For King and Country (23 page)

But then Mrs Lowery had begun to resent the time the housemaid spent helping the doctor, and whenever he called for her she would find something – some trifling task in the house or the
kitchen that had to be done by the housemaid, that minute. Then the housemaid began to resent Mrs Lowery, although she was certain she’d never shown it. Things were coming to a head, but it
was when the doctor started wanting to take her out on his calls with him, Sally knew there was going to be trouble.

She’d only told Armstrong half the tale. The rest didn’t bear thinking about. She turned on her side and pulled the pillow down to support her neck, then drew her knees up and tucked
her feet into her nightie, determined that she wouldn’t think about it, because if she let her mind start running on that track, she’d never get to sleep. But determination availed
nothing; the more she dragged her thoughts away from the Lowerys, the more they were drawn back.

She’d lain there for five minutes or so, becoming more and more wakeful, when her ears pricked up at the sound of something spattering on her window. Nothing but a gust of rain. It would
soon put the last of the bonfire out. But no, there it was again, not rain, something else – gravel. Thanking her lucky stars that Curran and Armstrong were back in their own rooms she crept
out of bed and carefully raised the sash, to peer out into a night that was as black as pitch, with only a thin sliver of a moon hanging in the sky, giving no light at all. She could make nothing
out, and then she heard it, a muted hiss:

‘Sally! Sally!’

What was he thinking of, doing such a stupid thing? If anybody heard him . . . She slipped her slate blue serge skirt on over her nightie, put on her good coat and her hat and, stealthy as a
cat, groped her way out of her room, along the corridor, and down the back-stairs, to find the back door was locked.

Oh, heavens, she ought to have known. She racked her brains for the nearest escape route, but there was nowhere nearby. The conservatory doors would be locked by now as well. She would have to
go the full length of the bottom corridor, and see if she could get out of the window in the probationers’ sitting room. As silent as a serpent she slid along, gained the sitting room,
crossed to the window and raised the sash.

With nerves as taut as a bowstring, she slipped out of the window. He must have been listening for the slightest sound because he was there beside her in a moment. ‘Have you gone wrong in
your mind?’ she whispered.

‘I wanted to talk, that’s all. To hear my own voice, talking to somebody who knows who I am, before I do go “wrong in my mind”. Come on, there’s still a bit of
light from the bonfire.’

‘But throwing gravel at my bedroom window, man!’ she protested, trying to keep up with him. ‘What if somebody heard you? And how did you know which one?’

‘Reconnaisance. They teach you that in the army. And nobody did see me. Anyway, I’m beginning not to care.’

‘What? Well then, what about me? I care. I don’t want to spend years of my life sitting in a cell, sewing mailbags.’

‘That’s not very likely.

‘Of course it’s likely!’ She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘What’s brought this on, anyway? It’s not so long since you were begging me to carry letters to your
mother, and keep my mouth shut about it, and now I have, you’re going to end up getting us both caught. Just have a bit of patience. She’ll find a way to get to you.’

‘She already has. I saw her yesterday, sitting on the platform in Central Station.’

They’d reached the corner of the building, just within sight of the bonfire’s dying embers. Sally stopped, and after walking on for a few paces, he returned, to stand beside her.
‘Central Station! What a stupid place to choose!’ she hissed. ‘The amount of people who go through there! Anybody might have seen you.’

‘Anybody might, but they wouldn’t take any notice. Not when it’s dark and they’re all intent on getting home. A soldier in an Australian uniform, hiding behind his
newspaper? People wouldn’t be looking for Will Burdett under that lot. They wouldn’t be looking for me at all. I’m dead, remember?’

‘You soon will be, if you carry on the way you are.’

‘You should have seen the way she looked when she first saw me; she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and she hasn’t even seen what’s under the dressing yet. She looks
about fifty years older an’ all. She’s gone as thin as a rake. It bucked me up no end, I can tell you.’

‘Well, at least she knows you’re alive now. She must be glad she’s got one of you back.’

‘You wouldn’t have known it. After a bit she just sat there beside me with the tears dripping off her nose end, and I’m behind the paper, cracking on I don’t know her.
And then she got on the train, and I’d have sold my soul to get on with her and go home but I just had to sit there, and watch it go, and think: it’s finished. It’s all changed
– we’re not even the same people. I can’t be your son; I can’t be Will Burdett any more, and you’d be better off if you’d never had me, or any of us. It was the
same when I saw you at the bonfire, and you were talking to some of the lads and then Dr Campbell shoved his way in. If Will Burdett had been alive they wouldn’t have stood a chance,
I’d have been in the thick of the fun and games, but instead of that I kept out of the way. That’s where I seem to belong now, out of sight.’

‘It was you I was watching for when Dr Campbell got a hold of me, and if he hadn’t, I’d have been able to wait a bit longer. I’d have wandered about until you saw me, and
we might have had five minutes out of everybody’s way.’

‘That’s just it, Sally, man. I’m sick of it, sick of trying to keep out of everybody’s way, and fed up of pretending to be somebody I’m not. Can you understand what
it’s like, living like that? You can’t. It’s a bloody nightmare.’

The meeting with his mother should have cheered him up, and instead it had cast him down further than ever, Sally thought. But brooding and feeling sorry for himself were no good. She’d
have to snap him out of it.

‘Stop it, man, or where’s it going to lead? What did your mother say, anyway?’

‘She’s got the idea I’m going back to Stafford with her, to live with her father. One of her brother’s lads is dead, and the other reckons he’s going to Canada
after the war, so there’s an opening in the photography shop.’

‘Well you could do that, surely? You could have a rosy future there,’ she encouraged, ‘A sight better than working down Annsdale pit.’

After a long silence came a long sigh. ‘Aye, it might be all right, if it were all straightforward and above board. It might be Hibbs and Nephew, at the finish, but the police never stop
looking for deserters, Sally, and the first place they look is among their relations. There’s talk about an Amnesty now, you hear it all the time. But there’ll be no amnesty for lads
like me, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’

‘But they won’t be looking if they think you’re dead, and they won’t go all the way to Stafford, surely.’

‘Somebody’ll put two and two together before long.’

‘They will if you go parading round Central Station with your mother very often,’ she said, ‘but nobody in Stafford knows you from Adam. Your grandfather and your uncles will
vouch for you, and you’d be out of the way at the back of the shop most of the time.’

‘Kept out of sight in the darkroom, you mean? You haven’t been listening, Sally, man. I’m fed up with it. I’m sick of keeping out of sight and creeping about like a
thief. And I love my mother, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hidden away with her and my uncle, I want to be making a life of my own among people my own age. I want a normal
carry-on, with a wife and family like everybody else. I wish to God I’d never deserted.’

‘Why did you, then?’

‘Not because I’m a coward, although I know that’s what you think.’

‘Keep your voice down!’ she warned. ‘Why, then? Why did you desert?’

‘It’s time you went in, Sally. You’ve a day’s work to do tomorrow, and I shouldn’t have got you out of bed. I should never have got you involved in this. I never
intended to.’

But he wasn’t going to get out of it as easily as that. ‘Well, you did get me out of bed, and you did get me involved, and I’m here now, so you might as well tell
me.’

But he was off down another track, with the same expression of disgust on his face that she’d seen when she showed him the newspaper advertisement. ‘Do you mind that time the teacher
had us reading
The Tempest
, and she made me read the part of Caliban, that “deformed monster of the island”? I dreamed about that the other night. She must have had the gift of
prophesy, that old witch.’

‘She wasn’t an old witch, but she had the gift of taking you down a peg or two, for baiting one of the poor lasses, as I remember – calling her monkey-face and telling her she
had a big nose and sticking your fingers down your throat pretending to be sick when somebody said they’d seen you kissing her, until you had all the other kids rolling about laughing,’
she snapped, engulfed in a flood of anger and shame as a memory that had been buried for years resurfaced and hit her with the force of a sledgehammer.

‘I don’t remember that,’ he said, but it was obvious from the look on his face that he did.

‘Well, I mind it very well. I had a habit of putting my hand over my nose for years after that,’ said Sally, overcome with pity for her soft, shy twelve-year-old self whose heart had
been lacerated by the conceited idol of all the girls.

‘Why, I never said it, anyway.’

‘You did, though.’

‘Can’t have.’

‘Oh, yes, you did.’

‘Oh, no I didn’t! Anyway, Nurse Wilde, the pantomime’s over, and it’s time you went to bed, like the good little infant you are. You’re out of bed when you should
be asleep, and you’re fraternizing with the soldiers. You’re breaking the rules twice over.’

‘You’re a fine one to tell me that, when it’s you got me out of bed.’

‘Well, seeing you’re going to sacrifice your life to nursing, you’d better not take any notice of me, you’d better go and do what the home sister tells you, even
supposing she tells you to jump in the Tyne. I’m glad you can stand being told who you can talk to and what time to go to bed, just as if you were a kid, by a lot of old maids who never had
any bairns of their own. It’s lucky you love being so bloody subservient. It’ll make your vocation easy, and when you’re an old maid yourself you’ll get your turn, nailing
all the young ones down. That’s something to look forward to, is it not?’

A lot of old maids! The insult to herself she could have swallowed, but she was stung to fury at this assault on the dignity of women she respected by a man who owed them nothing but gratitude!
And that was his opinion of nurses whose years of hard training and devotion had gone a long way to saving his arm, and what was left of his miserable face. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said,
‘and I’ll tell you something else. If Will Burdett’s dead, he’s nobody to cry for. He was a rotten little beggar when he was a kid, and I don’t think he’d ever
have got any better.’

‘He got better enough to go all the way to Darlington, chasing after you. He thought he was chasing a lass who had a heart, but she turned out to be a sour old maid in the making, with
vinegar running through her veins instead of blood. I can see it all as clear as crystal now. Pity I couldn’t then – I’d never have gone to collect my white feather.’

‘N
ever mind the Champagne, my pets,’ Armstrong declared. ‘I’ll stand you all a celebration cup of tea!’

The results of the final exams had been posted on the noticeboard, and she stood by the trolley in the probationers’ sitting room dispensing a strong brew from the massive brown enamelled
teapot into the cups ranged on its surface. One of her own set picked up a cup, and nodded towards another third year sitting nearest the fire.

‘Academic Armstrong, you’re bound to get the gold medal for our year, if Pauline Richmond doesn’t pip you to the post.’

Sally looked at Richmond, a very stately person who, like most of the seniors, lacked Armstrong’s egalitarian attitudes and usually kept herself aloof from first years. Sally had hardly
exchanged two words with her since she started nursing, and imagined that her ideas about what was good and bad for discipline would be very similar to Major Knox’s.

The rivals’ expressions became more guarded. ‘I don’t know,’ Richmond said. ‘The rest of you have passed as well. We’ve got some strong
competition.’

‘Not from me, you haven’t, and not from the rest of our set, either,’ said the third year.

‘I’m glad we’re all safely through, though,’ another said. ‘Wouldn’t it have been horrible if any of us had failed? They’ll be keeping you on as a staff
nurse, I suppose?’

Evidently embarrassed by her good fortune Armstrong turned pink, and admitted, ‘Yes, if I want to stay. But don’t worry, they’re too short-staffed to get rid of anybody just
yet.’

Not all the finalists would get taken on, Sally surmised. They were such a small group it might have been possible, but only the medal-winners would have any hope of a staffing job. The hospital
wouldn’t want to pay a lot of qualified nurses while it could get a supply of probationers on the cheap. How awful for the women the hospital hadn’t chosen to keep, Sally thought,
taking her tea. ‘There’s really no chance of you doing Army Nursing, then, Armstrong?’ she asked. ‘Is there still a bar on women who haven’t done two years as a
VAD?’

‘No, there’s no chance, and if there were I wouldn’t take it now. If the army wants its men looked after by untrained volunteers for a pittance, I can’t stop it. I pity
the men, but I’ve got no well-to-do family supporting me, and I want a decent salary in exchange for my years of hard training. I started doing a bit of serious thinking when I was nearing my
finals, and when I got my little holiday I did a bit of finding out.’

‘Finding what out?’

‘Finding money out, my pets,’ she said, lifting her own cup and going to stand with her back to the fire. ‘Since I’m taking myself to market, I want the best price on
offer. So I went to a British Nurses Association meeting and talked to a few of our colonial colleagues. My word, I got my eyes well and truly opened, I can tell you. As soon as the war’s
over I’m hanging up my halo and I’m going to work in the colonies for an eight-hour day and decent pay.’