Home for Christmas (6 page)

‘At least the RAF are giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine,’ Dulcie replied, trying to lift Tilly’s spirits by reminding her of what they’d heard on the wireless of a night time raid Bomber Command had made on German cities earlier in the week in retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s attack on London.

‘Time we had those sandwiches, I think,’ Olive decided when a fresh crescendo of explosions had both girls looking noticeably pale-faced in the glow of the oil lamp. Olive couldn’t forget the danger they had already faced and from which, miraculously, they had escaped safely. They had made light of the experience since, but Olive wouldn’t have blamed them if they had shown far more fear now than they were doing.

‘Some East Enders we’ve had at the hospital have been saying that Hitler is only bombing the East End because he wants to get rid of it before he sets himself up in London,’ Tilly told her mother. ‘He doesn’t care how many people he kills and hurts.’

‘It’s the docks the Germans have been aiming for,’ Olive pointed out, ‘because they know how important they are for bringing in supplies to keep the country running.’

‘They’re bombing more than just the docks and the East End now,’ said Dulcie ‘although it’s true that the East End has been the worst hit. There’s whole streets gone; nothing left at all except half a house here and there. I saw one when I went to see my mother, where the whole side of the house had been taken off and you could see right into every room. Of course, the downstairs rooms had been cleared. There’s looters everywhere, Sergeant Dawson said, nabbing everything they can. But upstairs you could see the bed and all the furniture with a rag rug half hanging off the floor where the wall had gone. I’m glad it wasn’t my bedroom. Horrible, it was, with a really nasty green bedspread on the bed. I’d have been ashamed to call it mine.’

Olive reached for the sandwiches, carefully wrapped in a piece of precious greaseproof paper – precious because it was virtually impossible to buy it any more, thanks to the war – and then almost dropped them when the sound of a bomb exploding somewhere close at hand was so loud that both girls immediately clapped their hands over their ears. Putting the sandwiches aside, Olive opened her arms and immediately the girls came to sit one on either side of her so that she could hold them both close. The warmth of them nestling close to her reminded her of something she needed to say to Dulcie.

Olive placed her lips close to Dulcie’s ear and told her, ‘Dulcie, I’ve decided that whilst you’re off work with your ankle, you don’t have to pay me any rent.’

Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She had been worrying about paying her rent whilst she was off sick and on short wages, but she was a thrifty young woman and she’d worked out that if she was careful she’d got enough in her Post Office book to pay her rent for the six weeks she’d be in plaster. To have Olive tell her that she didn’t need to pay her anything for those six weeks wasn’t just kind, it was generosity the like of which Dulcie had never previously known.

For a few seconds she was too surprised to say anything, able only to stare at Olive with wide disbelieving eyes, before replying, ‘That’s ever so good of you, but I’d like to pay half of my rent. I can afford to, and it doesn’t seem right you letting me stay for nothing.’

Her offer touched Olive’s heart. She knew how difficult it was for Dulcie to be gracious and grateful to anyone, but especially to her own sex, so she gave her an extra hug and shook her head.

‘No, Dulcie. I’ve made up my mind.’

To Dulcie’s horror her eyes had filled with tears and now one rolled down her cheek to splash on Olive’s hand.

‘I’ve never known anyone as kind as you . . .’ Dulcie began, but what she wanted to say was silenced by the sound of more planes overhead.

There was no need for any of them to speak. They all knew what they were feeling. There were bombs dropping all around them, even though the docks, and not Holborn, were the bombers’ targets. Everyone knew that the planes dropped whatever they had left before turning homewards, and if you just happened to be underneath that bomb then too bad.

The night stretched ahead of them, filled with danger and the prospect of death. There was nothing they could do, certainly nowhere for them to run to. They could only sit it out together, wait and pray.

Chapter Four

When the sound of the all clear brought the three occupants of number 13’s Anderson shelter out of their fitful light sleep and Olive opened the door, the sight of the house still standing – and with it, as far as they could see, the rest of Article Row – was a huge relief. They trooped wearily and thankfully back indoors, ignoring the smell of burning in the air, the taste of brick dust, and the sight of the red glare lighting up the sky to the east.

‘Nearly four o’clock,’ Olive commented, seeing Tilly stifle a yawn. ‘That means we can have three hours’ decent sleep before we need to get up again.’

Olive had been intending to have a bed put up in the front room for Dulcie because of her broken ankle, but her lodger had insisted that she could and would manage the stairs, and she had been as good as her word. Secretly Olive had been relieved by Dulcie’s insistence about this. Olive was very proud of her front room. Upstairs in the bedrooms she still had the dark wood furniture she had inherited, with the house, from her in-laws, but in the front room she had replaced everything.

Olive had redecorated the room herself, painting the walls cream, and the picture rail green to match the smart, shaped plain pelmet, and curtains in a lighter green pattern of fern leaves. During the winter months, drawn over the blackout fabric, the curtains gave the room an air of cosy warmth, whilst in the summer they let in the light. Olive had made the curtains herself using a sewing machine borrowed from the vicar’s wife.

A stylish stepped mirror hung over the gas fire. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring, and over it was a patterned carpet in green, dark red and cream to match the dark green damask-covered three-piece suite. On the glass and light wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, stood a pretty crystal bowl, which she’d bought in an antique shop just off the Strand. Against the back wall, behind the sofa, was a radiogram in the same light wood as the coffee table.

Olive had been perfectly prepared to push her precious furniture to one side to put a bed up in the room for Dulcie, but Dulcie had gone up in her esteem for insisting on not ‘putting her out’, as she had called it.

In the ticket office Agnes heard the all clear with great relief. She hadn’t really slept at all, partly because of the bombs and partly because of her anxiety about Ted’s mother. Now she had to get up and get back to her voluntary duties. Not that she minded. Her truckle bed wasn’t very comfortable, and Miss Wood, who also worked in the office and had volunteered to come in overnight, had snored dreadfully.

People were already starting to make their way out of the underground, a small stream of yawning, tired-looking humanity: mothers carrying babies, fathers with children, on their shoulders, families with older children, their silence punctuated by the laughing and whistling of several men who staggered past the ticket office carrying bottles of beer.

Mr Smith, who had emerged from his office looking, Agnes noticed, every bit as spruce as though he had only just arrived at work and not spent the night there, glared after them disapprovingly.

‘Disgraceful, carrying on like that. And at a time like this,’ he told Agnes.

‘Perhaps they were trying to cheer themselves up,’ she replied.

‘Make a nuisance of themselves, more like.’

‘I’ve heard that at some of the undergrounds they’ve had people organising singsongs,’ Miss Wood confided to Agnes, when Mr Smith had gone ‘up top’ to see ‘what was what’. ‘I can’t see Mr Smith encouraging that here.’

Agnes didn’t like to think of how much more damage the bombs must have done overnight. The noise had been dreadful.

Would Ted have time to come into the office to see her? He’d want to see his family safely home, of course, and then he’d have to come back to work himself. She wasn’t going to think about Ted’s mother not speaking to her. Agnes swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Ted was her hero and she wanted so very much for his family to like her. There was no getting away from her shaming background, though. As one of the other children at the orphanage had told her, ‘If your ma leaves you outside the orphanage and then scarpers, that means that you’re a bastard and that you’ve got bad blood in you ’cos your pa didn’t want to marry your ma.’

Agnes had known from the way that Ted talked about his mother and their family life that being respectable was important to her. This thought brought another lump to Agnes’s throat, and her eyes began to sting.

It was daylight when Sally left the hospital, with the kind of misty smoke haze hanging over the city that September mornings could bring. But this was a different kind of haze: small black smuts and even hot cinders were floating down from the sky. She could smell burning in the air, a smell with which all Londoners were becoming familiar. This morning’s smoky haze smelled unpleasantly of tallow fat. In the direction of the docks a red glow lay on the sky like a painful raised weal on a patient’s flesh, betraying the savagery of the wound they had suffered.

Just as Sally had left, one of the theatre porters, also going off duty, had told her with real shock in his voice, ‘St Paul’s nearly got it last night. Dropped an eight-hundred-pound bomb on it, Jerry did. Landed right in front of the steps and would have blown the whole front to bits, but someone up there,’ he had gestured towards the heavens, ‘wasn’t going to let Hitler get away with that.’

Now Sally felt impelled to go and view the cathedral herself – just to make sure it wasn’t damaged.

Of course, the area around it had been cordoned off, and a crowd had gathered at a safe distance. From what she could see, soldiers, the Home Guard, policemen and fire fighters were all busy working by the steps.

‘Got to dig the bomb out, and that will take some doing,’ a man standing next to Sally informed her.

‘They’ll have the bomb disposal lot in, of course,’ another man put in, older and possibly ex-military himself, from his upright bearing.

As comments and opinions flew back and forth – East End accents mingling with upper class and the falsely ‘refined’ tones adopted by those who wanted to ‘better themselves’ – the fate of Sir Christopher Wren’s cathedral drew the people of the city together in a common cause.

Once she had assured herself that St Paul’s was undamaged, Sally started to make her way back to Article Row. At least working nights meant that she was avoiding the sleeplessness of night raids. She’d never thought it lucky to be doing night shifts before, she smiled to herself ruefully, acknowledging the shouted, ‘Watch out for the hoses,’ from a fireman with a nod of her head, as she stepped carefully over them.

From the evidence of the large basket on the other side of the street, incendiaries had obviously been dropped. These bombs were easy enough to put out if one was swift to collect them on a shovel and douse them in water or sand before the chemicals inside them exploded, but the baskets in which they were dropped contained hundreds, and even the most fleet-footed fire watcher couldn’t possibly extinguish them all. Once the fires took hold, no building was safe. Apart from shattered windows, the buildings either side of the road seemed to be intact, although from the evidence of so many hoses, their interiors would now be soaked and damaged, Sally thought sympathetically.

A flat-bed lorry was parked at the end of the street, a salvage team working busily to clear up the mess of roof slates, and broken glass. Sally could see two men removing broken glass from one of the windows, one of them giving a warning shout to the other as a large piece from higher up fell towards him.

As though she was watching it in horrific slow motion Sally saw the man giving the warning putting out his hand towards his workmate; saw this man looking up and then stepping back and stumbling; the glass catching the morning light; the sticky tape that had once secured the edges rolled back in pale brown ringlets. She saw the glass slicing into the first man’s arm; the bright plume of arterial blood shooting upwards; the silence and then the frantic surge of men towards their injured comrade.

Sally ran to the men. ‘Don’t try to remove the glass,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m a nurse. Barts.’

The men immediately fell back respectfully, except the one supporting the injured man.

‘He needs to get to hospital,’ he told her unnecessarily, his voice gruff with shock.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed, kneeling down beside the injured man, who was now looking, to her, that familiar shade of grey-green white that came with shock and loss of blood. ‘But first we need to tourniquet his arm.’ Because if they didn’t he wouldn’t get there at all, at least not alive, Sally recognised, although she didn’t say that to the men.

‘There’s a first-aid kit in the cab of the fire engine,’ a fireman who had come to offer help told her. ‘Do you want it?’

‘Yes, please.’ Sally gave a small silent prayer of thanks for the insistence of the powers that be that first-aid kits were carried, whilst she applied what pressure she could to the artery still pumping out blood.

‘Pity we can’t get the Thames to give us that kind of pressure for our pumps,’ another of the firemen who had now gathered around joked in that way that men do when they are desperately concerned.

‘I’ll be all right, Nurse, if you can just take this glass out of me arm,’ the injured man assured her in a thready thin voice.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to do that. Doctors all over London will go on strike if a mere nurse takes over their duties,’ Sally responded. ‘We need an ambulance or, failing that, stretcher,’ she told the other men without turning her head.

She was already concerned that her patient might lose his arm, and she dare not risk trying to remove the glass in case she caused even more damage. Her comment about doctors, though, seemed to reassure them because they started telling her that they’d rather have a nurse treating them than a doctor any day. Meanwhile Sally had seen some men hurrying away in search of an ambulance, and the nearest ARP post.

Two of the firemen were back, one carrying the fire engine’s first-aid kit, which was placed on the ground and opened for her.

‘I’ll need a nice short straight piece of wood for the tourniquet,’ she told them, and almost before she had got the tourniquet bandage in place, exactly what she needed had been produced.

It was a relief to get the tourniquet on. The man had already lost a serious amount of blood, and was now unconscious. Sally didn’t like the colour of him, or the weakness of his pulse, now that his body had gone into shock from the accident. She hoped that an ambulance turned up soon, because she didn’t hold out much hope of his surviving for very much longer without proper medical attention.

‘Here comes the stretcher.’

Sally turned to see two ARP wardens hurrying towards her with it.

‘It’s going to be a while before we can get an ambulance to you. The ambulance service has been overwhelmed with calls,’ one of the wardens told her.

How long was ‘a while’? The man desperately needed hospital attention. Sally looked towards the empty flat-bed lorry belonging to the salvage crew and made up her mind.

‘We can get him onto the stretcher and then, provided he wasn’t the driver of the lorry . . . ?’ She paused.

‘He wasn’t, miss, I mean, Nurse,’ one of the men told her. ‘John here is the driver.’

John, bashful and very young, removed his cloth cap as he was pushed forward by the others, and rubbed a hand over his dust-covered face before confirming that he was indeed the driver.

The main problem, as far as Sally could see, was going to be the piece of glass firmly embedded in her ‘patient’s’ arm and which must stay there.

‘I’ll need enough men to get . . .’ she paused and John the driver supplied her patient’s name, as ‘Eric’, revealing two missing teeth as he did so.

‘. . . We need to get Eric onto the stretcher and then into the lorry as carefully as possible. I’ll stay with him and hold onto his arm and the glass. We need to keep both as still as we can,’ she explained to the men.

If one of the many newspaper photographers recording the devastation left by the bombs had been around, he would have got a photograph like no other, Sally thought ruefully when, in order to carry out her instructions, the salvage men, along with the firemen, formed a group to lift not only their workmate, but Sally herself, bodily into the back of the flat-bed truck.

Not that any of the men took advantage of that intimacy – far from it; their reluctance to look at Sally as they lifted her assured her of their respect.

Instead of an ambulance siren to speed their progress, an ARP warden rode with Sally and the four men who were holding down the stretcher, and the warden blew his regulation whistle to clear the way.

The only time they were stopped was when a policeman stepped out into the road in front of them, tilting back his helmet as he demanded to know why the warden was blowing his whistle when there wasn’t an air raid on. However, as soon as the situation was explained to him they were waved on their way with great alacrity.

Although Sally’s amateur stretcher-bearers had made a Herculean effort to keep the stretcher steady, when she could see the entrance to Bart’s casualty department ahead of them Sally felt very relieved. Eric was still unconscious and his breathing had become worryingly shallow and fast. Her own fingers were practically numb from holding his arm with one hand and the glass with the other, and she was praying that she could continue to keep hold. At least he wasn’t losing blood any more, thanks to the tourniquet.