Home for Christmas (3 page)
From the window of her pretty bright kitchen with its duck-egg-blue walls, and its blue-and-cream-checked curtains, Olive could see out into the long narrow garden, most of which Sally had converted into a vegetable patch. But it was their earth-covered Anderson shelter that drew her attention. They had spent the last four nights inside it, and would probably be inside it again tonight, unless by some miracle the Germans stopped dropping their bombs on London.
Where was Tilly? No air-raid sirens had gone off during the last couple of hours, so she should have been able to get home by now, even given the delays in public transport the bombing had caused. Perhaps she should go and check the street outside again?
Olive had just walked into the hall when she heard the back door opening. Quickly she hurried back to the kitchen, relief flooding through her when she saw Tilly standing there.
‘Oh, Tilly, there you are.’
‘I’m sorry I’m a bit late, Mum,’ Tilly apologised immediately, seeing her mother’s expression.
The resemblance between mother and daughter was obvious. They both had the same thick dark brown curls, the same sea-green eyes and lovely Celtic skin, and even the same heart-shaped faces, although Tilly was already nearly an inch taller than her mother.
‘I was just walking into the Row when Ian Simpson called me over to introduce me to an American reporter he’s got lodging with him.’
‘An American?’ Olive’s voice held a hint of wariness. America was a neutral country and had not taken sides in the war, unlike the British Dominions, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who were all offering ‘the mother country’ support in their fight against Hitler.
‘Yes,’ Tilly confirmed as she went to give her mother a hug.
Olive put down the knife with which she’d been about to resume scraping the thinnest possible covering of butter onto some slices of bread.
‘I thought I’d make up some sandwiches to take down to the Anderson with us later, unless Hitler gives us a night off.’
‘Huh, fat chance of that,’ Tilly responded. ‘We’ve had three air-raid warnings already this afternoon, but at least we’ve got the hospital basement to go to. We’re ever so busy, Mum,’ she added, ‘and if you could see some of the poor souls we’ve had come up to our office, looking for family they’ve lost . . .’
Tilly’s voice broke, and Olive hugged her tightly, smoothing Tilly’s curls with a loving hand.
‘I know, Tilly. Our WVS group went over to the East End today. Everyone’s doing their best, but no one expected that there’d be so many made homeless so quickly. All the rest centres that haven’t been bombed have been overwhelmed. They’re trying to get more opened as quickly as they can, but the conditions in some of the shelters people are using are so squalid and unhealthy . . .’ Olive released her daughter to look at her. ‘I should have sent you away out of London, Tilly. It would have been much safer for you.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ Tilly told her determinedly, adding when she saw her mother’s expression, ‘I’m not a child any more, Mum. I want to be here, doing my bit. It wouldn’t feel right, running away and leaving it to others. Only this morning Miss Moss, the office manager, said how hard we were working and how proud she was of us. And, anyway, where would I go? We haven’t got any family I could go to. Besides, I want to be here with you, and I know that you wouldn’t leave.’
It was true, Olive was forced to admit. She would never leave London whilst her house was still standing. Olive was very proud of her home and of living on the Row, in the small area that took such a pride in its respectability and its standards. People who lived on the Row felt they had made something of themselves and their lives, and those were things that no one gave up lightly. But much as she loved her home, Olive loved her daughter more, and she knew there was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep Tilly safe.
‘Where are Agnes and Dulcie?’ Tilly asked, wanting to divert her mother’s anxious thoughts.
Of the three lodgers, Agnes was the closest in age to Tilly, though her start in life had been very different. Abandoned on the doorstep of the small orphanage close to the church, Agnes had no mother that the authorities had ever been able to trace, nor any other family. Because of that, and because of Agnes’s timid nature, the kindly matron of the orphanage had allowed Agnes to stay on well beyond the age of fourteen when most of the orphans were considered old enough to go out into the world, employing her to help out with the younger children in order to ‘earn her keep’. When it had become obvious that the country could be going to be at war and the orphanage had had to evacuate to the country, Matron had managed to get Agnes a job with the Underground, and Olive had been asked to take Agnes in as one of her lodgers. By the time Agnes had plucked up the courage to come to see Olive, because of a mix-up Olive had already let the room to Dulcie. Olive had felt terrible when she had realised how vulnerable and alone Agnes was, and very proud of Tilly when she had insisted on sharing her room with the girl.
When Agnes had been taken under the wing of a young underground train driver, both she, and then romance, had bloomed, and the young couple were now going steady.
Olive smiled as she reflected on Agnes’s quiet happiness now, compared with her despair the first time she had seen her.
‘Agnes said this morning that she had volunteered to stay on at work this evening now that London Transport has agreed to open Charing Cross underground station as a shelter if there’s an air raid.’
Tilly nodded. There had been a good deal of pressure from people, especially those who were suffering heavy bombing raids, to be allowed to take shelter in the underground where they felt they would be safer than in some of the other shelters. After initially refusing, the authorities had changed their mind when Winston Churchill had agreed with the public, and certain stations were to be opened for that purpose.
‘What about Dulcie?’ Tilly asked.
‘She’s been dreadfully worried about her family, especially with her sister being missing, and them living in Stepney, although she’s pretended that she isn’t. She went over to the East End this afternoon.’
‘With that ankle of hers in plaster, and her on crutches?’ Tilly protested, horrified. ‘Especially now that she’s been told she’s got to keep the plaster on for an extra two weeks.’
Dulcie hadn’t liked that at all, Olive acknowledged ruefully, although when the hospital doctor she had seen before she had been discharged into Olive’s care had told them both that it was because Dulcie’s ankles were so slender and fine-boned that they wanted to take extra care, Dulcie, being Dulcie and so inclined to vanity, had preened herself a little.
‘It’s all right,’ Olive assured her daughter. ‘She hasn’t gone on her own. Sergeant Dawson has gone with her. He’s got a friend who’s a policeman over there who he wanted to look up, so he said that he’d go with Dulcie and make sure that she can manage. She should be back soon, but you and I might as well go ahead and have our tea.’
As she spoke Olive glanced towards the clock, betraying to Tilly her concern for the lodger whom initially Olive had not been keen on at all.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Tilly comforted her mother. Olive smiled and nodded in agreement.
What Tilly didn’t know was that Olive’s concern for Dulcie wasn’t just because of the threat of the Luftwaffe’s bombs, and her broken ankle. It had shocked and disconcerted Olive when she had visited the small untidy house in Stepney to tell Dulcie’s mother that Dulcie had broke her ankle after being caught in a bomb blast, to recognise that Dulcie was not being sharp or mean when she had said that her mother preferred her younger sister, but that that was the truth. Olive knew that, as the mother of an only and beloved child, she wasn’t in a position to sit in judgement on a mother of three, but she had understood in an instant, listening to Dulcie’s mother, that the deep-rooted cause of Dulcie’s chippiness and sometimes downright meanness to others was because she had grown up feeling unloved by her mother.
And yet despite that, since the bombing had started and in spite of Dulcie’s attempts to conceal it, Olive had seen how anxious the girl secretly was about her family, living as they did near the docks, which were the target of Hitler’s bombing campaign.
Being the loving, kind-hearted person she was, Olive was now concerned that Dulcie might be hurt by her visit to her old home. Olive had seen for herself when she had gone there on Sunday that Dulcie’s mother was beside herself with anxiety for her younger daughter, whilst in contrast she had hardly shown any concern at all for Dulcie.
Not that Olive would discuss any of this with Tilly. Dulcie’s home situation was her private business until such time as she chose to air it with the other girls in the house. She hadn’t said anything about her concern for Dulcie to Sergeant Dawson either, their neighbour at number 1 Article Row, though he would have understood that concern, Olive knew. He and his wife had, after all, had more than their fair share of personal unhappiness through the loss of the son who had died as a child. Mrs Dawson had never really recovered from the loss and was now something of a recluse. Olive felt rather sorry for Sergeant Dawson, who was by nature a friendly and sociable man – kind, as well, as his offer to escort Dulcie on her visit to see her mother had proved. Dulcie might insist that she could manage perfectly well on her crutches, but Olive had had awful mental images of the air-raid siren going off and Dulcie, all alone, being knocked over in the rush to reach the nearest shelter.
‘I saw Sally just before I left work today,’ Tilly informed her mother once they were seated at the kitchen table, with its fresh-looking duck-egg-blue, pale green and cream gingham tablecloth, trimmed with a border of daisies, eating the simple but nourishing meal of rissoles made from the leftovers of the special Sunday roast Olive had cooked in celebration of Tilly’s birthday, and flavoured with some of the onions Sally had grown in their garden, served with boiled potatoes and the last of the summer’s crop of beans.
‘She said to tell you that she doesn’t know when she’ll be home as she’s offered to sleep over at the hospital whilst they are so busy. They’ve had to bring back some of the staff who were evacuated to the temporary out-of-London hospital Barts organised when war was announced.’
Tilly put down her knife and fork, and told her mother quietly, ‘Sally said to tell everyone that we should all sleep face down and with a pillow over our heads. That’s what all the nurses are doing, because of the kind of injuries people have been brought in with.’
Olive could see that Tilly was reluctant to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Olive too had heard dreadful tales of the kind of injuries people had suffered.
Picking up her knife and fork again, Tilly wished that Sally’s advice hadn’t popped into her head whilst she was eating, stifling her appetite; no one with anything about them even thought of not clearing their plate of food, thanks to rationing.
As though she had read her thoughts Olive told her firmly, ‘Come on, love, eat up. We can’t afford to waste good food. There’s plenty from the East End right now that are homeless and with nothing but the clothes they’re standing up in who would give an awful lot to be safe in their homes and eating a decent meal.’
Olive’s familiar maternal firmness, reminiscent as it was of the days when Tilly had been much younger, made the girl smile, although the truth was that right now there wasn’t very much to smile about for any of them.
‘Suture, please, Nurse.’
The surgeon operating on the young child lying motionless on the operating table didn’t need to tell Sally what he required. She already had everything ready for him to sew up the wounds to the little boy’s body, from which he had just removed several pieces of shrapnel.
Having evacuated most of its staff out of London and closed down all but two operating theatres, which had been moved down to the basement for safety, Barts, like all London hospitals, was now having to cope with a huge influx of patients, many of whom, like this little boy, had very serious injuries indeed.
Those patients who could be moved were being sent out to Barts in the country for treatment, but those whose injuries were too severe, too life-threatening for treatment to be delayed or a long journey undertaken, were having to be operated on here, despite the bombs falling all around.
Down here in the basement, in the focused quiet of the operating theatre, the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns had to be ignored.
The operation was over. The consultant surgeon had gone to scrub up for the next one. The young patient was being wheeled out of the operating theatre ready for the porters to take him back to the ward where he would be nursed until – and if – he recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the country.
Sister had disappeared – no doubt to make sure that someone brought a cup of tea for Mr Ward the surgeon.
Sally’s boyfriend, George Laidlaw, was one of Mr Ward’s housemen, as the junior doctors were called. George was currently on duty in Casualty, where the flood of patients arriving seemed to increase with every bombing raid.
‘What have we got up next?’ Johnny MacDonald, the anaesthetist, a Scot, asked Sally, tiredly pushing his hand through his thinning ginger hair. Johnny was only in his mid-thirties but tonight he looked closer to fifty, Sally thought, and no wonder. They had almost lost the little boy twice during the op, only Johnny’s skill had kept him going.
‘Amputation that needs cleaning up,’ Sally answered without looking at him. No one liked amputations, and they liked them even less when someone or something else had done the amputating for them – in this case a falling roof slate that had sliced a fireman’s leg off just above his knee as he fought to save a burning building down on the docks.
‘I thought we were going to lose that wee laddie back there,’ the anaesthetist told Sally without saying anything about the next patient.
Sally didn’t reply. The reality was that they would probably lose the little boy anyway, and they all knew it. His little body had been pierced with so much shrapnel that it had left him, in the surgeon’s own words, ‘looking like a sieve’.
Somewhere in the hospital the boy’s mother would be waiting and praying, but there was only so much that even the best surgeon could do, and they did have the best here at Barts, Sally thought proudly, as she made her way to the sluice room to scrub up ready for the next operation. However, no matter how hard she scrubbed her hands Sally couldn’t rid her nostrils of the smell of blood, nor her mind of images of mangled, maimed bodies. The surgeons had been operating non-stop and suddenly, for no reason that she could think of, to her the smell of blood had become the stench of death. She leaned forward and closed her eyes as a surge of nausea gripped her.
The voice of one of the more senior theatre nurses who had already been in the sluice room, a short, stocky girl called Mavis Burton, reached her.
‘Bear up, Johnson,’ she said bracingly. ‘The theatre porters will be bringing the next patient along any minute.’
Immediately Sally snapped out of her uncharacteristic weakness. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally squeamish.’
The other nurse shook her head. ‘It would be hard to be anything else, given what we’ve been seeing. We all know that nurses are supposed to keep their distance and remember that they’ve got a job to do, and that weeping and wailing over injured patients doesn’t help anyone, but I’ve got to admit I’ve seen some things these last few days . . .’ She paused before continuing, ‘Mind you, with St Thomas’ being bombed on the first night of the blitz and its doctors and nurses risking their own lives in the damage to save patients, they’ve rather stolen a march on us in terms of showing the Germans what British medical staff are made of.’
St Thomas’ was the second oldest hospital in London, and there was a degree of professional rivalry between the two renowned establishments. On Sunday night a bomb had destroyed Medical Out Patients and most of college house, where the doctors where housed, killing two of them.
Only the bravery of three doctors, Mr Frewer, Dr Norman and Mr Maling, had saved two of their colleagues, who had been trapped by falling debris and ignited dispensary stores. Of course, no one working at Barts wanted their own hospital to be bombed, but Mavis was right: the bravery shown by St Thomas’ staff had naturally made everyone at Barts feel they had something to live up to.
Two hours later, when Sister Theatre had dispatched her to get herself a cup of tea and have a short break, Sally made her way tiredly to the canteen, almost walking right past George, her boyfriend, who was striding purposefully the other way, his white coat flapping open and his stethoscope round his neck.
‘Oh, George, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise.’ His smile creased his kind face, but he looked as weary as she felt, Sally acknowledged, as he pushed his thick light brown hair back off his face.
George might not be movie-star handsome but there was something about him that was very attractive. He had a kindness and a concern for others, combined with his warm smile and the twinkle in his eyes, that made him popular. Tall and rangy, George had the kind of slight stoop that came from bending over patients’ beds, but like all of those who worked with people whose health and lives had been blighted by the blitz of bombing on London, there were shadows at the backs of his eyes now from witnessing such suffering.
‘Sister’s just sent me to grab something to eat. We’ve got an impossibly full list. I’ve never seen anyone operate with the skill and the speed Mr Ward has shown these last few days. We had this little boy in earlier, peppered with shrapnel . . .’
‘I know. I saw him when he was brought in to Casualty earlier.’ George rubbed his face with both hands. In common with many of the other medics at the hospital, his jaw was showing the signs of stubble that came from working hours that were far too long and then falling into bed, only to be roused within a couple of hours to deal with another crisis.
They exchanged tired smiles, then both of them stiffened in response to a particularly loud explosion.
George reached out to grab hold of Sally protectively, saying when the building didn’t move, ‘Not us this time.’ But his words were inaudible above the pound of the ack-ack guns.
George was still holding onto her, and Sally looked up at him. She had seen those lean, long-fingered hands of his holding patients with such compassion and kindness. That thought brought a lump to her throat. George was such a good man.
‘This so-and-so war,’ he groaned. ‘More than anything else I want to have the time to court you properly, Sally, as you deserve to be courted, but we haven’t got that time. There isn’t time to even kiss you any more never mind court you. I’ve got to get back: Casualty is bursting at the seams with patients we haven’t got beds for already, and by the sound of what’s going on we’re going to have a hell of a lot more to deal with before tonight’s over.’
He lifted one of her hands to his lips and kissed it gently.
Her skin should smell of roses, not carbolic soap, Sally thought sadly, but the look she could see in George’s eyes said that he hadn’t even noticed the carbolic.
‘You’d better go and get your tea and I’d better get back to my patients,’ he said, releasing her.
Sally nodded and hurried down the corridor, pausing to look back when she reached the end. George was still standing where she had left him, watching her.
She was so lucky to have met him. He was kind and loving and fun to be with. He was also a good doctor who one day would be a first-rate doctor. And a first-rate husband?
It was far too soon to be thinking along those lines, Sally knew, even though she also knew that George himself would love to progress their relationship. There had, after all, been another man in her life she had once hoped to marry. Callum.
She was over Callum now. Callum’s refusal to understand the hurt and sense of betrayal she had suffered on discovering that her supposed best friend and her father were involved with one another, had destroyed the feelings she had once had for him. He might have followed her to London after she had fled here, unable to bear to stay in Liverpool and witness the relationship between Morag and her father, but he had not sought her out to beg her forgiveness. No, he had sought her out to tell her that, following their marriage, Morag was expecting a child.
Would she have weakened if he hadn’t told her that his sister and her father were expecting a child? No! She wouldn’t.
She was happy now, Sally reminded herself. Far, far happier than she had ever expected to be when she had left Liverpool. Where she had had one best friend she now had three very good close friends. Where she had loved a man whose loyalty to her above all others she had not been able to rely on, she was now loved by a man who she knew instinctively would always put her first. There was no going back, nor did she want to do so.
