Borrowed Time

“Did you go to this school, Daniel?”

He shook his head again. “I’m from Pisgah. I don’t know anyone here.”

“Me either. Maybe we can be friends, eh?”

“Ok,” he replied, his voice slightly firmer.

I folded a stretch of bandage into a square and pressed it over the cut causing him to wince. “I need you to keep this pressed nice and tight to your head, can you do that for me?” He nodded, replacing my hand on the bandage with his own. “If you need me just shout, ok. I’m Tom, remember.” He gave me another nod and I made my way back to Nellie who was still bandaging the man with the broken leg.

An anxious calm had fallen over the room as the women went about their work and the injured passed out or passed away. Most of the ones who remained awake had fallen into a sort of stunned silence and their vacant eyes bore holes in the ceiling as they replayed what had happened to them in their minds.

“You’ve quite a knack for this,” I said, reaching Nellie as she gently wrapped a cloth around the man’s splints. “How do you even know how to do any of this?”

She sat back and dragged the back of her arm across her forehead, wiping away the sweat. “Books, mostly. And the Order of Saint John. We’re a remote village, miles from a hospital, and most of the menfolk work in mines. They sent a group here to train people in the art of first-aid in case of an emergency and I volunteered my services. I was turned away at first but I reasoned that if all the men became injured in such an emergency then it would leave us back to square one, so now here we are.”

“Well, you seem to have it all in hand. You’re a natural.”

“I would have quite liked to go to the infirmary in Aberystwyth to train as a nurse,” she replied, keeping a perfect focus on the job before her as she spoke, “but father wouldn’t allow it so I applied at the post office instead.”

“Another carriage has arrived,” a woman shouted from the doorway, bringing an end to our conversation.

It had been over two hours since the last large intake of injured men had arrived and everyone had become a bit unsure if there would be more. A man named David who had ridden the previous wagon to the village had told us that two other neighbouring towns had set up similar operations to our own, but with all of them miles apart and with no idea of how many injured men there were, we didn’t know how many or who to expect.

The room became frantic again as the temporary nurses rushed to make room on the floor and seconds later the frenzied voices of the rescuers began shouting through the building as they carried men and boys into the hallways on makeshift stretchers

“Tom, tell them we can take two more in here and the others are to go into classroom one,” Nellie said as she jumped back into action.

I did as I was ordered and ran to the corridor to direct the men to the various rooms. Eight more miners were stretchered through the corridor in various states of injury. Six went to the first classroom while I ushered the remaining two towards Nellie. The first man we received was unconscious though appeared to have only minor injuries. The appearance of the second man, however, made even Nellie take a moment to compose herself.

In what must have been a consequence of the blast, most of the man’s clothing had been torn off leaving him naked but for a few loose threads of material where he’d worn extra layers. What was left of his clothes was charred and fused to his skin and most of his hair was gone too. His screams echoed through the room as though he were being tortured and one of the women closed the classroom doors to stop his wails from reverberating down the corridors.

“What can we do?” I asked, wanting to do something, anything, to ease his pain.

Nellie stood from her observation of the man and turned to me, bringing her head close to mine. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know enough to treat him and he’s so badly burned. He won’t make it.”

For the first time that day, the pressure looked like it might overcome her and her eyes began to glisten as tears formed at the corners.

“Laudanum, maybe?” she said with a defeated shrug. “It’ll ease the pain a bit but not by much and it certainly won’t be a cure. If nothing else it might make this a bit easier on him.”

Before she could even reach for the bottle the man’s cries stopped, dropping the room into an eerie silence, and we all turned to face his now lifeless body. Nellie immediately grabbed a sheet from her pile and covered him over then motioned to have his body taken away. As two women attended to the deceased man, she reached for the jug of whiskey that she’d been using to help with pain, pouring a little into a glass and knocking it back.

“Let’s not mention this to Father,” she said, holding her glass out at me with a quivering hand. I gave her shoulder a light squeeze and then left her to her thoughts.

Laying in the spot nearest the doorway was our other new patient. I wanted to give Nellie some respite so I decided to see what I could do by myself and headed over. He was unconscious when I reached him but the rise and fall of his stomach at least assured me that he was alive. I lifted his arms, checking for cuts, and tilted his head side to side to make sure there was no blood coming from his ears. I wasn’t sure if that was standard procedure but I’d seen it done on television shows and it seemed a good way to check for any problems with his head.

One of the straps on his suspenders was broken and I lifted the free side of his shirt to look at his stomach. It seemed whatever had caused his suspender to snap had given him quite a blow to the side. From just under his armpit, down the side of his stomach and around to his back, a large red bruise had formed that got darker as it curved underneath him.

I ran my fingers along the outline of the bruise and he let out a sharp gasp and jerked his body away from my touch. Startled, I pulled my hand back and looked at his face to see him staring back at me. The whites of his eyes were stark against his soot-covered skin.

“Hello,” I said, trying to remain as calm as possible. “I’m Tom. You’re going to be alright. Can you tell me your name?”

“Gwyn,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“Nice to meet you, Gwyn. Are you in much pain?”

“You’re English,” he replied.

“I am. I came all this way just to take care of you,” I joked, hoping to keep him at ease. He managed a small grin before coughing and wincing in pain.