The Girl From The Savoy

P.S. the camera arrived safely. I think you are right to send it back, considering the ban from the War Office. It would be silly to get into trouble if your officers found that you still had one, and worse still if it fell into enemy hands. I’ll keep it safe until you come home.

The room is silent apart from the occasional cough from another patient. I look out at the distant chimney pots of the factories, reaching up toward the clouds like grubby fingers. The nurse tells me they made bombs in that factory during the war. They make ladies’ gloves there now. Sometimes it all seems so pointless.

‘Another letter?’ she asks.

I shake my head. What’s the point? She must have read these letters to me a dozen times and still I cannot remember this girl called Dolly who says such nice things. I hold out my hand and take the pages from her. They are watermarked and stained with the filth of war. She told me they were found in the breast pocket of my greatcoat. A great bundle of them, carried against my heart. I fold the pages as neatly as I can, following the worn creases. The tremble in my hands makes hard work of what would once have been such a simple task.

She takes the pages from me and pats my hand. ‘Tea?’

I nod.

‘Two lumps?’

I nod again. I can remember that much, two lumps of sugar in my tea. I can remember the name of my cat, the date of my mother’s birthday, how to make a corn dolly. Trivial things. Everything else is a distant fog, my once apparently happy life slowly erased by years of war until I am left only with the nightmares that haunt me.

The doctors are troubled by my condition. They prod me and poke me and write things down. Words I don’t understand for a condition they don’t understand: delusions, hallucinations, hysterical mutism. I’ve seen their notes. But despite their many treatments – hypnosis, electric shock, basket making, warm baths – they can’t make me better and they won’t send me home. They have labelled me ‘Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous’. A fancy name for what the men called shell shock. We all knew someone who was sent back from the front, suffering with their nerves. Lacking Moral Fibre, was another label the officers stuck on it. The young lad in the bed beside me says I need to pull myself together, that if I keep screaming at night and talking about the things I’ve seen they’ll send me off to the county asylum. And this girl in the letters, this Dolly, she tells me of so many wonderful things I have seen and done. It seems such a shame that I can’t do them anymore.

The guns are silent, but I am still fighting my war.

It is all I have now. War, the nurse, and the butterfly at the window.

6 (#ulink_b066f8e9-69df-5750-9285-cccc4fb3b755)

Dolly (#ulink_b066f8e9-69df-5750-9285-cccc4fb3b755)

‘You look at things. Imagine things. I bet you see shapes in the clouds.’

The hotel room is dark and unfamiliar when I wake. I lie still, listening to the rise and fall of the girls’ breaths, the pop of a mattress spring as they move, the rustle of bedsheets as they fidget in their sleep. It is all so strange and new. I didn’t think I would ever miss Clover’s snoring, but I do. I hear other noises as the hotel wakes up: the rush of water through distant pipes, the yawn of a straining floorboard overhead, the whistle of a porter, the jangle of milk bottles in the courtyard below the window. I think of the sounds I woke to in Mawdesley: the cockerel, the wind in the eaves, the knock knock knock of the wonky leg at the kitchen table as Mam scrubbed it with sugar and soap until her fingers bled. She scrubbed that table for weeks, as though she might somehow scrub away the words on the telegram that told her my father had fallen in the line of duty. That relentless knocking became the sound of our grief until I couldn’t bear it any longer and propped up the wonky table leg with The Adventure Book for Girls. The knocking stopped. Mam’s tears continued. I had nothing to prop her up with.

Instinctively, I reach beneath my pillow for the photograph but my fingertips find the pages of music. The touch of them reminds me: grey eyes, russet hair, a moment of something unspoken. I think about the music on the pages; unplayed, unloved. It nags at me like an itch I can’t scratch. I feel again for the photograph and take it from its hiding place, pressing it against my chest as I pull back the bedcovers, wrap a blanket around my shoulders, and creep across the cold floor to the window. The gas lamps cast an eerie glow over the courtyard at the back of the kitchens, lending just enough light to the room for me to see his face. My heart collapses at the sight of him. So many questions I can’t answer. So much pain. So much hurt and anger – and yet still so much love; an instinctive yearning to hold him in my arms. I clutch him tight to my chest, just as I did the day the photograph was taken. If only I could feel the warmth of him once more. That would be enough.

Beneath the window, porters and deliverymen are lifting supplies off wagons and carts after their trip to the markets. They work quickly, the men on the carts tossing pallets of fruit and vegetables to the next man, and on down the line. A rotten tomato lands on someone’s head and I smile as the unlucky recipient throws one back in reply. Soon everyone is pelting each other with whatever they can grab: oranges, lemons, walnuts. ‘Silly buggers,’ I whisper.

A mattress spring pops behind me. I look round to see Sissy sitting up in bed watching me. I startle at the sight of her, making us both giggle.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispers.

‘Looking.’

‘At what?’

I shrug. ‘Nothing much.’

She wraps her blanket around her shoulders and joins me at the window. We stand for a moment, our foreheads pressed against the cold glass as we watch the porters larking about.

‘You’re a dreamer, aren’t you, Dolly.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You look at things. Imagine things. I bet you see shapes in the clouds.’

She is right. I do.

We watch as the lamplighter makes his way along the street with his long pole and ladder, extinguishing the lamps as a dove-grey dawn settles across the sky.

‘Did you lose someone?’ she asks.

I falter. What is the definition of loss? I place my fingertip on the glass, drawing patterns into the condensation formed from our breaths. ‘Yes.’

‘Me too. The Somme. He’d only been there a couple of months. My brother, Davey.’ She turns and points to the photograph on her nightstand. ‘That’s him. Handsome bugger.’

I place my hand on hers. ‘I’m sorry.’ It never sounds enough.

‘Left a wife and two babies, a mother, and a sister. We’re all sorry. His missus says she could bear it a little more if he’d written a good-bye. But there was no last letter in his pocket. Not our Davey. He wasn’t one for words or soppy sentiments.’ She draws a heart onto the glass and we watch as it fades away. ‘What about yours? How did he die?’

Our conversation is interrupted as something lands with a clatter against the glass, making us both scream and jump backwards. We peer down to see one of the porters grinning up at us. He has a handful of walnuts and sends another rattling against the window.

Sissy pushes up the sash. A blast of cold air nips at my skin as she sticks her head outside. ‘Oi!’ she shouts. ‘Watch it!’

The porter blows her a kiss and carries on with his work.

‘Cheeky sod,’ she says, closing the window and pulling the blanket closer around her shoulders.

‘Do you know him?’

‘Billy Morris. He’s taken a fancy to me.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Have you taken a fancy to him?’

Her cheeks redden as a smile crosses her lips. ‘Might have.’

‘What’s all the noise?’

We both turn around to see that Mildred is awake.

‘It’s Dolly,’ Sissy says. ‘She’s flirting with the porters.’

I cuff her on the shoulder. ‘I am not!’

Mildred looks at me with that same knowing look. ‘Well, Dolly should be careful or she’ll get herself a reputation before she gets her first pay packet.’

Sissy and I look at each other and burst out laughing.

Mildred throws her covers back and steps out of bed. ‘Honestly. It’s like being back at school.’ She leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.