Some Sunny Day

Back in Chittagong, 56 IGH heard about the end of the war in Europe a day after Basil. Madge celebrated in a very crowded nurses’ mess where Matron Olive Ferguson had gathered doctors and medical staff to raise a toast to victory. Sister Blossom was doing a sterling job of making sure every glass was full of good cheer. Unfortunately it was nothing stronger than fresh orange juice and not the pints of Newcastle Brown Ale that Vera had demanded because it was such a special occasion. Madge’s first thought when she heard the news was to hope Basil’s blistered shoulders were on the way to recovery so he would be well enough to join in the celebrations.

She wondered exactly when Mum and her sisters would finally be able to return to Dover, and kept her fingers crossed that in spite of all the reassurances this was not just another groundless rumour. Happily, radio reports that had previously been heavily censored began to reveal details of the unconditional surrender. Apparently, London had celebrated through the night and Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that there was ‘no greater day in the history of our country’. The royal family had made no fewer than five appearances on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in response to huge crowds gathered in the Mall. The report drew to a close by saying that for the first time in six years searchlights illuminated St Paul’s Cathedral.

In spite of VE Day, vicious fighting was still taking place in Burma and the nursing staff at 56 IGH were warned to be extra careful in Chittagong where another ‘Jai Hind’ rally in support of home rule for India was scheduled. For Madge, however, there was a more immediate problem because she was due back for duty on the Japanese POW casualty ward and had been made aware that the atmosphere had become increasingly unpleasant. She was told that many of the POWs were squabbling among themselves.

The surgical masks and tight-fitting caps the girls wore made spitting at the nurses harder for the Japanese, but they continued nonetheless. In spite of trying to block all medical treatment they still continued to eat and drink, however. Not a single case of a POW going on hunger strike was recorded in the war diary of 56 IGH. The British guards were starting to lose patience, despite the threat of a court martial, and began to make their feelings known. The key was to follow orders and not physically touch the POWs so, as had happened on Madge’s first shift with the Japanese prisoners, bed legs were kicked when they misbehaved. A senior Japanese officer became so disgusted by the POWs’ behaviour that he held talks with the worst offenders in a bid to end the continuing abuse of the nurses. Fortunately, guards were on hand to save him from serious injury when a furious row broke out and several POWs trapped the officer in a corner.

The day after VE Day, Madge had a fractious and somewhat tiring shift. The humidity was particularly unpleasant and as she sterilised wounds and administered injections, she could only wish that the Allied POWs were being treated the same way by the enemy.

The Japanese officer hobbled over and surprised her when he said, in passable English, that he had told the soldiers they should appreciate the nurses instead of behaving the way they were doing, but his mission had failed. It was the first conversation Madge had had with any of the Japanese POWs and while there clearly was no apology forthcoming, the sentiment reassured her that her work was necessary and right.

A few days later, there was a call for nurses to staff a casualty clearing station (CCS) that was to be set up in the hills east of the port of Maungdaw near the Arakan area just south of Chittagong. Madge was one of six who volunteered. The Arakan was one of the most bitterly fought over areas in the Burma Campaign and for medical staff it was a very dangerous place indeed. The previous year during the Battle of the Admin Box a field hospital operated by the Royal Medical Corps and the Indian Medical Service had been overrun by Japanese, who were looking for medical supplies. During that search they bayoneted bed-bound patients and shot a Red Cross doctor, all in their quest to steal morphine and quinine, and even cotton wool. Indian soldiers who survived being shot were told that the Japanese aim was to be in control of Chittagong within two months. The slaughter of doctors and helpless patients continued and when the Japanese were finally forced out of the hospital complex the bayoneted patients and thirty other bodies were discovered.

Madge was told, along with five other VADs including Vera and Phyl, that they would spend more than a month in the Arakan jungle during which time they would be living in tents. It was unlikely there would be running water and the nurses would be expected to be on duty from the moment they awoke to the time they fell asleep. There certainly wasn’t much sleep on the journey by road and track down the coast from Chittagong to Cox’s Bazar, a strategically vital port on the Bay of Bengal. At least this will be good preparation for when we arrive, thought Madge on the arduous journey.

On the day before the group were due to leave Madge had a wonderful surprise when a letter from Basil arrived. The letter was deliberately upbeat, filled with stories designed to make her smile. It was obvious from the way he signed the note ‘your loving Basil’ that he still felt just as strongly about her as she did about him, and just that knowledge helped to lift her from the sadness she felt at being apart from him.

The distance from Chittagong to Cox’s Bazar was little more than a hundred miles but for the nurses travelling in the rear of the battered old green army ambulance it turned into a bone-shaking nightmare that seemed to take hours. The constant rainstorms turned the roads to quagmires and Madge was grateful for the kindness of the Ghanaian driver, who went out of his way to make the trip as bearable as possible. Awooner was a member of the Royal West Africa Frontier Force that fought with such distinction in the Burma Campaign and he was an expert at manoeuvring the rickety old vehicle through floods and round deep and dangerous potholes.

‘Don’t you ladies worry yourselves,’ he told them as they each gripped their seats as hard as they could. ‘Back in Ghana the roads are always like this when the rains come. It’s no problem to me!’

He always had a smile and went out of his way to make things as comfortable as possible for the girls, which helped to put them all at ease.

If they thought that leg of the journey was bad, the drive into the hills after a two-day stopover in Cox’s Bazar was terrifying. They spent several hours driving on what were little more than jungle tracks before they reached the CCS. Once the group had settled in to the tented accommodation that would be home for several weeks a very welcome late evening meal was served.

‘I thought we would at least have our own tents,’ said Madge. ‘But I suppose it’s quite nice to be back together again under one roof. Even if it is only canvas!’

The nurses were all so dog-tired when they eventually got into their camp beds that they slept like logs, but they got a big surprise when they woke just before dawn. There had been another heavy and prolonged rainstorm during the night and a bubbling, gurgling stream was flowing right through the middle of their tent!

Luckily, due to the tarantulas, poisonous spiders, leaches and other creepy crawlies that were inclined to pop into the CCS tents, the camp beds were high off the ground so nothing of importance was damaged.

Later that morning their tent was moved away from the stream that was still happily flowing from a crevice further up the hill. What really surprised the newly arrived group of VADs was the size of the camp that was camouflaged and neatly tucked away at the bottom of a lush green valley. Birds fluttered in and out of the trees that grew on the slopes and pretty little flowers sprouted alongside thick, spiked bushes that surrounded the camp.

A main tent acted as an operating theatre and makeshift casualty ward, and then there was a kitchen, a separate toilet and a makeshift shower hidden behind a tarpaulin that the soldiers had rigged up. That was about it, so far as Madge could see. She was told that there were always troops on guard, but those boys must have slept elsewhere because there were no more tents in sight.

The staff at the camp more than welcomed the young nurses because the first thing that Phyl did when she saw the kitchen facilities and sacks of potatoes was to teach the cooks how to make ‘very passable’ chips.

Wisps of mist rose as the morning sun broke through to turn the valley into a scene of such beauty that it came as quite a shock when the peace was shattered by the rumble of thunder.

‘Does this thunder mean we’re in for another of those heavy downpours?’ Madge asked a guard after another loud and prolonged burst.

He shook his head and smiled gently. ‘That noise wasn’t thunder, miss. It’s our artillery giving the Japanese their early morning wake-up call,’ he said.

That will teach you to ask silly questions, Madge said to herself, and try as she might, she found it difficult to balance the Arakan’s forested glory with the utter brutality that was taking place just a few miles away.

Madge had spent the early part of the day in the operating theatre, where it had been a surprisingly quiet start. Most of the ‘repair work’ took place on men who had been brought in overnight with shrapnel damage suffered in a twilight confrontation with a Japanese raiding party. Casualty clearing meant exactly what it said. Doctors had to decide whether the injured soldiers could be patched up and returned to their units, or if they needed specialised treatment, in which case they would then be stretchered to the nearest air strip and flown to Chittagong or Calcutta. Only rarely did wounded troops stay for more than a couple of days and if that did happen, it was usually to get them fit enough to travel on to more sophisticated medical facilities. Thankfully, there was no shortage of medicine at this stage of the war because everything was supplied by air. The team were free to carry out blood transfusions, minor operations, stitch wounds and treat soldiers for everything from malaria to typhoid as well as dysentery and beriberi. They even had to sort out one poor young lad who had been bitten by a snake.

His pal who had brought him in to the station kept on teasing him that he was going to die in minutes.

‘Just you leave him alone,’ Madge said jokingly, aware that in a bizarre way his friend was trying to keep his spirits up. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, turning to the lad who had been bitten, ‘it wasn’t one of those really poisonous ones they have around here so I’d say you’re actually pretty lucky. You’ll be fine in no time.’

The state of some of the boys when they first came in was often very worrying because they arrived with literally nothing and Madge had to clean the soldiers up, find out what the injury was and get them to theatre as quickly as possible. As warned, the nurses worked round the clock until they were told to get some sleep. It wasn’t unusual to be called to deal with the wounded at 3 a.m. and no matter how badly injured or sick they were there was always a ‘thank you’ after dressing even the nastiest of injuries.

After one particularly gruelling day at the CCS, as she tucked herself up in her rather uncomfortable camp bed, Madge thought to herself, It really is a case of all work and no play here. They weren’t wrong when they told us to expect to have to work our socks off. There was the odd moment of fun and teasing at meal times, but there was not even the hint of a social life. When they weren’t nursing the girls tried as much as possible to catch up on their sleep. And they certainly didn’t get any mail, which would have helped to raise their spirits.

Madge was shocked early one afternoon, about halfway through their six-week stint at the CCS, when she heard two explosions that seemed alarmingly close. There was no way of finding out what was happening because she was in the middle of treating a soldier who had been shot in the thigh. An hour later she looked out of the tent to see two of the guards being cheered as they walked up the valley with several big, fat, juicy fish. They had thrown grenades into a deep stream in the next valley. She couldn’t believe the size of the haul!

‘One of our nurses has taught the boys in the kitchens how to make chips,’ she told the wounded soldier, who could see the guards through the flaps of the tent. ‘It looks to me as if there could be a treat on the menu,’ she added. ‘Good old-fashioned English fish and chips!’ That seemed to bring a smile to the soldier’s face despite the pain he must have been in.

The troops, out of gratitude for what the nurses were doing for them, told the girls they would be first in the queue for dinner that night before the inevitable blizzard of requests for the delicacy flew in. Madge and every other nurse, however, turned down the offer of fish and chips deep in the Burmese jungle that night so wounded troops could enjoy a little treat that would remind them of home.

The following morning, instead of the usual thunderous Allied artillery there was prolonged small-arms fire. It was a sign that the fighting was closer but Madge and Vera had no time to think about what was happening around them. They were kept busy dressing wounds of men who had been brought in at dawn on makeshift stretchers which had been hacked into shape from boughs that had fallen from trees. Two others had carved themselves such ornate walking sticks they took them back to the front line with them after their bullet wounds were patched up. The noise subsided around noon and the majority of the walking wounded had been treated and wasted no time in bravely returning to the conflict.

It meant the CCS was virtually deserted for the first time since the VAD contingent’s arrival.

‘The silence here is almost spooky,’ Vera said when she joined Madge for some lunch after having been on duty with her from first light that morning. ‘I don’t think we’ve even had a moment’s peace before now, and then this!’

‘No,’ said Madge. ‘I can’t get used to it either. It feels very strange.’

Phyl had overheard the girls talking and arrived at the table with her lunch. ‘Well, girls, I say we just enjoy it while we can, don’t you? You know it’ll be absolute mayhem here again before we know it!’

The other two laughed in agreement before they all tucked in to their well-deserved meal.

Just as they were finishing, however, the afternoon calm was broken by the loud voice of a sergeant who appeared out of the blue. ‘Excuse me, ladies, but everything in the camp must be packed up immediately. Please set to work without delay. We will be moving out in three hours,’ he said.

The nurses weren’t shocked or even scared, but put two and two together and decided that the Japanese were probably getting too close and that was the reason they had to get out at such speed.

Soldiers appeared to help move beds and medical equipment, and dismantle the tents. With fifteen minutes still to go before the three-hour deadline the convoy was ready to move out.

This time the nurses travelled in an army truck instead of the old green ambulance so they were able to look out at the rolling Arakan hills that were entwined with stretches of often impenetrable jungle. The fragrant wild flowers and beauty of the multi-coloured foliage provided the background against which the brutal hand-to-hand confrontations took place day and night. For the first time in days there was no rain and the journey made the most welcome of changes from the emotionally draining weeks they had spent nursing young men with life-changing injuries and the sheer intensity of dealing with increasing volumes of casualties.

During the journey the girls began discussing the time they had spent so far working at the CCS.

‘The men are just so brave. Virtually every one I nursed simply wanted to get back alongside their pals,’ Madge said as the truck shook and bumped its way out of the valley where their tented village had been home for the past weeks.

They thought they were returning to the coast and then north to Chittagong so when the convoy headed south instead of due west back to the Bay of Bengal, the nurses looked at one another in surprise.

The fact that they were told so little had always been a source of humour but they certainly were informed in this instance because their happy-go-lucky driver announced, ‘We’ve got the Japs on the run, ladies, and the plan is to set up another CCS a lot closer to the action and a lot further south.’

‘If we were moving home back in Blighty, talk would be all about the house and what the new garden would look like. Here it’s all about changing one tent for another and the number of snakes and tarantulas and leaches that will be slithering around!’ Vera said.

The camp was fully operational within hours of their arrival. Madge tried to pay special attention to the increasing number of troops who were being brought in to the new CCS after ‘cracking up’ following months of fighting in jungle territory. They hadn’t been shot or wounded so there was no visible sign of the trauma they were experiencing, and as a result she felt a little out of her comfort zone. In general the poor souls who suffered from shell shock were taken by ambulance to the coast and flown to Calcutta military hospitals which had more qualified staff and better equipment to deal with their problems. But in the meantime Madge and the girls had to find ways to try to help them as much as they could.

‘There’s always the worry that one or two may be swinging the lead in a bid to get back to England,’ said Vera one evening as the girls were getting ready for bed. ‘You never can be sure, can you?’

‘That’s why we have to involve a doctor as soon as possible for troops with emotional problems,’ Phyl joined in. ‘At least they get to make the final call and we don’t have to.’

‘I find it all very difficult,’ said Madge, ‘because they’re so often vague about their worries. Not obstructive . . . far from it! They just don’t want to talk about what happened.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Madge. ‘When you think what they go through in the jungle where the rustle of a leaf or twig cracking could mean the difference between life and death, the real surprise is that there aren’t many more being brought in suffering from battle fatigue.’

Madge, Vera and Phyl had been particularly impressed with the patience shown to emotionally troubled troops by Grace Padgett, a nurse they had always said hello to in Chittagong, but hadn’t socialised with much. Madge had become concerned about the stressed soldiers and, one day, asked Grace just how she coped with it.

‘Having three sisters and a brother and living on a farm in Yorkshire certainly helps . . .’ Grace then became serious and said the key thing was to try and get the boys to talk about their problems. ‘You need a lot of patience and time, which rather sadly we don’t have here in the CCS. But in my opinion it is a major breakthrough if you can get them to share their worries because it’s the first step, however tiny, on the road to recovery,’ she added.

Grace’s brother didn’t want to work on the land when he grew up so their father sent Grace to agricultural college with the aim of getting her to run the farm when he retired. She however, chose nursing rather than farming. Over the next few days, Madge discovered that she really was also a good listener and when Vera was in full voice Madge felt that was a very necessary blessing!

During one of the very few quiet periods in the whole of their tour of duty, Vera, Phyl, Grace and Madge enjoyed an extended lunch. The main topic was a long weekend in Darjeeling that Phyl and Vera had spent at the very same time that Madge and Basil were in Calcutta.

‘By far the best thing about the time Phyl and I spent there,’ said Vera, ‘was that it was full of men. Lots and lots of men!’

‘We had the time of our lives,’ laughed Phyl. Madge had heard her friends’ stories before but she saw the glow that remembering the trip brought to their faces.

‘The best day we had,’ said Vera, ‘started at two a.m. when we got up to watch dawn rise over the Himalayas. Then it was back to Darjeeling for an early breakfast, one or two pre-lunch gin and tonics, followed by a lengthy afternoon nap and then dinner and dancing in a nightclub until the early hours.’

In the end the VADs spent six weeks living under canvas, often waking to the sound of artillery units shelling the Japanese and the rattle of small-arms fire. They had also been drenched daily by endless monsoon rainstorms, but when the time came to leave the nurses were sorry their mission was coming to an end. Madge had seen first-hand what the soldiers had to put up with. There was no doubt in her mind, those boys were heroes.

The girls were thanked time and time again by patients, given bunches of divine-smelling jungle flowers and beautifully carved teak souvenirs. The finest compliment of all, however, came from a young corporal, barely out of his teens, who said he was going to let Madge in on a secret.

‘That sounds really interesting,’ said Madge. ‘I’ve got two sisters at home and neither can keep a secret. Now, what’s this one?’

‘We looked on you as our lucky mascots,’ he said. When she asked why, the reply was, ‘Because very few soldiers died from their wounds during the time you girls were nursing here. So we decided you really must be bringing us luck.’

The journey back took almost a day and a half. After weeks of being on duty round the clock the weary nurses, once safely back at 56 IGH, indulged themselves in the ultimate luxury – hours of blissfully uninterrupted sleep. The only thing that was even better for Madge was a long, lazy soak in a tub that she loaded with Coty bath cubes.

On her first afternoon back working at the hospital Madge wandered up to the nurses’ mess for a pot of tea and was given the warmest of welcomes by Sister Blossom, who rushed off to her office and reappeared minutes later with letters from Mum dating back to April, and one from Basil in Rangoon. Mum’s first was written before Winston Churchill announced the German surrender on 8 May and was full of optimism and hope that ‘once this is all sorted out we can get back to our own home in Dover’.

Happily the mail system from Rangoon to Chittagong had been re-opened for the first time in almost three years and the letter from Basil said what a marvellous job the Pioneer Corps had done in cleaning up the place. There had been no running water and little food, disease had been rife and the streets had been coated in filth after the Japanese fled for their lives as units of General Slim’s 14th Army fought their way into the city. The Japanese had left the place in an absolutely dreadful state, he said, but thankfully had not desecrated Rangoon’s religious monuments like the Shwedagon Pagoda, an almost 100-metre high, gold-plated stupa with a diamond-studded spire. Basil said in the letter that although it had taken days to recover from the sunburn he had suffered on their wonderful last day together at Patanga beach, it had been ‘nowhere near as painful as being without you’.

Madge went out on the veranda to be on her own and read and read those last few words time and again. Oh dear. How silly, she said to herself, after letting a little tear of joy drop on the letter which she carefully blotted dry.

Her happiest minutes since returning from the CCS came to an end when she heard an excited Sister Blossom asking, ‘Has anybody seen Nurse Graves?’ She was waving a little blue envelope in the air and as Madge appeared in the doorway of the veranda simply beamed with delight as she added, ‘You’ve got another letter. It’s just arrived and I think it’s from Basil!’

Oh no, thought Madge, another one so soon just has to be bad news. She thanked dear old Blossom before returning to the veranda for a little privacy, her tummy turning over with worry. She took a deep breath and with very shaky hands opened the letter that looked so short at first glance that it worried her all the more.

Dearest Madge, it began. After the wonderful time we enjoyed together I would love to have told you this face to face . . .

She could hardly bear to read on and lifted her gaze to see a new group of Japanese soldiers, with Gurkha guards either side, being stretchered down to the POW ward.

Her chest pounded as she lifted the letter up again and continued from where she had left off.

. . . but circumstances deem it otherwise. I even tried to phone you without success. There has been absolutely wonderful news from home and because you are the most important person in my life I wanted to share it with you.

Madge’s mood turned in an instant from the verge of despair to sheer joy and she was delighted to hear from Basil that all his brothers and his sister had survived the war. Not entirely without incident, but all were alive and well.

Bill got a nasty head wound in France, but has made a full recovery, and all the others have come through unscathed. It turns out Beryl was working at Brooklands, which was bombed by the Germans because Wellington bombers were being built there.

Young Bob is also OK after joining the Air Cadets and serving at Brooklands. Later in the war he moved to Fairoaks airfield at Chobham, where he helped repair Bristol Beaufort fighters and even went up on a couple of test flights. The Germans also had a go at the airfield but without much success.

I just wish we were together to celebrate this wonderful news.

Love Basil

The CCS nurses were given a forty-eight-hour pass to recover from the exhausting return journey to Chittagong but after that they were put on Matron’s roster once again. Madge was listed for duty on the DI ward. Vera was on the Japanese POW casualty ward and said that the prisoner turnover was dozens every week.

‘It’s even busier than before because so many are on the brink of starvation when they arrive,’ she told Madge over a pot of afternoon tea. ‘But at least this group haven’t yet started the usual spitting.’

The respite from being used as a human spittoon was more than welcome for Madge, who had been assigned to nurse one of the sixty-two Japanese POWs who had arrived late the night before. To her astonishment, it was a woman. Lieutenant Colonel Whittaker noted in the war diary of 56 Indian General Hospital (C) on 16 June 1945, that one of the Japanese POWs ‘was a female . . . GSW back’. She was placed in a specially partitioned section of the DI ward that was as far from the Japanese POWs as possible.

She was suffering from a gunshot wound in her back which meant she had to lie face down on the bed. In spite of the constant pain she managed the sweetest of smiles at Madge’s efforts to pronounce her name, which was something like Miho.

‘She’s beautiful and speaks passable English,’ explained Madge to Vera and Phyl later that day, ‘and always says please and thank you. She told me she is a journalist and learned to speak a bit of English on a holiday in New York. Her newspaper in Tokyo sent her to Burma and after a week with a Japanese unit somewhere in the Arakan she realised that they were desperately short of food, fuel and ammunition and actually retreating from our troops. When she tried to discuss the problems with an officer to obtain background information to write a story he went straight to the unit commander who issued orders for her to be taken from their camp into the jungle and shot.’

‘All she remembers,’ Madge continued, ‘is waking up on a stretcher being carried from what was meant to be her jungle graveyard by two English soldiers and then being flown to Chittagong.’

Over the next few days Madge spent as much time as possible with the lonely, frightened and badly hurt Miho, who apologised repeatedly for being such a burden. Madge washed her beautiful raven hair, cut and filed the nails of her elegant hands, and spoon-fed the perfectly mannered and quietly spoken woman at meal times.

Miho had been placed as far away as possible from the Japanese POW casualty ward for her own safety and as she began to regain a little strength she posed the same question as virtually every other patient. ‘What is going to happen to me?’

‘Hopefully you’ll be flown to one of the big hospitals in Calcutta when you’ve recovered enough to be moved,’ Madge said as she fluffed up her pillow and helped her move to a more comfortable position.

Later that evening when darkness had fallen, Madge checked on Miho and was pleased to see that she had drifted into a light sleep. Pain was still etched on those delicate features, but at least she was resting and hopefully would not be bothered by the noise coming from the next ward. It’s supposed to be empty, Madge thought to herself, but the sound of footsteps echoed quite clearly. In fact, when Madge listened a little more intently she realised there were two sets of footsteps walking slowly towards the adjoining DI ward. She popped her head round the door, but could see nothing in the unlit interior and the footsteps stopped. A frightening thought crossed her mind; she began to wonder if the Japanese POWs had found out about Miho and were coming to finish her off once and for all.

Madge’s mind went into overdrive as she walked back to Miho’s bed to lift the top sheet over her head in the hope that the two POWs would walk past without noticing her. She lifted the sheet as gently as possible but the movement still woke Miho from her shallow slumber and Madge instantly put a finger to her lips to indicate silence. She then put a hand to her ear to try and get the now wide-awake patient to listen and within seconds the footsteps started again. Hit them with anything you can get your hands on, the self-defence expert had told the nurses, but there was nothing to hand and the footsteps were coming closer and closer. A vivid flashback to the scene in the kitchens at Stoke Mandeville when the troubled British soldier had held a knife to her throat crossed her mind. You were just a teenager then, she told herself, so this time keep calm. Madge was just a month short of her twenty-second birthday.

She peered under one of the shutters to see if any of the guards were close, but she was on her own and she decided to have one last peep round the corner before starting a rumpus that would wake the whole hospital. The flop, flop of two sets of footsteps was now frighteningly close, but she still couldn’t see a thing until two huge, jet-black eyes set in a horned head turned to stare directly at her. Surely not, Madge thought. This can’t be real. I must be having a nightmare. She looked again to see if the horns had been a trick of the light.

A sacred cow had found its way into the ward! By the time the beast actually lumbered past Miho’s bed the two girls were laughing so much they were close to tears and thanking their lucky stars it hadn’t left a very stinky visiting card.

Madge missed her gentle patient when Miho was eventually moved to Calcutta and often wondered what happened to the brave young woman.