The Hidden Years

Besides, she had added acidly, in case Lizzie hadn’t realised it, there was a war on and it was her duty to do what she could to aid her countrymen. Aunt Vi had made up her mind. The matron of the hospital was one of her friends, and, before Lizzie had time to draw breath, she was installed in the hostel not far from the hospital grounds, in a dormitory with a dozen other girls, all of them working the same long, gruelling hours, although the others, unlike Lizzie, spent their free time not on their own but in giggling, excited groups, vying with one another to present the most enticing appearance for their weekly visits to nearby barracks to attend their Saturday night dances.

They made fun of Lizzie, taunting her because she held herself aloof from them, because she was ‘different’, and not just because of the way she spoke.

Aunt Vi was very strict, and, even though Lizzie was no longer living under her jurisdiction, the lessons she had enforced on her made it painfully difficult for Lizzie to throw off her aunt’s warnings about what happened to girls foolish enough to listen to the brash flattery of boys who ‘only wanted one thing’ and who ‘would get a girl into trouble as soon as look at her’.

Aunt Vi had no very high opinion of the male sex, which, in her view, was best kept at a distance by any right-minded female.

She herself had grown up in a harsh world, where a single woman who managed to rise to the position of housekeeper in a wealthy upper-class home was far, far better off than her married sisters, who often had half a dozen dependent children and a husband who might or might not be inclined to support them all.

Men, in her opinion, were not to be trusted, and Lizzie had a natural sensitivity that made her recoil from the often clumsy and always suggestive passes of the few young men she did come into contact with.

This was wartime and young men did not have the time, or the necessity, to waste their energy, and what might only be a very brief life, in coaxing a girl when there were so many who did not want such coaxing.

The only other men Lizzie met were the patients in the hospital, men who had been so badly injured that it was tacitly admitted that nothing more could be done for them, and so they lay here in the huge, decaying old building, economically and clinically nursed by young women who had learned to seal themselves off from human pity and compassion, who had seen so many broken bodies, so many maimed human beings, so many tormented young male minds that they could no longer agonise over what they saw.

For Lizzie it was different. She had wondered at first when she came to the hospital if she might eventually try to qualify as a nurse, but after a year there, a year when she had seen a constant stream of young men, their minds and bodies destroyed by this thing called war, lying in the wards, when she had seen the hopelessness in their eyes, the anger, the pain, the sheer bitter resentment at their loss of the future they had once anticipated, she had known that she did not have the mental stamina for nursing.

With every familiar patient who left the wards, taken home by a family helpless to cope with the physical and mental burdens of their sons and husbands, and with every new arrival, her heart bled a little more, and she could well understand why the other girls sought relief from the trauma of working with such men by spending their free nights with the healthy, boisterous, whole representatives of manhood they picked up at the dances they attended.

That the Americans were the best was the universal opinion of her colleagues; Americans were generous and fun to be with. There were some stationed on the other side of the village, and once or twice one of them had tried to chat her up when Lizzie walked there to post her weekly duty letter to Aunt Vi.

She always ignored them, steeling her heart against their coaxing smiles and outrageous invitations, but she was only seventeen, and often, once she was safely out of sight, she would wonder wistfully what it would be like to be one half of the kind of perfect whole that was formed when two people loved with the intensity she had envied in her reading.

Lizzie was an avid reader, and a daydreamer. When she had first come to live with Aunt Vi, she had barely opened a book in her life, but, in addition to ceaselessly correcting her speech and her manners, Aunt Vi had also insisted that her great-niece read what she had termed ‘improving books’.

The chance munificence of a large trunkful of books from the vicar’s wife, which had originally belonged to her now adult children, had furnished Lizzie with the ability to escape from Aunt Vi’s strict and sometimes harsh domination into a world she had hitherto not known existed.

From her reading Lizzie discovered the tragedy of the love between Tristan and Iseult, and started to dream of emotions which had nothing in common with the clumsy overtures of the outwardly brash young men with whom she came into contact. Their very brashness, the fact that her sensitive soul cringed from their lack of finesse and from the often unwelcome conversation and revelations of the other girls in her dormitory, made it easy for her to bear in mind Aunt Vi’s strictures that she was to keep herself to herself and not to get up to any ‘funny business’.

By funny business Aunt Vi meant sex, a subject which was never openly referred to in her aunt’s house. As far as Aunt Vi was concerned, sex was something to be ignored as though it did not exist. Lizzie had naïvely assumed that all women shared her aunt’s views, until she had come to work at the hospital. From her peers’ conversations she had learned otherwise, but until now she had felt nothing other than a vague yearning awareness that her life was somehow incomplete… that some vital part of it was missing. She had certainly never contemplated sharing with any of the men she had met the intimacies she heard the other girls discussing so openly and shockingly… Until now…

She stared dreamily at her diary. It had been at Aunt Vi’s insistence that she had first started keeping a diary, not to confide her most private thoughts in, but as a factual record of the achievements of her days.

It was only since she had come to work at the hospital that she had found herself confiding things to her diary that were little more than nebulous thoughts and dreams.

Kit… Even now she was dazzled by the wonder of meeting him…of being able to whisper his name in the secret, private recess of her mind, while her body shivered with nervous joy.

Kit… He was so different…so special, so breathtakingly wonderful.

She had known the moment she saw him. He had turned his head and smiled at her, and suddenly it was as though her world had been flooded with warmth and magic.

And to think, if she hadn’t decided to go and visit poor Edward, she would never have met Kit… She shook with the enormity of how narrowly she had averted such a tragedy.

Edward Danvers had been with them for many months now; a major in the army, he had been badly injured in Normandy… his legs crushed and his spine injured, resulting in the eventual amputation of both his legs.

He had come to them supposedly to recuperate from a second operation, but Lizzie knew, as they all knew, that in fact he had come to them because there was nowhere else for him to go. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, and privately Lizzie suspected that he himself no longer had any desire to live. He wasn’t like some of the men who came to them: he didn’t rage and rail against his fate; outwardly placid and calm, he seemed to accept it, but Lizzie had seen the way he looked inwards into himself, instead of out into the world, and had known that she was looking at a man who was gradually closing himself off from that world. Willing himself to die, almost.

He never spoke about his injuries. Never complained, as some of the men did, about fictitious limbs that were still there. Outwardly, he seemed to have adjusted well to his amputations, quietly allowing the nurses to get him into a chair, so that Lizzie, or one of the other aides, could wheel him into the gardens.

Lizzie liked him, although she knew that most of the other girls found him poor company, complaining that he never laughed or joked like the other men and that he was a real misery.

Lizzie didn’t mind his silences—she knew that he particularly liked to be wheeled round the gardens. He had told her once that they reminded him of the gardens of his grandparents’ home.

Cottingdean, it was called, and when he talked about it Lizzie could tell that it was a place he loved and that, in some way, the memory of it brought him both joy and pain. Sometimes when he mentioned it she would see the bright sheen of tears in his eyes and would wonder why, if he loved it so much, he stayed here, but she was too sensitive to question him, too aware of the deep, raw pain he kept hidden from the others.

She liked him and discovered, as the months went by, that she looked forward to seeing him, to winning from him his fugitive, reluctant smile.

Like her, he enjoyed reading, and when he discovered that she had read, and now reread, everything the vicar’s wife had donated to her he offered to lend her some of his own books. She refused, worrying about the wisdom of leaving them in the dormitory. The other girls would not deliberately damage them, but they were not always as careful with other people’s property as they might have been.

Gradually, a tentative friendship developed between them and often, on her days off, she would spend time with Edward, taking him out in the garden if the weather was fine, sometimes reading aloud to him when it wasn’t, knowing how much the mere effort of holding a book sometimes tired him.

She made no mention of Edward in her letters home to her aunt. Aunt Vi would not have approved. Edward came from a very different world from her own and Aunt Vi did not approve of any mingling of the classes. It always led to trouble, she had warned Lizzie.

It made her blood run cold now to remember that, on this particular Thursday, she had almost decided against spending her precious time off with Edward. She had woken up in an odd, restless, uncomfortable mood, her mind and body filled with vague, unfamiliar yearnings, but then she had reminded herself that Edward would be looking forward to going out. The rhododendrons were in full flower in the park, and he had been looking forward to seeing them for days. The sun was out, the sky a clear, soft blue… No, it wouldn’t be fair to let him down.

And so, suppressing her rebellious yearnings, she had washed in the cold, shabby bathroom which all the girls shared, allowing herself the luxury of washing her hair, and wondering at the same time if she dared to have it cut. She was the only girl in the hostel who wore her hair in such an old-fashioned style, braided into a neat coronet, which Aunt Vi insisted upon. She wondered idly for a moment what she would look like with one of the shoulder-length bobs worn with such suggestive insouciance by some of the other girls, and then sighed as she studied her make-up-free reflection in the spotted mirror.

The other girls wore powder and lipstick, and cheap perfume given to them by their American boyfriends. They curled their hair and darkened their eyelashes with shoe blacking and, if they were lucky enough to own a pair of the coveted nylons, they deliberately wore their skirts short enough to show off their legs.

As she dressed in the serviceable cotton underwear which Aunt Vi’s strict teachings ensured that she spent her precious allowance of soap scrupulously washing until her hands were almost raw and bleeding, to ensure that it stayed white, she admitted that lipstick and fashionably bobbed hair were not for her.

She knew the other girls laughed at her behind her back, mimicking her accent and making fun of her clothes.

Aunt Vi had practised a lifetime of frugality and, as Lizzie had grown out of the clothes she had originally arrived with from London, the older woman had altered garments from the trunks full of clothes she had been given by her employers over the years to fit her great-niece, and, in doing so, had also turned the exercise into lessons in dressmaking and fine plain sewing.

That the skirt she was wearing now had once belonged to Lady Jeveson would have impressed the other girls in the hostel as little as it impressed her, although for different reasons, Lizzie acknowledged. The other girls would have screamed with laughter and derision at the thought of wearing something which had first been worn by a girl who was now a grandmother.

That quality of cloth never wore out, Aunt Vi declared firmly, and indeed it did not, Lizzie reflected wryly, fingering the heavy, pleated tweed.

It was a pity that Lady Jeveson had not favoured the soft pastel colours more suited to her own fair colouring, rather than the dull, horsy tweeds of which she had apparently been so fond. The blouse she was wearing might be silk, but it was a dull beige colour which did nothing for her skin, just like the brown cashmere cardigan she wore over it.

She had seen the other girls, on their days off, going out in bright, summery dresses, with thin floating skirts and the kind of necklines which would have shocked Aunt Vi, and, while she knew that she could never have worn anything so daring, this morning Lizzie found herself wishing that her blouse might have been a similar shade of lavender-grey to her eyes, and that her skirt might have been made out of a fine, soft wool, and not this heavy, itchy stuff, which was a physical weight on her slender hips.

There were no nylons for her. She had to make do either with bare legs, which the rough wool made itch dreadfully, or the thick, hand-knitted stockings her aunt had sent her for Christmas.

She wasn’t sure what had made her opt for bare legs, what particular vanity had decreed that this morning she would not be sensible and wear the hated stockings, knowing that they made her slender ankles look positively thick, even if they were warm and practical.

The hostel was just across the village from the hospital, and Lizzie cycled there on an ancient bicycle. When they were on duty, the girls ate at the hospital; not the same food as the patients, but meals which the others often angrily derided as ‘not fit for pigs’.

Certainly, the meals were stodgy and unappetising, and not a patch on Aunt Vi’s dishes. Her aunt might almost be bordering on the parsimonious, she might make every penny do the work of two, but she was a good cook, and Lizzie missed her appetising meals, the fresh vegetables and fruit in season which she always managed to obtain by some country means of barter.

This morning, since she wasn’t on duty, there would be no breakfast for her at the hostel, and, since the girls were not allowed to cook food in the hostel, that meant either whatever she could buy and eat on the way to the hospital, or an expensive and not very appetising snack in the village’s one and only café.

Trying not to let herself think about her aunt’s porridge, thick and creamy with the top of Farmer Hobson’s milk, Lizzie told herself stoically that she didn’t really want any breakfast.

All the girls were always hungry; their workload was heavy, and no matter how unappetising they found their food it was always eaten.

All of them were a little on the thin side, Lizzie in particular as she was more fine-boned than the rest, with tiny, delicate wrists and ankles that sometimes looked so frail that they might snap.