Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  I was inclined to take comments like ‘material damage is slight and casualties few’ with a grain of salt. I knew how many bodies we delivered to the mortuaries. The BBC always dramatically understated the casualties. I wondered if they equally overstated the number of enemy aircraft shot down.

  The news finished and the delicate notes of a piano piece played by Myra Hess trickled out of the wireless. Usually I would have listened with delight, but tonight it was unsatisfying somehow. I told myself it was because I was keyed up by the impending air raid and worried about Betty; it had nothing to do with Flight Lieutenant Vassilikov.

  So I turned off the radio, picked out a poetry book from the bookshelf and flicked through to the poems of Lord Byron. He had been mad, bad and dangerous to know, and in my mind’s eye he looked exactly like Levy.

  ‘I defy you all,’ I said, to no one, as the nightly noises began.

  The distant drum-fire of the outer batteries. The crum-crum of the Regent’s Park guns. Then the sharp notes of some nearer batteries. In the middle distance the rocket sound of the heavy guns in Hyde Park. And always, above the noise of the guns, was the dentist’s drill of the German aeroplanes, circling round and round, waiting to drop their sticks of three bombs. I waited.

  Then . . .

  Crump, crump, crump.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I woke to a cold morning. Damp white mist swirled around the gardens and the sun was like a great orange ball. It was nearly winter, I realised disconsolately. It would be my second winter in England, and I was not looking forward to it at all. It was the darkness that had affected me the most last year. I expected that I would find it as miserable this year also, with the added bonus of nightly air raids. I couldn’t help sighing. It was springtime in Perth now and my mother’s roses would be in full bloom in our small garden.

  On the table in the lobby, next to the cubicle that housed the building’s telephone, were the letters that had been delivered for the occupants of St Andrew’s in yesterday’s second post. There were three letters for me, all from Australia. The flimsy aerograms were creased and a little grubby after their long journey. One was my mother’s weekly epistle. I recognised Uncle Charles’s scrawl on the second, and when I turned the third letter over, it was from a school friend. I was delighted at this tangible connection to home, but I sighed as I tucked the letters carefully into the pocket of my jacket; I would read them once I had breakfasted.

  I had been away from Australia now for nearly three years, and I missed my family terribly. After so many letters, I knew what my mother’s would contain: she would tell me that my father and my brother Ben were well, give me a small anecdote about each, and then concentrate on her ‘war work’. Mum had formed a local Red Cross branch as soon as war was declared and now spent most of her time rolling bandages, packing parcels for Australian prisoners of war and helping to run funding drives for Blitz victims, in between knitting scarves and jumpers for servicemen. From her letters, it seemed my mother was the same tiny ball of energy as she had been when she waved goodbye to me at Fremantle Dock on that hot January morning in 1938.

  My father hated writing letters, but I knew he would have scrawled a message of love at the bottom of my mother’s epistle, telling me that he missed me and longed to see my beautiful smiling face. He always wrote the same message, and it always made me cry. If I were lucky, my brother Ben, now fifteen and about as fond of letter writing as Dad was, would also have written me a short note.

  I was well aware that my parents were desperate for me to return home, but they never pushed. Sometimes I wished I could leave London and sail back to Australia, but I knew the work I did in London was worthwhile and essential, and I had made up my mind not to leave until the war was over, no matter how many cold, dark winters I had to endure.

  Breakfast in the service cafe was the usual porridge, followed by a small rasher of bacon set upon a generous pile of watery scrambled dehydrated egg. As I chewed I pondered the mystery of how Americans managed to make the dehydrated eggs taste exactly like chalk and what they did to manufacture that peculiarly dry yet slimy texture.

  Somewhere in the course of the meal I made up my mind to take a walk around London. I thought I would clear my head and also see what damage last night’s raid had caused. The newspapers were not allowed to publish detailed information about the bombings, in case it aided the enemy and hurt morale. We were all interested, of course, and Londoners wandered around the city streets, inspecting the damage and swapping gossip about the numbers of casualties.

  If my walk took me in the direction of Regent’s Park, I thought, so what? Jim Vassilikov was not bad looking, despite the nose. He was an RAF hero, most probably a friend of Levy’s and, anyway, I enjoyed classical music concerts on fine autumn afternoons.

  In my bedroom I stood in front of my wardrobe, gazing at its contents. I pulled out a pale green afternoon dress in lightweight wool that had been made for me in Prague before the war. I loved the dress, which was trimmed with green velvet on the collar and cuffs. Although clothing was not rationed, material was in short supply and it was becoming difficult to find pretty outfits. I wished I had spent more of my money on clothes when I lived in Prague, where women’s fashion was as stylish as it was in Paris and the tailoring was excellent.

  Silk stockings were also in short supply – we had been warned that there were to be no more available after 1 December – and rather than risk my last silk pair I made do with rayon. I slid my feet into a pair of low-heeled shoes – the dusty, shattered pavements and London’s Blitz-blighted roads destroyed pretty shoes.

  Should I wear gloves? Before the war, a lady would never be seen on the street without them, but the old rules were falling away as the war dragged on. I picked up a pair of soft dove-grey gloves and popped them into my handbag. If I did end up meeting Jim Vassilikov and if he took me somewhere nice for tea after the concert, I would slip them on then.

  I patted on powder and rouge, swept mascara onto my lashes and pouted to apply the bright lipstick that brought out the golden highlights in my brown hair. There was a definite sparkle of excitement in my light-brown eyes – it had been a while since I had been out with an eligible male. I grimaced at my reflection in the mirror.

  ‘He may not even turn up, you silly chump,’ I said, and grimaced again. I wondered if he would recognise me, clean and all dolled up.

  My precious bottle of Je Reviens was on my dressing table. I picked it up and stared at it for a moment, before replacing it, unopened.

  ‘Not yet,’ I murmured. ‘No need to overdo it.’

  Finally, I fluffed up my curls and placed my green felt hat at a rakish angle, then shrugged on my raincoat, which I firmly buttoned and belted for protection against not only rain but also the brick dust that had whirled constantly in London’s air since the raids began. I slung my gas mask over my shoulder and headed for the door.

  When I stepped down onto the footpath, the familiar smell, sour and chill, of bomb-blasted ruins assailed me. A block of flats along the street had been hit and the sight was a shock. Yesterday a sturdy building had stood there. Now it was a jumble of wood and bricks and plaster. The road outside the building was roped off and red warning lights flashed. Clean-up crews were at work. Their job, once the dead and wounded had been recovered, was to clear the road and footpath and make the site safe. They would engage in primary demolition and use wooden props to shore up the walls and doors and windows that remained.

  It constantly amazed me how quickly repairs were carried out after a raid. A railway line might be wrecked by a bomb in the morning and be in use again in the evening. Our electricity had been restored earlier that morning, as had the gas supply. Every day lorries rumbled through the streets, carting away tons of bomb debris from damaged buildings.

  I asked a lorry driver once where all of the rubble ended up and he told me, ‘We’re off to the ’Ackney Marshes. And if ’Itler keeps this up, it won’t be long before there won’t be any
’ouses in between.’

  I had to ask Katherine what he meant and she sang the old music hall song for me with gusto, and in a Cockney accent.

  Although they worked quickly, the crews did their job with an ear to the ruins. They were always listening, always hoping to find someone still alive. Of course, finding a live person after the rescue crews had been through the ruins was rare. It was the bodies that remained and these had to be recovered and removed for transfer to the mortuary in our ambulances.

  The crew in front of me obviously had been working hard. Their shouted conversations and whistles competed with the thud and splatter of falling masonry. A couple of the men there knew me from my work and called out a greeting. I waved in reply.

  The sun soon burned away the morning’s mist and it shone brightly as I walked down Gray’s Inn Road. I thought, not for the first time, that it was a terrible irony of this Blitz that it began in a golden autumn, when London should have been a delight. Now fallen leaves shared the streets with a sunlit shimmer of broken glass, sometimes inches deep. The air stank of cordite. Clear skies of cloudless blue, in peacetime so delightful, were deplored for making London an easy target for raiders. We were all waiting for a dose of really bad weather, hoping it would bring some respite.

  Hundreds of people milled around on this sunny morning, like tourists in a strange, devastated land. In Lamb’s Conduit Street the little shops and businesses seemed oddly vulnerable with their fronts in pieces on the pavement and the interiors exposed to casual onlookers. Brick and plaster dust caught in my throat as I walked past the shamble of shattered windows and breached walls.

  A policeman stood in front of the shattered windows of a draper’s shop, guarding the contents and keeping an eye on the rest of the street. I smiled at him and walked on, dodging barricades to get through the maze of diversions but giving a wide clearance to a roped-off area where a notice said ‘Danger: Gas Leak’.

  The extent of the damage of the past weeks became more apparent as I headed towards Oxford Circus. Great gaps had been blasted in rows of shops and houses and the glassless windows were like empty eye sockets with only darkness behind them. From Holborn to New Oxford Street, heavy and light rescue crews scrabbled around in piles of rubble and tangles of beams and metal. The devastation reminded me of photographs I had seen of Ypres in the Great War. At High Holborn, an ARP officer in a steel hat directed operations from a desk that stood in the middle of the road among fallen masonry and glass shards, ignoring the couple of inches of water from the snaking hosepipes that swirled around him.

  Tottenham Court Road seemed derelict at first glance, but the Lyons’ Oxford Corner House was still open for business. In Oxford Street, Peter Robinson’s stood, gaunt and spare, like a ruined cathedral, but across the battered front an enormous banner had been hung, declaring it to be ‘OPEN’. Strings of Union Jacks had been draped over the ruins of Bourne & Hollingsworth, which also was declared to be open for business. John Lewis had been devastated by blast and fire and water. Selfridge’s windows were all gone. I had seen enough for the moment, and doubled back to the Lyons for an early lunch.

  There I picked up a Dispatch that someone had left on the table. The French columnist, Madame Tabouis, said ominously that things would only get darker for Britain; the Nazis would soon dominate the Mediterranean. I put it aside and concentrated on my grilled chop, boiled potatoes and carrots.

  I had just left the Lyons when the banshee wail of the Warning sounded. Hitler’s lunch break, people called those raids in the early afternoon. The streets were crowded, but there was no panic. Londoners now tended to ignore daylight raids, possibly because they somehow felt braver than they did in the hours of darkness. I knew all too well that mutilations due to shattered glass were far worse in the daylight raids because people had not taken cover, and I looked around for a shelter as the siren sputtered out in a few strangled notes and the roar of bombers came closer. The pavement shook with the thunder of the guns.

  ‘There they go.’ An elderly man in a suit was standing beside me, staring upwards at curls of smoke in the sky. Far above us aircraft were dodging each other in an aerial dance we’d all seen before, a dance that Jim Vassilikov would know well.

  ‘They’ve just turned ’em. Spits, God bless ’em.’

  ‘And Hurricanes,’ I said. He nodded.

  An ARP warden appeared and told us all to get to shelter, repeating in a kind of helpless resignation: ‘Nah then, show a little common sense, can’t you? It’s no good standing there like one o’clock half struck.’

  ‘Are you going to take shelter?’ I asked the old man. I nodded towards a handwritten sign that had been propped up in the window of the tailor’s shop nearby, ‘Public Air Raid Shelter 10 yards’, and underneath was an arrow, pointing to my left. The roar of planes, allied to the thunder of the guns, now was almost deafening and shrapnel had begun to fall around us.

  ‘No, miss. I reckon I’ll keep watching.’ He pointed to the shop awning above him. ‘I’m safe enough under here. Daylight raids aren’t usually all that bad. Mebbe I’ll see a real dogfight.’

  A thin, sad-faced man standing beside him said, ‘I saw one last week. A mass of German bombers were suddenly set upon by RAF fighters. They were smaller, of course, but they sailed into the middle of the pack and performed the most amazing antics in and around the bombers.’

  The old man suddenly pointed upwards. ‘Did you see—’

  ‘Rather.’ His companion nodded enthusiastically as he, too, stared into the sky.

  I left them to it as I marched towards the public shelter and ducked down the stairs. The room was empty. I picked up a discarded Observer and read. After about twenty minutes the door opened and the shelter caretaker clumped down the stairs. He was balding, middle-aged, and had short, rather bandy legs.

  ‘Afternoon, miss,’ he said. ‘Sitting in solitary splendour are you?’

  I laughed. ‘I wish people would take these daylight raids more seriously.’

  ‘And I, miss. Madness to stay up top with the shrapnel flying.’

  ‘Any bombs in the area?’

  ‘None have fallen yet. But who’s to say they won’t.’

  He sat beside me on the bench and took off his steel hat to wipe his forehead. ‘You know, I reckon Holborn has caught it worse than anywhere else in London – barring the East End, of course.’

  ‘Do people use this shelter at night?’

  ‘Of course they do. About fifteen or so arrive in the late afternoon and stay all night.’ He grinned. ‘All sorts. Old, young and in between. More comfortable here than the Underground.’

  I looked around at the small room with its cement floor and the wooden benches set around the sides and thought he was laying it on a bit thick.

  He saw my glance, and added, a trifle defensively, ‘They bring bedding, cards, board games and even a phonograph. It’s really quite cosy.’

  The All Clear sounded twenty minutes later. When I emerged it was evident that no bombs had fallen in the immediate area, and I wondered if the old man and his companion had been treated to a good show.

  A bus drew up next to me, and I hopped on. It took a roundabout route to Regent’s Park because of bomb crater diversions, but I still arrived early for the concert.

  Part of the park had been requisitioned by the RAF and a barbed wire fence cut off the area to the north, but the lake and rose gardens were open and apparently as yet undamaged by bombs. I spent the time wandering around the garden beds, wondering what I thought I was doing. I had half a mind to cut and run. Perhaps Jim would not turn up – it had not actually been an invitation, no matter what Katherine thought. What if he turned up with another girl? What if he turned up with Nancy and they laughed at me? I realised then I was quite fearful because of Henri Valhubert’s dismissal of me in the Algarve. That decided me – I would stay, consequences be damned.

  Regent’s Park was crowded with Londoners determined not to let the Luftwaffe ruin what might be th
e last fine Sunday of the year. Barrage balloons floated listlessly above us, like shoals of silver fish. They were tethered to the balloon unit in the palatial Winfield House beyond the lake. Gnats rose and fell in shimmering waves above the massed roses. The light warm breeze was only slightly marred by the smell of smoke and cordite. It was a beautiful afternoon, as beautiful as that Saturday six weeks before, when wave after wave of German planes appeared, dropping death and despair from the sky. I shivered. The sun might be shining but there was a chilly wind and little warmth to be found in the sunshine.

  I wandered aimlessly. The brilliant green of the turf was as astonishing to me now as it had been when I first arrived in England. My childhood had been spent on dry, red earth and this abundance of green was almost hurtful to my Australian eyes. When I reached out to touch the petals of a rose, the sublime softness was somehow profoundly moving and I suddenly wanted to cry. I did not try to analyse the emotion and let my hand fall away.

  Before the war, if you walked in Regent’s Park you could sometimes hear the lions in the zoo roaring and the sounds of elephants and other animals. Not now. The dangerous animals had been slaughtered or evacuated when it all began, in case they were to escape during a bombardment. The week before, several bombs had fallen on the zoo, but I had heard that no animals were hurt. The big anti-aircraft guns were positioned on Primrose Hill, and I spared a thought for the terror of the trapped creatures surrounded by the unearthly noise of an air raid.

  When I checked my watch it showed ten minutes to three. I took a breath, straightened my shoulders and walked towards the area where the concerts took place.

  The open-air theatre was in a natural depression, almost encircled by thickets and tall trees. Rows of chairs had been set up, facing the orchestra. Jim Vassilikov who was really Ivan was waiting by the entrance, so he scored points for politeness. He was alone. I took a breath and tried not to look as if my heart was thumping. Ambulance work was a doddle compared with this.