The very first patient she assisted with had been an infantryman in His Majesty’s Army. Bernard Hughes was twenty-three and had had munitions explode in front of him, both blinding him permanently and giving him shell shock to such a degree that he had tried to kill himself a dozen times in fits of nightmarish psychoses.
Sister Lucille told her that Hughes had undergone a number of procedures.
“But the poor man is gone and he’s not coming back. You don’t need to have a medical degree to see that, do you? He won’t talk, he barely eats. He grunts. He has no energy. He’s like an infant, except he’s a man. Or was.”
There were others who were the exact opposite of Bernard Hughes, screaming and chanting and hurling themselves at padded walls behind locked doors. They could only be administered to when burly orderlies restrained them and sedatives were administered. Still, one had tried to bite Molly as she sought to clean and bandage a bloody and ragged self-inflicted wound.
Later, Molly had just finished helping with another patient and was walking back to the staff room when a masked Dr. Foyle stepped out of a room. His gown was covered in blood, and he appeared quite dejected. Through the open doorway Molly glimpsed a body lying on a metal table with a sheet fully covering it. A nurse stood next to the newly deceased, looking stricken and helpless.
Foyle saw Molly, pulled the door closed, and said, “A difficult case.”
“Yes, I can see,” said Molly.
“There are no easy problems to solve here,” Foyle said as he lowered his surgical mask and wiped some blood off his forehead.
“I’m sure not, Doctor.”
“You’ve been seeing patients, I take it,” he said, eyeing her uniform.
“Yes. I wanted to help however I could.”
“It’s so very kind of you.” He looked at the closed doorway. “My father was a patient here.”
“‘Was’?”
“He... I tried my procedure. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. He was in the army, you see.”
“Surely he was too old to fight in this war.”
“He fought in the first world war. A mortar round hit within thirty feet of him and he awoke to see a dozen of his mates blown to bits all around him. He survived, of course, but with serious injuries. The external wounds were eventually repaired. But the internal ones, the psychological ones, festered. As a child I remembered that he was always a bit odd after coming home. But then one day he didn’t remember who I was. And, as the years passed, there were other strange episodes. Once he... took off his shoe and tried to eat it. I was quite a capable surgeon by then. But when my father suffered what he did, I changed my career path. I studied mental disease. I brought my father here because my mother insisted that I at least try. And I did, but to no avail. He had a seizure on the operating table that stopped his heart. He literally died in my arms.”
“I’m so sorry, but I’m sure you did your best for him.”
An awkward silence persisted for a few moments until Foyle stirred.
“I meant to ask you last night, but I wasn’t sure how to broach it in front of everyone.”
“Yes?” she said expectantly.
“To better help treat patients it’s always important to understand their background, how they came by their disorders and the like. What can you tell me of your mother?”
“Didn’t my father inform you of what had happened?”
“Not really. He just said she became violent and uncontrollable. He actually had to administer a sedative to her for the trip here.”
Molly told Foyle about the incident at the bomb shelter.
“So she was... robbed and assaulted and, um...?”
“Yes. Her clothes were torn... She apparently had been... She was, understandably, hysterical.”
“I see. I am so sorry, but that explains a lot.”
“It does?”
“That sort of mental trauma is like shell shock in a way. It does things to your mind. Terrible things. You can never seem to dig your way out of the hole the horrible event has placed you in. Your trust in humankind is also shattered. You see the world solely through the prism of that one awful experience. It becomes your obsession and impacts all aspects of your life. It is as though you can never see the good in people ever again.”
“Poor Mother,” said Molly. Her cheeks flushed, and tears rose to her eyes.
“I wonder why your father didn’t tell us about it.”
“I... I think he felt guilty for allowing it to happen.”
“I see. Unfortunately, that is a common enough reaction. If I had known that, we would have offered him counseling as well. It sounds like he needed it.”
“I wish he had.”
Foyle slumped back against the wall and closed his eyes. “Do you know what I wish, Miss Wakefield?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Doctor.”
He opened his eyes. “I hope that one day we come up with... another way to help people with illnesses such as your mother and my father.”
“I share in that wish.”
They both went back to work.
An End-of-Life Admission
While Molly had been performing her nursing duties inside, Oliver and Charlie had been working outside helping to maintain the grounds. Oliver had been told that Dr. Stephens had been abruptly called away to London on important business the morning after they arrived, and would not be back for several days.
He and Charlie also pushed convalescing patients around the paths in wheelchairs and, with the help of one of the groundskeepers, caught some fish from the Channel for dinner.
Charlie viewed that body of water in the daylight the first morning that he and Oliver stood by the shore. Seagulls swirled overhead, looking like bright bits of confetti risen to distant heights.
“As I said before, not that far across the water is France,” said Oliver, pointing that way.
“Knew it was somewheres round here,” replied Charlie, still looking amazed by this as he gazed out to sea.
“The region in France directly across from here is called, ironically, Brittany. It comes from the Latin, Britannia, which means ‘Land of the Britons,’ and, indeed, it shares a deep history with people from Britain, who settled there. I traveled through France while I was at Oxford, you see. A flutter abroad before the working world beckoned. Quite beautiful, and the food and the wine? Well, let me just say that it was something one does not normally experience on this side of the Channel.”
They glimpsed the long, blunt snouts of artillery guns pointed to the sky up and down the coastline. And uniformed Home Guard and regular British Army personnel brandishing binoculars continually watched over the waters and skies. Far out in the Channel British ships lurked, and at far higher altitudes than the seagulls, darted RAF planes.
As they worked away one afternoon on their fourth day here, Dr. Stephens came outside smoking a pipe, and he waved at Oliver, who was collecting some firewood in a wheelbarrow.
Stephens walked over to him and said, “I apologize for not having spoken to you about your wife before now. I didn’t want to do so when you first arrived, and the last few days things have been terribly busy. I just got back from London, in fact. Our local MP thought it best if I traveled there and argued my case directly to the government. You see, we desperately need more resources, and as we care for a number of soldiers here I was trying to procure some public funds, and also some additional nursing assistance.”