It wasn't an unusual situation for Patsy to be waking up in the middle of the night, she had woken in a sweat, panting and with tears staining her face. She knew this routine well. It had been happening since 1945, since she was a young teenager – only thirteen.
Now, now she was 28, she was long past the horrors of what had happened in 1941. Still the memories haunted her and she believed they always would. Currently there were two dreams which haunted each night. In one, she had her Father turn up in London, he knew about the feelings she had for the other young nurse- Miss Busby, the probationer under her care. The other dream was the one she had always been haunted with. The memory of the cold, cold water.
"Patience! Patience!" she remembered the calling, the screaming, the desperation in her Mother's voice. All she could see was crowds and crowds of people, multi-coloured backs and shoulders and knees. The people were so closely packed, shoving and pulling and shouting. Someone barged into the back of her. She was flung forwards, landing hard on her knees and sliding across the wooden deck. She felt her skin slide off her knee caps and soon the warm, wet blood pooling under them.
She was frozen in place, stuck as if the blood from her knees had turned to glue. She was cold- frozen- and shivered in her thin cotton dress. She couldn't move her feet to clamber up, move her hand to catch attention or move her lips to shout.
She was yelling at herself in her head, abusing herself with fowl words she'd heard her father utter. She had to bloody move, she had to get up the stupid bitch that she was. Still nothing came of her words, she could do nothing as if she had suddenly turned to an infant with her own mind.
Suddenly a rough hand grabbed her under her arm, wrenching upwards to her feet. She had to reach and scramble to her feet as she was lifted and soon she was pulled to a man's chest. She remembered glancing upwards, looking to see a face through the light of the moon and the small amount of lights from gas lamps hanging around the cabin.
The hands belonged to an older man, a man who had the thickest blonde moustache she had ever seen. The lines under his eyes were thick and harrowed as though he had been scratched by a tiger or lion. Those eyes were covered with a pair of golden framed round spectacles and beyond the panes of glass were two orbs, round and icy blue. He looked so lacking of feeling, as though he was some kind of puppet.
She was so scared, so cold and so shocked that she wasn't aware of the man speaking to her. He shook her hard. She remembered seeing his lips move, the tiny twitching below his moustache but she heard nothing. The sounds around her were blurring in her head, a cacophony of sounds that overlapped like waves onto the shore. A last shake. His words finally broke the barrier in her ears.
"Can you swim?"
Swim. Yes. She knew that, she had taken lessons in their pool in the small cul-de-sac they lived in. She had a little red swimsuit. She had only worn it a few times. Her mother had always said it was too cold. She would catch her death in the pool.
The man shoved her forwards, pushing her through the crowds, steering her like the handles of a bicycle in and out of the shouting and pushing men and women who towered above her.
Suddenly another pair of hands grabbed her by the shoulders, the other man disappeared into the crowd as the face of a sailor appeared at her level. The sailor was younger he had a spattering of stubble across his strong jaw. His eyes were brown, warm and comforting. He gently stroked her shoulder, gave her a tiny smile.
"What's the name kid?" He asked, his voice soft.
"Patience, Patience Elisabeth Mount." The sailor nodded, "Listen, Patience, you need to jump from this bit here, and I need you to jump as far as possible, like you're doing the long jump at school."
She remembered going to nod, beginning to move her head up but before it could even begin to go back down she felt the sailor give her a push. The ground fell away under her and she was falling, falling fast. Her stomach twisted, she felt sick and that was when she woke up.
It followed the same timeline every time. Every dream ended as she fell or was pushed into the freezing cold ocean below the boat. They had been saving them, saving the children from being captured by the Japanese.
Saved. For three years of her life she had lived as a slave, she had gone to sleep and woken to find that people in their hut had passed away during the night. She had lived of a small bowl of rice which often contained more flies than grains. She had stood in the sun for hours, she had fainted and starved and been terrified of every man she ever saw. She had seen her sister die of typhoid, then her mother contract the illness and die also. Everyone had gone.
She sat up in bed, letting the duvet fall away from her so the cool air could come around her. She breathed deeply, in and out slowly. She felt the sweat on her body turn cold. There was light shining through the curtains, light from the moon. It was a full moon, the busy night of everyone in the medical profession- or so they claimed. And yet she was here. Using the light of the moon she squinted to see the hands of the clock. It was nearly midnight. It would be nine am over there. Over where she lived for so long.
She looked down, Delia lay next to her. She had tried to create a distraction, knowing that Nonatus was empty. She had known the date, known the feelings that always came to her girlfriend on this day. They day the horror had ended for Patsy and yet the horror was really just beginning.
After the camp was liberated there had been horror to face. Her mother and sister were gone, her father was missing and for days she didn't know if she would ever get home. She went back to stay with an aunt in Devon, then back to school as soon as she had gained enough strength.
She looked at the muddle of dark brown hair on the pillow next to her in the small single bed. She sighed, laying back down against Delia's back. She wrapped her arm over Delia's hip, feeling the girl she loved sighing.
It had been a long time, fifteen years since the horror had both ended and began. She had now gone to believe that good had come of the camp. She had become a nurse, she had met the woman she loved rather than marrying a man she found repulsive.
It could never outweigh the pain. Nothing could outweigh the horrors, the scales would never balance and yet the light end contained something heavier than everything else. That thing was why Patsy remembered this day. Through all the bad there had come a tiny crack of light. There had always been hope.