No Man's Land (65 page)

Matron received her in the stony manner which was characteristic of her, and laid a couple of fingers on the girl's pulse.

‘There's nothing the matter with you at all, Nurse,' she snapped. ‘Many people have a slight cough without making a fuss of this sort. What you want is a little hard work. You V. A. D.s are far too easily sorry for yourselves. Go back to your ward.'

And back O'Reilly went, swearing to herself that nothing in heaven or earth would induce her ever to report sick again.

‘And she's getting worse and worse,' declared Phipps to the others at night. ‘Soon she'll scarcely be able to crawl round the ward. She refuses to take her own temperature – says it would be useless. I keep pressing aspirins and cough lozenges on her, but—'

There came a point when O'Reilly's condition could no longer be ignored. Having almost collapsed one morning, she was sent to the sick-room at the top of the main building and put instantly to bed. It was found that she had bronchial pneumonia. From then onwards she received the best attention which the hospital could provide. But by then it was too late.

Everyone went about, as it were, on tip-toe. ‘How is O'Reilly?' would be asked in frightened whispers – even by those who had only known the girl by sight. Guarded reports came from the sick-room. Nothing could be definitely ascertained. At mealtimes Matron's face was scanned by hundreds of young eyes, but it preserved its nutshell impenetrability.

Then it was rumoured that O'Reilly had become unconscious; then that her people had been sent for; then that she was a little better and was being kept alive on oxygen and brandy.

By the time that her parents had been able to get over from Ireland the girl was dead.

O'Reilly had not been a particularly popular or a particularly significant member of the community of the 1st London, but thenceforward she became a symbol and a martyr. For days feeling ran high among those who knew the facts about her; but Phipps's fury of indignation against Matron was mingled with remorse that she herself had not been able to do more to help the girl.

Outwardly, of course, the higher authorities proceeded on their way as before, but their attitude to V. A. D.s as malingerers underwent a profound change. In dying poor O'Reilly had done more for her companions than ever she had done by living.

*

The stifling August days wore through, and now that work was less of a nightmare, Joan, in her off hours, used to take a bus and go into London.

She saw Pamela twice, but was unable to dissuade her friend from the munitions scheme; and when, soon afterwards, Pamela left Bruton Street and went to work in some awful factory out at Willesden, Joan realised that henceforward meetings would be impossible.

On ordinary days it was not worth while to go as far as Hampstead, but on her ‘half-day' a week (from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.) it was very pleasant to be at home, to lie curled on the old chintz-covered sofa in the drawing room, to chat to Aunt Florence, to hear news of relations, and of how Jimmy was getting on in the country where he was ‘cramming' with three friends. Not so pleasant to trek back after dinner (a little tug at the heart) by tube and bus to dreary Camberwell – allowing just enough time to arrive at the hostel before Sister Ansdell locked up for the night.

Sometimes, instead of going home, Joan would divide her ‘half-day' between different friends – tea-ing at one house, dining at another; or else go to a matinee with an officer on leave, or to dinner with him at a restaurant. Swift delightful patches of another sort of life, taking the smell of lysol and of wounds from the nostrils.

These London expeditions of Joan's earned her, from her roommates, the reputation of living ‘a double life.' One of them, especially, a kindly individual called Gower with a long nose and a pronounced cockney accent, thought her almost paralysingly energetic. Gower herself seldom went beyond the hospital grounds.

‘You'll come to a bad end, Seddon,' she used to say to Joan through the curtains of her cubicle at night. ‘Can't live the double life, you know – end by wearing yourself out!' (she pronounced it ‘ay-out').

‘Out on the tiles again, Seddon?' she would call, as Joan came in, by the skin of her teeth, at ten o'clock from a ‘half-day.' And Joan would laugh at the stock joke, and keep up the fiction of secret dissipations.

*

September sailed in on the calm glory of a full moon.

On the second night, at about twelve o'clock, Joan was awakened from fathom-deep sleep by the murmur of voices in the bedroom. Reluctantly she opened an eye, and saw, outlined against the window, the heads of the three other V. A. D.s. But what struck through her half-consciousness as an odd fact was that their heads were silhouetted against crimson. Was it morning, she wondered vaguely, or was there a fire?

‘Get up, Seddon – air raid!' she heard Gower's voice somewhere in the darkness.

‘Air raid?' grunted Joan.

‘Yes – Zeppelin! You'll probably see it if you go to the window. Slip on your shoes and your coat, and you'd better put a few 'air-pins in your pocket – you never know.'

Gower spoke in matter-of-fact tones, but Joan couldn't for the life of her see the necessity for putting hair-pins into her coat pocket. She knew she was excessively sleepy, and not in a condition to reason about anything – but hairpins? She saw a vision of herself with Gower, Sister Ansdell, and the rest, wandering about outside, screwing up their hair in an attempt at decency while dodging German bombs. Then she dropped off.

Voices broke in on her again. ‘There it is! There it is!'This time she roused herself fully, scrambled out of bed, and went to the window. An extraordinary spectacle met her eyes. Far up in a murky pink sky gleamed a small silver cigar, and near it hovered, dancingly, a fire-fly. For a moment these two objects kept at an equal distance from one another, then merged, and there was a burst of flames. A roar, as from the whole of London, went up; and the flaming cigar sank through the sky and disappeared beyond the trees.

The whole thing had been so unexpected, so eerie, and Joan had been so far from wide awake that she could never clearly remember afterwards what she had imagined, and what she had really seen and heard.

For instance, why had the sky appeared red against the windowpanes when first she woke – for that was surely before the Zeppelin caught fire? And that dull terrifying roar – had it actually come from the throats of thousands of London onlookers miles away, or only from a few folk on Denmark Hill? All was confused. But printed vividly on her brain for ever was the picture of that small silver cigar and the dancing fire-fly.

Later she learnt – as did all the world – that the German military airship, S. L. 11, had been attacked by Lieut. Leaf Robinson, and had fallen, a burning mass, near Cuffley, Middlesex. It was considered that London had been saved by the young man's deed, and he was awarded the V. C.

‘Can't 'elp being sorry for them pore burnt Germans,' remarked one of the charwomen, who scrubbed the ward-floor, to Joan. ‘Mothers' sons every one of 'em. And coming by night all that way from their 'omes too, up in the air.'

This was so concise an expression of the haunting thoughts which Joan had been trying to hold at bay that she shuddered. It could not have been better put: ‘Mothers' sons every one of 'em.' An instant's imagination as to what that Zeppelin crew must have been feeling as their machine caught fire would have checked the roar which had greeted its destruction.

And apart from this, although it was true that Robinson had done a very gallant thing, was there not, Joan asked herself, something distasteful in the frantic eagerness with which he had been praised and decorated? – something that savoured of smug self-congratulation on the part of the city at its escape? Every day, in the skies of France, deeds as gallant were being performed and going unrewarded; every day the stolid soldiers in the trenches were unostentatiously ‘saving London.' But for once the civilian population had really felt itself to be in danger, had actually seen itself defended, and had gone mad with gratitude.

Irene Rathbone
was born in 1892. Before the war she pursued a theatrical career and was a dedicated suffragist. During the war, she worked as a nurse in hospitals in England and as a VAD (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse in France. Written in 1930,
We that Were Young
is an autobiographical novel that reflects those experiences and poignantly conveys how for a whole generation the war was a time of tragedy but also of exhilarating change:

But as more and more injured and maimed soldiers pass through the rest camps, the exhilaration of the women gives way to a powerful sense of injustice. After the publication of
We that Were Young
, Rathbone became more radical – she was a committed pacifist, an anti-fascist and a supporter of Republican Spain.
They Call it Peace
, written in 1936, reflects these views. Irene Rathbone died in Oxford in 1980.

ROSE MACAULAY

EVENING AT VIOLETTE

from
Non-Combatants and Others

A
FTER SUPPER KATE GOT OUT
the good coffee cups, and they waited for the Vinneys. Kate was rather pink, and wore a severe blouse, in which she looked plain; it was a mortification she thought she ought to practise when the Vinneys came. Evie was skilfully altering a hat. Alix made a pen-and-ink sketch of her as she bent over it.

Mrs Frampton knitted a sock. The
Evening Thrill
came in, and Kate opened it, for Mrs Frampton liked to hear tit-bits of news while she worked.

‘Stories impossible to doubt,' read Kate, in her prim, precise voice, ‘reach us continually of atrocities practised by the enemy…' She read several, unsuitable for these pages. Mrs Frampton clicked horror with her tongue. The papers she took in were rich in such stories. As it was impossible to doubt them, she did not try. Possibly they gave life a certain dreadful savour.

‘To think of the march of civilisation, and this still going on,' Mrs Frampton commented. ‘I'm sure any one would think they'd be ashamed.'

Kate said, with playful acidity – (Kate had reached what with many is a playful age), ‘Thank you, Alix. Thank you ever so much, Alix, for getting between me and the lamp.'Alix moved, her attempt foiled.

Kate read next the letter of a private soldier at the front. ‘The Boches are all cowards. They can't stand against our boys. They fly like rabbits when we charge with the bayonet. You should hear them squeal, like so many pigs. There's not a German private in the army that wants to fight. The officers have to keep flogging them on the whole time.'

‘Poor things, I'm sure one can't but be sorry for them,' said Mrs Frampton. ‘Knit two and make one, purl two, slip one, pass the slipped one over, drop four and knit six.' (Or anyhow, something of that sort, for she had got to the heel, as one unfortunately at last must.)

‘It's wonderful how long the war goes on, since all the Germans are like that,' said Kate, without conscious irony, as she took up her own knitting. Hers was a body-belt. ‘I believe this new wool is different from the last. Somewhat stringier, it seems. Brown will have to take it back, if it is.'

‘I say, just fancy,' said Evie, ‘those sequin tunics at B & H's have come down to seven and eleven three. I think I could rise to that, even in war time.'

The war mainly affected Evie by reducing the demand for hats, and consequently lowering the salary she received at the exclusive and ladylike milliner's where she worked.

As she spoke she caught sight of her threequarter likeness as etched by Alix.

‘Goodness gracious,' she commented. ‘You've made me look anything on earth! I mayn't be much, but I hope I'm not that sort of freak.'