‘An everlasting dislocation of combinations’

Many contemporary First World War books inspired me as I undertook the research for Where No Shadow Awaits. I’ve already written about two of the key texts, but there is a third that was also very influential. Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates records her time working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, where life is ‘an everlasting dislocation of combinations’. Lady Cynthia Asquith called the book ‘wonderfully gripping, pitiless and true, and so vividly written.’ It certainly made an impact. When it was published early 1918, 15,000 copies were produced, and Bagnold was immediately sacked by the hospital for breaching military discipline because of the content.

The ’diary’ follows the seasons from autumn through to summer. Otherwise, the narrative is constructed from rather disjointed fragments of experience, not only Bagnold’s but also those of the soldiers whom she nurses, linked by self-conscious statements which effectively reposition the claustrophobic world of the hospital within the wider spectrum of human experience: ‘I didn’t mean to forget him, but I forgot him’ she notes of one patient, ‘from birth to death we are alone.’ As with Mary Borden and Ellen La Motte, there is something modernist about her style, stark, detached, compelling and devastating.

The wounded men make no distinction between the VADs like Bagnold and trained nurses. VADs are upper and middle-class, self-funded young women who are doing their bit for the war effort, generally with no previous medical experience. Very different from the trained nurses who run the hospital. Although for the men they are all ‘sisters’, Bagnold’s narrative highlights the difference, both in terms of the potential for conflict and a grudging respect for the career nurses whose support and guidance she needs. In the end, she can walk away; they can’t. But through her eyes we do get a fully rounded picture of hospital life that feels visceral and, as Asquith notes, true.

Mary Connelly in Where No Shadow Awaits is a VAD, although both Joe and Gabrielle know her as Sister Mary. She is a pivotal character who links the two as she encourages their burgeoning relationship. Mary has a quiet authority about her, despite her VAD status, and a way of making all those who encounter her feel special. She appears to be capable of anything, and perhaps she is. My recreation of Mary’s work at the field hospital owes much to Bagnold’s account, both medically and otherwise.

A Diary Without Dates is structured in three parts: the first focuses on her work before she is allowed on to the wards, the second deals with her time in the officers’ ward and in the third part she is nursing ‘the boys’ on the ‘Tommies’’ ward. Her discomfort with the different standards of treatment is palpable. The social class of my characters is central to the plot of Where No Shadow Awaits. Mary Connelly has a very different social background to Joe and Gabrielle and consequently she enables me to explore these divisions more fully as her interventions have a dramatic impact on their lives. But you’ll have to read the novel to learn how…

Where No Shadow Awaits is published on 5^th September… so coming soon.