Churchill’s Angels (26 page)

‘C’mon, you’ll be no use to your lad if you’re sick all over him. It is a lad you’re here to see?’

Unable to speak, Daisy nodded and allowed him to lead her into a little room where she was encouraged to sink into a chair. ‘I’ll get you a cuppa and a bun or something. We’ve barely enough time to look after the real casualties without their beautiful girlfriends collapsing on us. Don’t look so ashamed, love, you’re more than welcome to a cuppa if it helps you cheer up one of our lads.’

He was back in a few minutes, a mug of hot, sweet tea in one hand and a plate with a small bun on it in the other. ‘Told the cook you’re a WAAF and she’s given you a scraping of real butter. Now get that down you and don’t move till I come back.’

‘Yessir,’ she said automatically and he laughed from the door. ‘Nurse, Mr Wishaw, or just Frank will do, love. Now don’t let that butter go to waste.’

Twenty minutes or so later, Frank returned to see how she was doing. The tea and the bun were gone. ‘You rushed out without a bite this morning, didn’t you? Now depending on who you want to see, your promising never to start the day without breakfast, and what’s going on in his ward, I might be able to spirit you in.’

She stood up. ‘Thank you, Frank, for the tea and the food. His name’s Maxwell.’

‘Well, well, Squadron Leader Maxwell? It has to be him, only male military of that name. Doctor’s done his round so I can let you hide behind a curtain for five minutes. Sister shouldn’t be there for a while but, like most sisters, she’s a law, as they say. C’mon, you look better so smile. I want him feeling better when you leave, not worse.’

Daisy followed Frank’s tall, broad form along corridors and through doors until he stopped at the ward where Adair was a patient. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, and went in alone.

‘Coast’s clear. In you go.’

‘Frank, is he …?’ She stopped and tried to begin again. ‘Is he very ill?’

‘There’s no damage to his pretty face, if that’s what you mean.’ Frank’s voice had completely lost its friendliness.

‘Is he very ill?’ she asked again, and her voice was almost as angry as the nurse’s.

He smiled down at her. ‘Nothing vital’s been hit, love, but he’ll be with us for a few weeks. I’ll tell you more when you come out.’

Daisy pushed open the door and looked at a long surgical ward with at least twelve beds on each side. The room was full of a strong smell of some kind of antiseptic. Daisy wrinkled her nose in distaste.

‘Second from the end on the left,’ came a disembodied voice, ‘and you only have to worry if they’re near the door.’

Daisy did not even want to begin to think what that cryptic remark might mean. She walked firmly down the ward, not looking at any of the men lying down or propped up in any of the beds. She stopped at the bed second from the end.

Adair was lying down, his eyes closed. His left leg was in some kind of sling and his right arm was heavily bandaged. What was obviously a new bandage was round his head. His face was bruised and scratched and he had the most colourful black eye. She was surprised by the sight of glorious yellow daffodils brightening the whole ward from what looked like a milk jug on the side table. She looked around. None of the other tables held flowers. ‘Wonder who brought these?’ she murmured.

‘Alf,’ came a whisper. ‘Poor chap was fearfully embarrassed. Chap in the next bed asked him when the baby was due.’

Daisy blushed to the roots of her hair.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘guard down.’

‘Adair.’

‘Daisy.’ He held out his left hand and she held it. She felt that she never wanted to let go. ‘Daisy,’ he said again, ‘how wonderful. I watched you come down the ward but convinced myself I was hallucinating.’

‘If that means you thought you were seeing things that weren’t there, I am here.’

‘Afraid I can’t get up. Mangled my leg a bit.’

‘And your arm.’

‘Arm? Oh, yes, forgot. Bullets, I think. Can’t feel a thing, Daisy, floating.’

Was he losing his mind – or worse? Floating? What did he mean? She squeezed his hand but had no awareness that she did so.

‘You are here, Daisy. You’re real.’

‘Of course I am. A nurse let me in; I shouldn’t be here.’

Apart from a visit to Rose she had never visited a patient in hospital and had never dreamed that she would ever visit an injured pilot who had been forced to crash-land. What should she say? Damn. The WAAF had guidebooks for everything but not this.

‘Are you still floating, Adair?’

‘Floating? Learned in the swimming baths at school. Knew a chap who could lie there and read. Never managed that but learned to drift. Lovely. Drifting on top of the water.’

‘Your head?’

‘Hurts. Heading for some farm workers, Daisy.’ He seemed agitated and tried to rise but fell back down.

‘You missed them.’
Please God let me be right. Alf would have said something.

‘Tried to pull her up over them. Remember stones, lots of stones.’

‘Time for you to leave, miss. Has he been reliving the crash?’ The nurse, Frank, was beside the bed.

She nodded.

‘You hit a dry-stone dyke, lad. The farm workers would have been softer but they’re grateful to you.’

‘Thank God,’ said Daisy.

‘Thank the pilot, love. The farmer said he can’t understand where he got the strength – pulled his bird out of a nosedive, up, and bang, destroyed his dyke. Cheap at the price. Now off you go and don’t come back till visiting hours. Go on, give him a kiss and scarper.’

Daisy looked up at Frank and down at Adair, whose eyes were closed. She bent, and very gently kissed his lips, almost the only part of his face not bruised and battered.

She had just left the room when a nursing sister sailed down the corridor towards the ward.

‘I am pretending that I do not see you, young woman. Now run before I step on you.’

Daisy ran.

Daisy visited Adair every day – at the proper visiting hours, until the end of her leave.

The first few days had been difficult as he was heavily sedated. She was glad to find out that his ‘floating’ was nothing serious, merely his way of trying to explain how he felt as the medications took effect.

Daisy saw Frank Wishaw almost every day too, and took him a plate of her mother’s apple turnovers for the nurses’ tea break. He was devoted to his work and to his patients, having been a very young volunteer during the Great War.

‘That’s where I learned to look after people, Daisy. It was a mess out there – still have nightmares about the trenches – but at least I got a career out of it.’

As a seventeen-year-old, Frank, big enough to be taken for a man much older, had been pressed into service by an overworked doctor. At first he carried injured or even dead soldiers, and the doctor had been impressed by the respectful way in which the big lad had treated the patients. ‘I got on-the-field first-hand training from one of the best in the business and managed to get into nurses’ training in the early thirties. Shocked people, a man wanting to be a nurse, not a doctor, but things are changing.’

‘Would you have liked to train as a doctor, Frank?’

‘A lad from Billingsgate, grateful to get a job hefting crates of fish? Lord love you, lass, I left school at twelve and wasn’t there much when I was there. Got most of my education right there on the battlefield from a saint.’ He stared into his cup, and his face was sad.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Blown to bits in 1918, two days before the war ended. Now, you best get off and say goodbye to your squadron leader. Any idea where you’re going to next?’

‘Not yet. Hope it’s somewhere where there’s real planes to work on.’

‘Watch out for them propellers. You wouldn’t believe the number of … cut arms there are on airfields.’

‘I’ll be careful, Frank,’ said Daisy, who knew that he had substituted ‘cut arms’ for the truer ‘severed arms’. ‘And remember, my mum’s expecting you to drop in for a cuppa on your day off.’

They said goodbye rather sadly as Daisy had come to like and admire the nurse. Adair too spoke highly of him. They knew that, like Adair, he had no real family and so Daisy had taken him home with her one day. Flora, mother of five, had immediately decided that Frank needed to be looked after, and was she not the very person to do it?

‘Between your little crooks and Frank, she’ll have something concrete to do for the war effort, instead of worrying and moping over us,’ the twins had agreed happily.

But now in the hospital for the last time, Daisy wondered how she would cope in the coming weeks when she could not see Adair or ask Frank, splendid Frank, how he was. Adair’s wounds were healing. His broken leg had been set, and other damage to the leg repaired, the three bullets that had lodged in his shoulder and arm had been removed and the areas were healing nicely, as were the bruises, bumps and cuts on his head. He had stopped ‘floating’ but sometimes, or so it seemed to Daisy, he was ill at ease, their conversation stilted.

She walked along the now so familiar corridor, acknowledging, as she walked, the various members of staff whom she had met, and admitting for the first time that it was the kiss, nothing more than a soft pressure of her lips on his, that was the problem.

She had visited him every day since and, depending on his condition, had either gently kissed his bruised face as she left or not kissed him at all. Adair had never referred to the kiss. He had been unconscious, surely, when she had kissed his lips. Or had he merely been ‘floating’ and found her forward?

Oh, how she wished that she were more experienced. She should have tagged along with Rose to those dances. Had Rose not told her, just last night, that in the few years since they had left school she had kissed, she thought, at least nine lads?

And she can’t even remember for sure, worried the despairing Daisy. Most of the men she herself had met in the past five years were either delightful old men like Mr Fischer or totally unsuitable men, military personnel like Tomas Sapenak – or Adair Maxwell.

She managed to smile as she walked down the length of the busy ward. Some men were sitting up chatting to visitors, but these were in the minority. Most relatives and friends lived too far away to visit on a regular basis. One or two of the beds were curtained off because the patient was desperately ill. Daisy caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, sitting by the bed of a man who probably did not even know she was there. She had been there the last two times Daisy had visited. Has she even left his bedside? Daisy wondered. She looks exactly the same each time, hat, coat, gloves, her Sunday best. His mother, perhaps?

Daisy felt oppressed by grief and was glad to reach Adair’s bed. He was sitting up watching her. She took his hand. ‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Daisy Petrie.’

She was lost for words. Where was she to start? What could she or should she say?

She started with his nurse. ‘Mum’s going to look after Nurse Wishaw. He loves her apple turnovers; that was all it took.’

‘I’m glad. He’s a wonderful man but too lonely.’

Both were silent for a moment, neither seeming able to say what was uppermost in the mind.

‘Your leave is over, Daisy.’

She felt her eyes brighten with tears. ‘Yes.’

‘Any idea where you’re going?’

‘Haven’t received anything so far.’

‘I was awake, Daisy, and absolutely
compos
mentis
.’

She bowed her head.

‘You wouldn’t have kissed me had you known?’

‘I don’t know.’

He held out his free hand, now released from the sling. ‘Please come over here, Daisy Petrie.’

She moved forward so that she was standing at the head of the bed, near his head. She was still holding his left hand.

‘There’s a chair. Please sit down.’

She obeyed.

‘I like seeing you sitting there, Daisy. I like seeing you.’

Love scenes in the cinema didn’t go like this – if this is a love scene. What could she say; what should she say?

The truth. ‘I like seeing you, Adair.’

‘Enough to lean over and kiss me?’

‘Oh, Adair, of course I do.’ She leaned over and he whispered, ‘Not my bruises this time,’ and she obliged by kissing his lips.

She had released his hands and he reached up and pulled her towards him and returned the kiss. No gentle kiss now but a kiss that sent rivers of fire coursing through her body.

‘Allow your visitor to come up for air, Squadron Leader.’

Frank was there. ‘Surgeon wants to have a look at his leg, Daisy. Can you wait outside for a few minutes?’

Daisy stood up, ready to go.

‘You could give him a little more medicine, pet; seems to be doing him a world of good.’

Daisy blushed but was quite happy to lean forward again but this time the kiss was a chaste pressure on his forehead.

‘See, Nurse,’ said Adair. ‘Doesn’t my bruise look better?’

Daisy laughed and went off to wait in the hospital canteen until the surgeon’s visit was over.

When she returned she heard that the surgeon had expressed his delight that each of Adair’s wounds was healing beautifully, so much so that he would be allowed to go to a convalescent facility where he would receive physiotherapy for his injured leg. There would be, he assured Adair, no lasting difficulty. Squadron Leader Maxwell could well be in action within weeks, not months.

Adair was delighted. Daisy was not. Her time in Wiltshire was over and, as yet, she had no knowledge of where she would be sent next. Several bases had training facilities for mechanics, engineers and such. She could be sent to any one of them, and some were a long way from the London area. She had been so grateful to Sergeant Gordon for his offer to recommend her that asking for any more help would never occur to her.

She had had one more poignant meeting with Adair.

‘You will write, Daisy?’

She nodded.

‘I have no idea when we’ll see each other again, possibly not for months.’

She held back the tears that she could feel forming. ‘There’s a war on, Officer.’

He laughed and looked eloquently at his bandages. ‘Sorry, ma’am, I forgot.’

Daisy stood up. She knew that if she sat there by the bed, holding his hand a second longer, she would begin to weep and a letter in a magazine she had read on the train from Wiltshire had advised Forces Sweethearts never to cry in the presence of a loved one: ‘Be brave and show him only a smiling face. Weep when you are alone.’