Flora's War (20 page)

‘So are things better on Lemnos? It doesn’t sound like it.’

‘There are different problems now,’ said Lydia. ‘We’ve got more equipment so that’s better, but the cold weather’s come and there’ve been freezing conditions at Gallipoli. We’re getting boys with frostbite – can you imagine, frostbite! Some cases are so bad they’ve lost feet or hands. Some of the girls have frostbitten toes themselves. We weren’t issued with winter uniforms. In the end, we were handed whatever could be scratched up: riding pants, gumboots, big waterproof coats. I’ll have to show you a photograph I took. We look tragic, really tragic!’

Lydia paused to take mint tea and a plate of hot meat pastries from Mr Bilal. She smiled. ‘Thank you, this looks so good!’

‘What else is happening?’ I asked.

‘We’ve had really high winds. The tents creak and shake and strain all night and often they blow right down. With the wind, there’s rain. The camp’s turned into a quagmire. We’re supposed to be getting huts built, but it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘Oh, Lydia!’ I said. ‘It’s all too awful!’

Lydia quickly tried to reassure me. ‘Oh, it’s not so bad now. There are some rest camps on the island and the boys from Gallipoli are rotated there. There are concerts and entertainments, if we have time to get to them.’

‘Well, I’ll make sure you have a good time while you’re here!’ I said. ‘Have you time to dine at Shepheard’s with me? Or tea at Groppi’s? We’ll go everywhere!’

‘Thanks,’ said Lydia. ‘I’d love to go out with you. But like last time, what I want to do most is sleep. In a warm bed, in my room at the nurses’ home that I can be confident is not going to take off in a high wind.’ She laughed. ‘It doesn’t take much to make me happy these days!’

I walked Lydia out. She hesitated in the courtyard, gave me a quick smile and crossed the courtyard to peer into the water of the Well of Bats. She stood there for some time. Then she turned to me and her smile was brilliant. ‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘I knew he’d arrived safely in Australia. But now I really know he’s being well looked after!’

The Well of Bats had told her all that? When Lydia had gone, I looked down into the water myself. All I saw was the pale, wavering, moon-like reflection of my own face.

Just as I’d expected.

…

December wore on. Lydia had long gone back to Lemnos. The trains kept arriving. I continued driving and working at the rest and recreation centre; even there Gwen and I were avoiding each other. The situation was starting to feel ridiculous, like two small children squabbling, and neither prepared to give in. I didn’t know how to end it.

I wasn’t needed on the wards anymore. Frankly, that was a vast relief. I appreciated even more how Gwen had felt.

Fa and I didn’t even discuss throwing a Christmas party this year. So many of the guests that had attended our wonderful party last year were gone, to Gallipoli or Lemnos or Alexandria. Some were gone forever.

As the year drew to an end, I said to Fa one morning over breakfast, ‘Christmas?’

Fa shrugged. ‘There’s not a lot to celebrate, is there?’

‘There’s Khnumhotep,’ I said.

With assistance from some of his friends, and advice from the British Museum, Fa had painstakingly removed the resin from the sarcophagus. Finally they were able to open it. And there he was, Khnumhotep, wrapped in layer upon layer of linen. Fa was working on deciphering the hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus.

No one else was giving parties either. We decided, in the end, that we’d just have Christmas dinner at Shepheard’s.

The large dining room at Shepheard’s was full that Christmas night, but it was a very subdued gathering. We’d been invited to dine with the Travers. In the lounge before dinner, Fa and Professor Travers immediately launched into an excavation comparison. Tonight they would settle their bet as to who had found the most interesting object on their sites.

‘Khnumhotep’s tomb is quite beautifully preserved,’ Fa said.

‘I don’t think a double burial is anything to sneeze at,’ Professor Travers countered.

They’d each visited the other’s site, and knew the calibre of the discoveries.

‘What do you say we call it a draw this year?’ Fa said with a smile.

‘I say, let’s order some champagne and toast to it,’ Professor Travers said. We all raised our glasses to the wonderful finds of Fa and Professor Travers.

A band was playing and Frank asked me to dance. ‘I hear your father’s thinking of going to England to do some research,’ he said, holding me a little closer than necessary.

‘Yes, but I’ve asked him to wait a little. I’m still needed here,’ I said.

‘We all are,’ said Frank soberly. ‘But afterwards – what will you do?’

‘We’ll go to England, I suppose,’ I said. ‘But I expect we’ll come back to Egypt eventually to work.’

There was a pause. ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What will you do after all this ends?’

‘I could go back to Boston and finish my studies,’ Frank said. ‘But, well, I might go to England myself.’

‘England?’ I said. ‘What for? Research?’ Then I looked at him sharply. ‘Frank, you’re not thinking about enlisting? You don’t have to do that!’

‘It’s not a question of what I
have
to do,’ Frank said quietly, firmly.

The music stopped, but Frank and I didn’t break our embrace. Standing in the middle of the dance floor, we stared at each other, until all the other dancers had cleared the floor and were smiling at us in amusement. Hurriedly, we released each other and walked back to our table.

I’d been placed across from Gwen. I wondered if Mrs Travers knew of the reserve between us, and had seated us near each other to try and mend the friendship. Or maybe she hadn’t noticed; we tried not to let our coolness show. I looked around the room. There were many people here we knew: archaeologists and their wives and families, officers on leave, British army staff based in Cairo. Lady Bellamy approached from a table across the room where her husband sat with other high-ranking military officials. Professor Travers courteously offered her his chair and she graciously accepted.

‘I understand your excavations went very well this year,’ she said to Fa and Professor Travers.

‘Thank you, yes,’ said Fa. ‘An intact tomb. I’m working on the hieroglyphs on the sarcophagus at present.’

‘A husband and wife in my tomb,’ said Professor Travers proudly.

‘Have you deciphered many of your hieroglyphs?’ Lady Bellamy asked Fa.

Fa hesitated. ‘It could be better,’ he admitted. ‘I need to consult the experts at the British Museum. But that requires travelling to London, of course.’ He glanced at me. ‘It’s not the right time; Flora is being very useful here and she feels she must stay.’

Lady Bellamy looked at me, tapping her folded fan against her chin.

‘Flora is indeed being very useful,’ she said. ‘Gwendoline too, of course. Their work is much appreciated.’ The fan tapped again. ‘Perhaps – hopefully – they will not be needed for very much longer. Well, I must be off.’

She snapped her fan open, fluttered it vigorously, stood up, and moved off across the dining room.

I stared after her. ‘She knows something!’ I said.

‘She didn’t say anything specific,’ objected Frank.

‘She never does,’ I said. ‘But you can always tell when she knows something.’ I forgot all about not speaking to Gwen and appealed to her for support. ‘Can’t you, Gwen?’

Gwen, startled, was silent for a moment, then Frank nudged her and pulled a face. ‘Oh yes,’ she confirmed. ‘You never know what until it happens, but she always knows.’

Frank handed Gwen a Christmas cracker and nodded significantly at me. It wasn’t exactly an olive branch, but I appreciated the gesture. Gwen and I looked at each other across the table. Slowly, we both smiled. It was Christmas, the season of good will. Gwen passed one end of the cracker to me and we pulled it – and everything was all right again.

I looked across the room at Lady Bellamy. ‘If she’s hinting I might go to London, then maybe everything here will be over soon,’ I said. I couldn’t imagine it, however.

‘There’s no sign of the hostilities at Gallipoli coming to an end,’ said Professor Travers. ‘It seems as if the soldiers will be there for the long term.’

Wait and see, I thought. Wait and see.

…

And it stopped.

Just like that.

Over only a few days in late December and early January, the Allied forces were withdrawn from Gallipoli.

We didn’t hear the full story, not at once. But we noticed the stream of wounded was slowing. It became a trickle.

It stopped.

It was early January when Gwen, Frank and I realised we weren’t needed to help clear trains anymore. There was still a small amount of work for us; driving patients between hospitals, staffing the rest and recreation centre, visiting boys in hospital. But the trains had stopped.

The news spread around Cairo. The fighting at Gallipoli was over.

We’d given in.

We heard that Allied troops had been withdrawn, in secret, on the nineteenth and twentieth of December from Suvla Bay and the Anzac beaches, and then from Cape Hellas on the eighth and ninth of January.

There would be no more wounded from the Dardanelles.

There were still many wounded in Cairo hospitals and some would die of their wounds. What an appalling waste, I thought angrily, as I drove to convalescent hospitals with boys with missing limbs, shattered faces and eyes that would never see again. Our troops had been in the Dardanelles for nine months and absolutely nothing had been achieved. They had advanced no further inland than a mile from the beaches on which they’d landed. But there were tens of thousands of casualties. I heard there had been twenty-five thousand Australian casualties alone, and well over eight thousand of these had died of wounds or disease. Some of the dead were soldiers I knew.

Haggard, ragged soldiers began returning to Cairo from Gallipoli, exhausted, filthy and dispirited. They went to rest camps to convalesce and recover. Before long they were making their way to the rest and recreation centre in the Ezbekieh Gardens. Some also made their way to the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith – the boys I’d been writing to. Alex, Ted and Stan were some of the first to call. I was so delighted, and relieved, to see them back safely that I cried.

When the soldiers called, whether I was there or not, Mr Bilal welcomed them and took them up to the roof terrace. He invited them to sit, insisted they had tea and cakes or little meat pastries, and told them I’d be back soon. He sent a message to me and I got back as fast as I could. Sometimes I found an exhausted soldier sound asleep on one of the cushioned divans.

They all said they’d come to thank me for writing to them. ‘It meant a lot, miss.’

I’d impressed upon Mr Bilal to ask each visitor’s name and to include it in his message, so I was able to greet each soldier with, ‘Tom!’, or ‘Bill!’, or, ‘Ernest!’, or ‘Edward! I’m so glad you’re safe!’

From these boys I learned what happened at Gallipoli.

‘We didn’t know we were being pulled out until a day or so before. We left in secret, at night, so the Turks wouldn’t attack as we moved out.

‘We tied sacking around our boots, so they wouldn’t make a noise. When we reached the pier at Anzac Cove it was covered with sacks too, to keep the noise low.

‘We set up ghost guns, that’s rifles rigged to fire by themselves at different intervals. We left them in the trenches so the Turks would think we were still there, firing at them.

‘We had to walk past the graves of our mates on the way to the beach. And we were leaving others who had no graves at all. It was hard to leave them behind. Really hard.

‘I hope,’ Ernest added bitterly, ‘that they didn’t hear us go.’

I asked each soldier who came if he’d known Jay, if they knew how he’d died. None of them knew him. They all gave me sympathetic looks, and said they were sorry for my loss, and that they’d ask around. Someone must know him and how he’d died.

I felt a complete fraud, they were all so careful with what they supposed were my feelings, so sure that I’d suffered a terrible loss. I was very sorry Jay had died, but there simply hadn’t been any relationship between us. I just had to know
how
he’d died. It would be closing the chapter.

One day in mid-January, a nice young soldier named Eddie called for a second time at the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith. This time, he brought a mate with him. Eddie was beaming; he looked as if he was about to give me the biggest present I’d ever received in my life.

‘This is Nobby Clark,’ Eddie said. ‘He knows Jim Hunter. Lieutenant Hunter, I mean.’

Nobby turned his hat around and around in his hands, saying nothing.

‘Go on, Nobby!’ Eddie prodded him.

Nobby, overcome with shyness, looked down at his feet.

‘Can you tell me about Jay – I mean, Jim?’ I prompted him. ‘You knew him? Were you one of his men? Can you tell me how – how he died?’

‘Well no, miss, I can’t,’ Nobby got out.

‘Nobby, you great lump!’ groaned Eddie. ‘Tell her! Tell her!’

Nobby swallowed hard and continued. ‘I can’t tell you how he died, miss, because as far as I know he didn’t. He was alive when we left Gallipoli.’

‘But I – I – I haven’t heard from him in months! I thought he was – I just knew he was –’

‘The mail often didn’t get through,’ said Eddie eagerly.

I was still trying to take this in.

‘You’re completely certain?’ I said to Nobby. ‘You saw him leave Gallipoli?’

Nobby smiled. ‘Oh, I saw him all right. He was an absolute hero, miss. You should’ve seen him. He wouldn’t leave until he was sure every one of us was out. He carried a couple of the fellows on his back. They had frostbite, see, and couldn’t walk easily. He piggybacked each of them all the way down that path. All the way to the pier. Absolute marvel, he was. He just wouldn’t give up.’

‘And he was on the ship?’ I asked.

‘Yes, definitely. He collapsed when we got to the pier, exhausted he was, and they loaded him onto a stretcher and put him on the ship.’ A look of uncertainty crossed Nobby’s face. ‘I haven’t seen him since, mind you. But he was definitely on the ship.’