Where Earth Meets Sky (37 page)

There was a nursing room, a place of mixed joy and desolation, where the new mothers were expected to go and feed their infants. The occasions of feeds were strictly timed and no extra time was allowed for holding or playing with the babies.

‘No good getting a feel for her when you’re giving her up.’ Sister Jenkins, who was in charge of the nursing room, was a hearty but heartless person who treated both mothers and babies with utter lack of feeling. Lily watched her sometimes, her pink, brawny face bent over one of the young mothers, waiting to snatch the infant from them the second they had finished their allotted time at the breast.

Lily secretly called her little girl Victoria after the old queen. The home didn’t allow the giving of names.

‘They’ll be given a name,’ she was told. ‘By their new families.’

The first time she saw the little one, once she had been cleaned up after the birth, was in the nursing room. Sister Jenkins carried her in from the nursery next door.

‘Now – here you are. Undo your gown.’ She had been issued with a thick, rough frock; the front crossed over her chest, with special ties so that it could be loosened for feeding. Lily was so fixed on seeing the child that she forgot to obey.

‘I said undo your gown!’ Sister Jenkins snapped. Lily found that her breasts were seeping a clear liquid. ‘Now – take her and latch her to the breast.’

Lily held out her arms. She stared and stared at the tiny, perfect form that was handed to her. Tears welled up in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Oh, she was Sam’s child all right! She had thick tufts of dark hair and his sallow complexion.

‘It’s no good looking,’ Sister Jenkins bossed her, trying to manoeuvre the baby on her arms to turn her to the breast.

‘It’s all right.’ Lily drew back. ‘I’ll do it.’

She wanted to scream at the woman to go away.
Don’t touch my baby, you cold, heartless woman! Leave me with her. Leave us in peace!
But she knew it was no good. It would only get her into trouble.

The feeling of the child’s mouth on her nipple was strange and powerful and she sat wincing at it and the pains it caused in her stomach. Sister Jenkins sat watching her like a hawk and Lily kept her head down, trying to hide the overpowering rush of emotion which filled her. Here was this tiny being, sucking at her breast, so small and so dependent on her. And she was the first person Lily had ever known who was truly hers, who belonged to her. She felt stripped naked by the emotion, by the need she had for this little child. She would look down at her, wrung with tenderness, wanting to hold her in her arms forever.

What if she were to keep her? The idea ran round and round in her head. But she thought of going out again, alone, to the streets. All she had to her name was the payment from Eustace’s family, the small remnant of her wages from the factory and Mrs Chappell’s jewellery. What could she possibly give her baby? She would be so much better off with a family who could give her a good life. She forced herself to close down any such thoughts in her mind.

Victoria
, she thought, looking down at her, willing both herself and the little girl to be strong. It was a strong name, and she would need to be victorious. She stroked her finger gently over the tiny, warm cheek.

‘Right – that’s long enough,’ Sister Jenkins would decree, peering at the fob watch pinned to her ample chest.

Lily felt as if little Victoria was being torn from her as Sister Jenkins took her briskly away. How could she do the work she did, Lily wondered, when there was all this love and grief in front of her, all the powerful instincts of new mothers? She saw that Sister Jenkins had killed all such feelings in herself. And as she left the nursing room that evening, after Victoria’s first feed, Lily knew that to survive losing her, she was going to have to do the same.

It was a freezing day in February when she stepped out through the forbidding front door of the home, dressed once more in her own clothes, holdall in her hand, head down against the bitter wind.

In her head were her instructions: the train to Euston, the directions to her new place of work, where, with Susan Fairford’s glowing references, she had obtained a new post as nanny to two young girls at a respectable west London address.

Her figure had soon recovered. She was as rounded and curvaceous as before, and walked with a healthy step, boots clicking along the cobbles. Looking up, she crossed the road, hurrying out of the path of a coalman’s dray. She was wearing new clothes, bought with her payment from Eustace’s people, a smart green dress, a new black coat and hat, and in every way she looked like a beautiful young woman setting out to embark on a new life. It was only her eyes that gave away her state, the pain locked in her heart. As she looked along the street, working out her route to the railway station, there was a deep sadness, a hardness which had not been there before, which covered up her grief, her bereavement, which she could not let herself feel.

Holding her head high, and with a determined step, she walked quickly away.

France, March 1918

‘Oh God, here we go!’

Sam’s hands tightened automatically on the truck’s steering wheel. His convoy had just set off as the bugle sounded across the wide expanse of hospital huts to summon the nurses for emergency duty. Already they could hear the planes. Should he stop and turn back?

A small convoy of them had been ordered to drive desperately needed supplies to the casualty clearing station at Armentières. The raids had been coming night after night now the stalemate along the front had been broken by the German assault. Things were bad, very bad. The reception huts in the hospital were flooded with wounded, Allied and German, the place was like a scene from hell and all of them knew the war was hanging by a thread. The Germans were coming closer – they had reached Amiens.

Gripping the wheel, Sam eased his shoulders up towards his ears for a moment, a movement which had become so habitual that he no longer noticed it. His body had been forever taut during the three years he’d been in France; now it was pulled tense enough to snap. It was as if, in this endless hell of war, there was nothing but fear and exhaustion, no other state.

‘Where are you buggers, then?’ He leaned forward to try and see the droning threat in the darkness. He could hear nothing now, over the roar of their own truck engines. The Boche would be after the Étaples railway, which ran between the wide settlement of the hospital and supply depot and the sand dunes of the coast. Ambulance trains moved relentlessly along the tracks day and night, bringing the wounded from the Front, and it was the main artery along which the supplies to service General Haig’s vast army were carried from the base depot. Shell that, and others like Calais and Boulogne, and they would paralyse the Allied supply lines. Just what they wanted, of course, Sam thought grimly. His mind slid round the fear:
And they’ll win the war, and then what? What will happen?
But he buried the thought immediately.

He fixed his gaze on the lights of the lorry behind him. Bert, the driver, had leaned from the cab before they set off and called chirpily through his Woodbine, ‘Don’t lose sight of me, Ironside – no kipping on the job!’ Act as if nothing was happening, that was Bert. That was all of them, come to think of it. Close down: don’t think.

And you had to use every grain of strength to stay on the road. These rural routes were being grossly overused, bottlenecked with the traffic servicing the vast army, the roaring lorries and ammunition wagons, the horses and carts, the files of khaki-clad men. The area was already low-lying and marshy and the combination of spring rains and constant churning by wheels and hooves and feet had turned the roads into a quagmire of liquid mud, filling the deep holes and ruts. He began the usual lurching trial of strength which driving in these conditions involved, fixing his mind on it, trying not to think of anything beyond . . .

He didn’t hear it coming. Afterwards he knew it was a shell, that it had landed in the mist-filled pasture close by, that it had hurled his lorry over on to its side. But all he knew then was instant blackness.

For a long time he passed in and out of consciousness. When he surfaced, groggily, he knew he was lying somewhere hard, that his face felt stretched and tight, he didn’t know whether with caked mud or blood or both, that there was something strange about his left eye, that there were pains all round his body and that he was shaking. He was aware of a dimly lit place, of groaning cries, of a ghastly stench. And then he dipped under again into the darkness.

He was aware of being moved, much later, lifted higher on to a bed; of an atmosphere of chaos, and light in his face.

‘I don’t think there’s much wrong, despite the look of him,’ a man’s voice said. ‘He’ll lose the eye, that’s all. Not urgent – leave him till later, Nurse.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Sam tried to say. His mouth tasted metallic, of blood, and nothing sensible came out.

A woman’s voice came next and with his good eye he caught a glimpse of her in the dim light of the oil lamp: the VAD uniform, a white veil, her face pale and thin beneath, dark circles under the eyes. And she understood what he was asking

‘You’ve got an eyeful of glass and a lot of bruising. But you seem to be all right otherwise. You’ve been very lucky. I’ll come back to you later . . . Too many others to see to . . .’

He drifted again, but each time he surfaced, his mind snagged on something.
You’ve been very lucky . . . Too many others to see to . . .
Something familiar. That voice, prim and well spoken. He knew that voice from somewhere.

‘Water . . . A drink . . .’ His mouth was parched, foul-tasting.

His head was lifted and he sipped water. God, water was lovely. He just wanted to keep lapping it, more and more, but the cup was taken away.

Sam opened his good eye. It was that nurse again.

‘What time is it?’ he said hoarsely.

‘Why?’ Her voice was flat and exhausted. ‘Does it make any difference?’ Then her natural good manners took over. ‘I suppose it’s five in the morning, or so.’

‘Thanks. Am I going to be blind?’

‘Can’t you see out of that one either?’ She came a little closer. Yes, he could see out of his right eye, and he knew then. She had changed a good deal. Had it not been for the voice he wouldn’t have known her. But with the voice he was sure now. What on earth was she doing here? Would she remember him?

‘I’m going to see if I can get some of the glass out of your eye,’ she was saying. ‘Before another convoy arrives and we’re swamped again.’ She seemed about to move away, perhaps to fetch instruments, but somehow he couldn’t bear it.

‘Aren’t you . . . I mean . . . I know you, I think . . .’ he said, confusedly. He was stunned, disorientated by seeing her again, here of all places.

‘No.’ Her voice was brimful of sadness. ‘I’m sure you don’t. I’m not your mother, or your sister, dear. But I’ll look after you, all the same, as if I were.’ The utter sweetness with which she spoke brought a lump to his throat.

‘But you’re Mrs Fairford – aren’t you?’ As he said it he even wondered himself if he was hallucinating. ‘Captain Fairford’s wife – Ambala Cantonment?’

With only his one blurred eye he could still make out the change in her face. There was shock, and then she began to tremble. He thought she would weep.

‘I seem to recognize you as well . . .’ Her voice was high and tremulous, just in control. ‘I’m not imagining what you’re saying, am I?’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘Sometimes I start to doubt myself . . . I’m so very tired . . .’

‘No – it’s all right. I’m Sam Ironside – remember? From Daimler. I brought your husband his cars.’

He saw her staring hard at him. Even now he felt himself tense, waiting for the response he remembered in her when they first met, the class superiority, her cool snobbishness. Her words came out haltingly, the recognition sinking in.

‘Your face – you’ve so much blood on it I can hardly tell . . . Ironside . . . Of course, Charles’s driver . . . We had picnics with the children, and Charles . . . Oh!’ The last was an uncontrollable cry. ‘Oh God!’ She put her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking. ‘I’m so sorry . . . Oh, forgive me . . .’

For a few anguished moments, Susan Fairford stood sobbing at the side of his bed.

As the dawn light increased through the windows of the hut, she bent over him, the lamp hanging from a hook near her head, and assessed his injuries again. She was quite collected now. He was covered in blood, she told him, because of a large number of cuts from small glass splinters, which had made his injuries seem far more serious on first sight. Sam realized the tightness in his cheeks was because of the dried blood. His eye was the only thing more seriously damaged and he knew he was one of the most fortunate blokes in there. Even losing an eye was as nothing compared with what some of them were going through.

‘There’s a bit of a lull,’ Susan Fairford said. ‘Let’s see what I can do.’

And she began to try and remove some of the glass. Her only equipment was a small pair of tweezers. As yet, though, there was no pain, or very little, only a numbness, a feeling that his eye had been punched rather than pierced. As she worked, with great care, he did begin to feel the sharpness in his eye and he winced.