Softly Grow the Poppies (22 page)

‘Yes,’ Rose lied. ‘His mother cannot come since she is not well so I offered to visit Captain Summers in her place. He is my . . . cousin. I have just made a long journey from Liverpool where I am a VAD at a nursing home and cannot go back to her to tell her you would not allow me to see her son.’

‘I am not saying you may not see him but visiting hours are—’

‘I must see him at once, Nurse. I have a job to do at the hospital which you of all people must understand and I must get back to it as soon as possible. The wounded from the last battle are pouring in and we can barely manage; surely you must realise how important
our
work is?’

The officious nurse relaxed, for she was worn to the bone nursing the sick and wounded who flooded not just into her hospital but others all over the country and this woman whom she was certain was not a cousin of Captain Summers knew exactly how she and her fellow nurses and VADs worked round the clock. She nodded her head towards the stairs and turned away and without a word Rose sped up the stairs heading for the ward where Harry lay.

He lay completely still under his bedsheets except for his hands which moved restlessly, pulling at something as though he hauled at a fishing net. Careless of the men who lay in their beds, some asleep, others unconscious, she almost ran along the ward until she reached the last bed where he lay. He continued to stare at the ceiling and seemed unaware of her presence until she knelt beside him and took his twitching hands in hers, bringing them to her lips in an outpouring of love. She folded them gently in her warm grasp. Silently she spilled out the endless current of her love and when he turned his head and looked into her eyes she bent and kissed his mouth. He was gaunt, sunken-eyed, the lovely chocolate brown of his eyes flat and unfocused as though he were still back on that battlefield where he had stepped on poor Joe Turner’s fallen body.

‘Harry, Harry, my love . . . what . . .’ She did not know what to say. ‘How are you? How badly are you wounded? Does it hurt? What happened?’ all seemed so stupid, puerile, as though the wounded man, who stared at her as if he wasn’t sure who she was, was a fool for he wouldn’t be here if his wound were not serious.

‘I don’t know what to say except how glad . . .’
Glad!
What a stupid word to describe the way she felt, the joy that was running through her at the sight of him, of knowing he was alive, wounded, certainly, but alive and back here in England. She had lived a life of worry, with an agonising, ever present expectation that he would vanish as so many of them had done. The unknown was a spectre that stared her in the face day after day after day. Even asleep she had been troubled by dreams of him festering in the muck and mud that Alice had inadvertently told her about. She had not meant to hurt her, to drive her mad with anxiety but Alice had been unable to hold back her own knowledge of the horrors that faced the men who fought ‘over there’. And here he was back within reach of her eager hands, arms, lips, but there was something wrong with the beloved man she had known. He seemed confused,
uncaring
of who she was and yet she knew he loved her as she loved him.

‘Harry, my love, I am here. Look at me, sweetheart. I am here to take care of you, perhaps to bring you home if they will let me. Charlie is found, did you know? And Alice is back with us. The boy, their boy – dearest, look at me, please, and say you know me, that you love me still . . .’

His face spasmed as though in sudden pain and she gripped his hand, turning to search for a doctor or a nurse. She wanted to know the precise details of his injury but the nurse was bending over another bed, giving a soldier an injection, she thought, and she did not like to interrupt.

‘Rose . . .’ Harry’s voice quavered and with a gasp of relief she turned back to him.

‘Yes, my love, I am here.’

‘I stepped on poor Joe Turner’s body. I didn’t mean to but he . . .’ Again his face spasmed and she realised it was not with pain but with anguish. He was remembering the last battle in which he had fought and though this man – Joe Turner – must have been dead, the fact that he had stepped on him seemed to have made more impression on him than any other memory of that terrible day. Among the many hundreds who had fallen under the first rain of bullets and who scattered the ground like leaves from the oak trees at Summer Place in the autumn, this one soldier obsessed his mind. His spirit seemed to have been broken but if she could just get him home to those who loved him she was determined it would be mended.

‘Darling, don’t.’ She didn’t know how to comfort him, to expunge from his mind this one moment of horror when he himself had been injured. What was there beneath the cage that covered his legs? Not – oh sweet Jesus – not
amputation
, not the horrific damage to the life of this active man who had already given so much of himself since the beginning of 1915.

She stood up decisively and placed Harry’s hand on the bed where it lay like an upturned leaf, then started again with its drawing in of a net, and walked the length of the ward barely aware of the smell of suffering, of the antiseptic used, the carbolic soap with which everything was scrubbed, a smell with which she was very familiar. She patiently waited until the nurse had finished ministering to the soldier and spoke harshly to her as she left the ward though she did not mean to be harsh.

‘Nurse, please, can I speak to a doctor? I have come from Liverpool to . . . to be with my . . . cousin but he seems unable to tell me what has happened to him. He is wounded in the leg but in what way? I work in a hospital and I am used to wounds but if you would tell me where I might find—’

The nurse, not a VAD but a trained nurse, did her best to brush by her agitated visitor. ‘The doctor, all the doctors are run off their feet, miss, and have not the time to—’

‘To tell a relative what has happened to a loved one! I cannot believe it. I must know what has happened to Captain Summers so I may return and reassure his . . . his mother that he will recover from what has happened to him. The captain seems unable to communicate.’

‘He is very ill, Miss . . . Miss . . .?’

‘Beechworth.’

‘Miss Beechworth. He was unconscious when he was brought to us—’

‘When was that?’ Rose rudely interrupted her, then was sorry, for did she not know herself how hard these nurses worked,
overworked
, and hardly had time even to speak to each other, let alone to anxiously demented visitors.

‘I’m sorry to plague you when you are so busy, really I am, but perhaps you can tell me the extent of Captain Beechworth’s wounds. He has not had his leg . . .’ She could hardly bring herself to speak the word. It seemed to stick in her throat, choking her and the nurse relented, putting a gentle hand on Rose’s arm.

‘He still has two legs, Miss Beechworth, though it has been touch and go. He was trapped in a shell-hole, I believe, and the wound was not tended to for a couple of days. A shrapnel wound that tore through his thigh, just missing his . . . and, perhaps I should not tell you this but you say you have had some nursing experience.’

‘Yes, I have. I shall stay here with Harry, if I may. I promise not to get in the way but I should like to speak to a doctor regarding the possibility of taking him home and nursed in the hospital where I work.’

The nurse looked doubtful. She was obviously also eager to be away. From somewhere on the lower floor there was some kind of commotion and with a shake of her head and a long sigh she began to move hurriedly towards the head of the stairs along with other nurses who had appeared from different wards and a group of orderlies.

‘More of them, I’m afraid. There must have been another battle.’

Rose followed her down the stairs, watching the long line of ambulances come from Waterloo station straight from the hospital train proceeding slowly up the drive, the first one stopping at the bottom of the steps. Stretcher-bearers, well used to the drill now, ran to the back of the ambulance and gently lifted the stretchers carrying the sighing, moaning, murmuring wounded and carried them into the hospital. One of them screamed as the orderly jogged the stretcher on which he lay, a pathetic bundle of a blood-stained, mud-stained uniform. Doctors were here and there, hurriedly studying the tags tied to the men denoting the seriousness of their wounds and for the next few hours it was confusion, and out of the confusion came order. Rose Beechworth, calm and steady, was there to help where she could and where she was needed and nobody seemed taken aback to see a woman – not dressed as a nurse but wearing an enormous white apron she had been given – in the midst of it.

When she returned to the ward where Harry lay she was not surprised to see the beds there pushed even closer together to allow for the extra ones on which the newly arrived wounded lay. There was barely room between each bed. Harry seemed oblivious to it all.

She knelt awkwardly again by his side, taking one of the twitching hands in hers and he became still.

‘I stepped on Joe Turner, you see,’ he said in a conversational tone as though describing a walk in the gardens he had once known. ‘He had been hit in the stomach and his insides were hanging out. He had done his best to hold them in, his insides, his hands were . . . a gaping hole in which I stepped but the rest of us crawled back to the trench as best we could though some of them didn’t make it.’ He mused for a moment or two on the terrible circumstance through which he and his men had lived, slithering across the bodies of their mates, some still horribly alive and crying for water, for their mothers, for Elsie or Maggie and the event seemed to have affected him more than the rest of his experiences of war.

‘Darling, try and rest. Joe would not have blamed you for stepping on him,’ wondering at the same time how he had come to
step
on a comrade when he had just told her they had crawled back to safety.

But now as they fought in the Third Battle of Ypres in August Captain Summers had managed to stand despite his wounds, doing his best to rally his men before collapsing again on to the still and sometimes squirming bodies of those who had ‘gone over’ first. As she did her best to soothe him into healing sleep she said a silent prayer to whoever had brought this about that he was out of it now, please, please, God.

Rose stayed in a small private boarding house quite near to the hospital, going every day and staying as long as she was allowed with Harry. The doctors had sewn together the dreadful gaping wound in his thigh which had come close to his genitals, delicately reuniting the muscles, the flesh, the bone that had been shattered, and he was slowly recovering though the doctors told her he would always have a limp. It was not the wound that had crippled him but the festering filth that had been allowed to remain in the leg during the two days it had taken him to get to the dressing station. ‘Another day and he would have lost the leg, his . . . his manhood, you understand,’ – delicately – ‘and possibly his life, Miss Beechworth; it is not the wounds but the muck that these men pick up on the battlefields before they can be tended to. French farmers were very liberal with the manure they spread on their fields. But –’ he passed a weary hand across his forehead, then smiled at her.

‘You say there are two hospitals nearby.’

‘Yes, one of them my own home,’ she answered eagerly. ‘There are nurses and doctors to continue his care but . . .’

‘Yes, Miss Beechworth?’ the doctor enquired.

‘He seems to be . . . he keeps talking, rambling, really, about a man in his regiment who fell with him – died, I should imagine. It preys on his mind and—’

‘There are many who have such things on their minds, Miss Beechworth, and who can blame them. He knows you, does he not?’

She hesitated. ‘I think so, though this one particular soldier, in his regiment, seems to be uppermost. He stepped on him; he, the soldier, had taken shrapnel in his stomach and must have died almost at once but Harry put his boot in . . . in the injury and cannot seem to forgive himself.’

The doctor stood up. There was nothing more he could tell her and after taking note of her address and telephone number, the name of the doctor in charge at Summer Place, he told her she could take Harry home.

‘I have arranged for a private ambulance to drive us to Liverpool.’

‘Good, good. Please keep in touch.’ For though Captain Harry Summers was only one of the thousands who had passed through his hands the doctor was concerned with all of them and it broke his heart, he told his wife a dozen times a day, to send those he put together again back to the trenches.

She and Harry arrived back in Liverpool on a warm, sunny day at the end of August when the garden looked full of colour, though sadly neglected since Tom could only do so much with only Jossy to help, especially with that young scamp, Will, constantly by his side and the dogs barking and dashing all over his beds. The lanes they drove through on the way to Summer Place were ablaze with guelder rose, elderberry and wild angelica in a tangle of blossom. The birds were singing, chiefly linnets and warblers, and as they passed between the slowly rusting wrought-iron gates and up the drive they saw men, lying in long chairs, some able to hobble about on sticks, others just standing and staring at nothing, or at the glory of the wallflowers that would soon be over.

They were all there to greet him, since she had telephoned Alice to expect them. Dolly, her face that had once been round and rosy drawn with weariness and sorrow, for she loved Rose and Alice, and Captain Summers, though she had not really got to know the captain’s brother Charlie. Tom came across the grass with Will at his heels and the dogs, as usual, ‘mekkin a damn nuisance o’ theirselves’ as Dolly said, getting under everyone’s feet. If she had her way she’d get rid of the whole boiling lot of them, but she realised that the animals, sensing the frailty of the wounded men, especially that Tommy, certainly did them a power of good.

Without a word Alice put her arms about Rose and they held one another for several long moments, then Rose stepped away from her, tears on her cheeks and on Alice’s. Then it was Dolly’s turn before they turned to Harry who lay patiently on the stretcher carried by the ambulance driver and one of the orderlies.