Special event: wartime tales come to life
A burns victims’ fundraiser remembers East Grinstead, Amanda Ellis reports.
Forty-one years ago, British playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn chose the English town of East Grinstead as the unlikely site for an adulterous affair in his West End trilogy The Norman Conquests.
Ayckbourn’s rather-resistible character Norman chooses the tiny West Sussex town for romancing his sister-in-law Annie.
Audiences responded by asking “Why East Grinstead?” But once a person evaluates the history of the town on the Greenwich meridian, the question takes on a graver importance.
East Grinstead is now home to about 24,000 people. It is bordered by East Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and is just 16km from Gatwick Airport.
The civil parish near Crawley hosts many religious organisations but in recent history became known as the “town that didn’t stare”.
East Grinstead extended its hospitality to badly burnt fighter pilots in the 1940s and 50s, welcoming so-called “guinea pig” men despite the severe injuries they had received during wartime service in aerial campaigns such as the Battle of Britain.
The men underwent operations at a burns ward at Queen Victoria Hospital at Saint Hill Manor. The site was later owned by the Maharajah of Jaipur, Sawai Man Singh II, then Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
During World War II and the 1950s, the manor’s ward III was the domain of charismatic burns plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. The New Zealander is famed for his McIndoe nose and pioneering work for burns victims.
However, literary audiences recently discovered his unorthodox approach to patient rehabilitation included encouraging the men to romance the nurses involved in their care.
East Grinstead expat and WA-based writer Liz Byrski shone a light on the goings-on in her memoir In Love and War, released by Fremantle Press last month. She interviewed both pilots and nurses for her Curtin University-funded tour in 2007, finding McIndoe had deliberately blurred the lines of professional distance between patient and nurse — and nurses had kept the secret of how far they’d gone, often with a sense of shame.
Byrski gives her take on why the community accepted McIndoe’s approach: “He made them feel like they were doing their bit for the war ... perhaps going further than they otherwise might’ve done but it was also in the townspeople who wanted to help out.”
Byrski will stage an extended reading of the tale withThe West Australian ’s books editor William Yeoman at a burns research fundraiser later this month. “The idea is to make that time and that place, of East Grinstead, more present to the audience by performing it,” Yeoman says. “We travel there in our imaginations.”
The pair will read aloud to period music while imagery from the era is projected on to a screen behind them.
Yeoman will take the part of Sydney-born Royal Air Force Flight-Lt Richard Hillary, whose embellished account of his Battle of Britain exploits, The Last Enemy, was read by scores of children.
Byrski’s discovery of what happened to nurses at McIndoe’s facility transforms the “Why East Grinstead” question into “Why so unnoticed, East Grinstead?”
FACT FILE
Liz Byrski and William Yeoman’s performance based on In Love and War and Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy is at Mt Lawley Bowling Club on June 21 at 2.30pm. Tickets are $35 and include refreshments, with full proceeds to the Fiona Wood Foundation for burns research. Book at trybooking.com.
