Not Just a Soldier’s War Page 4

  Polly Hurley nodded. ‘Absolutely. And, of course, if you are away from home and in a situation like this where everyone is a stranger to everyone else, then there are only people like myself or prostitutes for the men and casual lovers for the women.’

  That evening, once Eve had taken some food and drink to the exhausted Sister Wineapple, she put on one of Polly Hurley’s white aprons and learned how to warm between her palms the small bottles of aromatic oil, and how much to drip on to bare shoulders and backs. As she watched, she was fascinated to see how knots of muscles appeared to dissolve under Polly Hurley’s manipulative fingers, and when she rolled into bed that night, she thought: Of all things to learn on my first day here – anarchists are not sinister bombers. Any skill one had was valuable.

  * * *

  For four days, Sister Wineapple slept almost continuously. There was little Eve could do, so she helped Polly Hurley with the dozen or so stressed and overworked people who came into the neat little room where she worked; mostly in silence either because few spoke English or because they appreciated the quiet of the sweet-smelling room. She came to know the restful routine of the ‘guests’, as they were referred to. In the extensive grounds of the villa there was a tennis-court with odd lengths of mosquito nets tied to string for a net. And there was a stable with four horses, not well groomed or particularly well fed, but at least they were well exercised.

  On the fifth day, Eve, rising early as she always did, found a transformed Sister Wineapple sitting on the edge of her bed, her hair wet from shampooing, scooping some pills into her mouth. ‘Hell’s teeth, that feels better. D’you know if they still keep horses here? Do you ride?’

  Eve was astonished at the overnight resurgence of spirit in the American nurse. ‘Four. I saw them yesterday. They’re very popular with the other guests.’

  ‘Guests? Is that what they call us in the nut-house in these egalitarian times? Fair enough! Do you feel like a ride out?’

  The morning was bright, brighter than any morning Eve could remember since the summers of her childhood in rural Hampshire, but much hotter. They rode in silence for perhaps an hour. The terrain was rocky and dry, something Eve had never experienced before, but the American nurse, sitting straight in the saddle, went easily with every movement of the spare-fleshed animal between her hooked-up knees. Eve was reminded at once of Bar Barney, the close friend of her childhood and now her sister-in-law.

  Bar was good with horses, born with them and sat on them before she could walk, as were all the Barneys, especially Duke. Duke Barney did not so much ride a horse as give the horse the privilege of carrying him. Even in his barefoot boyhood, Duke had driven a pony trap standing up, like a Roman charioteer.

  Duke still strode disturbingly into her sleep. So too did David Hatton. The gypsy and the gentleman. Together they sounded like a Red Letter magazine romance, but they were the only two men who had interested her sufficiently to arouse her to passion. They had each given her an insight into her nature. She was aware now how strong sexual desire could be, and how it was dangerous to a young woman who did not want to become entangled in romantic love, or tied down in marriage. She had a life to live, a future to make. She knew how to take care of herself if only she wasn’t caught unawares, as she had been by Duke and David.

  Sometimes separately, sometimes confusingly together, she dreamed of the two men. Each was trying to force his rival away, although in the real world neither knew of the other’s existence. In other dreams they appeared in some mysterious kind of collusion, not exactly against her but more in league with one another. It was this latter image that disturbed her most, seeming to make her heart thump and swell, making it difficult to breathe and waking her before dawn.

  When at last the two women dismounted in the shade of one of the few tree-sized shrubs of the rocky region, Eve said, ‘You ride well.’

  ‘I was born with a horse between my legs, almost literally. My ma was out ride’n when I started to come on her, she gee-d the horse up and got back in town just as I was coming out. Well, that’s how she tells it, and I can believe it. Toughest man in town is my ma.’ She burst into sudden exuberant laughter, then just as suddenly burst into tears. Eve sat close and did nothing to try to stop the tears, remembering Aunt May’s advice: ‘Let it all go.’

  Eventually Wineapple said, ‘If you can’t stand watching a strong woman cry… sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK. Better out than in, my Aunt May would have said.’

  ‘Have you got the makings?’

  Eve handed her a tin containing tobacco and some papers – the nearest thing to a packet of cigarettes that she had been able to acquire in Albacete.

  ‘Guess that means I’m getting back to normal.’

  ‘I’m glad. You looked pretty dreadful when I picked you up.’

  ‘Did I? I guess I must have. They tried to get me to have a spell in France or England, but all I needed was to catch up on some sleep. How long have we been here?’

  ‘This is the fifth day.’

  ‘Phew! A real sleep bender. Time I got out of the booby-hatch and back to work. OK if we get going today?’

  ‘According to my instructions, I’m not supposed to take you back for another two days yet.’

  ‘I’m needed. Every time a nurse or doctor goes down, it puts extra pressure on the rest of the team. Then they go down. You know how it is.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t. I’ve only been in Spain a few days. Bringing you here was my first job.’

  As she drew hungrily on her cigarette, the nurse looked long and hard at Eve. ‘If I had any sense I’d tell you to go back. If you had any sense, you’d go. But I guess good sense has no more to do with you being here than it has with me. Why’d you come?’

  For a few moments Eve watched the smoke of her cigarette curl upwards in the dry, warm air. Why? No simple answer. A longing to get away; to see for herself what her brother Ken had described in his letters home; to be Eve Anders. ‘I saw a boatload of Basque refugee children arrive. I think I felt ashamed that the government didn’t appear to care… it was left to ordinary people to care.’

  ‘There are a lot of politicals in the medical aid service, non-politicals too, religious types, Quakers, all sorts of reasons to be here.’

  ‘I’m not that much of a political type, you don’t have to be. Just a democratic type, I suppose.’

  ‘Not political? I’d say taking the law into your own hands when you believe in something is quite political enough for some folks.’

  ‘I mean, I’m not an anarchist or anything. There’s a woman here who is.’

  Sophie Wineapple raised her head with a smile. ‘And she wasn’t hiding a bomb under her cloak?’

  It suddenly occurred to Eve Anders that, to all intents and purposes, she was a political type: she carried a Communist Party card and she was sponsored by communists. ‘Can you tell me something about… about what it’s like here? Do you mind talking about it?’

  ‘I don’t mind, but I don’t know about you. It ain’t no picnic.’

  ‘I never expected it would be.’

  ‘It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done. That’s why I wouldn’t let them send me away to rest up, thought I might not be able to get back into the country if I left. Of course I could have, but when a body flakes out your brain ain’t exactly razor-sharp.’ She smiled, her hollow eyes filling out, the dark rings fading. ‘But I’m OK now.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to the house?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll be glad to talk if you can take it. Talking’s necessary to recovery, it’s often the best thing a nurse can do for a patient, sit and listen. Ain’t much time for that in a front-line hospital.’

  ‘So talk to me. It’s my assignment to stay with you, remember?’

  ‘For me, volunteering’s been a bit like when you’re a kid, and you set out with your best friends, all excitement and expectations on some adventure, some kind’a expedition that you sure as hell know is going to ch
ange your life. Know what I mean? Then it starts to go wrong. One of the kids falls in the creek, another gets into poison ivy, it starts to storm and you can’t remember why in hell’s name you thought it was so important. Ever done a thing like that?’

  ‘A lot of things have fallen apart in my life.’

  ‘Hey, you talk like your own grandma. You can’t be more than… what?’

  ‘I’m twenty.’

  ‘Twenty. It’s fifteen years since that happened to me.’

  ‘Are you saying that you made a mistake in coming here?’

  ‘Never! What I’m saying is, I didn’t know how to pace myself, none of us does. What are you supposed to do when you’ve been sewing men back together for two days without sleep and they still keep coming?’

  ‘You keep working without sleep?’

  ‘You do, but there’s times when you shouldn’t. Thing is, I always had real heavy menses, y’know? Doctors, being men, never think of a thing like that. It’s OK, you can keep going if you get the squitters – and boy, do you get the squitters or do you get the squitters! Hard to keep going if you got women’s problems. Seems as though you can’t hardly think of anything except the cramps. Men don’t want to know. Doctors especially.’

  ‘You’d think they’d understand better than ordinary men.’

  ‘Who said doctors aren’t ordinary men? They’re often the worst, they get to see women’s insides and they don’t like what they see. Don’t think I’m snivelling, just stating facts. Three months now, my cycle’s been all to pot. Wasn’t till I crashed in the theatre that I realized how bad things had got. God, I felt a failure, an absolute and utter failure. There’s all these lads – legs off, ears shot away, bits of shell in them – and here’s Sister Wineapple dropping in a heap on the floor and being sent to the booby-hatch because of belly cramps and loss of sleep.’ Her mood changed in a second and she started to cry with long wrenching sobs and streams of tears.

  Eve was non-plussed. Had her companion been Bar Barney or Kate Roles, her friends from childhood, she would have known how to offer comfort, but Sister Wineapple was an older woman, a tough-talking American, so she hesitated before putting her arm about the woman’s shaking shoulders.

  When at last the tears subsided, Eve said, ‘I think we should go back to the house, and you should get some rest.’ Sophie Wineapple nodded agreement, and they made their way back to the villa.

  While Eve was kneeling down helping to unlace her charge’s heavy shoes, Sophie Wineapple touched Eve’s cheek. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you’re a real pal. If I said anything to put you off, take no notice. It’s the right thing to do, you know, absolutely the right thing. There’s no way those sons a’ bitches are going to take back the freedom from these great people.’ She made a fist. ‘¡No pasarán! You know that? “They shall not pass”.’ She sank back on to her bed.

  ‘I know, and I’ll do my best to see that they don’t if you’ll just get some rest.’

  ‘OK, but sit and talk for a bit, d’you mind? It felt real good out there, you’d make a good psychiatric doctor. What are you when you aren’t sitting nurses who’ve gone a bit nutty?’

  So, what or who was Eve Anders? She was none of the things she used to be when she was Louise Vera Wilmott. She wasn’t the schoolgirl who still smarted from not being able to continue at the grammar school. She wasn’t the factory girl who had spent half her spare time at night-school and the other half in glamorous home-made dresses dancing her feet off. She was no longer Lu Wilmott, a poor kid from the back-streets of Portsmouth whose dreams could never be realized while her old class weighed down her ambitions. ‘You aren’t nutty. I’m a lorry-driver. I hope when I get to Albacete they’ll give me an ambulance to drive.’

  ‘Girl truck-drivers are rare as hen’s teeth; I don’t think I’ve met more ’n two. One especially, Eve, yeah, Eve Hutchins, an American, little person, raised hell when they said she couldn’t enlist, they had to give in in the end, she shamed them for being chauvinists so she reckoned. Remember her if anyone tries to tell you it can’t be done.’

  ‘OK, I will.’

  Without preamble, Sister Wineapple launched into a long monologue. ‘I guess the last straw was on the day before you brought me here. Every day for weeks now, the hospital courtyard and all the corridors have been filled with the dead and dying. The ambulances can’t even get near to unload. Everywhere we go we have to step over bodies. Some of the wounds are terrible but they have to wait because there’s always others who are worse. I hadn’t slept for days, just snatches here and there – how could you when you had to step over all those injuries? If anyone spoke to me, I felt like killing them. When I fell down in the theatre, the doctor ordered me to get some sleep.’ She paused, and smiled wryly, her mind obviously elsewhere. ‘There’s a more equal relationship between us medics here, but I was trained to obey God when he ordered, it’s not a thing you can untrain. So I went to the little room where the nurses used to flop down but both beds were occupied… severe head injury… awful bad one… brains oozing out, y’ know, big pool of blood on the floor. The man in the other bed was dead, stomach shot to pieces. I had him removed, turned the mattress over and went out like a light. I couldn’t have slept for long – there was a raid or shelling or something, I don’t know, it gets so that you only notice when the walls shake – and I realized the boy in the next bed was dead, nothing I could do, so I left him, turned over and went back to sleep, for about an hour, I think, maybe more, I don’t know, except that when somebody came and made me get up because they wanted a bed for a patient, I thought I should have screamed and never stopped. But of course I didn’t, did I, too well trained for any show of emotion. So I splashed my face and went back into the theatre. I guess I must ’a looked a sight, shaking like I had the DTs or something, eyes and nose running like nobody’s business – a real mad-woman scene, I guess. I don’t really know. Somebody gave me a couple ’a pills, acted like a Mickey Finn. Last clear memory until you came for me.’ She sighed heavily and smiled. ‘Sounds like a mad-house, it’s not really. It just don’t do to abuse yourself. There’s nearly always a food shortage, well that’s OK, but shortage of sleep? That’ll do for you in the end.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what you should be doing now.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I feel really quite good now. Sorry if I’ve been mingy to you, you just new here and all, but you’ve done a real job on me, better’n a psychiatrist’s couch, off-loading on to somebody who don’t have a stake in keeping you on your feet. Hope you don’t ever need the same favour from me, but I’ll be right here for you if you do, remember that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Promise?’

  The following day Eve returned a fresh and competent theatre sister to her hospital and picked up a message with new orders, which were to take the van to a transport depot and get a lift in a truck on the way south to the Auto-Parc at Albacete.

  Sophie Wineapple said a formal thanks and, as Eve was leaving, added, ‘Feixisme ¡No! Stick to the beans.’ Feixisme ¡No! was the antifascist slogan daubed everywhere in Barcelona.

  * * *

  Although Helan Alexander had not said so, she must have thought Eve competent, for her next assignment was to deliver a Bedford ambulance.

  ‘The Bedfords are going up to El Goloso. D’you know El Goloso?’ Alexander asked Eve when she reported to her.

  ‘Near Madrid?’

  ‘Yeah, near the Guadarrama mountains.’

  The Guadarramas. Madrid. Madrid was now the front line.

  The hospital trucks were for El Goloso. The rest of the convoy consisted of supply trucks and a personnel carrier with some soldiers in uniform, probably not regulars but older than those who had travelled with Eve to Albacete. These men wore bandoliers and carried their rifles with ease. The convoy leader was Captain Benito Delgado, a Spanish officer of the Republican army, a dark and handsome man who wore his cap at a jaunty angle. Another Spaniard and an Australian were also ambulanc
e-drivers. Among the various medicos travelling to Madrid were Smart and Haskell, the nurses who had shared Eve’s dormitory in the Starlight Hotel.

  Captain Delgado said that the hospital trucks should be at the middle of the convoy, keeping within sight of one another. ‘If there is sniping or shelling, you will stop and take cover only when ordered.’ It seemed to Eve that he was speaking directly to her.

  Nurse Haskell smiled at Eve and said quietly, ‘He probably thinks women shouldn’t be allowed loose with a precious hospital truck.’

  Grinning, the Australian, who had overheard the comment, said, ‘He don’t mean noth’n by it, I know him. Anarchists can be a bit set in the old ways when it comes to the womenfolk, but he’s a decent fella.’ He gave Eve a hearty handshake. ‘His name’s Delgado, mine’s Clive Lavender. They call me Ozz. You’ll never guess why.’

  Eve laughed and thanked the big, handsome Australian. ‘Anders. Eve Anders.’

  ‘OK, Andy, I’ll be right behind you.’

  It was another beautiful, cloudless day as the convoy rolled out of the Albacete Auto-Parc depot. Smart and Haskell travelled with Eve, a French doctor rode with the captain, and an untrained orderly and two more nurses rode with the Australian.

  Smart and Haskell spent the first hour writing letters, enabling Eve to concentrate on keeping the correct distance from the ambulance ahead. Apart from a donkey and cart in the middle of the road, and a little girl with two frisky goats, the road was empty. Eve was able to enjoy the experience of seeing everything from a much higher vantage point than she had in the lorry. ‘What are those trees? We passed a whole orchard of them back there, they seemed to be growing on rocks and sand.’

  ‘Olives. You call them groves, not orchards. This is oil country, same as Texas.’

  ‘Oh, I always expected olive trees would be enormous, like oaks. They sound so grand and important in the Bible.’

  There was a moment of the kind of silence that can almost be felt, then Haskell said, ‘How long have you been out here?’