They are wrapped up in many ways, these stories. Some are in brown paper boxes; others red; others are in blue or brown folders, tied up like parcels with crisscrossed white tape.
There’s Mrs Winterbottom, who, when her husband is called to the Front, offers herself and her car to the War Office. She then spends six months driving officers to the front line and wounded soldiers back from it, often under fire or in a rain of shrapnel. Then there’s Mabel St Clair Stobart who founds a hospital in Serbia and then, as the Serbian army retreats, goes with it, taking the whole setup. Her description of the three month journey includes travelling on roads full not only of holes and rocks and mud, but dead animals; horses and oxen, and dead men.
There’s the story in a hundred or more newspaper cuttings of Miss Mairi Chisholm and Mrs Elsie Knocker, who on their own initiative set up a nursing station just behind the Belgian front line, so as to nurse soldiers as swiftly as possible after they are wounded.
There’s a large, flower covered album belonging to VAD nurse Miss Sybil Reeves, purchased in Italy and full of photographs, drawings, autographs, poems and mementos of her time there and of the people she knew. And there are the small things. Requests for soap to be sent from home. Slang. Top hole. Did people really say top hole?
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