Survivor (31 page)

He shone his torch over where the steps
were and wondered how on earth she’d managed to get through it.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Help’s on its way, but tell me your
name.’

‘Mariette Carrera,’ she
said. ‘I live in Soame Street with Joan Waitly, she’s one of those still
alive. You must get her out, she’s got two children.’

‘I will, but first you must tell
me what it’s like down there. The more we know about the conditions, the more
chance we have of getting them out safely.’

She tried to get to her feet, but he
could see she was in great pain. He lifted her up in his arms, took her over to a
low wall that was still left standing, and sat her on it.

‘A wooden beam pinned us all down
on the right-hand side as you go in. Tom, the air-raid warden, is by the door.
He’s dead, and I think the couple next to him are too. Then there’s
Joan, my friend. I was on the other side of her. I managed to jack the beam up with
some bricks so I could get out, and to take the weight off her. Then there’s a
huge lump of concrete in the middle, hiding the people on the other side. And
another at the end of the beam, beyond where I was sitting. Aggie and Brenda are on
the left-hand side and they both spoke to me. But it sounded like they were in a bad
way. The door to the shelter will only open a crack. I managed to wriggle through
it, then I climbed up through the rubble on the steps.’

‘You’ve done well to
describe that so clearly,’ Feanny said. ‘As soon as an ambulance gets
here, I’ll get them to take you to the hospital.’

‘I’m not going until you get
Joan out,’ she said, shaking her head.

Instinctively he knew there was no point
in arguing with
her. He signalled to one
of the men to bring a blanket for her and then went off to start the rescue
work.

Mariette had no idea what time it had
been when she got out of the shelter, but it was likely to have been around three in
the morning. Yet, whatever time it was, it seemed like hours before the first rays
of light appeared in the sky. Twice she’d been brought a cup of tea, and
she’d given the names of everyone she knew in the shelter. Several ambulance
men had tried to persuade her to let them take her to hospital, but she’d
stubbornly refused.

‘I’ll come when they get
Joan out,’ she said.

As the sky grew light, she saw that
Soame Street was gone. Nothing remained but heaps of rubble with odd pans, items of
clothing and bits of curtain strewn about here and there. She’d seen similar
sights dozens of times before, and had felt deeply for the people who had lost
everything. But this time they were all people she knew; she’d been in their
little homes, knew about their children, their husbands and parents. Tears ran down
her battered face at the cruelty of war. What had any of these people done to
deserve this?

The sound of voices wafted through the
swirling brick dust and plaster, and she knew it was her neighbours returning from
other shelters and the tube stations. Shrieks of outrage filled the air as they saw
what had happened, the shrieks turning to wails of despondency as they realized
everything they owned was gone.

Some of these people came over to her,
wanting to share their despair with her, but, although she tried to console them,
reminding them that they were at least alive, she had her eyes firmly fixed on the
rescue workers at the shelter.

While she understood they had to remove
the rubble with caution, they seemed to be moving it at a snail’s pace.

‘Mari!’

She turned her head to see Johnny coming
towards her. He’d obviously just finished a shift as he was still in his
uniform, and his face was streaked with dirt. She tried to get up, but her legs
buckled under her and she was forced to sit down again.

‘Oh, sweetheart!’ he
exclaimed once he was close enough to see her injuries. ‘I heard at the fire
station that Soame Street copped it. Surely you didn’t stay in the
house?’

She explained about the shelter, and how
she’d got out. ‘I’m not going anywhere until I know how Joan
is,’ she finished up.

Johnny was well used to the diverse ways
people reacted to bombing. The traumatized ones who ran wild-eyed and terrified, the
shell-shocked ones who just sat and stared, and others who appeared to take it all
in their stride, only to break down later. He knew that there was little anyone
could do for them, other than dressing wounds, offering tea and a warm blanket, and
kindness; they would eventually find their own way of dealing with it.

But he knew Mari, and this war had
already taken more from her than most people had to face. She needed medical help
immediately; if her head and leg wounds were not cleaned and dressed quickly, they
would become infected.

‘Let me take you to the hospital,
before those wounds become infected,’ he said. ‘I promise to come
straight back here and help. And let you know the moment there is any
news.’

‘No, I’m staying,’ she
said stubbornly. ‘I’ll go in the ambulance with Joan, when they get her
out. She needs to know she’s got me at her side.’

He knew then there was no point in
arguing with her. That strong will of hers had always been the problem between them.
Perhaps his uncle had been right in saying he’d be happier with a girl from
the same background as him, someone
who
wanted a man to look after her, who wasn’t determined to do everything her own
way.

‘OK,’ he said, tucking the
blanket more firmly around her. ‘I’ll go and help the rescue team. But
will you let one of the ambulance men standing by at least clean those wounds and
put a temporary dressing on them? You won’t be any use to anyone, if they
become infected.’

‘Alright,’ she agreed.
‘But you take care in there, won’t you?’

After sending one of the ambulance crew
to see to Mariette, Johnny joined the rescue team and introduced himself.

They were almost down to the shelter
door now, but they had been constantly hampered by further loose masonry falling on
to the stairs.

‘God only knows how that girl
managed to get out,’ Feanny said to him. ‘We could see the hole
she’d got through, but it was barely big enough for a cat. Amazing what
determination can do.’

Johnny told him she was his girl, and
smiled grimly. ‘Well, I say she’s “my girl” loosely,
she’s a law unto herself. All I know is, she won’t go to hospital until
we get her mate out. So the quicker we do that, the better.’

Finally, the door was open and Feanny
led his men and Johnny in. But his initial impression was not a hopeful one. The
air-raid warden and the elderly couple beyond him were all dead. He shone his torch
further, to see the woman he knew to be Joan. But before he could get her out, or
the three dead, the beam trapping them would need to be lifted.

Shining his torch upwards, he saw that
further beams were resting precariously on lumps of concrete, and behind these were
the other trapped people. One false move and the whole lot could cave in. This was
not a purpose-built shelter that had been thoroughly inspected, it was merely a
large
cellar running beneath three
typical East End shoddily built houses. Before the war, it had been used by a
second-hand furniture dealer as a warehouse. One of the houses above had already
come down, and the other two could follow at any time.

He called out to tell anyone who was
still conscious that he and his team were in there now and would reach them
soon.

A faint response came from two women who
identified themselves as Brenda and Aggie.

Crouching over, Feanny made his way
carefully along beside the beam and reached over to Joan to feel for a pulse. She
had one, but it was very faint, and if she was to be saved he would need to get her
out fast. He could see the bricks Mariette had told him she’d used to jack up
the beam and get out, and he marvelled that she’d found the strength to do
it.

Feanny looked back at his men,
signalling where they were to take up their positions. ‘On the count of three,
lift the beam and move it backwards out of the door,’ he said. ‘Once
it’s out, you, Johnny, get your girl’s mate out and up to the ambulance.
There isn’t room enough here to use a stretcher. Ready! One, two, three,
lift
!’

A small amount of rubble moved as the
beam was lifted, but the men carried on undeterred. As soon as they had lifted it
clear of Joan, Johnny darted forward, picked Joan up in his arms and carried her
out.

Mariette rushed towards him as he
emerged up the steps. An ambulance man had got as far as cleaning her face, but
she’d pushed him aside when she saw Johnny.

‘Is she still alive?’ she
asked.

‘Yes, but only just,’ Johnny
said as he carried her to the ambulance. ‘Now go with her, Mari, and no more
excuses.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Carrera, but
there is no question of you leaving here today.’

Mariette looked up at the stern face of
Sister Charles, who had been called by the nurse because she was being
difficult.

She hadn’t meant to be, but the
moment she stepped into the London hospital in Whitechapel, the smell and the
injuries all around her made her feel sick. Then, when she was ordered to take off
her clothes and get into bed in a cubicle, she became frightened too, so she asked
the nurse to patch her up quickly and let her go.

Sister Charles was well over forty, tall
and slender with the regal air of a woman who expected to be obeyed. She pulled back
the sheet covering Mariette’s legs and winced at the sight of them.

‘I take exception to the term
“patch up”,’ she said crisply. ‘I would never allow one of
my patients to leave here knowing he or she hadn’t received the right care to
allow their wounds to heal well.

‘Both your head and leg wounds
need thorough cleaning and stitching, and I understand there is barely an inch of
your body without a laceration. You also need bed rest to recover from the ordeal
you’ve been through.’

‘I only wanted to leave quickly
because I need to help my friends,’ Mariette explained.

‘Well, you can’t help any of
them in the state you are in. From what the ambulance driver told staff here on your
admittance, I understand that you were the one responsible
for alerting the rescue workers to your friends’
plight in the shelter. I can see by your injuries what you put yourself through to
get them that help, and that was very courageous. But I am in charge here, and you
are going to do what I tell you.’

Strangely enough, that firm order made
Mariette feel easier. She didn’t actually know why she had insisted she wanted
to leave. It wasn’t as if she had a home any longer, and Johnny would turn up
before long with news of the other people in the shelter.

So she managed a weak smile. ‘You
sound like my aunt back home. She’s very fond of telling me I must obey her.
But can you just find out how Joan Waitly is? She’s the friend I came in with,
and she was in a bad way.’

Joan hadn’t regained consciousness
in the ambulance, and Mariette didn’t have to ask if her condition was serious
– that much was obvious. The nurse who travelled with them in the ambulance said she
was afraid she had internal injuries.

Sister nodded. ‘I will send
someone to make inquiries. But now I’m going to get all those bits of dirt out
of your wounds myself.’

A couple of hours later, Mariette had
been washed, stitched up and given pain relief. She was in a bed on a ward full of
women who had been injured in the night’s bombing. She felt so much more
comfortable that she even managed to convince herself no news of Joan was good, not
bad. She fell asleep and only woke at evening visiting time, when Johnny
arrived.

He had washed, shaved and changed into
ordinary clothes, but she could see by his drawn face and red-rimmed eyes that he
hadn’t had any rest.

‘Brenda and Aggie are here in the
hospital now,’ he told
her.
‘It looks as if Brenda might have a spinal injury, but Aggie has only cuts and
bruises.’

‘And everyone else?’

‘All gone, I’m
afraid,’ he said wearily. ‘If it’s any consolation, the doctor who
came into the shelter to see them thought they were all killed instantly. They say
there will be an inquiry as to why that cellar was approved as a shelter. But
that’s just shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

‘And Joan? Do you know how she
is?’

Johnny took her two hands in his.
‘I think you must brace yourself for bad news,’ he said sadly.
‘The force with which the beam hit her damaged a lot of organs. There was
extensive internal bleeding, and although they’ve done an operation to try to
save her, they aren’t very hopeful.’

‘Oh no!’ Mariette began to
cry. ‘Her poor children and her husband!’

‘I know,’ Johnny said.
‘It’s terrible, but then it is terrible for the families of those
killed. You know that better than anyone.’

‘There’s no sense to any of
it,’ she sobbed out angrily. ‘That family had everything to live for,
they deserved a better life together after the war. Why wasn’t I taken too?
That’s twice now I’ve survived, when people I loved were
killed.’

‘My gran, who was religious, would
have said that God has special plans for you,’ Johnny said gently.
‘I’ve seen lots of my mates die fighting fires, and I’ve thought
the same and asked why I was so lucky.’

‘I don’t feel lucky at
all.’ She turned her face into the pillow and cried hard.

‘I never do either, when I lose
someone I care about,’ he said, and he reached over to stroke her hair back
from her face. ‘But I am so very pleased you were spared. I couldn’t
bear it, if I lost you.’

The emotion in
his voice was unbearable. She couldn’t let him go on thinking of her that way
and imagining his feelings were returned.

‘Don’t say that,
Johnny,’ she said. ‘I can’t be what you want me to be. I love you
as a person, but I’m not “in” love with you, if that makes any
sense.’

She stole a peep at his face and saw he
looked stricken. She knew it was a terrible time to tell him such a thing, but if
she didn’t speak out now he’d be wanting to take care of her, finding
her a place to live, and before she knew it she’d be in too deep to ever get
out.

‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’
she said. ‘You are the best friend a girl could have. You are kind, warm,
funny and strong, everything a girl wants from a man. But I know you want much more
of me than I can ever give you.’

For a moment or two, he was silent.

She prepared herself for his pleading,
expecting that he might insist she was only saying such things because she was
upset.

But when he did speak, his tone was very
curt. ‘Well, I have to say, your timing stinks. But they do say the truth
comes out with drink or trauma. I’ll be off now. No point in spinning it out
any longer.’

He turned on his heel and just walked
away.

And Mariette cried even harder.

Sister Charles, who had attended to her
that morning, came into the ward just before ten, when the nurses were doing their
last rounds before turning down the lights for the night.

Mariette had been crying ever since
Johnny left, and she knew immediately she saw the sister that this was going to be
bad news.

‘She’s died, hasn’t
she?’ Mariette said.

‘I’m afraid so,’ the sister said, her voice soft with sympathy.
‘I’m told she regained consciousness fleetingly after her operation, and
asked the ward sister to give you a message. She asked that you be there when her
children are told of her death because you’d know how to be with
them.’

Further tears welled up in
Mariette’s eyes. She knew that message had been repeated word for word as Joan
had said it. She could almost hear her cockney accent and her desperation that Ian
and Sandra should never be in any doubt that her last thoughts were of them.

‘I am so sorry,’ Sister
Charles said, and took one of Mariette’s hands in hers. ‘Have her
children been evacuated?’

Mariette nodded. ‘I went with her
to meet them recently. Ian’s eleven and Sandra is nine. Joan’s husband
is in North Africa.’

‘The hospital will inform the
army, and they’ll get a message to him.’

‘The children are in Lyme Regis.
Joan wanted to move there, when the war’s over,’ Mariette said brokenly.
‘She used to daydream of a little cottage by the sea all the time. They are
such lovely, happy children and I so much wanted for her dream to come
true.’

‘I can see why she wanted you to
be with them,’ the sister said. ‘You have a big heart, and no one could
have done more than you did today to try to get help for Joan. When you feel a bit
better, write down all the things you loved about Joan, and when Ian and Sandra are
a bit older you can give it to them. It helps children who lose their mother when
they are young to know how other people felt about her.

‘I have to go now, I’m on
duty again at six tomorrow morning. But you’ll be in my thoughts and prayers,
Mariette. God bless you.’

‘You are as wise and kind as my
Aunt Mog, back in New
Zealand.’
Mariette sniffed back her tears and tried to smile. ‘That’s twice today
you’ve said something just as she would say it.’

The sister leaned forward, her starched
apron crackling, and kissed Mariette on the forehead. ‘I’d be very proud
to have a niece like you. Now try to sleep, my dear. You’ve had a day of
terrible shocks and sadness.’

The lights in the ward went out, except
for the one on the desk in the middle where a nurse sat writing up her notes. Her
back was to Mariette, but it was comforting to see her there, in her starched cap,
uniform and white apron, the guardian of all the badly injured women on the
ward.

Thinking about what nursing meant
brought back a memory of her mother and Mog discussing it as a career for her.
Mariette had certainly wanted to go to Auckland, but she’d turned up her nose
at the thought of bedpans, blood and vomit. Back then, she never thought beyond her
own needs.

Would she make a good nurse now?
Somehow, she doubted it. She might feel for other people now, but she was still
squeamish about wounds. Even looking at her own legs today had made her feel
sick.

At eighteen, she would have thought it
was the end of the world to be scarred. But now she wasn’t unduly concerned.
She had had six stitches in her forehead, there was a bald patch on her head where
they’d cut away her hair to put ten stitches in there, and there were a
further eighteen on her right calf and sixteen on the other. But as long as she
could walk and wasn’t in any pain, it didn’t matter.

When she got home, she would compare
scars with her father. As a little girl, she’d always been fascinated by his –
although he always told her a different ridiculous story about each one. Yet he
never would tell her how he got the one on
his cheek. But she would make him tell her the truth
about it when she got home.

If only she could go home. She had
nothing to keep her here now – well, apart from seeing Ian and Sandra. She had her
job, of course, and they would always want help in the rest centre at the old
factory. In fact, she would have to go there for herself now and see if someone
could help her find somewhere to live and give her some clothes. All the times
she’d helped other women sort through the dresses, cardigans and shoes,
she’d never imagined she would one day be doing that for herself. To think the
diamond bracelet Noah and Lisette had given her for her twenty-first was buried in
the rubble of Joan’s house! And all those other little things she had once
owned that defined who she was.

Everything gone. Photographs, letters
from her parents and Mog, little things Rose had given her. Clothes could be
replaced – though they would never be as nice as her old ones – but she was, in
fact, destitute. Even her savings account book, ration book and passport were
lost.