Snowflakes in the Wind Read online

  She was just coming off duty, and her initial delight at seeing Nicholas waiting for her was immediately dampened by his grim face. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’ she asked anxiously as he took her arm.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

  ‘Then why are you looking like that?’

  ‘This is my doctor face,’ he joked quickly, kicking himself for not preparing his expression before she caught sight of him. ‘It doesn’t do to go round grinning like a Cheshire cat. Come on, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Now? I need to get changed and—’

  ‘Now,’ he said firmly, keeping hold of her hand as he led her out of the hospital onto the wide verandah beyond, down the steps and then across the lawn to the shade of the trees surrounding the compound. It was sufficiently distant from the hustle of the hospital to be quiet, the only sound being of birdsong in the branches above their heads and the drone of an aircraft somewhere high in the deep-blue sky.

  Abby was just about to ask him again what was the matter, when to her amazement Nicholas dropped down on one knee. ‘Abigail, my darling, beautiful Abigail, will you do me the honour of marrying me?’ he said throatily, his dark-brown eyes holding her wide grey-blue ones. ‘Will you be my wife, my precious girl? Now, today?’

  Her heart thundering, she stared down into his dear face, her astonishment robbing her of the power of speech.

  ‘I would have liked to do this in the time-honoured fashion,’ he murmured, still on one knee. ‘I would have liked to court you and woo you, to have gone through an engagement and for you to have chosen a beautiful dress and all the trimmings you deserve, but I don’t want to wait to make you mine. Do you? Do you need more time, my darling?’

  She didn’t have to think about her reply, sinking down beside him and into his arms so they both fell backwards onto the grass as she whispered, ‘Yes, I will be your wife and no, I don’t want to wait. I love you, I love you, I love you . . .’ She would gladly have given herself to him without the legality of a wedding ring, but Nicholas had made it plain within the first few days of them finding each other again that he wanted to ‘do things properly’ as he had put it.

  ‘You’re different to all those others,’ he had whispered one night when he had drawn back from their lovemaking, ‘and I want our first time together to be different. I want to honour you with my body – I don’t know how else to put it. I want it to be perfect, when we’ve stated our vows as man and wife and we’re joined together in the sight of God and man. You’ll be the mother of my children, my darling, my wife. I want to protect you and cherish you and adore you, do you understand?’

  She had said she did, and she had, in a way, but with the war and the uncertainty that each day brought, she had just wanted to belong to him, heart, soul and body.

  ‘The padre will be ready to marry us within a few minutes.’ Nicholas sat up, positioning her on his lap. ‘You find Delia and I’ll find John for our witnesses.’

  ‘How did you get permission?’ Such unions were frowned on. And then, as a thought occurred, she said, ‘It will mean we can’t serve here together, won’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not.’ He wasn’t going to go into that. ‘Darling, I want you to be my wife. That’s all that matters.’

  It was all that mattered to Abby too.

  She got married in her QA uniform because she didn’t have time to change. Delia insisted on stopping and picking one of the sweet-smelling white lilies that grew in profusion on the island though, carefully winding the stem of the lovely exotic flower in her friend’s silver-blonde hair, and then plucking a few more for Abby’s bouquet, before they hurried on their way to find Nicholas and John.

  The padre, a young man for whom romance wasn’t dead, was clearly delighted at his unexpected duty, performing the ceremony with relish as the young couple stood together, hands clasped tight and faces aglow. And at his, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ John let out such a whoop that Delia jumped a mile. It was doubtful if Nicholas and Abby even heard him, wrapped in each other’s arms as they made the most of their first kiss as a married couple.

  ‘Congratulations, Captain Jefferson-Price, Mrs Jefferson-Price.’ The padre smiled when Nicholas and Abby drew apart. ‘May your life together be long and happy.’

  Once the necessary papers had been signed, the four of them strolled over to the officers’ club where Nicholas ordered a bottle of champagne and Abby kept glancing down at the inexpensive ring of some indeterminate metal that Nicholas had managed to procure from one of the native servants at the last moment. ‘It will make your finger go green,’ he whispered to Abby as he noticed her gaze, ‘but I’ll get you a beautiful engagement ring and wedding ring as soon as I can.’

  ‘They won’t be as precious as this one.’ She smiled mistily at him, her eyes starry. She was his wife, his wife. Mrs Jefferson-Price. She could barely take it in.

  They spent their first night as man and wife in a tiny guest room at the officers’ club. Abby had been worried that she wouldn’t be able to please him like the women he’d had in the past, experienced and worldly-wise females who knew all the tricks to make a man happy. She needn’t have worried. From the moment they were alone Nicholas set about proving she was the only woman in the world for him. Mindful of her innocence he didn’t rush her. Once they were naked together in the small three-quarter-size bed the room held, he spent a long time caressing and kissing her, touching and tasting her until Abby was delirious with pleasure. And it was only then, when she was ready for him, that he took her, even then restraining his hunger until her tightness had eased and her moans were ones of pleasure.

  When it was over they lay entwined as he gently stroked the hair from her flushed face, dropping little kisses where his fingers touched.

  ‘I’ll never be as happy in my life again as I am right at this minute,’ Abby whispered dreamily.

  He chuckled, deep in his throat. ‘I hope you are. I want us to have many more nights like this until we’re old and grey and wrinkled, and perhaps even then.’

  ‘But tonight is special.’

  ‘Yes, it is, my love. I grant you that. No regrets then?’

  ‘Only that I was so blind and stupid in the past.’

  ‘You were never that.’ He raised himself on one elbow, his dark eyes suddenly serious. ‘You tried to do what you thought was best for everyone concerned, I understood that.’

  ‘How can I ever make it up to you? All the wasted years?’

  ‘Ah, now, let me think.’ He winked lasciviously, making her giggle. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve got it . . .’

  They made love twice more that night, sleep the last thing on their minds as they loved and laughed and whispered until dawn broke, a beautiful tropical dawn that filled the sky with colour and brought a thousand birds singing.

  Later that day, a peaceful Sunday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, 360 Japanese war planes making a massive surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in its home base in Hawaii. Japanese planes also attacked American bases in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake islands in the middle of the Pacific. Imperial headquarters in Tokyo announced that Japan was at war with the United States and Britain.

  It had begun, and Nicholas was too late to do what he had agreed with the lieutenant colonel and have his new wife shipped home to the relative safety of the UK.

  Events moved rapidly. The day after Pearl Harbor, the 38th Infantry Division of the Japanese Army launched a ferocious attack on the mainland with the prize of Hong Kong in their sights, while their planes totally destroyed the airport at Kowloon, and with it Nicholas’s hopes that he might get Abby off the island by air. Whether Abby would have agreed to leave was a different matter, as she told him in no uncertain terms when he was foolish enough to reveal his thwarted plan to her. Her place was where it had always been, she said firmly, and that was as a QA nurse doing her duty. And now she had an added incentive, to remain close to her husband, and he needn’t think the Japanese would inti
midate her into doing anything else.

  The aerial bombs soon did a great deal of damage, and within hours medical teams were despatched to several makeshift hospitals set up across the island. Army ambulances began to stream backwards and forwards loaded up with wounded men. There was no time for the medical staff to get into cellars and basements during the bombardments as the ceaseless stream of stretcher bearers brought in fresh casualties. All the hospitals were quickly overwhelmed, and stretchers were left wherever there was space while fresh beds were made up.

  Each night, grimy and exhausted, Abby and Nicholas would find each other and have something to eat, too tired to do more than sit close with her head on his shoulder. After an hour or two’s rest, they would go their different ways back to tend the injured and dying. There had been several direct hits on the three-storey hospital and the two top floors had been evacuated, all the patients and equipment being squeezed into the ground-floor area. Nicholas was soon working in an emergency operating theatre in the basement of the building, doing what he could in difficult conditions.

  In spite of the shelling and the constant line of exhausted stretcher bearers bringing in fresh casualties, the gruelling shifts, the terrible injuries she was dealing with and the fear, Abby found that the shortage of water was the hardest thing to come to terms with. The island’s reservoir had been bombed in the first day or two of the attack, and water had been rationed to a pint a day per person for drinking and washing. Needless to say, no one washed and they were desperately thirsty all the time. Water became priceless. On more than one occasion Nicholas tried to persuade Abby to drink some of his ration, but she refused so hotly the last time he attempted it, he was forced to give up.

  Filthy, exhausted beyond words, hungry and thirsty, medical teams all over the island battled to take care of the injured and dying, all sizeable buildings – schools, convents, hotels, even the local racetrack – being turned into emergency hospitals to care for the mounting casualties, each staffed by one or two doctors, two or three QAs and locally recruited volunteers and orderlies. The volunteer nurses who had joined the local Voluntary Aid Detachment when war had broken out had, for the most part, had the briefest of medical training, but Abby and the other QAs were full of admiration for these colonial housewives and young single women. As Nicholas remarked to Abby some days into the attack, each one was a heroine fighting for her country, her family and those around her – as were they all.

  The merciless bombing continued twenty-four hours a day. The Japanese had complete air superiority over the colony, having quickly destroyed the small RAF contingent on the ground at Kai Tak airport on the first day of the conflict. Abby and the other nurses soon became accustomed to the different types of shells the enemy was using and whether they were going to strike close by. The ones passing overhead were terrifying, roaring like express trains, but these burst beyond the hospital with a sound like boulders tumbling down a mountainside. Others, the really deadly ones, had a different tone and exploded in the garden area or scored a hit on the hospital itself, filling the air with red-hot gusts of metal. Everyone knew the Japanese would cross the bay sooner or later using small boats and barges they had taken on the mainland; it was as inevitable as day following night.

  A couple of days after the onslaught began, Abby and Nicholas managed to have a few hours together one night. Too weary and traumatized to do more than hold each other close, they slept for a while in spite of the noise from the shells screaming overhead and the explosions. The day before, Nicholas had continued without a break for nearly twenty-four hours, and it was only when his lieutenant colonel had ordered him to take some rest that he had capitulated. When they awoke, still in each other’s arms, they came out of the layers of sleep slowly, and Abby’s voice was still dazed with exhaustion when she whispered, ‘How much longer can we hold out, do you think?’

  ‘Not long.’ Nicholas moved her more comfortably into his side, kissing the top of her head. ‘It was always going to be a hopeless fight.’ But it was what would happen after the garrison surrendered that worried him. He hoped the Japanese would observe the rules of war under the Geneva Convention, but the atrocities committed by marauding Imperial forces in the war against China were nagging at him constantly. Japanese soldiers had been permitted to terrorize the Chinese population in an orgy of sadism the world hadn’t seen since the Mongols had first surged west, and it seemed women had often been deliberate targets of Japanese cruelty. Gang rape, torture, mutilation and murder had been commonplace and Chinese women had been raped in all locations at all hours, the soldiers never being punished for their crimes. He had shared his agony of mind with John the day before but his friend had been unwilling to even consider that such things could happen in Hong Kong.

  ‘Look, Nick,’ John had said quietly, ‘I can understand you are worried sick for Abigail but what happened in China is not going to happen here. You know as well as I do that the Japanese have been taught to think of the Chinese as subhuman. It’s one of those terrible culture things. That’s why their soldiers treat all Chinese women as prostitutes and sexual playthings – it’s been ingrained in them from birth. But white women, Europeans, are different. And nurses, well, I mean, they’re respected everywhere.’

  He hoped John was right. Nicholas kissed the top of Abby’s head again. He would rather kill her himself, quickly and cleanly with a bullet in the head, than let her fall into the hands of murdering rapists. The fingers of his right hand felt for the revolver he now kept in his pocket at all times. The slightest suggestion that what had happened in China was going to be repeated here, and he would kill her and then himself, because he couldn’t live without her. But perhaps John was right and his love for Abigail had distorted how he was thinking, that and the exhaustion and lack of food and water. Nevertheless, as soon as they were invaded he would keep her close to him no matter what. She came first, even before his patients.

  ‘I love you.’ Abby snuggled closer into his side. Even with the whine of the shells and explosions that seemed to make the building shudder, she would rather be here, with him, going through this, than somewhere safe without him.

  ‘And I love you, my sweet.’

  ‘Do you ever think about when the war is over?’

  ‘Since I married you, yes. Before . . . well, I’m not sure I cared enough.’

  ‘We haven’t talked about children. Do you want them?’

  Nicholas smiled to himself. Here they were, in the midst of mayhem where any moment could be their last, and she was talking about whether he wanted children. But that was his Abigail, and he loved her for it. ‘Yes, I want children. Do you?’

  ‘Of course.’ She sounded almost indignant. ‘A little boy first who looks like you, and then maybe two girls. After that we’ll see.’

  ‘Unless you’ve got a direct line to the Almighty that I don’t know about, I think you have to take what you get.’

  ‘That’s all right too, I don’t mind. I just want your babies, lots of them.’

  ‘So the first three are just for starters?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They talked on in the same vein for some minutes more – silly lovers’ talk about a future that seemed as far away as heaven itself with the sounds of war vibrating in the distance, but it didn’t matter. It made them both feel better by the time Nicholas stood up, pulling Abby up after him as he said, ‘Time to do our duty, Mrs Jefferson-Price.’

  ‘OK, Captain Jefferson-Price.’

  They kissed, long and hard, and then walked hand in hand out of the room and back into the real world.

  It was later that same day in the evening. Nicholas had left the operating theatre in the basement of the building after working non-stop for ten hours, and was making his way to the ground floor. He needed to breathe fresh air – or at least as fresh as the dust and smoke from numerous shells made it. The cloying sweet smell of blood was in his nostrils and anything was better than that. He felt he had been drenched in blood dur
ing the last little while; at times the floor underneath the operating table had been swamped with it. The shelling was causing slaughter on a mass scale, which of course was exactly what the damn Japanese intended. He ground his teeth as hatred and loathing of the enemy engulfed him briefly.

  They had heard that there was serious rioting and looting in the coastal town of Kowloon across from Hong Kong island. One of the injured sailors who had been brought to the hospital earlier that day had reported that British sappers were getting ready to destroy anything in the town of military value, after which the oil depot would be set on fire. It was the same at the naval base, the sailor had whispered. They were preparing to scuttle ships in the near future, and dynamite, petrol and sledgehammers were already being gathered into one place so that when the time came, the soldiers and sailors would know exactly what to do and with what.

  Nicholas knew there were three destroyers still at the base although the sailor had told the CO that two of these were making ready to sail very shortly. There were also a few gunboats and motor torpedo boats, and a handful of smaller vessels.

  It seemed impossible that a month ago both the RAF and the navy, along with the rest of the military personnel on the island, had been going about their business oblivious to the approaching threat.

  ‘There’s none so blind as those who don’t want to see.’ Who had said that? he asked himself wearily. He couldn’t remember but if ever a quote was apt, that one was for this situation. For a decade Japan had been carrying out raids in China and Manchuria; hadn’t the writing been plainly on the wall for all to see?