Ambulance Girls At War

by Deborah Burrows

  I pushed those thoughts aside to consider later. Right now I needed to decide where I would spend the rest of the night. My friends either lived with me in the club or were my colleagues in the ambulance service and lived too far away. It was long past the eleven o’clock lockout in the club and the late key had gone away with Ellie, presumably to hospital. Poor Ellie. I could only hope she was not badly injured.

  After a minute of feverish thinking, I was on the point of resigning myself to wandering around Soho to find an early opening cafe, when I realised that the answer was obvious. It was only a few hours until my shift at the ambulance station began and bunks had been installed there when we moved to twenty-four-hour shifts. I’d sleep at the station.

  Unfortunately, it was easily a half-hour walk away.

  ‘Needs must,’ I murmured. I squared my shoulders and set off briskly.

  By the time I was halfway along Wardour Street my steps had slowed to a weary plod.

  ‘Maisie,’ a man called. ‘Maisie, wait.’

  An American accent. I didn’t need three guesses as to who it was, and he was someone I really did not want to speak to, because I intended reporting Michael Harker to the police just as soon as I could. So I ignored him and continued walking. His steps were loud in the empty street as he came up quickly behind me. Then he grabbed my arm.

  Stupid move, chum.

  I swung around in an arc and thrust my elbow into his face, making sharp contact with his chin. He grunted, released my arm and took a step backwards. Then I linked my hands and swung around again to elbow him hard in the chest. He stepped back further, holding up his arms in a gesture of surrender.

  ‘If you don’t walk away immediately,’ I said, ‘I’ll scream the place down.’ My voice was clipped and angry, and I hoped he couldn’t see how shaky I was. I curled my hands into fists and dug my nails into my palms. The pain focused me. ‘I have a very loud scream, Mr Harker.’

  He had become very still.

  ‘I could ask you what this is about,’ he said, ‘but that would just rile you all the more, wouldn’t it?’ He sounded easy and friendly, but there was a hint of ruthlessness in that suave voice.

  I stared at him. ‘You looted Mr Egan’s body.’

  ‘I had a reason. A good one.’

  ‘I’m sure you did.’ My voice was sarcastic. ‘Let me see. What could it have been? Was it that he had something you wanted?’ I glared at him. ‘A nice watch, perhaps? A wallet full of cash?’

  Harker took a few breaths, as if trying to remain calm. My own breathing was fast and my heart was pounding. He’d looted a dead man’s body, but I didn’t think he was the sort of man to hurt a woman. So I turned my back on him and began to walk away.

  He said, ‘I know you think I’m a—’

  ‘I think you’re much worse than that,’ I said, without turning around.

  ‘Than what?’ He was following me, but keeping his distance.

  ‘Whatever you were about to say. I think you’re the lowest of the low. Scum.’

  ‘Maisie, I had a good reason to search Harry’s body.’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  I kept walking.

  He tried again. ‘I had to get hold of something he was carrying. I can’t tell you what it was, but believe me, I had to do it. That’s all I can say. Please, Maisie, it was that important.’

  ‘Go away. If you don’t stop following me I will scream.’

  The sound of his footsteps behind me ceased. I continued my walk to the station.

  CHAPTER NINE

  By the time I arrived I was stumbling with fatigue.

  I marched down the ramp into the station to find that all the vehicles were out at incidents and the only person in the place was Beryl McIver, the station leader for that shift. McIver, a cheery Scotswoman, wore her iron grey hair in two long plaits wound around her head, which I always thought made her look like a much older version of Heidi. She gave me a warm welcome when I explained what had happened.

  ‘Of course you can sleep here,’ she said. ‘But have a bite with me before you head off to bed. I’ve just made a fresh pot of tea.’

  I followed her into the common room and almost collapsed into a chair. McIver poured me a strong cup of tea and pushed a plate of squashed-fly biscuits across the table. I munched a biscuit and sipped my tea, and felt a little better for it.

  ‘So you were in the Café de Paris,’ said McIver. ‘I’ve heard it was pretty bad. Bathurst and Bydder were sent there on diversion once it was realised just how serious it was, but they haven’t returned yet to tell me about it.’

  ‘It was about as bad as it gets,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t see Bathurst or Bydder, but I think I saw Ashwin. And also Dr Levy.’

  ‘It’s just the sort of place Ashwin would go to. I hope she’s not injured.’

  I shook my head. ‘Ashwin looked fine,’ I said, ‘although her frock was in tatters. Lots of the girls were tearing their dresses for bandages.’

  ‘Dr Levy always seems to turn up where he’s needed.’ McIver smiled. ‘Lovely man, just like his brother was.’

  ‘Most people were wonderful down there,’ I said. ‘There was some looting, though.’

  McIver shook her head. ‘Soho gangs, no doubt. Easy pickings.’

  ‘Apart from the Café de Paris, was it a bad raid last night?’ I asked.

  ‘The worst since January. Buckingham Palace was hit again. There were a fair few casualties at Garland’s Hotel, and that’s where our other vehicles were sent. The Café de Paris was much the worst, though.’

  The room was beginning to swim and McIver gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘You look exhausted, Halliday. Go and get cleaned up and then get some sleep. Moray’s on duty in two hours. I’ll tell him where you are and how you spent last night. I expect he’ll not disturb you until mid-morning.’

  I nodded, rose slowly and plodded along the corridor to the women’s washroom. In the room were numerous pegs on the wall, each holding a black steel helmet with the letter ‘A’ painted in white at the front. The peg holding my helmet was over to the right and looking at it now I remembered the first time I’d worn it. How excited and happy I’d been to be able to help out in the war. How innocent that Maisie had been. I was still honoured to be a part of the London County Council Auxiliary Ambulance Service, but I had no illusions now about the horror of aerial warfare, the devastation it caused to lives and property. It was a dirty, bloody business, driving an ambulance in the Blitz. And there was nothing else I’d rather be doing.

  McIver hailed me and I turned to see her enter the washroom carrying a kettle. ‘Forgot to say, gas is off, so no hot water except what we can heat on the oil stove. Pour this into a basin and do what you can.’

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small bar of soap. ‘Courtesy of Sadler, so it’s probably black market, but much better than any other soap at the station.’

  I thanked her with a smile. It was kind of her to offer me her soap. Most wartime soap was such poor quality that it never formed a lather, no matter how hard you scrubbed, but this soap appeared to be good quality. When I gave it a sniff, it was scented with roses. Sam Sadler often had goods to sell that were probably of black-market origin. We all bought them, though.

  McIver looked me up and down. Her forehead wrinkled and she asked, ‘Do you have any clean clothes here?’

  ‘No.’ Unlike some of the others, I didn’t keep any clothes at the station. I had only two sets of trousers for work – one now with a badly sewn patch across the left knee – two white shirts, one blue tie and one pullover. I relied on my raincoat to keep off most of the blood and mud because we had to launder our clothes ourselves.

  ‘Ashwin keeps a spare set of clothes here.’ She gave me a knowing smile. ‘The shirts and trousers are tailor-made. Pre-war, of course.’

  We exchanged looks that said how nice it must be to have money enough for oodles of tailor-made shirts and trousers.
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  ‘I’m sure she won’t mind you borrowing some clothes,’ said McIver.

  I poured the hot water into a basin as McIver rooted around in one of the closets.

  ‘Ah ha!’ She said on a note of triumph. ‘Thought so. She’s also got a pair of pyjamas here. Just the ticket. And a spare pair of socks – you’ll want them. Her clothes are hanging up in here.’ She put a pair of folded flannel pyjamas and a roll of socks on the bench. ‘You’re both around the same size, I’d guess, although she’d be a couple of inches shorter.’

  ‘You’re sure she won’t mind? I hate to borrow her things without asking.’

  ‘Needs must. Wash it all before you bring it back, mind.’

  ‘Of course.’

  With a cheery grin, McIver left the washroom. I stripped off, flinging my dirty, bloodied clothes on to the floor. Shivering in the cold air, I wet a flannel in warm water, loaded it with soap and scrubbed at the dirt and grazes on my body until most of me was rose-scented. I finished with a cold water rinse that brought up goosebumps and made my skin tingle. It was invigorating to say the least, but not unpleasant.

  The difficulties and privations of wartime had not been so much of a shock to me as they seemed to be to those who had been raised in greater comfort. I had grown up washing with a flannel, hard soap and cold water from a basin.

  When I’d seen London’s East End slums I’d thought they were no worse than where I had lived until the age of twelve, in one of Sheffield’s notorious ‘courts’. My grandparents’ back-to-back house in Park Hill was one of a close-packed mass that clung precariously to the hillside. All around us was begrimed with smoke from the railway. We shared a cold water tap and the privies with the residents of the five other dwellings that clustered around our court.

  There was no electricity or gas and we used oil for cooking and lighting. Our front door opened directly into ‘the room’. In one corner was a door leading to the small coal cellar. In the other was a staircase that led to the bedroom where my grandparents slept. Above that was the leaky attic, reached by a pull-down ladder. Mam and I slept in the attic. It made me want to laugh out loud when Celia spoke of how cold her family pile was in Kent. She had no idea of what it meant to live through a Sheffield winter in that leaky attic.

  My mother had refused to let poverty defeat her and insisted that I was always as clean and well turned out as she could make me. We’d wash every night, as I had just done, using a flannel and a pan of hot water with a cold water rinse. And every Friday we’d visit the public bathhouse, where hot water was available in scalding quantities and where, for a few pence, we could soak ourselves in gigantic bathtubs.

  And yet, although we had been poor – very poor – in Park Hill, there was a sense of community in those grimy Sheffield streets that I had not found in London until the Blitz had winkled it out. It seemed to me that it was only when we all faced utter annihilation that Londoners were prepared to speak to each other in the street or on buses.

  By now I was so weary that I felt ill and a little hysterical as memories of the night kept pushing into my mind. I needed sleep. I pulled on Celia’s pyjamas, gathered everything up and stumbled to the women’s bunk room. I climbed on to a narrow bunk and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  When I opened my eyes it was nearly eleven o’clock. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and headed to the washroom. A quick splash of cold water on my face brought me fully awake and with some trepidation I put on Ashwin’s clothes. The shirt was too tight in the bust, and the top three buttons strained dangerously, seemingly ready to pop. I undid those buttons and pulled the dark pullover over the gaping shirt. Celia’s trousers were a good three inches too short and my ankles, covered in Celia’s dark woollen socks, poked out. Not an attractive look. At least I had my own brogues to wear. They were caked with dust and blood, so I grabbed some paper from the ladies’ toilet, wet it and rubbed them fairly clean. Only then did I head for the common room.

  I’d timed it well. It was eleven o’clock. Everything had stopped for elevenses, our mid-morning tea. When I walked in, Sadler, Squire, Armstrong and Harris were in the room. Through the sliding window to his office I saw that Moray was on the telephone.

  ‘New fashion,’ asked Sam Sadler, nodding towards my too-short trousers.

  I gave him a smile. ‘I’ve borrowed a pair of Celia’s.’

  George Squire’s big face was less jovial than usual. ‘We hear you were at the Café de Paris last night.’

  ‘Yes. I was there when the bomb exploded.’

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘As bad as it gets,’ I said, sitting beside him in a canvas chair. ‘Big bomb, confined space. Crowded, too.’

  He gave me a sympathetic smile and reached over to pat my hand. ‘Yeah. That’d be bad.’ He paused, then said quickly, ‘I’m worried about Ashwin. She’s not turned up this morning. You don’t know if she was …’

  ‘She was there,’ I said. ‘I saw her afterwards. She was with Dr Levy, actually. Don’t worry. Celia wasn’t injured so far as I could see. They’d been helping out.’

  Squire’s face relaxed and he gave me a smile. He was close to Celia, which some might think unusual, as he was a former boxer from Seven Dials and she was a blue-blood from Mayfair. Somehow, though, they seemed to understand each other and had become firm friends. Perhaps it was their shared love of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I asked him.

  ‘Purvis and Powell are on a mortuary run.’ He looked up as the door was pushed open. ‘No, here they are now.’

  They came in.

  ‘Back already?’ said Harris. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Watch out if you’re driving along Tottenham Court Road,’ said Purvis as he dropped into a chair. ‘That big crater – the one a bus fell into a few weeks ago – it’s been reopened by another bomb. Gas and water mains are all in pieces again.’ He looked at Harris. ‘I’d love a cup of tea, please.’

  She pushed it over to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I despair, sometimes. Too many people are accepting war as a normal condition of life now. They won’t go into the Anderson shelters because they’re damp and cold. Well, of course they are, but there’s no point being comfortable just before you die.’

  Powell also accepted a cup of tea. ‘Thanks ever so. Are there any biscuits? Purvis is talking about a family of four we picked up just now. They had an Anderson shelter in the backyard, but had taken to sleeping on mattresses in the front room.’

  ‘And that’s where they found them,’ said Purvis. ‘All dead together in what remained of the room.’

  ‘Lovely cup of tea,’ said Doris Powell, who seemed to be blinking back tears.

  ‘Blasé,’ said Sadler. ‘That’s the word. They’ve become blasé about it all. Think it won’t happen to them.’

  ‘What people need are those new shelters,’ said Armstrong, very earnestly. ‘Morrison shelters, they’re called, after Mr Morrison. A fellow in our street has one and I’m trying to get Mum to get one, and my sister as well. They’re supposed to be for people without a back garden, but I think we should all have one.’

  ‘They’re the ones like a big dining room table?’ asked Squire.

  ‘Yeah. But specially reinforced.’

  Sadler sneered. ‘So you’re stuck in them as the house comes down around you? Buried alive.’

  Armstrong flushed.

  I said, quickly, ‘Until light and heavy rescue arrive to dig you out. I think they’re a marvellous idea. Would have saved those people Powell and Purvis just picked up, I’ll bet.’

  The boy nodded vigorously. ‘Would’ve, you know.’

  Moray poked his head out of the door of his office.

  ‘I’ve some news,’ he said. ‘Ashwin won’t be in today. Like Halliday, she was at the Café de Paris last night helping with the casualties. She’s fine, but her husband was also there. He was injured, and she’s just received word that he died of his wounds.’

 
There was a moment of shocked silence. Celia’s husband, Cedric Ashwin, was notorious in London as being a high-up member of the British fascists. He was not well liked, some said hated, but Celia was one of us. It was difficult to know how to take the news.

  ‘Good riddance, I say,’ said Sadler. ‘That Ashwin, he were a Nazi. And who are we fighting? The Nazis, that’s who.’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Funny how it were one of his mate’s planes what dropped the bomb what killed him.’

  ‘His mate?’ asked Armstrong.

  ‘Hitler. Ashwin were a mate of Hitler’s. Even went to Berlin to see him before the war.’

  Armstrong’s eyes went wide, and he looked very young.

  ‘I’m not shedding any tears,’ Sadler continued, in a low, bitter voice. ‘Nor will Ashwin, I bet. She wanted to divorce him. They came to my club when I were playing there one night and you should have seen how he—’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Myra Harris sternly. ‘The man’s dead and he’ll account for himself to a greater authority than you, Sam Sadler. If we can’t have respect for the dead, no matter what they were when they were alive, then we’re as bad as the Nazis.’

  There was a short, embarrassed silence. Moray cleared his throat.

  ‘I also have some happy news. We’re finally getting a new officer, and it’s someone we already know and like. Lily Brennan, or Lily Vassilikov, as she now is.’

  That was very good news indeed. All the group knew Lily, who was a très petite Australian. She had worked with us until December, and was well liked.

  ‘Vassy-Vissy-what?’ said Sadler. ‘I can’t call out that name in an emergency. By the time it’s out she’ll have been run over by a lorry, or buried under a falling wall or something. Other stations use nicknames.’

  ‘Her husband is often called Vassy, I believe.’ Moray spoke slowly, and seemed uncertain. ‘But Ambulance Service policy is to use surnames. I don’t like nicknames.’