Softly Grow the Poppies (10 page)

It seemed that the wounded from the battle were pouring back across the Channel and beds were needed at once. All the hospitals in the south were filled to overflowing and though they themselves had nothing but a willingness to open Summer Place to the wounded, as Sir Harry had promised, they could hardly do so without somewhere to lay them. They needed a doctor, she told the disembodied voice on the other end of the line, and nurses for though she and her staff would do all they could they knew nothing about nursing wounded men. They needed beds to fill the rooms that were to be prepared for the soldiers and so many other things because they were not yet set up to care for wounded men. They would do everything that was necessary but . . .

It was all taken care of, the harried voice at the other end of the telephone told her. With the ambulances and the soldiers would come iron cots, mattresses, blankets, bed linen, two doctors, two nurses and three VADs. All they needed was space to put them in and would Mrs Summers please have . . . Rose tried to tell her that she was not Mrs Summers but the voice at the other end of the line was not listening. She was up to her eyes in it, she told Rose, and very grateful and when Dr Roberts arrived would Mrs Summers ask him to ring her. He would know who she was and with that she rang off.

Dolly, who had gently broken the news to Alice about Charlie, had been brought over in the gig by Fred when Mrs Summers started in labour. She was upstairs with Alice, wanting Alice to cry, to cling to her, to show some sign that she had taken in the dreadful news about her husband but she just lay rigidly in her bed, the baby beside her, and stared into God knows what hell the death of her young husband, whose son she had just borne, had flung her. Dolly wanted to comfort her, to hold her in her arms, rock her as one did with the bereaved, but Alice was as stiff as a board and refused to be comforted and Dolly was sadly aware that it was she herself who needed comfort. In giving it to others one helped oneself. Nessie and the three housemaids had made their way to Summer Place so that they would be on hand for the arrival of the wounded. They knew nothing about injuries, they whispered to one another, but any woman would do her utmost to ease the suffering of their brave boys. Both Elsie Smith from Ashtree Farm and Jenny Dunbar from Top Bank had sons ‘out there’ and dreaded the telegram, those that would be sent to so many homes in the next months.

Dr Smith had gone downstairs to see if he could get hold of his wife on the telephone, for he had been at Summer Place all night and most of the day. He found Miss Beechworth in the hall clutching the telephone in her hand, for the moment her usual resourcefulness seeping away from her like water from a cracked jug.

‘They’re coming, Doctor,’ she managed to say in a quivering voice.

‘Who are coming, Miss Beechworth?’ His voice was impatient, wondering where the wonderfully efficient young woman who had helped in what had been a difficult delivery had gone to.

‘The wounded.’ She handed the receiver to him or rather he snatched it from her hand.

‘What wounded?’

‘They’re coming here at this very moment and we’re not ready.’

Dr Smith, though he was not young, was quick to grasp a situation. You had to be in his profession. He had no idea how long it would take the impending arrivals to get here but with the help of Miss Beechworth’s stable men and gardeners they must at least clear the rooms that were to be made into wards.

‘They’ll need to be scrubbed down with carbolic, Miss Beechworth. How many rooms have you available?’ forgetting for a moment that Miss Beechworth was not mistress here. The real mistress was lying in a coma-like state unable to help herself, never mind dozens of wounded men.

‘I think about twenty bedrooms and then the drawing room and . . . I’m not awfully sure but—’

‘Get them all cleared of furniture, Miss Beechworth. An operating theatre will be needed, a sluice, rooms for the nurses, the doctors—’

‘An operating theatre?’ Rose quavered.

‘Come now, Miss Beechworth, pull yourself together. This house has been found suitable and I presume you and Mrs Summers have discussed it?’

‘Yes, but it has come so suddenly and this is not
my
house, Doctor. I can’t just move furniture . . . and to where? I don’t know if—’

‘Miss Beechworth, as you know, Mrs Summers is not capable at the moment of making any sort of decision so it is up to you. Good God, woman, these men need your help. Gather all the men and women you can in the area and start right away. I’m sure they will be more than willing to help. These poor wretches will be at the gate any minute. Let us try to be ready.’

Dr Smith was himself exhausted but with Miss Beechworth’s men and women hastily summoned from the farms they had all the ground-floor rooms cleared, the furniture stored in attics, in rooms over the stables, in fact any place where there was an empty spot was soon filled. The farmers’ wives had rallied round and were on their knees with buckets of water and carbolic soap, vigorously scrubbing the acres of floor, the miles of skirting boards, windows to be leathered, even the two farmer’s wives whose sons were over in the mud of France climbing ladders to reach the high walls of the once lovely rooms – breakfast, dining, drawing room – but leaving Harry’s study for the doctors as it was. They would need somewhere to write up notes, to give orders and simply to rest when there was a moment from their gargantuan task. The nurses and VADs were allocated temporary bedrooms on the first floor and when at last the convoy drove up the long drive they were more or less ready.

Under the directions of the doctors and nurses, the iron cots were hastily erected, simple beds that were put up in a minute, and the wounded men carefully placed on them. The sounds of the suffering men had most of the women in tears and Polly fled to what had been the butler’s pantry which was to be turned into a sluice. Mrs Philips and Nessie were in the kitchen boiling water for the tea women thought was the answer to all life’s problems. Polly, crying silently so that her tears fell in her bucket, was scrubbing down for the second time because she could not bear it, she said. Nessie was sorry she had brought her, she kept saying to Mrs Philips, since she was as much good as a chocolate teapot but she was sorry later when she saw the girl doing her best to comfort a man –
man!
He was no more than a lad in long pants – crying for his mother.

They were all non-commissioned men from all walks of life, the wounded officers going elsewhere. Staff Nurse Long had twenty years of nursing behind her, Nurse Heron slightly less, but with fifty wounded men to attend to and the VADs, who had a first aid certificate, they managed admirably. Rose hovered round them, taking orders and performing the most onerous and dirty jobs, for none of the men could get themselves to a toilet, should there have been enough to accommodate them. Dolly stayed with Alice who had not spoken a word since the news about Charlie had been hesitantly given her, taking no notice of the lovely little boy who lay at her side.

‘That babby’ll die if he’s not fed soon,’ one of the farm wives told Rose as if they weren’t already prepared for it. ‘My lass ’as just had one, ’er fourth. She’s enough milk for two babbies. Give ’im ’ere an’ I’ll tekk ’im across,’ for his fretful wailing was undermining everyone’s strength, everyone except Alice who seemed impervious to anything.

So Charlie’s son who had not yet been given a name was taken to Ashtree Farm where Elsie Jones’s daughter-in-law gave him his life back. They decided he might as well stay there instead of ‘lugging’ him backwards and forward as Dan Herbert’s wife said. He slept peacefully by the side of young Jane Jones who shared her mother’s breast with him.

Rose found that she had a talent for nursing; well, perhaps not a talent but at least she did not flinch from some of the tasks the nurses were beginning to ask her to take on. She was learning all the time as those first days were got through, standing at the elbow of Staff Nurse Long or Nurse Heron while dressings were changed, injections given and wounds cleaned. One of the men, a sergeant, had a terrible injury to his leg which Dr Roberts had confessed to the other nurses he thought might have to come off because it had turned gangrenous.

‘Please, Doc, don’t tekk me leg off,’ the sergeant begged, and Rose wanted to weep for him, since she knew he was a farm labourer with four children to support and what good was a one–legged farm labourer?

‘I’m sorry, old man, but if I don’t it will spread and even kill you.’

‘I’d rather be dead,’ the sergeant said. ‘’Ow can I work and keep four kids an’ a wife?’

‘I’ll give you work, Sergeant,’ Rose told him. ‘If you let Dr Roberts amputate you could have a false leg fitted and there will be work for you then.’

‘’Ow long’ll that be, miss?’ the sergeant asked hopelessly. And as though he had given up he allowed his leg to be amputated but died on the operating table.

‘Can I see you in my office, Miss Beechworth?’ Dr Roberts asked her politely, leading the way in to what had been Harry’s study. She remembered the night she and Harry had sat there, friends but with something already blossoming between them. They had been discussing the war and he had treated her as though she was an intelligent woman instead of the usual ‘you’re a woman, dear, and wouldn’t understand’ which was the attitude so many men took. Where was he now? Dear Harry, where was he now? After seeing some of the terrible injuries the soldiers suffered and hearing their cries of pain, seeing the way they watched as the nurses approached them, starting their work of suction treatment on suppurating wounds, the employment of irrigation with bacterial fluids, making their agony worse, she had this scene in her head of Harry somewhere in a hospital such as this suffering what these men suffered, or, worse still, lying in the muck and muddle from which these soldiers had come.

Some men had stood for days in hastily dug trenches without a chance to remove their boots, ankle deep in tainted water, some of them with gangrenous feet. A soldier who had been wounded would make his way, or be carried to the regimental aid-post in the line. From there, after his wound had been hastily dressed, he would be taken to a field dressing station and with luck then taken by ambulance further back to a casualty clearing station. Then there would be a train journey to a base hospital to be shipped directly home across the Channel. It was an admirable scheme but when a wounded man had been days with the soil and dirt of the battle festering in his wounds his chances of survival became slimmer and slimmer. Even then, if there were no room at the hospitals in the south they were taken to hospitals such as Summer Place, another long and pain-ridden journey.

‘Sit down, Miss Beechworth,’ the tired doctor told her, which she did.

‘I know you mean well, my dear, but you cannot go up and down the wards offering jobs to men with no legs, who are blind or mutilated and it will get worse, Miss Beechworth. Some men, not here at the moment, have such horrific wounds to their faces that their own mothers cannot bear to look at them. You must learn to be dispassionate, detached. I know, I know it is hard but it is something a good nurse learns no matter what is in her heart.’

‘Dr Roberts, I cannot—’ she began but he cut her off.

‘Then I cannot allow you to help on the wards. You will be kept scrubbing and polishing and working in the sluice. There is always more washing of bed linen than your women can keep up with and . . . well, your friend who has had the baby needs you. She has lost her husband and lies in her bed staring at the ceiling all day. Even her baby has been taken away.’

‘She cannot feed him, Doctor,’ Rose said passionately. ‘Do you want the child to die?’

‘There you go again, Miss Beechworth. You
feel
things too much and perhaps if more effort had been made to put the child to Mrs Summers’s breast she would—’

‘Really, Doctor, I find your words very insulting. Mrs Summers is my dearest friend. I would die for her.’

The doctor sighed. ‘Then go to her and instead of nursing the men, try to get her up out of that bed and into the spring air. Try to interest her.’

‘We do but she is grieving for her lost husband. We are to christen the baby next Sunday and I am trying to get out of her what she is to call him. She has not spoken and unless she does I am left to choose the name for the poor child.’ She looked round her desperately as though seeking inspiration.

‘You must choose his name then, Miss Beechworth,’ Dr Roberts replied.

‘How can I possibly?’

‘Had you and she not discussed it before . . . before all this?’

‘Well, my father and grandfather were both called William and—’

‘She liked it?’ He looked wearily at her for he had enough problems without what to him seemed a trivial thing, the naming of the child of a missing – perhaps dead – soldier. At this very moment he should have been in his bed while Dr Cartwright took over, since there were thirty wounded soldiers needing attention.

‘Yes, she was—’

‘Then you must do it because I believe Mrs Summers will not be well enough by Sunday to attend her son’s baptism.’

He stood up and passed his hand over his thinning hair. He had been about to retire when this war came upon them and had felt it his duty to continue his doctoring until it was over. The trouble was they had not expected so many wounded or for the war to thunder on as it was doing. The ‘lull’ or the stalemate was well and truly over and everywhere men like him and women like Miss Beechworth had stood up to the horrendous task set before them. He looked out of the study window and could hardly believe the beauty of the gardens that surrounded the house. It seemed almost obscene when over the Channel it was a charnel house. A mist of bluebells carpeted the woods on the far side of the garden, and a mass of daisies grew round the small lake on which two swans glided side by side, impervious to what the world was up to. In the lawn, which needed mowing, were more daisies and against the wall with the gate to the stables was a great splash of orange, marigolds he thought. At the side of the house a conservatory contained an explosion of colour, trailing ivy and ferns, all very overgrown. White wrought-iron chairs, which his idle mind thought would do nicely for men as they convalesced, were positioned around the lawn, and beyond that the trees were heavy with pink blossom. What a wonderful world this was until men smashed at it with greedy fists.