by Rosie Hendry
Victory for the East End Angels
Rosie Hendry
Victory for the East End Angels
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Copyright © 2021 by Rosie Hendry
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This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this publication, other than those in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Published by Rookery House Press
Cover design by designforwriters.com
For Tom
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Dear Reader
HEAR MORE FROM ROSIE
If you enjoyed Victory for the East End Angels
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Also by Rosie Hendry
About the Author
Chapter 1
February 1944
‘Ready?’ Bella glanced across at Frankie who was sitting beside her in the ambulance cab. Her friend’s face was shaded under the brim of her steel helmet, while the white letter ‘A’ painted on the front stood out in the pale, ghostly moonlight cast down by the full bombers’ moon streaming in through the windscreen.
‘Yes.’ Frankie nodded. ‘Let’s go.’
Bella put the ambulance into gear and pulled away, carefully steering it through the narrow archway that led out of Station 75 and onto the Minories. Turning right, they headed towards the Tower of London which stood blackly silhouetted against the red glow of burning buildings across the far side of the River Thames. Following a familiar route, Bella drove them further into the East End towards the incident that they’d been sent to.
‘Blimey, that was close!’ Frankie yelped, as a loud explosion in a neighbouring street made them both jump in surprise.
‘We don’t want anything closer than that, thank you very much.’ Bella aimed her words upwards, looking at the sky which was criss-crossed with searchlights trying to catch enemy planes in their probing beams. The drone of the bombers’ unsynchronised engines flying overhead, the sound of which always made Bella’s blood run cold, kept on and on, like a backing soundtrack to the destruction that was being rained down on London yet again.
After the huge, devastating raid in May 1941 that had ended the Blitz, there hadn’t been any big bombing raids and Londoners had once more grown accustomed to spending the whole night sleeping in their own beds instead of having to flee to the shelters when the air-raid sirens started to wail. The ambulance crews of Station 75 had become used to quieter shifts, but all that had changed last month when the bombers had once more turned their sights on London, and they’d been coming back regularly ever since. People had started to call it the mini Blitz, and how long it would go on for was anyone’s guess. Bella hoped it wouldn’t live up to the ferocity of the first one, which had mercilessly pounded London for months on end, leaving so many dead and injured, and changing the city landscape for ever.
‘I don’t think they can ’ear you,’ Frankie said.
‘I know, but it makes me feel better.’ Bella slowed as she reached the junction and turned left, bumping the ambulance slowly across some fire hoses that snaked across the street to where firemen were tackling a blaze in a shop, probably started by one of the many incendiary bombs that had been raining down tonight.
Finally arriving at the incident they’d been sent to, she saw that there’d been a direct hit on one house, hollowing it out of the row, like a missing tooth. It had caused several neighbouring houses to crumple in on themselves, spilling rubble out across the road. Bella pulled the ambulance over to the side of the road where the waiting ARP man signalled for her to stop. Winding down her window she called out to him, ‘What have you got for us?’
‘Three casualties pulled out so far, all alive, but there’s more in there. I ain’t so sure about them yet, they’re still trying to dig them out but it ain’t helped by them buggers up there still dropping bombs on us.’ He winced as another loud crump sounded from a few streets away.
‘We’ll start loading up the people you’ve already got out,’ Bella said.
He nodded and touched the rim of his steel helmet. ‘Right you are then.’
Bella turned to Frankie. ‘Here we go again.’
Outside, they slipped into a well-rehearsed routine, taking stretchers out of the back of the ambulance and hurrying over to the casualties, ready to quickly assess them; their job was to provide basic first aid and get them to hospital where they could be properly treated. Always, they had to make sure their patient was as comfortable, warm and secure as they could make them.
‘Hello, I’m Bella.’ She knelt beside an old woman who was coated in a thick layer of grey dust giving her a ghostly appearance. She was shivering, despite the blanket draped over her, not surprisingly as it was a cold night. Bella felt cold herself, despite wearing her greatcoat, scarf and gloves.
‘Herbert, my ’usband, ’ave they found him yet?’ the old woman asked, her voice croaky with dust.
‘I’m not sure, but the rescue workers are searching right now,’ Bella reassured her. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Joyce, Joyce Stephens.’
‘Well, Joyce, I just need to check you over to see if you’ve broken anything, and then we’ll get you in the ambulance and tucked up with some hot-water bottles to warm you up. Do you hurt anywhere?’
‘Me ankle.’ Bella gently felt her ankle and could tell that it was broken. She felt along the rest of her limbs but apart from scratches, bruises and the broken a
nkle, Joyce had come out of the bombed house relatively unscathed.
‘Right, I’m going to sort your ankle out, so you’ll be more comfortable while we get you to hospital, all right?’
Bella took some bandages and splints out of her bag and carefully arranged and secured them around Joyce’s ankle. ‘There you are, that should keep it from moving around.’ She took a label out of her bag and started to fill in the details ready for the hospital staff to use – Joyce’s name and address, the time of incident and the type of injury – then she secured it to a button on the older woman’s cardigan. ‘That’s so they know who you are and what you’ve been up to.’
‘Thank you, ducks,’ Joyce said.
After Frankie helped her move Joyce onto a stretcher, Bella tucked a blanket around her patient, and then secured the straps around her to stop her falling off when they moved her.
‘Right, you’re all tucked in and ready to go in the ambulance as soon as my crew mate’s ready.’ She looked over to where Frankie was attending to another casualty, going through the same routine, checking, treating and labelling ready for the hospital.
‘You nearly done, Frankie?’ Bella called over to her.
Frankie looked up and nodded.
‘You’ll ’ave a look for my Herbert, won’t yer?’ Joyce asked, pulling her hand out from under the blanket and grabbing hold of Bella’s arm.
‘Of course I will, we’ll just get you safely into the ambulance and then I’ll ask.’ Bella looked up at the ARP man who’d just come over from where the rescue workers were digging out more casualties and must have heard what Joyce had said. He looked at Bella and gave the slightest shake of his head, the meaning painfully clear – they’d now found Joyce’s husband, but the outcome wasn’t good, he was dead.
Bella nodded at him and swallowed hard. She couldn’t tell her, now was not the time or place.
‘Ready?’ Frankie said, coming over. ‘Shall we take this lady first?’ She smiled at Joyce.
‘Yes.’ Bella went to the head of the stretcher and took hold of the handles. ‘On the count of three – one, two, three.’ Together she and Frankie carried Joyce into the ambulance, where she tucked some hot-water bottles in beside her to warm her up.
After they’d loaded in three other casualties and while Frankie made the final preparations in the back of the ambulance before they left, Bella hurried over to the ARP man to check that she’d got the right message. ‘Did they find Joyce’s husband?’
‘Yes, poor fella’s gone, nothing any of us can do for him now.’ He nodded to where some bodies lay, shrouded in blankets; Joyce’s husband clearly hadn’t been the only one killed here tonight.
‘Poor Joyce.’
‘They’d been married for nearly fifty years,’ the ARP man said. ‘They was goin’ to have a celebration in the Blue Flag next week, my missus and me were goin’.’ He sighed. ‘You’d better get her to hospital, they’ll look after her and I’ll go and see her in the mornin’, tell her what happened.’
Back at the ambulance Bella checked in the back where Frankie would stay with the casualties on the journey to hospital. ‘Ready to go?’ Bella asked.
Frankie nodded. ‘We’re all set.’
‘See you at the London.’ Bella closed the back doors and went around to the cab, climbed in, started the engine and pulled away gently, doing her best to make the journey as smooth as she could, aware that every bump and jolt could cause pain to the casualties. She was constantly on the lookout for any craters or rubble scattered across the road that might jerk the ambulance, and that, combined with sticking to the strict sixteen miles per hour top speed that ambulances were allowed to travel, helped to make it a comfortable journey for their patients.
As she drove, Bella couldn’t stop her mind from thinking about Joyce and how she’d feel when she found out about her husband’s death after fifty years together – the poor woman would be devastated. Her life would never be the same again. Bella bit her bottom lip, aware of how that felt; she hadn’t been married to someone for fifty years, not even engaged, but she’d loved James dearly and when he’d been killed on that foggy Armistice Day in 1942 when London had been shrouded in a thick, dank fog, knocked over by a bus he hadn’t seen until it was too late . . . She knew how it felt to suddenly lose someone you loved. How much it hurt. And went on hurting. That was something Bella never wanted to experience again; she was never going to put herself in a position where that might happen. They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, she thought. Yes, perhaps, but she’d done just that and bore the scar. Bella wasn’t planning on repeating the experience – a career was a far better, safer path for her to take and she was already well on the way to it now that she was selling more of her writing to magazines.
‘Are we nearly there?’ Frankie’s voice coming through the grille at the back of the cab brought Bella’s mind back to the present.
‘Another five minutes.’ And then they’d hand over their casualties and go back to Station 75. Poor Joyce would have her broken ankle fixed, Bella thought, but the broken heart she’d get when she heard about her husband wouldn’t be so easily mended.
Chapter 2
Winnie stroked Trixie’s butter-soft ears while the little dog slept on her lap. She’d curled herself up and seemed oblivious to the sounds of the air-raid going on outside Station 75’s bomb shelter. She loved the way Trixie could go to sleep no matter what was happening. It was surprising that she could after what had happened to her – being buried in a raid under the rubble of a bombed-out house in which her previous owner had perished – but she seemed to have forgotten it and was now happily living with Winnie and being an unofficial part of Station 75’s crew. She wished she could switch off and go to sleep like her dog, it would make sitting here waiting so much easier.
‘Are you all right?’ Rose whispered. She was sitting next to Winnie and had been engrossed in a book since they’d come in here.
She nodded. ‘I’m still not used to these raids.’ She spoke softly so that only Rose could hear her. ‘I’m afraid I’d got rather accustomed to the quieter shifts that we’d been having. But I’m sure I’ll get used to air raids again if they carry on long enough.’ Glancing up, she saw that Station Officer Steele was looking at her, the older woman raising her eyebrows questioningly. Being Deputy Station Officer, Winnie knew that it wouldn’t do for her to show her discomfort, so she smiled back at the boss as if she were feeling perfectly at ease while bombers flew overhead and there was the distinct possibility of being sent out at any moment to an incident in the middle of tonight’s attack on London.
The arrival of the mini Blitz had come as a shock to them all, but they had no option other than to do as they’d done during the first Blitz and get on with the job. Glancing around at the other crew members who were sitting along the benches that lined the inside of Station 75’s shelter, she could see everyone was occupying themselves while they waited for a call-out: some people were reading, others playing a rowdy game of cards, a few, like Trixie, even trying to snatch a bit of sleep despite the noise of the bombers and crump of falling bombs.
The sudden jangling of the telephone made everyone stop and stare at Station Officer Steele as she snatched up the receiver and listened intently to the message. She grabbed a chit of paper and quickly began writing down the details of the call-out. Winnie knew everyone would be thinking the same question: who would be sent out to attend the incident?
‘Winnie, Rose,’ Station Officer Steele said without looking up as she finished writing up the chit.
Winnie looked at Rose as they stood up in unison, and the younger girl nodded back at her and smiled, knowing the routine well. Tucking Trixie, who’d been woken up by the telephone, under her arm, Winnie made for the door of the shelter, going out first to get the ambulance started as the drivers always did while Rose, who worked as the attendant, got the chit and found out where they needed to go.
Outside, the drone o
f the planes was even more ominous and when she glanced up into the moonlit sky, Winnie saw their black silhouettes passing over the pale face of the full moon; it sent a shiver down her spine. Trixie whined, and Winnie hugged her tightly.
‘It’s all right, Trix.’ She stroked the little dog’s head as she hurried over to the garages where the ambulances stood prepared and ready to go.
By the time Rose came out, Winnie had started the ambulance, pulled out of the garage into the courtyard and was ready to leave.
‘Any clue what the incident is?’ Winnie asked as she drove along, her hands clasped tightly around the steering wheel.
‘ No,’ Rose replied. ‘You know that there never is on the chit, only the address to go to.’
‘I know, but I’m trying to keep my mind busy, that’s all.’ Winnie winced as another loud boom from the ack-ack guns reverberated through the streets from the nearest gun emplacement. She wondered if they ever actually hit an enemy plane, but she supposed at least the sound of them blasting off made the people cowering under the falling bombs feel that something was being done to protect them.
