Green for Danger (4 page)

“… sorry to break up this happy party, but as you may have noticed, there's an air-raid on! These entertainments are allowed strictly on the understanding that if things get too hot, we must close down.” He explained earnestly: “If so many of the personnel were to be killed or injured at one time, it would make things very awkward,” and everybody thought this silly and unnecessary because it was perfectly obvious and they all knew it quite well. “Now, I'm afraid there's been a bad show in Heronsford. The Air Raid Precaution centre has been hit, among other places, and there are a lot of casualties. The Cottage Hospital is filling up and we're taking some of the people in here. I want everybody to go to their posts at once.” He added automatically: “Without panic,” though anything less like panic it would have been difficult to imagine; and continued with a little duck towards Sister Bates who still stood uncertainly at the side of the stage: “We've all enjoyed the ‘play' very much indeed; now it's time for work!” He scrambled down from the platform and hurried off out of the hall.

“
I
didn't see no play,” confided the up-patients to each other, quite bewildered.

The hospital was built in the shape of a gigantic wheel, its spokes forming the different departments and, above and below ground level, the wards; its hub a great circular hall, not unlike Piccadilly Circus Tube Station both in shape and purpose, and general appearance of seething activity. The lift ran straight up through the hall, the staircase curling round it in a slow spiral. The main operating theatre was on the ground floor, easily available to all the surgical wards; the emergency theatre in the basement was used only during raids.

Marion Bates was theatre sister at Heron's Park. She scurried down to see that the emergency night staff was prepared, and her mind was the strangest jumble of surgical instruments, ‘Song of Songs' and Gervase Eden. She knew that her poor little effort at pleasing him had failed. “Thank God I didn't do the dance,” she thought as she dived between the swing doors of the operating theatre. “He wouldn't have liked it. He'd only have laughed.” The cold sweat broke out on her forehead at the thought of her madness in ever having supposed that it would impress him. If it had been Frederica Linley, now—but she knew that Frederica would never for a moment have considered so demeaning herself. Anyway, he was not with
her
this evening. Linley had gone back to her ward and Gervase was strolling across the circular hall with Woods. Woods was forty if she was a day, and she had a face like the back of a cab. “Forceps, retractors, scissors, knives,” muttered Sister Bates, checking over instruments in the hot, bright, green-and-silver security of her own domain; “forceps, retractors, scissors, knives. But Woods has marvellous legs!” Outside, the guns thundered and rolled, there was the scream of a bomb and the occasional noisy rattle of machine-gun fire; even down here, twenty feet below ground, the room shook with the crash of every gun. “I wonder what he's saying to Woods,” thought Bates, automatically separating the jingling instruments. “I wonder if she's still in the hall with him. I think I'll just slip up and see …”

Frederica had gone back to her ward with Esther who happened to be on day duty there. “I'll stay and give you a hand,” said Esther. “There are two empty beds and they're sure to fill them up with casualties. It's already as much as one person can manage in here, now that we're so short of orderlies.”

The relieving V.A.D. was glad to see them. “The Orderly Officer hasn't made his round yet, Linley. Sister says when he comes will you ask him for some morphia for the two hernias and the appendix that were done to-day, and to say can he give you something for the asthma in number seven. She's gone down to St. Cat's ward.”

“Oh, all right; thank you, Jones. I'll tell him.”

“Blast these air-raids,” said Jones cheerfully, struggling into her ugly blue outdoor coat for her dash across the grounds to the safety of her shelter. “They keep the men awake.”

The ward was on the ground floor, opposite the main operating theatre; a long, high room, the tall windows now blacked out for the night; fifteen beds were ranged down each side, with an aisle down the centre, its narrow tables denuded of their bowls of flowers. The open lockers were tidily packed with the little miscellaneous possessions of the men; on the lower shelves their uniforms were folded into precise, square bundles and their overcoats and caps hung on hooks at the bed-heads. A corner of the ward, near the door, had been partitioned off into a small square ‘bunk' for the sister, furnished with a desk and some chairs; here notes were kept, reports written up, discussions held with the medical officers, endless cups of tea consumed, and a good deal of more or less surreptitious entertainment carried on. A large pane of glass had been let into the side facing the ward, so that all that went on there could be seen from the bunk. It frequently escaped the attention of the occupants that, especially when the light was on in the bunk, everything that went on there could be seen from the ward.

The air-raid was becoming very heavy. The droning of aeroplanes overhead was incessant, and the building shook and shuddered with the thundering of the guns in the neighbouring fields, and now and again with the sickening thud of a bomb. The men moved uneasily in their beds and made foolish, defiant little jokes. “Cor that was a near one! Nearly scraped me 'air off, that one did! They've 'eard about the pudding we 'ad to-day, nurse, and they're trying to kill the cook!” The hospital humorist sat up in bed and every time a bomb fell tapped himself on the back of the head and made his false teeth shoot out.

“You have no business to have all these lights on,” said Freddi severely, and went round clicking them off.

Night Sister appeared in the doorway. “Oh, Nurse Sanson—are
you
here?”

“I said I'd stay on and help Nurse Linley, Sister, if that's all right?”

“Yes, of course. I expect she'll be very thankful. I shan't be able to help you much to-night, nurse; we've got four bad casualties in St. Catherine's.… However, if you need anything you must send for me at once. They've just rung through from Reception and there's a man coming in with fractured femur; get him into bed, will you? and just keep him quiet and warm; don't do anything about the leg. Major Eden will be along in a few minutes to see him. Let me know if he wants me.” She hurried off again.

“What a flap!” said Frederica calmly, watching her go.

Two civilian stretcher-bearers appeared, carrying a grimy bundle on a canvas stretcher. “Is this right, Miss? The old gent in Reception asked us to bring him straight down here, as he hadn't got any orderlies to send with him.”

“Yes, that's right: this corner bed, please. Esther, will you deal with this, while I get the rest of the ward settled? I think that'll be the best way to manage it.”

The stretcher-bearers helped to lift the man on to the bed. “Wouldn't they take him in the resuscitation ward?” asked Esther, rather surprised at his condition.

“No, it seems they're filling up there, and he wasn't as badly shocked as some of the others. They've had two deaths there already. Never should have taken 'em in, really, but we thought there might be half a chance. The A.R.R Centre's been hit, and a pub out at Godlistone, and various other places. They're still digging one chap out. Rescue squad they was, waiting to go out on a job. Looks as if he'd needed a bit of rescuing himself!” said the stretcher-bearer cheerfully. He put out his hand and pushed the damp hair off the man's forehead, with the rough, crude gentleness of all his kind. “Poor old boy!” he said, and picked up his stretcher and, whistling softly, went away.

Poor old boy. He lay pathetically still under the blankets, packed in with hot-water bottles, his hands lying loosely at his sides, his eyes closed, his face covered with dirt and dust and grime. His leg was bandaged to a long wooden splint. His boots had been torn off by the blast and his clothes were cut to ribbons, but she made no attempt to undress or wash him till the warmth and rest should have strengthened his pulse and brought back depth to the flickering respirations. She put her hand to his mouth, however, to feel the cold breath on her knuckles, and he must have been unconscious of the gesture, for he moved his head a little, laying his grimy cheek against her forearm with a gesture of trust and dependence, infinitely touching. Tears filled her eyes. “Don't worry. Just lie still. It's all over now. You're safe now. You're going to be all right.”

He opened his eyes and she turned away her head, for she knew all too well the expression she would see there. It was only six months since her mother had died. For two days and two nights she had waited in anguish while men toiled unceasingly at the mountain of rubble that had once been a tall block of flats; had torn with her own helpless hands at the beams and girders and concrete that, having proved so frail a shelter, now heaped themselves into so deep a tomb. At the end of the second day, a foreman had come to her and wearily wiping the filth and sweat from his face, had broken it to her that it was useless to go on; at any moment the building would collapse, burying his men with those already dead. The following day the systematic demolition of the building had begun, and after another day and night they had brought her mother out. As they carried her past, she had turned her head very slightly on the stretcher, and her eyes had met Esther's; there had been no smallest gleam of recognition in their depths: only pain and bewilderment and terror and—could it be?—reproach! And so she had died, Mummy who had been so pretty and sweet, so gay and funny, whose little faults of selfishness and petulance had endeared her to a selfless heart, immeasurably more than nobler qualities might have done. Alone in the world, she had gone like an automaton through the heartbreaking details of identification and burial; had sought ease for her aching remorse in the hard, rough, satisfying toil in the wards at the hospital; it was through these first bewildering days when she walked through her work in a dream of hideous unreality and lay, sleepless and haunted through night after endless night, that Woods and Frederica had first come to be her friends; against Freddi's passionless sanity no less than Woody's fond, maternal clucking, she had dashed out the first agony of her mother's death.… “But I was a fool to come back here,” she thought, standing with the old man's cheek against her arm. “I was a fool ever to think that I could forget the way she looked, when I see it again and again in the faces of strangers.…” In her heart, she reverted unconsciously to the formula of her childhood prayers. “Poor old man. God help him and make him get well.”

Frederica came down the ward. “Esther, it's nearly ten and I've just realised I haven't had anything to eat. Could you possibly hold the fort for another ten minutes or so, while I rush out and get something? It's all such a muddle to-night, and the orderly's helping with stretchers, and I probably shan't get another chance and I shall be starving by morning?”

“Yes, of course, darling. Don't hurry. I can cope.”

Freddi departed. Gervase Eden, who was Surgeon on Duty, came into the ward. “Sister here, nurse?”

“No, she's on one of the other wards. Shall I go and get her?” Outside the hospital, Eden was Gervase to Esther and Freddi and Woods, but she added the regulation ‘Sir'.

“No, never mind. She's probably snowed under with casualties. Major Moon's just admitted a man …”

“Here he is, sir, in the corner bed. The Emergency Post label said, ‘fractured pelvis'; he was given a morphia injection two and a half hours ago while they were digging him out. They don't give his name; I suppose they haven't found out yet who he is.”

“You haven't cleaned him up?”

“Well, he was still very shocked when they brought him in, so I left him to warm up. That was right, wasn't it?”

“Yes, perfectly right,” said Eden. He bent over the man's body, feeling with short, thin fingers deep into the flesh and muscle and down to the bone. The man shrank and groaned. “It's all right, old chap. It won't be long now, and then we'll give you another dose of something and send you off to sleep. It isn't very serious. You're going to be all right.” He straightened himself and moved away from the bed. “Fractured his femur all right. Everything else seems to be intact. There's no internal injury.” Sister arrived while he was washing his hands in the lavatory outside the ward. “I don't think we'd better touch him to-night,” he said, explaining the state of affairs to her there. “He's too badly shocked, and anyway we've got all we can cope with. They've fixed him up with a splint at the Emergency Post and I think we'll leave him undisturbed and have him up to the theatre in the morning. He'll have to be X-rayed first …” He consulted a list. “Major Moon's doing a duodenal ulcer at half-past nine; could you have him ready after that?”

“Yes, sir, of course; it'll just give the X-ray people nice time.”

“Well, that's what we'll do then. Leave the leg as it is, nurse; clean him up a bit, but don't worry him; and then you can give him a shot of morphia and I'll see him again in the morning.”

“Put a couple of screens round him, nurse,” said Sister, “so that the light doesn't disturb him; I'll leave out the morphia for you. Oh, and Major Eden, will you let me have something for the appendix Major Moon did to-day, and those two hernias? And the man in seven, Captain Newsome's cartilage, you know, he's developed a very troublesome asthma …” She drifted away with him, towards the bunk.

2

Frederica returned, still swallowing the last crumbs of her meal. “It's too heavenly of you to have stayed on like this, darling. Have you coped all right?”

“Yes, nothing's happened except a visit from Gervase.” She repeated the gist of his instructions. “I'll stay and finish this fractured femur for you. You carry on; I'm perfectly all right.”