Call Nurse Jenny (11 page)

His back against the unlit mobile searchlight, Matthew stood beside the as-yet mute field telephone, his companions waiting, watching. Nothing doing yet but there soon would be. Thin clouds scudding across a full moon would soon disperse, leaving sky and earth bright from what had become known as a bomber’s moon – ideal for Jerry who had already checked the weather and knew he could enjoy good hunting tonight.

Which city would Jerry go for? Birmingham? Coventry? Callous to hope it would be Coventry, but Susan lived in Birmingham. What if she suffered a direct hit? It didn’t bear thinking about.

They had been writing to each other for two months now. Each time he thought of her, which seemed to him to be every other second, a flood of warmth swept through his insides followed by cold fear for her safety. He’d never felt like this before. If he were to lose her now …

The man beside him chuckled. ‘What’s that great big sigh for, Matt? Not that girl you go to see every time you get a pass?’

Bob Howlett was a close mate, of a similar background to his own. Their accents often drew smirks from the mix of Welsh, Scots, Midlanders and Cockneys, especially their rough-tongued sergeant, Pegg, constantly and vociferously cursing his luck in being saddled with a couple of junior NCOs whose education put them far above him, except for his military dedication, though theirs, according to him, was nil. Both had been before the selection board. Both had been rejected, one for his flippancy, the other for his apathy. Bob possessed no ambition whatsoever. Six feet tall and thin as a pole, propped at the moment against the sandbagged parapet he looked like a loose bag of bones with a stoop that resisted all the Army’s attempts to straighten him up. Nose aquiline, chin long and narrow, physically he was the most unprepossessing man Matthew had ever known, yet he displayed the sweetest disposition and an agonisingly mild temper. People didn’t come any better than Bob Howlett. Too good ever to become an officer.

Matthew grinned at him, laying aside thoughts of Susan for a little moment to follow this second train of thought. ‘I wonder what old Peggy would do if either of us ever did get a commission?’

‘Follow us to the ends of the earth probably,’ Bob said with lethargic sagacity. ‘It won’t be me though. I’m no leader of men. Don’t want to be. All I want is this war to end and me to be back with Phyllis and the kids.’

‘Amen,’ Matthew echoed fervently, at the same time hoping that Bob wouldn’t suddenly bring out his latest photos of his blonde-haired wife and three children as he was wont to do.

From far away came an almost inaudible eerie wail of a civilian air-raid siren. But for the stillness of the country around, it would not have been detected at all. Their own klaxon had sounded a short while before, sending men running to their stations. As though in obedience to that faint wail, the moonlight poured out from its shielding of cloud to throw every object on the earth beneath into stark relief. From the direction of distant Coventry tiny dull flashes silhouetted the black horizon. Thin cones of light, made squat by distance, began to play back and forth, crossing and re-crossing the sky in slow motion, low down, like flat furtive ghosts. Hardly discernibly came a low and ominous crump-crump, crump-crump-crump of a far-off barrage. Coventry was getting it. Matthew found himself offering up silent prayers of thanks, his radio set still quiet, their own searchlight still in darkness. Not Birmingham tonight, thank God.

The field radio crackled. Suddenly sick at heart, Matthew unhooked the earphones and put them on to note the coordinates they conveyed. A shape materialised from the darkness of the field around to stand beside him.

‘Why are we still in darkness, sonny?’ Sergeant Pegg’s voice filled the night air, making the nearby mobile parabaloid sound indicators tremble.

Matthew sprang to his job. ‘They’re going on now, Serg.’

To his barked command, the huge disc clonked. A shaft of blinding light pierced the sky, here picking out remnants of fagged cloud in fleeting, flat and fuzzy patches, moving hastily on, there the cone’s vortex swallowed up eerily by the immensity of space. But Sergeant Pegg was not happy. Stepping close, he put his lips close to his quarry’s ear to be heard over its messages.

‘’Alf asleep was we, Corp’ral?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, I suggest yer get yer finger out a bit more sharpish, next time, an’ stop bloody daydreamin’. Fine example you are. Whatever’d ’appen to us if you ever got a commission? The day you do, my arse’ll turn into a bleedin’ pumpkin, that’s wot. Now keep yer mind on yer job or I’ll ’ave them stripes orf yer before yer can say, “Oh bloody my!” ’

For twenty minutes Matthew kept his mind on his job, the sound indicator booming and roaring, amplifying every sound of any plane overhead, pinpointing its direction. On one occasion his searchlight trapped a plane, prompting others to sweep over and join it in a perfect star of beams, the ack-ack guns in a nearby sandbagged pit consequently opening up in an energetic earsplitting barrage. The plane swopped east, then north, finally managing to evade the deadly nucleus of light by slipping behind a low cloud and no doubt veering off to rejoin its fellows over Coventry.

One by one the searchlights were doused. Matthew’s radio went quiet. Bob and the rest of the crew fell to rolling cigarettes.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, his tone low and confidential, recalling the sigh Matthew had given earlier and interpreting it correctly as only a gentle, perceptive soul could. ‘Why don’t you propose to this girl of yours? In a letter. See what she says.’

Matthew looked up with a frown from the cigarette he too was rolling. On a corporal’s pay, packet cigarettes ran away with money and he did his best to discourage his parents sending cheques; telling them in no uncertain terms that it made him look bad before his hut-mates and that he was managing adequately enough.

‘I’ve only known her two or three months. I can’t go mad.’

‘If you feel about her the way you appear to me to, I would say you wouldn’t want to lose her to someone else. Better now than never.’

That was true. But marriage. Matthew gave Bob a nod to placate him and told himself he’d have to think about that one. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed it was what he wanted. He remembered having the same feeling about Jenny, strange little twinges of excitement in the pit of his stomach when he thought of her, but Susan had come along and the sensation had transferred itself to her, fourfold. He knew now who he wanted, that it was Susan for whom he would further his career, making her proud of him. Perhaps he’d take Bob’s advice, re-apply to the selection board. A man should do all he could to support his intended.

Sitting on his bed, a book on his knee for support, he absorbed himself in putting down on paper all he wanted to say. But reading it back, he cringed. The worst drivel he’d ever read – she’d laugh her head off. Better to tear it up before he did any damage and made a complete fool of himself.

But he didn’t tear it up. Instead he folded the flimsy wartime paper and laid it carefully inside his pay book. Finding a fresh sheet of paper he penned another letter, full of the things he normally wrote to her, his hut-mates, their doings, the smelly Eddie Nutt whose socks stank the place out every time he opened his locker, the lecherous clown Taffy Thomas, the foul-mouthed Bert Farrell, Bob and his family, Sergeant Pegg, the rotten food, the hard beds, how much he looked forward to seeing her again and hoped it would be soon, and how was she, and what had she been doing?

‘Ward, M.L.C. 092.’ Matthew shouldered through the waiting men to receive two letters. Perched on a wall in the weak sunlight of the November morning that threatened rain, he put aside the one from his parents and opened the other with its large childish handwriting.

The letter was short, two small ruled pages, laboriously written, with several words misspelt, which evoked a surge of compassion … no, more one of tenderness. It was little more than an outline of her activities since he’d last seen her – pictures with a girlfriend, a dance or two. A twinge of panic smote him that she could so easily meet someone else during one of those dances, someone more conveniently to hand than he.

‘Damn this bloody war!’ he uttered so vehemently that Bob looked up and grinned.

Hastily scanning the second page of writing which didn’t quite reach to its foot, it was the last line that brought relief flooding through his chest in a hot glow: ‘I’ve been worried you might get fed up of riting to me. I cant wait to here from you.’ A thousand words penned by the world’s greatest poet could not have conveyed as much meaning as he read into that one artless sentence.

Life took on new meaning; time was a most precious commodity. But it was one the Army seemed perversely set on spinning out into an eternity of misery, for just as he was settling down after his day’s duty to write to her the beefy bulk of Sergeant Pegg appeared to announce that the whole unit was on the morrow being sent to the wilds of Wales on an exercise, duration not divulged, all passes cancelled. Matthew, who had planned on wheedling a few hours’ pass for himself, suffered an intense sense of loss hardly to be borne.

‘Damn this bloody war!’ he uttered for the second time that day as he fought to rush off a letter to Susan.

The Blitz was a tyrant. Begun in September and still going strong, there was no chance for Jenny to be at home for Christmas or New Year. Her mother had either to spend both on her own or go to her sister in Leicester. That she wouldn’t do, fearing to travel alone. Daddy had always done everything and she, used to following him around like a small puppy, had still not learned independence.

‘Can’t you
try
to get away, dear,’ she asked when after the sixth or seventh attempt Jenny got through on the telephone to the couple next door – well, the girl next door now that her husband had been called up.

Her mother sounded out of breath from hurrying into the other house, shouting down the mouthpiece as though distance made this obligatory although there’d not been a lot of static crackling over the wires.

‘I’m on duty, Mumsy. I can’t just get time off. It’s terrible here. So many people being brought in injured.’

‘I don’t like us being apart.’ The voice filled with consternation. ‘I’ll have to spend all night Christmas down the shelter all on my own. We’ve had a bomb come down near here. Some of the tiles are off. It’s only a matter of time before this place is hit. I wish you were here. I feel so … so … isolated. Can’t you come home?’

‘They need every nurse they can get here at the moment, Mumsy.’

‘Well, it’s terrible. They should allow you home for New Year at least.’

‘German bombers don’t worry about holidays, Mumsy. They’ll drop them whatever day it is.’

‘I don’t think I can stand being here all on my own.’

‘Can’t Joan next door come into our shelter with you?’

‘I couldn’t ask her that, dear.’ Her mother’s voice had dropped to a whisper lest the girl overhear. ‘I couldn’t open my house to
strangers
.’

‘She’s not a stranger. You’re in her house right now. Now she’s on her own too, you could both become quite good friends and help each other. We need to help each other these days.’ The Blitz had made everyone conscious of the need for people to help each other.

‘She won’t be here at Christmas or New Year. She’s spending the holiday with her family or her husband’s family.’

Jenny tried not to let her sigh echo down the line. ‘Well, I can’t come home. The hospital’s bulging. There are even beds in the corridors. And during an air raid we have to get as many as we can under the beds or down into the basement. It’s like another hospital down there.’

‘If you asked them nicely, they’d let you have just
one
day?’

‘I can’t, Mum.’ She’d not been listening. ‘This line’s going funny. I’ll have to ring off.’

‘But Jenny …’

‘I’ll try to get home for a few nights after New Year, but it’s impossible at the moment. You’ll be all right, Mumsy.’ She wanted to say that her being at home wouldn’t stop a bomb dropping on it. ‘I’ll get time off eventually. I shall need it to get over all that we’re going through here.’

‘What, dear? What?’ The crackling was growing noisier; impossible to hear anything now. And her time was almost up, her money running out. Moreover, she knew she was taking liberties during work time.

‘I’ve got to ring off, Mumsy. Love you.’

‘What?’

‘Love you, Mumsy. I must go.’ A sturdy, starched blue figure was approaching. ‘I’m on duty. I’m wanted. Try to get home as soon as I can.’

She replaced the receiver on its hook, goodbyes cut short by the glare from the stone-grey eyes of Miss Grenville, approaching with a few attendant senior staff.

‘Have you not enough to do, nurse?’ The question was quietly authoritative. Jenny’s reply was hasty, unrehearsed.

‘My mother, Matron, asking if I’d be spending Christmas with her.’

In truth she had no real wish to go home. Christmas here would be far more exciting if she could believe what the nurses who’d been here last Christmas told her: wards decorated with paperchains fashioned from whatever coloured paper they could get hold of, spending any off-duty hours in each other’s rooms to make them; going round the wards on Christmas Eve, their blue capes drawn close around them as they sang carols in muted voices, each nurse holding a lit candle; later sitting in the nurses’ quarters all cosy and warm by a fire while others piled in to roast chestnuts and eat the mince pies someone’s mother had sent, swapping jokes and stories of latest conquests with junior doctors.

That had been last year’s. Jenny looked forward to this year’s but wondered if it would have changed since the Blitz started. But anything was better than just sitting at home with Mumsy, even if there was an air raid on Christmas Day itself. She wouldn’t even put that past the enemy.

She had been transferred to the London Hospital from her teaching hospital in October, a month after the Blitz had started. Eight weeks on and night bombing was still going on, not a single night free of it, remorseless, dominating all else. As darkness fell, she, like everyone else, merely prepared herself for the wail of sirens, the drone of bombers, and the horrible tearing sound and crash of falling bombs when the very air shook and dust drifted in from everywhere. The sky turned lurid to the mad clanging of fire engines, ambulance bells that heralded another stream of casualties. She and everyone felt it would go on until the war was finally won, all steadfastly refusing to imagine it could be Britain who might lose. Such a prospect remained so preposterous it was unthinkable.