Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (31 page)

At the hostel, to meet the needs of about twenty young women, was one cold bathroom equipped with an ancient and unreliable geyser. This apparatus took about twenty minutes to half fill the bath with lukewarm water, and as supper at the hospital was not over till nearly nine o’clock, and lights at the hostel had to be out soon after ten, there was seldom time after the journey up Denmark Hill for more than two persons per evening to occupy the bathroom. So temperamental was the geyser that the old housekeeper at the hostel refused to allow anyone but herself to manipulate it. While the tepid water trickled slowly into the bath she would sit anxiously perched beside the antique cylinder, apparently under the impression that if she took her eye off it for a moment it was bound to explode.

Any gas company could probably have installed an up-to-date water-heater in half a day, but it had not occurred to anybody to order this to be done. As several Sisters also slept in the hostel the V.A.D.s had seldom much luck in appropriating the bath, so in the bitter November cold we did our shivering best to remove the odours and contacts of the day with tiny jugfuls of lukewarm water. Later a second bathroom was installed, a process which, as I told Roland a few weeks afterwards, ‘for some reason or other requires the cutting off of the entire hot water supply . . . It is rather an amusing state of affairs for the middle of London.’ Never, except when travelling, had I to put up with so much avoidable discomfort throughout my two subsequent years of foreign service as I endured in the centre of the civilised world in the year of enlightenment 1915.

Much subsequent reflection has never enabled me to decide who was really responsible for our cheerless reception. Probably, in the unfamiliar situation, responsibility was never formally allocated to anyone by anybody, and, human nature being incurably optimistic and fundamentally hostile to assuming any work not established as its own by long tradition, each person who might have shouldered the task of organisation hopefully supposed it to have been performed by one of the others.

Organisation and regulation of another sort existed in plenty; it was evidently felt that, without the detailed regimentation of their daily conduct, amateur intruders would never fit into the rigid framework of hospital discipline. We went on duty at 7.30 a.m., and came off at 8 p.m., our hours, including three hours’ off-time and a weekly half day - all of which we gave up willingly enough whenever a convoy came in or the ward was full of unusually bad cases - thus amounted to a daily twelve and a half. We were never allowed to sit down in the wards, and our off-duty time was seldom allocated before the actual day. Night duty, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. over a period of two months, involved a twelve-hour stretch without off-time, though one night’s break was usually allowed in the middle. For this work we received the magnificent sum of £20 a year, plus a tiny uniform allowance and the cost of our laundry. Extra mess allowance was given only on foreign service, but at Camberwell the food, though monotonous, was always sufficient.

Those of us whose careers survived the Denmark Hill conditions gradually came, through the breaking-in process of sheer routine, to find the life tolerable enough. We all acquired puffy hands, chapped faces, chilblains and swollen ankles, but we seldom actually went sick, somehow managing to remain on duty with colds, bilious attacks, neuralgia, septic fingers and incipient influenza. It never then occurred to us that we should have been happier, healthier, and altogether more competent if the hours of work had been shorter, the hostel life more private and comfortable, the daily walks between hostel and hospital eliminated, the rule against sitting down in the wards relaxed, and off-duty time known in advance when the work was normal. Far from criticising our Olympian superiors, we tackled our daily duties with a devotional enthusiasm now rare amongst young women, since a more cynical post-war generation, knowing how easily its predecessors were hoodwinked through their naïve idealism, naturally tends to regard this quality with amusement and scorn.

Every task, from the dressing of a dangerous wound to the scrubbing of a bed-mackintosh, had for us in those early days a sacred glamour which redeemed it equally from tedium and disgust. Our one fear was to be found wanting in the smallest respect; no conceivable fate seemed more humiliating than that of being returned to Devonshire House as ‘unsuitable’ after a month’s probation. The temptation to exploit our young wartime enthusiasm must have been immense - and was not fiercely resisted by the military authorities.

2

Most of the patients at Camberwell were privates and N.C.O.s, but the existence of a small officers’ section made me dream of fascinating though improbable coincidences.

‘I wonder,’ I wrote to Roland, ‘if some fine morning I shall come on duty and hear indirectly from a friendly V.A.D. that a certain Lieutenant L. of the 7th Worcestershires came in with the convoy last night . . . But it’s too good to think of. It is the kind of thing that only happens in sensational novels.’

My first ward was a long Tommies’ hut in the open park, containing sixty beds of acute surgical cases. The knowledge of masculine invalid psychology that I gradually acquired in my various hospitals stopped short at the rank of quarter-master-sergeant, for throughout the War I was never posted to a British officers’ ward for longer than a few hours at a time. Apparently my youth and childish chocolate-box prettiness gave every Matron under whom I served the impression that if I were sent to nurse officers I should improve the occasion in ways not officially recognised by the military authorities.

When I began to work in the long hut, my duties consisted chiefly in preparing dressing-trays and supporting limbs - a task which the orderlies seldom undertook because they were so quickly upset by the butcher’s-shop appearance of the uncovered wounds. Soon after I arrived I saw one of them, who was holding a basin, faint right on the top of the patient.

‘Many of the patients can’t bear to see their own wounds, and I don’t wonder,’ I recorded.

Although the first dressing at which I assisted - a gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid bare - turned me sick and faint for a moment that I afterwards remembered with humiliation, I minded what I described to Roland as ‘the general atmosphere of inhumanness’ far more than the grotesque mutilations of bodies and limbs and faces. The sight of the ‘Bart’s’ Sisters, calm, balanced, efficient, moving up and down the wards self-protected by that bright immunity from pity which the highly trained nurse seems so often to possess, filled me with a deep fear of merging my own individuality in the impersonal routine of the organisation.

‘There is no provision,’ I told Roland in one of my earliest letters from Camberwell, ‘for any interests besides one’s supposed interest in one’s work. Of course I hate it. There is something so starved and dry about hospital nurses - as if they had to force all the warmth out of themselves before they could be really good nurses. But personally I would rather suffer ever so much in my work than become indifferent to pain. I don’t mind anything really so long as I don’t lose my personality - or even have it temporarily extinguished. And I don’t think I can do that when I have You.’

It was perhaps fortunate that I did not know how inexorably the months in which I should have to do what I hated would pile themselves up into years, nor foresee how long before the end I too, from overwork and excessive experience, should become intolerant of suffering in my patients. Even without the bitterness of that knowledge I felt very desolate, and as much cut off from what philosophers call ‘the like-minded group’ as if I had been imprisoned in one of the less ‘highbrow’ circles of Dante’s
Purgatorio
. My first experience of convoys - the ‘Fall in’ followed by long, slowly moving lines of ambulances and the sudden crowding of the surgical wards with cruelly wounded men - came as a relief because it deprived me of the opportunity for thought.

‘I had no time to wonder whether I was going to do things right or not,’ I noted; ‘they simply
had
to be done right.’

But afterwards the baffling contrast between the ideal of service and its practical expression - a contrast that grew less as our ideals diminished with the years while our burden of remorseless activities increased - drove me to write a puzzled letter to Roland.

‘It is always so strange that when you are working you never think of all the inspiring thoughts that made you take up the work in the first instance. Before I was in hospital at all I thought that because I suffered myself I should feel it a grand thing to relieve the sufferings of other people. But now, when I am actually doing something which I know relieves someone’s pain, it is nothing but a matter of business. I may think lofty thoughts about the whole thing before or after but never at the time. At least, almost never. Sometimes some quite little thing makes me stop short all of a sudden and I feel a fierce desire to cry in the middle of whatever it is I am doing.’

As the wet, dreary autumn drifted on into grey winter, my letters to him became shorter and a little forlorn, though my constant awareness of his far greater discomforts made me write of mine as though they possessed a humour of which I was too seldom conscious. The week-ends seemed especially tiring, for on Saturdays and Sundays even the workmen’s trams ceased to function, and the homeward evening walk through the purlieus of Camberwell was apt to become more adventurous than usual.

‘I picture to myself,’ I told Roland, ‘Mother’s absolute horror if she could have seen me at 9.15 the other night dashing about and dodging the traffic in the slums of Camberwell Green, in the pitch dark of course, incidentally getting mixed up with remnants of a recruiting meeting, munition workers and individuals drifting in and out of public houses. It is quite thrilling to be an unprotected female and feel that no one in your immediate surroundings is particularly concerned with what happens to you so long as you don’t give them any bother.’

After twenty years of sheltered gentility I certainly did feel that whatever the disadvantages of my present occupation, I was at least seeing life. My parents also evidently felt that I was seeing it, and too much of it, for a letter still exists in which I replied with youthful superiority to an anxious endeavour that my father must have made to persuade me to abandon the rigours of Army hospitals and return to Buxton.

‘Thank you very much for your letter, the answer to which really did not require much thinking over,’ I began uncompromisingly, and continued with more determination than tact: ‘
Nothing
- beyond sheer necessity - would induce me to stop doing what I am doing now, and I should never respect myself again if I allowed a few slight physical hardships to make me give up what is the finest work any girl can do now. I honestly did not take it up because I thought you did not want me or could not afford to give me a comfortable home, but because I wanted to prove I could more or less keep myself by working, and partly because, not being a man and able to go to the front, I wanted to do the next best thing. I do not agree that my place is at home doing nothing or practically nothing, for I consider that the place now of anyone who is young and strong and capable is where the work that is needed is to be done. And really the work is not too hard - even if I were a little girl, which I no longer am, for I sometimes feel quite ninety nowadays.’

Fortunately most of my letters home were more human, not to say schoolgirlish, in content. Their insistent suggestions that my family should keep me supplied with sweets and biscuits, or should come up to London and take me out to tea, are reminders of the immense part played by meals in the meditations of ardent young patriots during the War.

3

Apart from all these novel experiences, my first month at Camberwell was distinguished by the one and only real quarrel that I ever had with Roland. It was purely an epistolary quarrel, but its bitterness was none the less for that, and the inevitable delay between posts prolonged and greatly added to its emotional repercussions.

On October 18th, Roland had sent a letter to Buxton excusing himself, none too gracefully, for the terseness of recent communications, and explaining how much absorbed he had become by the small intensities of life at the front. As soon as the letter was forwarded to Camberwell, I replied rather ruefully.

‘Don’t get
too
absorbed in your little world over there - even if it makes things easier . . . After all the War
cannot
last for ever, and when it is over we shall be glad to be what we were born again - if we can only live till then. Life - oh! life. Isn’t it strange how much we used to demand of the universe, and now we ask only for what we took as a matter of course before - just to be allowed to live, to go on being.’

By November 8th no answer had come from him - not even a comment on what seemed to me the tremendous event of my transfer from Buxton into a real military hospital. The War, I began to feel, was dividing us as I had so long feared that it would, making real values seem unreal, and causing the qualities which mattered most to appear unimportant. Was it, I wondered, because Roland had lost interest in me that this anguish of drifting apart had begun - or was the explanation to be found in that terrible barrier of knowledge by which War cut off the men who possessed it from the women who, in spite of the love that they gave and received, remained in ignorance?

It is one of the many things that I shall never know.

Lonely as I was, and rather bewildered, I found the cold dignity of reciprocal silence impossible to maintain. So I tried to explain that I, too, understood just a little the inevitable barrier - the almost physical barrier of horror and dreadful experience - which had grown up between us.