Читать книгу The Girl From The Savoy - Hazel Gaynor, Hazel Gaynor - Страница 13

Maghull Military War Hospital, Lancashire

March 1919

‘I wonder if I might see your face among the clouds, because sometimes I forget you.’

My bed is the last in a long row of twenty on the ward. It means that I’m the last to be fed and the last to be seen by the doctors on their rounds, but it also means that I am beside the window, and for that I would come last at everything.

With a simple turn of the head I can look out at the sky and the distant hills. I can watch the clouds and the weather rolling in across the Irish Sea. I can turn my back on the rest of the ward and forget that I am here at all.

Today the sky is a wonderful shade of blue. Bluebell blue. A welcome sight after yesterday’s relentless sheets of grey rain. My nurse tells me she hopes to take a walk in the park later.

‘It’s lovely out,’ she says, her voice cheery and bright. ‘Looks like spring has arrived at last.’

I don’t speak. I barely acknowledge her as I stare at the window and watch a butterfly dancing around the frame. Unusual to see them at this time of year. A Peacock. Or maybe it’s a Painted Lady. I forget. I used to know my butterflies so well. Whatever it is, the nurses have let it out several times but it always comes back in.

‘I’ve brought some more of the letters to read,’ the nurse continues. ‘Shall I start?’

I turn my head towards her. She sits in a small chair beside the bed. Smooths her skirt across her knees. Tucks a loose hair behind her ear. I nod. What else can I do? She’s here now. She says the letters will help me remember.

She unfolds the page, and starts to read.

October 5th, 1916

My dearest Teddy,

I looked at the sky this morning. Not just a quick glance because a bird flew overhead, but really looked, like you always told me to. I stood perfectly still and did nothing but look up. It was all peaches and raspberries. Yesterday it was soft velvet grey, like moleskin. I wonder if the sky looks the same in France. I imagine it is different somehow. Darker.

Do you remember when we used to meet at the stone bridge and sit with our legs dangling over the edge, swaying like the bulrushes in the breeze? ‘Listen to the river,’ you would say. ‘What can you hear?’ I laughed at you. All I could hear was the water. But when I really listened I heard other things: the rush of wind through the grass, the hum of dragonfly wings, the splash as a fish took a fly from the surface. When I looked at the water all I could see was our reflections and the shadows of the clouds. But you told me to look beyond the surface and slowly my eyes would adjust and I’d see a fish. And like magic, an entire shoal would be there. They’d been there all along, but I couldn’t see them. I wasn’t looking properly. And then all sorts would appear from the murk: the glint of a coin, a child’s rattle, the flash of pink and gold as a trout flickered beneath the surface.

I remember.

It comforts me to know that we are looking at the same sky. If we look hard enough, what might we see, Teddy? I wonder if I might see your face among the clouds, because sometimes I forget you. I struggle to catch the image of you, like I struggled to see those fish. But I keep looking, keep searching, and suddenly there you are, as clear as if you were standing in front of me. As if you’d been there all the time.

I just need to keep looking and there you’ll be.

Don’t forget me, Teddy. Look for me.

Your Little Thing,

Dolly

X

P.S. I’ve been catching the leaves and making a wish like you showed me. I don’t need to tell you what I wished for.

The words of the letters upset her. Sometimes she dabs a little cotton handkerchief to her cheek to wipe away the tears. Perhaps she wrote letters like this to someone too. Perhaps they stir memories of her own.

‘Would you like me to read another?’ she asks. I look back to the window; stare at the trees with their buds promising new life. I shrug. ‘I know it’s difficult,’ she says, ‘but it’s good for you to hear them.’ She places a comforting hand on my shoulder. ‘They’ll help you remember. In time.’

I turn my head slowly to look at her. My eyes feel dull and tired. She looks distant; far away. Picking up another envelope from her lap, she removes the pages and continues.

November 12th, 1916

My dearest Teddy,

It is eight months since you left, and everything has changed so much. Conscription is so cruel. Everyone who is able to fight has gone now, even the married men. Those who are left – too young, or too old or infirm – drift around the village like dandelion seeds. They feel guilty and useless and wish they were out there fighting with you all. I tell them they should be grateful they’re not and that I’d give anything to make you a year or two younger so you’d still be here with me.

We are all doing our bit. I seem to be knitting, mostly. Socks, gloves, and other comforts. It turns out I’m almost as bad at knitting as I am at sewing, but if I keep trying I might improve. Others are making Christmas puddings to send to you all and everyone’s helping out on the farms. The Land Army, it’s called.

I finished up at the big house and work in the munitions factory since I turned eighteen. It’s hard work, but anything’s better than domestic work and it pays better. We wear trousers! We clock in and out and fill the shells with TNT powder. They call us ‘canary girls’ because the powder stains our skin yellow. The work is dangerous – there was a big explosion at a factory in Faversham down south – but at least I feel like I’m doing something to help, and sometimes, when we sit out on the grass on tea break, we feel quite happy. I know we shouldn’t because there’s a war on, but Ivy Markham says you can’t be maudlin all the time. We all feel terrible when one of the girls gets the King’s Telegram. Oh, that’s so awful, Teddy. We don’t know what to say and I know everyone else feels the same as I do deep down – relieved that it wasn’t news about our own, and that’s an awful thing to think when someone’s just lost somebody dear to them.

I’ll try to write with happier news next time. Mam says I shouldn’t be telling you sad things. She says the job of the women back home is to cheer you all up.

Your Little Thing,

Dolly

X

P.S. the camera arrived safely. I think you are right to send it back, considering the ban from the War Office. It would be silly to get into trouble if your officers found that you still had one, and worse still if it fell into enemy hands. I’ll keep it safe until you come home.

The room is silent apart from the occasional cough from another patient. I look out at the distant chimney pots of the factories, reaching up toward the clouds like grubby fingers. The nurse tells me they made bombs in that factory during the war. They make ladies’ gloves there now. Sometimes it all seems so pointless.

‘Another letter?’ she asks.

I shake my head. What’s the point? She must have read these letters to me a dozen times and still I cannot remember this girl called Dolly who says such nice things. I hold out my hand and take the pages from her. They are watermarked and stained with the filth of war. She told me they were found in the breast pocket of my greatcoat. A great bundle of them, carried against my heart. I fold the pages as neatly as I can, following the worn creases. The tremble in my hands makes hard work of what would once have been such a simple task.

She takes the pages from me and pats my hand. ‘Tea?’

I nod.

‘Two lumps?’

I nod again. I can remember that much, two lumps of sugar in my tea. I can remember the name of my cat, the date of my mother’s birthday, how to make a corn dolly. Trivial things. Everything else is a distant fog, my once apparently happy life slowly erased by years of war until I am left only with the nightmares that haunt me.

The doctors are troubled by my condition. They prod me and poke me and write things down. Words I don’t understand for a condition they don’t understand: delusions, hallucinations, hysterical mutism. I’ve seen their notes. But despite their many treatments – hypnosis, electric shock, basket making, warm baths – they can’t make me better and they won’t send me home. They have labelled me ‘Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous’. A fancy name for what the men called shell shock. We all knew someone who was sent back from the front, suffering with their nerves. Lacking Moral Fibre, was another label the officers stuck on it. The young lad in the bed beside me says I need to pull myself together, that if I keep screaming at night and talking about the things I’ve seen they’ll send me off to the county asylum. And this girl in the letters, this Dolly, she tells me of so many wonderful things I have seen and done. It seems such a shame that I can’t do them anymore.

The guns are silent, but I am still fighting my war.

It is all I have now. War, the nurse, and the butterfly at the window.