Changes

         I asked for and received a transfer shortly after Lily died, for I couldn’t bear living in Portsmouth without Lily.  She had been my dearest friend, closer than any of my sisters.  I was sent to a convalescent home near Salisbury, where the wounded were being rehabilitated. 

         One of the men in my charge was Leonard James, an extremely handsome member of the Royal Horse Artillery.  A cannon had backfired on him during training at Salisbury Fields.  He was injured in both mind and body, for along with the shrapnel wounds he was badly shell-shocked as well.  Despite his injuries, we slowly bonded with each other over the year I nursed him. 

         During that year I was interested to learn that many towns and villages were following the example of the large memorial the King had ordered to be built in London, and cenotaphs were springing up all over England.  In November of 1919 his majesty had instituted a two-minute silence to be observed in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in observance of all the Great War’s dead.  One of the more touching memorials was built in East London, where a class of five and six year old children had died in the bombing of their school. 

         Anti-German feeling was everywhere, so much so that King George decided to change the royal family’s name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor.  He took the name from one of his castles, I believe.  I often wondered how he managed to live with his decision to refuse admittance to his first cousin the Tsar of Russia, when he was overthrown. I remember how shocked we were to hear the Bolsheviks had murdered Tsar Nicholas and his family in cold blood.   

         Change was in the air, it seemed, in those days.  Airplanes and fast cars were everywhere.  We nurses took a few of the more mobile patients to the cinema, where Ernest Shackleton presented his adventures in Antarctica in a film called “South.”  There were lots of labour strikes, from the bakers and miners to the Liverpool police.  Women’s fashions changed to skimpy little dresses that women had flatten their breasts to wear.  Marie Stopes authored a book everyone was reading, called  “Married Love.”  Like everyone else, I was fascinated to read her theories on contraception and intimacy in marriage.

         Our patients, for the most part, slowly continued to mend and be discharged.  When it was Leonard’s turn to leave he asked me to take a final walk around the garden with him.  We sat on a bench, and it was there, among the sweet-smelling lilacs, he asked me to marry him.   All he had in the world was the bronze cigarette  box presented to soldiers by the Queen as a Christmas present in 1914.  He was handsome and charming, and I accepted, but if I had known what I know now about Leonard James I would have, should have, said no.