The Poppy Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

everyone over they discovered that, by some miracle, most of the injuries were shallow cuts which needed only simple stitching. Only a couple of lads were more seriously hurt and needed evacuation, and they later heard back that both of them had survived and weren’t likely to suffer any long term after-effects. ‘Saved their bloody lives, those two lassies of yours,’ the surgeon told her CO later.
    She checked the drunken squaddie over, swabbed him down, shaved an unnecessarily wide strip of hair on either side of the wound, stitched him up and told them to wake him every half hour to check for concussion, with a bucket of cold water if necessary. That’ll teach him, she thought to herself.
    One day she diagnosed a case of ‘housemaid’s knee’. The spotty lad gazed at her in confusion: ‘I ain’t been doin’ no housework.’
    ‘It’s an inflammation of the tissues in front of the kneecap. You just need to take it easy for a couple of weeks and it’ll sort itself out.’
    ‘Can’t tell me sergeant I’ve got housemaid’s knee,’ he muttered. ‘Never bloody live it down.’
    She would normally have found this funny, but for some reason his pathetic embarrassment irritated the hell out of her. She took a deep breath, wrote ‘ Prepatellar Bursitis ’ on a note and passed it to him. ‘Will that do?’
    He tried to pronounce the Latin and gave up.
    ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, with a brazen smile. ‘Fancy a drink sometime?’
    ‘Get lost, you cheeky bastard,’ she said, showing him the door.
    ‘I just can’t cope with the pettiness of it all,’ she shouted to her mother as they struggled along the shingle beach in the face of a bitter cold wind whistling off the North Sea. She’d been given a few mid-week days off and, to be honest, was pleased to have her parents to herself. ‘Their stupid little complaints. I feel like slapping them, telling them to man up.’
    Her mother had suggested the walk after she’d come downstairs at three in the morning to find Jess watching the shopping channel with a large glass of her father’s whisky on the table in front of her.
    ‘What’s up, love?’ she’d asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Jess noticed for the first time that her mother’s hair, the gingery side of auburn like her own, was turning grey.
    ‘Can’t sleep. It’s just too quiet here,’ she replied, trying to make light of it. ‘What are you doing up, anyway?’
    ‘Saw the light on when I went for a pee.’
    Jess had been looking forward to a few days by the seaside, where she could take long walks in the sea air and hopefully knock herself out with physical tiredness, but it hadn’t worked like that. For the second night running she had lain awake for hours before giving up and going downstairs to raid her father’s drinks cabinet.
    ‘You shouldn’t drink so much of that stuff,’ Susan had said, looking pointedly at the glass.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Jess said. ‘I’ll buy Dad another bottle. Go back to bed. I’ll be fine.’
    Later that morning, out on the beach, she found herself almost enjoying the distraction of physical discomfort as the wind slashed at their faces.
    ‘Tell me about this drinking,’ her mother had started.
    ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Jess said. Admitting the nightmares to her mother would only make her more anxious – better to gloss over it. ‘Just fed up with work. It’s so boring. I can’t wait to get out.’
    ‘You haven’t got long to go now, have you?’
    ‘Four weeks, that’s all. I can deal with it. Thanks for being so understanding, Mum.’
    But that evening she lost it again. Her father had insisted on doing a barbecue in spite of the fact that it was still only February, and bitterly cold. The wind had dropped, he said, and besides the barbecue was under cover of the patio awning. He would be perfectly dry, and once everything was cooked they could eat inside. Except that it began to bucket with rain, and while Jess tried to