Ambulance Girls At War

by Deborah Burrows

  Michael didn’t answer. He began to run, pulling me along in his wake, heading for the mock-Tudor structure in the centre of the garden. We reached its rough wooden pillars as another bomb began a screaming descent.

  ‘Where’s the damned entrance to this thing,’ he shouted, pushing at the doors in front of him.

  ‘Other side.’

  His grip on my hand was hard, uncompromising. He dragged me around to the shelter’s entrance, hauled the door open and practically threw me inside. We stumbled down a dozen steep steps and pushed open the doors at the bottom. A single electric light in the concrete ceiling revealed a large crowd of people sitting on rows of benches in a brick-lined room with bunks around the walls. They looked up at us in dull surprise.

  The shelter shook as the bomb hit the ground nearby.

  ‘Welcome, strangers of the night,’ said a man with a plummy voice.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Michael. ‘We’re glad to be here.’

  A portly gentleman in a shabby raincoat rose to greet us. ‘I’m the shelter warden,’ he said, in the same plummy voice. ‘I recognise you, miss. You’re from the Theatre Girls’ Club. And you, sir, are American, if I hear your accent correctly. Please, sit anywhere. I fear we’re in for a long night. All the bunks are spoken for, but we have some spare mattresses if you don’t mind the floor.’

  ‘Halliday,’ called out a voice I knew. I looked towards it, and Moray was sitting on a bunk near the entrance, with a newspaper propped against his knees. He was reading it by torchlight.

  I walked over to him and introduced Michael.

  ‘Don’t you wish you were on duty tonight?’ said Moray. ‘I know I do. It’s easier to be busy than to wait these things out down here.’

  I knew what he meant. Somehow, no matter how dangerous it was, when you were out in the ambulance you could push away your fear. You were just too busy. Sitting in a shelter was much harder on the nerves.

  Michael and I sat together on a wooden bench. He put his arm around me and I rested my head on his shoulder. Around us I heard bits and pieces of muted conversations, but the thunder of the guns and crash of falling bombs penetrated even the thick walls and concrete that protected us. The shelter quaked with each near explosion. And always the faint, sinister and unceasing roar of the bombers was above us.

  ‘Comfortable?’ said Michael, pulling me even closer.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I guess I was being a damn fool in that restaurant. But I’m trying to protect you, Maisie. I don’t want you to end up like—’

  ‘Vivian? I’m able to protect myself. And I’m not Vivian.’

  ‘No,’ he murmured into my hair, ‘you’re not. I love you so much, kid.’

  My heart gave a lurch. ‘No one has loved me since my mother died,’ I whispered, and his arm tightened around me.

  ‘I just want you to be happy, Maisie,’ he murmured.

  I said, slowly, ‘I really think we’ve a much better chance of being happy together than apart. And I love you, too, by the way.’

  He breathed a laugh. ‘You win. I’ll find a way to come back to you, I promise. And then we’ll see if we can make this work.’

  I might have been sitting in a smelly public shelter, experiencing the worst raid of the entire Blitz, but I was with Michael and we were in love. I felt a surge of pure happiness.

  The raid continued without the usual lulls. Instead, not long after midnight, we were shocked to realise that the roar of bombers had increased. As had the frequency of explosions. I could feel the fear in the people around me. It pressed down and deadened the atmosphere.

  At the beginning of the Blitz it had been a matter of pride to keep up the pretence of bravery. In nightclubs, even when bombs fell close enough to rattle the glasses, bands would up the ante and everyone would sing, shout, yell out the words to cheery songs until the siren, the guns, the bombs were all drowned out. But we’d been suffering through the Blitz now for eight months; defiance fades when one has to keep on being defiant, night after night after night. We all sat glumly and tried not to flinch as more bombs fell around us.

  ‘Must be hundreds of them up there,’ a man called out. ‘Mebbe a thousand.’

  ‘My God, poor old London,’ said another.

  The night of the tenth and eleventh of May 1941, came to be called ‘London’s Longest Night’ because, to those of us who lived through it, those seven hours of continuous bombing seemed never-ending. Pray God, London never endures anything like it again. Wave after wave of bombers came, hour upon hour, dropping devastation upon an already devastated city. At around three in the morning I became convinced that I would die that night. I knew, somehow, that the shelter would suffer a direct hit. Michael and I and everyone in there would die. I hoped it would be quick.

  I whispered my fears to Michael, and he murmured, ‘Won’t happen. I won’t let it happen.’ And, strangely enough, I felt heartened.

  Hours dragged by and still the raiders were above London. Their bombs were now falling so close together that there was no respite. We seemed to be in the middle of one enormous, never-ending explosion that juddered and rocked the shelter unceasingly. There was no singing, no sense of community spirit. We were a crowd of cowed people sitting silently in a box of concrete and brick, as the world outside was being blown apart.

  And then, after the longest night I have ever experienced, came what seemed like a miracle. There were intervals without the dread roar of engines. The noise of the planes grew fainter and eventually faded into the distance. The guns fell silent.

  The long, glorious note of the All Clear sounded. I checked my watch. It was six o’clock on Sunday morning.

  ‘We made it, kid,’ he said. ‘Told you we would.’

  Smiling, I lifted my face to him and he kissed me.

  People around us smiled. Some cheered, others wept. A man thumped his neighbour on the back.

  ‘We’re still here, mate,’ he shouted. ‘Still here.’

  I caught Moray’s eye and he gave me a thumbs-up.

  Michael and I climbed out of the shelter into Soho Square gardens to find it was a beautiful May morning, with clear skies and bright sunshine. Around us was a mess of charred wood from burned trees and shrapnel. Trees were uprooted and branches were down. The air was thick with dust and smoke and bits of charred paper and the smell of cordite.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Michael. ‘The king survived.’

  King Charles II still stood in the garden, hand on hip, surveying the wreckage with an elegant aloofness. The statue was not even chipped.

  ‘Kings usually do,’ he said. ‘Want me to walk you to the ambulance station? You’re due on duty in an hour or so, and you’d be able to grab a nap there.’

  ‘Could we look around first? See just how bad the damage is.’

  Michael shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s your town.’

  Soho was a shambles. It was hard going on foot. Cascades of broken glass still tinkled down from all the shattered windows. Shops were burnt out in Tottenham Court Road, a good part of both Charlotte Street and Old Compton Street had been completely destroyed by fire. The entire block between Dean Street and Wardour Street was a pile of rubble. Fires, or smouldering ashes, were everywhere we looked. It seemed that if high-explosive bombs had missed a building, it had been claimed by incendiaries or oil bombs. On all sides columns of smoke whirled up from fires and tongues of flame gushed from craters in the roads.

  ‘And we haven’t seen the City yet,’ I said, my eyes swimming with tears. ‘This is the worst raid we’ve had.’ I looked at Michael and said, my voice cracking, ‘London can’t take much more of this, you know. We can be as defiant as we like, but God knows how many died last night. And look at the damage!’

  ‘London will survive it,’ he said, taking my shoulders and giving me a little shake. ‘Yes, it’s bad, but London will survive. You Londoners kept going between September and December when there were raids every single night. You are able to face whatever is to come.�
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  My worst shock came as we walked to the ambulance station. Much of Bloomsbury had been hit, including Russell Square and Bedford Square. The ambulance station was located in Woburn Place, which was undamaged, but the buildings directly behind the station in Herbrand Street were now a pile of debris. The high-explosive bomb that destroyed them had missed the block of flats above the station by a mere fifteen yards or so.

  I’ve always cried too easily. Tears fell then, running down my cheeks, no doubt etching channels in my dusty face, the way Mr Denbeigh had wanted Lily to be filmed. Michael cupped my cheeks with his hands and wiped away my tears with his thumbs.

  ‘Promise me you won’t take any silly risks when you’re out there in the bombing,’ he said fiercely. ‘Promise me.’ He leant forward to kiss me, hard and possessively.

  ‘I suppose I can’t ask for the same promise from you,’ I said, gasping a little when he released me.

  ‘Nope. Sorry, honey. It comes with my job.’

  ‘It does with mine, sometimes.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I said silly risks.’

  ‘Promise me the same, then.’

  He laughed. ‘I promise not to take silly risks. I promise to come back to England as soon as I can, and to court Maisie Halliday properly when I do. And I promise to marry her when she’s twenty-one, if she still wants me to.’

  It was a lot of promises. I wiped away the last of my tears with shaky hands, and smiled. ‘She’ll want you to,’ I said. ‘She’s not an idiot.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that.’

  He left me standing there. A hug, a frantic kiss, and he was gone, striding down Herbrand Street past hoses and rubble, heading for Russell Square Underground Station. I stumbled into the ambulance station like a sleepwalker. It was close to the end of the shift and McIver was still on duty.

  She took one look at me, and said, ‘Don’t tell me. You were caught in the raid and spent the night in a public shelter.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘The heavy eyes, filthy face and slept-in-clothes appearance.’

  I smiled and brushed hair out of my eyes.

  ‘The shelter in Soho Square,’ I said. ‘Moray was there too. It was a bad raid.’

  ‘The worst yet in this Blitz. They bombed all over London – every one of the boroughs got hit. The British Museum is well alight around the corner. They took out most of what was left of Red Lion Square after the parachute bomb last month, and all of Red Lion Passage, much of Theobald’s Road, too. I hear that what remained of the City is pretty much gone, although St Paul’s is still standing. Westminster Abbey was hit and the Palace of Westminster – we’ve lost the House of Commons entirely. Holborn is in ruins, Finsbury, Romford and Hornchurch as well. They’re telling me there’s over a thousand dead, perhaps closer to fifteen hundred. Many more thousands injured.’

  I swallowed convulsively. ‘It’s even worse than I’d thought.’

  ‘My God, Halliday,’ said McIver, and her face crumpled. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of planes came over last night – more than five hundred, I’m told. They’d drop their bombs, go back to France, refuel and come back with more bombs, and they did it again and again and again. There were bombs coming down every two minutes. One plane let eight bombs go, one after the other. I counted them as they hit, just like you’d count Big Ben’s chimes, only it was bombs hitting London. How can there be anything that hasn’t been hit? You saw the incident in Herbrand Street? I can’t believe we survived.’

  I watched her, appalled. McIver was usually so stolid, so dependably cool, no matter what the crisis. I knew that last night she would have taken it all in her stride. It was the shock of surviving that had undone her. She took a breath, visibly pulled herself together, and gave me a smile. ‘But we did survive. Lord be praised.’

  ‘Are all the vehicles out?’ I asked.

  ‘All out. All frantically busy. You get yourself cleaned up and go to bed for a nap. You’ll be needed soon enough when last night’s shift returns from duty. And you’ll find Harris in one of the bunks. She was bombed out and arrived here an hour ago.’

  ‘How terrible.’ I shut up when I realised how trite that sounded, given what had happened last night. Harris was alive. So many others were not.

  ‘I’ll bring the kettle into the washroom,’ said McIver. ‘There’s no hot water, or any water. I filled every basin and bucket we had when the raid began because I thought it might be a big one. At least your shift will have water for tea and to wash your hands.’

  I turned to leave, and she added, ‘Ashwin’s spare clothes are ready and waiting for you.’

  As I washed in the meagre supply of hot water I thought how sensible I had been to choose the ambulance service as my job when I returned to London. I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Lily shook me awake at eleven o’clock that morning.

  ‘I know you didn’t get to sleep until after seven,’ she said, ‘but you’re needed. Armstrong hasn’t come in at all and we’re very worried because Moray can’t raise him on the telephone. You heard about Harris?’

  ‘Bombed out,’ I said, as I threw on Ashwin’s spare clothes.

  ‘Powell has offered her a bed, but she’s got grown daughters who will take her in. Poor thing’s worried about her old cat, thinks that this might all be too much for it. She says that she can’t lose Tibby on top of everything else and who can blame her for that? I’ve never seen Harris so close to breaking, I mean—’

  Lily was chattering almost frantically.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, putting my hand on her arm.

  Lily stopped walking and raised the back of her hands up to her cheeks, as if to cool them.

  ‘Oh, am I being silly? I’m a bit jittery today.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just that we were bombed out, too. It’s Jim’s second time, but my first. Oh, Maisie, it’s such a strange and horrible feeling. We came up from the shelter and found that our home – the entire block of flats – is now a pile of dust.’ She gulped in a breath, and gave a faint smile. ‘Well, not just dust, of course. There was lots of debris, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘Jim has a few friends who have moved out for the duration and left their flats empty. He’s ringing around. We’ll be fine, but there’s nothing left. No clothes, or crockery or – or anything.’

  She began to shake, and put her hands over her eyes. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to be such a mess. But it was so awful last night. All through the night, bomb after bomb, all falling so close to where we were. And you know how every bomb within five hundred feet seems to be falling on top of you. I knew perfectly well that the odds were against us being killed unless we suffered a direct hit, but I’ve seen direct hits on shelters.’

  She turned a tear-stained face to me. Lily, who was brave as a lion and rushed into danger without a second thought. Lily, who was to be awarded a medal for her bravery in rescuing a trapped family from a bombed building.

  ‘I thought we’d die, Maisie. I really thought it last night. It was the first time I’ve thought that, but the raid was so bad. I clung to Jim and prayed that if it had to happen, please make it quick and if Jim goes, take me too.’

  I put my arms around Lily and let her cry herself out. She pushed away from me, wiped her tears, took a deep breath and said, ‘Sorry. I was bound to begin blubbering some time. I’m glad it happened when I was with you. I’m sure Celia would think I was a frightful fool. Would have told me to pull myself together.’

  ‘No. She’d understand,’ I said. ‘And I do, too. I was in a public shelter last night, and I thought we would all die. It was the worst raid I’ve ever been in.’

  ‘So many people did die,’ said Lily. ‘We’re lucky. People all over London are making arrangements to go the mortuary to identify bodies.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘We’re the lucky ones.’

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sp; When I entered the common room Moray was in the office on the telephone. He saw me and waved as he replaced the receiver. He came to the office door.

  ‘Halliday. Good, you’re up. They’re still digging people alive out of the ruins in Theobald’s Road – Purvis and Powell have taken an ambulance load to hospital already, and Ashwin and Squire are there now. Harris took the saloon, but the warden has asked for another ambulance.’

  He held up a chit and I walked across to collect it from him.

  ‘Here’s the address,’ he said. ‘Get over there with Lily in the Studebaker right away.’

  ‘Any news of Armstrong?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t raise him. I’ll keep trying.’

  Lily and I exchanged looks. We were both worried for Stephen Armstrong, the ‘baby’ of the station.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

  ‘Finsbury. It took quite a battering last night.’

  As we were leaving he called out, ‘Eight hospitals were hit. We’ve been told to take our wounded to Middlesex.’

  Lily and I drove past Russell Square with its uprooted, scorched and blackened trees, some half-buried by piles of bricks. On the footpath, in the rubble of a ruined house, was a battered tin hat. I hoped the owner had made it out alive. In Southampton Row the damage became more poignant. A perambulator lay on its side, smashed and flattened, with a headless doll beside it.

  A little further on and the entire front of a house had been ripped off, revealing three layers of flats, each with different wallpaper. In the top flat a bedroom was on show, with two chairs still neatly place on either side of a double bed where a towel had been laid out, ready for morning ablutions that would never be taken; one floor down revealed a dressing table and wardrobe with a dressing gown still hanging neatly on the back of the door; in the next flat down the floor tilted dangerously. On it was a kitchen dresser pitched at a sharp angle, but the crockery it held was still in place, cups neatly on hooks. The table was set for breakfast that would not be eaten. It was like a crazy, life-sized doll’s house.

  We arrived at the incident to find piles of bricks, rubble, splintered wood and plaster that swarmed with rescue workers. Little was left of the houses that had been there. Just the external walls, with nothing between them but slats of wood from the ceilings. I flinched as a nearby building collapsed in a deafening roar. As it shuffled downwards it released a cloud of choking dust that mingled with the smoky air and caused me to cough almost uncontrollably. Through streaming eyes I saw the Warden approaching us.