It was the trilling song of an English woodlark perched high in the gnarled and outstretched limbs of an ancient oak that reminded Staff Nurse Cora Barker that she was ten thousand miles from home.

For six long weeks on the RMS Osterley, she had watched birds she’d only ever read about in the encyclopedia soar and swoop and dive around the ship, an ornithological escort for the Australians on board. Enormous seagulls had hovered and screeched and called to her as the ship coursed its way across the Indian Ocean to England. Wandering albatrosses had floated overhead, so low that she had almost been able to see each individual feather in their silvery underwings. Trussed up in a stiff life jacket during a drill on deck, straining to hear the captain shouting above the wind and the roaring sea-splash on the hull, Cora had lifted two fingers to the sky to estimate the span of the impressive bird’s wings. It must have been ten feet at least—bigger than any bird she’d ever seen in South Australia, bigger even than a pelican. The petrals, as broad as the albatrosses but with short stubby beaks instead of elongated ones, had speared into the water at sunset with such velocity that Cora imagined they might reach the sea floor with the power and propulsion of their dives. And the gliding shearwaters, brilliant white and shimmering silver, had skimmed across the waves whenever she tossed a bread crust or an apple core into the air for the pure pleasure of enticing the creatures closer.

The incessant roaring of the ocean and the pounding of the waves against the hull had created a soporific song that still sung in Cora’s ears, even though her feet had already been firmly planted on English soil for two days.

How, she wondered, was it possible to already be pining for a kookaburra’s belly laugh or the ear-splitting screech of a galah when she had only walked up the gangplank in Australia six weeks earlier? It wouldn’t be long until those familiar sounds of home would once again be the soundtrack to her days and evenings, she was sure of it. The war was certain to be over by Christmas, according to the newspapers she was in the habit of devouring, and her adventure—and her duty—on the other side of the world would be complete. Her aim was to serve her country, and its soldiers, with pride and distinction…

Continue reading the extract here…

Buy a copy of The Nurses’ War here.