Henry received a letter a couple of days back from one of his pilot pals at Biggin Hill; a man called George Sheridan.

‘Good old Sherry,’ recalled Henry wistfully, as he read the letter. ‘He was one of the red scarf pirates; now the only active member in fact. All others are either deceased or have had half of their skin burned off them.’ He grinned at me and offered to read the letter out loud.

‘Dear Henry,

I’m ploughing a lonely furrow here at Biggin Hill now that you’re not here and the rest of the squadron’s gone to Wales. I requested to stay to fight on in this blasted battle – kicked up a real fuss actually – and so I am accompanied by my faithful mechanic, Frank Edwards – the wiry little Brummie who plays violin and looks over an engine like an artist inspecting his canvas. The Group Captain passes on best regards as does Canary, who reckons he can add one to your tally which was previously a probable. I’m not sure if that’s much of a boost for you at the moment. From the sounds of your nurse it sounds like your morale should be fairly high anyway!

Anyway, I’ve no idea how all this is going to end up. The Germans are still coming as you’ve probably read in the newspapers. There are more and more of the blighters and Biggin Hill’s now so full of holes that you’d think a giant mouse had been eating chunks out of it.

There’s some chance that I might be joining you down at East Grinstead the way things are going.

Anyhow, I hope that you’re well and enjoying the holiday. I’ll have a pint for you down at the White Hart this evening on the condition that you buy another for me when you return.

With all the best from your chum,

Sherry.’

The grim fatalism in the letter hidden not far beneath a veneer of jolly humour shocked me and I hated the idea that there were pilots out there anticipating that they might find their way here sooner or later. But it’s true that the war seems to have taken an even grimmer turn, though I hadn’t thought that was possible before. London is under attack and the Luftwaffe seem to be ruling the skies. There needs to be one almighty battle to stop an invasion happening now I think.

I realise that I have been spending more and more time on the ward and less and less in my room or going for walks in the country on my own. I don’t like to leave the place. Sometimes the Matron will tell me to take some time off, but otherwise I’m quite happy to be here to look after the men. I like to feel wanted and it’s become clear that the work I’m doing is so important for the lives of these patients. I cannot imagine what would happen to them were it not for the Maestro and us nurses.

 I went with Henry to the cinema the other day and we had a lovely time. I like having the company I realise; I don’t want to be on my own anymore. Perhaps Henry isn’t the man for me, perhaps Alexander Rhodes isn’t (I haven’t yet received a reply from him), but I’m now sure that there might be another romance in my life. After all, I am 27 years old, which isn’t that old is it?

A new man came into the ward – an Australian Flying Officer who had been shot through the jaw and burned in his plane. He managed to bale out and was fortunate that a doctor was on hand when he landed. His jaw was held together with a metal frame while the bone recovered so he could not chew any food. Instead he is on a liquid diet supplemented occasionally with thin beef mince which he slurps up greedily through a rubber tube. When he thinks I’m not looking, he also puts his rubber tube into a bottle of Scotch which he hides next to his bed. He’s a tough man and he manages to swear through his teeth and shout out encouragement to the other patients in between supping whisky.

Henry, the pilot from Biggin Hill who arrived wearing a half-burned red silk scarf, has been more communicative compared to when he first arrived here a few weeks ago. Yesterday, he came for a short walk with me around the edge of the wood that is next to the ward. Afterwards we sat on a bench in the sunshine with the sound of planes in the distance and he told me that he was scared about the future.

‘The trouble is, nurse, is that no girl is ever going to look at me again, are they? How am I going to get myself a wife now? I may not even fly again.’

‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘You are a hero and women love nothing more than a hero. There have been many romances here at the hospital between patients and nurses, for example.’

‘Yes, but this ward isn’t real, is it nurse? It’s a fantasy place and the only reason that these romances happen is because of the intense closeness we all develop in that building. I know Gordon, the chap in the bed next to me, better than my own brother even though we’ve only known each other for a few weeks. And you have been kinder to me than anyone I have ever known.’

He put his bandaged hand out to touch mine.

‘I think you’re very lovely Nurse Lawrence,’ he said, looking me straight in the eye.

I returned his gaze but shook my head slightly.

‘I’m ever so sorry, Henry, as much as I like you and admire you, and I do, there cannot be any romance between us. You see, I was married before the war. My husband flew planes as well. What beastly things they are. He died in an accident and I returned to nursing, but I have never been able to forget him.’

‘It’s alright nurse, I understand,’ he said and rested his hand back on his thigh.

That evening I went back to my room and felt for the first time in a long time that I did not want to be alone anymore. I don’t know whether I want romance, but I’d certainly like company. I wrote a letter to Alexander Rhodes, the newspaper man on Fleet Street and said that next time I was on leave I might catch a train to London to go to the theatre. Are there any plays on that he would recommend?

But then I wondered why I had spurned Henry’s advances. Why shouldn’t I get involved with one of the patients here? They’re lovely men and I really do think that they’re heroes and I honestly don’t care that their faces are burned and scarred. But I don’t want to fall in love with another flier who might fall out of the sky again. I’d like a man that at the very least is going to stay alive and look after me, as much as I might look after him.

What of the burned pilots of East Grinstead though, who are poked and prodded as though they are guinea pigs? What is the future for men like Henry and Gordon? I’m certain that many of them will need more care, particularly those whose hands can never be fully fixed. I just hope that a charity such as the RAF Benevolent Fund will be able to provide it for them once they have left the hospital.

The next day Gordon talked to me about his hands, which the Maestro was hoping to operate on very soon.

‘If I’m going to fly again, I’ll need two hands that work properly,’ he said.

‘But I’d like to see a hand operation first so that I can understand more about how they will be mended.’

The Maestro was enthusiastic for him to join the viewing gallery high above the operating theatre later that day when he was doing a similar operation on another patient. I was assisting in the theatre and as I walked in I looked up through the glass screen at the viewing area above where Gordon was sitting. The patient was already on the table. The Maestro, with his own stumpy fingers – strong and determined rather than graceful and elegant – took away the bandages and revealed a clenched hand where much of the new, pink skin had webbed across two of the digits, turning them into a single solid-looking lump. He separated the fingers from one another with a scalpel and took a thin layer of skin from the patient’s upper arm, wedged it between the two divided fingers and sewed it all up with neat, black silk stitches. Then the patient’s hand was wrapped in gauze, dipped in orange emulsion and covered by more gauze, also coloured with disinfectant, and finally held in place by an elastic crepe bandage.

It still seems amazing to me that this procedure can restore function to fingers that had previously been little more than claws, but I’ve already seen it work a number of times. It means that with the successful operations, these men will at least be able to live independent lives, but not many of them will be able to fly again. Often all that they’re able to do with this new hand of theirs is the most basic of motor tasks like grasping a knife and a fork. Gordon, though, is desperate to fly; I wonder whether he will and, terribly, some part of me wishes that he won’t.

I went over and asked Henry how he was feeling.

‘I’ve felt better, nurse,’ he said, attempting to smile a rather weak smile. ‘The thing is it all happened so quickly. I was in that cockpit just a couple of seconds too long, you see, before I could get out and fall into the sea. It happened in a flash but it causes so much damage.’

‘But it’s a great thing that you fell in the sea, Henry, rather than onto the land’, I said.

‘Yes, that’s what your “Maestro” said to me yesterday when he saw me. He said “you’re one of the lucky chaps. You’re not going to need me. You’re going to grow a new skin. The main reason is that you came down in the sea. And we’ve learnt from you chaps that a brine bath is the best initial treatment for a burns case.”’

‘He’s quite right,’ I said, ‘it makes an enormous difference.’

‘But he’s quite wrong to say that I’m “lucky”. Look at me!’

‘Yes, but there are plenty of other men in a far worse position than you, Henry. You have to see the positive side of things. Self-pity will get you nowhere. Now, is there anything I can get you?’

‘I’d like to look at my face in a mirror, nurse. Right now,’ he said, his voice getting louder.

Gordon cut in.

‘It’s not allowed, old chap,’ he said. ‘The Maestro decides when you’re ready to look in the mirror. Until then they draw the curtains so you can’t see your reflection in the window. They make sure that no stainless steel is left lying around that you might use to look at yourself in. Don’t worry: when the time’s right you’ll see yourself in the mirror.’

‘Well, in that case, I’d just like a cup of tea please, nurse.’

I went to fetch him a cup of tea from the large cylindrical urn at the end of the ward. But as I was walking towards the urn, one of the men reached out of the end of his bed and pinched my bottom. I yelped and jumped in surprise, lost my balance and put my hand out onto the hot tea urn, burning my fingers. ‘Ouch,’ I screamed.

Almost immediately Gordon ran to my aid.

‘Oh nurse, you’ve hurt yourself you poor thing,’ he said. And he led me to the wash basin to pour cold water over my fingers and dried them with a towel with his own damaged, bandaged hands and found a bandage and wound it gently around my hand.

I confess that by the time he’d finished, and in spite of the pain, I was enjoying being nursed by someone else for a change. But it did feel rather strange, and extremely touching, to be cared for by someone as badly injured as he is.

But I feel more like a mother to these boys, anyway. I was always attracted to a slightly older man. Robert was 35 when I married him. I had to give up my nursing career for him (the Royal College of Nursing rules state ‘no married women’) and it is only because of his death that I returned to nursing at all.

I have been at the hospital for long enough for the Maestro to invite me to the theatre the other day to watch an operation and help the Theatre Sister as she in turn assisted him. I had no fear of watching the surgery as I have seen so many gruesome sights that I was sure the clean conditions of the operating theatre would hold no nasty surprises for me. I washed thoroughly, put on the theatre scrubs and a face mask and stood behind the theatre sister looking over the patient while the Maestro, standing behind the patient’s head, with long black rubber gloves, attached grafts to make the patient’s new eyelids. The operating theatre was busy with trainee surgeons, anxious to see what the great man was up to, along with orderlies and another nurse. I felt very privileged to stand there and watch such a procedure; it is the highlight so far of my career as a nurse, and one that very few other nurses will get to see.

With such a lot going on, it has been easy not to think about Mr Rhodes, the journalist who I saw here the other day. Everything at the moment is full-steam ahead: there are more aircraft flying overhead, more convoys of lorries on the roads, and more work in the hospital. I don’t think there will be any summer holidays or trips to the seaside for me this year!

There are also plenty of new patients arriving at the hospital. A Hurricane pilot from Biggin Hill arrived the other day, with the charred remnants of a red silk scarf grasped in the bandaged claws of his right hand.

‘That looks like it was a lovely scarf,’ I said when I saw him. ‘I’m sure we can find you a new one in the town somewhere.’

‘We were the red silk pirates,’ he said sadly and almost inaudibly, ‘boys playing games in the sky with planes and bullets. Now look at us. Two of us dead, me burned to a crisp, and goodness only knows what will happen to George.’

It had been a good week. Of course, there have been more patients coming into the ward as others are sent elsewhere to recuperate, but I now believe that we are doing the most remarkable work of its kind and helping these young boys to have a decent future again. Once I’d seen the Maestro give a man a new set of eyelids, I was convinced. Gordon’s progress in particular has shown me that what we’re doing here is invaluable – after being so withdrawn and depressed when he first arrived, he is now, after two successful trips to the operating theatre, one of the most cheerful and energetic patients on the ward, sometimes irritatingly so: he pinched my bottom yesterday! I told him that if he tried it again Matron would have something to say to him.

But Gordon has the ambition to do great things with his life again (beyond pinching my behind!). My only fear is that the first thing they’ll do with him when he is well enough is to put him straight back behind the controls of a fighter plane again. And if he crashes again, perhaps he won’t next time be so lucky (as if you can call what’s happened to him now luck!)

Then on August 5, Mr Rhodes the journalist arrived, wearing a brown trilby hat, smoking a pipe and looking very sophisticated and knowledgeable about the ways of the world. But he also had a sprightliness to him that surprised me; a deep well of energy and curiosity that I suppose is all part of the newspaperman’s trade. The Maestro was in theatre at the time and I had just finished changing some dressings so I made Mr Rhodes a cup of tea. While we sat down and drank he asked me a few questions about the ward and about myself and I got flustered and giggled and talked so much I barely know what I said.

Fortunately the Ward Sister interrupted us to say that Mr Rhodes could do the interview now and I got on with my duties. But then a little later it just so happened that I was by the door as Mr Rhodes was leaving. I should probably have just said goodbye to him but I said instead that I wanted to know what it was like to go to the theatre in London and that if I sent a letter to Mr Rhodes in London would he please write back and tell me? Of all the stupid things to say!

I’ve rather regretted this since and Sister and some of the other nurses have pulled my leg about it too. But the worst of it is that I felt I had let Robert down by behaving in such a silly way. I put it down to all the hard work I’ve been doing here at the hospital. And I’ve resolved that I won’t be writing to Mr Rhodes in London not this week, next week or the week after that.

I spent the next four days going on long walks into the countryside, writing letters, reading books and newspapers. On one occasion, when I was walking through a cornfield, I could see a mass of fighters heading down toward the coast and I wondered to myself whether any of the pilots would end up on the ward at some point. Being away from the hospital, particularly on country walks, gave me the opportunity to think about the war. Oh, what a futile thing it is. I swear that if women were in charge there would be no wars (though a couple of the fiercer sisters might disagree with that). You might think that it would be a good idea to get all the politicians – British and German – and bring them on a visit to East Grinstead so that they can see the result of what they’re doing. But I suppose that Churchill does have to stand up to Hitler, who strikes me as being a very nasty piece of work. I’ve always thought that, though Robert always seemed to like the man. We argued about it once.

On July 31 it was the most glorious day and I set off after breakfast through the woods and up into the fields. It was such a warm day and I decided to sit down for a few minutes in the sun. I must have fallen asleep and I only woke up when I felt a dog’s cold wet nose on my face and looked up to see a Border Collie gazing at me. I sat up and saw that about twenty yards away an elderly farmer was walking towards me.  He came over and touching his hat said ‘good morning, miss’.  We had a bit of chit-chat and he told me that a German plane had come down in one of his fields the day before. Out of curiosity I asked whether I could see it.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It’s still there and there’s a soldier standing guard over it. I’ll show it to you now.’

We walked through two more fields until we came upon the wrecked plane, which was mangled, charred and blackened from fire. A soldier was sat on a nearby log smoking a woodbine and he came over and said hello.

‘Did the pilot get out?’ I asked.

‘No he didn’t,’ said the farmer. ‘They think his legs had got broken in the crash and when it burst into flames he couldn’t move. I got down here quick as I could but there was nothing I could do. Some people round here said they didn’t care if he burned to death, he’s the enemy, you see. But I saw it and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. He’s got a mother somewhere, a wife maybe, a child – who knows.’

‘But at least it wasn’t one of our lads, hey,’ said the soldier, grinning.

‘It certainly is,’ I replied in my sternest, most matronly voice. ‘Now stop making such a terrible noise and come in to the ward. And you can bring the rest of the choir boys with you.’

‘My dear nurse,’ he said, in as slurry a voice as I’ve ever heard, ‘I have just been completing one of the most important parts of the Maestro’s therapeutic plan for me: learning to have a good time again. Yes, I may be drunk, but most importantly I’m happy.’

I resisted the temptation to leap with joy at his transformation, and settled for chiding him some more and tucking him firmly in his bed as if he were a naughty schoolboy (which he practically is). He fell asleep the very moment his head touched the pillow and I at last felt that I could break out into a broad grin, which I did.

There have been other hilarious episodes as well such as the long-running and increasingly good-natured feud between the naval commander and his two neighbours – both young fighter pilots, one from Canada and the other from Australia. At first the commander, a bearded man in his forties who was burnt in an attack by German planes on a Channel convoy, was spluttering with indignation that he should be placed so close to such juniors, and they agitated him all the more with frequent jokes about his stuffiness and even impressions of him. ‘I say, old chap,’ the Australian would say to the Canadian, ‘I say, tally-ho and all that, but would you mind awfully passing me the old pipe and tobacco, and a bottle of ship’s rum if there’s one to hand.’ When the commander accused them of insubordination they fell about laughing. He grumbled and muttered and complained for a day then fell silent. The following evening, the two fliers got into bed then simultaneously sprang out again, squealing in a chorus of high-pitched pain. This time it was the commander’s turn to laugh. ‘Men become high-ranking officers,’ he lectured the two pilots, who stood rubbing their sore bottoms, punctured by surreptitiously placed pins, ‘because they know how to fight a war. You two would do well to remember that.’ They looked at each other and, still rubbing their sore behinds, they laughed as well. The ice had been broken.

I feel that this is sadly what the reaction of many people in the rest of the country will be, though, as in a large number of cases the disfigurement is so extreme it would be unnatural for people not to register some form of shock. Many of the burns victims also have other terrible injuries; some have amputated limbs and others will never have the full use of their hands. I know that there’s an organisation called the RAF Benevolent Fund and it seems clear to me that this charity will require more funding in the future so that it can help these men, and other victims of the war in the air, in later life.

I sometimes worry whether I am the right person to be nursing the patients back to health. The more that Gordon’s case touches me, for example, the more I think about my own sadness and difficulties in life. I am not like the Maestro who cheerfully assures the patients that they will ‘have enough skin to hang their spectacles off’ when he is operating on badly burnt ears, or the fat, jolly bespectacled anaesthetist, who tells the patients with a broad smile, ‘all right, old boy, it’s just a little prick’, as he is plunging the hypodermic into their arm. I don’t have that kind of burlesque, boisterous humour. I smile delicately and speak soothingly and chide like a mother might, but I have none of that rude, even cruel, wit which seems to be the best way of keeping the patients from self-pity.

I wrote my feelings down to my sister and sent a far more considered letter to my parents. I want to write a letter to Robert too – something like a prayer if he is there in heaven. ‘My darling Robert,’ I might write (or pray), ‘what on earth should I do? I want to do my duty, yet I spend every hour when I am not occupied worrying that I’m doing more harm than good to the patients in my care. I don’t want them to sense that I too am sad, yet it seems that they must feel it. And how can someone so sad encourage others to long for life again? I do long for life, but it’s a past life, not a future one. It was our life together, before that terrible crash ended it all.’

I feel now that I am waiting for something to happen that will make me understand what future course of action I need to take – whether to stay in Ward Three or whether I should make my feelings known to the Maestro.

As the second of the two nurses was bashing her head, one of the patients was hammering out a tune on the glossy black mini-grand piano in the middle of the ward while other patients wrapped up in bandages were singing from their beds, clearly under the influence of alcohol. On days like these it all feels like some kind of terrible dream. But so much so that after the poor nurse – Henri’s her name – had recovered and I was wiping her blood off my white uniform, I had to stifle my laughter at how ridiculous it all seemed.

Of the two new arrivals one was a Naval Commander and the other a Sergeant Pilot who came down in a Hurricane in the Channel. Here, they are both simply patients. The Maestro believes in treating all ranks the same and so there is no difference made between the officers and the rank and file men. He is a civilian and I think this makes it easier for him to do things differently than the military way and to make a stand against many of the rules that he sees as unfair. I’m not sure that this is always appreciated by the military authorities. He has been in constant rebellion against the 90-day rule, for example, which decrees that if a man has been out of action due to injury or sickness for more than 90 days, he must be invalided out of the force. But that means almost all of the patients here will never be allowed back – mainly into the RAF – as their treatment will almost always take longer than 90 days in total. So where does that leave poor young men like Gordon, who went into the Fleet Air Arm straight from school and know no other way of earning a living?

It’s not just all different ranks that are here, but all different nationalities as well – French, Czechs, Australians, Belgians, Poles and Canadians, all talking in different languages and accents. The Maestro himself is from New Zealand, though with strong links to Scotland.

Which reminds me once more of Gordon, who went under the Maestro’s knife for the first time the other day. A small patch of skin was taken from his arm and used to make two new top eyelids – something I still consider to be a miracle of sorts even after witnessing it a number of times. The operation made him blind for a few days and as I sat next to his bed helping him to eat a meal he spoke to me in a strangely poetic way through a fog of pain-killing drugs. ‘Thank you, dear Mary,’ he said, ‘for helping a creature who is neither of this world nor the next, a strange raw and bloody animal who cannot see nor barely feel, yet whose spirit still burns somewhere as fiercely as the flames that burnt him. Such tenderness as you have given me is a gift indeed.’

This was a moment of great intimacy, even in a world where we nurses are used to intimacy every hour of the day. I felt, even, that no-one had spoken to me in such a tender way since my husband Robert died two years ago. But I did not look at Gordon in the same way as I looked at my husband. No, I looked at him as being like the child that Robert and I never had.