The Desert Nurse

by Pamela Hart

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

At the outbreak of the first World War, 21-year-old Evelyn disobeys her father and enlists as an army nurse bound for Egypt and the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. There, under the blazing desert sun, she starts falling for polio survivor Dr William Brent but knows a man has no place in her future if she wants to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. William in turn thinks his disability makes him unfit for marriage and for two such self-reliant people, relying on someone else for happiness may be the hardest challenge of all.

Release date: July 10, 2018

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 416

Sample

29 OCTOBER 1911

She’s 21 today, 21 today

She’s got the key of the door

‘What on Earth?’

Laughing, Evelyn went to the parlour door. Harry was banging away on the piano, the morning light coming through the lace curtains to light up his blond hair:

Never been 21 before

And Pa says she can do as she likes

So shout, Hip Hip Hooray!

She’s a jolly good fellow

21 today.

He finished with a loud if not exactly tuneful arpeggio and sprang up to hug her.

‘Happy birthday, old girl!’

She hugged him back. It was so kind of Harry to have come back from university for the weekend of her birthday. A long trip in a rattling train and nothing entertaining to do at the end of it. How many nineteen-year-old boys would have done that? But in the years since their mother’s death they had drawn close.

‘Thank you, dear,’ she said. He produced a small package from his pocket with a flourish.

‘Not much,’ he shrugged.

She undid the package – professionally wrapped, by the look of it; Harry had never done up anything so neatly in his life.

A pair of surgical scissors, with her initials on the hilt.

‘Oh, Harry!’ She hugged him again, tears threatening to fall, grateful beyond words for his unspoken support.

‘That’ll do, that’ll do,’ he said, backing away. ‘By Jove, if I’d known it would turn you into a watering pot I’d never have given it to you!’

But when she smiled at him, he smiled back, and for a moment it was as though they had never been parted.

‘What’s all this noise on a Sunday?’ Their father glared at them from the doorway, but his expression softened when he saw Evelyn. ‘Happy birthday, my dear,’ he said. He, too, produced a small box – but this was a jeweller’s box, unwrapped.

‘Thank you, Father.’ She reached up to kiss his cheek, and opened the box with a real sense of excitement. Would it be the key of the door? Or, better yet, a safe deposit key from the bank!

A pearl brooch. How … conventional.

‘It was your mother’s,’ he said, and cleared his throat as though moved. She bit her lip at her momentary disappointment,
and smiled at him. After all, she could afford to be generous. Today was the day of her liberation.

‘It’s very lovely,’ she said, and pinned it onto her shoulder.

‘Well, let’s have breakfast,’ her father said, with an air of someone who had brushed through a difficult situation better than he had expected.

She walked into the dining room happier than she had been for years. Finally of age. Finally able to follow her own path, instead of obediently following his. This was the day she shook off his rule over her once and for all. To return to the goals she’d laid out for herself when she was fourteen.

After her mother’s long illness and death, she had expected to return to school – was prepared, even, to be put in the year below due to her absence, although she had been keeping up her studies as well as she could.

‘No,’ her father had said at the dinner table. ‘I need you here now, to run the house and look after Harry.’

Harry, then twelve, who was going back to boarding school in Sydney the next week, had looked surprised, as well he might. Their housekeeper spoiled him day and night.

‘But –’

‘I’ve made my decision, Evelyn.’ That was that.

‘That’s not fair, Father!’ she broke out. She had never spoken against him before, not once.

He stood up, enraged beyond reason, and pointed to the door.

‘To your room, miss!’ he hissed. ‘You’ll not gainsay me in front of your brother.’

And later, he’d switched her on her legs fourteen times. One for each year of her life. He had a strong arm.

Her anger didn’t go away, but she controlled it. What other choice did she have? A parent was allowed – encouraged, even! – to punish their children, and certainly to decide about their schooling.

She had gone on studying alone for another few months, because there was nothing else she could do. Until her father declared that, while Harry was at school, she was underemployed and could help him in his practice.

It wasn’t until much later that she realised his motives were twofold: to save money on a practice nurse and to prevent her from studying. The work was interesting, though. Fascinating, really, and just confirmed her desire to be a doctor. And, as a doctor, her father was faultless. Not only competent and up-to-date, but also gentle; a side of him she had never experienced came out when he was dealing with patients. Soft, compassionate, almost tender. Whenever she was most angry with him, she would see him with his patients and lose that anger completely. Although a resentment that she had never been treated so gently still grated, underneath it all.

And he was happy – even eager – to discuss medicine with her. On their buggy rides around the district for his house calls, on their horseback rides into wilder country, he would tell her about the latest medical journal, the most recent treatments. They enjoyed those conversations, both of them.

So at eighteen, when she had broached the subject of going to university, she’d expected him to agree immediately. But she’d learnt her lesson about public discussions, and asked him in his office when he was particularly pleased with her handling of a small child who had come to have his broken arm set.

He laughed.

‘What would you study? Needlework?’

‘Medicine, of course.’

He looked at her as though he’d never seen her before. But surely he’d known? She’d talked about it often enough, in the days before her mother had died.

‘No.’ That was all.

‘But I’ve been keeping up with my studies, Father. I might have to study hard for a few weeks – perhaps not accompany you on your rounds for a while – but I’m confident I could pass the matriculation test.’

‘No.’

‘Father –’

‘Women doctors are anathema. It’s morally wrong to have women give orders to men. And beyond that, women don’t have the mental capacity. They can’t possibly make reasoned decisions about patient care. Their emotions get in the way. I am completely opposed to female medicos.’

He spoke as if to a small child. As if she were a natural, unable to grasp even the simplest concept. Resentment burned through her.

‘I’ve been helping you capably enough!’

‘Of course!’ He smiled, jovially. ‘With proper direction, a woman can be most helpful in medicine. As a nurse.’ The good humour went out of his eyes. ‘Anything else is impossible. I will not pay for you to study at university, Evelyn. Put it out of your mind.’

‘I have an inheritance from my mother,’ she said numbly.

‘Yes. As your trustee, I pay your pin money out of it. When you reach the age of reason, it will be given to you. Or if you marry, your mother’s will provides that it go into the care of your husband. I very much hope you will marry and have children. That’s the best way you can serve your country and your family.’

At eighteen, the ‘age of reason’ seemed a long way off; the three years until she was twenty-one had stretched bleakly ahead of her. But, she told herself, she could continue to learn from her father in those three years, and come into medicine knowing a great deal more than the other students.

And now the three years were up. She could sit the matriculation examinations in mid-November, and start university the following February. Her blood fizzed in her veins as she thought champagne might, imagining the lectures, the companionship of other students, the freedom of intellectual discoveries.

‘I’ve written to the University of Sydney,’ she said, standing at the sideboard, putting bacon and toast on her plate. With light steps, she carried it to the table and sat opposite her father, the place of the lady of the household. ‘They have agreed I can sit the matric next month. I thought I might be able to stay with Aunt Johanna.’

‘Why would you sit that examination?’ her father asked, slicing the top off his boiled egg.

She blinked at him.

‘You know why. I’m going to enrol in medicine.’

‘And how are you going to pay the fees?’ He was quite bland. Harry looked quickly from his face to hers, and then gazed resolutely at his plate.

This wasn’t how she had imagined this conversation. She had expected him to be annoyed, dismissive, but not this.

‘From my inheritance. I’m of age now. You said …’

‘I said, “When you reach the age of reason.” The age of reason in a woman is thirty. You can’t possibly think I would hand over control of your dowry to you now.’ His face was grave, but his eyes revealed a secret enjoyment. He had misled her deliberately.

She wanted to shout at him, to yell and scream and throw things. The desire to simply slap his face welled up in her, hot and volcanic. She pushed it down. That would reinforce his ideas about her unfitness for medicine, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Pushing back her chair, she walked out of the room, her legs shaking. She wouldn’t sit there and watch him gloating over her powerlessness.

In her room, she sat on the side of her bed, heart racing, stomach churning. Rage shook her until she felt her rib cage might break under the strain.

Thirty. Nine years away. She could not live in this house for nine more years.

She could walk out. She should walk out. But then – where would she go? Her abdomen cramped with worry and frustration.

It was Sunday, the long quiet of a Protestant Sabbath ahead of her. Church was in half an hour.

No. Not today. She couldn’t sit in a pew next to her father and pretend to feel Christian love. It would choke her. Today she needed respite.

She changed into her riding clothes and slipped down the back stairs, out through the kitchen (with an apple in her pocket) and into the stables.

Leaving Barney had been the one dark spot on her plans for the future. He was a plain, ordinary bay Australian stockhorse, and that meant he was clever and kind and untiring. He greeted her with a whicker and a soft nose in her ear. She gave him the apple and saddled him up while he ate it.

‘Come on, lad, let’s get out of here.’

Riding on Sunday for pleasure wasn’t exactly frowned on, but it was best not to flaunt it in front of the conservative country matrons parading to church. She went down the lane, past the back of weatherboard houses and stable blocks, to where the small township petered out into market gardens which stretched down to the river, the wide, placid-seeming Manning, curving around the mangroves, shining with the reflected blue of the open sky.

It felt wrong that it should be such a beautiful day. Why couldn’t she have storms and thunder, like in Wuthering Heights?

There was only one place to go when she felt like this.

•

Once free of the town and on the river path, she gave Barney his head and he cantered for a while until the hard baked track began to hurt his hooves and he dropped back to a walk.

The bracken was high and the last of the wattle blazed gold against the scrub. Taree was timber country, but near the town the forests had been felled decades ago, replaced with mixed farming: some sheep, wheat still green and purple in the fields, and a couple of dairy farms which serviced the local townships. Hereford steers being fattened for market stared at her over a wire fence.

Her mother had been a squatter’s daughter, and was buried in the private cemetery on her family’s old land, a half-hour’s easy ride. It was down near the river, removed from the main house, so she could visit without having to keep company with the new owners.

She dismounted and tied Barney to a branch loosely enough to let him lip at the grass edging each tree trunk.

Not only her mother lay in this shady grove of river gums. Two younger sisters and a brother were there, all dead before they were two, as so many children were. There was still so far to go in medical science. Saving the newborns, the babies dead of fever, the mothers who bled out or suffered puerperal fever …

She sat by her mother’s grave and picked the weeds from it, talking as she went.

‘I don’t know how you bore living with him!’ A dandelion, a clover, some native grass. ‘I don’t know what to do …’ Abruptly, grief overwhelmed her, tears rising, throat catching, a pain below her heart pressuring her … not just grief for her mother, although that raw ache was always present. But something sharper, less natural: grief for the father she might have had but didn’t, a father who would support her, be proud of her, steady her and keep her on course to achieve her goals. It wasn’t fair! Why couldn’t she be a doctor? It was her money, for God’s sake!

‘How could you have let him talk you into putting thirty down as the age?’ She thumped the grass over the grave in righteous anger, tears running down her cheeks. ‘Didn’t you trust me?’

But she knew the answer. Her mother had been a compliant woman; loving, gentle, generous, the perfect mother – but never able or willing to stand up to her husband. Evelyn knew, deep down, that she hadn’t wanted to defy him. That something in her mother had liked his masterfulness. She had once said, ‘He’s a proper man,’ with a deep, almost lascivious satisfaction. Evelyn had been thirteen, and uncomfortable with that declaration without knowing why; now she understood what might have been underneath that satisfaction, and was still uncomfortable, and angry.

Her mother should have stood up for her daughter, if not for herself.

But there was nothing she could do. A will was binding. She felt rage building in her, but there was no way to let it out which would do any good. The unfairness of the world wasn’t something she could change – not right here and now. Her father’s disdain for women wasn’t going to affect how the law buttressed his rights. Society was against women, pushing them down. Even though Australian women had the vote, it hadn’t changed anything. Men were still in charge. Fathers and husbands and judges and parliamentarians. She lay on the rough grass and looked up at the gum leaves, feeling a deep thrumming of anger in her solar plexus, as though her body wanted to pounce on something – someone – and hit and hit and hit. Once she got her inheritance, no one was ever going to have control of her again.

She had no formal qualifications in nursing, although she’d been active in that role now for several years. If she left home, her pin money would be stopped – oh, he was petty enough for that, certainly. She would have to earn her own living – and the best she could hope for was as a nurse’s assistant, on pitiful money, living in servants’ quarters of some hospital. A drudge.

She didn’t hate her father enough to live like that. She wasn’t such a fool.

Qualifications. Nursing qualifications would get her out of this house and into a respectable profession – a profession in which she could continue to learn medicine until she came into her inheritance. It looked like a long cold future, but it was the best she had access to. University was so expensive that there was no possibility she could afford it without her mother’s money. Harry was going to university at her father’s expense. Of course.

In Taree, nursing qualifications meant the Manning District Hospital, the only teaching hospital in the area. Her father, for some arcane reason she didn’t understand, rarely used it, preferring the smaller private hospitals. Which meant she might be able to train there undetected. Or, at least, take her exams there.

Only one way to find out.

•

The next morning, once surgery hours were over and her father had retired to his smoking room with the newspaper, she went to the Manning District Hospital and talked to Dr Chapman, who was the assistant director and had control over the nursing staff.

He was energetic and charming, a favourite of the local ladies, and a friend of her father’s in a professionally distant way.

‘What can I do for you, Miss Northey?’ he asked, with a spark of admiration in his eyes for her – she had worn a smartly cut suit and fashionable hat to give her confidence. ‘Please, sit down.’

She sat on his visitor’s chair, her purse clutched on her knees. The office was in a corner of the ground floor of the hospital, and strong spring sun streamed through the window. A wisteria vine was in full bloom outside, and the perfume filled the room.

‘I want to get my nursing qualifications, Doctor. I was hoping I could take the exams here, at the hospital. In confidence.’

He looked at her silently.

‘I won’t lie for you, Miss Northey,’ he said, stirring restlessly, tapping a pencil on his blotter.

‘I wouldn’t ask you to, Doctor.’ A pause, while he looked out the window, his mouth pursed, considering who knew what ramifications of her request. ‘I just want to have my experience recognised,’ she added.

‘Yes. Yes, I can see that.’ He put the pencil down and leant forward. ‘But there’s a bit more to it than exams. We’ll need you to take some shifts in the operating theatre, and demonstrate certain skills on the ward …’

‘I’d like that,’ she said. Oh, yes, she’d like that! To work with others, to learn from other doctors and nurses. It was like a window opening.

‘We’re short-handed at the moment. Perhaps I can ask your father to lend you to us for some weekend shifts.’

Her father would love to play the beneficent doctor, helping out the local community – with her time. It was shaming that Dr Chapman knew him so well.

Their eyes met. His were blue, sympathetic and understanding. She swallowed down a lump in her throat.

‘Thank you, Doctor. That would be wonderful.’

‘You can probably take your first-and second-year exams together,’ he added cheerfully. ‘Have you been studying anatomy? Here –’ He reached behind her and grabbed a book from the shelves behind his desk. ‘Gray’s Anatomy. That’s what you need. I’m sure your father has a copy.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I think I’d better get my own.’

He grinned at her. ‘Borrow this one until it arrives. You’ll have to order it from Sydney.’ He paused, and looked out the window again. ‘Have them deliver it here.’

Tears pricked her eyes. He was so understanding. So truly the gentleman, to not put into words the difficulties she faced.

‘Thank you, Dr Chapman,’ she said. She’d never meant anything more in her life. He smiled at her.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘We need competent nurses.’

6 AUGUST 1914

‘There!’ Her father ripped the certificate in two and threw the pieces on the floor. ‘So much for that.’

He smiled at Evelyn with unpleasant satisfaction and a lingering rage. She drew in a breath. She had to stay calm. But no matter how old she got, her father’s anger always called up an answering fear in her. Which was ridiculous. There was nothing he could do to her anymore.

Still, it took an effort to answer him.

‘Dr Chapman gave me two certificates,’ she said, hoping he didn’t hear the slight tremor in her voice. ‘In case you tore up that one.’

That brought him up with a jolt. He didn’t like the idea of Dr Chapman judging him so accurately, nor of her being prepared for his actions.

‘There’s nothing you can do, Father,’ she said. She went to the window and opened it, ignoring the cold of the metal catch against her fingers. ‘Listen.’

Their house was on the main street of Taree; a typical country town street, usually drowsy and quiet in mid-afternoon. But today the town was alive and buzzing. People, men and women alike, crowded the footpaths, talking avidly, and sulkies and carts were stopped in mid-street as their drivers leant down to chat to passers-by. A newspaper boy was doing a roaring trade, shouting, ‘War! Britain at war with Germany!’

Evelyn faced her father.

‘I’m enlisting as a nurse, Father.’

‘I forbid it!’ His face was mottled with rage, his hands gripping the back of his chair, knuckles white.

‘I’m nearly twenty-four and now,’ she gestured to the pieces of certificate on the carpet, ‘I’m fully qualified and I’ve been registered by the Australasian Trained Nurses’ Association. There’s nothing you can do.’

Her father smoothed his sparse hair back and stared at her as if he’d never seen her. She realised with a small shock that he was staring her in the eyes; she’d known he wasn’t a tall man, but now they were the same height. ‘You’re needed here,’ he insisted.

‘You’ll have to find someone else to do your dressings for you.’ Her voice was firm at last. Her father barely glanced out the window, and turned back, sneering.

‘This is a fool’s errand. They’re saying it will be over by Christmas, and then what will you do?’ His voice was bitter.

‘Get a job in Sydney as a private nurse,’ she said swiftly, and had the satisfaction of seeing his brows twitch together. The front door banged and Harry rushed in, bringing winter air with him in a gust.

‘Have you heard the news? It’s good, isn’t it? We’ll show those German blighters. I’m off to Sydney to enlist!’ He grinned at them both, and she felt her heart twist. She was enlisting as a nurse because she knew that the victims of battle would need all the help they could get. To think of Harry being one of them was piercingly hard. He was a solicitor newly minted,
about to take up a position with the local solicitor’s office. He would be safe behind a desk.

Still, if anyone could come through unscathed, it was Harry. Tall and long-limbed, strong as an ox, he’d never even had the normal illnesses of childhood. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d been ill. And he was a crack shot and rider.

‘Did you see what The Sydney Morning Herald says?’ he went on, as if not noticing their silence. He read from the paper crushed in his fist. ‘“For good or ill, we are engaged with the Mother Country in fighting for liberty and peace.” That’s the spirit, eh?’

‘Nonsense!’ her father said, ignoring her. Where her announcement of enlisting had brought nothing but wrath from him, Harry’s had brought fear to his eyes. ‘They can’t need lawyers in the Army.’

‘I’m a reservist with the Light Horse, Dad, you know that.’ He beamed, genuinely excited. ‘What a lark! Off to Europe to fight old Fritz! I’ve got to get my kit together.’ He ran up to his bedroom, taking the stairs two at a time. Evelyn and her father stared at one another, united at least in their worry for him.

‘Wouldn’t you want a nurse available if he’s injured?’ she asked. Perhaps that was cruel, but it was the truth. The Army was going to need every possible nurse before this war was over, even if it did only last until Christmas.

‘I forbid it,’ he said quietly.

She bit her lower lip to stop herself saying words she would regret – saying, ‘Yes, Father. Whatever you say, Father.’ The habit of obeying him – of fearing him – was so strong, but she was an adult now.

‘I’ll pack and leave on the late train,’ she said, speaking as she turned away and went out the door. ‘Rebecca Quinn will put me up in Sydney until they need me to embark.’

‘If you leave this house, don’t think you can come back.’

Alone in the world with only her own meagre resources. It was a daunting image; women had a hard enough time of it when they had a family at their back. She’d be completely dependent on her own income, with nowhere to retreat to if she were sick, or out of work or otherwise in trouble. What father would do that to his own daughter?

She paused in the doorway, her back to him. Anger burned out fear. But for her mother’s sake, for her memory, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell him what she thought. After a split-second’s stillness, she went on, moving up the stairs as quickly as she could, so she could get to her room before she began to cry.

Rebecca Quinn was delighted to put her up, and to take her to the enlistment office.

‘I’m so glad to see you out of that dreary little town, Lynnie,’ she said, briskly weaving her sulky through the Sydney traffic. ‘And to get your nursing qualifications behind your father’s back, too! Well done.’

Rebecca was a journalist, and the daughter of a prominent women’s rights campaigner. They had met playing hockey against one another in their schooldays. Her blonde-haired sophistication always made Evelyn feel like a red-headed frump, but although they had never been close friends she had known she could rely on Rebecca’s support.

‘He had no right to stop you being a doctor in the first place,’ Rebecca continued.

‘Well, he had the legal right,’ Evelyn said, half-amused and half-comforted by her partisanship. ‘My inheritance from my mother is held in trust until I’m thirty, and he’s the trustee.’

‘Until you’re thirty or you get married,’ Rebecca said darkly, as if she herself hadn’t married her Jack only six months before.

‘Well, that’s not going to happen,’ Evelyn said firmly. No. If she married, her money would come under her husband’s control, automatically. She would never again put herself in the position of having her life controlled by someone else. Anyone else.

They followed a line of carriages up a hill, beside a long sandstone wall. The gate which was eventually revealed was staffed by soldiers. A crowd of men had gathered outside.

‘There you are,’ Rebecca said. ‘Victoria Barracks. Ask for the Army Service Corps’ Drill Hall. Enlistments opened at ten o’clock, and it’s only 10.30 now, so you should have plenty of time.’

Evelyn laughed. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘It’s my job to know!’ Rebecca laughed too. ‘Speaking of which, I have a ladies’ charity auction to get to by eleven. You’ll be faster walking from here anyhow.’

‘Thank you, Bec. I’ll see you back at your flat …’ Evelyn hesitated, suddenly unsure. ‘At least, I suppose I will. I’ll send you word, anyway.’

Rebecca smiled at her. ‘What an adventure! I half wish I could come with you.’

Evelyn climbed down, reassured. She wished she had a soupçon of Rebecca’s charm. Particularly now, when she’d be facing strangers. Although she hoped that charm wasn’t the main qualification the Army was looking for.

The walk up to the gate wasn’t long, but she had to make her way through the crowd of men, all wanting to get in, presumably to enlist.

She had been in crowds of men before, naturally. Train stations, town fairs. But she realised, as she eeled her way through, that not a single one of these men was paying her any attention. Not one was giving her the eye, or assessing her looks. No one whistled or catcalled. They were so concentrated on getting in through that green gate that it was like she’d been turned into a man.

It was curiously fortifying. They were all here together for the same purpose: to fight for King and Country. No matter if she thought this war could have been avoided. No matter if Serbia had been stupid, or Russia overly aggressive. Germany had invaded Belgium, and that meant war for all Belgium’s allies, including Britain. And when Britain, the Mother Country, went to war, so did Australia.

She had come as far as she could; now she just had to wait for the line to inch forward.

Forty minutes later, she said to the long-suffering sergeant at the gate, ‘I’m here to enlist for the nursing service.’

‘Good-oh,’ he said. ‘We need all the nurses we can get. Go along there to the hospital office, and they’ll give you your medical straightaway. We’ve got a rush on for nurses.’

The hospital was to the right of the gate, a lovely old sandstone building, as they all seemed to be in the enormous quadrangle. There was a short line of young women, mostly in nurses’ uniforms, at the front door, and she joined them, thankful beyond measure for the extra certificate Dr Chapman had given her, and for the letter of accreditation from the Nurses’ Association. She wished she’d thought to wear her own uniform.

The other girls were welcoming.

‘What a lark!’ one of them, a vivacious brunette with spectacles, said, reminding Evelyn vividly of Harry. He would be here in a few days, once he’d served out his notice at his job in Taree.

‘We’ll have some fun,’ another girl agreed.

‘You’ve got a strange idea of fun,’ an older woman said. ‘I was in the Boer War, and I can tell you, it’s not much fun when the boys are brought in bleeding.’

They fell to silence then, going in one by one as a voice within called out ‘Next!’

Evelyn reached the head of the queue about twenty minutes later.

‘Next!’ A matron sat behind a desk in the hall, flanked by a sergeant and a civilian clerk.

Evelyn had her papers ready, and put them on the desk in front of the matron. They were quickly checked by all three, then the clerk copied her details down.

‘You’ve just qualified?’ the matron asked.

‘I’ve just received my certification, but I’ve been acting as my father’s practice nurse since I was sixteen,’ she said. ‘A country doctor. I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of patients.’

‘Theatre experience?’

‘Yes. At the Manning District Hospital.’

‘Any emergency experience? Wound treatment?’

‘We’re a timber town,’ Evelyn said. ‘There have been accidents. With saws, and milling equipment.’ She tried not to think of the last one, a little girl crushed by a log fall