Harry Bingham - The Sons of Adam

What year was it?

‘Nineteen thirteen.’

What month?

‘No idea.’ Alan laughed at the idiocy of the question, hoping that the doctors would be able to see the funny side. They couldn’t.

What was his name?

‘Alan.’

Alan who?

‘Creeley. Alan Creeley.’

The doctors tutted to themselves, then vanished. The ward sister looked at Alan’s bedclothes with disapproval and tucked them in so tightly that she might have been packaging her patient for shipment overseas. Then she left too.

The pretty nurse, auburn-haired, freckled, and with lovely dancing blue eyes, drew closer to the bed. She loosened the bedclothes.

‘It’s not so tidy,’ she said, ‘but at least you can breathe.’

He smiled at her. ‘I don’t think the doctors liked me much.’

‘They don’t like any one, not unless your injury is particularly interesting.’

‘I didn’t come up to snuff, then? I feel rather as though I’ve been run over by an omnibus.’

‘Well, the operation proved rather lengthy, I’m afraid. More than expected, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve seen worse cases do well.’

Alan realised that it must have been her who had changed his dressings and bathed him. He reddened with an old-fashioned embarrassment.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve been here two years now and I’ve seen everything.’

‘Still …’

‘Still, nothing.’ She slipped a thermometer into his mouth, forcing him to cut his protest short. ‘Mutton stew or Scotch broth for lunch?’ she said. ‘Nod if you want mutton, shake if you want the soup. The mutton’s an absolute fright, by the way.’

He shook his head.

‘Good choice. I’ve telephoned your mother and father. They’ll be here this evening. I’ve told them you’ll be a bit muzzy, but you’d love to see them. I’ll find you some vases and sneak them away for you. Pamela’s bound to bring flowers, even if she has to strip the hothouse bare.’

‘Thank –’

‘Ah! Thermometer! Don’t talk!’

‘Oree. Unk-oo.’

She took his pulse. Her fingers felt delicious on his wrist, making the rest of his battered body feel like a truck was rolling over it. The white of her uniform seemed dazzling. He watched it rise and fall as she breathed. It was the most beautiful thing … he drifted off.

When his parents did arrive that evening, they were laden with armfuls of flowers, jars of honey, bottles of barley water, and from his father, when his mother was busy with the flowers) a flask of whisky and a handful of cigars.

‘Who was that nurse?’ he asked. ‘She spoke about you as though she knew you both.’

‘The nurse? Lottie, you mean? Reddish hair, blue eyes? But Alan, darling, I’ve told you ten times already. That’s Lottie Dunlop, one of the girls who’s been staying with us this year. A lovely girl. I’ve been longing for you to meet …’

‘Hier! Komm! Bitte schnell!’

The guard was elderly, silver-haired, Jewish. He was standing thirty yards away across the prison yard, beckoning at Tom.

Tom pointed to himself. ‘ Ich? Me?’

The guard nodded.

Tom dragged himself over. A bitterly cold winter had passed into spring. Tom was still losing weight, certain now that he was dying of hunger. He was listless and apathetic. His belly stuck out, jammed tight with wind and emptiness. He caught up with the guard.

‘Ja?’

‘Hier. Ein Geschenk. Für dich.’ A present. For you.

Tom woodenly put out his hands. The guard gave him a bag of sugar, a couple of tins of goose fat, a jar of raspberry jam. Tom stared down at his treasures, hardly able to understand. The guard tried to explain further. Tom couldn’t properly follow the Jew’s accented German, but it was something to do with a Red Cross parcel that had arrived for a man recently dead. The guard had seen Tom’s state and wanted to help. Tom was so grateful – so shocked – he began to sob out thanks, like a child at Christmas. The guard waved away the thanks, told Tom to eat slowly, and left.

The gift was like a second chance at life.

Tom was tempted to wolf the lot, but knew his stomach would quickly revenge itself on him if he did. He ate the goose fat and the jam over five days and took a spoonful of sugar with a mug of cold water morning and evening. His stomach complained, but his painful wind reduced. For the first time in months, Tom felt nearly human. And, as a human, he felt ready for action.

Speaking to Norgaard in the quiet of the camp that evening, he made a proposal.

‘Let’s escape,’ he said.

Alan recovered and Lottie Dunlop nursed him. One morning, as his brain fought its way out of its post-operation fog, he sat up in bed and tried to thank her.

‘Thank you so much for everything,’ he said. ‘I do apologise for not saying so earlier. I must have seemed very brutish. It was the anaesthetic, I suppose.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘Well, sorry anyway. It was ungentlemanly.’

She snorted out through her nose and began to clear away his tray of food.

‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said.

She stood upright, leaving his tray where it was. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. So far in this conversation you’ve called yourself a brute, ungentlemanly and now stupid. In the past couple of days, you’ve said sorry because you had dressings that needed changing. You’ve apologised for causing trouble – by which I assume you meant being honourably wounded in the service of your country. And when I tried to pay you the compliment of noticing your Military Cross you told me that you hadn’t earned it. So far, Captain Montague, I’m beginning to conclude that you’re a great nincompoop.’

He smiled. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sorry again? What is it this time?’

‘Very well then, not sorry … Miss Dunlop, may we start again? I’m Captain Alan Montague and I’m perfectly delighted to make your acquaintance.’

She bobbed in an exquisite curtsy and offered him her hand. ‘Charlotte Dunlop,’ she said. ‘Do call me Lottie.’

For six weeks, Alan recovered. At first he was embarrassed that he should be cared for so intimately by a friend and guest of his parents. Then, later, as he became well enough to be pushed round the hospital in a wheelchair, he began to understand what Lottie’s day-to-day job involved. The wing of the hospital in which she worked dealt with some of the worst cases coming over from France. She handled men who had lost both legs, who had been blinded or deafened, men whose lungs had been three-quarters destroyed by gas, who coughed black blood each time they tried to breathe too deeply. Compared with the things Lottie saw each and every day, Alan’s personal embarrassment at being bathed seemed so trivial.

They became friends.

At the end of her daily duties, Lottie came to find Alan, bringing two steaming great mugs of tea and a slice of cake from home. He learned how she had been on holiday in France when the war broke out. She’d extended her stay, ‘not wanting to travel back while the fighting was still going on – my goodness, how strange it feels to remember that now’. Staying in a hotel at Boulogne, she’d encountered some of the wounded men of the original Expeditionary Force and stayed to help. She’d been appalled by what she’d seen to begin with – ‘I must have been a very sheltered little girl, I’m afraid. I hadn’t imagined … I hadn’t even imagined what it could have been like’ – but came to find something like a vocation in her bloodstained trade. ‘I came back from France for Mummy and Daddy’s sake, but I insisted on at least coming here –’ she meant the Centre for the Very Seriously Wounded – ‘as I couldn’t stand to have become one of those ghastly debs who take a few temperatures and change a few dressings, then think they’ve earned themselves a letter of thanks from the King.’