A Rose for the Anzac Boys Read online

  Glen Donal. Home. It was an ache and absence in the heart. The scent of rough grass and the sharp tinny smell of snow from the mountains, the dangling arms of the willow trees, the neat lines of Mummy’s rose garden, the flowers more flamboyant than any Midge had seen in England. Even grass smelled different here, not as strong and sweet as home. At least school was in the country, away from the yellow smoke that buried the sky at Aunt Harriet’s. But everything was so small, she thought, as she hurried up the hall steps. The land divided into its tiny fields and smaller lanes. Even the people looked like they’d shrunk in the rain. A land of sparrows when she wanted to soar.

  Her shoes tapped on the polished wood floor. She glanced at the table. Yes! There were two letters under ‘M’. One on cheap thin paper from Tim; plus a blue envelope with a water stain on one corner and precise nursing sister’s writing on the front. A letter from Aunt Lallie—the second-best letter she could get.

  Letters were too precious to read here, where anyone could interrupt. But there was a willow down by the pond, almost like the ones back home, with a curtain of green branches.

  Midge ran out the door (school rules could go hang), holding her skirt high and trying to look as unavailable for rounders or lacrosse games as she could. She ducked her head under the willow’s branches and settled on the damp leaves that covered the ground.

  She’d open Aunt Lallie’s letter first and keep Tim’s to savour last. Even having his letter in her lap made him seem close.

  She tore open Aunt Lallie’s envelope. Her aunt’s last letter had been from Alexandria where she had ridden a camel with an upper lip just like Uncle Thomas’s. It had spat at Aunt Lallie’s friend Sister Atkins.

  Midge’s eyes skimmed the letter. Then she stopped in shock. This wasn’t like any letter her aunt had sent before.

  The Citadel Hospital, Cairo

  6 June 1915

  My dear niece,

  I hope this finds you as it leaves me, for I am well, though tired. Tired perhaps is not the right word. I think by now we have gone past tiredness, into another world.

  I do not know if you received my last letter from Alexandria. Since then I have been on the [here the word was blacked out by the censor], a transport ship from [another crossing out, but not enough, so that by lifting the letter to the light Midge could still see the impression of the word Gallipoli]. Initially it had been intended that the transport ships take the wounded to [crossed out] where I was posted, little more than an hour’s sail away. But there have been so many casualties that the ships were forced to sail two more days to the hospitals at Alexandria, which is how I have come to be transferred here. Now even our hospitals are full and the ships full of wounded boys have to sail on to Malta instead.

  My dear, I cannot describe [here the words were crossed out by Lallie’s hand].

  They call ships like ours the ‘black ships’ and, my dear, they deserve the name. We kept the men with gangrenous or suppurating wounds on deck, in the fresh air. The fever and dysentery cases were carried below, into a hold that had not been cleaned since the horses they had carried earlier were unloaded. The heat was worse than anything I have ever known; the air so thick you felt it needed a soldier’s strength to fight through it, but a stronger soldier than our poor boys.

  My dear, I am so glad that you are too young to be a nurse in this war, as you told me in your last letter you would like to be if you were old enough. Those ships were not nursing as any of us have known it or imagined. No pillows, no blankets, one bedpan to forty men, dehydration, the living next to the dead, the flies, the smell—it is a memory only death, I think, can erase.

  Conditions here at the hospital are little better. I am on one of the dysentery wards. Sister Atkins and myself are in charge of 230 men. We can give them little; we try to keep them clean and give them emetine by hypodermic injection. But it is not enough. Nothing is enough. They waste away so that strong young men look like they are eighty, their faces shrunk to wrinkles, their hands too weak even to hold a cup to drink.

  I cannot remember the last time that I slept—there is never a moment when it does not seem cruel to take a nap, knowing the agony that you must leave untended.

  I have just written another letter. It was for an Australian soldier, as are many here. He asked me to write a letter to his mother. He said,‘Tell her I am too weak to write. ’And then he died. I sat there, looking at the blank space on the paper, not knowing if it was crueller to send it or to crumple it away. In the end I sent it to his commanding officer, who will do as he thinks best with it.

  It fills me so with rage to think [a half-page blacked out here, and even by following the indentations of the pen with her fingers Midge couldn’t make out the words. And then, almost as though it were another letter:] I hope your studies are going well, my dear, and that your holiday with your aunt and uncle was satisfactory. I wish more than I could tell you that I could have offered you a home myself when your dear father died. But one day this madness will be over. One day you and Tim and Dougie will be home. Perhaps I will join you there, in the quiet fields of Glen Donal.

  I remain as always, my dear Margery, your most loving aunt,

  Eulalie Jean Macpherson

  Midge put the letter into the pocket of her tunic and stared out through the branches. What had Aunt Lallie been through to write like that? How could things be so bad? The war Lallie described was no glorious adventure. It sounded so different from the victories and heroism in The Times.

  Why hadn’t Tim or Doug or one of Anne’s cousins said how bad things were?

  Maybe, she thought hopefully, it’s not as bad where they’re fighting. Maybe it’s just that the hospitals can’t cope…

  She felt almost reluctant to open Tim’s letter now, afraid of what she might read. Aunt Lallie was—well, old. Experienced. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the thought of Tim in pain, like the young soldiers in Lallie’s letter.

  Tim’s letter was written in pencil. The writing was tiny and scrawled across the page. Even with the summer air around her, she grew cold as she deciphered it.

  24 May, Gallipoli

  Dear Sis,

  Well, here we are. You wouldn’t believe how much it stinks, or how many flies could land on one person. Am writing this during a truce with the Turks. There have been thousands of Turkish bodies in front of our trenches. Some have been there for three weeks. Which is why it stinks so much. I thought old sheep guts smelled bad. But dead men smell worse.

  Felt something squelch under my boot this morning. I looked down and it was a man’s head, all green and black. It moved suddenly and for a moment I thought it was alive. Then I saw it was just the maggots that were moving. Couldn’t tell if he was ours or theirs. Remember old Campbell burying rabbit and sheep heads under Mum’s rose garden, and the time you and I dug one up when we were three? Well, think of that.

  Anyhow, it rained this morning, and thank God for it, as it broke the smell a bit. We went up onto the plateau and through these gullies all covered in thyme, and there were about 4000 Turkish bodies. The Turkish Red Crescent blokes were giving out wool drenched in disinfectant to hold over our noses. Johnny Turk’s a good chap but I can’t say the same for Fritz. The blighters accused us of digging trenches while we pretended to dig graves. Lieutenant-`Colonel Fenwick—he’s our medical officer, a good man—speaks a bit of their lingo. He told them in no uncertain terms that the corpses were so rotten we couldn’t lift them and we had to dig pits right there to put the awful things into.

  When we’d finished we shook hands with the Turks and said, ‘Good luck’. One of them spoke English and said, ‘Smiling may you go, and smiling come again.’ I like that.

  By the way, there’s a good story going around the ranks. Seems the Turkish and British generals were in the British HQ tent discussing the details of the truce when this New Zealand batman puts his head in the tent and yells out, ‘Hey! Have any of you muckers pinched my kettle?’

  Don’t blame hi
m either. The one thing that makes life worthwhile here is a good cup of tea and bleak is the night when you can’t get it. You just have to hope no maggots drip into it but, like old Campbell would say, a bit of muck is just a bit more tucker. Wonder if he’d say that about lice. We’ve got some big ones here. Tried washing my clothes in sea water the other day to get rid of them but it just made the blighters hungrier!

  Don’t know if you’ve got any of my other scrawls. I’m sending this to the first aid post with one of the boys so hopefully it will get away. Look after yourself, Sis, and don’t worry about me. None of our lot have caught it yet. I’ve made some good mates here. I reckon we’re too tough to die.

  ‘Smiling may you go, and smiling come again.’

  Your loving brother,

  Tim

  ‘Midge? Midge, are you there?’

  The high, clear voice was unmistakable. Midge looked up as the pale and spotty face of the Honourable Anne peered through the curtain of branches.

  Anne was always pale, apart from her spots. ‘Mummy believes red cheeks are ill bred,’ she’d said once, as though Lady George had sent the midwife a polite note requesting exactly the correct details in a daughter: the straight blonde hair (so much easier to put up than curls), the long pale hands. Only Anne’s spots and her big feet failed to be aristocratic. ‘My dear, the feet come from great-grandmama’s gardener,’ she said. Midge never knew if she was serious or not. Anne was more concerned about her spots than her feet.

  Midge stared. Her…yellow…spots.

  ‘Anne, what on earth—’ she began.

  Anne touched her face automatically. ‘Miss Scatchley’s latest idea,’ she said. Miss Scatchley was the science mistress. She wore a white lab coat and had even studied science for two years at Oxford, though of course had not been allowed to sit the exams. ‘Flowers of sulphur dusted on each lunchtime.’

  ‘Does sulphur get rid of spots?’

  Anne shrugged. ‘One suspects I’m her latest scientific experiment. Item: one spotty aristocrat. Item: one pot of flowers of sulphur. Process: combine the two. Result:—’

  ‘Did you find her?’ Ethel’s big square face appeared beside Anne’s, tendrils of red hair escaping from her plaits. ‘I said she’d be under the willow tree.’

  ‘It must be a colonial thing,’ said Anne. ‘Trees and whatnot.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with being a New Zealander,’ Midge protested.

  Anne grinned. ‘Of course not. Everybody prefers a tree to a sitting room these days. Darling, the Hollow Beast wants to see you. Urgently. In her study. Now.’

  The Hollow Beast was Miss Hollington.

  ‘Cripes, lass, what has tha doon?’ said Ethel in her best exaggerated Yorkshire accent. She held out a hand to help Midge up. Ethel’s hand was large and square like her face.

  ‘Nothing. At least I hope it’s nothing.’ Midge brushed the leaves from her tunic.

  ‘You’ve got mud on your stocking,’ said Ethel helpfully.

  ‘Have I? Blow.’ Midge rubbed at the patch of dirt.

  Anne’s grin grew wider. ‘Pull the dirty bit round to the back. That way the Beast won’t see it till you’re going out.’

  ‘Yes, and maybe you can walk out backwards, like she’s the Queen and you can’t show her your bum,’ added Ethel.

  A year ago, Midge had wondered what the daughter of an earl was doing making friends with the orphaned daughter of a New Zealand sheep farmer and the daughter of a Yorkshire wholesale grocer and Quaker. Anne’s company was cultivated even by the sixth formers. ‘All hoping,’ said Anne once, with a small grimace, ‘for invitations to one of Mummy’s little parties. Just dripping with dukes and viscounts, you know, in case one of them decides to marry her youngest daughter.’

  Which was, Midge realised, one answer to the question. She longed for Glen Donal, not an English fiancé. And as soon as she turned twenty-one and inherited her money, she’d be back there with Tim no matter what Uncle Thomas said. And Ethel…well, the daughter of a wholesale grocer, five feet ten inches tall and with shoulders like a rugby player and a face like a pony, would never be accepted into society, even if befriended by the daughter of an earl, no matter how much deportment Miss Hollington tried to drum into her, or how wealthy her father was.

  Or maybe it was simply that Anne liked them.

  ‘What were you doing under there anyway?’ demanded Ethel.

  Midge held up her letters. ‘From Aunt Lallie and Tim.’

  Anne nodded sympathetically.

  The three walked slowly back towards the school.

  ‘How are they?’ Ethel kicked one of the stones on the drive with her shoe.

  Midge bit her lip. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Tim’s all right so far. He says none of his lot have been hurt yet.’

  Anne stared. ‘Are you sure? The casualty lists are enormous.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he wrote,’ Midge said uncertainly. ‘But that Gallipoli place sounds like a nightmare. And Aunt Lallie’s letter was strange. She’s never written anything like that before. She’s in charge of a dysentery ward in Egypt. But it all sounds—I don’t know. Chaotic. Like nothing’s organised at all.’

  Ethel screwed up her nose. ‘Dysentery is where you get the trots, isn’t it?’

  Midge nodded. ‘Really badly. And they don’t stop. Oh, it sounded awful! Just two nurses for two hundred and thirty men. I should be out there too. Helping!’

  ‘We’re doing what we can,’ said Anne gently. ‘I’m sure the army will get things under control soon.’

  ‘Will they? All we’re doing is bandage-rolling! Making baby clothes for refugees! It’s not enough!’ Not when Tim was facing guns, she thought, and Dougie too, and Aunt Lallie with all those dying men.

  Suddenly, it was all too much. When you were young, you were helpless, Midge thought. She’d been helpless when her mother had died, leaving her a tiny baby; helpless when diphtheria took her father, not even allowed to visit him in case she was infected; helpless when her older brother brought her across the world to an aunt and uncle she’d never met. And helpless when her twin brother followed everyone else to the war. Tim and Dougie were doing something. And she was just a problem to be shoved away at school.

  She bit her lip, unwilling to say anything that might hurt her friends. Three of Anne’s cousins were in France as well. And Ethel’s brother had decided his future lay in wholesale groceries, not in uniform, which was an even touchier subject these days when everyone was expected to do their bit.

  Anne looked at her curiously. ‘Darling, be sensible. Even if they let you leave school, you couldn’t be a nurse or even a VAD overseas till you’re twenty-three.’

  ‘Eight years away! The war will be over by Christmas,’ Midge said.

  Anne nodded. ‘My uncle in the War Office says that the French and English could drive the Germans back now if they wished. They’re just waiting for the New Armies to come out to make the victory a decided one. Midge, my sweet, you just have to accept it. Even the Duchess isn’t taking on girls our age.’

  The Duchess was Millicent, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland. As soon as war had been declared she’d sailed for France and established the Millicent Sutherland Ambulance. Other women, like Mrs St Clair Stobart, had followed, organising private cars, nurses, doctors, medical supplies, whatever they could gather to help the official medical services that were overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded and dying.

  Midge turned to Anne eagerly. ’You know the Duchess? I can drive, you know. I could drive an ambulance. ’

  ‘Mummy knows her, of course. But, darling, she wants professionals. We haven’t even passed our first aid certificates yet. Or at least women with…with experience.’

  ‘Older, you mean,’ said Midge bitterly.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘There has to be something we can do!’ She clenched her fists in frustration. It was illogical, she knew. But it seemed like the war must be over sooner if only she could do something.
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  ‘Comforts for soldiers,’ suggested Ethel.

  ‘Packages of toffee and writing pads! They don’t even have enough food over there sometimes! Dougie said the last time they were sent anywhere, they were two days without any food at all. One lot of men went three weeks without rations!’

  ‘Ah, lass, they be needing Carryman’s Cocoa.’ Ethel deliberately spoke in the broad accent that Miss Hollington was working so hard to get rid of.

  ‘What good is your dad’s cocoa when it’s over here?’ Midge said. ‘They need it there!’

  ‘Cocoa makes you spotty,’ said Anne.

  A bell chimed in the distance.

  ‘Prep,’ Anne said. ‘Come on, Eth. The war is far away, darlings, but Miss Jenkins and her posture classes are all too near. And you, Midge, still need to see the Hollow Beast.’

  Chapter 2

  Miss Hollington’s office looked like a parlour with a desk shoved in the middle. It had blue damask curtains, a pink and blue chintz sofa, and polished wood floors with a blue and red Turkish carpet.

  Why do we demand that German butcher’s shops close down yet still keep Turkish carpets, wondered Midge, as she shut the office door behind her.

  Miss Hollington looked up from her desk. ‘Ah, Margery. I’m afraid…well, I’m not sure…’

  Midge stared. She had never seen Miss Hollington uncertain before.

  ‘You have received a letter,’ Miss Hollington said, starting again.

  Midge nodded. ‘I got two this afternoon.’

  ‘I mean another one.’ Miss Hollington picked up a plain buff envelope from her desk. It had ‘OHMS’ printed on it. She cleared her throat. ‘As I am in the position of your temporary guardian here, I thought it my duty to open it.’

  And you wanted to stickybeak, thought Midge.

  ‘I have to say its contents surprised me. But perhaps you can explain.’