I lay there waiting and waiting and absolutely nothing happened. My bandages had been taken off for the operation, but my eyes were still permanently closed by the swellings on my face. One doctor had told me it was quite possible that my eyes had not been damaged at all. I doubted that myself. It seemed to me that I had been permanently blinded, and as I lay there in my quiet black room where all sounds, however tiny, had suddenly become twice as loud, I had plenty of time to think about what total blindness would mean in the future. Curiously enough, it did not frighten me. It did not even depress me. In a world where war was all around me and where I had ridden in dangerous little aeroplanes that roared and zoomed and crashed and caught fire, blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important. Survival was not something one struggled for any more. I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to he
lp.
The doctor had tried to comfort me by saying that when you have contusions and swellings as massive as mine, you have to wait at least until the swellings go down and the incrustations of blood around the eyelids have come away. ‘Give yourself a chance,’ he had said. ‘Wait until those eyelids are able to open again.’
Having at this moment no eyelids to open and shut, I hoped the anaesthetist wouldn’t start thinking that his famous new wonder anaesthetic had put me to sleep when it hadn’t. I didn’t want them to start before I was ready. ‘I’m still awake,’ I said.
‘I know you are,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’ I heard another man’s voice asking. ‘Isn’t it working?’ This, I knew, was the surgeon, the great man from Harley Street.
‘It doesn’t seem to be having any effect at all,’ the anaesthetist said.
‘Give him some more.’
‘I have, I have,’ the anaesthetist answered, and I thought I detected a slightly ruffled edge to the man’s voice.
‘London said it was the greatest discovery since chloroform,’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I saw the report myself. Matthews wrote it. Ten seconds, it said, and the patient’s out. Simply tell him to count to ten and he’s out before he gets to eight, that’s what the report said.’
‘This patient could have counted to a hundred,’ the anaesthetist was saying.
It occurred to me that they were talking to one another as though I wasn’t there. I would have been happier if they had kept quiet.
‘Well, we can’t wait all day,’ the surgeon was saying. It was his turn to get irritable now. But I did not want my surgeon to be irritable when he was about to perform a delicate operation on my face. He had come into my room the day before and after examining me carefully, he had said, ‘We can’t have you going about like that for the rest of your life, can we?’
That worried me. It would have worried anyone. ‘Like what?’ I had asked him.
‘I am going to give you a lovely new nose,’ he had said, patting me on the shoulder. ‘You want to have something nice to look at when you open your eyes again, don’t you. Did you ever see Rudolph Valentino in the cinema?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I shall model your nose on his,’ the surgeon said. ‘What do you think of Rudolph Valentino, Sister?’
‘He’s smashing,’ the Sister said.
And now, in the operating theatre, that same surgeon was saying to the anaesthetist, ‘I’d forget that pentathol stuff if I were you. We really can’t wait any longer. I’ve got four more on my list this morning.’
‘Right!’ snapped the anaesthetist. ‘Bring me the nitrous oxide.’
I felt the rubber mask being put over my nose and mouth, and soon the blood-red circles began going round and round faster and faster like a series of gigantic scarlet flywheels and then there was an explosion and I knew nothing more.
When I regained consciousness I was back in my room. I lay there for an uncounted number of weeks but you must not think that I was totally without company during that time. Every morning throughout those black and sightless days a nurse, always the same one, would come into my room and bathe my eyes with something soft and wet. She was very gentle and very careful and she never hurt me. For at least an hour she would sit on my bed working skilfully on my swollen sealed-up eyes, and she would talk to me while she worked. She told me that the Anglo-Swiss used to be a large civilian hospital and that when war broke out the navy took over the whole place. All the doctors and all the nurses in the hospital were navy people, she said.
‘Are you in the navy?’ I asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am a naval officer.’
‘Why am I here if it’s all navy?’
‘We’re taking in the RAF and the army as well now,’ she said. ‘That’s where most of the casualties are coming from.’
Her name, she told me, was Mary Welland, and her home was in Plymouth. Her father was a Commander on a cruiser operating somewhere in the north Atlantic, and her mother worked with the Red Cross in Plymouth. She said with a smile in her voice that it was very bad form for a nurse to sit on a patient’s bed, but what she was doing to my eyes was very delicate work that could only be done if she were sitting close to me. She had a lovely soft voice, and I began to picture to myself the face that went with the voice, the delicate features, the green-blue eyes, the golden-brown hair and the pale skin. Sometimes, as she worked very close to my eyes, I would feel her warm and faintly marmalade breath on my cheek and in no time at all I began to fall very quickly and quite dizzily in love with Mary Welland’s invisible image. Every morning, I waited impatiently for the door to open and for the tinkling sound of the trolley as she wheeled it into my room.
Her features, I decided, were very much like those of Myrna Loy. Myrna Loy was a Hollywood cinema actress I had seen many times on the silver screen, and up until then she had been my idea of the perfect beauty. But now I took Miss Loy’s face and made it even more beautiful and gave it to Mary Welland. The only concrete thing I had to go by was the voice, and so far as I was concerned, Mary Welland’s dulcet tones were infinitely preferable to Myrna Loy’s harsh American twang.
For about an hour every day I experienced ecstasy as Miss Myrna Mary Loy Welland sat on my bed and did things to my face and eyes with her delicate fingers. And then suddenly, I don’t know how many days later, came the moment that I can never forget.
Mary Welland was working away on my right eye with one of her soft moist pads when all at once the eyelid began to open. At first it opened only an infinitesimal crack, but even so, a shaft of brilliant light pierced the darkness in my head and I saw before me very close … I saw three separate things … and all of them were glistening with scarlet and gold!