Women's Weird 2 by Melissa Edmundson

Author:Melissa Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

8 Outside the House

by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor (1920)

If I say I was just engaged to be married, you will forgive my thus intruding my own affairs for a moment, because, through being engaged, I was landed into the most curious happening of my life.

I had been in France some two and a half years before the bit of shell met me, which landed me back in Blighty108, with a leg that was not going to be of much more service to me. I had had many and varied experiences in France – horrors, of course – but of these we do not often speak, much of deep interest, and much which goes to the furthering of knowledge of many kinds – knowledge which has led thousands of men to get down to realities – and to shun for evermore the superficial shams which made up their existences before 1914 – but this is not a war story, except in so far that it transformed me, an officer in a well-known regiment, into a very ordinary civilian, with a game109 leg, and fathoms deep in love with the sweet child who nursed me – Elsie Falconer was my nurse – in the stately Home of England in which I and my mangled leg found ourselves after a long, troublesome journey. It was a home – there are many such, especially in the south of England – given up by their owners to needs of ‘woundeds’. Homes, where, in many cases gallant young heirs have laid down their lives for King and Country, leaving none to inherit the stately bourne which for so many generations had belonged to their honoured name – so it comes to pass, that the old house is metamorphosed into a well-equipped hospital, strict routine taking the place of former gay hunting, shooting, and careless living.

It was a wonderfully beautiful old grey stone house, with an old-world garden; no money was spared, no labour was withheld to make it what it was now, a well-worked comfortable happy hospital.

I had been there some six weeks in the hands of an austere but clever elderly nurse, before Elsie was given charge of me. She was a joy to look at, to talk to, to joke with – but, she was not a nurse – Some women are born nurses – some have nursing thrust upon them – and some achieve nursing – Elsie was none of these, but she was very sweet, very sympathetic, and it was a delight to watch her little fingers bandage my poor leg, though I would not for worlds have let her guess the agonies I endured until, in her time off, I could capture the Sister, and beg a little relief, saying my bandages were not quite tight enough. Sister would smile, and being a sport, keep her own counsel.

It was an easy matter to step from sympathetic companionship into love-making – lots of us men have done it – perhaps some will find, to their sorrow, though each man says: ‘That will not be me.

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