ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR

It’s 1950s England and a curious girl up past her bedtime stands at the top of the stairs. Her father steps through the door, then a stranger. His face is badly disfigured by burns and he speaks to her: “Are you coming down?” The girl steps into air and falls down the stairs before ending up in hospital.

That grown-up girl, author Liz Byrski, now probes her memories and says she wonders whether the stranger was real or a figment of her imagination.

If the West Sussex-raised author’s visitor did exist, he was likely a burns victim and ex-fighter pilot from World War II — and one of more than 649 men who called themselves the Guinea Pigs.

“I have always been interested in the Guinea Pigs, because I’ve always had that early fear in my mind which never quite went away,” Byrski says.

Many of the burns victims lived in her home town of East Grinstead during the wartime and post-war period, occupying Ward III of an unorthodox facility housed at Saint Hill Manor, now the Church of Scientology’s British headquarters.

“There were always dreams about it and I realised I didn’t actually know very much about them. I knew they had been badly burned and it was pioneering plastic surgery. The more I thought about it, I wanted to know more.”

The Curtin University creative writing senior lecturer investigated further in 2007 and found Ward III wasn’t run like other nursing facilities which had strict rules about fraternisation between staff and patients.

Instead, Ward III’s nursing staff was encouraged to focus on its 3Rs of hospital treatment — responsibility, rehabilitation and re-settlement — while its charismatic leader Archibald McIndoe encouraged an atmosphere of flirtation and prompted men to go on dates with the nurses.

“I think perhaps that was because of my own dismay at the faces of the men at the time and so I wondered what that was like (for) the nurses, and the young nurses in particular,” the ex-broadcaster says.

The former journalist discovered little had been written about the women who experienced a workplace where McIndoe deliberately blurred the lines of professional distance.

During a six-month Curtin-funded trip she spoke to the unconventional surgeon’s daughter Vanora Marland about the New Zealander who performed transformative plastic surgery on the men, finding he hired pretty nurses with a sense of humour.

“My father wanted the best nurses and wanted them to be beautiful … they had to be the sort of women who wouldn’t make a fuss about having their bottoms pinched,” Marland told Byrski.

The author found a number of the nurses and female Volunteer Aid Detachment staff — particularly young and innocent girls from middle class backgrounds — went further sexually than they felt comfortable with and carried this secret with a sense of shame throughout their adult lives.

At a catch-up at the pub, Guinea Pig Club members reminisced with the author about chasing nurses and clandestine sex on operating trolleys, with one saying “the women loved it” and one jokingly labelling VAD nursing service volunteers “virgins awaiting destruction”.

Byrski found, with two exceptions, club members used deflection and humour to tell an almost universal narrative of good times.

“I realised it was foolish to expect that one person could break through that when they had been telling their stories that way for a long, long time because that was how it was bearable for them,” she says.

Byrski’s strength as a writer-of-substance shines through in this easy-to-read account of her investigation into the Guinea Pigs Club men and the women who nursed them.

She thoughtfully probes the lines of consent between the men and women, while still treating her subjects as real people worthy of respect.

It’s a humanity reflective of the layers of flaws and decency Byrski embeds in her fictional characters, and the staple pragmatism her fans are sure to recognise.

In Love and War: Nursing Heroes is published by Fremantle Press ($25). Liz Byrski and Will Yeoman will give a special performance based on In Love and War and Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, accompanied by music from the period, at the Mt Lawley Bowling Club on Sunday June 21. This will be a fundraiser for the Fiona Wood Foundation for burns research. Book at trybooking.com.