Flora's War (22 page)

When I slept, I had the same dream. I was walking around the Sphinx with a young man. It was dark and I couldn’t see him very well. Then the moon came out from behind clouds, and I turned to look at him, and he had no face. No face at all.

The only way I could sleep without dreaming was to work until I was exhausted. I spent as much time on the excavation as I could, drawing and cataloguing. But the work was almost finished.

…

I asked Fa about his plans.

‘I’m still thinking of travelling to London,’ he said, looking at me searchingly. ‘I expect you’ll come with me, and we’ll research together at the British Museum.’

‘Would we come back here?’ I asked. Fa knew I loved the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith.

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Fa. ‘What would you think of living in Egypt more or less permanently? I’ve made some enquiries through Khalid. We could buy this house.’ He laughed. ‘It turns out he owns it. He probably owns half of Cairo, the old scoundrel, but he’s willing to sell.’

I sat with my mouth open. Mr Khalid owned the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith?
Mr Khalid
? Then that meant he
must
know about the mysterious room with the artefacts that came and went. Mr Khalid must be involved in artefact smuggling. The signal he’d given me the night of the Wozzer riot made perfect sense now.

So
now
what should I do? I remembered that on our first night in Cairo, months ago, Fa had mentioned that Mr Khalid acted as agent for some of the more dubious archaeologists, as well as totally legitimate ones. So perhaps he didn’t steal, he just moved the artefacts along – a middleman. There was no way I could stop such a big operation. If Mr Khalid really was smuggling relics for corrupt archaeologists, reporting him would be a waste of time. He had connections in high places. If we bought the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith, that would close one outlet for smuggled artefacts, but I knew there would be others. Many others.

If we wanted to stay on and live peacefully and comfortably in Cairo, we could not make an enemy of Mr Khalid. Besides, I didn’t want to make an enemy of him! I liked him. I’d never look into that room again.

Fa, I realised, was still talking. ‘We can live here most of the time and travel occasionally to England and Australia.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That sounds … good.’

‘Oh, by the way. Khalid had a message for you. And he sent you something.’ Fa was feeling in his pocket. ‘When I spoke to him about buying the house he said: “Tell Miss Flora I am sending her something. I know she is intrigued by the blacksmith’s storeroom. I will have the room cleared and it will be hers alone.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Do you know what room he means?’

Fa held his hand out. In it was a large iron key. I knew at once what door it would open.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

Mr Khalid was telling me that I would never have to worry about smuggled artefacts again. Not in the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith, at any rate. No doubt the trade would continue to flourish elsewhere, but that wasn’t my concern.

Mr Khalid’s debt to me had been paid.

…

So, staying in Egypt was one option.

Gwen had other ideas. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. The Travers were going home to Boston. ‘Come with us,’ Gwen urged. ‘Come to Boston for a long visit. We could have such fun!’ Her face changed suddenly and looked deeply worried. ‘And if you do, I just
know
Frank will come home too. He’s been talking about going to England. If he does, I’m afraid he might join up. So please, please come. I don’t want to worry anymore. I want to have fun!’

‘Fun?’ I said. Fun seemed like something I’d had once, long ago, and I certainly remembered it. Maybe I could have it again …

‘Yes,
fun
.’ Gwen was determined. ‘You’d love Boston. We could visit New York. We deserve a good time, don’t you think?’

‘What about your violin?’ I asked. ‘Weren’t you planning to study?’

Gwen pulled a face. ‘I’m too far behind. I’ve missed too many lessons coming to Egypt every year. No,’ she went on forcefully. ‘I’m going to have all the fun I can for a while, and then I think I’ll marry someone, so I never, never have to come to Egypt again.’

‘You don’t want to come back to Egypt?’ I couldn’t imagine never coming to Egypt again, even after all we’d been through here.

Gwen’s face went suddenly pinched and hard. ‘I’ll be happy to live the rest of my life as far away from Egypt – and Gallipoli – as I can arrange.’

Frank had come into the room. ‘Come with us,’ he said. ‘Come to Boston. I’d like it if you would, Flora. I’m going back to help my father with the finds, then I’ll take a ship to England. We could go there together.’

I looked at him, he looked back, and I realised with a jolt that Frank
did
think of me in a way I’d thought he hadn’t. Now, it seemed to me that if I went to Boston, I’d end up marrying Frank some day. There were many worse fates than marrying Frank, but I didn’t think I was ready to take that step.

Lydia and many of the other nurses were going to England. They expected they’d be sent to work in France. I’d heard volunteers were needed there. Maybe I could drive an ambulance. Many of the Australian and New Zealand boys I’d met in Egypt would be going to France as well. Perhaps I’d see some of them there – though never, I hoped, please God, never in an ambulance.

Or maybe I could train as a nurse in London, I thought vaguely. I could do something useful. Train to help young men like Jay.

I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.

London. France. Boston. My future, for the present, lay in a place far from Egypt, far from Gallipoli.

But I’d be back. I’d return to Cairo, and Fa and I would live in the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith and we’d continue with our work, uncovering more and more knowledge about ancient Egypt. I’d visit, sometimes, the boys who lay in the cemetery in Cairo.

Maybe, one day, I’d even visit Gallipoli.

Author’s note

A long time ago, because I like reading history, I picked up a non-fiction book about Australian army nurses,
Guns and Brooches
, by Jan Bassett. It tells the story of Australian army nurses from the Boer War to the Gulf War. At the time, I vaguely thought that the experiences of nurses in World War I would make an interesting novel: I was thinking Gallipoli as seen from behind the lines (though some nurses on the hospital ships weren’t far behind the lines at all), and from a female perspective. It was one of those ideas that hangs about in the back of your mind.

Then, I happened to be at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, researching a very different book (
When the Hipchicks Went to War
, about entertainers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War). I had some spare time, so thought I’d have a look at what material the AWM had on World War I nurses in Egypt. They had heaps – but what I also found, what really grabbed my imagination, was an entirely different story. Cairo’s story.

How the city was in crisis in 1915, overwhelmed with the wounded from Gallipoli. How civilians volunteered and worked together to assist the exhausted, overburdened medical staff. How every likely – and unlikely – building was taken over to serve as a hospital. An amazing story!

In 2015, it will be one hundred years since Gallipoli. I thought that this would be the perfect time to tell the story of civilian volunteers in Cairo. There are many accounts of the work of nurses, but I had to search to find stories of civilians. In particular, because I write for young adults, I wanted to tell a story of a young volunteer. What could a sixteen-year-old girl do to help, in Cairo in 1915? The more I read, the more I found a girl could do.

Flora’s story is fiction, but the novel is based on fact. There were volunteer rest and recreation centres in the Ezbekieh Gardens. Shepheard’s and Groppi’s were the focus of social life, and they still exist today. There really was a riot in the Wozzer. The house that I’ve based the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith on is the Gayer-Anderson Museum, a magical house once lived in by Major RG Gayer-Anderson Pasha, who left his collection of Egyptian art and antiquities to the nation. You can visit, sit on the roof terrace, and hide in the secret balcony above the hall.

As the nurses and Flora did, I’ve explored inside the pyramids, spent hour upon hour in the Cairo Museum and visited ancient tombs on the Giza plateau. I only regret that Luna Park no longer exists. It must have been quite a place.

Throughout the novel, I’ve used the units of measurement in use at the time.

1 yard = .9144 metres

1 foot = .3048 metre

1 mile = 1.6093 kilometres

100 degrees Fahrenheit = 37.77 degrees Celsius

Money: there were twelve pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound. One shilling equals ten cents, and ten shillings equals one dollar in today’s money, but a shilling in 1915 would have bought far more than ten cents would today. Australian soldiers were paid six shillings a day, and this was considered good money; it was more than British soldiers were paid.

Many thanks to my publisher Paul Collins at Ford Street Publishing, the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust for research time, and my agent Pippa Masson and all at Curtis Brown. And of course my family, without whose support and encouragement this book would – as always – have been finished in half the time.

Bibliography

Barker, Marianne,
Nightingales in the Mud
:
the Digger Sisters of the Great War 1914-18
, Allen& Unwin, Sydney 1989

Barrett, Lieutenant Colonel James W and Deane, Lieutenant PE,
The Australian Army Medical Corps in Egypt
, HK Lewis& Co Ltd, London, 1918

Bassett, Jan and Egan, Bryan, ‘Doctors and nurses at war: No.1 Australian General Hospital, Cairo 1915’,
Journal of the Australian War Memorial no. 22,
April 1993

Bassett, Jan,
Guns and Brooches: Australian army nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War
, OUP, Australia 1992

Deacon, L.A.,
Beyond the Call
, Regal Press, Tasmania

Holmes, Katie,
Between the Lines: the letters and diaries of First World War Australian nurses
, Honours thesis, History Department, University of Melbourne, 1984

Rae, Ruth,
Jessie Tomlins: an Australian army nurse World War I
, thesis, The University of Sydney, 2001

Rees, Peter,
The Other Anzacs: nurses at war 1914–18
, Allen& Unwin, Crows Nest, 2008

Robinson, Gwen,
The Forgotten Women: personal accounts of Australian nurses abroad in World War I,
Mt Gravatt 1989

Diary of Sister Daisy Donaldson Richmond 25/11/14 – 6/11/1919,
Australian War Memorial