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Enid Bagnold, the daughter of the Commander of the Royal Engineers, was born in Rochester, Kent in 1889. Her early childhood was spent in Jamaica but was educated in England and Switzerland.
In 1908 Bagnold began attending Walter Sicket's School of Art. She developed a talent for etching and while in London became friends with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry.
On the outbreak of the First World War Bagnold joined the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) and worked as a nurse at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich. Her account of this experience, Diary Without Dates (1917) was so critical of hospital administration that the military authorities arranged for her dismissal. Determined to help the war effort, Bagnold went to France and worked as a volunteer driver. Later she wrote about this in The Happy Foreigner (1920).
In 1920 Bagnold married the head of Reuters News Agency, Sir Roderick Jones. Bagnold continued to write and in 1924 published the highly acclaimed novel, The Difficulty of Getting Married. This was followed by the commercially successful, National Velvet (1935). Other novels included The Squire (1937) and The Loved and Envied (1951).
Bagnold also wrote several popular plays including Lottie Dundass (1943), The Chalk Garden (1951), The Chinese Prime Minister (1964), and a Matter of Gravity (1975). Enid Bagnold died in 1981.
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(1) Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates (1917)
I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only VAD nurse of whom they continually ask, "What say, nurse?' It isn't that I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.
"An antitetanic injection for Corrigan," said Sister. And I went to the dispensary to fetch the syringe and the needles.
"But has he any symptoms?" I asked. In the Tommies' ward one dare ask anything; their isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers' illnesses.
"Oh, no," she said, "it's just that he hasn't had his full amount in France."
So I hunted up the spirit-lamp and we prepared it, talking of it.
But we forget to talk of it to Corrigan. The needle was into his shoulder before he knew why his shirt was held up.
His wrath came like an avalanche; the discipline of two years was forgotten, his Irish tongue was loosened. Sister shrugged her shoulders and laughed; I listened to him as I cleaned the syringe.
I gathered that it was the indignity that had shocked his sense of individual pride. "Treating me like a cow" I heard him say to Smiff - who laughed, since it wasn't his shoulder that carried the serum.
(2) Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates (1917)
In the bus yesterday, I came down from London sitting beside a Sister from another ward, who held her hand to her ear and shifted in her seat.
She told me she had earache and we didn't talk, and I sat huddled in my corner and watched the names of the shops, thinking, as I was more or less forced to do by her movements, of her earache.
What struck me was her own angry bewilderment before the fact of her pain. "But it hurts. You've no idea how it hurts!" She was surprised.
Many times a day she hears the words, "Sister, you're hurting me. Couldn't you shift my heel? It's like a toothache," and other similar sentences. I hear them in the ward without some such request falling on one's ears.
She is astonished at her earache; she is astonished at what pain can be; it is unexpected. She is ready to be angry with herself, with her pain, with her ear. It is monstrous she thinks.
The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine.
(3) Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates (1917)
It was the first time I had a man sing at his dressing. I was standing at the sterilizer when Rees's song began to mount over the screen that hid him from me.
It was like this: "Ah... ee... oo, Sister!" and again: "Sister... oo... ee... ah!" Then a little scream and his song again.
I heard the Sister's voice: "Now then, Rees, I don't call that much of a song. " She called me to make her bed, and I saw his left ear was full of tears.
Oh visitors, who come into the ward in the calm of the long afternoon, when the beds are neat and clean and the flowers out on the tables and the VAD's sit sewing at splints and sandbags, when the men look like men again and smoke and talk and read... if you could see what lies beneath the dressings!
(4) Enid Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates (1917)
I can only think of death tonight. I tried to think just now, "What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it." But that won't do; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.
Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water. We talk of tablets of the dead. There can be none but in the heart, and the heart fades.
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