Gwendolen slowed her pace and then finally stopped so that she could listen better. The cornetist was playing “Blow the Wind Southerly,” very beautifully, and Gwendolen didn’t think she had ever heard anything sadder—the “Last Post” perhaps, but that, by its very nature, was the embodiment of grief and melancholy.
The tune was doing him little good as no one was tossing any coins his way, and he changed tack, towards the English hymnal. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Again, he played it in a terrifically mournful manner. Gwendolen hadn’t previously thought of the cornet as such a wretched instrument. She was tempted to request “I Want to Be Happy”—the poor man would make more money.
What a friend we have in Jesus. （Do we?, Gwendolen wondered. She had lost any religion she may have once had.） It was the hymn the men sang their own lyrics to, you heard it everywhere. When this bloody war is over. She had heard a rousing chorus once, from a mixed bag of walking wounded and stretcher cases being evacuated home, a job lot of Blighty wounds on an ambulance train that she was accompanying to Boulogne.
They were words one didn’t hear in mixed company—not just “bloody” but “arse” and “fucking”—and when they spotted Gwendolen, they all grinned ruefully and gave apologetic little salutes, murmuring down the line Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister. As if—years into the war by then—she could still be discomfited by words alone. （She was not a sister, but they were all sisters to the men.） She had bed-bathed some of those men, you would think that might be more awkward for them than her hearing an “arse” or a “bloody” on their lips. Or indeed a “fucking,” come to that—a word she had certainly never heard before she went to France but which she heard plenty of times once there. Patients in extremis were inclined to obscenities and men close to death were not always as polite as people liked to think.
In the rose-tinted accounts of her fellow nurses in those endless diaries, the men were all well and cheery, even the most broken, even those nearest to death. Suffering in silence was for saints, not soldiers, in Gwendolen’s opinion. Where was the virtue in a quiet death—slipping below the waves, sinking into the mud? Or living on, limbless after gas gangrene or with a body flensed of flesh or ripped to ribbons by artillery fire?
Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister. She had laughed and said, “Good luck, boys.” Some—most—would be back in a few weeks. Some—many—would be dead or badly injured by the end of the year. She could have wept for them, but what good did weeping do?
The veteran moved on to “Abide with Me,” which was tricky on a cornet. It had been played on the wheezing church organ at her mother’s funeral. The cornetist’s sombre repertoire had made her spirits drop. She no longer felt elated by her spree—her purchases had been paid for with those never-ending bales of barbed wire, no different really from profiteering from armaments and munitions. Her father knew he had blood on his hands, it had been unkind of him to pass on the poisoned chalice to her, tainting her new-found sense of release. She had been wrong, the war would never be vanquished. And, even if it was, another one would come along and overlay the memory of this one.
One must be cheerful, she determined. And she must give the poor man some money. Fumbling in her handbag for her purse, she was suddenly rushed at by someone—a woman—and knocked to the ground. Gwendolen gave a cry, more of shock than pain, as she lay sprawled full-length on the pavement. Quite stupefied by the collision, it took her a moment to understand that it had been deliberate—she had been robbed! Her handbag had been stolen. Only this morning, in the car outside Holloway, Frobisher had warned her that there had been a spate of women being robbed of their handbags. What a fool she was not to have been more vigilant.
As she lay prone, momentarily stunned, she watched as her battered old cloche hat rolled into the road and was squashed beneath the wheels of a butcher boy’s bike. Several people stepped around her. So this is what London is like, she thought.
* * *
—
“Goodness, Miss Kelling,” Mrs. Bodley said when Gwendolen returned to the Warrender after her encounter in Regent Street. “What on earth happened to you?”
Gwendolen supposed she looked a sight. Her cheekbone had hit the pavement and must already be bruising, a black eye seemed inevitable. There was an ugly tear in one of her stockings, she had a badly scuffed shoe and her skirt was smeared with something unpleasant. Thank goodness it was her shoddy old clothes.