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Bright, Pamela

Life in Our Hands, [82] 12

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20250606150042 The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.
20250604121141 Pamela Bright, Life in Our Hands, SFE no. 67 holding image

Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.
20240517170035 Life in Our Hands | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Life in Our Hands | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.

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