A Rose In Flanders Fields (11 page)

I knocked on the landlady’s door and introduced myself; she knew me only as one of the Creswells from the manor, and I told her I had come on behalf of Will’s family, to pay rent in advance and remove his belongings so she could let the room out again. In all the time we had been together I had never come here, it had been too much of a risk. The stairs were narrow and dark, and I pictured him climbing them at night, exhausted from his work, looking forward to a wash and a quick meal before bed – where perhaps he might have lain and thought of me, as I did of him. Through the pain of missing him, the thought made me smile, just a little. Even the smile hurt, made me feel disloyal.

The landlady unlocked the door and I gave her the two weeks rent money I had brought. ‘I can take just a few things now, but I’ll send for the rest tomorrow.’ She nodded, already used to her tenants’ sudden departures. I waited until she had gone back down the stairs, then turned to take my first look at where Will had lived for the past three years.

The room was not a big one and the first thing that struck me was the clutter, although a second look revealed it to be no mess, but rather a collection of paintings, carvings and sculptures. The largest of these stood on the table, half-covered by a carelessly thrown sheet which I drew back to reveal a statuette, standing around a foot high and carved in dark wood. It was the shape of a woman, her hair escaping her hat and shaped into wild curls that blew across her face, hiding the features, but I didn’t need to see them; I raised my hand to my own face, tears thick at the back of my throat.

The statuette wore the roughly outlined symbol of the Red Cross on her front, standing out against her uniform dress, and her legs were not yet shaped, just a solid block of wood. It felt as if my own legs were the same; just an unmoving lump, unable to take another step. The care that had gone into the carving of this piece sang from every notch and scrape, and the knife he had used to craft it lay on the table beside it, curls of wood littering the table as if he had been called away from his work suddenly. As I looked closer I saw, in the girl’s hat, a tiny rose carved out of the same block, and with a sharp pang I remembered his face when he’d seen the paper rose at my waist just yesterday. The rose itself was back in its box, and would go with me to Rugby, and from there to France, or wherever we were sent.

This piece was the one I would take with me tonight. I glanced around: the majority of the space was taken up with paintings, most of them facing the wall, and when I turned one or two of them around I understood at once why Nathan had been so unsuccessful towards the end. It wasn’t a lack of talent, far from it, but the paintings were dark and tortured-looking, full of deep reds and blacks, and swirls of mashed colours in thick oil that seemed to leap, screaming, from the canvas. Bodiless faces; roaring rivers; tall, black buildings; a huge, Golem-like creature bearing down on a tiny, helpless man…symbols of the trapped terror the artist was feeling for his debts, no doubt.

Disturbed, I turned these paintings back to the wall. It was little wonder Will had faced them that way, it would be impossible to sleep in this room otherwise. I looked at one or two others and they were calmer, presumably painted during earlier, easier days, but of less artistic merit that I could discern. It was ironic that Nathan’s best work had emerged as a result of the lack of success of these lesser pieces, and that gave me a pinch of sadness for Will’s unknown friend, but it was followed by frustration that he had given Will this dream, and then left him alone with the nightmare.

I went back to the table and picked up two of Will’s small pieces: a miniature cottage no bigger than my hand, but intricately carved in soft, pale wood; and a daisy of around the same size – both unpainted – and then I wrapped the statuette in the cloth again and tucked her under my arm. I would have everything brought over to Oaklands tomorrow, but for tonight I would have these things to remind me of my husband when I lay down in my bed, alone once again.

I slipped off my wedding band before the car arrived, and on the way home I rehearsed my cheerful lies; I’d already said I was attending a wedding, giving the impression it was a friend from London who was getting married, and fixed the description of my own gown in my head, ready to attribute it to the fictitious bride. The way the lies fell from my lips, cheerful or otherwise, disturbed me, but I wasn’t ready yet to place this burden on Mother’s shoulders; she was already distressed about my imminent departure to the Red Cross. Neither was I ready to turn this joyful news into something cold and hurtful, to be argued over rather than held tightly and treasured.

I tried once more to tell the truth before I left, but my mother’s despair at my stubborn insistence on going overseas, instead of serving in England, stole any inclination I had to heap more woe upon her, and it simply grew more and more difficult to tell her the truth. It seemed easier, and kinder, to let her believe I had too much to think about to waste time on hopeless, and unsuitable, romantic entanglements.

My training began in St Cross Hospital, Rugby, on a chilly October day. The hospitals were already taking in wounded from the various fronts and, although I knew I’d have heard if Will were hurt, I still felt my heart clench every time I went to the docks. When I realised he wasn’t among them, I fought the guilty relief and threw myself harder than ever into helping those who were, to make up for it. I know I wasn’t the only one to feel like that, and I soon bonded with a cheerful, freckled girl named Barbara, who was in love with an airman and talked about him non-stop. One day I called her “Boxy”, for “Chatterbox”. during one of our regular one-sided conversations, and it stuck. It suited her surname, Wood, too, and soon everyone was calling her Boxy but they didn’t know why. It was our joke; a small thing, but in our situation it was the small things that could sometimes get you through the most difficult times.

Boxy Wood shared my interest in motor vehicles and their workings. She told me what it was like in the ambulance corps; her sister had gone out two months before to join a convoy in France. ‘Honestly, Davies, it’s the most awful sort of torture you could imagine. And I’m not talking about the wounded, or even the driving. Clara says their commandant waits ’til they’re all falling asleep after a fourteen-hour shift, then blows her damnable whistle for inspection. And woe betide any poor girl with a mucky uniform; punishment duties are dreadful.’

It did sound awful. On the other hand the War Office had been calling specifically for young ladies of good breeding to go out there and do their bit. ‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘They need people like us, and it doesn’t look as though the war will be over by Christmas after all.’

She sighed. ‘I know, poppet.’ Then she looked at me with a little glint in her eye I was starting to recognise, and I felt a smile twitch at my lips in anticipation.

‘What are you cooking up now?’

‘All right, listen. We’ve missed out on our chance to go out with the Munro corps, correct?’

‘Correct. Unfortunately. Why do you suppose Doctor Munro only took six in the end?’ We’d both been keen to apply to Hector Munro’s exciting-sounding venture; working with the support of the Red Cross, but independent of their strict regimes, closer to the lines, and right in the thick of things.

‘Well, he had to pick the cream of the crop, and Mrs Knocker and Dorothie Feilding are certainly that.’

‘They’re so lucky,’ I grumbled, ‘avoiding all the huff and puff of inspections, uniforms and rotas. Doesn’t seem at all in the spirit of why we want to help.’

Boxy nodded. ‘Even worse since we’ve paid for our own training. It galls rather, doesn’t it? So, why don’t we just set up by ourselves?’

‘What?’ It was such a casual comment I wasn’t sure I’d heard properly.

Boxy warmed to her suggestion, and became more animated. ‘Look. We just have to find a base, some building no-one’s using, and you can be sure there’ll be plenty of those. We’ll find a place as close to the lines as we can get, and move forward as they do so we’re always within reach with emergency help. We’ll do a bang-up job, I know it. If we’re going to suffer I’d much rather it be on our own terms, wouldn’t you?’

I would, of course, but there were practicalities to think of. ‘How on earth would we get passes to work up near the lines, if we’re not attached to the Red Cross?’

‘We’ll just have to prove they need us. Think about it, are they really going to turn us away if we arrive with our own vehicles, and fully trained to boot? You and I are just what they need out there.’

The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. We could take our own ambulances, or cars if we couldn’t get them, and act as whatever was needed at the time; stretcher-bearers if they’d let us, ambulance-drivers if they wouldn’t, both if we possibly could. Boxy wrote to the commanding officer of a unit just outside Dixmude, a friend of her airman, and he wrote back advising caution, but hinting that an independent ambulance base would be just as welcome as another Red Cross one.

Later, as he realised we were serious, Lieutenant-Colonel Drewe offered to arrange passes for us, provided we were certified and able to supply our own vehicles, and so we continued our training, knowing there would be little back-up once we were out there and making doubly sure we were proficient in all we could be.

Between us we raised enough cash through savings and donations, and bought a rattly old ambulance that we named Gertie in honour of an amusing pig we had seen on a postcard.

‘She
sounds
rather like a pig,’ Boxy had said, as we drove a noisily snorting Gertie off the ferry and onto French soil. ‘A splash of pink paint and who’d know the difference?’

I rolled my eyes and laughed, a tingling excitement was making me feel a bit giddy despite the very real fear that was taking hold now. ‘Barbara Wood, we are
not
painting her pink!’

The cottage in Belgium was a decent enough place. We had to give it a number, so as to identify it with the ambulance convoys and the hospitals nearby, so it became Number Twelve. Abandoned shortly after the Yser Canal had been flooded, to stay the German advance in late October, it sat alone in its own little courtyard, miraculously whole and quite the ugliest place I’d ever seen. But oddly beautiful at the same time. We loved it from the very first. Although it was just a one-bedroomed cottage it had a roomy cellar, perfect for converting into a small ward, and with room for seven beds and an equipment store. We, and those we planned to help, would be safe down there from shellfire, and it was somewhere to administer basic first-aid before moving the wounded along to the Clearing Stations once they were more likely to survive the journey.

Not being part of an officially designated field ambulance division meant we lacked mechanical backup, so I was grateful Uncle Jack had always been firm with me, and shown me the basics of engine maintenance when he’d heard about my clandestine driving lessons.

‘No good just learning to drive,’ he’d said when I’d pulled a face. ‘You need to know what to do if something goes wrong. You’ll like it, once you get going, I know you.’

He was right and, even better, I discovered I had an aptitude for it; I couldn’t help grinning with delight the first time I was able to correct the problems he’d deliberately caused, and I was glad he’d persisted – especially now, given the work Gertie was putting in over increasingly rough roads.

We’d arrived in November 1914, and collected as much bedding as we could find, but the luxury of gathering equipment, and setting up what we’d fondly imagined would be our sweet little dressing station, with comfort and curtains, and hot drinks for the Tommies, was not to be. We were thrown into it right away, attached to the military unit a couple of miles away, and, with no field telephone, we quickly grew accustomed to the shrill whistle of the runner on his bicycle as he summoned us to duty. Days blurred into long, cold nights, and weeks into months, while we battled extremes of boredom and terror, and we faithfully wrote our sunny “gosh it’s exciting being in the thick of it!” letters home so our parents could boast about us to their friends. Heaven forbid they should find out what we actually did, night after night, I’m not certain Mother would have sat quietly at home if she’d known.

Our own tentative excitement had been crushed out of us after the first, awful night. With nothing of our own base ready we’d volunteered our services at least, and turned out to help the Red Cross convoy, lining up with the other drivers at the railway station. The trains had come in; old, rattling things in these early days of war, filled from end to end with wounded. Weeping men; silent men; angry, bewildered men; men numbed with misery and mute with horror…
dear God, was Will in danger of becoming one of these?

We’d sat, still and shocked, while the orderlies loaded us up and barked our load:
four stretchers, one sitter
, and then driven, somehow, to the sergeant at the gate. ‘Four stretchers, one sitter,’ I repeated, stumbling over the impersonal words that were supposed to somehow explain the softly moaning, tangled mass of humanity I was carrying.

He consulted his clip-board. ‘Number Five.’ He waved us through, and we were on our way. Where was Number Five? I was utterly lost, both mentally and geographically, but we found Number Five hospital mercifully quickly and were unloaded. Then it was back again; the train was still crammed with men awaiting their turn. Or their deaths. As dawn raked the sky with glorious pink rays that belied the tragedy beneath it, Boxy and I returned, in trembling silence, to our beds. Different women. Grown up in the space of a few horrific and nauseating hours.

The next morning, after we’d opened the ambulance doors to begin cleaning, and instead contributed to the mess, we looked at one another, wiped our mouths and both of us had broken down in tears. It was the last time we did so as a result of our work, and since that night our bond had been unbreakable and if ever one of us wavered in her determination to stick it out, the other would simply touch her hand and walk away, leaving her standing alone. It served to remind us how the fighting men felt, away from the comradeship of their unit, hurt and frightened – it was why we were there.