Ambulance Girls Under Fire

by Deborah Burrows

  The trip home in Simon’s little Austin took us through detours and dead ends. He drove in a silence as cold as the swirling snow outside the windows. The thin shafts of light from the car’s taped headlights could not illuminate all the potholes and debris caused by the raid, so it was a bumpy drive. Each bump caused pain to shoot through my head and I shivered, despite the blanket Simon had begged for me from Maisie.

  I slipped into a reverie and was jolted back to reality as I realised that the walls of Coram’s Fields loomed palely beside us. We were driving along Guilford Street. I never went that way any more. I would cycle the long way to and from the Ambulance Station rather than pass by Caroline Place, the short shattered row of terraces opposite the old Foundling Hospital grounds. The flat where David and I used to meet had been in Caroline Place. It was there that David had died.

  I hugged the blanket close around me and closed my eyes, trying to force away the vision that flashed into my mind: David lying still and cold on the floor of the flat.

  The car slowed and stopped.

  ‘That’s where he died, isn’t it?’

  I opened my eyes. Caroline Place was in almost total darkness, but the vague shapes of ruins could be discerned through the falling snow.

  ‘Yes.’

  My brother – my parents’ favourite – he died recently. We were very close, more like twins. I closed my eyes. Simon released the brake and we moved off slowly, bumping over some rubble on the road. I didn’t open my eyes again until the car came to a final stop outside St Andrew’s Court.

  Simon, holding his doctor’s black bag, came around to open my door and assist me out of the vehicle. I leaned on him as we walked slowly up the front step, but once he had pushed the doors open and ushered me into the lobby, I shook off his hand. Standing without support, the room seemed to sway and I was forced to cling to the doorjamb until the dizziness resolved. I looked up at Simon, who offered me his arm. I hesitated, then gave way under his sardonic gaze. Accepting the inevitable, I took hold of his arm. Ahead of us were the stairs, which swept around the small but elaborate lift that dominated the centre of the lobby. Leaning heavily on him I walked towards the lift.

  The lift stopped at my floor with a jerk that seemed to split my head in two and I led him along the narrow passage to my door. There I tried and failed to insert the key with hands that shook like those of a drunk with the delirium tremens. Simon waited with a kind of neutral patience.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘would you? My hands are stupidly unsteady.’

  He took the key from me, opened the door and followed me inside. My flat was small, but the sitting room was a good size and I loved the balcony that was reached through French doors from the bedroom. There was also a tiny kitchen – more a kitchenette – and a small bathroom.

  The blackout blinds were still in place from when I had left for work early the morning before, so I switched on the light. It revealed a neat sitting room, one with few keepsakes or indicators of my taste. A bland, careful room. One that kept its secrets. When I had moved there from the town house in Mayfair, I left behind anything that had belonged to Cedric, almost everything in the house. I should have taken more, because a bomb hit the house four months later and what wasn’t destroyed in the blast was burned in the resulting fire. Since joining the ambulance service I’d had no time or inclination to shop for personal items.

  ‘There’s a first-aid kit in the bathroom,’ I said.

  He gestured towards his black bag. ‘I’ve got all I need. Please sit down. I’ll be ready in a minute.’

  The bag was deposited in the bathroom and he went to the kitchen. I sat quietly, trying to ignore the throbbing in my head, concentrating on presenting an unruffled demeanour. Head high and walk tall. Inside, I was squirming with embarrassment. I knew I had behaved badly, and I was ashamed of myself. Simon Levy had been trying to help me and although I found his concern intrusive, I should have responded graciously.

  Simon was opening cupboards and moving around in the kitchen. There was some hesitation, where he obviously had to search for an implement or vessel, but on the whole his movements were sure and unhurried. Then the sound of water filling a pot and the crump of the gas being lit. After a while he emerged with a saucepan of boiling water and carried it into the bathroom. A second or so later he appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Please, come in,’ he said.

  I entered the bathroom. Simon was standing by the washbasin in his shirtsleeves. He had laid out gauze, bandages, tweezers and a small pair of scissors. A basin of steaming water that smelled of antiseptic was in the bath. Its metallic smell competed with the sulphurous odour of the open bandages. I sat down carefully on the edge of the bath.

  He unwound my bandage and, with painstaking care, cut away the stitches and washed the wound with warm water. He was a careful, gentle nurse, but it was all I could do not to scream with the pain he caused.

  ‘This may sting,’ he said, turning away to drench a piece of gauze in a liquid I assumed was antiseptic.

  ‘Why do doctors, nurses and ambulance officers always say that,’ I replied tartly, ‘when we all know perfectly well that it will hurt like blazes?’

  He smiled as he picked up the sodden gauze with the tweezers.

  ‘This will sting,’ he said, and laid it on the wound. I had gritted my teeth in anticipation of the pain, but could not help flinching. He pulled back and paused, until I nodded to indicate that he should continue. Fifteen minutes later it was done, and I was a shaking mess. Simon’s hands were steady as he restitched the wound and rebandaged my forehead, but he was holding his lips tightly and a sharp crease had appeared between his eyebrows.

  I raised my hand to the bandage. The wound was at the scalp line, on the left side, where I usually parted my hair.

  ‘Will I be I scarred for life?’ I asked. I said it lightly, meaning it as a joke.

  Simon closed his black bag with a snap. ‘I think you probably need a scar.’

  ‘Why? Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘For your own protection.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t they say God dislikes perfection?’

  When he looked at me his expression gave the game away.

  ‘You’re joking, you beast.’ Without thinking I playfully punched his arm.

  He smiled at me as he rubbed the spot. It was a sudden, very attractive smile similar to that he had given the tea-car girls. It lit his face with mischief, so that he looked like a schoolboy caught out in a joke who was a little abashed at his temerity. I realised with some surprise that it was the first time he had ever smiled at me.

  And then – it was as if I could read each thought as it came into his mind – he remembered I was not simply an ambulance girl, ripe for teasing and sharing a light-hearted moment in dark times, I was his dead brother’s married lover, who had been the last person to see David alive and whose cowardice had caused such grief to his parents. The shutters descended and his expression reverted to the rather sullen wariness he had always displayed towards me.

  ‘No need to worry,’ he said briskly. ‘There will be a slight scar, I expect, but you’ll still be a beautiful woman.’

  It took talent to make the compliment sound so insulting.

  ‘Come back into the sitting room,’ he said. ‘I’ll dissolve an aspirin powder in water for you. It should help to relieve the fever and headache. Then you should go straight to bed.’ Then he added, without any inflection at all in his voice, ‘And get your beauty sleep.’

  He disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later, holding a glass of water that was opaque with dissolved aspirin.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding out the glass. ‘Drink this. You’ll feel better for it.’

  I sipped the mixture, coughing a little as small particles caught in my throat. When I looked up Simon was leaning forward in his chair, regarding me with a frowning intensity, looking much like a younger version of his father. David had taken after their beaut
iful mother.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For…’ I lifted my hand to brush the bandage. Then, for a reason I didn’t stop to analyse, I held out my hand to him.

  ‘Pax?’ I said, invoking the schoolboy’s way to show hostilities had ended.

  He sat still, looking at my outstretched hand. It trembled a little, but I did not pull back. Eventually he sighed and took hold of it. His handshake was firm, formal, uncompromising. He had not said ‘Pax’ in reply, and I felt like a fool.

  We sat in silence as I finished my drink.

  ‘I must be going,’ he said, rising in one quick movement and reaching for his black bag. ‘I’m due at the hospital in a few hours. Be sure to go straight to sleep.’ A pause. ‘Any scar on your forehead will soon fade. Really, it will be nothing to worry about.’ His voice took on a brusque note. ‘That is, if you take care of yourself and get rid of that infection. No, please don’t get up. I can see myself out.’

  The aspirin did take the edge of the pain in my head, but I found it hard to sleep that night, and I found myself fervently hoping that I would not meet Simon Levy again at an incident. Or anywhere else for that matter.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lily Brennan and Jim Vassilikov arrived the following evening with first-aid supplies and Lily announced that she had spoken to Simon Levy, who had asked her to dress my head wound.

  Australian Lily was a tiny sprite with brown curls and a delightful smile who seemed delicate but was tough as steel. She was one of the few people who know about my affair with David. Jim was around a foot taller than Lily, a tall, fair-haired man with a strong, aquiline nose, obvious intelligence in his deep-set grey eyes and the bare hint of the Slav in his cheeks. Although he still wore the blue-grey RAF uniform that Londoners so loved, he no longer flew due to injuries sustained when his Hurricane was shot down in November 1940. Without knowing his surname, it was difficult to pick his antecedents, as his type of blond diffidence was as equally common in Berlin as in London. In fact, he was a White Russian aristocrat who escaped Bolshevik Russia as a small child and spent the next two decades becoming as English as John Bull.

  I had known and liked Jim since I was fourteen, when he was at Cambridge and stepped out with my sister Helen. I was there when Jim first met Lily in the St Andrew’s lobby three months before. Lily had tumbled inside on a gust of wind, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. Her face had been grimy after a hard shift, but she lit up the room with her hundred-watt smile. Jim hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. It was obvious to everyone there that he was besotted. Except Lily, who could be remarkably obtuse on occasion.

  ‘This may hurt,’ said Lily, as she pulled away the bandage. She grimaced apologetically at my gasp of pain. ‘Sorry. Let’s have a closer look. My word, it looks a lot better than Simon led me to believe. I think it’s healing nicely.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘Dr Levy made a terrible fuss over nothing.’

  Lily exchanged a look with Jim, and then they both looked at me. I had an impression of Lily’s eyes, that always seemed to sparkle, and Jim’s measured grey gaze. I looked down, annoyed at myself for my rudeness about Simon and wondering why he brought out the worst in me.

  ‘Well,’ said Lily, picking up the soaked gauze, ‘I’m very pleased to see it’s healing. Simon told us you were barely able to stand up.’

  I gasped at the pain as she laid the iodine-soaked gauze on the wound, then said hotly, ‘That’s sheer exaggeration. I could have finished my shift, but he was ludicrously insistent. He’d do much better to mind his own business in future.’

  ‘You really don’t like Simon, do you?’ said Lily.

  I looked up and held her gaze. I remembered how brave Simon had been to insist on being lowered into the narrow hole to administer morphine to Joe Gardiner, and his kindness to me when I was fractious and ill. His refusal to acknowledge my offering of peace. His comments just before he left.

  ‘Oh, I know I owe him a great deal and he’s obviously a good man. But he dislikes me. I think he can’t forgive me for David’s death.’

  ‘Give him time,’ said Jim, reaching into his tunic. ‘We picked up your afternoon post downstairs.’

  He handed me two letters. One was from Moray. The other from Cedric, sent from the Isle of Man, where his internment camp was located. The postmark was dated three weeks earlier and on it was stamped ‘Delayed due to Enemy Action’. I set it aside to read when I was alone. In all of my now irregular letters to Cedric I asked him for a divorce, but he had remained implacably opposed to the idea and I did not hold many hopes that he would have changed his mind.

  The usual form in a divorce case was for the husband to admit to adultery in an affidavit. Just one of Cedric’s many affairs would form the basis for a divorce, but without Cedric’s affidavit I had no proof that a court would accept. I did not want to admit to my affair with David. If Cedric divorced me on that basis it would be embarrassing for the Levys and humiliating for me, and there was no guarantee that Cedric would bring divorce proceedings against me even if I did. If I refused to return to Cedric then he could divorce me for desertion after three years, but I doubted that he would do so unless he wanted to remarry. I had no grounds to seek a divorce for cruelty. There were no other options open to me. My greatest fear was that Cedric would never allow me a divorce and I would be married but not married, unable ever to get on with my life.

  ‘Do you mind?’ I asked, holding up Moray’s letter. At their nods, I opened it. Moray wrote that he had spoken to Dr Levy that morning, who said I was not to return to work until Saturday at the earliest. Although Moray appreciated my devotion to the ambulance service, if I came back any earlier I would be sent home immediately. Which was annoying, as I felt remarkably improved after a long sleep and a day spent lounging around my flat.

  The upward wailing notes of the Warning split the air.

  ‘Do you want to take shelter?’ I asked.

  They shook their heads. I knew why. St Andrew’s was a solid building, we were sitting away from the windows and, like me, Lily and Jim preferred to remain put rather than scurry down to the basement shelter during an air raid.

  ‘I’ll make a pot of tea,’ said Jim. He held up a paper bag. ‘Brought our own supply.’

  ‘And we’ve brought biscuits,’ added Lily.

  Jim disappeared into my kitchen and a short while later, as the roar of German aircraft competed with the thump of the guns and the crump of falling bombs, we were sipping tea and munching biscuits and discussing a parrot.

  ‘I simply can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘You’ve found Bobby?’

  ‘Not quite yet, but we will,’ said Lily. ‘The parrot deserves a good home. After all, he saved your life by calling out and letting the rescuers know where you were.’

  I gave an involuntary shudder at the memory of those long hours in the darkness. ‘So he should have,’ I said. ‘I was trapped only because I’d tried to save the bird. But how—’

  Jim smiled. ‘You know what Lily is like once she gets the bit between her teeth. She went to the ARP warden – dragging me along with her – and demanded to know what he’d done with the thing.’

  Lily laughed. ‘Jim loomed over the poor man and cross-examined him until he admitted he’d sold it to a bird seller in Club Row.’

  ‘The bird market?’ I had visited Club Row in Shoreditch as a child. Images came to mind of birds squawking and tweeting in cages piled up along grimy stone-fronted shops. ‘That can’t still be operating, not with the bombing.’

  ‘Apparently the little shops are still open,’ said Jim, ‘but the street market has shut for the duration. According to the warden, Bobby is at the shop of Ephraim Tulloch.’

  ‘Well, I doubt Mr Tulloch has sold the bird,’ I said. ‘Poor Bobby was practically bald.’

  Outside, the raid had increased in intensity. A loud explosion shook the room, and we all flinched. I put my cup and saucer on the small table in front of me. ‘That was close.’r />
  Jim shook his head. ‘At least a mile away. Jerry’s hitting the City again, I suspect.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ said Lily. ‘It’s all gone.’

  ‘It’s not been utterly annihilated,’ protested Jim.

  ‘Give them time.’

  I decided to bring the conversation back to more cheerful matters. ‘What on earth are you going to do with the parrot if you do get hold of it?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘I’ll have to find it a new owner. Fancy a parrot?’ Her accent broadened. ‘It’ll make a bonzer pet.’

  ‘You don’t want to keep it yourself?’

  She threw Jim a sly smile. ‘Jim says a mouthy parrot is not conducive to marital bliss. His words, not mine.’ Her smile became wider. ‘And we’ll be married in less than three weeks. Someone will take Bobby, I’m sure.’

  Without giving the matter any real consideration, I found myself saying, ‘I’ll take him.’

  Lily threw Jim a look as if to say, ‘I told you she would.’

  To me she said, ‘Good-oh. Bobby will be company for you. No one can mope with a parrot around. We had a gorgeous cockatoo in Kookynie when I was a child and it picked up all sorts of funny sayings. I’ll teach Bobby some Australian slang and you’ll laugh—’

  ‘Like a parrot at a bagpiper,’ said Jim.

  Lily and I both stared at him.

  ‘Shakespeare,’ he said, with more than a little smugness. ‘The Merchant of Venice.’

  ‘Don’t show off, darling,’ said Lily.

  Three whistling, ripping noises cut through the ceaseless drone of German aircraft, and a minute later the room shook three times in quick succession. A stick of bombs had landed, much closer than before. When I lifted my teacup to my lips my hand trembled. This worried me. I had always found air raids exhilarating, rather than terrifying. Had my time buried underground turned me into a coward?