The Bannister Girls (23 page)

She had never believed herself to be so unforgiving. But that was the way she felt, and for the present it was the one thing she was unable to change.

The leave ship was crowded with khaki-clad veterans who were all of nineteen or twenty years old, and eager new recruits, full of show and aggression, all ready to put a bayonet up Jerry's backside. There was a sprinkling of Queen Alexandra's nurses, some officers, and the V.A.D.s, each group keeping strictly to themselves.

‘It's like belonging to separate clubs,' Angel commented, when they had found a space to put down their belongings. They wore their uniforms now, and eyed each other in the dreary dark cloth, trying to give false encouragement.

Why couldn't they have joined something more dashing, and worn those jolly little swishing nursing hats? Bravado made them flippant as they were crushed together on the none-too-sweet-smelling ship.

‘The damn thing will sink before it gets to mid-Channel at this rate,' Margot grumbled.

‘There can't be any English people in England any more,' Angel agreed in the same spirit. ‘They're all on board ships travelling between the Channel coasts.'

‘Or filling the trenches at the Front Line,' Margot muttered. Despite their jocularity, the enormity of what they were doing struck them forcibly. Listening to the varied catcalls from the soldiers testified to that.

The old hands … some bawdy, some subdued, having seen so much of the war … the new ones, arrogantly swaggering, having as yet seen nothing…

‘They say the trenches stretch for five hundred miles,' Angel tried to make interesting conversation as they were shoved along to make room for others. ‘How many do you think it takes to fill them if you have one man to every three feet of space?'

Margot's voice had an edge to it. ‘How the hell do I know? I was never any good at arithmetic –'

‘It takes a bloody lot, I can tell you!' A group of Tommies clustered together on the deck as the ship got under way, and grinned down at the two girls. ‘You'd better change your ideas if you think we each get three feet of space, sweetheart.'

A second soldier added his piece. ‘More like three inches when the going's rough, and if you count the dead 'uns buried in the mud beneath your feet, it's less than that.'

Margot felt decidedly queasy. The ship was lurching broadside as it moved out into the Channel, and she had to swallow deeply to keep down the bitter rush of bile in her mouth. Angel too, was gripping on to the rail and trying not to let the soldiers' words conjure up a ghastly picture in her mind.

‘Where're you two lovelies going?' one of the Tommies said cheerily. ‘You can warm up my bit of trench any day –'

‘Are you going to the trenches?' Angel looked directly into his eyes, instantly feeling a fool for asking such an inane question. Presumably that was where they were all going. Going to die, many of them…

‘'Course we are, sweetheart. It's our home from home. Can't you see our webbed feet?'

‘We don't know where we're being sent yet. My friend can drive, so she expects to be doing ambulance duty. I'm going to ask to go to a factory to pack food kits,' Margot said.

She and Angel looked at each other. If they did as they intended, they would be separated. In this unreal world, it was a worse thought than working in one of the field hospitals.

‘I might change my mind, though,' Margot added.

‘That's right, darling,' one of the older soldiers said lazily. ‘You stick to rolling bandages. Maybe I'll see you again. When I'm crying out for somebody to hold my hand in the night, I'd give a week's ration to see your pretty face looking down at me. I'll ask for you, if you tell me your name.'

‘Don't wish yourself into a hospital bed,' Angel said quickly. ‘It's bad luck to talk like that.'

The man laughed, a slightly chilling sound. ‘P'raps it was bad luck to be born at all. When you've been at the Front for a year or more, you get a gut feeling when your number's coming up, and this was the leave for me to put my affairs in order…'

‘Stuff it, Jimmy. You'll be frightening the poor lassies before they've even set foot in France. They're nobbut babbies, either of 'em.'

Angel's face burned. The man who spoke had an accent similar to Harriet Garth's. She turned her back on the group.

‘Let's walk around a bit,' she hissed to Margot. ‘If we keep moving, we may not feel so peculiar.'

She didn't need telling that the ship's motion was doing odd things to Margot. The whiteness of her face told her so. Angel was a reasonably good sailor, but it gave her an excuse to get away from these disturbing revelations. There was no use anticipating what they would find when they arrived in France. They were to be allocated their jobs then.

They managed to find a corner near the nurses, and leaned on the rail. Dover was a hazy mist behind them. Ahead of them was the narrow stretch of choppy grey sea, busily populated with craft plying back and forth between the two Allied countries. Taking the well and whole; bringing back the dead and maimed…

‘Did you mean what you said?' Angel asked. ‘About changing your mind about working in a factory?'

Margot nodded weakly. ‘Please don't talk about packing food right now. The thought of food at all makes me –' she paused while she breathed deeply, trying not to retch as she
fought down the nausea. There was nothing Angel could do but wait until the paroxysm subsided.

‘I don't want us to be separated,' Margot managed eventually. ‘We should stick together. I'll ask if I can be a hospital helper, then at least I'll see you between your ambulance journeys.'

‘We may have no choice,' Angel said worriedly. ‘But it won't do any harm to ask, and of course I want that too.'

‘Have you written to tell Jacques you're coming?'

The Channel breeze cooled the sudden heat in Angel's cheeks. It had been her first instinct…

‘No.' Her voice was flat.

‘Why on earth not? He'd get leave, try to see you! I thought you'd have written to him immediately.'

Angel didn't answer. Of course she'd wanted to let Jacques know, but the confusion in her mind still raged. The longing to see him again was tempered by a bittersweet fear that he may have changed in the months they had been apart. People did change, feelings altered, love died. It was almost better not to know than to risk seeing that in Jacques' eyes. Her own father had proved to her that love didn't last for ever. How could he still love her mother when he was consorting with that Yorkshirewoman? How long had the pretence gone on? Living a lie…

‘Angel, when are you going to tell me what's hurt you so badly?' Margot said quietly. ‘It's something to do with your father, isn't it?'

Angel drew in a painful breath. They were jostled on all sides by anonymous uniforms and unknown faces. She had meant to keep the hurt to herself, but somehow, as she stared out to sea and saw the growing line of the French coast turn into green and gold, she felt as though she and her closest friend were alone. And she was finally able to say the words that lay like gall in her heart.

‘He has a mistress. Doesn't that shock you? My so-respectable father!'

Margot knew what it must have cost Angel to confess to something that wasn't her fault, but which nonetheless touched every one of her family. And it wasn't so staggering, since Margot had already guessed the truth.

‘No, it doesn't shock me,' she said evenly. ‘Your father's human, like all of us. The Royals have had mistresses and lovers for centuries. Why should we lesser ones be so different?'

‘I don't care about Royals! I only care about
us
!'

‘Isn't that being a little selfish?'

Angel turned to look at her now, her face flushed with anger. To her friend, it was a healthier emotion than the blank bewilderment that had masked her face for much of the time since arriving on Margot's doorstep.

‘
Selfish
? It's my father who's being selfish –'

‘Who's he hurting? Not your mother, who's always been so self-sufficient she probably only ever needed him for procreation, and once all that sordid business was done with, I'll bet she never allowed him into her bedroom again. Can you deny it? Remember how wicked we used to feel at college, taking bets on it?'

‘I know, but –'

‘He's certainly not hurting Louise, who by all accounts is well rid of that chinless wonder, Stanley, and good luck to her with her haggis man. Ellen couldn't care less what your father does, as long as she goes her own sweet way. So that leaves you – Daddy's darling. Face it, Angel, you're jealous.'

Angel glared at her.

‘Don't be ridiculous –'

‘You're just plain, old-fashioned jealous. You can't bear to think that some other woman has claimed your father's affections. All these years when your dear Mama has been frigid and unloving, he's lavished all that generous love on little Angel, and now he's found a real warm flesh-and-blood woman. At least, I presume that's what she is. Do you care so little for him that you begrudge him that?'

‘I thought
you
cared about my feelings.'

Margot put a sympathetic arm around her.

‘I do, darling. That's why I can't bear to see you so unhappy, but don't blame your father for being a normal healthy man, and don't punish Jacques for just being a man.'

The V.A.D.s were being called together, and given brief instructions where to go when the ship landed at Calais. There was a depot there to deal with the fresh intake, and they would receive their orders. There was no more time for soul-searching or confidences, to Angel's relief. Margot's words had been too near to the truth she wouldn't admit and hadn't realised, to want to dwell on them.

Three hours later, after endless delays and arguments, they were given space in the same truck leaving for northeast France the following morning. Angel's First Aid training and ability to drive had given her slightly more status than Margot, but their insistence that they must stay together had finally worn down the Section Leader, who dismissed them as being of little use anyway.

They'd learn, she thought grimly, stamping their cards with a flourish. If they were out here for a lark, the way some of these upper class girls were, they'd soon be cut down to size. The hospitals receiving casualties from the Front Line soon decided which of the women volunteers were made of steel and which of cotton wool.

They had to sleep in makeshift quarters that night, on hard fold-up beds with little bedding. It was cold and miserable, and the other girls who had travelled with them eyed them suspiciously, in the same way that factory girls treated them with inverted snobbery. Resenting the air of breeding and money that no rough clothing could disguise; refusing to show friendship for fear of being taken down a peg or two.

‘Little snots,' Margot muttered to Angel. ‘What do
we care, anyway? We've got each other.'

They were on the road early next morning, herded into an army truck with two other V.A.D.s going to the same clearing hospital and a group of men returning to their unit. The other girls giggled and flirted with the soldiers, and completely ignored Angel and Margot. It didn't bother them. By the time they got out of the bone-shaking truck that jolted every bone in their bodies, they felt ready to crawl into hospital beds themselves.

The ‘hospital' caring for British wounded was part of the Town Hall in a small town called Piersville. The regular cottage hospital could never have dealt with all the casualties arriving almost hourly. Piersville was a typical French town, such as Angel and Margot had often visited with their families.

In its centre was the town square, surrounded with trees and little shops,
patisseries
and
pharmacies
and
boulangeries
, all the lovely names that tripped so delightfully off the tongue.

Nostalgia for times past swept over Angel. As children, she and Ellen and Louise had always loved the quaint French patois of the shopkeepers, charmed in their turn to find the little English girls practising their French with solemn attention to vowel sounds and accents. She had never been to Piersville, but the essence of the place was that of every small French town and village…

Except … the minute they alighted from the truck, stiff and aching in every muscle, she knew it was vastly different. In time of war, the very character of a country changed. The normally sleepy square throbbed with the sound of trucks and ambulances. The trees in the square, usually alive with chirping, gaily twittering birds, merely rustled their leaves as the traffic rolled by. There were no birds to be seen in the grey unseasonal sky over Piersville.

In the distance, Angel suddenly became aware of the dull
sound of gunfire to the east. It had probably been there all the time, but until the engine of their truck was silenced, she only just registered it. It wasn't so far away, she thought, her heart jumping, as a blast that was louder than the rest split the afternoon air.

There was something else. A sickly, unpleasant smell that drifted all around them as the doors of the hospital were opened wide. It was a weird mixture of the dank sweat of hopelessness, disease, excreta and vomit. It filled the very air, tainting it. Glancing at Margot, she could see by her pinched nostrils that she was aware of it too. But come what may, they were in it now. They were part of this bloody war.

A hospital official came out to the truck, a sheaf of papers in his hand.

‘There should be four for us today,' he said shortly to the truck driver. ‘Bannister, Lacey, Green and Martin.'

They sounded like a music hall act, Angel thought with a feeling of rising hysteria. The four of them side-stepping out onto some brilliantly lit stage, spangles glittering in the spotlight, Tango-orange smiles flashing at the audience as eight feet tapped their way across the stage to the sounds of wild applause … Bannister, Lacey, Green and Martin…