A Liverpool Lass (24 page)

But they were not. Instead, they hung onto the back of the tram like grim death, not letting go until they were well clear of pursuit.

‘And we still got the coal,’ Art remarked, as they limped into Coronation Court very late that night. ‘Poor old Lilac, you won’t forgit today in an ’urry!’

‘A fall?’ Aunt Ada repeated. ‘Let’s ’ave a look.’

She told Lilac to bathe her torn and bloodied knees in warm salty water and later, when one knee went septic and yellow bubbles began to appear, she applied blisteringly hot fomentations to the wound. But she never asked what Lilac had been doing – because she must have guessed – and she never even suggested that Lilac should stop going off with Art.

All through that cold and snowy winter, Lilac and Art kept both families supplied with coal and various items of food. They nicked what they could and earned money to buy what they couldn’t nick. Art made it clear that their partnership was a business one, and they did very well for themselves, considering.

They haunted the docks after school and collected broken boxes, which they split into bundles of kindling. They sold some and kept some.

Then they collected rags. First you had to clean yourself up and go touting for rags somewhere posh, Seaforth was a good hunting ground, up Penny Lane, across to Knotty Ash. Then they sold the rags, which were sometimes quite decent bits of clothing, to traders in Paddy’s Market.

After that there was ‘carrying’. Boys usually did that, but Art graciously allowed Lilac to lend her muscle-power and the two of them would stagger home with heavy baskets, rolls of wallpaper or oilcloth or whatever a shopper might need to have transported. And a couple of kids were a lot cheaper than hiring a van or taking a taxi.

And Lilac really enjoyed it. She had not enjoyed being cold and hungry, but now that she earned – and spent – the money, at least she was not often very cold or very hungry. She tried to remonstrate with Aunt Ada when that person drank to excess, but Auntie always said it was just Lilac’s imagination, that she only took a little nip now and then to keep out the cold, and that Lilac could be sent back to the Culler for telling lies if she ever said she’d seen her aunt the worse for drink.

So apart from schooling, Lilac ran wild and enjoyed every wicked minute. Art remarked, once, that Nellie would have a fit if she could see her precious Lilac now and for the first time for ages, Lilac took a good look at herself in the window pane, and was appalled by what she saw. She had grown long and thin, her clothes were all far too short and tight and her lovely hair, seldom washed, hung in tangles to her shoulders. Her skin was not perfectly clean and sometimes she felt suspicious
movements in her hair and had to rush for the paraffin and the steel comb. She did the best she could, but with soap a rare commodity and hot water getting rarer, since when she was at school Aunt Ada frequently let the fire go out, it was not easy to keep clean.

Never mind, when spring comes I’ll wash hard, every day, Lilac thought, turning away from the window pane. What’s more, when spring comes I’ll take Auntie up to the Lake District to visit Charlie, he’ll talk some sense into her, get her off the drink.

But spring was slow in coming and Lilac had an education to get – for she never lost sight of her hopes for the future – and money to earn. So though she was sorry for Aunt Ada, and often angry over the waste of their money, she enjoyed her freedom very well and put up with the fact that freedom, in this case, equalled neglect.

‘Right, girls, everyone ready? Let them in then, Nellie.’

Nellie, standing nearest the door, gulped, nodded and swung the double doors open. Outside, they waited in the chilly spring evening, the wounded who had walked, stumbled, dragged themselves back from the dressing station which, until barely forty-eight hours earlier, had been a bare five miles from the front line.

For it was March 1918 and the big Push, so eagerly awaited by the Allies, seemed to have turned into a disaster, a rout. The German army had moved forward, easily over-running the first positions they reached, and then they had surged on, full of power and confidence, and the weary, ill-equipped allied troops had had no choice but to run or be captured.

Hospitals like the mobile one in which Nellie, Lucy and many others served had been moved up from the coast to within a few miles of the Front in early March, before the offensive began. The people who plan wars were confident that they would be safe there, and more useful once the inevitable flood of wounded which always followed any offensive had to fall back. The generals envisaged wounded men being treated quickly and probably returned to the attack, Nellie thought bitterly as the men dragged themselves wearily across the wide green lawn of the chateau which had become the hospital’s new home. No British general ever thought of defeat – and precious few considered the
lives of their men, either. But the doctors who ran the hospitals had obediently moved their staff and quarters close to the line though several had voiced worries over the proximity of the enemy to their hoarded medical equipment and precious, overstretched staff.

But the Germans had made the first move and within twenty-four hours of the reverberating crash of the guns beginning, men began to pour in, wounded, desperate ... some just running as they had seen their trenches, outposts, lines disappear beneath a wave of Huns.

It had been terribly frightening, even to hardened souls like Nellie and Lucy, used to the rumble of the guns, the whistle and crash of mortar shells, the tremendous whooshing roar of descending bombs. But treating men who had come straight from the battle, on foot, some with clothing torn off in the blast, others with limbs missing, gaping wounds – and with the knowledge that the enemy were advancing all the time – that was enough to make the strongest soul blench.

A few hours after the first German break-through, the hospitals were also in retreat. Nellie, Lucy and their friends were crammed into lorries, equipment was mostly abandoned though everyone tried to take with him or her some useful tools, and any wounded man capable of walking was ordered to do their best to follow and try to catch up with the retreating hospitals wherever and whenever they set themselves down.

And now they had reached comparative safety at last and set up their tents in the grounds of a very large chateau. Once more they were within a mile or two of the coast and comforted by this, they had set to earlier in the day and had begun to transform stately salons and bedchambers into wards, and smaller rooms into emergency sluices or kitchens ... even dressing-rooms.
Some of their equipment arrived and more was coming from the coast but for now mattresses were put on floors, a room was roughly equipped as an operating theatre, and the girls greeted the arrival of their stained and disgusting old bell-tents with real relief. And now they were trying to sort out their patients; mostly weary men in the last stages of collapse, with dreadful wounds, who had come straight from the front or had been turned out of the departing hospitals to do their best on foot to reach safety once again.

Nellie, nearest the door, had been told to remove bandaging and dressings so that the wounds could be treated, but looking at the sea of faces outside she realised that this could not be a prolonged and careful business. She told the men to form a line and then, as the first one approached her, holding out his arm for inspection, she said briskly, ‘What’s your name, tommy?’ and as he opened his mouth to reply she slid the scissors under the bandages and snatched the dried and encrusted dressing off.

The boy – he was little more – gave a hoarse shriek, abruptly stifled. He swayed and Nellie patted his arm, her eyes full.

‘Well done,’ she muttered. ‘Straight over to the M.O., he’ll prescribe and tell you where to go next.’

The second man in the line stood before her. He had seen what she had done – been forced to do – and was sickly pale, his lips tightly set. Nellie snipped and snatched; the man grunted and beads of sweat broke out on his filthy brow. Nellie felt her own brow damp, her hands shaking. But it was no use, if she didn’t move fast some of these men would collapse before their wounds had been seen, let alone dressed. She reached for the next dressing, tore it off, dropped it on the floor and gestured the man past her.

‘Next,’ she whispered. Behind her, she heard the M.O. giving instructions to the nurses doing the dressings, heard the clatter and murmur as the troops moved slowly through the hall. She had no idea what would happen to these young men once their wounds had been dealt with – she could see what looked like several hundred men waiting – and these were just walking wounded, men who were considered capable of getting themselves to safety. There were many others who were being dealt with by the rest of the staff, men whose wounds would prohibit their being moved on ... and what if the Germans suddenly appeared? What would they do then? There were terrible tales of what the Germans would do to English nurses, to young injured tommies, and their air force had already proved that they didn’t care much for the rules of war by bombing the hospitals whenever they got the chance despite the huge red crosses on their roofs.

But it was no use fretting; Nellie worked on solidly, trying to chat to some of the soldiers, joking with the ones still capable of talking back, trying not to allow the aura of fear and depression to push her deeper into the slough of despond. But it was uphill work; these were men who believed themselves defeated. She made a cheerful remark to one, something about his leg meaning he’d be back in Blighty for a spell and he said: ‘We’ll all be back in Blighty pretty soon, Sister – the Germans, too. Nothing can stop them. They’re invincible. You should have seen them bearing down on us – all I could do was turn tail – me, who’s fought the Hun and the trenches and our own dam’fool generals since December 1914!’

It halted her; she looked into his dark, bloodshot eyes and read conviction there ... and passed him on down the line, turning to the next man. Soldiers were wrong, sometimes. She prayed that this one was wrong.

‘Nell, are there many still to come? We’re going to run out of dressings pretty soon, someone will have to go to the stores for more. And it’s midnight, we’ve been working since seven, I’m sure we’ve dealt with more than a hundred wounds. They said it was only a hundred, didn’t they?’

Nellie turned and smiled at Emma, a pretty VAD in her early twenties whose good spirits were much prized by the other girls. But today even Emma had clearly had enough. It was, Nellie thought, the horror of not knowing what was happening as much as the tremendous numbers of wounded. They knew the Germans had broken through, knew the Allies were in hot retreat for the first time in their soldiering careers ... was it the end, then? A week ago their hopes of victory had been high, but now it seemed defeat stared them in the face.

‘Is that what they said, only a hundred?’ Nellie shook her head to clear it and then smiled across into Emma’s fair and cherubic face, blanched now with exhaustion, shadowed by fear, smiled also at Lucy, steadily working away next to the younger girl. ‘Well, there are a good few more still to come, and I’m sure I’ve ripped off at least three hundred dressings already and probably more, so you go down to the stores, Em, and take your time. I’ll slow down a bit whilst you’re gone, that will stop a bottleneck forming round the dressings table, if necessary I’ll move over and help Lucy for a bit, just until you get back.’ She turned to the M.O., sitting at the table between them. ‘Will that be all right, Dr Dunning?’

‘What ... ? Oh, for the nurse to fetch more dressings. Yes ... surely. Are we nearly at the end of the line, nurse?’

Dr Dunning was not much older than Nell and he
looked desperately tired. Nellie craned her neck to look through the doorway, blocked with men leaning against the door-jambs, all but asleep themselves as soon as they stopped walking.

‘Not many more, sir,’ she lied. ‘We’ll be finished and in bed before the sun comes up.’

‘There’s a weariness in all of us that’s never been there before,’ Nellie said three weeks later as she and Lucy were tumbling into their beds and hoping for a few hours uninterrupted sleep. ‘I’ve had a letter from Li and another from Stuart and I’ve not had time to read either.’

Lucy, sitting down on the bed in all her clothing except for her apron, for it was still cold despite the advance of spring, thrust back the covers and rolled inside, heaving the sheets up round her shoulders.

‘Stuart? And you’ve not read it? What’s the matter, Nell? Are you ill?’

Nellie laughed, getting briskly into her own bed.

‘No, not ill, Lu. Just totally exhausted. All I think when I get a letter now is, ‘well, he was alive when he wrote it’, and then I pray a bit that he’s alive somewhere, still, and then I go on working.’

‘Or go to sleep,’ came a mumble from beneath the covers.

Nellie laughed.

‘Or go to sleep,’ she agreed. ‘Oh, Lu, tell me tomorrow will be better.’

But no reply was forthcoming. Lucy slept.

After no more than two hours of sleep, Nellie was awoken by an orderly calling at the door of the tent – and by the drone of aero engines overhead.

‘Wake up, girls,’ the orderly was shouting. ‘Get into the hospital, it’ll be safer than the tent ... air-raid warning!’

It was remarkable how swiftly you could wake and dress with the whistle of descending bombs all around and only a flimsy tent between you and the alien night. Neither Lucy nor Nellie had undressed properly, so it was only a matter of moments before they were running across the garden which separated them from the chateau, clutching a blanket each, with their aprons unfastened but at least in position.

They burst into the hospital and found the place in darkness. Other girls equally breathless surrounded them. A chattering, as of anxious sparrows, filled the air. What was it, what had happened, were the Germans here already? A convoy of wounded had clearly just arrived, there were stretchers on the floors, on tables, up and down corridors. Makeshift beds were everywhere and they reached their ward just as the windows were lit up by an appalling explosion, so that for a moment the room was light as day. Sister saw them and hurried between the beds.