Kitty’s War. Terri Nixon

if she’d been of average height I would not even have been able to see that, and I kept glancing back for that small comfort as the waves of soldiers and nurses lifted me closer to the ferry, and to the horrors I would have given anything to be able to forget.

      The water churned, choppy and grey beneath us, as we made our laborious, zigzagging way across the channel. Even knowing Jack waited for me at the other end, I felt that chilly loneliness again, and wished I could simply stay on the ferry for ever.

      A couple of VADs tried to engage me in conversation, but they were fresh from training, and excited to be going overseas to help our boys. I knew if I began talking I would dampen their chatter, and turn them into what I myself had become. It wouldn’t be fair. So, ignoring the look that passed between them, ‘Well, we tried,’ I went to the front of the boat instead, and stared out at the nothingness ahead.

      I had been just like them. Most of us had, and even once reality set in, and that happy anticipation had been crushed from us, we found strength in the minute-by-minute dealings with people whose lives depended on the pressing of a wound, the spotting of an incipient heart failure, the speed of transport to hospital. I hoped those two girls would find the same, but, for me, all Belgium held now was the shocking, painful memory of one brutal night.

      Lieutenant Colonel Drewe, the friendliest, cheeriest of men—grandfatherly, kind, patient. A veteran of the Africa campaign, and a man known for his bravery. How could someone like that…

      I turned away from the rail, my chest tight, and a phantom pain at the juncture of my thighs, as if the bruises he had given me were still there, his Webley revolver still rammed into my side. The decrepit ambulance parked haphazardly at the side of the road had been just one of any number of broken-down and abandoned vehicles. Evie said later that he’d known I would have sole charge of Gertie that night, and I shivered at the cold knowledge that I’d been exactly where he’d wanted me to be when I’d seen him stumbling up the centre of the road; if someone else had stopped, and had not been alone, it would have been nothing to him to wave them on and claim to be perfectly well.

      But of course it was me who’d stopped. And I was alone, and he’d looked at me with those strangely skittering eyes and accepted my help to climb into the back. I’d spoken gently to him, settled him onto the stretcher and turned to pick up the first-aid box, before asking him where he was hurt. When I’d turned back to him the gun had been out of its leather holster. My breath stopped, and my numbed fingers fell open, and the box crashed to the floor. The only words he’d spoken had been a warning that Oliver would be the one to suffer if I spoke of this night, and then he had stood up, seized my arm with his free hand, and pushed me onto the stretcher-bed in his place.

      The time that followed alternately flew by in seconds, and stretched into interminable hours; my horrified mind could still not place which. He had left me shaking, but not crying, too stunned and sick-feeling for tears, with my trousers wrapped around one ankle and trailing across the filthy floor. Fresh blood smeared the stretcher, mixing with the half-dried blood of the countless wounded Tommies I’d transported that night.

      Archie found out what had happened, of course. Evie had promised not to tell him, and then told him anyway. I’d been beyond fury, screaming at her, and knowing I was wrong to do it. But I couldn’t help it. The anger I couldn’t hurl at Colonel Drewe was eating me alive, and I had to free it or go mad. Poor Evie bore the brunt of it, and she bore it with patience and with grief, but her sorrow, and her guilt at letting me go out on the road alone, only inflamed my anger—it was the most vicious of circles.

      I hadn’t seen Archie since he and Evie had driven away from Dark River Farm together, leaving me in the care of Frances, Lizzy and the others. His face, as he’d turned his attention to the long track up to the main road, was the last glimpse I’d had of him, and I treasured it even through the anger and betrayal I’d felt towards Evie. I’d lain in bed, once the pregnancy was made real, hating myself, and hating the baby. I never hated Evie, but my anger towards her didn’t fade until Lizzy had lost her temper and pointed out a few home truths: I had wanted to drive alone; it was all I’d ever begged for; Evie had been doing it from the start; she had cared for me and taught me everything I needed to know; I had given her my blessing to go and talk to Will… It had taken that tiny, fierce girl, with her dark curly hair sticking up in all directions, her hands on her hips and her eyes flashing blue fire, to break the awful cycle of self-recrimination and despair. It wasn’t hard to see why Jack Carlisle’s heart had been captured by her, despite the rumours about Evie’s mother. She had made me realise those truths, but by then Oliver had deserted, and faced death if he was found, and death if he was not, and it was all my fault. Now, when I raged, I raged against my own cowardice, my own weakness, and only in the privacy of my little room at Dark River Farm. I wept, and cursed the hand fate had dealt me. And I cursed the child I carried. The next night Colonel Drewe’s unwanted yet innocent gift died in a wash of pain and blood, in the back of another ambulance.

      What remained of my youth died with it.

      Archie might have left, but the image of his calm grey eyes had stayed with me, behind the closed lids of my own, during that terrible time. The memories of our younger, carefree days had been more immediate to me than the shock of what had happened, his image more real than the rasp of the sheets against my skin and the cool water I drank to assuage a raging thirst. There was also a bitter irony in knowing it was helping our sheep deliver themselves of their young, that had killed my own. I knew it, yet the guilt lay heavy in my heart for those dark and desperate prayers that the child had never existed.

      Frances had told me afterwards that I’d called out for Archie more than once, in my more feverish moments, but all I could remember was being certain it was now that was the dream—a bleak and terrifying nightmare—and that reality still encompassed those sweet, uncomplicated days when we would go out riding, and he would tell me all about Scotland. My overwrought mind became my dearest friend, giving me vivid and detailed remembrances I hadn’t known I possessed until now; I could smell the horses’ sweat; hear the thump of hooves on short, scrubby grass; feel sleek, powerful muscles beneath me; and I recalled, with a new and perfect clarity, the sound of Archie’s voice as he described Fort Augustus and the Great Glen in which he lived.

      Waking to find the fever once and for all broken I had wept again, but now it was for the loss of that escape route into the past. For no longer being completely absorbed in the simple joy of Archie’s company, still believing it to be the innocent love of a child for a brother. It was knowing I had lost him for ever.

      As we neared France the sky was changing colour from pale blue to an overcast grey. Evening was creeping inexorably closer, and my insides twisted tighter and tighter as I accepted that there was no going back now; if we were lucky my testimony might possibly save Oliver’s life, but the truth would come leaking out, like a rancid green sludge, to poison my own.

      People around me were gathering up their belongings, calling to new friends to say a new set of goodbyes, and collecting together in groups in readiness for disembarking. Some, the quieter ones, would be returning to what they knew all too well already, others embarking on a new life for which no amount of warnings and descriptions could prepare them.

      I craned my neck for sight of Jack Carlisle, but not knowing if he would be in uniform or not it was hard to pick him out of the crowd waiting on the dock. Then, as the crowd thinned, I saw him, with his back to me. For a second my heart was jolted into a helplessly excited rhythm; his hatless head was turned away and he looked, from this side view, so much like his nephew; they shared a height and broadness of shoulder, both had very dark hair, and both held themselves with the same alert readiness, as if they might be called into action at any second. From this distance, and to my untrained eye, the uniform might have been that of any officer, as likely a captain as Jack’s own rank of major. I lost sight of him as I started forward, pushing through the crowd until I came up to stand behind him, and raised my voice to be heard over the hubbub of conversation, and of vehicles rumbling to life.

      ‘Major Carlisle?’

      Then he turned, and my knees faltered.

      ‘Young Kittlington.’

      ‘Archie!’