Apple Blossom Time (39 page)

I couldn’t think how or where to start. I sat up, pummelled the pillow, and lay down on my stomach. The familiar shape of the mattress I had slept on for twenty years seemed to have altered. There were dips where there should have been lumps. There were hummocks where there should have been hollows.

So I crept downstairs, keeping to the edge of each step, avoiding the third tread from the top. I didn’t want Mother and Tom to wake just because I couldn’t sleep. The kitchen smelt of the marrow bones that had been set to simmer for stock all night on a cooling fire – lucky to get those, Mother had said, you’d scarcely believe the war was over. It smelt of grease and the soda I’d used to wash up, and cold ash. There was just enough glow in the embers to catch the kindling I fed to the range. And while I was waiting for the slow kettle to boil, I opened the back door and stood on the step, letting the stone draw the bedtime warmth from my feet, watching the sun rise and listening to the waking song of a sleepy wren – what a huge noise for a tiny bird – and working out what to do next.

The only place to start was at the beginning.

*   *   *

The military hospital at Netley was both impressive and immensely depressing. I remembered looking over the ship’s rail as I’d sailed to and from France and being grateful I wasn’t a nurse there. I’d wondered how many miles a day a nurse had to walk. What a relic, as externally magnificent, as internally impossible as the age in which it had been planned, the Empire’s answer to the squalor of Scutari. The building must have been impractical from the day it received its first patient, in March 1863. For more than a quarter of a mile, the Royal Victoria Hospital lined the eastern bank of Southampton Water, redbrick, faced with Portland stone and corniced with Welsh granite, with rows of windows drawn up like a battalion on parade, and the central domed chapel that was a landmark to vessels entering and leaving port.

The major part of the British forces on the Western Front, the returning casualties, the prisoners of war, all came and went from Southampton and past the Royal Victoria. From Southampton Docks, a train carried the stretcher cases the few miles to Netley. It was the staging post for the lucky men with a Blighty one, their first treatment in a permanent building, before, perhaps, being sent on to other hospitals throughout the country. Some would never leave it. It was the place to begin my search.

I walked through pleasant grounds that stretched down to the shore. Men in military hospital blue sat in the sun or were pushed in wheelchairs along a promenade by the water’s edge. Not so many now as there had been. The war had ended five months ago, but there were men here who might never go home. I didn’t know which door to go through, didn’t know where to look, didn’t know who to ask.

It was impressive. It was monstrous. The corridor stretched ahead of me, a quarter of a mile of highly polished lino that squeaked under my feet. About a hundred yards away, a nurse in scarlet and grey was squeaking along in front of me – walk, don’t run, nurses never run, even when they work in a hospital where a patient could die of a heart attack before anyone could reach him. The nurse certainly walked fast, though. She outdistanced me and turned off into a ward. Further away still, a porter was pushing a trolley. From where I stood, it looked as though the figure on the trolley had a blanket pulled over his face.

Closely ranked windows made up the left-hand wall of the corridor. It was like walking the length of a particularly badly designed greenhouse. No, plants would never have survived in that dry, dead atmosphere. The sun was scorching. It could have blistered the paint and melted the polish on the lino. Yet, I imagined, in winter it was probably bitterly cold. Not a single bluebottle buzzed against the acres of glass. The smell of Lysol caught at my throat. A germ wouldn’t have dared raise its head.

Somewhere there must be an archive store. Feeling like a sneak thief, I set off down the corridor, past doors labelled Surgical, Orthopaedic, Pathology, Officers Only. Yes, this was definitely a military hospital. Officers and soldiers couldn’t possibly lie in bed next to each other or use adjacent urinals.

I tried not to look through the many doors, but it was difficult to avoid getting glimpses of the dark interiors of the wards. Orderly rows of beds. Starched sheets. Hospital corners. Patients lying at attention. And I thought that the architect of this ridiculous building ought to have been made to spend a few months in bed here. He might have learned a lesson or two. The hospital was in a perfect setting, with sea breezes and views across the water to the margins of the New Forest, yet he’d wasted all that on a pompous façade and corridors, while the patients had to endure a view of the clutter of stores, kitchens and canteens at the back.

When I’d explored about three-quarters of the ground floor, I was cornered by a woman wearing the three-cornered starched veil and scarlet cape of a QAIMNS sister.

‘No visiting until 1400 hours,’ she informed me, crisply.

‘I’m looking for your records office.’

‘Top floor – but you can’t go up there—’

*   *   *

When I saw the RAMC sergeant sitting at his desk, reading the sports page of the
Daily Sketch,
cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, mug of tea comfortably within reach, I wished I was back in uniform. It would have given us a starting point, a bond of experiences shared. We would have known at once what to make of each other. It would have been ‘us’, the senior NCOs, the backbone of the army, against ‘them’ – meaning anyone and everyone else. Now, to him, I was just a nosy civilian.

‘1918? Well, now,’ he said, slowly, ‘I don’t know. I really couldn’t say. I can’t let just anyone poke around in confidential records.’

‘It’s terribly important.’

‘Can’t be that important if it could wait nearly twenty-seven years.’

‘It’s about … about my father. I never knew him, you see.’ I could scarcely recognize the breathy, feminine voice as my own. Good heavens, I was actually manipulating the man. I might have been ashamed of myself if I hadn’t wanted something from him so badly. ‘And he might have been here. I’ve just found out. And I do so need to know … to know
something.
’

‘Medical records – confidential,’ he reiterated. ‘I’d be for the chop if it got out. It’d be more than my stripes are worth.’

‘Please. I could make it worth your while.’

‘I didn’t hear that, love.’

‘Please.’

‘Well, I don’t know. I suppose I could just tell you if he was here. Would that help? I can’t let you look.’ He got up and went towards a door on the other side of his office. ‘
If
he was here.
If
I can find anything, which isn’t likely, considering.
If
it hasn’t all been eaten by mice or rotted in the rain or…’

I could see his point. Racks and racks of shelving stretched off into a dusty distance. Each rack was packed with paper: splitting brown envelopes spilling paper, paper shoved back and jammed at the back of shelves, crumpled, stained, spotted, nibbled paper. Here and there, buckets and basins stood on the floor to catch drips from the roof. There was no water in them at the moment, but they were tide-marked by past rainy days.

‘Good Lord,’ I gasped.

‘Not a pretty sight, is it?’ he agreed cheerfully. ‘It’s all here – right from the days when Florence Nightingale was lighting her little lamp – somewhere. Falling to bits, this place. All swank on the outside and a leaking roof. All fur coats and no knickers, as my old granny would say. They’ll have to pull it down, if something isn’t done soon. Now, what name are you looking for?’

‘Ansty. Captain E J T Ansty, Princess Augusta’s Own.’

‘Well, that’s a mercy, anyway. Narrows things down a bit. Officers’ documents are separate from ORs. Bad for discipline to have them hobnobbing on the same shelf.’

‘Alphabetic or date order?’ I asked brightly, trying to encourage myself that the task wasn’t hopeless. But it was, I thought. Hopeless. A needle in a haystack would be child’s play compared to this.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know? I’ve been here seventeen years and I’m only just getting the hang of it.’

‘Seventeen years?’ He was joking – wasn’t he?

‘That’s right. 1928 I came here, straight out of basic training. Sometimes I think the army’s forgotten me. Still, suits me. Nice cushy little number. Wife and kiddies, married quarters and all. Mind you, the hospital’s not what it was.’

I could only nod my encouragement. He was raking through a filing cabinet as he spoke and I didn’t want to distract him.

‘Before my time, of course, but would you believe that in the last lot, there was patients overflowing into the corridors and huts and tents all over the grounds. Stands to reason that some of the paperwork went missing. Beds everywhere. Germans, too. Kept them on the middle floor, where they could be guarded proper, while our lads were in tents, until the shop stewards in Thorneycroft’s heard about it and organized a protest march. Then it was Germans outside and Tommies in again, quick as you like. Not this war, though, not so many patients. Too near the docks and they had a pasting, I can tell you.’

I watched his sifting fingers, afraid to stop his flow of talk and searching – willing him, willing him to find something.

‘Look, love,’ he said, raising his head from the packed drawer. ‘Why don’t you take a little walk outside for half an hour or so. Give me a chance. Have a look round the cemetery, why don’t you? It’s very nice, very tasteful. And you never know what you might find.’

*   *   *

There is a path that leads through neglected woods. Still, heavy shade, dark and brambly, weighty. Then you come out into the dappled sunlight of a grassy knoll and you’re dazzled by the brightness of the neat rows of headstones. White, uniform, impersonal you think, until you read the few words on each, words of farewell, pride, regret, hope, chosen by the families of the men who came back from the war only to die. Among the stones are more angular ones carved with the names of the German wounded who never went home.

I read them all. Then I moved slowly up the slope, through the less-regimented ranks of older graves, the soldiers of the Queen-Empress who had carried back their tropical diseases halfway across the world to Hampshire.

Down the slope again and another handful of tombs, belonging to officers of the Great War, more ornate, grander than those at the entrance to the cemetery, divided even in death. I read the name on each one.

Edwin Ansty was not there.

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry. Both, perhaps. I had followed the trail for so long, with such intensity, that it would have been almost a respite to have reached the end. I longed to know, here, now, whatever it was that I had to face.

I wanted it to be over.

*   *   *

And when I went back to the sergeant clerk’s office, he had found nothing either. A waste of a day. A waste of
another
day.

‘Sorry, love,’ he said. ‘I did my best.’

‘It was kind of you to try. I’m sorry to have wasted so much of your time.’

‘That’s all right. I was only picking the winners at Kempton on Saturday, anyway.’ He held out his hand to shake mine. ‘Good luck. I hope you find him.’ Then, as I went out the door, he said, ‘I don’t suppose … he wouldn’t have been in the Asylum, would he, your dad?’

I sat and waited this time, while he fetched another bunch of keys and opened a different door. Behind it were the same racks of shelving, the same fruity smell of decay, but the number of documents was smaller. I felt very frightened.

Asylum. It was such a Victorian word. It stood alongside workhouse and pauper and poor law – and lunatic. No-one used it any more. No-one
modern
said it. But whatever you called it, it meant the same thing.

‘No need to look like that. It’s not as bad as you think,’ the clerk reassured me, as his fingers riffled through a card index. ‘They were mostly shellshock cases in there. The odd queer fish, of course, no getting away from that. D’you know the one about the loony looking over the wall, watching this feller scooping up the horse’s doovers from the road … no?… and the loony says … oh well, p’raps not. And there was always one or two who thought it was a quick way to get out of soldiering. Silly sods. They were soon given the old about-turn, quick march. But mostly, they were lads who couldn’t take any more. Well, they were either shot or sent to Netley, depending on how lucky they were.’ He slammed one drawer shut and opened another. I felt very cold. It was as if … as if I knew. ‘Take your pick which you’d rather. Those were the bad old days, weren’t they? We’re a bit more sensitive now, I like to think. It’s not so bad, though. “D” block. Its own grounds, pretty little summerhouse to sit in. Nice and secluded behind the wall. You can go and have a look if you like. Aaaah…’ He gave a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction and pulled out a card. ‘Here we are. There’s no-one can find their way round my filing system like I can, though I say it myself. Is this who you’re looking for? Here until May 1920 and then transferred to a nursing home in Surrey. Before my time.’

1920. He was alive in 1920 and so was I. But we never saw each other.

By May 1920, my mother had married Tom.

*   *   *

I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t talk to them.

My gentle mother – wispy hair always escaping, long hands always on the move. Always trying to make sure that everyone was happy and failing because what she tried couldn’t possibly be achieved, ever, only she hadn’t worked that out yet, so she kept on trying. I wondered what she had been like, in the days before I could remember her. Eighteen years old and a widow with a child on the way. Supposing my brief moments with James had left me in that situation. What would I have done? Would I have grasped at the next man who showed me kindness? But I had been older, stronger, altogether tougher than my mother ever had been.

Tom, whatever his faults – and who was I to criticize a man who had come back from the trenches with shot nerves and a taste for whisky? – had been the kindest, most generous stepfather anyone could have wanted. He had cared for me, played with me when I was small, supported me. He had never, not once, made me feel that I was any less his own daughter than Kate.