Pinetown, Natal,
April 1900.

When we arrived at Durban the town was very full, and the sisters had to stay on board until rooms could be found for them in a boarding-house. Late in the afternoon a tug came out with a message that we were to disembark and go to a house called "Sea Breeze" in Smith Street. It was rather rough at the anchorage, and we had to get into a basket and were slung over the ship's side into the tug, then the tug had to go round and pick up a lot of lighters that had been supplying other ships with coal, &c., and by the time we got into harbour it was getting dusk, and the Customs House, supposing that all the passengers had landed earlier, was closed.

I had meant to leave our heavy baggage in the Customs House till we knew where we were going; but it was impossible to leave it loose on the jetty, and there were no cabs or trolleys about, but a mob of riksha boys, dressed up in feathers and horns and beads (and very little else), who were all clamouring to be allowed to transport us up town. Eventually we piled our baggage on these rikshas, and, distributing the sisters amongst it, we gave the boys the address, and, with much shouting, our cavalcade started off at a trot; we soon reached Smith Street, but then our troubles began, no one knowing Sea Breeze; we searched up and down the street, and one old gentleman told me he had lived all his life in Smith Street, but had never seen a Sea Breeze there!

I tried all the places where I thought our officers might be—the R.A.M.C. Depot, hotels, &c.—but could not find them, the sisters all very tired and hungry, and some of them rather nervous; then, by good luck, we met our Major, who had come out to see if we were comfortable in our quarters, and discovered that we had been given the name of the wrong street!

About 9 P.M. we found the house; but the landlady had given us up, and, thinking we should not land till the morning, had gone out; but some other lodgers (refugees from Johannesburg) raided the larder for our benefit, and we thoroughly enjoyed our supper.

The next day we found the idea had been to send us up to Mooi River, but it was thought that, with the winter coming on, that would be a cold place for sick troops, so we had better be nearer the coast; and then a Durban gentleman came forward, and most kindly offered the use of his estate of 150 acres at Pinetown; it is only about seventeen miles from Durban, but much higher up and more healthy; so the offer was gratefully accepted, and the building was at once begun.

Then followed a time when we all had to forget that we had come out to "nurse the sick and wounded," and turn to work at other jobs.

Before they were ready for us to go up to Pinetown we were all inoculated against typhoid. It was not a pleasant experience: my temperature went up to 102°, and I had intense abdominal pain and headache; it seemed like a very concentrated touch of typhoid, but it kept us in bed only two or three days, and the following five or six days we felt as weak as though we had been ill for a month.

As soon as possible I went up to see where our hospital was to be built, and found them busy levelling the ground for the tin pavilions.

There were three permanent buildings already up on the land; one, we thought, would make a good ward for officers (eight beds); another had a large room we thought would do for our staff mess-room, and some small rooms suitable for medical officers' bedrooms; and the third was a row of rooms that was apportioned for sisters' rooms, and various offices, stores, &c.

The orderlies were established in tents a little way off; they were all St. John's Ambulance men, and camping out was a new experience for them, so of course they did not know how to make themselves as comfortable as regular soldiers would have done in a new camp. They had joined expecting to have the excitement of stretcher work at the front, and when they were told off to level the ground for the buildings, or to carry up the planks and the heavy boxes from the railway trucks, and to help the builders put up the pavilions, there was a good deal of grumbling.

At first the Major in command would not hear of our going up to stay until they had got some more of the stores up—beds, sheets, &c.; but when he found how slowly they got on, and how discontented the men were at having to rough it, he gave leave for me to go up with one other sister, as we thought we might help a bit, and, at any rate, could show the men we were willing to take our share.

The hospital we had brought out was for one hundred beds, but there was urgent need for more beds, so the P.M.O. had given orders that more huts were to be sent to us, and that we were to open as a two hundred bed hospital.

The railway was so hard worked that we had the greatest difficulty to get trucks to bring the building materials up from Durban, and the docks at Durban were so crowded with stores that it was most difficult to get the things through.

Some of our medical officers worked nobly at the docks, getting the things packed on to trucks, while the others superintended the unloading at Pinetown.

Every engine seemed to be needed for taking men, horses, stores, water, &c., up to the front, and the only wonder was that so few accidents occurred on the much over-worked single line of rails.

We had landed on the last day of March, and on the evening of 12th April Sister —— and I went up to Pinetown by rail, taking all the sisters' heavy baggage; and the other sisters went to give some temporary help on one of the hospital ships at Durban, until we could fix up some rooms for them. Some of the officers met us at the station, and a fatigue party had brought a truck for our baggage. A tramp of about ten minutes through thick sand brought us to our new abode.

Our first meal, a kind of supper, was somewhat quaint; a bare deal table in a room dimly lighted by two candles stuck into bottles; plates, knives, and forks had to be used with great economy, as there were not enough to go round; some good salt beef and biscuits and some fruit—and we were waited upon by an orderly in his shirt sleeves, who was an engine-driver when at home in England, and knew more about greasing engines than about cleaning the grease off plates!

The weather was very hot, and the officers all looked dead tired, so we soon decided to turn in, and were escorted to our room (in the other building) by the light of a guttering candle, as there were said to be many snakes about.

They had found us two beds, and actually some sheets, but absolutely nothing else in our room. However, I hunted up the cook, and he lent me a bucket with some water in, so that we might start fair with a wash in the morning.

The next morning we were up before six, and started work in earnest, unpacking cases, sorting stores, and putting them away in different store-rooms, and trying to find the things we were most in need of for household use.

Some of the hospital fittings had been put ashore at Cape Town and not yet sent on, and more of the necessaries were still down at Durban, so that it was very difficult to push on the building work; and all the time we knew the Field Hospitals were crowded up, and needing to send men down to us to give them a chance of recovery; and we heard that the generals said they could not fight any more till they could clear the Field Hospitals.

All the cases of stores were numbered, so that when we wanted any particular thing, we had to look up in the list the number of its case, and then hunt about till we found that number; all day long it was "Have you seen 4507?"—"No, I want 5470." Sometimes we found a lot of jugs, and then could not find the basins; sometimes a lot of saucers, and no cups; and it seemed as though we never should get order out of the chaos.

At first we had no house-boys, and the orderlies were all busy carrying the building materials up, so Sister and I kept the bedrooms tidy, and the medical officers (in return) carried the water for the baths! As soon as I could, I annexed a fine old Kaffir as a house-boy, and "John" is a great stand-by now.

We tried first of all to fit up rooms with the bare necessary furniture for the rest of the officers and sisters, so that they could all come up and help us.

If you saw the jetty at Durban you would wonder that any stores ever got sent up to their right destination; literally hundreds of tons of boxes stacked up in hopeless confusion. Durban is a bit overdone by military requirements, and quite run out of some stores.

On April 3rd we were made very anxious by a strong rumour that Mafeking had fallen. They say that all the little children have died there. Yesterday we heard of the loss of a British convoy and five guns, and also that the Boers were going into laager again quite near to where Cronje was taken.

Durban is full of refugees, and of Ladysmith people recruiting after the siege. I went over one of the hospital ships, the Lismore Castle, before I came up here, and it was melancholy to see the skeletons from Ladysmith; one quite young fellow told me he had come here from India, got typhoid soon after the siege began, then, as soon as he began to convalesce, the only food they could give him was mealy meal and a little horse-flesh, so he got dysentery. He is now mending, but it is slow work with them all.

Before we came, our rooms had been occupied by refugees, and fleas abound; I catch about six ter die and once in the night. Luckily we are fairly free from mosquitoes. It is awfully hot, and the medical officers go about in trousers and vests only: we wish we could wear as little!

This is a very scrappy letter; we work from 6 A.M. to dusk, and then I have been scribbling a little before turning in, but I am weary to a degree, and must fill up the gaps in my next.