Amy's Touch Read Free

comment as she told Danny, ‘Your wounds have to be re-dressed today, some time before lunch.’ She smiled her friendly, professional smile. ‘I’ll be assisting matron.’
    It was thoughtful of her to warn him of what was to come, and he liked her doing it because she had a gentle touch, unlike some of the other nurses. Taking the soiled bandages off his chest, shoulder and right thigh, swabbing the wounds and checking for infection, then redressing them, was a painful but necessary process. Still, on the brighter side, at least the wounds were healing, and with luck he’d be discharged from hospital just after Christmas.
    ‘At least I have a pulse, Harry. You probably don’t.’ Danny threw the smart remark back and ventured a grin at Amy.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ she replied, her tone a mild rebuke.
    She was good at handling the men, Danny noted, as Amy walked back down the aisle with her patients’ reports book tucked under her arm, considering she wasn’t as old as some of the other nurses. The same age as him—twenty-one—he reckoned. She had to be, because she was a fully trained nursing sister. He admired the way her hips swayed slightly from side to side as she walked, feminine but not too obvious, and how rebellious wisps of brown hair strayed from beneath her veil. But what he liked most of all were her clear blue eyes, and the way she would look directly at him when she spoke to him. As she left the ward, he watched her stop at Jim’s bed and rearrange his bedcovers for the second time. She had a good, kind heart, Danny decided.
    Lighting a cigarette, he settled back against the pillows and watched the smoke spiral towards the ceiling. If the blokes didn’t rattle on too loudly, maybe he’d get an hour’s shut-eye before breakfast.

CHAPTER TWO
    B raving the chill of a Friday in December, huddled in her militaryissue greatcoat with a woollen scarf wound around her neck, Amy sat on the wooden verandah outside the nurses’ quarters, determinedly penning a reply to Miles’s letter, the one she had received two weeks ago. Writing with gloves on was too awkward, so she’d taken the right-hand glove off. She dipped the pen into the ink bottle and continued writing about hospital experiences, the bland food, the weather. Oh, yes, the weather. She glanced up from the letter to see fine, misty rain start to fall, and sighed. How she missed the sun—even the excessive heat of summer was preferable to the cold and gloom of another British winter.
    She shivered inside her coat and, bending her head downwards, she wrote, With the war over and sick soldiers being repatriated every day, I’m hopeful that I too will be back in Adelaide by the end of March, or June at the latest, though with the threat of the Spanish Flu bordering on being an epidemic, and which has killed many people in Spain and other parts of Europe, I might be requested to stay longer.
    Newspaper articles and personal stories were beginning to filter down with alarming regularity to the medical staff about how devastating the Spanish Flu was becoming. Conservatively, estimates had been made that millions of people throughout Europe, including men in the trenches, and people in Asia and even the United States of America, had died quick but horrible deaths.
    A discreet masculine cough made her jump. She’d been concentrating so hard on writing information that Miles would findsatisfactory that the only sound she’d heard till then was the light squeak the nib made as it met the paper. At that moment a gust of wind blew in an otherwise still day, and two pages of her letter became airborne. They flew off the verandah and landed on the wet ground.
    ‘Oh, damn,’ she muttered in a most unladylike fashion.
    ‘Indeed,’ came a cool, masculine comment. ‘Let me retrieve them for you.’
    She was startled to see a soldier, and an officer at that. Cranky about the wet pages, which would have to be rewritten, she watched the officer, noting from the