Blitz - Book 4 of the Poppy Chronicles

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Oh, I’ll work, Sister,’ Puncheon said, with the sort of radiant and self-sacrificing smile on her face that always made Chick mime violent vomiting. ‘It’s no trouble to – ’

  ‘No, Staff Nurse,’ Sister Marshall said firmly. ‘I have made the arrangement I want. Nurses Chester and Bradman, you are due on night duty, are you not? Take tonight off, and report on Wednesday night. I will deal with Matron’s office on that. You are both to go to Casualty. Take care of yourselves down there. It won’t be as easy as it was here, you know.’

  ‘No, Sister,’ said Chick and glowed, tired as she was, and Robin was amused. Old Chick loved to be where the biggest hubbub was, adoring the busyness of Casualty, though Robin herself shrank from it; anything could come in through the great doors to the vast tiled waiting hall, any sort of injury and any sort of danger; but if Chick was to be there too, she told herself, she could cope well enough – perhaps.

  ‘ – if you don’t mind, Nurse Bradman.’ She heard Sister Marshall’s voice and realized she had been talking to her and reddened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister, I was – I didn’t hear.’

  ‘That was very apparent. Go to bed, nurse, at once. I’ve told the rest of you when to return on duty. Now go and have a good breakfast and take care of yourselves. You’ll need all the energy you’ve got to see you through the rest of these difficult days. But it’s all excellent training for you. Make the most of it.’

  And Robin again managed not to laugh aloud at the familiarity of Sister Marshall’s harangue and went gratefully trailing over to the Nurses’ Home for the bath and bed she so ached for. It had been another hellish night, but they’d survived it. They could again.

  2

  Considering how exhausted she had been when she had fallen into bed at seven, Robin slept poorly. The noise from the streets outside made by the lorries and fire appliances still trying to deal with the effects of last night’s raids, and the heat of the September afternoon that built up steadily in her small room on the ground floor of the Nurses’ Home, combined to make her toss restlessly and dream fitfully. And at two in the afternoon she gave up the struggle, and rolled over on to her back to lie with hands clasped behind her head, staring at the golden glowing blind over her window, and letting confused thoughts drift in and out of her head.

  She’d never get any studying done for the Anatomy and Physiology exam, she told herself, and considered for a while getting up and spending the rest of the day studying till it was time to go on duty; and then banished the idea as fast as it had come. The work would have to be done eventually, air raids or no air raids, with the October exams looming, but she couldn’t be expected to do any work today, not after last night’s efforts, shaky though her knowledge was of the heart, its arteries and nerve supply and the structure and function of the eye. Maybe they’d have a quiet night on Casualty and she’d be able to do some then, she thought optimistically; and then grinned at herself in the dim afternoon light. Quiet, on Casualty, in these incredible days? A ridiculous notion.

  Her mind drifted away; she should have phoned Ma before falling into bed, weary as she had been; Ma always fretted so when there were raids – and when weren’t there, these nights? – and she’d be getting herself into a proper lather. I’ll call her soon, Robin promised herself drowsily, and let a picture of her mother and the Norland Square house unfold in front of her eyes. The small room on the second floor that was hers with all her childhood dolls and books still scattered about; the nursery at the top of the house, with its rocking horse and doll’s house, and the contrast of the drawing room on the first floor, with its exotic, if now rather shabby, decor of Bakst fabrics and Eastern cushions. Her own father had designed that room, Ma had told her, and both she and David wanted to keep it that way as long as they could, though it had been done so long ago – before the First War even, the Great War, as they called it. Ha! thought Robin, remembering last night; it couldn’t have been greater than this one, and went on with her memory’s tour of the house that was home. She ended in the comfortable cluttered kitchen down in the basement with its scrubbed wooden table and the old rag rug, washed almost white now, in front of the shiny blackleaded range, and old Goosey pottering about and making a fuss of everyone who came within reach. Robin’s lips curved; dear old Goosey must be over eighty now, and still thinking she ran the house for her beloved Mrs Poppy and Mr David and the children, when in reality she was as much a burden to Poppy as a help. Not that anyone would ever dream of letting the old darling know that. Her place in the Deveen family was too important for that.

  Deveen, thought Robin and yawned. Would I like to be called Robin Deveen now? They’d asked her, just after they’d married, what she wanted to do. She could have changed her name to match her stepfather’s and mother’s if she chose; but even at the age of only eight she’d known what she wanted.

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair, would it, David?’ she’d said, and the grown-up Robin, in her crumpled hot bed in the Nurses’ home in Whitechapel Road could almost hear her own childish treble in her memory’s ears. ‘I mean, I know I never saw my father and he never saw me, but he was my father. Mummy explained about that. It wouldn’t be right, would it? Not after him being in the Great War and everything.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right about that, Robin.’ David had said gravely. ‘I couldn’t agree more. You are absolutely right. But I’ll tell you what – you can borrow my name if you ever need it. Okay? There may be times when it could come in handy to have another label to use. You never know.’

  Robin had laughed at the time, quite convinced that was just another of David’s sillinesses, but he’d been right. There had indeed been lots of times, when Chloe was being particularly ghastly, when Robin had yearned to stop being a Bradman, the way Chloe was, and had wished to be a Deveen like David and Ma. Like the time Chloe had got divorced; and at that memory Robin turned over in bed with a convulsive movement and tried to banish Chloe from her mind.

  But she wouldn’t go and Robin lay curled on her side, still staring at the oblong of golden blind and thought about Chloe. So beautiful, so selfish, so unkind, so thoughtless, the nastiest sister – well, half-sister – anyone could possibly have. The divorce had been awful because Chloe, out of sheer horridness, according to fourteen-year-old Robin, had reverted to her single name, and plastered it all over the newspapers. Going to school all through that summer had been frightful, simply frightful. The other girls had stared at her and whispered as one nastiness after another came out in court and was published with lip-smacking relish in papers like the Daily Mirror (oh, the shame of it!) and the Daily Sketch (oh, the even greater shame!). Which had been a strange experience for Robin, because she had always been popular with everyone as a lively person and a good hardworking one, too. Chloe had made it all so horrible that Robin had begged her mother to take her away from school and Poppy had been inclined to refuse (‘It’s such a good school, darling, and you’re doing so well. This’ll soon be forgotten, honestly it will!’) but it had been David who had made it possible to go on, and get over it, and prove his Poppy was right.

  ‘You have to give people the chance to be themselves,’ he had said in that soft American voice of his which never changed, however long he lived in England and which Robin had come to love as much as she had once hated it. ‘Chloe is what she is, a sad and sorry lady, and we just have to live with that. Pretending she isn’t your sister won’t help. You’ll know she is, you see, and that means other people will too. Stick with it and you’ll like yourself a whole lot more than you would if you tried to duck out. Give it a shot, anyway.’

  And she had, and they had been right, Ma and David; it had ended with Chloe divorced and given lots of money from it – because her husband had been immensely rich, as rich as he was nasty, it seemed – and everyone at school had got all excited about Fay Wray in King Kong and swooned over Greta Garbo in Queen Christina and forgotten the Chloe fuss and that had been that. Chloe had gone on her usual w
ay, though she hadn’t married again (thank heaven, thought Robin), and everything had been fine.

  Until the war had started and it all got so horrid, if in a different way. And Robin turned on to her back again and scowled at the blind. The first days had been so disagreeable, what with Ma and David having to do so much with their work, and at the same time persuade Lee and Joshy to be evacuated. Lee had been sensible enough but Joshy had not, and had screamed and sulked and made no end of a fuss.

  ‘For all the world,’ Lee had said with all the scorn of a sophisticated eleven-year-old, ‘as though he were four instead of eight. Do shut up, Joshy. You’re making it worse for everyone. I’ll be there to look after you.’

  Poor old Joshy, thought Robin as she saw the image of her small half-brother scowling in her mind’s eye, the shock of black hair that always fell into his eyes in its usual tangle and his dark eyes staring pugnaciously through it. Poor Joshy. Twice he’d run away already; and twice they’d made him go back. He must drive Goosey’s nephew potty, she thought, trying to keep an eye on him on that rambling farm in Norfolk. She remembered it well, from the times Goosey had taken her there to visit when she’d been small and Ma and David had first married. She’d hated it at first, had been angry with David for taking up so much of Ma’s time when Robin had always had her to herself, but it had got easier and easier as time had gone on and now the thought of life without David was insupportable. And she smiled at the blind, thinking of her stepfather, who always managed somehow to make her laugh.

  Jessie, she thought then. She makes me laugh too. And suddenly sat up in bed. There was no hope of sleeping any more, she told herself as she swung her legs out. And I’m absolutely starving. She hadn’t realized it, but she was empty because she’d been far too weary to eat when she’d come off duty this morning. The answer was either scrabbling for whatever she could get in the canteen – pilchard sandwiches or something equally revolting – or taking a cab up to Cable Street, to see what Auntie Jessie had to offer.

  And she hummed a little as she scrambled into her new trousers – bought especially for being in the shelters, if she ever got caught in a raid when she was off duty – and the cream silk blouse Ma had made for her out of one of her own old ones. She felt and looked cool and she leaned towards her mirror to brush her curly hair into some sort of order and made for the corridor.

  And as she closed her door softly the adjoining one opened and Chick put her head out and grinned at her.

  ‘Two minds with but a single,’ she whispered, for they were on the night nurses’ floor, and making any sound at all was considered a crime fit for hanging by Home Sister. ‘I’m absolutely starving – are you going on a recce?’

  ‘I can do better than that,’ Robin whispered back. ‘I’m going down to my Auntie Jessie’s. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Do cats eat kippers?’ Chick retorted delightedly and came out of her room. She was wearing trousers too, a very racy pair in checks with a matching cotton shirt which she’d bought in New York in the last summer before the War broke out and which she had brought on the long tour of Europe she had planned. Robin had only a hazy knowledge of her life in her own country but had a distinct impression that Chick came from a rich family. She certainly seemed to have plenty of cash and had none of the problems some of the other nurses had, lacking adequate support from their families. But she never showed off or made reference to such things, so neither did Robin. It was one of the most comfortable things about their friendship, she thought. You talked of what you wanted to, and didn’t have to talk of things you didn’t want to. She herself had told Chick lots about her family and had indeed taken her home to Norland Square to meet them but she had never told her of the awful Chloe. That would be too shaming –

  The street outside sobered them both. The smell of explosives still hung in the air, and everywhere they looked dust motes floated in the long rays of the September sun to create a golden haze over the battered buildings. Across the road the last of the flames had at last been extinguished, leaving behind the heavy reek of wet rotten wood and newly distributed mildew as well as the hint of coal gas that still hung around; and Chick shivered a little even in the sunshine and tucked her hand into Robin’s elbow.

  ‘Come on, kid. We’ll leg it down to Cable Street. I can’t imagine there’ll be many buses this afternoon, one way and another, and it’ll add to an already terrific appetite – it shouldn’t take long – ’

  It didn’t, as they stepped out with long strides, and even in the smoke-filled reeking air, laden with the smell of demolition, and even walking past the wrecked buildings that seemed to be everywhere, Robin felt the vigour that exercise always created in her, and the sheer delight in being alive that was so much a part of her, and knew a moment of guilt. She shouldn’t feel so when all around her was destruction and death; but then she felt better, because people they passed smiled and waved, and some of the air raid wardens, who knew all the nurses from the hospital by sight, spotted them as they went past a particularly high pile of rubble and waved and shouted cheerfully. Even the shops had cheeky signs on them; ‘Special Sale, Courtesy the Nasties’ read one in a shoe shop and on a china shop, ‘Business as bloody usual. To hell with Adolf.’ With that sort of attitude in everyone around her, it was all right, she decided, to feel tolerably good. And her step lengthened and they went belting arm in arm along the tired battered road until Chick gasped and laughed and complained of breathlessness.

  ‘Are you sure your aunt won’t mind me coming too?’ she said as soon as she could talk easily. ‘I mean, what with shortages and all – she can’t stretch her rations that far, surely? A woman on her own – ’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Robin said blithely. ‘She’ll not worry, you can be sure of that – she’s only happy when she’s feeding people. That’s why she runs a restaurant. She’ll be all right – ’

  ‘Black-market?’ Chick said and grinned at her. ‘No, don’t look like that! From all I hear everyone who can does and everyone who doesn’t wishes they could. People always try to do the best they can for themselves when times are hard.’

  ‘Not my Auntie Jessie. She’s the straightest person you ever saw. Says what she thinks when she thinks it. And she certainly wouldn’t black-market. She says you don’t have to – she gets lots of fish and so forth and she manages fine. I hope you like fish – ’

  ‘I like food,’ Chick said simply. ‘All I can get. God, I’m hungry! I’d kill for a hot dog.’

  ‘She might even manage that,’ Robin said and grinned at the look of sheer greed that crossed Chick’s face. ‘She runs a delicatessen, remember, and they have all sorts of odd foreign things in them, don’t they?’

  ‘Foreign! Don’t you dare call me foreign! Daughter of the Empire, that’s me, fighting for the Mother Country, or some such. Foreign, forsooth – I’ll have your guts for garters, you talk to me that way – ’

  ‘Of course you’re foreign,’ Robin said cheerfully. ‘That accent of yours, you could cut it with a knife, and the clothes you wear – you never saw anything like that in Swan and Edgar’s, now, did you?’

  ‘You’re damned right – I never saw anything I’d be caught dead in in Swan and Edgar’s – listen, is it the next road on the left or – ’

  ‘Good for you, remembering! Yes, it is. And here’s hoping Jessie’s got something ready to eat and doesn’t have to start making things. I don’t think I can wait another moment – ’

  They ran the last few yards, bursting with an energy neither knew they had, and stopped outside the neat shop half-way down Cable Street. Over its fascia a sign read, ‘Jessie’s Best Foods’ and below that an elegantly painted hand pointed to the right and a smaller sign that read, ‘Trade Counter. Ring Twice’.

  ‘Oh!’ Chick moaned ecstatically and lifted her nose to the air. ‘I smell pickles and pastrami, I swear it – ’

  ‘And salt beef and cheese and a lot of other goodies besides. Come on.’ And with a propriet
orial air, Robin ushered her friend into the shop.

  It hadn’t changed in all the years Robin could remember. She had first been brought here as a very small child and she could still remember the bewildering effect of the shelves full of exotic-looking packages and tins and the long glass-covered fitting below the counter where dishes of the most remarkable concoctions waited to be weighed out into small measures: cream cheeses and chopped herring mixtures, rows of different kinds of pickled fish and sides of rich rosy smoked salmon and umpteen different kinds of sausages. There weren’t any sausages there now, for they had come from France and Italy and Germany in the old days before the War, and supplies had vanished with the first air raid, but there were instead dishes of delectable-looking salads and piles of crisp rolls, some garnished with scraps of fried onions and some round and glistening with a rich golden brown crust and holes in their centres, and Chick looked at those and crooned, ‘Oh, as I live and breathe, bagels! Am I in London or New York? Who is the angel who did this? Let me at ’em!’

  The woman behind the counter, who had been serving an elderly customer with a pot of cream cheese, came and peered at her, and Chick looked up at the wizened little face under its mop of highly regrettable yellow curls, which looked so ferociously out of place that they made the shop look almost toylike, and grinned widely. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m the bagel maven!’

  ‘Maven?’ Robin said, mystified, and smiled at the little woman who now saw her and was coming out from behind the counter in an eager bustle. ‘Hello, Lily. Are you well?’

  ‘All the better for seein’ you, lovey! There, but you look tired! The way they work you down there, it’s a sin and a crime, that’s what it is. So, what’s this already? I ain’t never seen this one before, have I?’

  ‘I think you’ve always been at the restaurant, or in the kitchens,’ Robin said. ‘This is my friend Chick Chester. She’s been here with me before. What’s a whatever you said, Chick?’