"Do not let go of your luggage, you will never see it again.” Apt advice to anyone about to use Heathrow. And also for young nurses arriving on the frontline.
“Where are the conveniences?” wondered one. “There are chamber pots under the beds,” she was told. Which reminds me, must book that holiday camp.
The Crimson Field followed three young carers thrust into the soul-crushing grasp of the First World War, beneath the command of the somewhat austere Matron Grace, the medical equivalent of an 18lb field gun.
“The rules are clear,” she told the rather naive Flora, sprinkled in rose water, “no scent, powder or paint is to be worn, no fancy stockings, boots, shoes, belts, or trivialities – nothing that might incite, provoke, or inflame masculine attention.” I’m sticking my neck out here but I’m fairly sure she’d never feather-dusted topless.
Barely had they plonked their cases down than they were being drilled in the basics. “A well-made bed,” barked Matron, “is essential to a well-run hospital.” Today it’s considered more important to have pay-per-view television.
She went so far as to measure the exact sheet and blanket arrangement with a ruler, before ordering them to replicate it. “You have two minutes,” she said.
It was like the hospital version of The Krypton Factor.
Flora felt bed-making wasn’t her forte – I couldn’t help thinking we’d have got on well. “I’m ever so good at bandaging,” she countered. “I practiced on scouts, daddy, anyone who’d let me.” Two minutes in her front parlour and you were trussed up like an Egyptian mummy.
Matron, played by Hermione Norris, who appeared to have honed her character’s facial expression by sitting on a mine, felt Flora needed teaching a lesson. “Boiled, dried, rolled,” she snapped, pointing at a gut-wrenching heap of bloodied dressings. The Western Front was someway removed from boy scouts, although some British generals would have liked to recruit them.
“Don’t let them languish,” sneered the rancid Colonel Purbright, inspecting the wounded, “If they can walk and shoot, then back up they go.” Oh, to reach back through that lost generation and do something hideously and long-lastingly painful with his swagger stick.
Unlike the mud of no-man’s land, The Crimson Field has been carefully prepared to move and emote. “You will say her son died peacefully and without pain,” Grace told nurse Kitty of the letter she would write to the mother of a patient. “You always say it is peaceful and without pain, even when it is not.”
In this stinking mire, a white lie was a precious bloom.