Ardnish Was Home Episode 30

Next morning Louise exclaims: “It’s stopped snowing! I hope the Turks don’t come down here. Maybe we should hang a white sheet on a stick.”

My eye is getting better. It is wet and gooey, but after it has been bathed and I open and shut my eyelids for a minute, there is definite improvement.

I can make out the shape of people and see them moving around, and also the location of the door and window.

We talk about how long it might take for a rescue party to come and find us; we reckon at least two days. Will they come by boat, or along the shore?

We hope it will be by boat as then they would take us straight to the Gloucester Castle.

“What will we do if they don’t come?” I venture. No one has an answer.

“Come on, DP,” says Louise. “We need to get you more comfortable walking around. We need to build your strength up, too.” “I’ll need a cromach,” I say.

“A what?”

I grin. “A cromach is a stick that we take to the hill when we’re working the sheep, or for balance. I’ll need a dog, too. A Highland man always has to have a dog with him. But a cromach for now and we’ll get the dog later.”

Obstacles

Louise finds a stick and we go outside. Carefully, she puts her arm across my shoulder and shows me how to sweep the stick back and forth to detect obstacles, to lift my feet higher rather than shuffle, and to bend and straighten my injured arm.

“We’ll do this all day, DP,” she says. “You need to be a lot fitter than this.”

As we stand together in the warm evening sun it seems difficult to imagine the dreadful weather of just two days before. I gently flex my arm, and Louise rubs the muscle when I get spasms and cramps.

I can see shapes and movement quite well, but no colour yet, and everything is blurred. Louise has made a patch for my left eye.

“You look quite rakish, DP! It suits you,” Prissie exclaims. “I can almost see some naughtiness in you now. Not the perfect DP we thought you were.”

“Are you tired of my stories?” I ask Louise, somewhat belatedly. “They must mean nothing to you. A distant people in a faraway land.”

I feel her move close to me. “They’re lovely, DP,” she replies. “What a wonderful life you and your family have had. I long to see it for myself.”

I think I believe her. I feel happy. I inhale her scent and control the urge to touch her cheek. I want to so much. I could kiss her right now. No one would see.

But I don’t; she might run inside. If only I could see her eyes; then I could tell what she is thinking.

There’s a shout from Prissie. “Come on, Louise! We have lots to do before the light fades.”

Incapable

The other three patients are in as incapable a state as myself. The priest, Father Joseph, lies in the bed beside me.

I speak to him. His speech is slurred, as if he has been drinking. He’d been hit by shrapnel in the back and brought in by a party from HQ who were returning from a recce at the front.

Then there is the sapper corporal who lost a leg on a mine. Although it has been amputated above the knee, the stump has gone gangrenous, and the stench is awful. Prissie says it is like sharing a room with a man long dead.

Back in the Casualty Station, Dr Sheridan had put the stump in boiling water to try and kill the infection. He also strapped on a bag of maggots to eat the rotting flesh. The poor man has an awful fever and screams terribly in his delirium, for hour upon hour.

I ask Louise if he could be moved to another part of the house as no one can rest with the noise of his suffering. He will be dead by the morning, I think. God bless him.

Louise tells me that Prissie has something of a soft spot for officers. Mr Skinner and I talk a lot. He came straight from officer training at Mons and had been on the way up to join his battalion in the west.

He was staying overnight with a rearguard party on the beach when they were shelled and he was knocked out.

He is keen to get back to join them, and is worried that we think he is malingering.

His father is a lawyer and he is desperate to go to university and become a lawyer, too.

His privileged life is as different from ours as you can imagine, but nothing is too much effort for him. He dashes about, collecting wood for the fire and carrying things eagerly for the nurses.

Louise tells me that Prissie takes his pulse constantly and feels his brow, and we laugh. Prissie always has a good story to tell. She keeps everyone in good humour, especially Mr Skinner.

The sapper dies in the night. Mr Skinner helps Prissie and Louise carry him outside where they pile stones over him and mark his grave with a little wooden cross. Back in the house, Father Joseph says a prayer for him and asks him to have a word with our maker when he arrives up above to see if He can get us out of here.

Distressing

It is a selfish thing to think, but it is good to have silence again. His constant moaning was distressing and put all of us on edge.

Several days pass. Prissie and Louise find a couple of chickens which Mr Skinner kills and plucks. They boil them over the fire. We are growing increasingly worried: why haven’t we been rescued? Prissie and Louise are looking at all the alternatives to get to safety.

Maybe the evacuation is over and everyone has gone? But we all agree that it couldn’t have happened that quickly. I am privately concerned about how I am going to get around: the disorientation and vulnerability that I’d felt when stumbling out of the beetle and onto the rocks the other day is fresh in my mind.

I had fallen repeatedly, the waves soaking me up to the waist, and cracked my shin several times. Without a sailor on each side I would never have made it.

Just walking for a few minutes exhausts me, still.

Prissie always has a good story to tell. She keeps everyone in good humour, especially Mr Skinner