‘I can see!’ I cried. ‘I can see something!’
‘You can?’ she said excitedly. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes! I can see something very close to me! I can see three separate things right in front of me! And nurse … they are all shining with red and gold! What are they, nurse? What am I seeing?’
‘Try to keep calm,’ she said. ‘Stop jumping up and down. It’s not good for you.’
‘But nurse, I really can see something! Don’t you believe me?’
‘Is this what you are seeing?’ she asked me, and now part of a hand and a pointing finger came into my line of sight. ‘Is it this? Is it these?’ she said, and her finger pointed at the three beautiful things of many colours that lay there shimmering against a background of purest white.
‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘It’s those! There are three of them! I can see them all! And I can see your finger!’
When many days of blackness and doubt are pierced suddenly by shining images of red and gold, the pleasure that floods into your mind is overwhelming. I lay propped up on my pillows gazing through the tiny crack in one eye at these amazing sights and wondering whether I wasn’t perhaps catching a glimpse of paradise. ‘What am I looking at?’ I asked her.
‘You are looking at a bit of my white uniform,’ Mary Welland said. ‘It’s the bit that goes across my front, and the coloured things you can see in the middle of it make up the emblem of the Royal Naval Nursing Service. It is pinned to the left side of my bosom and it is worn by all nurses in the Royal Navy.’
Alexandria
20 November 1940
Dear Mama,
I sent you a telegram yesterday saying that I’d got up for 2 hours & had a bath – so you’ll see I’m making good progress. I arrived here about 8½ weeks ago, and was lying on my back for 7 weeks doing nothing, then sat up gradually, and now I am walking about a bit. When I came in I was a bit of a mess. My eyes didn’t open (although I was always quite concious). They thought I had a fractured base (skull), but I think the Xray showed I didn’t. My nose was bashed in, but they’ve got the most marvellous Harley Street specialists out here who’ve joined up for the war as Majors, and the ear nose & throat man pulled my nose out of the back of my he
ad, and shaped it and now it looks just as before except that its a little bent about. That was of course under a general anesthetic.
My eyes still ache if I read or write much, but they say that they think they’ll get back to normal again, and that I’ll be fit for flying in about 3 months. In between I still have about 6 or more weeks sick leave here in Alex when I get out, doing nothing in a marvellous sunny climate, just like an English Summer, except that the sun shines every day.
I suppose you want to know how I crashed. Well, I’m not allowed to give you any details of what I was doing or how it happened. But it occurred in the night not very far from the Italian front lines. The plane was on fire and after it hit the ground I was just sufficiently concious to crawl out in time, having undone my straps, and roll on the ground to put out the fire on my overalls which were alight. I wasn’t burnt much, but was bleeding rather badly from the head. Anyway I lay there and waited for the ammunition which was left in my guns to go off. One after the other, well over 1000 rounds exploded and the bullets whistled about seeming to hit everything but me.
I’ve never fainted yet, and I think it was this tendency to remain concious which saved me from being roasted.
Anyway luckily one of our forward patrols saw the blaze, and after some time arrived and picked me up & after much ado I arrived at Mersa Matruh, (you’ll see it on the map – on the coast, East of Libya). There I heard a doctor say, ‘Oh, he’s an Italian is he’ (my white flying overalls weren’t very recognizable). I told him not to be a B.F., and he gave me some morphia. In about 24 hours time I arrived where I am now, living in great luxury with lots of very nice English nursing sisters to look after me …
P.S. The air raids here don’t worry us. The Italians are very bad bombaimers.
‘But they are so beautiful!’ I cried, staring at the emblem. There were three separate parts to it, all of them heavily embossed in raised embroidery. On top there was a golden crown with scarlet in the centre and small bits of green near its base. In the middle, below the crown, there was a gold anchor with a scarlet rope twined around it. And below the anchor there was a golden circle with a big red cross in the middle. These images and their brilliant colours have been engraved on my memory ever since.
‘Keep still,’ Mary Welland said. ‘I think we can open this eyelid a bit more.’
I kept still and waited, and a few minutes later she succeeded in getting the eyelid wide open and I saw the whole room through that one eye. In the forefront of everything I saw Nursing Officer Welland herself sitting very close and smiling at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Welcome back to the world.’
She was a lovely looking girl, much nicer than Myrna Loy and far more real. ‘You are even more beautiful than I imagined,’ I said.
‘Well, thank you,’ she said.
The next day she got the other eye open as well and I lay there feeling as though I was about to start my whole life over again.
Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference between falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated.
All the time I was in hospital, my one obsession was to get back to operational flying. The doctors told me there was virtually no hope of that. They said that even if I managed to get back perfect vision, I would still have the head injuries to contend with. Severe head injuries are not easily overcome, they said, and I had better resign myself to being shipped home eventually as a non-combatant. I admit now, although I didn’t tell them at the time, that for several weeks after I had regained my sight I suffered from the most appalling headaches, but even these began gradually to grow less and less severe.
Alexandria
6 December 1940
Dear Mama,