This girl, this English nurse,
flings her flaming hair
over the bath
and sings.
We laugh –
we, who were born to be
Dovedale mothers
and farmer’s wives –
raised to live our lives
on smudge green dales
under heavy northern skies.
Oh, how far we’ve flown
and spread our wings –
to cast our shadows
on these distant lands:
to flop on canvas chairs
and stare at camels in the sand –
lounging, like movie stars,
with cigarette in hand.
Libya, Egypt, Tunisia –
why ever would we now return
to stare, with itchy feet,
at bilberries and Gritstone sheep?
We, who know the world!
Both cocksure and weary wise –
we’d felt the heat of men’s entrails,
laughed at their jokes in ways
our mothers never would
and, when we could,
we took the hands of dying boys
and whispered gentle words of love
amidst the dust and noise.
But here, in our billet,
behind our grand façade,
we were a harem without a king.
Oh, the giggling that night!
For, Red-head,
my friend, had sutured her last soldier,
finished her last shift
and tomorrow would be wed.
This was our party
to wave goodbye to her virginity –
more cackling and lurid cries,
“What virginity?
And that was it!
Merciless medical filth poured forth –
hymen, vagina…prick!
(Don’t send us nurses in
to patch up troops and then
condemn us when
our language blooms
like a violet bruise on skin.)
We picture their big day:
taste the champagne,
dance their first dance
and fall, with fearsome, frantic love
upon those pure white sheets –
the marriage sheets
he will not check
for signs of maiden blood.
Tonight our world is fizzing –
war forgotten!
By morning, she’ll be gone
to catch confetti in her hair.
For us, another shift,
the stifling heat,
the fight against invading sand,
the men laid out like meat.
But in our minds,
their promised night
will dance and tease,
at the edges of our dreams:
two heads upon a pillow,
two hearts beating far too fast
beneath tangled cotton sheets.
I rub her shampoo in,
lather it up:
make bunny ears
and gorgon snakes.
“Give her a beard,” they scream.
Together we make soapy strands –
a splash across her chin and loop,
above her lip,
a matador’s moustache.
The phone rings.
Her name is called.
“It’s him,” she says,
“It’s him!”
I catch her long enough
to wrap a towel around
her head
and let her go,
skittering and soapy wet,
towards…
We wait.
In his pilot’s uniform,
he grins, from a snapshot on the sink-
looking gawky, odd and slightly strange
but made so handsome in our eyes
by her adoring gaze.
We hear her speak.
Then silence,
and then, rising from the nothingness
a moaning – thin and raw and wretched,
like a shred of tattered skin.
I leap to my feet.
From the landing –
as if from the underworld –
I see her crawl:
a wretched climb, a gutshot girl.
I hold out my hand.
The other girls stand still outside
the bathroom’s bolted door
while, with bare feet on lino floor,
she takes a chipped bone china cup,
rinses bubbles from her hair
and lets me pin it up.
We sit, perched on the bath,
and watch as time draws lines of grief
around the shadow that she casts.
This war cry is not the first
and will not be the last.
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