Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Rosie and Millicent emerged from the door of the kitchen carrying a large galvanised dolly tub between them, and they began to go in and out with jugs of water from the kettle on the range, filling it with hot soapy water.

When Rosie unwrapped the clothes, Millicent stepped back and waved her hand in front of her face. ‘Cripes, miss,’ she complained. ‘That’s right niffy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosie. ‘You really don’t have to help me. I know it’s horrid.’

‘I will help, miss.’

Rosie had a washing bat, and Millicent a three-legged dolly stick. With these they stirred the mixture until a kind of loathsome scum began to gather on the surface of the water. They poured the water down the drain outside the kitchen and began the process again. They washed the uniform three times before the scum began to clear. ‘Why don’t we get clean water and leave ’em to soak?’ suggested Millicent. ‘We can have another go tomorrow. We’re both all of a lather, in’t we?’

‘Just think,’ said Rosie, wiping the perspiration from her face with a handkerchief, ‘we used to have a permanent whitster to buck the clothes. How times have changed.’

‘Well, now we all have to do our bit, don’t we, miss? You didn’t used to know how to wash clothes at all, miss, and now you’re no different from anybody else.’

‘I think I prefer it like this,’ said Rosie. ‘The only thing worse than having too much to do is not having anything to do. I much prefer being busy.’

‘Me too, miss, but me and Cookie don’t half have to do a lot these days.’

The following morning the uniform was washed again, put through the mangle, and hung out on tenterhooks on a line inside the boiler room. Rosie was ashamed that she had broken her promise to burn it, and did not want Mrs Pendennis to see it drying on the line outside.

In the warmth of the boiler room the clothes dried out, and even acquired the pleasant aroma of coal. Rosie inspected them where they hung on the line, and stroked the fabric. She put a forefinger through a shrapnel hole and thought about how Ash must have crumpled and fallen. The bloodstains had not entirely gone, but now they seemed bearable. Later on, in the light of experience, she would understand more deeply how fabric carried into a wound could set up complications, and how the mud that was carried into a wound by that fabric was purulent and lethal because it was made of corpses.

Rosie went into Eltham on the omnibus and bought a very small suitcase at Elliot’s. Into it she put Ash’s uniform, his memorabilia, his diary and their letters to each other, and then she slipped it under her bed, next to her statue of the Virgin.

She often took the suitcase out and stroked the bloodstains, putting her fingers through the holes and holding the fabric to her face.

St Omer

6 April 1915

Dear Rosemary,

I heard recently on the grapevine that Ashbridge Pendennis was killed in February, at Kemmel. I am in the RFC now, and met him in the trenches, as I expect he told you. Thereafter I used to go and stunt for him. Anyway, I got the news from an HAC man that I came across at a CCS near here (not allowed to give locations) when I was delivering an airman with a head injury.

I know that you two were engaged to be married, and so I just wanted to tell you how very sorry I am about this terrible loss. You must be inconsolable, so what could I say to console you?

I have been out here a few months now, and have seen many terrible things. It is very hard to justify them, but I realise that in a way this war has nothing to do with Great Britain or America. I mean, Great Britain could simply have disregarded its treaties and stayed out. Ashbridge was American, and had even less to do with it.

But I am half French, and so this war means everything to me, and I am incalculably grateful to Ashbridge and everyone else who has come out to here to help us. What I am trying to say, on behalf of France and myself, is ‘thank you’ to him, and to you for your great sacrifice.

Our liberty, when it comes, will be his everlasting monument.

Yours ever, je vous embrasse,

Daniel Pitt

ROSIE ARRIVED AT the hospital an hour early. It had its own railway station, and so her trunk had been sent in advance, containing all fifty-one items stipulated, which included even a lantern, galoshes and a collapsible rubber basin. Everything had been assembled at some trouble and expense, and she felt with all these articles she could probably survive for months. Slipped into pairs of stockings and wrapped up carefully inside her apron (white), her apron (coloured), her wool dress and dust skirt, was her plaster statuette of the madonna and child, and her mending bag contained the battered New Testament and Psalms with which she had once been sent off to school.

As she was too young for Foreign Service, she had been posted, just as she had hoped, to Netley. She had arrived courtesy of a first-class travel warrant, and had read the regulations over and over on the train. She was entitled to seven days’ leave in the first six months, and was to be paid twenty pounds for her first year’s service, which was just two pounds more than Millicent earned at home as a housemaid, and she would receive two pounds and ten shillings in uniform allowance, which she had already spent during a rather sober spree on the ground floor of Selfridge’s, now entirely given over to nursing supplies.

Although much bolstered by the happy thought that, almost identically equipped, Ottilie was at the same moment making her way to Brighton Pavilion, Rosie was confounded by the vast size of Netley. She stood by the sentry box before its grand facade thinking that it must be several times larger than Buckingham Palace. Built by command of an empress, the place was on such a scale that it could have belonged only to the greatest empire on earth. It had been constructed to echo the style of Osborne House, just across Southampton Water, whence the late Queen had frequently ventured forth to visit her wounded troops, of whom she kept photographs, and for whom she had knitted shawls which became so highly prized that no one dared or wanted to use them.

At its centre was a copper dome, green with verdigris, and to either side stretched wings of granite, brick and Portland stone, set up in the classical style, with Italianate turrets and spires. Hundreds of windows were set into walls that were 440 yards long. On the greensward of the grounds hobbled or sat the wounded in their blue uniforms, and all seemed peaceful and orderly. Here and there a VAD with the red cross on her breast supported an elbow or strode forth on a mission.

She plucked up her courage and entered the building through the vast double door. She found herself confronted by the stupendous skeleton of an elephant, whose bleached bones had been set up in the lobby. There were alligators and crocodiles mounted on the walls, row upon row of snakes preserved in formaldehyde, and fish were set into the plaster of the walls in imitation of a shoal. Vast sets of horns and antlers were set up by the hundred, as if this were not a hospital but the country house of an implacably bloodthirsty aristocrat.

Rosie was just emerging from the museum, and wondering where to report, when mayhem suddenly broke loose. There was a great commotion as people began to pour out of the building — doctors, nurses, VADs, FANYs, stretcher-bearers. As if drawn irresistibly by their collective purpose she followed them, still carrying her valise, only to realise that a hospital train had come in.