The Hidden Years. PENNY JORDAN
this job at the hospital, but Aunt Vi had firmed up her mouth and eyed her with cold determination when Lizzie had pleaded to be allowed to stay on at school, telling her sharply that she couldn’t afford to have a great lazy girl eating her out of house and home and not bringing in a penny piece.
Besides, she had added acidly, in case Lizzie hadn’t realised it, there was a war on and it was her duty to do what she could to aid her countrymen. Aunt Vi had made up her mind. The matron of the hospital was one of her friends, and, before Lizzie had time to draw breath, she was installed in the hostel not far from the hospital grounds, in a dormitory with a dozen other girls, all of them working the same long, gruelling hours, although the others, unlike Lizzie, spent their free time not on their own but in giggling, excited groups, vying with one another to present the most enticing appearance for their weekly visits to nearby barracks to attend their Saturday night dances.
They made fun of Lizzie, taunting her because she held herself aloof from them, because she was ‘different’, and not just because of the way she spoke.
Aunt Vi was very strict, and, even though Lizzie was no longer living under her jurisdiction, the lessons she had enforced on her made it painfully difficult for Lizzie to throw off her aunt’s warnings about what happened to girls foolish enough to listen to the brash flattery of boys who ‘only wanted one thing’ and who ‘would get a girl into trouble as soon as look at her’.
Aunt Vi had no very high opinion of the male sex, which, in her view, was best kept at a distance by any right-minded female.
She herself had grown up in a harsh world, where a single woman who managed to rise to the position of housekeeper in a wealthy upper-class home was far, far better off than her married sisters, who often had half a dozen dependent children and a husband who might or might not be inclined to support them all.
Men, in her opinion, were not to be trusted, and Lizzie had a natural sensitivity that made her recoil from the often clumsy and always suggestive passes of the few young men she did come into contact with.
This was wartime and young men did not have the time, or the necessity, to waste their energy, and what might only be a very brief life, in coaxing a girl when there were so many who did not want such coaxing.
The only other men Lizzie met were the patients in the hospital, men who had been so badly injured that it was tacitly admitted that nothing more could be done for them, and so they lay here in the huge, decaying old building, economically and clinically nursed by young women who had learned to seal themselves off from human pity and compassion, who had seen so many broken bodies, so many maimed human beings, so many tormented young male minds that they could no longer agonise over what they saw.
For Lizzie it was different. She had wondered at first when she came to the hospital if she might eventually try to qualify as a nurse, but after a year there, a year when she had seen a constant stream of young men, their minds and bodies destroyed by this thing called war, lying in the wards, when she had seen the hopelessness in their eyes, the anger, the pain, the sheer bitter resentment at their loss of the future they had once anticipated, she had known that she did not have the mental stamina for nursing.
With every familiar patient who left the wards, taken home by a family helpless to cope with the physical and mental burdens of their sons and husbands, and with every new arrival, her heart bled a little more, and she could well understand why the other girls sought relief from the trauma of working with such men by spending their free nights with the healthy, boisterous, whole representatives of manhood they picked up at the dances they attended.
That the Americans were the best was the universal opinion of her colleagues; Americans were generous and fun to be with. There were some stationed on the other side of the village, and once or twice one of them had tried to chat her up when Lizzie walked there to post her weekly duty letter to Aunt Vi.
She always ignored them, steeling her heart against their coaxing smiles and outrageous invitations, but she was only seventeen, and often, once she was safely out of sight, she would wonder wistfully what it would be like to be one half of the kind of perfect whole that was formed when two people loved with the intensity she had envied in her reading.
Lizzie was an avid reader, and a daydreamer. When she had first come to live with Aunt Vi, she had barely opened a book in her life, but, in addition to ceaselessly correcting her speech and her manners, Aunt Vi had also insisted that her great-niece read what she had termed ‘improving books’.
The chance munificence of a large trunkful of books from the vicar’s wife, which had originally belonged to her now adult children, had furnished Lizzie with the ability to escape from Aunt Vi’s strict and sometimes harsh domination into a world she had hitherto not known existed.
From her reading Lizzie discovered the tragedy of the love between Tristan and Iseult, and started to dream of emotions which had nothing in common with the clumsy overtures of the outwardly brash young men with whom she came into contact. Their very brashness, the fact that her sensitive soul cringed from their lack of finesse and from the often unwelcome conversation and revelations of the other girls in her dormitory, made it easy for her to bear in mind Aunt Vi’s strictures that she was to keep herself to herself and not to get up to any ‘funny business’.
By funny business Aunt Vi meant sex, a subject which was never openly referred to in her aunt’s house. As far as Aunt Vi was concerned, sex was something to be ignored as though it did not exist. Lizzie had naïvely assumed that all women shared her aunt’s views, until she had come to work at the hospital. From her peers’ conversations she had learned otherwise, but until now she had felt nothing other than a vague yearning awareness that her life was somehow incomplete… that some vital part of it was missing. She had certainly never contemplated sharing with any of the men she had met the intimacies she heard the other girls discussing so openly and shockingly… Until now…
She stared dreamily at her diary. It had been at Aunt Vi’s insistence that she had first started keeping a diary, not to confide her most private thoughts in, but as a factual record of the achievements of her days.
It was only since she had come to work at the hospital that she had found herself confiding things to her diary that were little more than nebulous thoughts and dreams.
Kit… Even now she was dazzled by the wonder of meeting him…of being able to whisper his name in the secret, private recess of her mind, while her body shivered with nervous joy.
Kit… He was so different…so special, so breathtakingly wonderful.
She had known the moment she saw him. He had turned his head and smiled at her, and suddenly it was as though her world had been flooded with warmth and magic.
And to think, if she hadn’t decided to go and visit poor Edward, she would never have met Kit… She shook with the enormity of how narrowly she had averted such a tragedy.
Edward Danvers had been with them for many months now; a major in the army, he had been badly injured in Normandy… his legs crushed and his spine injured, resulting in the eventual amputation of both his legs.
He had come to them supposedly to recuperate from a second operation, but Lizzie knew, as they all knew, that in fact he had come to them because there was nowhere else for him to go. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, and privately Lizzie suspected that he himself no longer had any desire to live. He wasn’t like some of the men who came to them: he didn’t rage and rail against his fate; outwardly placid and calm, he seemed to accept it, but Lizzie had seen the way he looked inwards into himself, instead of out into the world, and had known that she was looking at a man who was gradually closing himself off from that world. Willing himself to die, almost.
He never spoke about his injuries. Never complained, as some of the men did, about fictitious limbs that were still there. Outwardly, he seemed to have adjusted well to his amputations, quietly allowing the nurses to get him into a chair, so that Lizzie, or one of the other aides, could wheel him into the gardens.
Lizzie liked him, although she knew that most of the other girls found him poor company, complaining that he never laughed or joked like the other men and that