Ship of Brides Page 6

  ‘He’s at sea, Mummy.’

  ‘—and I just think all the signs are against you. Cut your losses, darling, and come home.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know nothing about this man’s family. Nothing. You have no idea if there’s even going to be anyone to meet you at the other end. That’s if this warship even gets there. Come home, darling, and we’ll sort it all out from here. Plenty of girls change their minds. You read about them all the time.’

  ‘Plenty of girls get dumped too,’ called Deanna.

  ‘I’m married, Mummy.’

  ‘And I’m sure we can do something about that. I mean, hardly anyone over here even knows.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it was only a little do, wasn’t it? We could have it annulled or something.’

  Avice was incredulous. ‘Annulled? Ugh! You’re both such hypocrites! I know what you’re doing. You got me on the rottenest old ship you could find just so I wouldn’t want to travel.’

  ‘Avice—’

  ‘Well, too bad. You’re not going to make me change my mind about Ian.’

  The receptionist had given up any pretence of not listening and was agog, leaning over her counter. Avice placed her hand over the receiver and raised her eyebrows at the girl. Embarrassed, she busied herself with some paperwork.

  Her father broke back in: ‘You there? Avice?’ He sighed heavily. ‘Look, I’ll wire you some money. Leave it a while, if you want. Sit tight at the Wentworth. We’ll talk about this.’

  Avice could hear her mother still wittering in the background. Her sister was demanding to know why she was staying at Sydney’s best hotel. ‘No, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Tell Mummy and Deanna I’ll be on the damned ship to meet my husband. I’ll get there my own way, even if it does mean swimming in diesel fuel and stinking troops, because I love him. I love him. I won’t ring again, but you can tell her – tell Mummy I’ll wire her at the other end. When Ian – my husband – has met me.’

  3

  To be eligible for an appointment in the Australian Army Nursing Service, the applicant had to be a trained registered nurse, a British subject, single, without dependants . . . medically fit and of good character and personal attributes essential to the making of an efficient army nurse.

  Joan Crouch, ‘A Special Kind of Service’,

  The Story of the 2/9 Australian

  General Hospital 1940–46

  Morotai, Halmaheras Islands, South Pacific, 1946

  One week to embarkation

  There was a full moon over Morotai. With a melancholy lucidity, it illuminated the still night, the heat so stifling that even the gentle sea breezes that could normally be relied on to filter through the sisal screens were deadened. The leaves of the palm trees hung limp. The only sound was a periodic muffled thud as a coconut hit the ground. There was no one left to take down the ripe ones, and they fell unchecked, a hazard to the unwary.

  For the most part now the island was dark, only a few lights winking in the buildings that lined the road, which stretched the length of the peninsula. For the past five years that end of the island had been clamorous with the traffic of the Allied Forces, the air filled with the roar of aircraft engines and the belch of exhaust fumes, but now there was silence, broken only by bursts of distant laughter, the crackle of a gramophone and, just audible in the still night, the clink of glasses.

  In the tented confines of the nurses’ mess, a few hundred yards from what had been the American base Matron, Audrey Marshall of the Australian General Hospital, finished her day’s entry in the Unit War Diary.

  – Hospital ship movements for POW evacuation from Morotai in hand.

  – Movement orders to hand for unit – 12 POWs and 1 nursing sister move to Australia per Ariadne tomorrow.

  – Bedstate: occupied 12, vacant 24.

  She gazed at the last two figures, wondering at the years of entries in which those figures had been reversed, at the hundreds of days in which she’d had another column to enter: ‘those deceased’. The ward was one of the few still open: forty-five of the fifty-two were now closed, their patients restored to families in England, Australia, or even India, nurses discharged, supplies waiting to be sold to the occupying Dutch authorities. The Ariadne would be the last hospital ship, carrying with it this raggle-taggle of men, some of the last POWs to leave the island. From now on it would be just the odd car accident and civilian illnesses until she, too, received her orders to return home.

  ‘Nurse Frederick says I should tell you Sergeant Wilkes is foxtrotting Nurse Cooper around the operating theatre . . . She’s fallen over twice already.’ Staff Nurse Gore had stuck her head round the sheeted doorway. Her complexion, which always bloomed in the heat, was flushed with excitement and the last of the whisky. With the hospital so close to abandonment, the girls were skittish and silly, singing songs and re-enacting scenes from old movies to entertain the men, their former reserve and authority evaporating in the moisture-filled air. Although, strictly speaking, they were still on duty, she didn’t have the heart to reprimand them – not after what they’d seen these last weeks. She couldn’t forget their shocked, drained faces when the first POWs arrived from Borneo.

  ‘Go and tell the silly girl to bring him back in. I couldn’t care less if she injures herself, but he’s only been on his feet forty-eight hours. We don’t want him breaking a leg to add to his troubles.’

  ‘Will do, Matron.’ The girl was gone, the curtain falling back limply into place. Her face reappeared briefly. ‘Are you coming? The boys are asking where you are.’

  ‘I’ll be along shortly, Nurse,’ she said, shutting her book, and raising herself from the folding stool. ‘You go along now.’

  ‘Yes, Matron.’ With a giggle she departed.

  Audrey Marshall checked her hair in the little mirror she kept above the wash-basin, then blotted her face with a towel. She slapped at a mosquito that had launched itself into the back of her arm, straightened her grey cotton slacks and walked out through the nurses’ mess, past the operating theatres (now, thankfully, silent) towards Ward G, thinking what a rare pleasure it was to be following the sound of laughter and music rather than the howling of men in pain.

  The majority of beds in the long tent known as Ward G had been moved back so that half of the room now formed an unofficial, sand-based dance floor and those men still confined to their beds could see it. On the desk in the corner the gramophone huskily issued the songs that had not been scratched to nothing through years of sand and overuse. An impromptu bar had been set up at what had been the dressings station, the drips converted for use with whisky and beer bottles.

  Many were out of uniform tonight, the women in pale blouses and floral skirts, the men in shirts with trousers that had to be winched round their waists with narrow belts. Several sisters were dancing, some with each other, a couple with the remaining Red Cross staff and physiotherapists, stumbling over the more elaborate moves. A couple stopped when Audrey Marshall entered, but she nodded at them in a way that suggested they should carry on. ‘I suppose I should do my final rounds,’ she said, her voice mock-stern, which prompted a weak cheer from the tent’s occupants.

  ‘We’ll miss you, Matron,’ said an emotional Sergeant Levy in the corner. She could just make out his face behind his raised legs, which were still in plaster.

  ‘You’ll miss the bed-baths, more like,’ said his mate. More laughter.

  She moved along the row of beds, checking the temperatures of those with suspected dengue fever, peering under dressings that covered tropical ulcers, which refused obstinately to heal.

  This lot weren’t looking so bad. When the Indian prisoners-of-war had arrived at the beginning of the year even she had had nightmares for weeks. She remembered the shattered bones, the maggoty bayonet wounds, the starving, distended stomachs. Reduced to an almost inhuman state, many of the Sikhs had fought the nurses as they tried to treat them – over the years they had become used to brutality and, in
their weakened state, were unable to anticipate anything else. The nurses had cried in their mess tents afterwards, especially for the men whom the Japanese had deliberately overfed as they left the camps, and who had died painful deaths from their first taste of freedom.

  Some of the Sikhs had hardly been men: they were light enough to be carried by a single nurse, mute or incoherent. For weeks they had fed them like newborn babies: two-hourly doses of powdered milk, followed by teaspoons of mashed potato, minced rabbit, boiled rice, trying to coax their collapsed digestive systems back into life. They had cradled skeletal heads, mopped spilt food from chapped lips, slowly convinced the men with whispers and smiles that this was not the precursor to some further terrible act of violence. Gradually, their hollow eyes bleak with whatever they had seen, the men had begun to understand where they had come.

  The nurses had been so moved by their plight, their wordless gratitude and the fact that many had not heard from home in years that some weeks later they had got one of the interpreters to help them prepare a curried dish for those able to stomach it. Nothing too ambitious, just a little mutton and spices, some Indian flatbread to go with the boiled rice. They had presented it on trays decorated with flowers. It had seemed important to convince the men that there was still a little beauty in the world. But as they entered the ward, and proudly laid out the trays before them, many of the POWs had finally broken down, less able to cope with kindness than with hard words and blows.

  ‘Share a nip with us, Matron?’

  The captain lifted the bottle, an invitation. The record finished and at the far end of the room someone cursed as the next disc slid out of slick hands on to the floor. She eyed him for a moment. He shouldn’t be drinking with the medication he was taking. ‘Don’t mind if I do, Captain Baillie,’ she said. ‘One for the boys who aren’t going home.’

  The girls’ faces relaxed. ‘To absent friends,’ they murmured, glasses upheld.

  ‘Wish the Americans were still here,’ said Staff Nurse Fisher, mopping her brow. ‘I don’t half miss those buckets of crushed ice.’ Only a few British patients now remained.

  There was a swell of agreement.

  ‘I just want to get to sea,’ said Private Lerwick, from the corner. ‘I keep dreaming of the breezes.’

  ‘Cups of tea without chlorinated water.’

  ‘Cold English beer.’

  ‘No such thing, mate.’

  Normally heat like this would have left them all listless, the patients dozing on their beds, the nurses moving slowly between them, wiping damp faces with cool cloths, checking for ulcers, infection, dysentery. But the imminent departure of the POWs, the fact that they were mending, that they were here at all, had injected something into the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the sudden realisation that long-standing units, tightly knit groups that had supported each other through the horror of the last years, were about to be disbanded, separated by miles, in some cases continents, and might not meet again.

  Audrey Marshall, watching the people before her, felt her throat constrict – a sensation so rare that she was briefly perplexed by it. Suddenly she understood the girls’ need to party, the men’s determination to drink, dance and plough their way with forced merriment through these last hours together. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, gesturing towards the drip in the corner, where one of the physiotherapists was drinking beer from a false limb, ‘make mine a large one.’

  The singing started not long afterwards: ‘Shenandoah’. The reedy, drink-lubricated voices drifted through the canvas into the night sky.

  It was half-way through the chorus that the girl entered. Audrey didn’t see her at first – the whisky had perhaps dulled the sharp senses that usually ensured she missed nothing. But as she raised her own voice in song, enjoying the sight of the recovering men singing in their beds, the nurses clutching each other, their eyes occasionally welling with sentimental tears, she became aware of a sudden froideur, the sideways glances that told her something had changed.

  She was standing in the doorway, her pale, freckled face porcelain still, her thin shoulders erect in her uniform as she took in the scene before her. She was holding a small suitcase and a kitbag. Not much to show for six years in the Australian General Hospital. She stared into the crowded tent as if it had altered her resolve to come in, as if she were about to change her mind. Then she caught Audrey Marshall looking at her, and walked over slowly, staying as close as she could to the side of the tent.

  ‘Packed already, Sister?’

  She hesitated before she spoke. ‘I’ll be boarding the hospital ship tonight, Matron, if it’s all right by you. They could do with a bit of help with the very sick men.’

  ‘They didn’t ask me,’ said Audrey, trying not to sound aggrieved.

  The girl looked at the floor. ‘I – I offered. I hope you don’t mind. I thought I could be of more use . . . that you probably didn’t need me any more.’ With the music it was difficult to hear her.

  ‘You don’t want to stay and have a last few drinks with us?’ Even as she said it Audrey wasn’t sure why she’d asked. In the four years they had worked together Sister Mackenzie had never been one for parties. Now she probably understood why.

  ‘You’re very kind, but no, thank you.’ She was already looking at the doorway, as if calculating how soon she could leave.

  Audrey was about to press the point, unwilling to let her drift off, to let this be the way her years of service should end. But as she tried to find the right words, she became aware that for the most part the girls had stopped dancing. Several of them stood in huddles, their eyes cold, assessing. ‘I’d like to say—’ she began, but one of the men interrupted.

  ‘Is that Sister Mackenzie? You hiding her there, Matron? Come on, Sister, you can’t go without saying a proper goodbye.’

  Private Lerwick was trying to get out of bed. He had put his feet on the ground and was steadying himself with one hand on the iron bedhead. ‘Don’t you go anywhere, Sister. You made me a promise, remember?’

  Audrey caught the knowing smirk between Nurse Fisher and the two girls beside her. She glanced at Sister Mackenzie, and realised that she had seen it too. Sister Mackenzie’s hands had tightened on her two bags. She stiffened, then said quietly, ‘I can’t stay, Private. I’ve got to board the hospital ship.’

  ‘Ah, will you not take a drink with us, Sister? A last drink?’

  ‘Sister Mackenzie has work to do, Sergeant O’Brien,’ the matron said firmly.

  ‘Ah, come on. At least shake my hand.’

  The girl took a step forward, then went to shake the hands of those men who proffered them. The music had started up again, deflecting attention from her, but even as she moved, Audrey Marshall noted the narrowed eyes of the other nurses, the deliberate turning away of several men. She walked behind her, making sure she wasn’t kept at each bed for too long.

  ‘You’ve meant the world to me, Sister.’ Sergeant O’Brien held her pale hand in both of his, voice tearful with drink.

  ‘Nothing that any of us wouldn’t have done,’ she said, a little curtly.

  ‘Sister! Sister, come here.’ Private Lerwick was reckoning. Audrey saw the girl register him, and then the number of people she would have to pass to get to him. ‘Come on, Sister Mackenzie. You made me a promise, remember?’

  ‘I really don’t think—’

  ‘You wouldn’t break a promise to a wounded man, would you, Sister?’ Private Lerwick’s expression was comically hangdog.

  The men on each side of him joined in chorus: ‘Come on, Sister, you promised.’

  Then the room went very quiet. Audrey Marshall saw the girls step back as they waited to see what Sister Mackenzie would do.

  Finally, unable to bear the girl’s dilemma any longer, she intervened: ‘Private, I’ll thank you to get back into your bed.’ She walked briskly across to where he sat. ‘Promise or no promise, you’re not ready to be out of it.’

  ‘Aw, Matron. Give a guy a break.’
>
  She was lifting his leg back on to the mattress when a voice said, ‘It’s all right, Matron.’ She turned to see the girl standing behind her, face bright. Only the fluttering of her pale hands betrayed her discomfort. ‘I did promise.’

  Audrey felt, rather than saw, the gaze of the other women and, despite the heat, felt her skin prickle. ‘If you’re sure, Sister.’

  She was a tall girl so she had to stoop as she helped the young man to a sitting position, and then, arm under his shoulders in a long-practised manoeuvre, hauled him to his feet.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Then Sergeant Levy yelled for music, and someone jigged the gramophone back into life.

  ‘Go on, Scottie,’ said the man behind her. ‘Just don’t step on her toes.’

  ‘I couldn’t dance before,’ he joked, as they moved slowly on to the sandy area that had passed as the dance floor. ‘Two pounds of shrapnel in my knees isn’t going to help none.’

  They began to dance. ‘Ah, Sister,’ Audrey heard him say, ‘you don’t know how long I’ve been wishing for this.’

  Those men still nearby broke out a spontaneous round of applause. Audrey Marshall found she was clapping too, moved by the sight of the frail man standing tall and proud, beaming to have achieved his modest ambition: to stand on a dance floor again with a woman in his arms. She watched the girl, braving her own discomfort for him, rangy arms tensed to support him if he lost his balance. A kind girl. A good nurse.

  That was the saddest part of it.

  The music stopped. Private Lerwick sank gratefully into his bed, still grinning despite his obvious exhaustion. Audrey felt her heart sink, knowing that the simple act of kindness would count against the young nurse. Knowing that, as the girl searched with her eyes for her bags, she was aware of it too. ‘I’ll see you out, Sister,’ she said, wanting to save her further exposure.

  Private Lerwick was still hanging on to her hand. ‘We know what you’ve all done, coming here in your time off . . . You’ve all been like – like our sisters.’ He broke down and, after a brief hesitation, Sister Mackenzie bent over him, murmuring to him not to upset himself. ‘That’s what I’ll think of when I think of you, Sister. Nothing else. I just wish poor Chalkie . . .’