Chapter 10. Breaking Up

Busy, busy times followed after D-Day for a few more weeks.  We avidly followed the news, especially grabbing the Stars and Stripes for the straight dope.  A larger share of patients were badly injured but had been processed through newly set up medical stations in France.  Others came from the Italian battles.

Meanwhile I had managed to carry on with less pain.  I had suffered an intense pleurisy that the doctors couldn’t diagnose for several weeks:  Intense pain in my chest at every breath and killer pain if I coughed.  A short break in bed didn’t help as I had real misery.  Carrying on, I felt so indispensable.  Nobody had time to sympathize, but at least I had the support of my mother and dad who wrote more frequently.

Imagine my shock recently.  In going through my V-mail and WWII letters which my mother had saved, here was a letter my brother Neill had written home.  Mom accidentally had slipped it in with my stack.  Doctor Neill had died many years before my discovery of his letter.  But I’m still angry at him—typical big brother—always interfering with my life.  (He had spent a whole 8x11 page telling my folks:  “Stop worrying about Nanny—(I hated that name—couldn’t shed it until I went away to college.  Neill as a tot couldn’t say “Jeannette” and said something that ended up “Nanny” and the family thought it was so cute it became my name.)

“Stop worrying about Nanny,” Neill had written.  “She is all right.  I visited her at the time she was sick and at that time she looked better than I had seen her for a long time.”  She complained of a pain in the chest.  All the x-rays were normal and I am sure,” goes on Doctor Neill, “that she had merely sprained a little ligament between the ribs from coughing.  I have seen many of these cases and they are a nuisance for a few weeks but they are not important and they get well no matter what is done.”  On Neill went, “Jimmie Corning, (a young lieutenant friend from Lamar), dropped by here a few days later and said he had seen her and she was working again.” 

Back to Ringwood, in late July, I believe, we got word to pack up—we were to go to France.  Soon we found ourselves in western England in a less than pleasant “parking area” south of Bristol at a makeshift camp at Cannington near the larger town of Bridgwater.  We called it Bilgewater.

Surprisingly much good came of that situation.  I was close enough to see my brother (in my good favor at the time) and to meet his new serious girlfriend whom I liked better than the fiancée he had left in Michigan. He had met the new friend, Kay, on a tennis court.  They took me around to historic places—most memorable the old Roman baths in Bath, England.  And I got to help Neill decide to break up with his fiancée.  A couple years later he did marry Kay from Bristol. 

Bilgewater paid off for me also because Margaret, our Social Worker talked the General into letting us 5 Red Cross Workers off for a week’s stay in Oxford which was holding its annual Shakespeare Festival.  Every day we saw a different Tragedy or Comedy and we had lots of rest and time so we could enjoy the Oxford campus, punt on the Avon or whatever.  Not a bad way to avoid sitting idle as we had to wait to cross the Channel to Normandy!