Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (51 page)

‘
May 24th
. - Roused up at 5.0, attempted a little tidying; though without any water or space this was a little difficult. (Had to take most of our food with us from Malta, so seldom got anything to drink.) Went along edge of Apennines; quite beautiful in light of early morning.

‘Reached Rome at 8.30. Bundled out of train into Hotel Continental, luggage and all. Luggage piled up in entrance; hotel people slightly disturbed. Our six straightened up in a room we shared for the day with 3 others and had a bath (found by me). Had lovely coffee, rolls and syrup brought up to our room. Went out and sent telegram home. Then went out in small carriages to see sights. Thought Rome very majestic - grand rather than beautiful. Age seems to have touched it not to mellow but to render it the more austere . . . Had tea in an English restaurant; after tea drove to English quarter and wandered around curio shops. Bought Roman pearl brooches and crucifix. Met an English woman friend of one of the Sisters, who told M——n and me we looked very young to be in the Red Cross! Had dinner at hotel; after dinner fell asleep on bed for an hour through sheer fatigue.

Roll-call in hotel hall at 9.0; then went to station, collected luggage together and sat on it on dark dimly-lighted platform for about
an hour. When train came struggled in all together into comf. 1st class carriage and slept well all night.

‘
Friday, May 25th
. - Woke to find we were all among mountains, just going into Pisa. Saw Leaning Tower of Pisa from train. Glorious mountain scenery; mountain-sides covered with thick trees, cypresses and pines standing out among them . . . Went through 98 tunnels between Spezzio and Genoa. Reached Genoa about 11.30. On learning we had 20 mins. to wait, dashed out of train and into buffet just as we were, I in blue motor veil, dirty blouse and bedroom slippers; others in similar state. Restaurant very perturbed; regular turmoil ensued. Had omelette and coffee, bought oranges and dashed back to train with them . . . Stopped at Alessandria and Turin, where we expected to change but did not. Scenery after Turin very lovely; we passed all through the Southern Alps . . . Air very cold and pure; great relief after the stuffiness and heat between Genoa and Turin. Stopped at many small stations where there were pumps; we held out our enamel mugs and the porters filled them for us with the water. The water was beautiful; this way we gradually quenched our thirst for about first time since journey began. Passed quite close to Mt Cenis. Went through very long tunnel just before reaching Modane, on the Franco-Italian frontier. Here we changed, passed through Customs, and got into Paris express. Most splendid train I have ever been in; seats very large and comfortable; got a corner. Had a most excellent dinner. Could feel we were travelling very swiftly and hardly stopped at all; had water in lavatory, too, for first time. Excellent night.

‘
May 26th
. - Were approaching Paris when we woke up; typical French scenery so often described by Roland - thin sentinel trees and straight white roads. Thought very much about Roland and Geoffrey, for this was their country, now.

‘Arrived at Paris about 10.0, St Lazare. Met by Red X doctors (not R.A.M.C.) from the Hôtel Asturia, now an officers’ hospital under the Franco-British Red X, where we were to be put up for the day. Drove there in a large motor wagon; Paris seemed fairly familiar, even after 4 years. Found Hotel Asturia in Champs-Élysées, close to Arc de Triomphe. Most of the party by now were very nearly fainting and collapsed, and after breakfast proceeded to lie down at once somewhere in the two rooms allotted to us. Nurses there were very kind and lent their rooms to the illest people . . .

‘They have luxurious suites of rooms and when off duty, which seems to be often, go out in gorgeous Paris mufti; it hardly seems pukka nursing to us.

‘Fortunately M——n, K. and I didn’t feel at all collapsed, so after lunch, as neither of them had seen Paris before, I took them round to look at some of the sights. Took them to Notre-Dame, the Madeleine and along the most important streets - Rue de Rivoli, Avenue de l’Opéra, Place de l’Opéra, Boulevards, Place de la Concorde, etc . . . . Had delightful coffee and
pâté de foie gras
sandwiches at Kardoma Restaurant in Rue de Rivoli.

‘Afterwards did a little shopping; bought a cigarette-case and some handkerchiefs. Returned to hotel for dinner and went to station for train about 10.0. Mrs M. very trying, espec. when the only seats we could get turned out to be a second-class carriage and we had to have 8 in it. However we didn’t mind much as we learnt we were crossing from Boulogne instead of Havre, and this was the last night. Night somewhat uncomfortable but slept a little.

‘
May 27th
. - Woke up at 5.0 when train stopped at Amiens. Seething crowd of British and French officers and soldiers, most of them in a trench-state. Thought of Roland, Edward and Geoffrey as having been here; don’t think Victor ever was. Felt very near the War. Left Amiens at last and went through Abbeville and Etaples. Étaples seemed one enormous and very dirty camp; we were much cheered by Tommies in a troop train that we passed, and cheered and waved to by the soldiers in the camps along both sides of the railway. Made me very glad I had elected to be a nurse and remain one, instead of doing something else. Sat outside Boulogne for about 2 hours. Could see it just in front; could easily have got out and walked to it. Got very bored; however we moved at last, got out and had breakfast - a good and pleasant breakfast - at the Hôtel de Louvre (familiar of course to Edward).

‘Boat left at 1.0; we were on deck at 12.0 and all had to wear lifebelts. Boat was a leave-boat - mostly officers and nurses but some Tommies; another boat crammed with Tommies followed in our wake. Were escorted by 6 destroyers. Met another transport going towards Boulogne; men all waved to us and cheered. Crossing very good and smooth; seemed a very little way after the many hours I had spent on the sea. Found a pleasant 8th Sherwood Foresters officer to talk to. The white cliffs seemed to appear very quickly; it seemed like a dream to be seeing them again, or else a dream that I had ever left them.

‘Soon luggage had to be collected and we were hastened across the gangways. It was Whit-Sunday, the day after the big air-raid at Folkestone, but I saw no traces of it. Great crush at Folkestone Station; only three trains for two boat-loads. Should never have found a seat and my luggage had not two very charming officers, a staff lieutenant and a R.F.A. colonel, helped K. and me. They talked to us hard all the way to London. It seemed very strange to be at Victoria again; same old crowd round barriers, same old tea-rooms, same old everything. One began to believe one hadn’t really been away.’

Twenty minutes after leaving the two officers - K. and I had tea with them at Victoria, I remember, and we all sentimentally wondered whether we should meet again, which of course we never did - I was standing, a little bewildered, outside my parents’ flat in Kensington. I had never seen the flat before, and because I knew that my mother ran it - incredible thought! - with only one maid, I had expected to find it small and compact. So much overawed was I by the imposing block of buildings, the numerous entrances, the red-carpeted staircase and the lift, and so conscious did I suddenly become of my battered straw hat and dirty, sea-stained uniform, that I quite forgot to impress the elderly porter who took me up to the top floor with the information that I had just returned from service overseas.

The inside of the flat was as spotlessly immaculate as any dwelling-place that my parents have inhabited, and my mother, though indubitably relieved that I had not been stranded in the Alps or torpedoed in the Channel, was most immediately concerned to dispossess me of the accumulated grime of Malta, Sicily, Italy and France. Supper was not yet ready, so, pausing only to learn that Victor was still alive and still progressing, I threw off my dilapidated garments and jumped into a hot bath, while my mother hurried my holdall and my much-travelled uniform out of the newly decorated flat.

‘I thought the best thing was to take them up to the roof - because of fleas,’ she explained.

I laughed at her, and did not tell her that she had guessed right about the fleas. Two or three had been wandering pertinaciously under my vest ever since the night in Syracuse harbour, and a peculiarly big brown one had walked in circles round my hat all the way from Paris. It was delicious after the bath to slip into clean underclothes, and to appear before my family gorgeously wrapped in the scarlet silk kimono that I had made so perseveringly on night-duty. In spite of six days of dirt and heat, of interrupted uncomfortable nights and two crowded afternoons of sight-seeing of which the mere memory now fills me with exhaustion, I did not really feel tired.

After supper I settled down luxuriously to smoke - a new habit originally acquired as a means of defence against the insect life in Malta - and to talk to my father about the hazards and adventures of my journey home. My parents took a gratifying pleasure in my assumption of worldly wisdom and the sophistication of the lighted cigarette; after twenty continuous months of Army service I was almost a stranger to them. Sitting before the open French windows of the big drawing-room, I looked out upon the peaceful, darkening square with a sense of unbelievable repose. Between the flats and the turmoil of London lay a long unspoilt area of wooded parkland; the great trees stretched eastwards as far as I could see. Hidden by the cool green of their new spring foliage, innumerable birds twittered softly on their topmost branches. The War with its guns and submarines, its death and grief and cruel mutilations, might have been as innocuous and unreal as time and the smooth, patriotic selections of school history-books had made the Napoleonic campaigns of a century ago.

That night I slept without thinking or dreaming, but the next day the glamour of scarlet kimonos and idle cigarettes had firmly to be put aside. I had come home for a purpose and must now face up to it.

14

The 2nd London General Hospital opened out of a short street in the Chelsea half of the monotonous and dreary buildings which run almost continuously from the public house appropriately known as World’s End to Fulham and Hammersmith. Two schools formed part of the building, and their joint play-grounds made a large open space which held quite comfortably the collection of huts and tents that sprang up wherever a few hundred mangled heroes were gathered together. It was not nearly so big as the 1st London General, and had several wards exclusively devoted to head wounds and eye cases.

I found Victor in bed in the garden, his pale fingers lethargically exploring a big book of braille. His head was still copiously bandaged, and one brown eye, impotently open, stared glassily into fathomless blackness. If I had not been looking for him I should not have known him; his face seemed to have emptied and diminished until what was visible of it was almost devoid of expression. ‘Hallo, Tah!’ I said, as casually as I could, self-consciously anxious to keep the shock of his appearance out of my voice.

He did not answer, but stiffened all over like a dog suddenly hearing its master’s call in the distance; the drooping lethargy disappeared, and his mouth curved into the old listening look of half-cynical intelligence. ‘Do you know who it is, Tah?’ I asked him, putting my hand on his.

‘Tah!’ he repeated, hesitating, expectant - and then all at once, with a ring of unmistakable joy in his voice, ‘Why - it’s Vera!’

All that afternoon we sat and talked. The world had closed in around him; he definitely discouraged the description of loveliness that he could no longer see, of activities that he could never again share, and at first seemed interested only in discussing the visits of his friends and the hospital detail of every day. But of his complete rationality there could be no question, and with time and the miraculous adaptability of the blind, the wider outlook would certainly return.

I saw no trace on that day, nor any of the successive afternoons on which I visited him, of the bitterness that Edward had mentioned; he seemed to have accepted his fate, to have embarked upon the conquest of braille, and to have compared, with a slight bias in favour of the former, the merits of an East End curacy with schoolmastering as a career for a blinded man. Captain Ian Fraser of St Dunstan’s - then also recently blinded - came several times to visit him, and told him of the work that had already been done in making other sightless officers independent and self-supporting. The news of these experiments gradually stimulated his own determination, and he was ready, as soon as his curiously obstinate head wound had healed, to divert the energy with which he had made himself into a soldier to the reconstruction of his future.

I did not see Edward until he appeared on June 1st for a week-end leave. When he did come he was an unfamiliar, frightening Edward, who never smiled nor spoke except about trivial things, who seemed to have nothing to say to me and indeed hardly appeared to notice my return. More than his first weeks in the trenches, more even than the Battle of the Somme, the death of Geoffrey and the blinding of Victor had changed him. Silent, uncommunicative, thrust in upon himself, he sat all day at the piano, improvising plaintive melodies, and playing Elgar’s ‘Lament for the Fallen’.