped one of the tablets into a teaspoon, added sterile water and re-sterilised the whole over the flame, mixing in the dissolving tablet with the needle of the hypodermic syringe; sucked up the solution into the syringe and carried it over, with a piece of iodined gauze, to one of the hernia patients. “There you are,” she said, smiling at him, dabbing at the tiny puncture with the gauze. “That’ll set you up till the morning!”
He smiled back at her hazily. “Thank you, nurse.”
She gave the second injection to the other hernia, and a third to the fractured femur. He was becoming increasingly conscious, muttering wildly to himself: “Bombs! The bombs! All gone … all of us gone this time!”
“This will ease the pain now, and make you go to sleep.”
“All of us gone; all my mates gone.… All sitting there and the whole place came down on top of us.” He struggled up from his pillow, muttering wildly: “It’s going to hit us! It’s going to hit us …” and after a pause began to mumble softly to himself: “The effete and spineless remnants of Churchill’s once-great England … cowering in their rabbit holes from the might of the German air force.…”
Frederica came and joined her at the foot of the bed. “What the dickens is he talking about?”
“He seems to be quoting something; I suppose he’s a bit lightheaded.”
“All gone,” insisted the man, moaning to himself. “All gone and me the last!”
Frederica was the perfect nurse. If she was moved by the sight of suffering or sorrow or fear, she gave no sign of it, and her dry, matter-of-fact little manner often brought balm where more gentle methods failed. She said now, softly but quite brusquely: “You mustn’t talk any more. Give yourself up to the morphia and let yourself go to sleep. Try not to look forward, try not to think or worry.… Everything’s going to be quite all right. Just lie still and let yourself go to sleep.” The monotonous repetition, the level voice, soothed and comforted him. He relaxed against his pillow and did not speak again. She clicked off the remaining lights in the ward and arranged a couple of screens round him, leaving him in almost total darkness; on the centre table a lamp shone in an unshadowed pool upon the layer of fine plaster shaken down from the ceiling by the guns and bombs; she passed a cloth over the dust, and five minutes later it had settled there again. The men moved restlessly, resigning themselves to the long night; there were still one or two to call out: “Good-night, nurse! God bless, nurse! Aren’t you coming to kiss me good-night, nurse?” Outside the guns grumbled and reverberated round the base of the hill, a flare hung, dripping stars, in the shell-splintered sky, the drone of the bombers was rent now and then by the frightened scream of a falling bomb.…
4
Esther replaced the syringe on the tray, blew out the spirit lamp, and wiped the teaspoon clean. “Well, darling, I think my work of mercy is over for the night.”
“Yes, and thank you a thousand times, sweetie, for all you’ve done. They’re expecting another in from Resuscitation, and I don’t know how I’d have managed without you.”
“You’re sure you’re O.K. now?”
“Oh yes, perfectly, now that I’ve finally got the ward under control. That’s the worst of these blessed air-raids; they do unsettle the men.”
“I suppose Woody and I will have to plunge down to that mouldy shelter. The one and only advantage of night duty is that you can stay above ground. Do you think we dare just go to bed and see if we can get away with it?”
“My dear, last time Joan Pierson and Hibbert did that, the Commander routed them out and drove them down to the shelter just as they were, and now everybody knows that Hibbert goes to bed in her vest and knickers.”
“Well, we don’t go to bed in our vests and knickers. Com’s welcome to drive me forth in my Jaeger pyjamas. I hope Woody’s got some tea.”
“Have some here, Esther, before you go.”
“No, no, I’d better go over to quarters; she’ll be wondering what’s happened to me. Good-night, darling. God bless!”
“Happy sheltering,” said Frederica. She added, with rarely spoken sympathy: “You do look tired, my dear; and I’m afraid it’s my fault!” and came over and gave her a brief little peck of apology and gratitude.
5
It was long after ten. Esther departed, and Frederica made herself the inevitable cup of tea and settled down to innumerable small jobs left over from the evening’s work. A shadow fell across the table. “Hallo, Freddi.”
“Oh, hallo, Barney; I wondered if you would come. I saved some tea for you; it’s only just made.”
“I need it,” he said wearily. “We’re having a rotten time. Perkins is on his seven days’ leave and there’s no one else to give anæsthetics, so we’ve just been working all out in the emergency theatre. Some of the casualties are awfully bad; they’ve had two deaths already in Resuscitation. You’ve got another fellow to come in here; did you know? Compound fracture of the tibia and fibula. They’ve cleaned up the wound and put on an extension; he’ll be along very shortly. I thought I’d slip along and see you while we had a little lull.” He put his tea down carefully and came round the table and took her into his arms. “Frederica—I just get through my days, waiting for this moment!”
She returned his kisses lightly and pushed him gently away. “You ought to be concentrating on your work, Captain Barnes, not thinking of your young woman!”
If he was hurt he did not show it; but after a moment, as he sat stirring his tea, he said suddenly: “Frederica, you would never let me down? Would you?”
“Of course not, darling,” said Freddi; but a little too lightly; a little too readily.
He sat staring at his tea, speaking more to himself than to her. “That would be too much cruelty,” he said slowly. “I—I couldn’t bear that. Cruelty and dishonesty—those are two things that I just can’t stand …”
“Sometimes a person has to—has to chose between them. I mean, sometimes if you don’t want to be cruel, you have to tell, or act, some lies.”
He went very white and stood up suddenly, looking down into her wide, grey eyes. “Well, Freddi—always remember this: I’d rather have cruelty than dishonesty. I’d rather be hurt than deceived.…”
