Ambulance Girls Under Fire

by Deborah Burrows

  I free-wheeled down the ramp and rode over to the place where we propped our bicycles, beside the green five-gallon cans containing the station’s precious petrol. In front of me were the station’s ambulances, and also the cars we used to transport the ‘sitting’ wounded. The cars all had large white crosses painted on their bonnets and the ambulances had crosses on their roofs, but that didn’t stop over-enthusiastic Messerschmitts from using them as target practice.

  I dismounted, propped my bicycle against the wall and stood quietly to catch my breath as I glanced at my watch. Seven-fifteen. My shift started at seven-thirty, and because the station had moved to alternate twenty-four-hour shifts with the New Year, I would be spending the rest of the day and all of the coming night either at the station or out attending incidents.

  The previous shift were working on their vehicles, cleaning them after a hard night and readying them for the day ahead. Some ceased their scrubbing to wave at me. I waved back and walked over to an old Studebaker that had been converted into an ambulance by welding a box van body to the back. It was the ambulance that was usually assigned to me. Inside the body were fittings for stretchers and I now knew from bitter experience just how uncomfortable a ride it afforded for our patients. A pair of long legs encased in ugly brown trousers protruded from the back of the ambulance. Only Maisie Halliday had legs that long.

  ‘Good morning, Halliday,’ I sang out.

  The rest of Maisie appeared and beamed at me. ‘Ashwin. You’re back.’ Her smile faded. ‘All better, then?’ Maisie seemed unconvinced.

  ‘Well enough to work,’ I replied, touching my bandaged forehead. ‘Slight concussion. Otherwise only minor injuries, cuts and bruises.’

  ‘Gosh, you’re lucky.’ Maisie turned away to fuss around in the ambulance again. It was clean, because the previous shift had done its job, but Maisie’s duties as attendant required her to make sure all the first-aid equipment, bandages and blankets were there, ready for a call-out. Her voice floated out of the vehicle. ‘You were out of hospital quickly. I didn’t even have time to visit you.’

  ‘They needed the bed, so they chucked me out yesterday and I went back to my flat.’

  Maisie reappeared. ‘I was so scared when you were buried. Thank God for Dr Levy. He’s not much like our Levy to look at, is he? Even though they were brothers.’

  I shook my head, managed a smile. ‘No. He’s not much like our Levy.’ I gestured towards the ambulance. ‘I’d better check the old girl before they send us off.’

  ‘And I need more blankets,’ said Maisie. She ran off, heading for the storeroom.

  I opened the bonnet to check the water and oil and made sure the petrol tank was full and the lights were working. Next I examined the tyres, which were in reasonable shape after a night on the glass-strewn roads. All of this information was entered into the logbook. My head was still throbbing, but I could cope with the pain when I was busy.

  ‘All shipshape?’ asked Maisie, a little later.

  ‘And Bristol fashion.’

  Maisie nibbled at her lip, seemed about to speak, but stayed mute.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Did you hear that the old lady died? The one with the parrot.’

  I hadn’t heard that, and I sighed. ‘It must have been the shock, poor old thing.’

  ‘But – well, I’m worried. Whatever happened to Bobby? I know they rescued the bird.’

  A vision came to me of a parrot cage in my sitting room, and of the company a talking parrot would be. It might fill the blank, silent hours I spent there alone.

  ‘I’ll see if I can find out,’ I said.

  She motioned towards the stairs that led to the common room and kitchen. ‘And now I think we both deserve a nice cup of tea.’

  The common room had acquired a few comforts in the sixteen months since war was declared, including a card table, a dartboard, a bookcase and books and even a piano, but the room was always chilly, despite the oil heater and the rugs that covered the concrete floor. One end had been partitioned off into two rooms, a small storeroom and the office, from where ‘reports of incidents requiring assistance’ were telephoned through from Central Control. A window with sliding panes had been set into the wall between the office and the common room. Through this window the officer in charge for the shift would shout out instructions or hand over the chits detailing the incidents to the drivers and attendants. There were ten of us on each twenty-four-hour shift, including the station leader, Jack Moray.

  In my time at the ambulance station I worked closely with my colleagues but I knew very few of them at all well. I was not invited to anyone’s home, or to meet anyone’s family. Lily Brennan and Maisie Halliday were my friends. The rest were comrades. We depended on each other to get a difficult job done and did so on the whole with grace and good humour, but we were not friends. This means that when I describe those who worked with me in the station I am at a disadvantage. If those descriptions seem shallow, it is because I am unable to flesh them out.

  Moray was in the office on the telephone when Maisie and I entered. He gave me a wave through the window. Moray at that time was a dark-haired man in his thirties and attractive in a wolfish sort of way. He ran the station well but I had long suspected he was secretly as fascist as my husband, Cedric. It was something in his expression when Oswald Mosley or Cedric Ashwin were mentioned, and his refusal to publicly denounce Hitler. Of course, he was as appalled as the rest of us at the devastation wreaked by the Luftwaffe and he had risked his life on many occasions to save air-raid victims. But he did not seem to detest Hitler – known generally as that man – as passionately as did most Londoners.

  Nola Fripp looked up from the book she was reading when Maisie and I entered the common room and she gave us a tight-lipped nod. Fripp is difficult to describe, mainly because she was so very drab. Picture a rail-thin, rather mousy woman in her early twenties who dresses very well but wears her clothes badly. Someone who speaks in a quick, breathy voice, as if determined to get out all she has to say before the listener becomes bored. The type of person who avoids eye contact but gives the impression of always covertly watching you. Her father worked in the War Office and occasionally she made announcements about the state of the war that she ascribed to him.

  Fripp was not among my favourites at the ambulance station. For one thing, she was an anti-Semite who had made her dislike of David embarrassingly and publicly apparent. For another, when she had arrived at the station the previous July, she had pulled me aside to express her extreme admiration for Cedric and her horror at his incarceration.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ she had declared. ‘England never recognises true genius. They lock away a visionary like Cedric Ashwin and I just know they’re going to appoint Winston Churchill the prime minister.’ Her tone became chatty. ‘My father can’t see Churchill lasting more than a few months if they do. Says he’s a warmongering firebrand.’

  My response had been less than enthusiastic, which had disappointed her. I had rebuffed any other attempts at friendliness and now we were simply acquaintances.

  When Fripp had first spoken to me, Cedric had been in gaol for two months. For the first time in our marriage I was free of his influence and I was beginning to realise how tightly he had controlled my life. It’s a heady thing, freedom at the ripe old age of twenty-one. More importantly, my views on Cedric’s politics had begun to change. My brother had just died, and I could not allow myself to accept that he had died for nothing. Especially as the aerial battle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF, which we came to know as the Battle of Britain, was in full swing in the skies above us. We all knew that if our pilots lost that battle, German invasion would soon follow, and reports of the Germans strafing fleeing civilians in Europe, and murdering Jews and those who did not agree with Hitler meant that we had few illusions about what would happen in Britain if the Nazis arrived. So it was becoming crystal clear to me that Cedric had been wrong about Hitler and the war. What els
e had he been wrong about, I wondered? Less than two months later, David Levy transformed my views utterly.

  ‘Ashwin,’ Squire’s voice boomed out. ‘Glad to see you back, Duchess. Bee-yoo-tiful as ever.’

  I smiled at the man who, as usual, was hunkered over the oil heater. George Squire was a former boxer, not tall, but with big hulking shoulders and enormous hands. When we had first met, some seven months before, he told me that he had been brought up in Seven Dials.

  ‘I think you’d be more of a Belgrave Square beauty,’ he had added, ‘but I won’t hold that against you.’

  And, to my astonishment and my delight, he had taken a breath and sung out in a deep baritone voice:

  ‘Hearts just as pure and fair

  May beat in Belgrave Square

  As in the lowly air of Seven Dials.’

  He sang well, in an accent from the streets of that once notorious slum. I loved Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and Iolanthe is one of my favourites. So I had smiled at him and sung in reply:

  ‘When virtuous love is sought

  Thy power is naught,

  Though dating from the Flood,

  Blue blood! Ah, blue blood!’

  When I finished Squire had clapped a hand over his heart and swept me a low and flourishing bow. As he bent over his left ear was clearly larger than the other, and the cartilage was red and thick and deformed. I had seen my first cauliflower ear.

  ‘Ah, Duchess,’ he had said to me when he was upright, ‘I’ve a feeling that if we nicked you, you’d bleed blue.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I had replied. ‘It’s just as red as yours.’

  He had grinned and shaken his head. We’d been allies from that moment on. Another reason I disliked Fripp was that, although she rarely looked directly at anyone, she ostentatiously avoided looking at Squire as if the sight of him gave her pain.

  A chorus of voices joined his that morning and I was greeted with smiles and sympathy. I found myself a little overwhelmed by this show of support and affection, as I knew I was not one of the more popular members of the team.

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘I hear it was Levy’s doctor brother who kept you alive.’ Doris Powell raised her head and darted me an inquisitive look. Curly-haired Powell loved to gossip. ‘Now that’s a turn-up for the books.’

  ‘I thought Levy’s brothers were with the army in North Africa,’ said Alma Harris, glancing up from the mess of khaki wool on her lap. Harris was in her fifties, a brisk lady with iron-grey hair, a forthright manner, lots of pep, and a flair for organising things. She spent all her spare time knitting for the troops, when she wasn’t volunteering on a mobile refreshment car that provided tea and refreshments at a bomb site. That morning she was knitting a service helmet, with earflaps.

  ‘He told me his other brother is still in Africa with a tank squadron’ said Maisie. ‘But Dr Levy had a bad bout of typhoid and then pneumonia and was sent home to recover just before Christmas. So now he’s working at the Queen Alexandra – you know, the military hospital in Millbank – but he put his name down to help out with ARP in whatever spare time he has.’

  ‘You’re a full bottle on the bloke,’ said Sadler, who was playing patience in the corner. ‘Fancy him, then?’ He regarded Maisie with an appreciative eye. She returned his look coldly.

  Sam Sadler was an East London spiv, a wide boy with slicked-back hair and fingers in many pies, including the black market. Aged in his forties, he moonlighted as a dance-band leader at a nightclub in Soho, and apparently he was an excellent trombonist. In looks he was scrawny, with sharp features and plenty of nervous energy that kept his hands busy and his watchful eyes darting around.

  Sadler had avoided being called up because of an irregular heartbeat, a ‘dicky ticker’ as he called it, and I had overheard him tell Squire that he loved wartime because of the many opportunities for easy money to be made. A couple of months before, his best friend had been dismissed from the ambulance service for looting, and although it was widely assumed that Sadler was involved, he had never been charged. He seemed to have a steady supply of black-market goods and I suspected him of looting when he could get away with it.

  ‘Is he handsome as his brother was?’ asked Powell with a raise of an eyebrow.

  Maisie thought about it. ‘To be honest… no, he’s not.’

  Which is hardly fair, I thought, given that David was so ridiculously good-looking. Simon wasn’t unattractive, but his frowning intensity could be off-putting, I supposed.

  ‘Nice, though,’ Maisie went on. ‘He managed to make me laugh, even though I was so frightened for Ashwin.’

  I looked at her. ‘Made you laugh? He seemed awfully serious to me.’

  Then I recalled that Simon Levy had made me laugh, too. But that was before he knew who I was.

  Maisie smiled. ‘Well, I suppose there wasn’t much to laugh about when you were both trapped in the dark with a UXB next door.’ Then she said, with a touch of concern, ‘He’s getting a bit of a reputation for reckless bravery. One of the lads on the site told me.’

  The conversation shifted and I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the pain in my head as the voices rose and fell around me.

  Doris Powell was engaged in Careless Talk, as usual. ‘They say fifth columnists had spread petrol all around the City and that’s why the buildings went up so quickly.’ Powell was always mentioning fifth columnists, or spies, or was promoting some outrageous theory.

  ‘Nah. There weren’t enough fire-spotters.’ Sadler’s cockney accent was unmistakable. ‘The City was almost empty and incendiaries were able to take hold without hindrance. It was neglect that did for the City.’

  ‘It’s very easy to criticise,’ said Harris.

  ‘At least St Paul’s is still standing.’ That was Stephen Armstrong, a spotty seventeen-year-old who was waiting to be called up and was ruthlessly mothered by the older women in the station.

  There was a chorus of assent to his comment.

  ‘A land mine was dropped on the Temple, though. Did an awful lot of damage.’ Rupert Purvis was the station’s ‘conchie’, a conscientious objector. He was a pleasant-looking man of around thirty – an artist – with very bright blue eyes and a close-cropped beard that lent him a naval air. He had been raised as a Quaker and that was why he steadfastly refused to take up arms. I knew him to be a brave and careful ambulance attendant.

  ‘The guns went all night but not one raider was brought down,’ said Armstrong.

  ‘They do what they’re supposed to,’ said Purvis, ‘which is keeping the bombers high and forcing them to dodge and swerve and change their speed and altitude, so they can’t bomb accurately. It’s because of the guns that none of the bridges across the Thames has been hit as yet. Nor Battersea Power Station just across the river, or any other military objectives.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Sadler. ‘And so Jerry hits the East End docks instead. Because it’s an easier target. It’s just tough luck for them what live there.’

  ‘They knock down more pubs and churches and houses than factories,’ said Harris, ‘and more biscuit factories than arms factories.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose that’s good for the war effort.’

  ‘They always seem to manage to hit the City,’ said Maisie.

  Powell spoke up. ‘I heard that’s because fifth columnists placed a special box under the Bank of England. It lets out a magnetic ray so that the raiders know when they’re over the City.’ Any further comments were drowned out by groans.

  ‘Why’s it only work on moonlit nights, then?’ said Sadler. ‘Eh, Powell? I’ll tell you why. You’re talking a load of old cobblers.’

  ‘No need for nastiness,’ said Powell, obviously aggrieved. ‘We’ve not seen the worst tricks the Germans have up their sleeves. You know what’s coming next, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  She lowered her voice and said, in a hissing whisper, ‘Mustard gas.’

  ‘Honestly, Pow
ell…’ Maisie’s tone was exasperated.

  ‘You just wait and see. That’s why I carry my gas mask everywhere. Everywhere. Always.’

  ‘Tell you something,’ said Sadler. ‘I heard that the best thing a woman can do if she’s caught without her gas mask in a gas attack is to drop her knickers.’

  There was general laughter and some outrage at that, but Sadler spoke across it. ‘Nah. Minds out of the gutter, please. You soak ’em in water and then put them over yer head. Works a treat apparently. My old Aunt Millie said so.’

  ‘What a load of—’

  ‘Those Messerschmitts are bad enough,’ said Harris firmly. ‘The other day saw me running along the Putney High Street dodging machine-gun bullets, with no protection other than a shopping basket.’

  The thump of a distant explosion cut through the chatter, and sudden silence fell.

  I felt a quick stab of anxiety and opened my eyes to see Jack Moray enter the room. He was holding chits in his hand. Another explosion sounded.

  ‘Heavy rescue are dynamiting parts of the City to make it safe,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry us. There’s a motor vehicle accident in Leigh Street that needs an ambulance. Harris, Squire, it’s yours. Take the old Ford.’

  Harris thrust her knitting down the side of the chair, rose and collected the chit. She left with Squire.

  ‘Armstrong, you go with Fripp in the Buick – I’ve a mortuary run for you two.’

  During the day the ambulances were often sent out on ‘mortuary runs’ to transport bodies or body parts to the hospitals for identification and preparation for burial. Sometimes there was little left to bury, just fragments of what had been a human being. Sometimes we picked up bodies that were untouched, that looked as if they were sleeping. Blast will do that. It destroys the lungs and leaves everything else intact. I found that to be worse, in a way. To be confronted with what appeared to be a sleeping child, knowing that it would never wake, is truly awful. Surprisingly, Fripp managed the mortuary runs with remarkable ease. It was loud noises and personal danger that she couldn’t bear.