Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (44 page)

When the
Galeka
at last docked in the Grand Harbour at Valletta on October 7th, I awoke to find the Principal Matron of Malta standing by my side, looking down at me. A handsome woman of classic proportions, she seemed somehow to restore their lost heroic quality to our vicissitudes, and I grinned apologetically at her from my lowly cot.

‘
This
one can smile, at any rate!’ I heard her remark in a singularly gracious voice to the Matron of the
Galeka
.

In the afternoon I was carried off the boat on a stretcher, and pushed into one of the ambulances which were taking the convoy of sick nurses to Imtarfa Hospital, seven miles away in the centre of the island. I dozed fitfully throughout the ride, and realised Malta only as a waking dream of brilliant white buildings against a bright blue sky. The scintillating air seemed to echo with the clang and clatter of half the bells in the world; I believed them to be imaginary noises ringing in my head until a Sister in the hospital told me that the day was a
festa
.

‘There seem to be so many saints,’ I explained later to my mother, ‘and so many things that happen to them, and every time there is a
festa
, which is always on the day that you want to go to Valletta. I think saints are a very good idea if you are fond of holidays.’

At Imtarfa occurred an uncomfortable delay upon which I commented with some feeling in a subsequent letter to Edward. ‘When we arrived at the hospital we were left waiting for at least twenty minutes with the hot afternoon sun pouring right in to the ambulance; several A.S.C. men came and gazed in with great interest, but no one attempted to move us. Finally the Matron came out and asked indignantly why we weren’t brought in, and one of the men said it was the orderlies’ work, not theirs, and the orderlies were having their tea! Typical,
n’est-ce pas
? When I think of the number of meals I have postponed or cut short or missed altogether in order to help with convoys - and in other people’s wards too, I think how unduly altruistic women are!’

For some reason my anonymous germ behaved more malignantly than anyone else’s; I had left England for Malta without having had a day’s rest since the beginning of the rush after the Somme, and the invader probably took advantage of my need for a holiday. Days passed in the drowsy discomfort of fever, with large doses of castor oil as the only interruption to the monotony of burning head and aching limbs. Almost the end of October had come before I was able to drag myself to a chair on the stone balcony outside my ward, and look across a deep, rocky valley to the domes and towers of Cittá Vecchia, the old Maltese capital, drowsing in a heat more radiant and profound than the warmest English midsummer.

In those first normal hours I fell in love with the island; a secret rapture which the years have not dimmed made me thank heaven that I had defied the nightmare sea and bidden farewell to melancholy, tragic England. It was all so different from Buxton, and so infinitely different from Camberwell! At the end of the summer the grass all over the island was parched and withered; from a distance the surface of the uplands resembled the stretched skin of a great tawny lion. A macabre fascination, such as I had realised in Mudros, seemed to radiate from the dazzling light which drenched this treeless barrenness, making black and sharp-edged the tiny shadows cast by the clumps of tropical shrubs - cactus and prickly pear and eucalyptus - that fringed the dusty white roads or leaned against the ubiquitous stone walls. In the hospital garden immediately below the balcony, pastel-blue plumbago and pink geranium foamed with luscious generosity over sulphur-hued balustrades.

It’s just like the illustrations to Omar Khayyam, I thought.

They say the lion and the lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.

That’s what it reminds me of. But it’s like the Bible too. That rough track dipping steeply down into the valley and then winding up to walled Cittá Vecchia might be the road from Bethany to Capernaum.

Whenever I could escape from my fellow-patients in the stone-floored ward with its wide-open doors and windows, I sat alone on the balcony, happy and at peace in this strange, new country as I had never been since the War began. Occasionally, as strength returned to insecure legs, another patient and I made expeditions in a
carrozza
to Cittá Vecchia across the valley, where we encountered the characteristic Maltese odour of unwashed humanity, centuries-old mud, and goats. We debated quite hotly which were the more numerous and which smelt worse, the monks or the goats, without coming to any permanent conclusion.

Never before had I realised the sense of spiritual freedom which comes with southern warmth and colour and beauty. Night after night the sun set exuberantly all over the sky. Beneath its glories of orange and violet, of emerald and coral and aquamarine, the dusty flats surrounding Imtarfa turned into purple moorlands. I began to understand why Roland, hating the grey abnegations of Protestantism, had turned from mud and horror and desolation to the rich, colourful glamour of the Catholic Church.

For Imtarfa, and indeed for the whole of Malta, the sick V.A.D.s remained interesting patients even when the last of them - myself - was up and about, and Lord Methuen himself, the Governor of the Island, came up to pay us an official visit.

‘Everyone here is trying to trace the origin of our disease,’ runs a letter to Edward written at Imtarfa. ‘We have had quite twelve doctors in here, sometimes five at once. Three of them are lady doctors, all very charming too, in khaki tussore coats and skirts, dark blue ties and solar topees. I am getting quite tired of giving my name (and wish it was Jones so that I didn’t have to spell it every time), my age, my detachment number, particulars of what I had to eat lately, etc., etc. They have taken blood tests of various kinds from us, for malaria, dysentery, etc., from our ears, fingers and wrists. They still don’t seem able to decide whether we have been poisoned by something we had to eat or whether we just picked up some unoccupied germ that was wandering about the Mediterranean.’

Food poisoning of an obscure type was the final tentative verdict, and the
Britannic
and the
Galeka
were both detained for several days in their respective harbours while investigations were made. The Principal Matron professed herself ‘very unhappy’ about the quarters allotted to the V.A.D.s between Mudros and Malta, and the
Galeka
had to undergo a thorough disinfection before leaving Valletta. It was a work of supererogation on the part of the sanitary squad, for she was torpedoed and sunk in the Channel on her next voyage home.

After nearly three weeks of treatment I was passed fit for light duty, and sent across the island to join Betty at St George’s Hospital on a lovely peninsula of grey rock and red sand almost encircled by the sea.

4

I was still at Imtarfa when I received my first letters from England.

In Malta the arrival of the mail - which was often held up so long by storms, submarines and the censors at various ports that letters dispatched on widely different dates overtook one another on the way out - became the chief event of the week. We awaited the P. & O. liner that brought it with a perturbing mixture of pleasant anticipation and sick dread, for owing to casualties at the front, and air-raids and other troubles at home, neither life nor happiness nor peace of mind could be counted on for more than a few days at a time.

My worst fears now were for Geoffrey in France; he had grown into a very dear friend whose intelligent understanding never failed the most exacting demands, and my admiration for his determined endurance of a life that he detested was only enhanced by his shy self-depreciation and his frequent asseverations of cowardice. In letters it was possible to get behind the defences of this abrupt young man to a sensitive mind as responsive to beauty as it was considerate towards human pain and fatigue.

‘Promise me faithfully this one thing,’ I urged Edward in reply to his first letter from home; ‘if anything important happens to either you, Geoffrey or Victor, will you cable to me at once? You have no idea what one feels out here when one realises it is October 20th and the last one heard of anyone was October 9th . . . It gives me a queer feeling to read Geoffrey’s letter of October 9th and remembering that “out here we are here to-day and gone tomorrow”, to think that he has had time to die a thousand deaths between then and to-day. The other day I got hold of a weekly
Times
of October 13th and looked down the casualty list in absolute terror, fearing to see Geoffrey’s name.’

‘I never thought,’ I added, ‘that there was Tah’s to look for too’ - for Edward’s letter had contained the surprising news that Victor had gone unexpectedly to the front by transferring from the Royal Sussex Regiment into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. ‘On the Monday after you left,’ he wrote, ‘a wild telegram from Tah announced that he was going to France. I met him in town, helped him with all his shopping (and you can imagine he needed some help) - it was an awful business as he didn’t like most things and knew nothing about anything; occasionally he would suddenly take a violent dislike to a most necessary article of clothing and refuse to have it until I had wasted about
an hour conjuring up an imaginary situation in which he couldn’t possibly do without the thing in question.’

My mother, after describing the move from Macclesfield to Kensington, told me that they were having a portrait of Edward in uniform painted by a Chelsea artist, Mr Graham Glen. Even my work-driven uncle at the bank wrote a long letter, enclosing a fragment of philosophy which had recently come to England from the French trenches:

‘When you are a soldier you are one of two things, either at the front or behind the lines. If you are behind the lines you need not worry. If you are at the front you are one of two things. You are either in a danger zone or in a zone which is not dangerous. If you are in a zone which is not dangerous you need not worry. If you are in a danger zone you are one of two things; either you are wounded or you are not. If you are not wounded you need not worry. If you are wounded you are one of two things, either seriously wounded or slightly wounded. If you are slightly wounded you need not worry. If you are seriously wounded one of two things is certain - either you get well or you die. If you get well you needn’t worry. If you die you cannot worry, so there is no need to worry about anything at all.’

This uncle, who was never a strong man, died in 1925 after a long illness caused by incessant overwork throughout the War. The numerous letters that he wrote me while I was in Malta - all emphasising the difficulty of carrying on the business of a bank from which men were constantly joining up - are typical of the more heroic civilian to whom, at that time, patriotism was the genuine and indeed the sole inspiration of a hard and disappointing life. In 1916 he was only thirty-five and still miserably anxious to enlist - a step that, as an ‘indispensable’, he was never permitted to take by the various authorities which now directed the occupations of ‘eligible’ men.

‘I am getting more and more ashamed of my civilian togs,’ he wrote unhappily to me about the beginning of 1917, ‘and I shrink from meeting or speaking to soldiers or soldiers’ relatives, and to take an ordinary walk on a Sunday is abominable. I cannot do anything to alter matters, for even if I walked out of the bank and joined up, I should in all probability be fetched back at once, as the Government are now making entirely their own decision as to which of us go and which stay, but the net result is real misery and the contemplation of the future if one has to confess never to have fought at all is altogether impossible.’

Though the future was to prove so much more indifferent to war records than my uncle imagined, such letters as his - which must have been reduplicated hundreds of times - do suggest that the men officially tied to civilian posts should either have been allowed to wear military uniform, or else have been enlisted into a recognised corps with a uniform of its own. Only a gross failure of psychological understanding in high places compelled men who were working themselves to death by simultaneously doing two or three full-time jobs to wear garments which in popular opinion branded them as ‘shirkers’, while ‘dug-outs’ engaged upon very light and perfectly safe garrison duty were eulogised as heroes. The War cost my uncle his life as surely as if he had been in the trenches, yet, far from sharing in the ‘glory’ of sacrifice, he was not permitted even to discard the trappings which brought him humiliation.