A Rose for the Anzac Boys (2 page)

Miss Hollington’s School

for Young Ladies

Surrey

England

5 June 1915

Dear Miss Davies,

Thank you for the talcum powder and the handkachiefs. (I still can’t spell that!) It was good to get a birthday present from home, even though you’re not at Glen Donal any more. It’s hard to imagine you being a governess somewhere else. I hope the Mackenzie children are nice, but that you don’t think they’re quite as nice as me and Tim!

Aunt Harriet and Uncle Thomas sent me a silver-backed hairbrush and mirror set. It was lovely but not the same as getting
a present from someone you really know. I hoped I’d hear from Tim or Doug, but I don’t suppose Doug can just leave the war and gallop down to a post office in Flanders, or that Tim has time to write letters at that Gallipalli place (can’t spell that either) that’s in the papers so much. Aunt Lallie sent me a wonderful Egyptian bracelet, but I opened that weeks ago so it doesn’t count either.

I’m liking school a bit better, though I still miss Glen Donal DREADFULLY. I still don’t see why Dougie had to dump me here when he decided to enlist in England. I could perfectly well have stayed at home with you and Mrs Campbell. After all, I was almost sixteen, not five years old!

It’s not as though I’m learning anything useful here, just ‘how to be a lady’, which means walking with my tummy held in and learning embroidery. (I am never going to embroider another tea cloth in my life once I leave here!) Oh, and French irregular verbs, which are a fat lot of use as I can’t even holiday in France now, with the war, and I’ll never need them when I come home. Maybe I can say ‘Parley Vous Francais’ to the sheep and see what they say. Probably ‘Baa’ which is what I’d like to say to Mademoiselle some days.

Sometimes I wake up hoping that when I open my eyes I’ll see the river and the willows out the window. I even try listening for the sheep and maybe a kea’s cry. Then Miss Jenkins plods into the dormitory bleating ‘Girls! Girls! Rally! Rally!’, which she does to wake us up every single morning. Miss Jenkins sounds a bit like a sheep and her hair is woolly too. But I don’t think you’d get much of a price for a bale of teacher hair.

At least I have a couple of good friends now. Anne is the daughter of an earl, which makes her an Honourable and impresses
all the teachers frightfully, though they try not to show it. Her mother is called Lady George, which makes me giggle every time I say it even though it’s the right thing to call an earl’s wife. If his name is George, anyhow.

Ethel’s mother is dead like mine, and her father is a wholesale grocer and has pots of money. Of course it’s dreadfully rude to talk about how much money someone has, but somehow everyone at school knows Ethel’s dad has more money than—who was that ancient rich chap? Crokus? Him, anyway. Ethel’s family live in Yorkshire, which means Ethel has a broader accent than I do. But Anne says my New Zealand accent isn’t too bad, and that Ethel just clings to hers because she’s too stubborn to give it up.

Ethel’s dad sent her here to make her ladylike. But Ethel isn’t interested in being ladylike. Or in French verbs or anything much. But she’s a good friend. She and Anne were wonderful to me when I first got here and was so lonely.

There isn’t much news from Dougie, except what I read in the papers. He wrote to me last month but didn’t say much. I think he has forgiven Tim for enlisting under another name. It just wasn’t fair to expect Tim to wait another four years till he was ‘old enough’ to enlist when Dougie and I were gone. I am so glad Dougie didn’t report Tim to the authorities. Of course Tim wants to do his bit for England, just like Doug!

Tim writes whenever he can, but maybe that’s because twins are closer than just brother and sister. He and I have great plans for after the war when we are both home again, so there is a lot to discuss.

I am so very proud of having two brothers in uniform, and a cousin too, as well as an aunt who is a nurse. One of the girls
in my class has three brothers in the army, but there are only six of us who have two. It’s hard to be a girl sometimes, stuck at school when there is such a great cause to fight for. We do first aid training here every Saturday and Wednesday, and bandage-rolling Tuesdays, and making baby clothes for refugees on Friday afternoons. But it isn’t like DOING something; it isn’t glory or adventure.

I’m sorry this has been such a long letter. Writing to you makes it almost seem like I’m home. If you get a chance and if it isn’t too much trouble, would you mind putting flowers on Mummy’s and Daddy’s graves? Daddy always put flowers on Mummy’s grave for her birthday (it’s 19 July). It would be horrible to think that no one did this year, just because I’m at school in England and Tim and Doug are away at the war.

Your loving ex-pupil,

Midge Macpherson

It began with letters.

Letters were delivered twice a day to Miss Hollington’s School for Young Ladies, but girls could only collect their mail after classes were over, from the table in the big hall that smelled of furniture polish. Pupils at Miss Hollington’s weren’t allowed to run, except on the lacrosse field, so Midge forced her feet to walk sedately across the
courtyard’s too neat grass, her skirts swishing around her ankles.

Would there be a letter today?

Not that Tim’s letters said a lot since he’d joined up. The censor blacked out his words if he wrote much more than ‘Hello there, Sis old girl, don’t worry I’m well’. But he’d managed to tell her about a sandstorm before they left Egypt, the sand so deep it covered the barbed wire; and about marching through the desert, all of them so thirsty that men licked the dry taps, desperate for a stray drop of water.

Please let there be a letter, Midge prayed. Tim was her only link to the future now—that blessed time when they would both be twenty-one. Tim would inherit half of Glen Donal and Midge would inherit the money her parents had thought more suitable for a girl than land. When that day came, when the war was over, when they finally sailed home, Tim would farm their land between the mountains and they’d use her money to build a house there, on the far bank of the river at Glen Donal.

Glen Donal. Home. It was an ache and absence in the heart. The scent of rough grass and the sharp tinny smell of snow from the mountains, the dangling arms of the willow trees, the neat lines of Mummy’s rose garden, the flowers more flamboyant than any Midge had seen in England. Even grass smelled different here, not as strong and sweet as home. At least school was in the country, away from the yellow smoke that buried the sky at Aunt Harriet’s. But everything was so small, she thought, as she
hurried up the hall steps. The land divided into its tiny fields and smaller lanes. Even the people looked like they’d shrunk in the rain. A land of sparrows when she wanted to soar.

Her shoes tapped on the polished wood floor. She glanced at the table. Yes! There were two letters under ‘M’. One on cheap thin paper from Tim; plus a blue envelope with a water stain on one corner and precise nursing sister’s writing on the front. A letter from Aunt Lallie—the second-best letter she could get.

Letters were too precious to read here, where anyone could interrupt. But there was a willow down by the pond, almost like the ones back home, with a curtain of green branches.

Midge ran out the door (school rules could go hang), holding her skirt high and trying to look as unavailable for rounders or lacrosse games as she could. She ducked her head under the willow’s branches and settled on the damp leaves that covered the ground.

She’d open Aunt Lallie’s letter first and keep Tim’s to savour last. Even having his letter in her lap made him seem close.

She tore open Aunt Lallie’s envelope. Her aunt’s last letter had been from Alexandria where she had ridden a camel with an upper lip just like Uncle Thomas’s. It had spat at Aunt Lallie’s friend Sister Atkins.

Midge’s eyes skimmed the letter. Then she stopped in shock. This wasn’t like any letter her aunt had sent before.

The Citadel Hospital, Cairo

6 June 1915

My dear niece,

I hope this finds you as it leaves me, for I am well, though tired. Tired perhaps is not the right word. I think by now we have gone past tiredness, into another world.

I do not know if you received my last letter from Alexandria. Since then I have been on the
[here the word was blacked out by the censor]
, a transport ship from
[another crossing out, but not enough, so that by lifting the letter to the light Midge could still see the impression of the word
Gallipoli
]
. Initially it had been intended that the transport ships take the wounded to
[crossed out]
where I was posted, little more than an hour’s sail away. But there have been so many casualties that the ships were forced to sail two more days to the hospitals at Alexandria, which is how I have come to be transferred here. Now even our hospitals are full and the ships full of wounded boys have to sail on to Malta instead.

My dear, I cannot describe
[here the words were crossed out by Lallie’s hand].

They call ships like ours the ‘black ships’ and, my dear, they deserve the name. We kept the men with gangrenous or suppurating wounds on deck, in the fresh air. The fever and dysentery cases were carried below, into a hold that had not been cleaned since the horses they had carried earlier were unloaded. The heat was worse than anything I have ever known; the air so thick you felt it needed a soldier’s strength to fight through it, but a stronger soldier than our poor boys.

My dear, I am so glad that you are too young to be a nurse in this war, as you told me in your last letter you would like to be if you were old enough. Those ships were not nursing as any of us have known it or imagined. No pillows, no blankets, one bedpan to forty men, dehydration, the living next to the dead, the flies, the smell—it is a memory only death, I think, can erase.

Conditions here at the hospital are little better. I am on one of the dysentery wards. Sister Atkins and myself are in charge of 230 men. We can give them little; we try to keep them clean and give them emetine by hypodermic injection. But it is not enough. Nothing is enough. They waste away so that strong young men look like they are eighty, their faces shrunk to wrinkles, their hands too weak even to hold a cup to drink.

I cannot remember the last time that I slept—there is never a moment when it does not seem cruel to take a nap, knowing the agony that you must leave untended.

I have just written another letter. It was for an Australian soldier, as are many here. He asked me to write a letter to his mother. He said,‘Tell her I am too weak to write. ’And then he died. I sat there, looking at the blank space on the paper, not knowing if it was crueller to send it or to crumple it away. In the end I sent it to his commanding officer, who will do as he thinks best with it.

It fills me so with rage to think [a half-page blacked out here, and even by following the indentations of the pen with her fingers Midge couldn’t make out the words. And then, almost as though it were another letter:] I hope your studies are going well, my dear, and that your holiday with your aunt and uncle was satisfactory. I wish more than I could tell you that I could have offered you a home myself when your dear father died. But one day this madness
will be over. One day you and Tim and Dougie will be home. Perhaps I will join you there, in the quiet fields of Glen Donal.

I remain as always, my dear Margery, your most loving aunt,

Eulalie Jean Macpherson

Midge put the letter into the pocket of her tunic and stared out through the branches. What had Aunt Lallie been through to write like that? How could things be so bad? The war Lallie described was no glorious adventure. It sounded so different from the victories and heroism in
The Times
.

Why hadn’t Tim or Doug or one of Anne’s cousins said how bad things were?

Maybe, she thought hopefully, it’s not as bad where they’re fighting. Maybe it’s just that the hospitals can’t cope…

She felt almost reluctant to open Tim’s letter now, afraid of what she might read. Aunt Lallie was—well, old. Experienced. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the thought of Tim in pain, like the young soldiers in Lallie’s letter.

Tim’s letter was written in pencil. The writing was tiny and scrawled across the page. Even with the summer air around her, she grew cold as she deciphered it.

24 May, Gallipoli

Dear Sis,

Well, here we are. You wouldn’t believe how much it stinks, or how many flies could land on one person. Am writing this during a truce with the Turks. There have been thousands of Turkish bodies
in front of our trenches. Some have been there for three weeks. Which is why it stinks so much. I thought old sheep guts smelled bad. But dead men smell worse.

Felt something squelch under my boot this morning. I looked down and it was a man’s head, all green and black. It moved suddenly and for a moment I thought it was alive. Then I saw it was just the maggots that were moving. Couldn’t tell if he was ours or theirs. Remember old Campbell burying rabbit and sheep heads under Mum’s rose garden, and the time you and I dug one up when we were three? Well, think of that.

Anyhow, it rained this morning, and thank God for it, as it broke the smell a bit. We went up onto the plateau and through these gullies all covered in thyme, and there were about 4000 Turkish bodies. The Turkish Red Crescent blokes were giving out wool drenched in disinfectant to hold over our noses. Johnny Turk’s a good chap but I can’t say the same for Fritz. The blighters accused us of digging trenches while we pretended to dig graves. Lieutenant-`Colonel Fenwick—he’s our medical officer, a good man—speaks a bit of their lingo. He told them in no uncertain terms that the corpses were so rotten we couldn’t lift them and we had to dig pits right there to put the awful things into.