A stranger to herself, p.23
A Stranger to Herself, page 23
‘Why not?’
‘We’ll be at war, silly goose. Think about it, while I doze.’ He leaned back and shut his eyes and seemed to be asleep. He rolled over and tried to pull her down beside him. Violet stood up and scrambled down the hill to the car. She was sitting in it when he joined her, slightly sulkily. She stuck her nose in the air and sat quite still as they drove back. In the end, ten miles and three-quarters of an hour later, he said, ‘No hard feelings, Violet. You are an incredibly attractive woman, you know. And there’s something else about you – you’ve got a bit of go in you. I don’t know, Violet, but no wonder Fred married you.’
Violet, driving on winding roads through the sun-filled countryside, felt very happy in spite, or probably because, of Tommy Brereton’s approaches. She condescended to say, ‘It’s been a lovely day, by and large.’
‘Yes, by and large,’ he said.
Farnley House was again silent when they entered. Violet wondered if the sign that disputes were taking place in an upper-class home weren’t the exact opposite of signs in other classes. Here, instead of shouts and crashes, everyone seemed to be in a different room, not speaking to each other, and the servants were tiptoeing about to avoid disturbing or irritating the combatants. Standing at the window of the empty drawing-room Violet thought the gardener and his boy had started to cut the lawn and been told to stop. Certainly, it was only half mowed.
‘Where have you been, Violet? I’ve been extremely worried,’ said Frederick, coming in suddenly and not shutting the door before he spoke.
‘I took her out to lunch, Fred,’ explained Tommy Brereton, who was lolling in a chair.
‘That’s all very well and good.’
‘I told Brough,’ protested Violet. ‘Surely he told you?’
‘It’s not good enough—’
‘Keep calm, Fred,’ advised Tommy, a little shocked by Frederick’s outburst. ‘This isn’t the age of Victoria. Women are allowed to leave their homes in broad daylight without a servant in attendance you know. I hesitate to mention it, but we left for reasons of tact. I felt perhaps private family matters were under discussion and thought you might be happier for the moment to be without a guest at luncheon. I suggested we might go out to lunch and Violet kindly agreed to come with me. We had lunch and returned safe and sound as you see.’
Frederick’s lips tightened. He said, ‘Sorry, Tom. You’re quite right. I’m sorry, Violet. The heat’s making me a little short-tempered.’ Still in his town suit, he had obviously been subjected to at least an hour’s barrage from his mother, blaming him for having disloyally conspired with his uncle to disinherit his brother. She’d probably attempted to persuade him to put pressure on Leopold to change his decision.
Meantime, Tommy Brereton stood up and stretched. ‘Frederick,’ he said, ‘you’re a gentleman, so you are. If you’ll both excuse me, I think I’ll go and study form in the library.’
Frederick shook his head, embarrassed again, ‘I’m afraid you might find Laurence and my uncle there …’
‘Well, why don’t we all go for a bathe in the river?’ suggested Tommy.
‘A good idea,’ said Frederick relieved at the suggestion. ‘Violet, are you coming?’
‘I think I’ll go and see baby,’ Violet said. ‘You go, Fred.’
When she went up to the nursery Nanny Thwaite and the children were not there. She went and lay down in her room and through the open windows smelt flowers and cut grass. She drowsed to the sounds of crickets on the lawn below, the occasional twitter of birds, the heavy humming of the bees. It had been a lovely afternoon driving along with Tommy, climbing the hill in the sunshine. If only there could be more such afternoons, she thought, but there couldn’t be, wouldn’t be. It wasn’t possible, somehow.
Seven
Violet Levine, 1917
‘Hold that lamp higher, to the right,’ said the surgeon.
Violet Levine, standing by the patient’s head, lifted the lamp, catching sight of a white face, stubbled chin, prominent nose. She observed a louse crawling into the pale brown hair, at the hairline. She dared not move to catch it. Her glance lowered down the blanketed body to the soldier’s two bare legs, one pale white, except for the flea-bites, and thin as a stick, the other with a mass of red and pink gauze on the knee and down to the middle of the calf.
Sister Maclean was unwrapping the gauze. ‘I should have preferred this to have been done earlier,’ said Dr Swann.
She said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and went on unbandaging, but the four people in the wooden operating theatre, Sister Maclean, the two VADs, semi-trained volunteers, one of whom was Violet, even the doctor himself, knew the complaint was meaningless. One of the two men on stretchers by the wall of the hut whimpered, perhaps with pain, perhaps in a morphia dream. The layers of gauze on the soldier’s wound grew redder. As they gazed at his smashed knee and upper leg, the knee a pulp, pumping out thin threads of blood with fragments of white bone poking through, the leg awkwardly broken, and black and blue with bruises, Swann said, ‘I’ll open the leg. If it’s a clean break we’ll try to save it.’ But the soldier’s leg was splintered vertically below a horizontal break. Swann said gloomily, ‘An amputation. Can you tighten the tourniquet again, nurse, for a few minutes. Is he well under, nurse?’ he asked Violet.
‘Yes, doctor,’ she told him.
‘Scalpel then,’ he said.
Plump Sister Maclean handed him a scalpel. Violet held the lamp high, her arm aching, and looked across at the other VAD, holding the lamp. She was breathing deeply. ‘Don’t look, Nurse Adrian. Hold the lamp steady,’ instructed Sister Maclean.
Neither Violet, nor Suzanne Adrian should have been there in the operating theatre at St Luc on the Normandy coast on that May night, but patients and staff had gone down wholesale with virulent dysentery of the trenches. Half the nurses were barely able to crawl to the latrines and back to their huts. They could not have stood up for the length of one operation, let alone the twelve, or was it now thirteen operations, Violet wondered, which they’d done that evening. It had started after supper when three truck-loads containing ninety injured men, no better for having been pinned down on the roadside for five hours by enemy fire, had come in from a dressing station near Arras. The orderlies had omitted to provide water for a journey which should have taken only two hours. Since then the two operating theatres at No 53 hospital, St Luc, had been dealing with the worst injured. There had been a bombardment and half an hour after they switched on, the lights and the power had failed. Now she heard another plane approaching above the sickening sound of the surgeon’s saw cutting through the thick bone below the man’s knee. Violet, who had ears like a cat, was supposed to warn people of what she heard. This was not the moment, with the man’s leg half off. Her arms were on fire. She prayed Dr Swann would hack the leg off quickly, just so that she could put the lamp down. There was a thump as he turned to put the leg in one of the big metal bins against the wall, a crash as the lid went back on. Violet and Suzanne Adrian moved closer, put their lamps on the operating table, handing the sister a bottle of carbolic, gauze, crêpe bandages, safety pins from the surgical trolley. In two minutes the stump of the soldier’s leg was stitched, tidily bandaged, and stretcher bearers were already in the doorway.
‘Next,’ said Dr Swann. Violet steadied herself.
Sister Maclean said, ‘I don’t think the VADs can go on any longer, doctor. It’s been four hours. I don’t need to remind you they shouldn’t be here.’
The doctor’s shoulders sagged. He said, ‘Can these men wait though?’
‘As much as any of them can,’ said Sister Maclean.
‘Plane’s getting closer, Sister,’ said Violet.
‘That’s it,’ said Dr Swann. ‘It’s probably a Hun. Ours wouldn’t be flying over here at night. All right,’ he said, pulling down his mask and starting to strip off his gloves, ‘take these men back. I’ll do them first at six thirty tomorrow. At least there’ll be light. Will there be any proper nurses available, Sister?’
‘I think we should have a few back on duty, doctor,’ said Sister Maclean.
‘I’m off then,’ he said. He turned in the doorway. ‘Thank you, nurses,’ he said over his shoulder.
When he had gone Sister Maclean gave instructions about which huts the men should go to, and the orderlies removed the amputee, and the two soldiers who had been lying waiting for their operations, on their stretchers. Meanwhile Violet got water in buckets from the standpipe outside the hut and set them to boil on the stove in the corner. Suzanne, tall and blonde, scooped up bloodstained dressings, surgical instruments, needles, chloroform pads, pieces of bloodied shrapnel, removed bullets, which had fallen on the floor during the hours of intensive operations, and Sister Maclean swabbed the metal trolley with surgical spirit and tidied the instruments which had not been used. She shouted for an orderly to remove the bins.
Violet, on her knees, scrubbing the wooden floor with Lysol and warm water, wearing thick rubber gloves to keep the corrosive liquid from her hands, said, ‘Proper nurses, indeed. We’re only fit to work in operating theatres, take charge of wards of thirty men, some dying – if we’re not proper nurses, who is?’
‘The Voluntary Aid Detachment is like the rest of Europe, overtaken by events,’ said Suzanne, pushing the instruments into a steriliser under which a small benzine-fed jet hissed. She shut the lid.
Sister Maclean straightened up and went to the door for a moment. She looked out into the darkness, breathing deeply. ‘Well, thank you, girls, for what you’ve done. You know Dr Swann didn’t mean to insult you. It was only his thoughtlessness. I’ll try and get you back on the wards tomorrow, normal duties, but it depends on who’s back on their feet, or who’s off them. You’d better be ready, here, at six thirty tomorrow, just in case.’ She turned round and said, ‘Put the soiled dressing buckets outside for the orderlies and tidy up generally for tomorrow. Then you can go off. I’m going to check the wards.’
Suzanne and Violet dropped their soiled aprons and cuffs into a bin outside the hut, walked back to the nurses’ canteen past the long wooden wards each housing thirty soldiers, injured by gas, affecting lungs, eyes, kidneys by shrapnel and bullets, the men with pneumonia, tuberculosis and VD. They had survived the trenches, the field dressing stations and if they survived No 53 hospital, they would be shipped back to England on the same boats which had brought out their replacements.
Violet was almost asleep as she stared into the mug of tea next to the doorstep of bread and butter she and Suzanne had persuaded the canteen manageress to produce for them, so late at night. Suzanne’s fair head was drooping on her chest.
‘Suzanne,’ she said loudly.
Suzanne’s head jerked up. ‘Oh, I was asleep.’
Violet asked herself, as well as Suzanne, ‘I wonder how much longer this can go on? There was a Hundred Years War, wasn’t there? How did they manage it?’
‘They had bows and arrows, I suppose, not tanks and mortars,’ muttered Suzanne.
Her head was sinking again. Her eyes closed. Violet thought Suzanne should go home. She was too thin, now, and she moaned at night. One of her three brothers had been killed in Italy, another was still fighting there. Yet, going home was sometimes hard, as well, a different kind of shock.
In London on leave a month before, Violet had taken a cab from Victoria Station, wondering at the quiet streets. So much had changed in three years. There were so many men in uniform and so many civilians, from old people to children, were wearing black. Everywhere she looked were tired faces, men on crutches, women in mourning – this was the third spring of the war; almost a million men had already died.
Laurence had been in France only two months when Brough carried into the drawing-room at Cavendish Square the telegram announcing his death. Sophie, Caroline and Violet were all sitting by the fire. All three looked up as he came in, at the silver tray on which lay the dreaded yellow envelope containing the telegram. All three were afraid. If Brough took the message to Violet, it meant that Frederick had been killed, injured or captured; if he took it to Caroline, it meant that something had happened to Laurence. The news that one of them had been mildly wounded or captured might be a relief – either would get them away from the fighting. Each woman waited for Brough to move towards her. He, wanting to speak, and knowing that he should, since he was the only person there who knew to whom the telegram was addressed, found his voice would not obey him.
Violet stood and asked, ‘Who’s the telegram for, Brough?’ She moved towards him, hand outstretched, to take it.
As she did so Brough said gently, ‘Mrs Laurence,’ and carried it over to Caroline in her chair.
‘I’ll open it,’ said Sophie Levine, her voice cracking. She jumped up.
Brough ignored her and bent over the motionless Caroline. She took the envelope. He went to the door, turned, and saw Sophie Levine standing over her daughter-in-law, ‘Open it, Caroline.’
Caroline did so. She sat staring at it and saying nothing.
‘Caroline!’ cried Sophie and seized the telegram from her hand. She gave a great cry and fell, still clutching the message, to the floor, saying, ‘No – no – no.’
‘Oh, God!’ shouted Violet. ‘Brough!’ Together they tried to pull her up, Violet saying, ‘Sophie. He’s at peace now.’
Sophie Levine wailed, ‘What do you know? What do you know? Frederick’s still alive.’ She sounded almost angry, as if both of her sons should have died when Laurence did or, perhaps, as if she should have been allowed to choose which should live, which die. ‘Think of Caroline,’ urged Violet.
Caroline spoke, saying in a flat voice, ‘I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it. Stop, Sophie. Stop.’
‘Get the doctor, Brough,’ said Violet, as they got Sophie to her feet and lowered the sobbing woman into a chair. ‘Caroline, I’m so sorry.’
‘Make her stop that noise, Violet,’ Caroline said tonelessly. Then, ‘Oh, Laurence – Laurence. What am I going to do without you?’
Rosalind arrived at midnight in evening dress, having found Violet’s telegram telling her of Laurence’s death when she came in. ‘How is she?’ she asked Violet in the hall.
‘Desperate,’ said Violet. ‘She’s talking and talking.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ Caroline had cried at her, ‘you don’t know what it’s like to love a man, body and soul. You don’t know what I’ve lost, Violet.’
Violet reflected that this was the second time today she’d been told, more or less, that Frederick should have died, not Laurence. The previous months with her mother and sister-in-law had been dull and painful as the three waited – for newspapers with accounts of the war, for letters or for the announcement that one of the brothers would be coming home on leave. The next years, she calculated cruelly, could only be worse with Caroline grieving and Sophie, perhaps, inconsolable. Caroline would recover, she estimated; Sophie might never get over the death of her favourite son. And she, Violet, would have to avoid all this, somehow or other. She had to get away.
In the hall Rosalind had sympathised, ‘You must be so upset yourself, Violet, but now you’re all they have.’
Violet said nothing.
Rosalind gazed at her. After a pause Violet declared, ‘I can’t stay here.’ She was on the margin of hysteria herself. ‘There’s some sandwiches and a thermos in the drawing-room, I think. I’m off to bed.’ On the second stair, she turned and hissed at Rosalind, ‘Don’t think I’m stopping here out of loyalty – I’m not.’
This incident, demonstrating Violet’s hard-heartedness to everyone who heard the tale, was talked much of in subsequent months, particularly when Violet joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and embarked on training as an auxiliary nurse at a London teaching hospital – where, unlike some of the better-off volunteers who had joined under the impression that their duties would mainly consist of flower-arranging and the wiping of fevered brows, she stayed the course.
By winter Violet was nursing in France, living in a shared hut where, if the window was left open at night, snow accumulated at the ends of the beds by morning. Sea winds lashed the hospital blocks of No 53 hospital, St Luc, in Normandy. The sounds of the bombardment often came to them from inland. Convoys of sick and wounded men came in and in.
Sophie and Caroline closed up the house in London and retreated to Farnley with Joseph and Pamela. There, they were spared the worst of the food shortages. Increasingly, basic commodities like flour and potatoes became impossible to obtain. The population, though not quite starving, was severely undernourished, but at Farnley, where elderly men and landgirls were at work, hens were kept, crops grown, gardens tended and what men were left could still trap and shoot game.
Violet spent her first leave with Sophie and Caroline but she found the experience depressing. Sophie urged her to return and take up her family duties. Caroline appealed, ‘For God’s sake, Violet, come back. I can’t get through another winter here alone.’
But she was adamant. Her conscience, she claimed, wouldn’t allow her to shirk the responsibility of nursing men who had, like Laurence, sacrificed themselves for their country. In fact she saw clearly that with many of the servants gone it would be convenient for Sophie to have with her a daughter-in-law brought up to cook, clean and carry in coal. Violet wasn’t going to do that, or help Caroline to grow vegetables in the garden. Apart from anything else she’d discovered she liked nursing, and was good at it. She’d been at Farnley only a week when Nanny Thwaite, furious that Violet was not planning to stay at home and take care of her child, offered her resignation, saying that the work was too much for her. Violet promptly telephoned her headquarters in London for the address of a fellow VAD who had been sent home after a series of illnesses caused by exhaustion, contacted the young woman, Jessie Oates, by telegram, got a favourable reply next day, and told Sophie that a suitable replacement for Nanny Thwaite was available. Sophie was doubtful. Nanny Thwaite, in the meanwhile, got wind of the new plan and said she might be persuaded to withdraw her resignation. Violet, aged twenty now, and suddenly conscious of the power she had acquired as the wife of the new male head of the family, sacked her.
