Convoy (2 page)

She had been off duty for the day or so before his operation – he would never have forgiven her if she had administered the blasted enema – and the septicaemia had begun almost as soon as he had belched and vomited up the last of the chloroform and ether fumes. Then there had been the haze of pain, the rapidly increasing stink of the septicaemia (the stink of his own flesh) and finally one became absorbed into the routine of the hospital surgical ward with ten patients, five in beds along one wall, five opposite, and a desk in the middle at which a nurse or sister wrote up notes (or love letters) at night by the light of a dim, green-shaded lamp, looking like a Whistler painting of Florence Nightingale.

A surgical ward – one could be thankful for that. Plenty of pain but no illness; at least not the sort of groaning illness, like stomach ulcers, where everyone had a long face. In this ward people were cheery enough, except immediately after their treatment, which the clock showed was now due for him in forty-six minutes’ time. St Stephen’s was old, the plaster of the ceilings was cracked, the lifts creaked alarmingly, but it was standing up well to being a Navy overflow hospital.

She was called Clare; he had discovered that on the second night, when the pain had seemed unbearable and she had stood up from that desk as though sensing the agony and glided silently to his bedside, and whispered: ‘Is it really bad, Lieutenant?’

It had been so bad he had only been able to nod, and she had fetched the night sister. After what seemed like a week the sister had come back and whispered instructions to the nurse, whom she had called Clare, and moments later there had been the prick of a needle and, just before the morphia took effect, he had heard the sister hissing some criticism of the way Clare had used the syringe.

Clare Exton. Tiny, black-haired, shy, humorous, with the promise of a body he could (and did) only dream about under all that nurse’s uniform, and so officious when necessary, which was frequently enough in a ward of young naval officers who were alternately in pain and bored stiff.

‘Lieutenant Yorke,’ she was now saying sharply, ‘please put that board back on the hook.’

‘I can’t reach over with my right arm, Nurse.’

‘You unhooked it without trouble.’

‘The seam of your right stocking, Nurse.’

She was blushing now. ‘What has that to do with it?’

‘It’s crooked, Nurse.’

‘That’s right, Nurse,’ a patient opposite confirmed. ‘It twists clockwise. Makes your leg look like a spiral.’

‘Like the baldacchino in St Peter’s at Rome,’ Yorke said, hoping to confuse her.

‘The
turisti
never seem to notice they spiral the other way,’ she said calmly as she snatched the board, hooked it up with a clatter and then hissed: ‘Don’t bother asking for a bottle, Lieutenant; I’ve gone deaf.’

‘The quack said I’ll be able to get up for an hour today,’ he said, a tentative peace offer.

‘Just you wait until you try it,’ she said. ‘Your arm will throb so much you’ll think it’s going to burst and you’ll be so dizzy you’ll probably fall over.’

The plump paymaster lieutenant in the next bed said in a stage whisper: ‘She’s afraid you’ll start chasing her round the ward.’

‘I shall be off duty when Lieutenant Yorke finds how difficult it is to walk after several days of high temperature,’ she said coldly.

Yorke was suddenly conscious of the drone of a German bomber right overhead as a series of whooshes told of a stick of bombs coming down: brief whooshes ending in heavy thuds that warned that the last two or three might hit the hospital, if not the ward.

A dull, deep explosion, then another; sudden darkness as the lights went out, a heavy weight on top of him, the shattering of glass, dust in the lungs…and yet another thud as the last bomb in the stick passed over and, from the noise, landed in the road beyond. The weight wriggled, he felt lips on his face and a hard kiss, and a murmured: ‘I’ll give you seams! I hope I didn’t hurt your arm.’

And then she was gone, flicking on her torch and showing the ward was full of dust like fog. She began checking the blackout screens; and only he knew she had used her own body to protect him when it seemed certain the ward would get a direct hit.

He saw her shadowy figure following the torch beam from window to window jerking all the heavy black curtains back into position and shaking out the broken glass, carefully screening her torch. A few moments later there was a faint vibration as the hospital’s emergency generator started up, then the lights flickered on and off once or twice and then stayed on.

‘Close,’ the paymaster said and was promptly contradicted by a full commander on his other side. ‘Bet it didn’t even hit the building. Whistled too long – obviously going right over us. You barely have time to hear the one that hits you. Hiss, bang and you’re dead. These long whining johnnies – just passing over you. You draw it on a piece of paper and you’ll see I’m right.’

The paymaster turned and winked at Yorke. ‘You were safe enough,’ he whispered. ‘I saw in the flashes of the explosions.’

‘You know what sister says – shove your head under the pillow to protect your face from glass.’

‘Think what I’d miss.’

So now the paymaster was in the conspiracy: not too many winks and sly remarks, please…

‘Must have been a late one on his way home, that Jerry. Still, we haven’t had the all-clear, Hardly heard him,’ the paymaster said. ‘You can’t mistake those engines, though; not synchronized, that’s why they seem to rumble.’

‘You sound more like an engineer than a paymaster.’

‘Hobby. Not aeroplanes, but motor cars. I’ve a nice little Frazer Nash down at Portsmouth.’

Yorke remembered the paymaster’s right leg had been amputated, and he had just had a second operation; something to do with the nerves being pinched in the first operation and leaving him in constant pain.

‘I’m hoping Archie Frazer Nash will fix it up for me after the war so I can drive with one leg. Put in a handle throttle; shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘Easy, I would think,’ Yorke said, knowing how optimism could keep a man alive; he had only just passed through the dark night of a possible future with one arm. ‘A bit of flexible cable and some practice. Like the Bowden cable on the Lewis gun of a last-war fighter.’

‘Hill climb trials will be out, though; I used to enjoy them. Great little bus for trials, the AFN, plenty of acceleration.’ He glanced up at the clock. ‘Be glad when they bring the tea urn round; that bloody dust has left me dry.’

Clare was taking the last few temperatures. Broken windows and dust were an almost nightly occurrence; the plaster ceiling looked like a reference book picture of leprosy. Soon the real work of the day would begin: after the glass and dust had been swept up the beds would be made, breakfast served, and then sister’s rounds, matron’s rounds, and finally doctor’s rounds. And today the whole ritual would be punctuated by the cheerful cursing of the glaziers replacing the glass in the windows. But before that, the surgical dressings; in another twenty-two minutes, in fact.

‘Any letters to be posted?’ Clare asked the ward, and several patients answered and reached into the drawers of their lockers. Yorke held up a letter and as she took it he said, ‘It needs a stamp on it, nurse; here’s the money.’

She took the coins and glanced at the address. ‘You’ve been writing sweet nothings to your girlfriend, Lieutenant?’ she teased.

‘Yes, the writing’s a bit wobbly because I can’t hold the pad steady.’

‘She’ll understand,’ Clare said, and Yorke knew she would, because the superscription on the envelope said: ‘Nurse C Exton.’

Sister Scotland put the last of the eleven stitches into the white enamel kidney bowl and then dropped the forceps and narrow pointed scissors with a clatter, as if to signal that the job was done. ‘Wipe his face, Nurse,’ she said to Clare, who reached for the towel on the rack behind the locker and patted his brow, which he knew was covered with pearls of cold perspiration.

The Sister cradled his hand gently as she wiped the scars with surgical spirit. It was bruised and bright pink with matching pairs of small purplish spots along each side of the long scars where the stitches had been. ‘The incisions and cuts have closed nicely,’ she said. ‘In six months you won’t notice anything, unless your hand gets cold. Then the scars will show up white.’

Yorke looked at the hand, remembering when it exuded yellow and green pus; when the putrid smell made him vomit. The hand was still there and he could just move the fingers and the only discomfort was that the skin seemed too tight, as though he was wearing a thick glove which had shrunk and become a size too small. It was still hard to believe the arm was his; it was a strange, alien limb, joined to him only by pain.

‘An artist’s hand, eh Nurse?’

Clare glanced up. You could never be sure with Sister Scotland.

‘I suppose so,’ she said warily.

‘Aye, and the last of his sun tan’s wearing off now.’ She flipped up the other pyjama sleeve. ‘See? The skin’s quite white. But all this–’ she pointed at the left forearm ‘–this dark brown will peel off; it’s from all the hot water. Scalded, really. It must have hurt.’

‘It did; I remember saying so at the time.’

‘Aye,’ she said, ignoring his sarcasm, ‘and I seem to remember your bad language. Now you’ve got to start the remedial exercises for the arm; otherwise it can wither and leave you with a useless hand.’

Clare glanced at him in alarm: no one had mentioned this before.

‘Wither, Sister?’ He tried to keep his voice flat but no man faced with that could be a hero in pyjamas.

‘Don’t be alarmed, Lieutenant; the physiotherapists at Willesborough will sort it out; you’ll soon get your grip back again.’

‘Willesborough?’

‘Down in Kent; we’re opening an annexe there in a day or two. An old country house, just the place for convalescence. Plenty of draughts, no doubt; but you’ll get a good night’s sleep, which is more than can be said for up here, with all the bombing and the guns. And anyway, the surgeons need your bed.’

Clare was staring down at his hand. Had she known about Willesborough?

‘And you’ll not be escaping from me either, Lieutenant,’ Sister said with an arch smile.

‘Are – will you be going to Willesborough, too, Sister?’

‘Yes, I shall be in charge of the unit. Three staff nurses, two physiotherapists, and six beautiful young ladies to powder your bottoms and make sure you don’t get bedsores.’

The paymaster was quick; he seemed to guess Yorke’s anxiety and from the next bed said: ‘Don’t say we’re losing Nurse Exton, Sister?’

‘Yes – no, rather, because you are coming to Willesborough, too, so Nurse Exton can continue to record your chronic constipation. We’ll fit you out with a wooden leg and you’ll soon be cadging free pints at the local pub. Anyway, Mr Yorke will need someone to fit his cufflinks and studs and you’ll need someone to prop you up for a bit. Jack Sprat and his wife; I can see the pair of you escorting Nurse Exton to the Willesborough church fete. They’ll put you in charge of the lucky dip,’ she said to Yorke, ‘you only need one hand to dip into a bran tub.’

‘When do we go?’ Yorke asked. ‘We might miss the three-legged race.’

‘The staff and the first batch of patients go tomorrow. By bus. One of your nice Navy buses, painted grey and with all the seat springs broken. It’ll be like a Sunday school outing, won’t it, Nurse?’

The bus juddered its way up the long hill and the movement made Yorke wince while the paymaster, lying in a nest of pillows across the back seat, swore quietly and monotonously, trying to steady the stump of his leg. Sister Scotland, sitting in the front offside seat, suddenly stood up, rapped on the window behind the driver and, having attracted his attention, shouted in a piercing voice: ‘Change down, you bloody fool!’

The driver obediently dropped into a lower gear, the juddering stopped, and Sister Scotland sat down to a round of applause, which she acknowledged with an airy wave of her hand.

It seemed odd to Yorke to be back in uniform again. The hospital authorities thought they would all wear hospital blue for the journey and found they had seven almost mutinous and certainly truculent naval officers who were in any case not mobile enough to pack their own uniforms and had no intention of admitting that any nurse could, and intended using the whole episode as a reason for not going down to Willesborough in flimsy hospital wear, even though assured the bus had good heating and they would have blankets.

So Yorke sat alone in uniform trousers and half-length mess boots, a white rollneck woollen jersey, his left arm in a sling, and his uniform coat and cap on the seat beside him. He saw Clare and another nurse get up in response to instructions from Sister Scotland and walk slowly back along the bus, talking with each patient. The other nurse sat beside one man, then walked forward again and spoke to the sister before resuming her walk.

Yorke put his jacket across his knees, leaving the other seat empty, and in a few moments Clare sat down, the paymaster at the back telling her cheerfully, ‘Leave me to your mate; I’ve no complaints and I don’t want a bottle.’

Clare took his jacket and put it across her knees and, turning back one of the sleeves, ran a finger along the gold stripes. ‘You’re regular Navy, then. I thought you were Wavy.’

Her eye caught a flash of colour and she turned the coat and pointed to a single medal ribbon, red with blue edges, on the left breast.

‘I didn’t know you had a DSO.’

‘I haven’t yet; only the ribbon. Have to collect it one day.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘It’s like virginity, one doesn’t go on about having it.’

‘I would,’ she said impulsively and blushed as he looked round at her. ‘That medal, I mean.’

She looked down and pointed at his bandaged hand, and murmured: ‘Was it anything to do with that?’

Yorke laughed. ‘The chicken or the egg! I’m not sure why they gave me the gong; the hand was a piece of something from an explosion.’

‘A torpedo?’

‘Bombs. Now tell me why a lovely girl like you isn’t married. Or engaged.’