Page 41

I hope the long silence hasn’t worried you too much, but I’m OK, as well as can be expected so far from home and in a ward full of other sick and wounded men.

The days seem very long and I try to escape from the boredom by imagining what you could be doing.

I hope you are keeping busy with Mrs Cullen.

My father will have told you how it is for me, and I will quite understand if you decide to abandon the plans we had.

Sorry I couldn’t write this myself, but my right hand was injured too. I dream of Cornwall a lot and of dancing with you wearing that beautiful dress. I’m hoping a letter will come from you soon.

Love, Jack xxx

Beth passed it to Rose, her joyful expression of just a few moments earlier now a look of extreme anxiety. ‘It doesn’t even sound like him.’

Rose read it and passed it back. ‘It’s very hard to dictate a letter, Beth. Whoever wrote it for him might be almost a stranger. He isn’t going to pour his heart out to someone he doesn’t know well.’

‘I know that,’ Beth said, nodding. ‘But I couldn’t hear his voice. He didn’t tell me anything about the treatment he gets, or the other patients. And what does he mean when he says he’ll understand if I abandon our plans?’

‘You know what he means,’ Rose said firmly. ‘He’s giving you a way out.’

‘But I don’t want a way out,’ Beth said indignantly.

When Beth listened to the news on 4 June about how Allied troops had entered Rome and liberated the city, she felt nothing.

Not excitement or joy, she just felt numb.

Two days later, on 6 June, when troops landed on the Normandy beaches, she did feel something, but it was mainly concern for all the wives, mothers and sweethearts who would be crying for their dead or wounded men before the Germans were pushed back.

Rose insisted on them going to the pictures to see Casablanca , the film with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

The exciting and often poignant story did lift Beth’s spirits a little.

Yet it wasn’t until Pathé News came on after the film that she realized Rose had hoped the scenes of courage and gallantry on the Normandy beaches would help to take her out of herself.

Rose’s plan worked. It would’ve been impossible not to see all those brave young men prepared to fight and possibly die for their country and not be moved.

As tears flowed unchecked down her cheeks, the hard knot of sorrow inside her softened.

She made a silent vow to herself that when Jack came back she would be whatever he wanted, be that nurse, companion or just friend.

Rose kept a close eye on Beth in the days that followed.

On the face of it she seemed calm, resigned and indeed relieved that she finally knew where Jack was, even if his situation was tragic.

But Rose was concerned that she was comforting herself by slipping into a kind of Joan of Arc fantasy, where her crusade would be to dedicate her life to making Jack happy and well looked after.

In one respect that was both brave and big-hearted, but Rose feared she hadn’t really faced up to the reality of what life would be like taking care of someone so severely disabled.

Rose did know a little of what that was like.

She had been a member of a women’s group attached to Christ Church after the Great War, and one of the things they did was to visit men who had been wounded.

These men were not from wealthy Clifton families; often they and their wives and children were living in appalling conditions in a couple of damp, squalid rooms, or with aging parents.

Rose remembered seeing photographs of weddings, of healthy, smiling faces alight with love and hope for their future.

Now that once strong, handsome groom had to get around on crutches, or was confined to bed, angry and bitter that once he’d been called a hero, but now society had turned its back on him.

Their children were listless, pale and thin, always hungry, and the mother like a wraith, worn out with the struggle to keep her family alive.

Could she still love that man who belittled her, hit her, and ordered her out to get him the drink he craved?

Rose remembered Duncan telling her about the wife of one of his patients who mixed rat poison into her husband’s porridge, killing him.

She said at her trial she could no longer bear clearing up after the doubly incontinent man.

She asked the judge if he could do that, day after day.

Duncan doubted he could, but the poor woman was still hanged and her children sent to orphanages.

However sad Beth felt, she rallied herself by not just writing cheerful letters back to Jack, but by volunteering in Hambleden House, a convalescent home for wounded servicemen up on Bristol’s Downs.

Rose understood she wanted to learn how men like Jack were coping with missing limbs or burns, and to find out what she could do to aid their recovery.

Yet while Beth was rushing off two afternoons a week to help wounded men recover, there were more challenges in store for Britain.

There had been great delight when the Allies liberated Paris in August, and people were beginning to think it was the beginning of the end.

But first came the so-called doodlebugs or buzz bombs the Germans began firing on England.

They were unmanned, and when their buzzing engine stopped, they would drop down to kill and destroy property.

They didn’t have a long range, though, so most fell in the south of England.

But then, much worse, in September came the V-2 rockets. These silent and deadly missiles gave no warning, and caused untold damage and death in London.

One afternoon, Beth was reading a newspaper article about wounded soldiers being brought back from France to Charing Cross Station, the picture showing volunteers plying the men with drinks and sandwiches.

She looked up thoughtfully from the newspaper and asked, ‘Do our servicemen ever get sent home if they are taken prisoner yet are wounded?’

‘No, never,’ Rose said. ‘Just imagine what the logistics of that would be.’

‘So what do we do with the German sick or wounded here?’

‘We take care of them. The Germans do too, by all accounts. I think it’s in the Geneva Convention that we must. Anyway, nurses and doctors are much the same the world over, their care doesn’t depend on nationality.’

Beth wasn’t so sure about that. If Germans could send Jews to prison camps she doubted they tucked up sick and wounded POWs in comfy beds at night.

But she said nothing– Rose thought well of everyone.

She just hoped against hope that no one was neglecting or hurting Jack.

She’d only had two letters so far, and neither of them gave any real idea of how he was.