The Poppy Factory (34 page)

Another photo showed the families formally posed: the newly-weds with their parents, and a young woman of Rose’s age. ‘That’s Alfie’s sister I think,’ Susan said, peering over Jess’s shoulder. Freda was shorter than her brother, slight and curvy with fashionably bobbed hair and a flirty grin. They must have looked an ill-assorted pair, Jess thought, the tall, serious-faced Rose towering over her bubbly friend.

The only person without a smile was a woman standing beside the bride, her face strained and wan. ‘Is that Rose’s mother?’

‘Betty Appleby, your great-great grandmother. Both her sons died in the trenches.’

Jess remembered how she’d cried over James; how painful it still felt to think of him even now, six years later. She couldn’t even start to imagine how much worse it would feel to lose your own child, let alone two of them.

‘And this is your grandfather Johnnie, aged about twenty.’ Susan handed her an official-looking photograph – larger than the rest – of a fresh-faced young man with a huge grin, wearing an air force uniform with the beret set on his head at a rakish angle. ‘He was a bomber pilot in the Second World War. Got shot down and spent half the war in prison camp.’

‘I’m sorry I never really knew him, Mum. Did he ever talk about it, at all?’

Susan shook her head. ‘Never. He just wanted to forget, he said.’

They turned a few more pages and found photographs of his wedding to Jess’s Granny Mary, on 11th April 1946. This was clearly a ‘proper do’ in a church, and even the small, grainy monochrome prints seemed to capture the joy of the day: everyone dressed to the nines, determined to have a great time despite post-war austerity. The sun was shining and, in the background were apple trees heavy with spring blossom.

The groom Johnnie, a tall, straight backed young man, seemed to dwarf his parents: Alfie in a smart suit, older now of course and going grey but still with a full head of curly hair, and Rose, resplendent in a smartly tailored calf-length skirt and blouse, her face shadowed by a wide-brimmed lacy hat. Her expression was hard to make out, but Jess felt sure she would have been grinning with fierce pride.

‘Was Alfie still working at the Poppy Factory by then?’ she asked.

Susan shook her head. ‘He only stayed there a couple of years, as far as I know. At some point he managed to get himself a job in a garage and they trained him up as a motor mechanic.’

‘That makes sense. Rose wrote about how much he loved driving the motor van for his father.’

‘They eventually set up their own company, somewhere on the Old Kent Road I think, and they certainly prospered, although everyone used to say that Rose was the one with the business brain. I remember he always smelled of engine oil, even as an old man.’

The bridesmaids – two hatless young women in matching floral dresses – stood arm in arm beside the bride and groom, throwing their heads back with laughter. ‘That’s auntie Alice, Johnnie’s younger sister,’ Susan said, pointing to the fairer one of the two. ‘She looks so like her pa, don’t you think?’ The other girl was tall and slim with straight dark hair blowing across her face. ‘Not sure about this one.’

‘Could that be Annie, Freda’s daughter?’ Jess asked. ‘Freda was Alfie’s sister, and Rose’s best friend.’

Susan peered at the print. ‘She must have died before I was born, or at least before I was old enough to know her.’

‘Did you know who Freda married? Rose wrote about her dating Walter, the guy Rose wrote about, who also worked at the Poppy Factory? He lost an arm in the war.’

Susan shook her head. ‘I never heard tell of that, sorry.’

They flicked through the rest of the wedding snaps until Jess’s eye was caught by a group who seemed to be sharing a joke. ‘Oh look, could this be him?’ She pointed to a man with tight wiry hair and an empty sleeve. To his side, looking up at him with a fond smile, was a small, slightly dumpy grey-haired woman. ‘And perhaps this is Freda?’ She scanned the group more carefully. Beside Freda was a young man, in his late teens or early twenties, with pale curly hair. Did Freda and Walter have a son together, perhaps?

Jess turned back to the photographs, studying the faces, eager to learn more about the people she’d grown to know through the diaries. What a resilient bunch, she thought to herself. They had endured so much, struggled with unemployment and poverty, lost family members and friends and suffered terrible setbacks yet here they all were, having a great time on this sunny day, just a year after the ending of a second terrible war. How much they must have longed for a few years of peace. Her own losses and difficulties seemed so slight in comparison, yet why did she find it so difficult to be optimistic about her own future?

Under her mother’s watchful eye Jess gave up drinking, but the nightmares returned with a vengeance. After a third night of waking to her daughter’s anguished screams, of holding her, stroking her forehead and trying to soothe her, Susan begged Jess to make an appointment with the local surgery.

The GP was an elderly, avuncular man in a three-piece suit, with thinning grey hair and a spotted bow tie. Jess’s heart sank – someone so old-school was hardly likely to understand what she’d been through. When she explained, in as casual a manner as possible, that she was only after a repeat prescription for the tranquillisers she’d been taking before, he turned from the computer screen and leaned forward in his chair.

‘It would be helpful to know why you needed them in the first place,’ he said, gently. ‘Take your time.’

She sighed, reluctant to recount the dreary story all over again, dreading the inevitable look of puzzled sympathy that would cross his face. She felt like a wimp; while her friends were trying to rebuild their lives without limbs she was sitting here trying to explain why she wanted medication for a few bad dreams.

Then, for some unknown reason, Rose’s words about Walter drifted into her mind: ‘He doesn’t try to conceal it, pretend it’s not there, or feel sorry for himself, he’s just making the best of it’.

With a jolt, she understood. For too long she’d made light of her problems, pretending to herself that they weren’t really there, that they were a kind of punishment to be endured, that she was strong enough to cope, that she could sort herself out. Deep down, she hadn’t been entirely certain that she wanted to be ‘cured’ and even, in a warped kind of way, had come to consider that the nightmares and flashbacks were the price she must pay; her penance for living when James and so many others had died. She seemed to have lost sight of that long-ago promise to herself: that she would justify the loss of his life by living her own in a way that would make him proud.

So why could she not now acknowledge that she needed help to ‘make the best of it’?

The doctor’s kindly face was still waiting. She took a deep breath, and began.

Jess left the surgery with a prescription given for a single month on the understanding that she would agree to being referred to a psychiatrist. ‘For a proper diagnosis, so that we can make sure you’re on the right medication. I honestly think it will be worth it in the long run,’ he said.

The appointment came through faster than she’d expected, and now here she was, reluctantly, at a hospital she had never visited before, in an unfamiliar town, sitting on an uncomfortable bright orange chair with a polystyrene cup of over-stewed tea from the ‘Friends’ café. Around her were a dozen other sad-eyed people of all ages and types, none of them displaying any obvious symptoms of insanity.

The psychiatrist, a tiny, elegant woman in a bright green sari, invited Jess to sit down and went straight to the point: ‘Your GP seems to think you might be suffering from post-traumatic stress after your experiences in Afghanistan, Miss Merton. Would you like to tell me more?’

The story came out more easily this time, almost as though she were talking about someone else’s experiences. It didn’t upset her or make her angry any more, as she described briefly how when they were out on tour she seemed to cope fine, even when close mates had died, even after the attack on the compound and the IED explosion, even after coming under fire in the poppy field.

She talked of how she missed the team spirit and the closeness of the unit, her pride in the job and the fact that she’d helped to save several people’s lives. And then she recounted how, when she had got back to the UK, the flashbacks and nightmares and the anger had started, the way she seemed to lash out at the people she loved, how tranquillisers had made her feel brain-dead, how alcohol had seemed to help, for a while, how she’d resigned from her job after the accident on the pavement because she felt she could no longer trust herself, and how the counselling had just made her even more angry.

The doctor listened in silence, her deep brown eyes watchful and compassionate, taking notes, nodding from time to time and prompting gently when Jess faltered: ‘tell me a bit about yourself before you joined the Army?’, ‘how did that make you feel?’, or ‘how might you have reacted to that sort of thing, before going on tour?’

When Jess finished, she sat back in her chair and said: ‘I think there is no doubt that you are suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress, Miss Merton. I would describe it as mild to moderate, and certainly nothing that cannot be sorted out, given time. I don’t think that the tranquillisers you’ve been using are quite right for this condition, so I’ll prescribe a different kind of anti-anxiety medication to take for at least three months, and would like to see you again after that. And I would urge you to try counselling again, a different approach this time. I will refer you to a specialist in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, who has specific experience of working with veterans.’

Jess nodded. There was something about this quietly spoken woman that inspired confidence. ‘If you really think it will help,’ she said.

‘I do,’ the doctor replied. ‘But there’s one other thing. You said you had resigned from your job? I would urge you to reconsider this. Is there any prospect of returning to work? Having a meaningful occupation can be a critical factor for recovery.’

‘Being a medic, or a paramedic, is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, the only job I’m trained for,’ Jess said. ‘But I’m really not ready to go back to that, not right now.’

‘Do you have anything else in mind?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s worth giving it some thought, you know, and there are organisations that can help.’

While the prescription was printing, the doctor picked up her pen, made a few short notes on a slip of paper and handed it to Jess. She read:

• PTSD and CBT: Combat Stress
  
• Employability/jobs: British Legion Civvy Street, also The Poppy Factory
  

‘The Poppy Factory? That’s where my great-grandfather ended up after the First World War,’ she said, incredulous. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting I should go and make poppies?’

‘Of course not,’ the doctor said, smiling. ‘They help disabled veterans back into work of all kinds these days. “Employability”, they call it.’

‘But I’m not disabled.’

‘PTSD counts,’ she replied, simply. ‘Anyway, it is up to you to decide what kind of help you need. It’s just a suggestion.’

Later that evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, Jess braved her parents’ painfully slow broadband connection to send some emails, and found herself checking out the organisations the psychiatrist had mentioned.

The
Combat Stress
site provided a clear definition of PTSD and, after reading the case studies, Jess reckoned she’d got off quite lightly. CBT seemed to have been helpful for many people, and the process seemed straightforward enough: in addition to sessions with a therapist, you would be given exercises to do for yourself, which sounded practical and sensible. She remembered how shamefully she had treated Alison in that colourless room, how quickly she lost her temper, how rude she had been, and the look on the poor woman’s face as she stomped out. It’s time to grow up, she said to herself. She would give counselling another go, when the appointment came through, and this time she would stay with it, to the end.

Civvy Street
listed plenty of vacancies but reading the descriptions only served to clarify her thoughts about the kind of job she really did
not
want: there were lots of admin and sales positions but she’d surely go crazy stuck in an office, and she’d make a lousy salesperson. She searched the database for ‘work with animals’ but it came up with no results.

She looked at the slip of paper again but something stopped her from looking up the third organisation named: The Poppy Factory. Remembering the picture Rose had painted, of men with missing limbs working at machinery to produce the red poppies for Remembrance Day, it still felt wrong, not appropriate somehow. I’m not really ‘disabled’, she thought to herself, I haven’t lost a limb like Alfie, or Scotty or Alex. It’s only in my head.

She closed the laptop and tried to sleep, but her brain wouldn’t switch off: the events of the day and the words of the psychiatrist still jangling in her head:
Having a meaningful occupation can be a critical factor for recovery
. Am I crazy, giving up the career I’ve always planned for myself, she thought? And anyway, what kind of job could I do now that’s not too stressful, yet isn’t going to bore me rigid?

Her thoughts turned again to Rose’s diaries. It was almost a hundred years ago, but there seemed to be so many parallels. Besides losing a leg, her great-grandfather had also displayed symptoms of what Jess now knew was PTSD: the nightmares, the fear of raw flesh, the outbursts of anger with those closest to him, and the drinking. Rose had learned from bitter experience how Alfie’s unemployment made him depressed and led him to drink. Not for them, in those days, the free healthcare and support of psychiatrists, counsellors, tranquillisers or a choice of organisations dedicated to helping veterans, all available at the touch of a button.

All Alfie got was a wooden leg, and he was too proud to ask for any further help. ‘Spare me the bleeding heart sympathy from some ruddy charity paying tuppence-halfpenny to make artificial flowers.’ Jess understood only too clearly how he felt.