Cherry Ames 05 Flight Nurse (5 page)

“Good luck,” Wade said under his breath. “Wish I were going with you.”

“Wade—Wade—” Cherry did not know how to express the terrible excitement she felt. “I’d like to stand right here and make sure they—all come back. As if waiting for them—hoping for them—would bring them home.”

“That,” the pilot smiled a little, “is known as sweating them in. You’re going to do a lot of that, living at a bomber base.”

“I’ll never hear those planes go out and be able to rest until—”

“Here, here, none of that,” he said gaily and took her arm. “You don’t burst out crying when you see a wounded boy, do you? It’d be the worst thing you could do to him. No, you just do your job for him. Now, my little landlubber, you have a very urgent date with a Coke—or an English version thereof.” The date with a Coke turned into a party. They ran into Agnes and Ann and some of the other nurses with their pilots. A bevy of fighter pilots gravitated to the new nurses. Wade, pretending reluctance, introduced them to Cherry. She was touched by their genuine admiration and respect for flight nurses. One of them said:

“You flight nurses are our real pin-up girls. When we salute you, we aren’t just following Army custom. We mean those salutes.”

A quieter pilot added, “Let me tell you, Lieutenant Ames, and it’s no exaggeration to say this, you flight nurses mean the difference between life and death to many a soldier. I was in North Africa when the hospital planes came in. I know.”

Praise, such as this and from such men, filled Cherry—and for that matter, all the nurses—with a warm, strong desire to perform heroic exploits. Upon rising the next morning, they looked forward eagerly to six o’clock which might bring them their first flight assignment. But unfortunately, six A.M. brought only 38

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calisthenics and drill, breakfast, house cleaning, and then an all-morning lecture by their Flight Surgeon, Major Thorne. He was a plump, ruddy little man with a twinkle in his eye. In closing the lecture he said:

“I know you ladies are eager for your first flight order.

I wish I didn’t have to disappoint you. Until your individual flight orders come through, you will do hospital duty. In fact, whenever you have time between flights, we’ll need you in the hospital.” The nurses groaned. So they weren’t going to fly at once! They had, apparently, crossed an ocean merely to help out on a ward! Major Thorne let them groan and then said:

“As a consolation prize, ladies, you are invited to take the afternoon off. There are several beautiful little English villages within cycling or hitchhiking distance of here. Go and explore and have yourselves a tea party!”

That was very pleasant consolation. Flight Three dressed themselves in their formal khaki jackets and skirts, and went off to pay a call on the nearest English village. A mail corporal gave them a lift in his jeep.

They rode along a narrow, gently winding road, past massive rugged old trees and lovely meadows laced with crystal streams. “It’s like fairyland,” Maggie murmured.

Cherry breathed in deeply of the fresh sweet air, but she was thinking of something else. She wondered if, by any chance, the village they were on their way to visit
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would turn out to be the village where Mrs. Eldredge lived. Cherry had not yet learned the names and loca-tions of the surrounding villages. She was disinclined to ask the jeep driver, nor did she want to discuss it with the other girls. The trouble Mrs. Eldredge was facing might be of a confidential nature. Dr. Joe had warned her to be “discreet.” Cherry decided, “I won’t try to do more this afternoon than get my bearings in a strange place.”

So she leaned back between Ann and Gwen, and drank in the sight of sun and leaves and dappled shadows, and enjoyed herself.

Their first glimpse of the little town was a curtain of protective barrage balloons, low in the sky, attached to cables. These helped fend off enemy planes. They saw three houses with roofs missing. In another house they looked in through a broken wall and saw a woman, wearing her coat, cooking at a stove. But at the village square, where the jeep driver called “Last stop!”, they found themselves in a kind of storybook village.

“It must be a movie set,” Gwen insisted, as they all stood and stared. “It can’t be real.” Elsie planted her feet firmly on the ground, industri-ously opened her guidebook, and read aloud, “Forty-five million people live on this small crowded island. The need for privacy has made them reserved. The Magna Charta was the first democratic bill of rights—”

“Elsie! We can do that later!” 40

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Elsie thumbed through the book. “I had the wrong page. No place in England,” she read brightly, “is more than a hundred miles from the sea. There is a great variety of scenery. The—”

“Well,
look
at the scenery!”

“—Tower of London is a thousand years old, and—”

“It’s positively dreamy,” Agnes Gray crooned to herself. “Oh, do you suppose we’ll be permitted to take pictures?”

Cherry and Ann were murmuring, “It’s lovely, lovely!” Nestled in a green valley, this village, with its low ancient buildings, was like a jewel cupped in a setting. A mellow patina of age had softened and deepened all the colors. The rosy bricks of the many-chimneyed houses were overgrown with rustling ivy, shaded by massive trees. Plaster cottages with steep, sloping, thatched roofs and dormer windows sat amidst gardens. The pub—public house—and the Fish and Chips shop displayed curious many-paned windows, and worn stone doorsteps that must have known the tread of the people of Elizabethan times. The silvery-gray fieldstone church, of exquisite and simple design, stood in the heart of the village, facing the single winding tree-lined street, High Street. Along the lanes were gardens and hedges ripe with centuries of cultivation. Over everything hung a seren-ity and dignity, even in wartime, which was very impressive.

The nurses strolled past a line of people patiently waiting at a sign
Queue Up Here For Bus
. Their pitifully shabby clothes, rather worn faces, several bandaged arms and legs and heads, bespoke the hardships of war.

Yet these English people appeared cheerful and calm.

The only betrayal was that the women on line stared at the American girls’ nice stockings. Their own were homely makeshifts, much darned.

The girls looked in the window of a food shop. There was little except potatoes, mutton and Brussels sprouts.

No eggs, no red meat, no oranges.

Cherry sighed. “Let’s go see the church,” she suggested.

They went up High Street, past a staid chemist shop which, unlike an American drugstore, was not a won-drous bazaar but sold only drugs, past a stationer’s with books in the small window, past the familiar red front of a Woolworth’s. They found the church was lovely within, and with the rector’s permission, they lingered there.

Coming out, the girls remembered Major Thorne’s suggestion that they have a tea party.

“Have we the right to eat these people’s limited food?” Ann asked.

They debated it, and decided Major Thorne would not have suggested having tea if it were not all right.

“Besides,” Maggie offered shyly, “we’ll be careful to eat very, very little.”

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Cherry remembered having passed a shop with a sign reading
Tiffin at Four O’clock
. She proposed, “Tiffin must mean tea, and four o’clock must mean you can’t buy food at any old hour of the day.” They found the shop and went in. It was a modest little tearoom. A plump woman in a flowered apron bustled over to them. She addressed the nurses, in a country accent which they could hardly understand, as “our transatlantic friends.” It made Cherry feel very strange to realize she now had the status of a foreigner, albeit a welcome one. The woman apologized that there were no traditional strawberries and thick cream and crumpets for tea during wartime. Instead, she served them excellent tea and paper-thin cucumber sandwiches. They were fun but not fill-ing. Cherry, who had a hearty appetite, began to sympathize in earnest with war-hungered people. Paying for their tiffin led to confusion and hilarity. The big English bank notes looked like wallpaper to them, and the huge coins like lockets. The obliging teashop woman explained, and said as they walked out the door:

“Come back
after
the war. Then you’ll see what a jolly country this is!”

The six nurses waited under a great oak for a passing jeep or Army truck.

“We had quite a lark, didn’t we,” Lieutenant Gray said soberly.

“It was lots of fun,” Maggie said in such a subdued voice that they all half-smiled, rather grimly.

“Not much fun, this business of having war in your own front yard,” Cherry summed up. She thought gratefully how lucky she was to be an American. She thought too, “It’s just as well that I didn’t find Mrs. Eldredge this afternoon. I needed to see all this before I could talk with any understanding to any English civilian!” For the next few days, Cherry helped out in the Army hospital. She met so many new people and was shifted around so much, from ward to X-ray rooms, from giving treatments to soldiers to being circulating nurse at surgeries, that her head whirled. One tired Chief Nurse said to her, “I wish to goodness more of our young girls would enter nursing. There’s the free Cadet Nurse Corps scholarship for them, and all. Student nurses, right at home, could relieve this shortage so much, if they only would come forward to help and release older nurses for overseas duty.”

“It would mean more American boys’ lives saved,” Cherry agreed. She knew that, against tremendous odds, the Army and Navy Medical Corps managed to save ninety-six men out of a hundred.

Some extra help did come—from British children, eleven to fifteen years old, who called themselves Cadets. Cherry saw many of these Cadets from the neighborhood around the hospital. United States doctors gave them training. These Cadets proudly did 44

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amazingly difficult things—helped take off plaster casts, made plaster bandages, took charge of a desk.

Their favorite job was regularly visiting the patients with gifts of food. And how the lonesome GI’s enjoyed their visits!

The young Cadets bobbed up with invitations for the nurses from their hospitable parents. Cherry was asked to dinner and to tea almost every day. She was disappointed that, so far, she was far too busy to accept.

And then to her immense delight, Cherry received her first flight order. She was the envy of all Flight Three, for the others’ operational orders had not come through yet.

Cherry was on the line at eight a.m. , dressed in her blue flying slacks, blouse, and cap—so excited, nervous, and happy she could hardly wait to get started. She waited in a small building—the “base operations”—on the air strip. Bunce, furiously chewing gum, was standing beside her. Like Cherry, he was wearing the white brassard with a Red Cross on his left sleeve. They had already carefully checked to see that straps, seats, and medical kit, were in place for patients. Bunce was too excited to talk. He merely sputtered.

“If I do anything wrong—gosh, Miss Cherry, keep your eyes peeled—maybe you could catch my mistakes in time—”

“You aren’t going to make any mistakes, Bunce. Calm down or you’ll explode into a million little pieces.”
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“Yes, ma’am! I’m calm! I’m calm like anything! Just—

just—I mean—”

“Well, here’s our pilot!” Cherry exclaimed.

Captain Cooper strode down the air strip to the base operations hut, past the C-47’s with their motors idling.

Lieutenants Mason and Greenberg marched together behind him, carrying their gear. Wade was not laughing this morning; he looked almost stern.

“Good

morning,

Nurse.

’Morning,

Sergeant.

Parachute checkup. Line up, please.” Cherry nodded hello to the copilot and the radioman as they all lined up and Wade inspected their harness.

“All right, everybody. Destination—Prestwick! Give it everything you’ve got.” Captain Cooper gave orders to his own crew, and to Cherry, “Nurse, whistle when you want me.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Wade stayed at the hut to make his necessary clearances and manifests—that is, records of crew, weights, weather, flight plan—and to make a last-minute weather check. The flight nurse and her technician walked on ahead to the plane.

At the plane they were joined by the Flight Surgeon, plump little Major Thorne. Then the copilot backed up the C-47 to meet five ambulances rolling down the field. Cherry and Bunce ran, and Major Thorne puffed along too, to be on hand as the ambulance orderlies lifted out the litters.

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Cherry caught her breath as she looked into the first litter. She pressed her lips tightly together, to keep from weeping at what she saw. This was no healthy GI playing patient; this was a boy with his leg torn off. In the second litter handed down, lay a khaki-clad fellow whose face was white and set with pain; his tag showed that his spinal cord was severed. “Easy, don’t jolt him,” she cautioned the stretcher-bearers. She smiled at the lad.

“How are you, fellow?”

“I’m fine, Nurse,” he whispered.

In the third litter was a boy in a leather jacket. His shattered jaw was held in place by wires, but his eyes smiled, because he was going home. In the fourth litter was a dazed-looking man. His medical tag read internal wounds and mental shock.

As Cherry bent to look at each casualty, she directed, with the Flight Surgeon’s approval, where he should be placed in the plane. Then she hurried off to see that the litters went onto the elevator safely. She found that these skilled medical corpsmen were carrying off the whole loading process with the deftness and silence of a surgical operation. She beckoned to Bunce.