Gifts of War (47 page)

It was not until one-thirty that I was ready to face the guests Sam had invited, all of whom had arrived by then. But she had told everyone why Will and I were missing, they all thought it was very funny, and that helped the lunch go with a bang. The guests stayed until about five, by which time Will was flat out, and Sam went to rest.

After the guests had gone, I read her birthday present for a couple of hours, every so often getting up to check on Will. He was still fast asleep, exhausted by the day, and he reeked of all the soap I had lathered on him during the bath we had shared. He usually smelled of soap when he was asleep in bed. I had grown to love that smell.

In the early evening Sam got up, wearing her dressing gown. “How would you feel about another birthday gift?”

“I’m happy with one. I was brought up that way, you know that.” She was smiling. “But you don’t know what this gift is.” I looked at her.

“Will gave me the idea. I don’t think you and I have ever taken a bath together.”

Throughout the war, we hadn’t seen much of Ruth, Sam’s eldest sister. A seamstress, helping to run a factory in North London, making uniforms, she was always very busy and it was obviously important work, and much in demand. In July 1918, however, we got a letter from her inviting us to her engagement party. Sam quickly accepted.

The party was held in the factory—not as bizarre as it might sound because as well as uniforms, Ruth’s factory made tents for the army, and so they had no difficulty in erecting a big one for celebrations.

I remember the event for three things. One, there was a slight awkwardness because Faye and Lottie were both there and we were all involved in an elaborate piece of choreography, carefully avoiding each other throughout the evening. (It wasn’t too difficult; there were more than three hundred people there—Ruth really did have a big job.) The second thing was that, at one point, Ruth drew us away from the crowd and took us into the factory proper. “I have something to show you,” she said to Sam.

She led us into a small office and drew open the doors of a large cupboard. “This is a new line we are introducing. You can have one free if you want.”

In front of us was a line of infantry uniforms, but in children’s sizes. I could see why Ruth had brought us here all by ourselves.

Sam was flustered. “Can I think about it, Ruth?” she said.

“Of course,” said Ruth softly. “They’ll be in the shops in about a month. I just thought I’d … you know… let you have a private preview.”

“Thank you,” said Sam.

We went back to the main party.

Ruth’s fiancé, Greville, was a wiry Welshman from Aberystwyth, with hard gray eyes and a long neck.

“They’re something, these Ross sisters, eh?” He grinned, looking from me to Sam. He had prominent cheekbones, too, which made his face seem longer.

I nodded. “Four firebrands.”

“You’re in the War Ministry?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You?”

“Security. Can’t say any more.”

“I understand. How did you meet Ruth?”

“She helped me with a case.”

“Oh yes?”

“You bet. I can’t say too much about that either, but we needed to put some men behind the German lines and for that we needed German uniforms. We had captured a couple but nowhere near enough. Ruth was able to copy them perfectly—how she got the right material, and the right color, and the right stitching, and so quickly, I’ll never know, but she did and the operation was a success. She’ll get an honor after the war—one of these Labor Medals I should think.”

“Are you having a honeymoon?” asked Sam.

“No. Neither of us can get away. Plenty of time for that sort of thing later.”

“Family?”

“I hope so. You have a son, right?”

“Yes,” Sam said, squeezing my arm.

“Does he want to be a soldier?”

“He’s barely three and a half. By the time he’s grown up, this war will be long over.”

“I hope so,” breathed Greville. “God, I hate Germans, don’t you?”

Toward the end of the month we went to the Battersea summer fair again. Will was now nearly three and a half (as he would say seriously whenever anyone asked him) and the fair was probably the first thing he remembered from one year to the next, so vivid was the experience for him, and so different from anything else in the rest of his short life. He was still a bonny boy—he had not yet thinned out—and guns were now his favorite toys. Three mornings a week he attended Miss Allardyce’s infant school—kindergarten was too German a word in those days—and he was making friends with other boys. While both Sam and I were pleased about this (he seemed to be popular), I know that Sam was less pleased by the jingoistic atmosphere at Miss Allardyce’s. War games were by far the most popular form of entertainment at the school—the lessons, at that age, were not very arduous. Everyone wanted to be British soldiers, and no one, naturally, wanted to be German. Sam, I could tell, though we never talked about it openly, was apprehensive as to how this might rebound on Will in later years.

Her predicament was made more poignant for me by the fact that Will more and more resembled his biological father. Save for the different colored hair, Will had Wilhelm’s eyes and nose, his lips, and the general thrust of his chin. From time to time, when I was alone in my office at work, I would take out Wilhelm’s photograph to double-check that this really was true. And true it was. Will had some of my mannerisms, but there was no doubting whose son he was. Not if you had met the father.

Will was a bright child and curious too—curious to a fault, in fact, as I think I have said before. He would stand too close to the bank of a river or canal, or approach too close to a railway engine, too close to horses, studying their muscles. Sam and I were always pulling him back. He climbed furniture without fear and was fascinated by fire. Perhaps all children are.

At Battersea that year there was a new attraction. It was a sort of horizontal wheel in which the chairs, as well as circling at the circumference, as the wheel turned, also spun on their own axes. Will was much too young to be taken on this contraption—I don’t remember what it was called—but he would have jumped at the chance if Sam or I had said yes.

As it was, while we were watching, he somehow slipped his mother’s notice, and mine, and got closer to the wheel than he should have. There was a crowd gathered, and for a moment I lost sight of him. A whirring sound started up, music began to play, the wheel slowly got going, and the chairs began to rotate. Women strapped into the chairs held on to their hats or tied their scarves more tightly about their heads, as the momentum increased. The wheel turned once, twice, three times, until it was going quite fast and the chairs were spinning at a dizzying speed. I saw Will at the front of the crowd and pushed through the people toward him.

Suddenly, there was a loud
crack!—
and a shout went up. From where I was, easing my way through a multitude of bodies, I saw a cable under the wheel snap, snake free of its moorings, unfurl in a kind of lazy whiplash—and slice across Will’s tiny body. I gasped as I saw blood spurt from his little arm as his frame fell to the muddy grass. I shouted—and was with him in no time. Sam screamed behind me but I had my tie off and was pulling it tight around Will’s upper arm, above the cut. The cable had severed an artery and I had to stop any
more loss of blood. I knew about severed arteries, ever since the murder in our village when I was a boy.

There was blood everywhere—on Will himself, on my clothes and face, sprayed across the grass around us. Women were screaming as the wheel ground to a halt and the music faded.

But I knew what I had to do. I lifted Will and began to run.

“Where are you going?” screamed Sam.

“Follow me!” I yelled over my shoulder, saving my breath. I ran between the new wheel and the great slide, and hurried to the edge of the park. I could hear Sam running behind me. My leg was hurting but not badly, not yet.

At the edge of the park I turned north, across the bridge over the Thames. I didn’t know how much time I had but I knew it wasn’t much. My tourniquet was an amateur affair and wouldn’t hold forever. Will’s face was pale and he looked frightened. So was I but I tried not to show it.

I reached the north end of the bridge and hurried across the road. I scared a couple of horses in the process and was shouted at by their riders, but I pressed on—I knew what I knew. Diagonally across the road from the park was the Lister Hospital. Sam and I had walked past it countless times on our jaunts through London.

I rushed in. “Quick!” I shouted at the first nurse I saw. “The boy’s severed an artery at the fair. He needs it cauterized, and then he needs a blood transfusion.”

The nurse—barely eighteen—stared at me.

“Get your sister
—now
!” I bellowed. “She’ll know what to do.”

Just then an older woman in a dark blue uniform appeared. “What’s going on?”

I told her. Sam arrived, panting. She just stood there, terrified.

“There’s no doctor here at the moment,” said the sister. “He’s been called out to an accident.”

“Then you’ll have to do it.”

She glared at me. People didn’t speak to sisters like that.

“There’s no blood.”

“I’m type O. Take it from me.”

The sister looked from me to Will, who was pale. Then she looked back to me.

“You’re right. Follow me.”

The operating theater was all the way at the far end of the corridor.

I laid Will gently on the table. His eyes were closed, his face was still pale, and his skin was caked with dried tears and spatters of blood. I was close to tears myself.

The sister replaced my tie tourniquet with another one, made of rubber tubing. It was neater and more tightly applied—it would hold.

Calmly, she set up a saline drip, fitting it into one of Will’s veins in his good arm with a needle, and then set about cauterizing the artery. The smell of singeing filled the room. Will began to cry out.

“I’m here,” I whispered. “The pain won’t last long.”

The sister finished what she was doing, put a swab of cotton wool on the wound, and tied a bandage over it. Then she loosened the tourniquet and watched for a moment.

There seemed to be no escape of blood so she straightened up and turned back to me. “Take off your jacket and roll up your shirtsleeve. How much blood do you think he lost?”

“I don’t know. Take what you need.”

She selected a needle for her syringe, tapped the vein in my arm quite hard, so that it stood out, and, to judge by the smell, wiped some form of alcohol on it.

Sam was holding the hand of Will’s good arm.

The sister inserted the needle and led blood from my vein into a bottle. The red, sticky liquid poured steadily but the bottle still took several minutes to fill.

Sam looked on anxiously, between Will and me. She had never seen anything like this before. Hardly anyone had. I only knew about it, of course, because my sister was doing this every day at the Front and because of the blood transfusion session we’d had at the ministry. I had received a letter not long afterward informing me that my blood group was O.

Finally, the sister was done with me. She took the bottle, suspended it upside down next to the saline drip, and led a fresh tube down to Will’s good arm.

The young nurse gave me a patch of cotton wool, soaked in alcohol, to hold over my wound.

The sister murmured to Will, “You’re going to feel a pinprick, young man. It will hurt a tiny bit but not for long. You’ve been very brave so far, so you’re not going to make a fuss now, are you?” She smiled.

Will, looking serious, shook his young head and half-whispered, half-cried, “My shoes are dirty.”

Sam and I looked at each other. She was crying and smiling at the same time.

The nurse inserted the needle and Will whimpered.

Sam kissed his forehead.

We watched the level of blood in the bottle fall as the liquid entered Will’s body.

Suddenly the door to the operating theater burst open and a man in a white coat strode in. He was tall and thin, and his hair drooped over his forehead. In a moment he took in what was happening.

“Where did the blood come from?”

“Me,” I replied. “I’m type O.”

“How do you know?”

“My sister works in an experimental unit at the Front, giving
blood transfusions. She told me about the technology. I work in the War Ministry and gave blood. They told me I am O.”

“I hope you are,” said the doctor. “Now, will you all wait outside, please. It looks like Sister Wakefield has done an excellent job but, under the law, I am responsible for patients here, and I need to double-check her work.”

The junior nurse led us back outside as the doctor bent over Will.

I put my arm around Sam as she sobbed. Then she looked up. “Will he be all right?”

“I think so.” I was more nervous than I looked.

“How did you know about—what’s it called?”

“Transfusion? It’s what Izzy does in her experimental medical unit in France. They are giving transfusions all the time to men at the Front who have just been injured. Apparently it’s very effective.” I told Sam about the session at the War Ministry. It certainly took her mind off Will for a few moments.

The young nurse brought us some tea. “Not many people know about blood transfusion,” she said. “It’s a new technique.”

We sat sipping our tea.

Suddenly a policeman appeared. He took off his hat and came up to me. “Excuse me, sir, are you the man who ran off with the young boy who was injured at the fair?”

“Yes.” I pointed to the operating theater. “He’s in there with the doctor.”

The officer nodded. “I won’t bother you much, sir, but we will need a statement from you, in case the fairground company is to be prosecuted for negligence.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Just your name and address, for the moment, then.”

I told him and he wrote down the details.

“Was anyone else injured?” asked Sam.

“I don’t think so, ma’am, not seriously
anyway
,” he said, putting his notebook in his pocket and making his farewells.