‘No,’ said Sister Crawford firmly. ‘I shall find someone more competent. Now open that window before we all suffocate. Then go at once and light the fire at the end of the ward. The men are complaining of the cold.’
Heart sinking, Louisa made her way back down the ward, past rows of clean but deathly pale heads lying against white pillows, blankets tucked up underneath their chins, like rows of newborn babies. She felt like kicking herself. All the techniques for bandaging injuries she’d pored over, the different diseases like polio and consumption she’d boned up on. Why hadn’t she thought to read up on simple tasks like lighting coal fires and making meals, which were clearly a major part of the auxiliary nurse’s job in 1917? She knelt before the fireplace, next to which were arranged coal scuttle, matches, kindling and newspaper. She took a deep breath and imagined Kerry sitting on the bed opposite, sipping a vodka and tapping the ash from her cigarette.
Come on, Doc. Seriously, how hard can it be?
The grate was full of brittle, burnt-up coals which would clearly need to be removed first. Then you had to use newspaper, didn’t you? To light the wooden kindling, which, in turn, would light the coals.
Painstakingly, she built a three-tiered edifice, then lit a taper and poked it under the paper, which soon lit. The wood started to crackle. She blew gently on it, but the flame went out. She tried again, only for the same thing to happen. And she began to feel horrible, burrowing panic again.
Doc, I’m going to die of old age at this rate…
‘You never lit a fire before, Nurse?’ someone whispered. It was the man in the bed behind her. One dark eye looked out at her from a half-bandaged face.
She shook her head.
‘You got too much coal on top. Ain’t never gonna catch like that.’
‘Oh, I see!’ she whispered back. ‘Thank you!’
‘And use the small lumps to get it goin’, not them great big things.’
She tried again. This time it finally caught. But then, to her horror, smoke started curling out into the pristine ward from beneath the fireplace hood.
‘The damper!’ whispered the patient as the smoke billowed outwards.
‘What’s the damper?’
‘At the top! You have to open it to draw the fire up. Hurry! Before that old sourpuss comes back in. She’ll have your guts for garters.’ He pushed back his bedclothes.
‘No!’ she whispered, even as the smoke stung her eyes, feeling under the hood with frantic, fumbling fingers. ‘Please, you must stay in bed! I’ll find it.’
But it was too late: quick, efficient footsteps echoed down the ward, like someone hammering nails into a coffin.
‘Miss Ashby!’ hissed Sister Crawford in a venomous whisper. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing now? Are you also completely incapable of lighting a fire?’
‘I’m sorry, Sister. I… I couldn’t find the damper.’
Sister Crawford felt under the fire hood and moved something with a heavy metallic clunk, and the smoke was immediately sucked back into the fireplace and up the chimney. Then she bent down, her immaculate, starched white cuff dirtied from the smoke and ash, and pulled out some kind of drawer under the grate that Louisa hadn’t even realised existed. Spent ash collapsed outwards onto the hearth in a soft heap, like a sigh of disappointment.
‘And you didn’t think to empty the ash pan either?’ said Sister Crawford icily. ‘I don’t know what you learned in your last posting, Miss Ashby, but clearly it wasn’t anything of use to us here. I suppose you’ve always had maids to bring your meals and make up the fire for you and do all the mundane things that you clearly think so beneath you. Well, that isn’t how things work here.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ Louisa whispered.
‘You are to clean up this mess at once. Then go upstairs to theatre. They need an extra pair of hands.’ She glared at Louisa. ‘And you had better give a good account of yourself up there, Miss Ashby, or I’ll see to it that you’re in front of Matron’s desk before the day is out with a warrant for your passage back home.’
A little later, Louisa found herself outside the operating theatres – and felt as if she were standing at a portal to hell. Scores of men lay all the way down the tiled hallways, on stretchers on the floor or on trolleys, all still in their filthy uniforms, the fabric ripped or cut back to reveal their appalling injuries – limbs missing, abdomens ripped open, heads bloodied. Some were crying out and writhing in agony while doctors, nurses and orderlies worked to try to keep them alive. Others were deathly pale and still, their eyes closed, or staring dead-eyed at the ceiling, so that she felt if she touched them she would find that they were not human at all, but blocks of marble carved to look like men.
A sheet had been pulled up over the man on one trolley, but it only half covered his mangled face. Next to him a doctor and nurse were busy working on another man.
‘Raise his shoulders,’ the doctor ordered, turning the patient’s head to the side and pulling his tongue forward with forceps. Then, in a regular rhythm, he began to bend the man’s arms and pull them up over his head, then bring them back down again to his sides. Louisa saw it was an old-fashioned method of artificial respiration. It didn’t look particularly effective.
The whole place smelt appalling – of putrefaction, sweat, nauseating, sickly-sweet anaesthetics and death. Through the open glass doors of a room at the end Louisa could see two anaesthetists in long white surgical overalls, sleeves rolled up, holding white gauze masks over their patients’ faces while dripping what must be ether or chloroform onto them.
‘Try not to fight it,’ she heard a doctor tell one man who was struggling, being held down by orderlies, and making hideous choking sounds. ‘Turn him on his side,’ the doctor called, ‘he’s going to be sick,’ before she heard the heavy splatter of vomit on the tiled floor.
Then a cool hand slid into hers.
‘Nurse, me foot aches summat fearful.’ It was a man on a trolley beside her, his face deathly pale and his eyes bloodshot. ‘This one.’ He rubbed at his left thigh with a bloodied hand. She saw that his leg was missing from the knee down, a dirty tourniquet tied above the filthy, bloodied mass of bone and flesh.
Then, ‘I say, you there!’ someone called. ‘Did Sister Crawford send you?’
A VAD appeared at the doors of an operating theatre. A powerful waft of anaesthetic gas came out and clawed at Louisa’s throat. ‘Take this outside to the incinerator right away,’ the VAD told her. ‘Go the back way, out the door at the end. And mind to come straight back – there’s much more.’
She pushed out a metal bucket covered in gauze. Louisa went over. An appalling smell emanated from it. She took a deep breath and picked it up. It was heavy. She turned back to the man with the missing leg, but saw that the orderlies were wheeling him into theatre. And someone had pulled up a sheet over the face of the man they’d been trying to resuscitate.