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for

‘baby sister’

Mary Nargi Bolk

I am grateful to Colonel R. G. Reeves, Australian Staff Corps (Ret.), Mrs. Alma Critchley, and Sister Nora Spalding for their generous technical help.

—CMcC

Part 1

1

The young soldier stood looking doubtfully up at the unlabelled entrance to ward X, his kit bag lowered to the ground while he assessed the possibility that this was indeed his ultimate destination. The last ward in the compound, they had said, pointing him gratefully off down a path because they were busy and he had indicated he could find his own way. Everything save the armaments his battalion gunsmith had taken from him only yesterday was disposed about his person, a burden with which he was so familiar he didn’t notice it. Well, this was the last building, all right, but if it was a ward it was much smaller than the ones he had passed along his way. Much quieter, too. A troppo ward. What a way to end the war! Not that it mattered how it ended. Only that it did end.

Watching him undetected through her office window, Sister Honour Langtry gazed down neatly divided between irritation and fascination. Irritation because he had been foisted on her at a stage when she had confidently expected no further admissions, and because she knew his advent would upset the delicate balance within ward X, however minutely; fascination because he represented an unknown whom she would have to learn to know. Wilson, M. E. J.

He was a sergeant from an illustrious battalion of an illustrious division; above the line of the pocket over his left breast he wore the red-blue-red ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, most prestigious and infrequently awarded, together with the ribbons of the 1939–1945 Star, the Africa Star without an 8, and the Pacific Star; the almost white-looking puggaree around his hat was a relic of the Middle East and bore a grey-bordered divisional color patch. He was wearing faded greens neatly laundered and pressed, his slouch hat was at the regulation angle, chin strap in place, and the brass of his buckles shone. Not very tall, but hard-looking, the skin of his throat and arms burned dark as teak. He’d had a long war, this one, and looking at him, Sister Langtry couldn’t begin to guess why he was scheduled for ward X. There was a subtle aimlessness about him, perhaps, as of a man normally well accustomed to knowing his direction suddenly finding his feet pointing down an utterly unfamiliar path. But that any man coming to any new place might feel. Of the more usual signs—confusion, disorientation, disturbances of comportment or behavior—there were none. In fact, she concluded, he looked absolutely normal, and that in itself was abnormal for ward X.

Suddenly he decided it was time to act, swung his kit bag off the ground and set foot on the long ramp which led up to the front door. At precisely the same moment Sister Langtry walked round her desk and out of her office into the corridor. They met just inside the fly-curtain, almost perfectly synchronized. Some wag long since recovered and gone back to his battalion had made the fly-curtain out of beer bottle caps knotted on endless yards of fishing line, so that instead of tinkling musically like Chinese glass beads, it clashed tinnily. They met therefore amid a discord.

‘Hello, Sergeant, I’m Sister Langtry,’ she said, her smile welcoming him into the world of ward X, which was her world. But the apprehensive irritation still simmered beneath the surface of her smile, and showed in the quick peremptory demanding of her hand for his papers, which she had seen were unsealed. Those fools in admissions! He’d probably stopped somewhere and read them.

Without fuss he had managed to shed sufficient of his gear to salute her, then removed his hat and gave her the envelope containing his papers without demur. ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have to read them to know what’s in them.’

Turning a little, she flicked the papers expertly through her office door to land on her desk. There; that should inform him she wasn’t going to expect him to stand like a block of wood in front of her while she delved into his privacy. Time enough to read the official story later; now was the time to put him at his ease.

‘Wilson, M. E. J.?’ she asked, liking his calmness.

‘Wilson, Michael Edward John,’ he said, a tiny smile of answered liking in his eyes.

‘Are you called Michael?’

‘Michael or Mike, it doesn’t matter which.’

He owned himself, or so it seemed; certainly there was no obvious erosion of self-confidence. Dear God, she thought, let the others accept him easily!

‘Where did you spring from?’ she asked.

‘Oh, further up,’ he answered vaguely.

‘Come on, Sergeant, the war’s over! There’s no need for secrecy now. Borneo, I presume, but which bit? Brunei? Balikpapan? Tarakan?’

‘Balikpapan.’

‘You couldn’t have timed the hour of your arrival better,’ she said cheerfully, and walked ahead of him down the short corridor which opened into the main ward. ‘The evening meal’s due shortly, and the kai’s not bad here.’

Ward X had been thrown together from the bits left over, parked like an afterthought down on the perimeter of the compound, never intended as housing for patients requiring complex medical care. When full it could hold ten beds comfortably, twelve or fourteen at a pinch, besides what beds could be fitted on the verandah. Rectangular in shape, it was built of unlined ship-lapped timber painted a shade of pale brown the men called baby-cack, and it had a hardwood plank floor. The windows might more accurately have been termed large apertures, unglazed, with wooden louvers to shut out the weather. The roof was unlined palm thatch.

There were only five beds in the main ward room at the moment, four down one wall in proper hospital rank, the fifth oddly out of place, for it lay on its own against the opposite wall and along it rather than at right angles to it, in contravention of hospital regulations.

They were drab low cots, each neatly made up; no blankets or counterpanes in this steamy latitude, just a bottom and a top sheet of unbleached calico long gone whiter than old bones from hard use in the laundry. Six feet above the head of each bed was a ring rather like a basketball hoop, yards of jungle-green mosquito netting attached to it and draped with a style and a complication worthy of Jacques Fath at his best. Beside each bed sat an old tin locker.

‘You can dump your kit on that bed there,’ said Sister Langtry, pointing to the end bed in the row of four, the one nearest to the far wall, and so with louvered openings along one side of it as well as behind. A good bed for catching the breeze. ‘Stow everything away later,’ she added. ‘There are five other men in X, and I’d like you to meet them before dinner arrives.’