Softly Grow the Poppies (19 page)

Dr Roberts came within the hour although he was up to his tired eyes with the influx from the recent Battle of the Somme; he could not keep up with the positions of the battles and felt ashamed, but there were so many and so many men involved all he could manage was his determined need to help those who came to him and Dr Cartwright. It had all become a blur to both the doctors as the wounded poured in and out, most of them destined for home but some poor bastards back to the trenches.

He looked down at the pretty but strained face of the young woman who he had been told was the wife of one of the Summers boys, the one who had been missing but was now discovered to be a prisoner of war. She was semi-conscious, muttering to herself and like Miss Rose who stood beside him he was astonished that she had arrived here at all. Not brought by ambulance as were the rest of his patients but under her own steam.

Her hand and arm up to the elbow were wrapped in a soiled bandage, probably put on by the beleaguered hospital at the front.

‘Let’s have a look,’ he said and began to unwrap the poor young woman’s arm. What was revealed caused him to gasp in shock. The arm was a suffused purple and red, puffy, swollen and the fingers on the hand were like plump sausages and all from a ghastly looking wound in her wedding finger but where her wedding ring was was a mystery. When he had cleaned the hand he found the ring embedded in her swollen flesh. The wound was oozing pus and the young woman next to him clutched his arm in horror.

‘How did she do this?’ he asked, wondering at his concern, for he had seen much worse than this on the wards of the hospital. But somehow it seemed worse in the case of a young woman.
A lady!

‘I think she said she got a splinter in her finger.’

‘All from a bloody splinter,’ he spluttered. ‘Why was it not tended to in the hospital at . . . where?’

‘Camiers.’

‘They were probably so overwhelmed they—’

‘She probably had it for days before she told them, knowing Alice. For such a little bit of a thing she was an obstinate beggar. She would hardly consider it worth mentioning. She was strong and wilful and her whole soul was obsessed with finding Charlie, her husband.’

The doctor bent down and sniffed at the exposed hand. ‘Well, one good thing there’s no smell of cheese so not gangrene but . . . I’m sorry, this finger will have to come off and let’s hope that will fix it or it will mean the whole hand or even the arm.’

Rose put her hand to her mouth, turning away to stare out of the window where the patient Tom was busy digging at something with Will kneeling beside him; she had time to bless the good man and to thank God he was too old for soldiering because he seemed to be the only one who could manage the extremely despotic little boy at the moment. Dolly was too distraught and Nessie too busy doing her best to do what Dolly usually did, and besides she had to feed those who needed it, staff, nurses, even helping with the menus for the wounded though they had their own cook of sorts, but not much ‘cop’ Nessie believed and said so to Dolly!

Alice was carried on a stretcher from Beechworth to Summer Place and the room on the ground floor that had been turned into a surgery where Dr Roberts and Dr Cartwright did their best to put together the mangled bodies that streamed into them. She was placed on the operating table on which minutes ago a young lad of eighteen had just had both his legs removed. He was sleeping peacefully on the ward, unaware that his life had changed for ever.

It took no more than ten minutes to cut the inflamed and swollen finger from Alice’s hand, a pathetic little piece of her body, the doctors praying in their own way that the rest of her would now heal. Neither of them was religious and their praying was more a ferocious tirade against whoever had done this to the men in their care but somehow it seemed much worse to slice into the flesh and bone of a woman, a brave woman who had probably sent on their way some of the wounded in this very hospital, more than likely saving their lives.

She was carried back to Beechworth where Dolly, in tears, the painful tears of the old, waited for her and when she was settled in bed, still unconscious, refused to leave her side as though now that she was home she would never let Alice out of her sight.

It was November before the Somme offensive ended and in all those weeks Alice lay in her bed and began to be introduced to her son. At first, being inquisitive and having evaded the two women who did their best to guard Alice’s door, he opened it quietly and peeped inside. He was astonished to see a lady lying in the bed with her eyes turned towards him as if expecting someone.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Have you come to check up on me? They won’t let me get out of bed.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, moving slowly across the rich carpet towards her.

‘I suppose it’s because I’ve a poorly arm.’

He glanced at the bandaged arm that lay on top of the quilt. ‘Did you fa-de down?’ He had many quaint sayings and this one meant had she fallen down which he did frequently.

Alice did not know how to reply so she answered factually. ‘I got a splinter in my hand.’

The little boy snorted derisively. ‘
A splinter
. Me got splinter one day but me not go to bed. Me brave boy,’ puffing out his chest.

‘Ah but you’re a boy. Ladies are not as brave.’

There was a dog barking somewhere, several dogs, and the boy leaned confidentially on the bed, careful not to touch the lady’s arm for she was a very pretty lady. Alice had been almost force-fed on Nessie’s custards and broths and indeed anything with plenty of milk and eggs in it and her face had filled out and had lost the dreadful flush of fever. Strangely, she seemed reluctant to get out of bed as though she were not yet ready to face the world despite being told Charlie was alive and would, when this war was over, be coming back to them. It was as if something had at last broken in Alice, perhaps not broken but cracked and needed rest to mend itself. The desperate life she had led for a year and a half, the whistle, the alarm bells, the sounds of ambulances being cranked, not to mention the cries of the wounded, and which had forced the pace of her days, had taken something from her but she had not been aware of it.

‘That’s Ginger an’ Spice an’ Tommy.’

‘What?’

‘My dogs. They all mine.’ He was full of his own importance.

‘You are a lucky boy. To have three dogs of your own.’ She wished the boy would go away. She knew she had a son and she supposed this was him but she did not know him and was too tired to get to know him. She closed her eyes and he patted her cheek.

‘You go bye-byes,’ he said kindly, then turned to tiptoe out of the room.

It was Christmas before she came downstairs and it was only Rose’s nagging, as Alice called it, that did the trick.

‘Look, sweetheart, you can’t lie up there for ever. Will is excited about having a Christmas tree and he keeps asking when the poorly lady is coming down to see it. He seems to have taken a fancy to you and is dying to show you his dogs. Dolly won’t hear of him bringing them up to you so you must come down to them. Your hand is healed and your arm is no longer in bandages. The doctor says you are recovered and—’

‘My finger, Rosie, my finger.’

‘I know, darling, but it is better than losing—’

‘My wedding ring is gone with the finger and I no longer feel I am married to Charlie. It is so long since I’ve seen him, married him; it’s all unreal.’

It was then that Rose at last realised that although Alice was recovered physically she was not really herself, the sweet, good–humoured girl they had all come to love in 1914.

The loss of her wedding ring, the absence of the man who put it on her finger, the boy they had made together who was still not hers, had interfered with something in her mind and she wandered about the house and gardens, often with Will and the dogs running round her, her face vague and expressionless, her eyes dulled so that Rose and Dolly began seriously to worry about her.

‘D’you think it’s shell-shock, Doctor?’ Rose asked Dr Roberts anxiously. ‘Men who come back from the front often look like she does and she seems to care for nothing, not even Charlie, nor her son. Look at her . . .’ And they both turned to look out of the window at Alice who simply stood on the lawn that ran down to the lake, staring at nothing. ‘Her life is empty without that compulsion she had to search for Charlie, and Will might as well be the gardener’s son to whom she is kind and to whom she listens when he speaks to her but she never bonds with him. We have told her he is hers – her and Charlie’s son – but she simply looked at him quite without interest and said, “Yes, I know.” I don’t know what to do, really I don’t.’

‘Try not to worry, Miss Beechworth,’ the doctor said absent-mindedly, his thoughts turning to the lad on whom he was to perform surgery within the hour. He had been shot in the face, only a glancing blow from a bullet across his forehead which did not disfigure him but which had left him blind, and the devil of it was he didn’t know what he could do to bring back his sight. There were doctors who dealt with specific types of wounds. Men who operated in men’s heads revealing their brains, others who cared for shell-shocked men who screamed at the slightest noise, men who looked after and did their best for those who had been burned: specialists in their chosen field. Perhaps he should send the young soldier to one of those.

He sighed and patted her hand and Rose was left to realise that the woman in the garden who to all intents and purposes was cured, for the loss of a finger was nothing compared to the loss of a young man’s sight, was not really of much concern to the overworked doctor.

There was great excitement in April when the United States of America declared war on Germany, for surely this meant that the war would soon be over and perhaps, Rose thought, Harry might get some leave. She had not seen him for more than nine months when he had managed a forty-eight-hour pass. She had gone up to London to meet him and they had spent the whole time cradled together either in the bed of the hotel in which she had booked a room, or in the bath, for he could not seem to feel clean, he told her. Indeed when she saw him climb wearily down from the train and walk towards her on the platform she had scarcely recognised him he was so covered in mud and what looked suspiciously like blood. He was weighed down with the usual clutter a soldier, even an officer, must carry about with him and when she shrieked his name she could see the effort it took to lift his head to look at her.

‘The blood?’ he asked, crying and laughing at the same time, she didn’t know why, but it wasn’t his, he managed to tell her. He did not mention to her that it belonged to several young officers, most of them straight from school and ridiculously boyish, whom he had carried one by one from the battlefield.

She stripped him in the warm hotel room and, without a word being spoken, put him in the bath she ran for him then followed him, sitting behind him as he leaned back against her. She murmured soft endearments to which he did not answer, sponged and soaped him, even his genitals to which he did not respond and she realised he was asleep. Exhaustion had him in thrall for almost twelve hours then when he awoke he took her savagely, no tenderness, no words of love, just as though it was the only way Harry could join Rose again in the way they had known on his last leave. Only when his orgasms, many of them, released some inner horror, allowing it to drift into the heavy London sky, did he begin to make love to her. The badness had gone and only the sweetness they had known remained and he spoke to her of his love and longing and dread of going back.

‘But when the Yanks arrive it will be the end of it all. I must stay . . . stay alive until then, my darling, for I want this, what you have given me, what I have taken, I suppose I should say, to go on for ever. We will make lots of babies and . . . and . . .’ He began to weep desolately and she knew that this bloody war had not only torn Alice from her but was going a fair way to taking this beloved man as well. He was on the edge, the precipice, ready to tumble down into the chasm of despair and only times like these few hours with her could drag him back. She supposed they were all like that, or most of them.

They parted at the railway station quite calmly, just a light kiss from Harry’s lips on Rose’s bloodless cheek, then he turned away and climbed into the carriage. She did not even watch the train leave but took a tram to the train that was to take her way up north and she was aware that anyone seeing them say farewell would think they did not care much for one another. An onlooker would not know that if they had let their feelings show they would both have run screaming into the traffic that crammed the streets, careless of death. She and Alice had died months ago and so had Charlie and Harry.

She got home, moving like a robot up the long drive and into the front door where an ecstatic Will clasped her round her knees and told her loudly that she was very naughty to have left him and she must promise never to do it again.

And now Alice watched as an ambulance came chugging up the drive of Summer Place with its usual cargo of wounded. As it passed her she turned to watch it and, slowly at first, then more quickly, she followed it to the wide front door. Stretcher-bearers began to unload the quiet men, the fresh batch of wounded, quiet since most of them had come straight from the trenches and had been on the move for several days. Nurses were busy about them, directing each man to the place where he was to be dealt with according to his wounds. There were a dozen of them and apart from the bit of rough first aid they had received at the clearing stations, they still had the mud and filth of the battlefields on them. Grey and silent, close to death it seemed, and the VADs were astounded as the woman they knew had herself been on the battlefields was bending over one of them with the words they all used.

‘It’ll be all right, old chap. You’ll soon feel better when you’ve been cleaned up.’

‘Mrs Summers, you have no business here with these wounded,’ Staff Nurse Long told her. ‘Please stand aside and allow—’

‘Give me some scissors, if you please, Nurse,’ to a VAD who stood uncertainly beside her. ‘I shall do my best to get these stinking uniforms from these soldiers. There, there, old chap,’ for the soldier had begun to moan. ‘Don’t fret, love, I’ll help you until the doctor sees to you.’