“Are you up to stopping in to see the Americans I met last night?” Pru suggested. Emma hesitated and then nodded. She was bone-tired but wanted to be a good sport. She didn’t know where Pru got her energy from. She was game to go anytime, even after a fourteen-hour day with critically ill men depending on her. If anything, it seemed to energize her and give her superhuman strength, except when they lost one, and then the bottom fell out of her world. It was true for all of them. They took the losses very personally. They remembered all the boys they lost, and always met afterwards to discuss whether the situation could have been handled differently, for a better result next time.
“Yeah, why not?” Emma said, matching Pru’s long strides with her shorter ones. “They looked nice enough.”
“It’s a good thing the Americans are sending us their nurses,” Pru commented, and Emma bristled.
“We’re just as well trained as they are,” she said, and Prudence smiled.
“Yeah, but they haven’t been in it as long. They’re fresher. We’ve been at it for four and a half years. They’ve been at it for two, and they’re only training them as flight nurses now. It’s a whole new game for them.”
“True,” Emma said. She couldn’t deny it. She felt as though she had grown up here, or maybe just grown old. It was hard to feel young with what they saw every day, so much tragedy and loss of life, such a waste of human beings, lives that were cut short, and dreams that ended with a single bullet or a bomb.
They walked to the nurses’ barracks since they weren’t in a hurry, and it was nice to get fresh air after a day with the smell of blood, burned and torn flesh, vomit, and disinfectant all around them. They both took deep breaths of the evening air and the smell of the earth.
There were clusters of women in uniform outside the dormitory, and as they walked past them, Pru and Emma could hear American accents mixed with English ones, from all walks of life. There were a group of Australian nurses banded together, laughing at something. And as they walked into the building, Pru spotted the women she had met the day before. They had notebooks in their hands and had just come in from their day in the classroom. Pru stopped to talk to Alex, and then introduced Emma to all the girls she’d met.
“So did you learn all about the RAF today?” Pru asked them with a wry grin. “Tell them to hurry the hell up. We need you in the air with us, and you won’t need all those protocols once you get up there. You know as much as we do, or you wouldn’t be here. And I hear your air evac training is hell on wheels.” They all laughed and agreed with her.
“It almost killed me,” Lizzie said, and Audrey nodded.
“Can we talk you into dinner at the pub, or are you in love with the fine cuisine in our mess hall?”
“It’s no worse than ours,” Alex answered generously, although they had all agreed after the night before that it quite possibly was worse, due to the rigors of rationing and food in short supply. The whole country was hungry and being short rationed.
“The pub sounds like a nice change,” Louise said politely, and Emma smiled.
“It’s all we’ve got if we don’t want the slop they serve here,” she said, and the others laughed. The six of them headed toward the pub a few minutes later. They were all happy to order a pint of ale or a glass of wine, and they ordered sausages and beans, and a wartime version of shepherd’s pie, which bore little resemblance to what it used to taste like before the war. But it was food, and the beer and wine raised their spirits after a long day.
“When do you start flying with us?” Emma asked them. She liked Lizzie and Louise and had talked to both of them. Audrey and Alex were talking to Pru. Emma decided Pru was right. They were nice women. She hoped they were good nurses too.
“They said next week,” Louise answered. “Or the others will. They’re assigning me to the hospital at first, and I have to do a rotation with the injured German POWs they have in a locked ward on the base.”
“Oh that.” Pru glanced at Emma knowingly, who nodded, and then Pru spoke to Louise to give her the straight scoop, in case no one had. “We don’t have segregation in our army the way you do in yours, but there are some ‘special assignments’ reserved for colored nurses, British nurses too, not just Americans. The German POWs are one of them. Just about all their nurses are colored, and they do a rotation at the hospital before they fly the transports with us. There’s no segregation in the dorms, you can room with whoever you want. And you can date whoever you want, but you get stuck with German POWs. I have no idea why. I guess no one else wants to manage them.”