Paper Aeroplanes & Other Stories

Bluebirds in the Blitz

"Nurse Horncastle, Phoenix we need you to come quick," the hurried voice of Doctor Fitzpatrick called her to attention rushing down the corridor after him until she reached the small room where they had left the next casualty.

Ten, fifteen minutes maybe more passed as they continued to work on the young boy who looked no older than eighteen. "We lost him," Doctor Fitzpatrick spoke the words that Phoenix had heard far too often since she'd arrived in France six weeks previously.

The young boy whose blood covered Phoenix's hands, apron and streaked across her face would never grow old. In a few days, his mother would receive a telegram informing her that her son wouldn't be coming home she would never see him again never hear his voice and never put her arms around him one last time. Instead, his mother would spend the rest of her life with people stopping her on the street and telling her that they were proud of her son, that he was a hero as if those words could offer her some small comfort.

This was not how she had envisioned she would spend her twenty-seventh summer, but her country needed her they had to do everything they could.

After spending two years working as a nurse at the children's hospital in Birmingham Phoenix received the news that she had been both anticipating and dreading. In a few short hours under the cover of darkness, she would make the same journey across the English Channel as thousands before her. Leaving the sick children of England behind to tend to the injured soldiers in France.

Following what seemed like endless hours of darkness under strict instructions of a total blackout daylight broke and as the ship neared the harbour, Phoenix witnessed the first casualties, bloated bodies floating in the water.

With each day that passed the number of wounded increased tenfold. Injured men were brought in sometimes one after the other but more often than not five, six, ten at a time. Beds soon filled and the injured spilt onto the floor; days were spent rushing from one patient to another dosing them up on penicillin, lighting cigarettes and reading the occasional letter.

Despite never having witnessed death first hand before Phoenix soon became accustomed to it; Death was never far away he stalked the wards looking for the next soul to take. With the body count accumulating it became increasingly more difficult to stay positive her heart weighed, heavy in her chest and she supposed that was why she like so many others sought solace in Vera Lynn and the hope her lyrics inspired, dreams of days when the war would be over. One day instead of fighter planes dropping bombs over the White Cliffs there would be peace, that was what the non-indigenous birds came to symbolise.

Very often Phoenix found herself singing or humming the song. "There'll be bluebirds . . ." she softly sang the lyrics to the song that inspired hope in so many as she made her rounds on the ward. She fell silent as she stood alongside the bed of Frankie Beauchamp; not wanting to wake him, if he was sleeping.

"Sing it again?" the twenty-four-year-old soldier who had been brought in the previous week asked. "Please?" he asked again when silence met his request. "Your voice it's like the sun in the darkest of days and well every day is dark around here," he smiled at her.

Phoenix smiled back at Frankie; she felt the blush slowly creeping up her chest and neck before taking up residence in her cheeks. She was thankful that no one could see her embarrassment, it was silly Frankie had only asked her to sing a few lines of a song.

". . . Over the White Cliffs . . ." she continued as she tended to the dressings that almost covered the whole of Frankie's face, his hands reached up to touch the exposed skin of his cheek; his fingers brushed against Phoenix's hand and again she found herself blushing.

It had been an accident and she knew that it was silly to be blushing again he couldn't see her, he couldn't see a thing, no one knew if he would ever see anything again. Shrapnel wounds to his face, the small fragments of metal were lodged and embedded under the skin and in his eye. Without thinking, she unclasped her hospital badge and pinned it to Frankie's pyjamas.