DURING THE LAST days of May the deliveries of medical supplies increased. More nonurgent cases were sent home. Many wards would have been completely emptied had it not been for the admission of forty sailors—a rare type of jaundice was sweeping through the Royal Navy. Briony no longer had time to notice. New courses on hospital nursing and preliminary anatomy began. The first-year students hurried from their shifts to their lectures, to their meals and to private study. After three pages of reading, it would be difficult to stay awake. The chimes of Big Ben marked every change of the day, and there were times when the solemn single note of the quarter hour prompted moans of suppressed panic as the girls realized they were supposed to be elsewhere.

Total bed rest was considered a medical procedure in itself. Most patients, whatever their condition, were forbidden to walk the few steps to the lavatory. The days therefore began with bedpans. Sister did not approve of them being carried down the ward “like tennis rackets.” They were to be carried “to the glory of God,” and emptied, sluiced, cleaned and stowed by half past seven, when it was time to start the morning drinks. All day long, bedpans, blanket-bathing, floor-cleaning. The girls complained of backache from bed-making, and fiery sensations in their feet from standing all day. An extra nursing duty was drawing the blackout over the huge ward windows. Toward the end of the day, more bedpans, the emptying of sputum mugs, the making of cocoa. There was barely time between the end of a shift and the beginning of a class to get back to the dormitory to collect papers and textbooks. Twice in one day, Briony had caught the disapproval of the ward sister for running in the corridor, and on each occasion the reprimand was delivered tonelessly. Only hemorrhages and fires were permissible reasons for a nurse to run.

But the principal domain of the junior probationers was the sluice room. There was talk of automatic bedpan- and bottle-washers being installed, but this was mere rumor of a promised land. For now, they must do as others had done before them. On the day she had been told off twice for running, Briony found herself sent to the sluice room for an extra turn. It may have been an accident of the unwritten roster, but she doubted it. She pulled the sluice room door behind her, and tied the heavy rubber apron around her waist. The trick of emptying, in fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes, hold her breath and avert her head. Then came the rinsing in a solution of carbolic. If she neglected to check that hollow bedpan handles were cleaned and dry she would be in deeper trouble with the sister.

From this task she went straight to tidying the near-empty ward at the end of the day—straightening lockers, emptying ashtrays, picking up the day’s newspapers. Automatically, she glanced at a folded page of the Sunday Graphic. She had been following the news in unrelated scraps. There was never enough time to sit down and read a paper properly. She knew about the breaching of the Maginot Line, the bombing of Rotterdam, the surrender of the Dutch army, and some of the girls had been talking the night before about the imminent collapse of Belgium. The war was going badly, but it was bound to pick up. It was one anodyne sentence that caught her attention now—not for what it said, but for what it blandly tried to conceal. The British army in northern France was “making strategic withdrawals to previously prepared positions.” Even she, who knew nothing of military strategy or journalistic convention, understood a euphemism for retreat. Perhaps she was the last person in the hospital to understand what was happening. The emptying wards, the flow of supplies, she had thought were simply part of general preparations for war. She had been too wrapped up in her own tiny concerns. Now she saw how the separate news items might connect, and understood what everyone else must know and what the hospital administration was planning for. The Germans had reached the Channel, the British army was in difficulties. It had all gone badly wrong in France, though no one knew on what kind of scale. This foreboding, this muted dread, was what she had sensed around her.

About this time, on the day the last patients were escorted from the ward, a letter came from her............