Trip from Trinidad - 4

May 11^th

Dear Phoebe and Philip,

What a wonderful evening we had yesterday, and I can’t wait to write more to you about Mairi Chisholm and her adventures. But first I must tell you a bit about the film.

'Wings' is about the Great War aviators and we, the viewers, were taken along in the cockpits of biplane fighters during high-altitude dogfights. The original score was played for us on the piano by the ship’s musical director.

Jack Powell  and David Armstrong  are rivals in the same small American town, both vying for the attentions of pretty Sylvia Lewis . Jack fails to realize that "the girl next door", Mary Preston played by Clara Bow  is secretly in love with him. The two young men both enlist to become combat pilots in the air service.. When they leave for training camp, Jack mistakenly believes Sylvia prefers him; she is too kindhearted to disillusion him, but lets David know that she loves him.

Jack and David are billeted together. Their tent mate is Cadet White  but their acquaintance is all too brief; White is killed in an air crash the same day. Undaunted, the two men endure a rigorous training period, where they go from being enemies to best friends. Upon graduating, they are shipped off to France to fight the Germans.

Mary joins the war effort by becoming an ambulance driver. (This is so interesting because that is what Mairi Chisholm was too.) When she is in Paris, she learns that Jack is on leave there. She finds him, but he is too drunk to recognize her. She puts him to bed, but when two soldiers barge in while she is innocently changing out of a borrowed dress back into her uniform in the same room, she is forced to resign and return to America.

The climax of the story comes with the epic Battle of Saint Mahiel. David is shot down and presumed dead. However, he survives the crash landing, steals a German biplane, and heads for the Allied lines. By a tragic stroke of bad luck, he is spotted by Jack, who is bent on avenging his friend. Jack shoots David down. When Jack lands to pick up a souvenir, he becomes distraught when he learns what he has done, but before David dies, he forgives his comrade.

With the end of the war, Jack returns home to a hero's welcome. When he returns David's effects to his grieving parents, David's mother blames the war, not Jack, for her son's death. Then, Jack is reunited with Mary and realizes he loves her.

I was in tears at the end, and even your Grandpa seemed somewhat moved.

Now to tell you a bit more about Mairi Chisholm. Her dad said she was always a great lover of doing exciting things, and very much envied her brother when he was given an Enfield motor cycle. He was always competing on it in rallies and did the Bournemouth Speed Trials in September 1913. She kept trying to steal it to have rides for herself. So her father decided to buy her one too, a Douglas, for her 18^th birthday. She quickly was good enough on it to go in for races as well. While doing the rounds, in Hampshire and Dorset, she met thirty-year-old Elsie Knocker, a divorcee and mother of a young son, who was also a madcap motor-biker. She had already competed in motorbike and sidecar trials for the last year. Elsie was nicknamed 'Gypsy' because of her love of the open road and membership of the Gypsy Motorcycle Club. She was a passionate biker who wore a dark green leather skirt and long leather coat buttoned all the way down with a belt 'to keep it all together' designed for her by Messrs.Dunhill of London. She rode two motorbikes, a Scott with a sidecar and a Douglas solo.

“Did you approve of your daughter racing all over on a motorcycle?” I asked Margaret, as I know I would have been terribly upset if it had been me.

“I disapproved as strongly as I could,” said Margaret in a shrill voice, showing how much she meant it, “but I might as well have been talking to the cat and dog for all the good it did me.”

So instead of the usual round of tennis parties and dances Mairi spent hours in the stables in her brother's overalls stripping down motorbikes, repairing them, and then, riding hard.

Because of the looming war Elsie had to cancel the 'ladies stiff reliability trial over 120 miles of Hampshire and Dorset countryside with plenty of hairpin bends' she had arranged for the middle of August. When war was declared Elsie wrote to Mairi that there was 'work to be done', and suggested they go to London to join the Women's Emergency Corps.

“We had a ferocious family row,” Margaret said. “Roderick was keen to let her go but I flatly refused to lend her a box to put her clothes in. But she crept up to her bedroom, tied a change of underclothes and her dress allowance of ten pounds into a headscarf, slipped out of the house and sped off on her motorbike to meet Elsie.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I was heart broken, and angry, but there was little I could do about it.”

Elsie and Mairi rode straight to the Little Theatre in John Adam Street, off the Strand, the headquarters of the Women's Emergency Corps. The place bustled with suffragettes, fashionable actresses, a couple of duchesses and a marchioness, and a handful of lady novelists. The Honourable Mrs Evelina Haverfield, splendidly got up in a short khaki skirt worn over riding breeches, had launched the Corps to provide women workers to help the country in its hour of need. Elsie and Mairi, who were then living in lodgings in Baker Street, were hired as dispatch riders and spent their first month whizzing about London carrying messages.

One day Mairi was spotted by Dr Hector Munro who was impressed with the way she rode crouched over her dropped-handlebar racing motorbike. He tracked her down to the Women's Emergency Corps and asked her to join his Flying Ambulance Corps to help wounded Belgian soldiers. She agreed immediately and recommended to Munro her friend Elsie, who was a trained nurse. Keen to show that women were as brave and capable as men, Hector Munro selected Elsie and Mairi out of two hundred applicants, and also took Lady Dorothy Fielding, well-connected and fluent in French; the novelist May Sinclair, a generous donor to his favourite causes; and Helen Gleason, a glamorous American whose journalist-husband was touring the Western Front and filing copy for British and American newspapers.(She was useless according to Mairi at anything but playing the piano.) Doctors, a clergyman, two London bus drivers, cooks and medical orderlies made up the motley crew of the Flying Ambulance Corps.

Arriving at Victoria Station, 'the Palace of Tears' as Elsie called it, on the morning of the 25th of September, Elsie and Mairi were tut-tutted at by ladies scandalised at their knickerbocker khaki suits, leather boots and overcoats: they were the only women in trousers. One of their colleagues in the Corps called them 'Valkyries in knickerbockers.' “The others were slightly scandalised,” Mairi told us, “one could see it in their furtive glances, it was difficult for these gentle ladies, who wore costumes and picture hats, to think there could really be any need for stepping right outside the conventional lines, at all events until they go to the war zone.

The Admiral told them all that a woman could not stain the strain. Elsie told him “Because I am a woman I can stand strain and hardship.” She told Mairi later that she nearly asked him if he had ever heard of childbirth.

In the early evening of the 25th of September, 1914, Elsie and Mairi followed their leader Dr Munro and the rest of the Corps down the gang-plank of the Princess Clementine at Ostend and onto Belgian soil. The four-hour crossing had been calm, no-one was sick, (unlike this trip, I said, and Margaret and I both laughed, because she had been as sick as I was) they were looking out for the German submarines at the entrance to Dover Harbour and for their destroyers and light cruisers in the English Channel. The Corps sang their way to Belgium in the ‘highest spirits’

They spent the night at the Station Hotel in Ostend which had been shelled the evening before but escaped serious damage. Elsie and Mairi shared a room and when it was ‘lights out’ at 8.30, despite Munro’s warning that the hotel could be shelled again, the girls went to bed feeling quite cheery in spite of it. They tried to make an early start the next day but a shortage of petrol meant they could not leave until the afternoon. Mairi sent a telegram to us telling us she was in Belgium and scribbled a note to her Aunt Lucy in London, assuring her that she had arrived safe and sound, saying that “Mum has cut up rough about my coming out. She had wanted me to go to Trinidad but I had already fixed this up. Fancy going out to Trinidad and lolling about doing nothing when there is such a tremendous lot to do here. It's too rotten to think of.”

“I was sorry she felt like that,” said Margaret, “and I worried every day about how she would survive.”

Money was tight. The Belgian Red Cross was grateful for Munro’s Corps, but it received no official funding from either the British, French or Belgian authorities. The British Red Cross eventually donated two ambulances and sixteen pounds a week, but most of the day-to-day running costs had to be raised and from the outset Munro and his team struggled to keep going, members each paying their own way.

The two cars donated by the Red Cross included a 42 h.p. Daimler with pneumatic tyres for passenger services and a 40 hp. Fiat with solid tyres suitable for carrying bags, but no one had thought of petrol, and a it seemed unprocurable in Ostend it was suggested that the cars should be put on a track and taken to Ghent, but this proved impracticable, as the cars, being very large refused to go on the tracks. finally the military authorities lent them enough petrol to take them to Ghent where the ambulance was attached to the Military Hospital at the Flandria Palace Hotel but the girls found the next two days dreadfully trying as they could not help in nursing the wounded, for their were plenty of nurses - besides that was not their job. their part was to go out to the firing line and fetch the wounded and render first aid, and bring them in, but no one had sent for them, and they had no permission to go.

A few days later, as they motored along, Mairi was surprised that Belgium was such a remarkably flat country, with not one hill the whole way to Ghent. The Corps was loudly cheered along the way and at first the party saw few signs that the country was at war, but within a day of arriving in Ghent they were confronted with evidence of the battles that had raged, and the humanitarian disaster that had been unfolding since the Germans had invaded the country on the 4th of August.

A thousand Belgians gathered to greet them when they arrived at Ghent and made their way to L’Hopital Militaire Numero Un, where Mairi told us, all the nurses were most kind in seeing to their wants. English habits preceded them and they were served with a ‘glorious tea’ in the hospital kitchen. The beautiful American Helen Gleason slipped away to see her roving reporter-husband, Arthur.

“By the end of their first weeks in Belgium, the letters we got from Mairi showed her frustration at not doing enough and not what she had thought she would be doing. Everything took too long for her and there were all those bits of paper to flourish and passports to show. From a sheltered background, used to servants, Mairi (pictured above)  was the youngest member of the Corps by at least ten years.”

Some of the ambulance party helped with the feeding of the refugees an enormous task, which to the credit of the people of Ghent was well tackled but even this was denied them, for they were recalled by authority for fear them might catch germs to the wounded when they handled them.

Three days after their arrival in Ghent, Ellie found a job driving the car of the Belgian Colonel, whose own chauffeur had disappeared. This was somewhat of an innovation in war time. She took the Colonel on his rounds to various outposts the next day picking up a wounded man on the way. “She had coffee with her new employer before he went on to the actual front, and she concluded that he was a dear, so kind and considerate, he had not taken any advantage of the unusual position.

(to be continued)