I was told that the surgeon would be coming to see me and I expected the usual formal visitation of surgeon, Sister and all those other, often unidentified people who stood around. It was very far from it; about ten minutes later a youngish man in rather aged country clothing strolled in and sat on my bed.
"Hello" he said "I'm the chap who is going to put some flesh and skin on that raw bone you've got there – lets have a look at it."
I was quite taken aback after the formality of the other ward. The leg was quickly stripped of bandages and he looked at it for some time.
"Yes you do need something to cushion that bare bone, a bit of flesh with some skin over it should do it. I can take a nice strip of flesh from your left calf but you will have to sit cross-legged for about three weeks while it grows across. Do you think you can do that?"
After the experience of the other ward I was rather surprised to be consulted at all but I said I was willing to have a go.
"Good " he said " Now I want to talk to you about this ward in particular. You will be the only patient here with your own face! All the others are having new faces built up as you have seen. It is the job of all of us here to help keep up the morale of the others. All those with damaged faces go through a period of despair. They cannot believe they will ever lead a normal life again. It us up to us all to convince them that they will. All the nurses know this and go out of their way to show the most horribly damaged men that a girl can still find them attractive."
"My part," he said "is, of course, important but I shall have failed and so will all of us if any of these men lose the will to live."
He talked for sometime longer and it was clear that he had talked to the orthopaedic Sister, but by that time I felt that I had been welcomed into a team doing something very important. It was rather inspiring and the feeling persisted throughout my stay there. There really were occasions when the morale of others far worse off than myself could be raised by listening to their fears.
Three of the others had been glider pilots and I got to know them well. The trouble with gliders was that they were of such flimsy construction that there was nothing really solid to which to fasten a seat belt. When they crashed, as they eventually did, the pilot almost always went through the windscreen leaving most of his face behind.
All three of them had started on the long process of taking a piece of flesh from the leg to the wrist area. When it had become established sufficiently to exist in its new position it would be severed from its original site and the arm bent up to place the graft in its final position. They were all three walking round with the new graft stitched on to their faces at one end but still attached to the wrist at the other.