Page 35 of Summer in Greece

Horrified, I leaned forward to peer down the row. They were holding the soldier’s limb up, the end of his trouser leg flapped for a moment, then concertinaed towards his knee exposing a mashed stump where his left ankle and foot should have been. I bit down on a scream before it escaped. It had started. The terrible injuries I would be expected to deal with, calmly, in my career as a nurse. Someone clutching a brown leather bag scrambled through the boat, which rocked violently again. When the man looked up, I recognised the surgeon.

‘Give me your belt, sailor,’ he said to one of the crew. ‘Keep the limb elevated while I stop the bleeding.’ He fastened the belt tightly around Perkins’s thigh, then he scrambled up to sit next to the priest. He thrust his fingers under the Corporal’s jaw and closed his eyes. After a moment, he shook his head. ‘He’s lost too much blood, I’m afraid he won’t make it to shore.’

After all we had been through and given what I had done, I could not accept that my patient was going to die. Outraged, I yelled, ‘No! Surely there’s something we can do? We can’t just let him die like this!’

‘He needs blood, miss, and he needs it right this minute.’

Right now, I would do anything to save the life of our poor Corporal Perkins.

‘Then give him my blood, I’m O, it does for everyone, doesn’t it, sir?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s very noble, but I don’t have the intravenous transfer equipment with me, miss.’

I remembered the two wide-bore needles, the glass tube and the rubber hose connecting everything together from my training days. ‘Please, there must be another way. What’s to stop you using a hypodermic syringe? Please try!’ I started rolling my sleeve up. ‘Please, sir, if he was your son . . . he is somebody’s son, we should at least try! My brother Arthur, if he’d had blood, perhaps he wouldn’t have died, sir. Don’t you see? Somebody could have saved him if only they had been brave enough. If only . . . oh, sir, you don’t know what that would have meant to my mother.’

He stared into my eyes for a moment, then he shouted, ‘Stop rowing!’

CHAPTER 15

SHELLY

Greek island of Kea, present day.

THE TAVERNA OWNER BROKE INTO her thoughts. ‘Hello, lady. What you want, café? Where you from?’ He asked brusquely. His eyes swept over her dark hair, pale skin, and long legs.

‘England.’

‘Ah, is good, I am Makris. You like, frappé, Nes?’

‘Greek coffee, sweet, please.’ A strong coffee would set her up for a swim.

‘Kafé, glykó!’ Makris yelled towards a woman in the open kitchen. ‘You alone? Married? Why you here? Holidays?’

‘I’m tracing my family tree,’ she said. ‘Look, the ferry’s leaving already.’

‘Yes, is going to Syros. Is near here. Tree? What tree?’ He glanced up at the heart-shaped mulberry leaves.

‘No, no, I’m tracing my roots.’ She stifled a giggle as his eyes travelled down to the base of the trunk. ‘My great-grandmother was an English woman, Gertie Smith. She was on a boat and stayed here for a while after it sunk.’

‘Ah, the Britannic?’

Surprised, Shelly nodded.

‘My grandfather say it hit a mine, or it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. There is still much talk. Was it a ship for the sick, or a secret carrier of guns and soldiers to help the forces near Gallipoli?’

He crossed himself, then his eyes lit up.

‘My cousin have the best dive school. If you like, I get you a good price, yes? You no have worries with Aries and his boys. The father of Aries helped the famous Jacques Cousteau, he found the ship, you know? He dived down to the Britannic many, many times. So, you want to dive?’

‘Yes, I want to dive,’ Shelly murmured, gazing out over the flat water, wondering just how far away the magnificent turtle was at that moment. She imagined it, buoyant in the blue Aegean, joyously rolling in ribbons of reflected light; frolicking, free of its eggs and weightless in the water. Could that crusty Caretta be cavorting over HMHS Britannic’s wreck? She peered past the lighthouse and tried to visualise how the hospital ship looked now, the oval shadow of her turtle sliding silently over the coral-encrusted hull.

*

Shelly approached the dive centre. A guy who looked as though he needed a good night’s sleep was loading diving gear into a trailer.

‘Anyone in there?’ she asked, nodding at the open door of a square, stone building. ‘I’m looking for Aries?’

‘Oh, Harry. He’s inside, but there’s no snorkelling trips today, madam,’ he said. ‘Harry’s just back from Athens.’