With Love from Miss Lily: A Christmas Story

By Jackie French

From the author of Miss Lily's Lovely Ladies comes a special free gift for her readers. A moving and heart-warming story that is perfect for Christmas - and beyond.

December1918

Thisfirst peacetime Christmas should be perfect.

Butthis is a ceasefire, not peace. Influenza ravages Europe and the hospital suppliesSophie ordered six months ago have not arrived from Australia.

Andthe old woman in Ward 3 will not stop knitting.

Yeteven in war-torn Europe, Christmas miracles are possible, as a stranger revealsthe extraordinary story of how thousands of female resistance workers sentcoded messages, including the most important message a woman can send.

Andsomehow Christmas does arrive, the perfect Christmas, with love from Miss Lily.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781460709993

Jackie French

Jackie French AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children's Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. In 2016 Jackie became a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to children's literature and her advocacy for youth literacy. She is regarded as one of Australia's most popular children's authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction for a variety of age groups. ‘A book can change a child's life. A book can change the world' was the primary philosophy behind Jackie's two-year term as Laureate. jackiefrench.com facebook.com/authorjackiefrench

Book preview

Dedication

To all those readers

who just couldn’t wait

for more Miss Lily

Contents

Dedication

With Love From Miss Lily

An extract from Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

An extract from The Lily and the Rose

About the Author

Copyright

With Love From Miss Lily

Men often don’t notice pain. Why else would they play football for enjoyment? But illness makes them weak. Women tend to keep going even through illness, for who else will care for the sick or children if they do not?

Miss Lily, 1914

‘She won’t stop knitting, Soapie.’

Sophie looked up from a pile of paperwork that had doubled of its own accord in the last half-hour. Only the paperwork — a gift (though not just for Christmas, sadly) from the military authorities — looked pristine. It sat on a desk with one leg missing (shell damage) in a room with one corner of the roof missing (bomb damage), lit by a single battered lantern (another bomb).

Dodders — known to the patients as Sister Blessington — stood in front of her, her apron stained, white-faced from overwork, and not, please not, the influenza that was killing people more quickly in this second month after the ceasefire than the entire ghastly war had managed to do.

This was Christmas Eve, but the hospital had no scents of Christmas. The office smelled of mud, mould, lingering shellfire and the dead rat dragged in by Monsieur le Chat, who now sat under her desk, one hind leg in the air as he cleaned his unmentionables, and added his own odour to the hospital.

Sophie sighed, applied blotting paper, and put her pen back into its holder. She tried to smile encouragingly at Dodders. ‘The old woman in Ward Three? She’s conscious?’

Sophie had noticed the knitting in the woman’s limp hands when she was carried there by a villager. She was a stranger, half starved: one of the countless refugees who straggled through the village.

‘Barely,’ said Dodders tiredly. ‘Her temperature is over a hundred degrees, her pulse is unsteady and she still isn’t even able to tell us her name.’

Dodders hesitated, not adding what Sophie already knew: the old woman would almost certainly be dead by morning. Spanish ’flu killed quickly. Merry Christmas, thought Sophie grimly.

Sophie had dreamed of this Christmas, the first Christmas after the war: peace and a proper tree, mince pies baking in the big bread oven, puddings heated in the coppers, Bûche de Noël and tinned goose for every patient or worker in her chain of hospitals . . .

But this was not peace: 11 November 1918 had been only a ceasefire. France still starved; the Allied armies still waited in case fighting broke out again; and rats still feasted on bodies in the mud — but not in her hospital, where Monsieur le Chat feasted on them, which almost made up for his smell.

Nor would it be the Christmas she had planned for months. The supplies she had had shipped from Australia four months earlier — cans of fruit, puddings and preserved goose, cakes wrapped in newspapers and cardboard — sat on a wharf somewhere between Sydney and Brussels, with shipping as confused as the rest of Europe.

And even she was stuck there in her hospital, in quarantine, unable to even go and try to sort out the mess, for one of the few things known about this new strain of influenza was that it was extremely contagious. Any patients showing symptoms were to be transferred here, to try to keep it from her other hospitals.

Tomorrow the hospital’s Christmas dinner would be turnip soup and corned beef on bread that was as much sawdust and ground acorns as rye or wheat flour . . .

She closed her eyes briefly. A year earlier she had been so full of energy, founding her hospitals, organising supplies. The war would end, and there’d be peace and a return to life and joy . . .

But even President Woodrow Wilson had not been able to negotiate peace, only a ceasefire. He was powerless to do more, just as doctors and nurses were powerless against the Spanish ’flu and even her skills and network of contacts could not get Christmas supplies from Australia to arrive.

‘Soapie, are you all right, old thing?’

Sophie opened her eyes and attempted a smile again. ‘Let her knit, Dodders darling, if that’s what she wants to do.’ The words ‘It won’t make any difference’ remained unsaid.

‘But she wants to speak to someone, Soapie. She keeps muttering that she needs to send a message, but she won’t give it to me. I told her you were Madame le Directrice though I don’t know if she understood . . .’ Dodders leaned wearily on the doorjamb. She had been on duty for sixteen hours now. Or was it twenty?

‘Go and sleep,’ ordered Sophie. ‘I’ll sit with her.’ A distressed patient could keep a whole ward awake. This time she managed a smile. ‘I had a nap this afternoon. I’ll do the first evening watch in Ward Three.’

‘If you’re sure . . .’ Dodders vanished into the corridor’s shadows.

Sophie stood, stretched. So did Monsieur le Chat, releasing more eau de dead rat. Sophie picked up the remnants of the rat on a stick kept for just that purpose, opened the window, deposited the rat outside, then waited till Monsieur le Chat followed it.