Jojo Moyes - Ship of Brides

In the tented confines of the nurses’ mess, a few hundred yards from what had been the American base Matron, Audrey Marshall of the Australian General Hospital, finished her day’s entry in the Unit War Diary.

– Hospital ship movements for POW evacuation from Morotai in hand.

– Movement orders to hand for unit – 12 POWs and 1 nursing sister move to Australia per Ariadne tomorrow.

– Bedstate: occupied 12, vacant 24.

She gazed at the last two figures, wondering at the years of entries in which those figures had been reversed, at the hundreds of days in which she’d had another column to enter: ‘those deceased’. The ward was one of the few still open: forty-five of the fifty-two were now closed, their patients restored to families in England, Australia, or even India, nurses discharged, supplies waiting to be sold to the occupying Dutch authorities. The Ariadne would be the last hospital ship, carrying with it this raggle-taggle of men, some of the last POWs to leave the island. From now on it would be just the odd car accident and civilian illnesses until she, too, received her orders to return home.

‘Nurse Frederick says I should tell you Sergeant Wilkes is foxtrotting Nurse Cooper around the operating theatre . . . She’s fallen over twice already.’ Staff Nurse Gore had stuck her head round the sheeted doorway. Her complexion, which always bloomed in the heat, was flushed with excitement and the last of the whisky. With the hospital so close to abandonment, the girls were skittish and silly, singing songs and re-enacting scenes from old movies to entertain the men, their former reserve and authority evaporating in the moisture-filled air. Although, strictly speaking, they were still on duty, she didn’t have the heart to reprimand them – not after what they’d seen these last weeks. She couldn’t forget their shocked, drained faces when the first POWs arrived from Borneo.

‘Go and tell the silly girl to bring him back in. I couldn’t care less if she injures herself, but he’s only been on his feet forty-eight hours. We don’t want him breaking a leg to add to his troubles.’

‘Will do, Matron.’ The girl was gone, the curtain falling back limply into place. Her face reappeared briefly. ‘Are you coming? The boys are asking where you are.’

‘I’ll be along shortly, Nurse,’ she said, shutting her book, and raising herself from the folding stool. ‘You go along now.’

‘Yes, Matron.’ With a giggle she departed.

Audrey Marshall checked her hair in the little mirror she kept above the wash-basin, then blotted her face with a towel. She slapped at a mosquito that had launched itself into the back of her arm, straightened her grey cotton slacks and walked out through the nurses’ mess, past the operating theatres (now, thankfully, silent) towards Ward G, thinking what a rare pleasure it was to be following the sound of laughter and music rather than the howling of men in pain.

The majority of beds in the long tent known as Ward G had been moved back so that half of the room now formed an unofficial, sand-based dance floor and those men still confined to their beds could see it. On the desk in the corner the gramophone huskily issued the songs that had not been scratched to nothing through years of sand and overuse. An impromptu bar had been set up at what had been the dressings station, the drips converted for use with whisky and beer bottles.

Many were out of uniform tonight, the women in pale blouses and floral skirts, the men in shirts with trousers that had to be winched round their waists with narrow belts. Several sisters were dancing, some with each other, a couple with the remaining Red Cross staff and physiotherapists, stumbling over the more elaborate moves. A couple stopped when Audrey Marshall entered, but she nodded at them in a way that suggested they should carry on. ‘I suppose I should do my final rounds,’ she said, her voice mock-stern, which prompted a weak cheer from the tent’s occupants.

‘We’ll miss you, Matron,’ said an emotional Sergeant Levy in the corner. She could just make out his face behind his raised legs, which were still in plaster.

‘You’ll miss the bed-baths, more like,’ said his mate. More laughter.

She moved along the row of beds, checking the temperatures of those with suspected dengue fever, peering under dressings that covered tropical ulcers, which refused obstinately to heal.

This lot weren’t looking so bad. When the Indian prisoners-of-war had arrived at the beginning of the year even she had had nightmares for weeks. She remembered the shattered bones, the maggoty bayonet wounds, the starving, distended stomachs. Reduced to an almost inhuman state, many of the Sikhs had fought the nurses as they tried to treat them – over the years they had become used to brutality and, in their weakened state, were unable to anticipate anything else. The nurses had cried in their mess tents afterwards, especially for the men whom the Japanese had deliberately overfed as they left the camps, and who had died painful deaths from their first taste of freedom.

Some of the Sikhs had hardly been men: they were light enough to be carried by a single nurse, mute or incoherent. For weeks they had fed them like newborn babies: two-hourly doses of powdered milk, followed by teaspoons of mashed potato, minced rabbit, boiled rice, trying to coax their collapsed digestive systems back into life. They had cradled skeletal heads, mopped spilt food from chapped lips, slowly convinced the men with whispers and smiles that this was not the precursor to some further terrible act of violence. Gradually, their hollow eyes bleak with whatever they had seen, the men had begun to understand where they had come.

The nurses had been so moved by their plight, their wordless gratitude and the fact that many had not heard from home in years that some weeks later they had got one of the interpreters to help them prepare a curried dish for those able to stomach it. Nothing too ambitious, just a little mutton and spices, some Indian flatbread to go with the boiled rice. They had presented it on trays decorated with flowers. It had seemed important to convince the men that there was still a little beauty in the world. But as they entered the ward, and proudly laid out the trays before them, many of the POWs had finally broken down, less able to cope with kindness than with hard words and blows.

‘Share a nip with us, Matron?’

The captain lifted the bottle, an invitation. The record finished and at the far end of the room someone cursed as the next disc slid out of slick hands on to the floor. She eyed him for a moment. He shouldn’t be drinking with the medication he was taking. ‘Don’t mind if I do, Captain Baillie,’ she said. ‘One for the boys who aren’t going home.’

The girls’ faces relaxed. ‘To absent friends,’ they murmured, glasses upheld.

‘Wish the Americans were still here,’ said Staff Nurse Fisher, mopping her brow. ‘I don’t half miss those buckets of crushed ice.’ Only a few British patients now remained.

There was a swell of agreement.

‘I just want to get to sea,’ said Private Lerwick, from the corner. ‘I keep dreaming of the breezes.’

‘Cups of tea without chlorinated water.’

‘Cold English beer.’

‘No such thing, mate.’

Normally heat like this would have left them all listless, the patients dozing on their beds, the nurses moving slowly between them, wiping damp faces with cool cloths, checking for ulcers, infection, dysentery. But the imminent departure of the POWs, the fact that they were mending, that they were here at all, had injected something into the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the sudden realisation that long-standing units, tightly knit groups that had supported each other through the horror of the last years, were about to be disbanded, separated by miles, in some cases continents, and might not meet again.