Daughter of the House. Rosie Thomas
her mother had not placed great emphasis on suitability or security in her own younger days.
‘I am never going to be bilingual’.
‘Apply yourself, Nancy. Mamselle Schenck says that you have a good brain.’
Lucie Schenck was a middle-aged French lady who was supposed to be teaching her the language.
Then seemingly without warning, like a thunderclap out of a summer sky, the war came.
It did not end before Christmas, even though most people had been certain that it would, and Mlle Schenck hurried back to her family in a village only ten miles from Neuve Chapelle. At the same time Jinny Main told Nancy that so many of the skilled men were leaving their benches at Lennox & Ringland to join up that no one remained to print the pamphlets and journals. Dust was gathering on the typesetting machines. Within a week she had applied for a job alongside Jinny, and was employed at once as the print floor dogsbody. Jinny herself had been promoted to Linotype operator.
At the end of 1914 Jinny volunteered to be a nurse with the London Ambulance Column. From the front, the wounded men were evacuated by train to the French coast and from there brought across the Channel to be loaded on to another train. Finally the LAC met them in London and drove them onwards to their final hospital destination. At the railway stations the ambulances were sometimes overwhelmed by crowds of well-wishers who had come to cheer the men home.
The LAC organisers were used to dealing with a different class of girl, and they advised Jinny that she did not have the required nursing qualifications. But she stood her ground in the matron’s office and insisted they at least recruit her as a driver. She was a country girl who knew how to operate farm machinery so they agreed in the end to let her try the work. Her supervisor later told her she hadn’t been expected to last a week, but Jinny settled into it and spent many of her nights threading her stretcher cases through the dark streets. Nancy would cover for her on the days when she crawled away to sleep in a cupboard, unable to stay awake any longer.
On the busiest ‘push’ nights when the trains pulled in with a seemingly unending stream of smashed bones and bloodied dressings, Nancy helped out at the Column HQ in Regent’s Park. She begged but Eliza had refused to let her train for proper nursing, so her work was little more than folding blankets and smoothing laundered slips on to stretcher pillows, or even making cocoa for the dispatch riders. But it was something.
Those nights deepened her friendship with Jinny. Day after day, in an attempt to bridge the chasm between the demands of the night and the ordinary working world, the two girls talked and shared their secrets.
Early one morning, as they sat in the fresh air under an unfurling chestnut tree in Regent’s Park to recover from an unusually bad night, Jinny told Nancy about the grey coaches.
Tacked on to the end of some of the hospital trains from France were locked carriages with blanked-out windows. The doors were never unlocked while the regular wounded were being unloaded, but plain grey vans discreetly waited until the rest of the train was empty. The ordinary ambulance drivers did not ask questions and no one speculated about the men who must be inside the coaches. There was no cheering for them.
Nancy listened to this account in silence.
This time in the Uncanny she did not see anything clearly and that was a mercy, but she could hear all too well. There was darkness barred with slats of light, a terrible weeping, and a husky voice that tonelessly whispered, ‘All gone,’ over and over. And there was a low growling, sounding less like a man than an animal, a wounded bear or some other creature she did not even know.
Jinny saw her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘It’s your other sight, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to wake it up, Nance.’
Nancy had never told another soul, but she had described to Jinny how as a girl she had glimpsed the war long before it had begun.
She breathed deeply. ‘It’s all right. We’re both all right, aren’t we? It’s the soldiers. They’re dying, not us.’
Worse than dying, some of them, she now understood.
Cornelius was out there, and her cousins Rowland and Edwin. Arthur was still too young to enlist but he was already at Sandhurst on an accelerated officer-training programme. Even Arthur would soon be going to France.
Jinny clasped her hand until the voices faded. Sunshine sparkled on the grass as they walked to a café to buy a bun for breakfast before catching the bus to Lennox & Ringland.
It was at the beginning of 1915 that Cornelius had suddenly decided he must join up in the ranks.
Devil was too old to fight in France, but he believed in doing his duty. He devised a series of shows for the Palmyra that featured comedy routines, patriotic songs and choruses, and uplifting speeches from popular public figures. They were called ‘Union Jack Nights’, and seats were given away to men in uniform. On one of these nights, Cornelius was sitting in a front fauteuil. Devil had asked him to watch the performance and give him some ideas for improving the static sets. A soloist came out to the apron to perform a song about joining up. The chorus went, ‘I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on.’ The women sitting in the seats near Cornelius sang and clapped and the singer marched down from the stage. Passing through the audience she stopped in front of Cornelius and handed him a white feather.
The next morning he went out to the recruitment office. He didn’t tell Devil and Eliza about his intentions, and even Nancy only heard about it afterwards. He was examined by a medical officer and – to his intense humiliation – immediately classified as medically unfit.
A different man might have accepted this judgement and looked for useful war work at home, but the normal rules could not be made to fit Cornelius. As always, only his personal logic applied. Once he had decided it was what he must do, he could not contemplate not going to France. He loved motor vehicles and driving with a passion that had begun with Devil’s De Dion-Bouton, and he concluded that if he was not to be a soldier he must be an ambulance driver.
He volunteered, and within days he was on the Western Front.
The field dressing stations were canvas shelters crammed with wounded and dying men. Cornelius and the other drivers collected the injured from the dressing stations and ferried them behind the lines, through the mud and chaos of the nearby battle, to the clearing hospital. The hopeless cases were set aside, and there were more than enough of those, but men with even the smallest chance of survival were roughly patched up and transferred to slow, crowded casualty trains.
Thus two people who Nancy dearly loved had formed the first and final links in this long rescue chain, and she was proud of them both.
At last the war to end all wars came to an end.
After the armistice Cornelius finally came home. Arthur also survived, although he remained in France with his regiment. Edwin and Rowland Shaw were among the many thousands of men who did not come back. The landscape of the Uncanny was thronged with lost and dead men, but if her cousins and others she had known were amongst them Nancy did not distinguish them. It was like being a mechanical conduit for images that were distressing but not connected to her, and for this she was deeply grateful.
Recalled to the present by a nudge from Jinny, Nancy collected herself. ‘What were we saying?’
Jinny said gently, ‘How’s your brother?’
‘Not bad, thank you. Some days better than others.’
Some days for Cornelius were very bad.
‘Is there any more tea in that pot?’
Nancy sloshed thick brown brew into their cups.
‘Why don’t you come out with us tonight, Nance? Me and Joycey and some of the others are going to have our tea at Willby’s and then quite likely a half-pint at the Eagle.’
Nancy liked poached eggs on thick slices of buttered toast, and the pleasant heat in the neighbouring saloon bar afterwards when Jinny’s friends crowded round