Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (33 page)

‘I don’t dream often,’ I wrote to Roland, shivering over the gas fire in the Sisters’ sitting-room on the day after my return from Lowestoft, ‘but all last night I was dreaming about you. It was a very pleasant dream; we were doing nothing in particular but wandering together about some fields I did not know. We weren’t talking much but just roaming indefinitely, and you were holding my hands to warm them as you did on the cliff that evening. And when the morning came all too soon and I found I had to go out into pouring rain and two inches of dirty slush, and get quite soaked through just when I particularly didn’t want to, it relieved me to shock my fellow-sufferers greatly by saying “Damn this War!” out loud. The person who said

I slept, and dreamt that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty
,

was painfully appropriate on this occasion.

‘All this morning I have been seeing in my mind Heather Cliff, and the sun on the sea, and the fishing-smacks with ruddy sails. I don’t think I could do without the family at Lowestoft now. I shall be glad when they are near and I can see them often. I saw some of Clare’s drawings this time. I think they are quite remarkable. They are better already than my artist friend’s, and she is supposed to be exceptionally good. I had no idea Clare was as gifted as that.’

The possibility of Roland’s family coming nearer to London was soon, I knew, to materialise, for I had learnt on my visit that they intended to leave the Lowestoft house, which was becoming more and more dangerous and inconvenient, and look for a cottage somewhere in Sussex. At the end of November they let Heather Cliff, with all its contents, to two Army officers, and went to live in a small house at Keymer, near Hassocks, where the domestic work was done by a village charlady who ‘ran in’. This cottage, with its manuscripts, its drawings, its vital, discursive inhabitants and its gorgeous, colourful disorder, provided a refuge which, almost exclusively during the next few months, bound me to life. Roland’s mother announced that they were moving for only a short period; actually, they lived in Sussex for nearly four years, and never returned to Lowestoft.

At exactly the same time, my own methodical parents were sentencing themselves to weeks of cleaning and packing in preparation for their immediate departure from Buxton for a few unsettled months in Brighton hotels. The rapid march of events since August 1914 had left them breathless and a little bewildered. Edward, that autumn, was at Penkridge Bank Camp, near Stafford, drifting nearer and nearer to despair as, one after another, the supernumerary officers of the 11th Sherwood Foresters were ordered to France without him. Even the diffident and oversensitive Geoffrey had gone to join the 10th Battalion near Ypres, and Edward did his best to forget how much he missed him by composing a little symphony called ‘Sunset Clouds’. But sooner or later, in a War which now seemed destined to be interminable, he was bound to be sent to the front, while my own long-awaited orders for London had been carried out, when they did come, with perturbing expeditiousness in the eyes of my parents.

Apart from our exodus from home, a business disagreement had made my father suddenly decide to retire - all too early, for he was only just fifty - from the mills in Staffordshire. There was thus nothing to keep him near the Potteries, particularly as he was not on really intimate terms with any member of his family. My grandmother’s death when I was eleven had removed the last uniting link between her numerous descendants, who were henceforth, in accordance with their austere tradition, to meet chiefly at family funerals.

‘I am so glad,’ I commented tersely on the parental removal, ‘that they are leaving that artificial, north-country hole.’ How thankful I should have been if they had only gone three years earlier! But already my debutante days in Buxton seemed to have vanished too far into the remote past to count any more.

5

At the end of my first five weeks at Camberwell, I was told, to my relief, that I was ‘shaping very well’, and asked to sign on for six months’ service, my contract of course being renewable at the end of that time. I celebrated my satisfaction by a solitary expedition to the theatre, and afterwards wrote to Roland in a happier mood than I had known since leaving Buxton.

‘Do you ever like to picture the people who write to you as they looked when they wrote? I do. At the present moment I am alone in the hostel common-room, sitting in an easy chair in front of the fire, clad precisely in blue and white striped pyjamas, a dark blue dressing-gown and a pair of black velvet bedroom slippers. It is my half-day and though only about 7.30, the opportunity of going to bed, or at least getting ready for it, moderately early is too rare to be missed. I have just been to St James’s Theatre by myself to see George Alexander in
The Big Drum
.’

It was still an adventure to go about London alone, especially in the pitch blackness of the cold winter evenings. Such solitude was usually inevitable, for my favourite companions among the V.A.D.s - Betty, and one of my room-mates whom I called Marjorie, a dark, sallow girl some years my senior, the sister of a now famous dramatist - were seldom off duty at the same time as myself. But it was only among the suffering patients and the alien Sisters in the wards that I felt really lonely. I was never alone amid the dark stir of the West End streets and squares, for Roland was with me everywhere, ‘all about me and nearer’ than he usually seemed in the flesh.

His answer to my letter was warm and sweet with sensitive understanding.

‘Through the door I can see little mounds of snow that are the parapets of trenches, a short stretch of railway line, and a very brilliant, full moon. I wonder what you are doing. Asleep, I hope - or sitting in front of a fire in blue and white striped pyjamas. I should so like to see you in blue and white pyjamas. You are always very correctly dressed when I find you, and usually somewhere near a railway station,
n’est-ce pas
? I once saw you in a dressing-gown with your hair down your back playing an accompaniment for Edward in the Buxton drawing-room. Do you remember ? . . . I am often regretful that you should be at the hospital after all. I picture you getting up at the same too early hour every morning, to go out into a cold world and to a still colder and monotonous routine of fretful patients and sanguinary dressings and imperious Sisters . . . and then late to bed, to begin all over again to-morrow. It all seems such a waste of Youth, such a desiccation of all that is born for Poetry and Beauty. And if one does not even get a letter occasionally from someone who, despite his shortcomings, perhaps understands and sympathises it must make it all the worse . . . until one may possibly wonder whether it would not have been better never to have met him at all or at any rate until afterwards . . . Good night, Dear Child.’

Never to have met him till afterwards! What a poor, empty thing life would be now if he weren’t right in it, I reflected, filling the whole horizon, giving purpose and justification to the abandonment of loveliness and learning, the substitution of forlorn hours of pain-tormented monotony. Oh, my darling, why don’t you come home again and let me show you - as I never showed you properly last time - how much I love you, whether you are self-absorbed or remorseful, autocratic or tender?

‘Sometimes,’ I told him, ‘I do wonder if you are not just an imagined lover that I have created in my own mind to bring a little romance into my present rather dreary existence. But when your letters are brought to my ward and the sight in the midst of disinfecting dishes of your delightful handwriting . . . reminds me that the imagined lover has a flesh-and-blood counterpart somewhere, I wish so greatly that he would materialise once more. Is there any chance of your coming over here again soon? Surely if there is very little to do, and winter being here it is not likely there can be much in the immediate future - why, then—? I
have
forgotten what you look like, though often your personality is with me still. And I want to remember again.’

And, unexpectedly, the very next day, before he could possibly have received my letter, came a tiny, thrilling note.

‘I hope now to get leave about December 31st. Will you be on night-duty then? . . .’

Although my frenzied longing to see him which was the aftermath of our quarrel made me anxious for him to have leave as soon as possible, I knew that my own chance of some extra off-duty time would be better after Christmas than before, and the world brightened with the suddenness of an electric light going up in a dark room. The men in my ward, too, were recovering; the worst-wounded derelicts from Loos had by now all gone to join their comrades in the damp autumn earth, and the gay impudence of the survivors, as I told Roland, made the whole affair less tragic and more amusing.

‘They say such things to me - sometimes quite embarrassing. It is never any use scolding them, as you can imagine; I have always to take it as a complete joke or else pretend not to see the point. One said yesterday, “You’ll be losing yourself in your off-time one of these fine days, nurse,” and the one in the next bed chimed in “Oh no! she won’t. She’s waiting till
he
comes back from the front, aren’t you, nurse?” And I don’t know that my efforts to behave as though there were no he are quite as successful as I could wish. Another one asked me to tell him what it felt like to be in love. So I said, “How should I know? You’ll find out for yourself quick enough.” And he said, “Oh, I bet you can tell me if you like, nurse. You’ve got just the right sort of face for love.” I don’t know what the Sisters would say if they could hear these little remarks.’

Should I find him, I wondered, even more of a stranger than before - still older, still maturer, yet treating me always with that queer mixture of a boy’s ruthlessness and a man’s passion?

‘Eight months since you went, now,’ I reminded him. ‘Sometimes I daren’t think of it, and certainly I never dare look back and remember what I have felt all the time . . . I am sorry your leave is not to come at present, yet, if you don’t in the meantime “get hit by something” (what a cruel little wretch that small phrase of yours makes me feel!) it will probably be better as far as I am concerned for you to have it in a month or so’s time, rather than now . . . It is very convenient,’ I went on, after telling him that after three months in hospital I should have a chance of a week’s leave out of the fortnight given every six months to V.A.D.s, ‘that both our families will be quite near one another in the Brighton district. No more enforced racing from Buxton to Lowestoft! Oh, don’t “get hit by something” in the meantime! When I think how all my world would go down into the abyss . . .’

6

Now that the time of waiting for him was measurable, going on night-duty early in December seemed a new and exciting experience. It also meant more privacy and less waste of time on perpetual walking, since the V.A.D. night quarters had recently been moved to some small individual huts just erected in the open park opposite the hospital. So Marjorie and Betty and I moved down from Denmark Hill with all our possessions - brown paper parcels, golf-bags full of shoes and bottles, a large package lavishly open at both ends containing Marjorie’s scarlet wadded dressing-gown - and I wrote and told Roland what fun it all was.

I was lucky, too, in my ward, for I was sent to the big surgical hut in the park where I had started my day-duty. There I found, as my Sister-in-charge, the first trained nurse I had yet encountered who seemed to possess the normal characteristics of vulnerable humanity - a pretty young Scotswoman, pink-cheeked, dark-haired and dewy-eyed. As she had recently married a doctor serving with the R.A.M.C. in France and was always on tenterhooks for letters, I found myself talking to her about Roland in the semi-darkness with a freedom from shyness that I had never yet felt with anyone. It was a relief from strain that began, too, on the very first evening, for just as the last of our restless patients had suddenly fallen from groaning into sleep, and we had settled down close to the stove beneath a red-shaded lamp half enclosed in a screen, the night-orderly brought me two letters from Roland from the wind and rain outside.

‘I don’t think,’ the first one announced defensively, ‘that when one can still admire sunsets one has altogether lost the personality of pre-war days. I have been looking at a blood-red bar of sky creeping down behind the snow, and wondering whether any of the men in the trenches on the opposite hill were watching it too, and thinking, as I was, what a waste of life it is to spend it in a ditch . . . It will feel like coming to another planet to come back to England, or rather to certain people in England. My leave, of course, is not definite at all yet and may not come off for some long time. But I have hopes; and anticipation is very sweet.’

The second and shorter letter acknowledged my swift and warm response to his remorseful termination of our quarrel.

‘Your sweet letter nearly made me cry . . . It reminded me of how much I really deserved the former one . . . No, it would not have been better to have thought the things and not written them, though they did hurt me, perhaps more than you thought they would. But it was very good for my Infallible Majesty; and you are very adorable when you are angry.’

It seemed strange and rather frightening, when the Sister had gone to supper, to be all alone in the long dark ward. Once, in the midst of trying to read a Strindberg play, I felt ghostly fingers gently stirring my hair, and twice mysterious footsteps walked slowly up the ward, stopped opposite my table and never returned. When the orderly officer came in on his round I almost shrieked in terror, but managed just in time to convert my alarm into a jump to attention, and to call him ‘Sir’ with circumspect propriety. Then, thinking how he whose grimmer ghosts were gaunt skeletons and squeaking rats might use the Quiet Voice to rebuke me a little amusedly for my fears, I made myself write to Roland in the Sister’s absence, telling him that I too understood the sinister qualities of wakeful nights, which made me think of all the people who had suffered agony and died in my ward.