Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  A few hours later, Levy and I were at a major incident close to the station in Bloomsbury. Two ambulances and two saloon cars from our station had been sent there. Light rescue were inside, trying to extract the injured from a cellar. I had accepted a cup of tea from the mobile refreshment van and was sitting with it in the darkness when I heard a yelp.

  Levy appeared with Knaggs in a firm grip, followed by Mr Richie.

  ‘Let me go, you bastard,’ Knaggs panted, trying unsuccessfully to break away.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘He tucked a bottle of something inside his coat,’ said Levy. ‘Maybe other items also. It was hard to make out what, he was very quick.’

  ‘Constable!’ Mr Richie’s voice rang out across the bombsite. ‘Police. Over here!’

  A long minute of Knaggs’s bluster passed before a policeman came up to us.

  ‘What’s all this, then?’

  ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong. He planted the stuff on me,’ whined Knaggs.

  ‘No he didn’t,’ I said, shocked.

  ‘Let’s have a look inside your coat, then.’

  The policeman was gruffly officious as he opened Knaggs’s coat and found a bottle of whisky tucked into an inside pocket.

  ‘Look in the other pockets,’ said Mr Richie.

  A quick search revealed silver spoons and bits of jewellery.

  ‘I’ve never seen these before,’ said Knaggs in an aggrieved tone. ‘He planted the stuff on me. He’s always had it in for me.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said the constable. ‘You’re nicked.’

  I glanced at Levy, who also appeared to be amused at the dialogue, which seemed to have come straight from a Punch and Judy show.

  The policeman blew his whistle and another constable arrived at a run. ‘Looter,’ said our policeman, and the constable’s lip curled.

  They walked off with Knaggs between them, but before they turned the corner he twisted around to shout at Levy, ‘I’ll get you for this, you kike bastard.’

  On our way to hospital, dodging bombs and bomb debris, I heard Levy’s calm voice reassuring the patients, talking loudly to counter the deafness caused by blast. Helping, encouraging, sympathising, sometimes flirting.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be able to fix the scarring. They’re doing wonderful things now with scarring.’

  ‘Pretty girl like you will be up and out dancing quick as a wink. I’ll see you at the Café de Paris yet – be sure to save me a dance.’

  ‘Don’t fall asleep on me. Wake up! Wake up now. That’s the ticket. Stay awake. Talk to me. I get terribly lonely back here you know. The driver’s a stand-offish creature, won’t chat with me at all.’

  ‘Of course you won’t die. I won’t let you die.’

  The air raid warden was standing in the middle of the road, pointing his torch towards the ground, where it made a small puddle of light, but the white letters ‘ARP’ on his steel hat showed clearly enough. The Monster jerked to a halt, and as I pushed open the door another ambulance raced past on its way to hospital with its load of injured.

  The road was crunchy under my shoes and the surface was uneven, so that I lurched rather drunkenly towards the warden. What had been a row of houses lay in front of me. One was now a pile of rubble and another three were barely standing, but the rest of the row was seemingly untouched.

  Several dark figures moved about in the gloom and there was the occasional flash of a torch. The raiders were retreating and the guns had become spasmodic, but when they sounded they lit up the whole scene, silhouetting the rescue party on the heaps of debris. As always, in the background was the steady swish of running water; water mains always ruptured in a blast.

  ‘Quiet!’ someone yelled.

  Everything stopped as three figures crouched over the ruin in front of us. There could be no silence in such a scene, but they listened intently. Someone shook his head, and the slow work of searching the ruins recommenced.

  I coughed a little in the bombsite fug of soot and dust and that indefinable ‘air raid’ smell of cordite and something I had not yet identified. The air seemed electric; it always did after a raid, as if the normal atmosphere had been sucked away and we were left with staler, thinner air to breathe.

  The warden had a soldierly, erect carriage. When I got closer I saw the neat black moustache on his upper lip.

  ‘It was a couple of tip and run raiders,’ he said, and I thought I heard traces of a Welsh lilt. ‘The latest thing.’

  He meant that a couple of planes had flown over and dropped strings of bombs. Somehow it seemed worse when it was only one or two planes, as if actual spite were involved.

  ‘Flew off half an hour ago,’ he added.

  He flicked a glance behind me and I turned to see Levy walking towards us, his gait unsteady as mine on the shifting rubble. He was carrying a couple of blankets from the ambulance.

  ‘Right-oh,’ I said, ignoring Levy’s smile at the Australianism, ‘where are our casualties?’

  The warden removed his helmet to swipe at his forehead with a handkerchief. He gestured to the ruined houses behind him.

  ‘The other ambulance took away four survivors. Your two wounded are over there.’ He sounded tired. ‘Elderly couple. He’s been cut about by flying glass. She’s worse off, looks like a badly broken arm. We’re still searching for others, but no need for you to wait. I don’t think we’ll find anyone else alive.’

  He let out a sigh. ‘A family – mother, grandmother and two kids – were in an Anderson shelter behind that one,’ he said, nodding towards one of the houses on the right that seemed to be undamaged. ‘There was a direct hit on the shelter and not one of them survived.’ He ran the handkerchief over his face again.

  ‘How awful,’ I said. It was totally inadequate, but what else could I say?

  ‘We didn’t find much of them.’

  I hardly supposed that they would. We had found the Anderson shelters remarkably effective at protecting people, but nothing and nobody could survive a direct hit.

  ‘We’ve put all that we found of them . . .’ He began to shake, and I wondered if it would all crack and crumble away, this calm demeanour that was his only defence against the night’s horror. He took a breath, paused, straightened his shoulders and continued, nodding towards the house, ‘in a biscuit box.’

  I shuddered involuntarily. A family of four whose remains could fit in a biscuit box. I had heard that in many cases the authorities were weighting coffins with rubble to sustain the pretence for relatives that there was something worth burying.

  ‘There may be more to find, though,’ he said. ‘So I’m supposing we’ll wait until the morning to hand it over.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Levy. ‘We want all the remains together. Light rescue will deal with it.’

  Light rescue searched the bombsites, trying to find the injured. If they did they would prepare them for removal by ambulance. Light rescue also found the bodies of the dead, which included digging into the earth around such sites, looking for the smallest bits of human remains. Sometimes they used sieves. It was a job that needed daylight.

  ‘I knew them,’ said the warden, in a strained voice. ‘They were a nice family. Follow me. I’ll take you to Mr and Mrs Nicholls.’

  Stumbling as we negotiated the debris, we followed the warden to our patients. His thin strip of torchlight illuminated a pair of ghosts sitting on a pile of rubble. The old couple were coated with plaster dust and were holding hands like lost children waiting for their mother.

  Levy and I tucked blankets around thin shoulders, then checked their injuries. In the past weeks we had found that blankets were more important than anything else. The force of the blast stripped away clothing, which meant that bomb victims were often chilled. We had learned that if a patient was not kept warm, death could come from no other reason than shock.

  The old lady’s right arm was at an unnatural angle.

  ‘Compound fracture, humerus,’ said Levy, unne
cessarily. He looked around, flashed his torch on the ground and picked up a piece of wood to use as a temporary splint. We were both trained in first aid, but our job was to make only a quick appraisal of the injuries, prevent further damage and take the patients to hospital immediately. There was no time to dress superficial wounds or apply elaborate bandages.

  ‘I’m the ambulance driver,’ I said to the old man, flashing my torch at his face. It was like a modernist canvas: chalky white from plaster dust and overlaid with crazy streaks of black dirt and bright red blood that oozed from innumerable little lacerations caused by flying glass. ‘I’ll give you a quick once over, and we’ll get you to the ambulance.’

  He peered up at me suspiciously, holding a hand to his ear.

  ‘What? What’d you say?’

  It was likely he had been deafened by the blast, but he may have been deaf anyway. I repeated the words more loudly as I checked him over. His face and scalp were slick with blood and I was worried about a spongy patch on his head. Such injuries were always worrying, but he batted away my hands, preventing further examination.

  ‘You’re a bit young for this lark, aren’t you?’ he bellowed. ‘You can’t be more than sixteen.’

  My mother always said that one day I would be pleased to be taken to be younger than I really was. This was not that day.

  ‘No,’ I replied loudly, in my schoolteacher voice. ‘I am much older than sixteen. Please keep still and let me get on with it.’

  The old man shook his head to show that he hadn’t heard a word. Then he laughed, although his face looked like raw meat and the pain must have been almost unbearable. He turned to his wife, who was sitting rigidly, submitting to Levy’s ministrations. ‘Oi, mother. This little girl’s taking liberties.’

  Levy had pulled out a roll of bandages from his bag and was splinting the old lady’s arm with the piece of wood he had picked up from the site and wrapped in a bandage for padding. She held her lips in a tight grimace, and made no sound at all as he did it, but the rigidity of her body and her quick shallow breaths were an indicator of the pain she was suffering.

  ‘What? What d’ye say?’ he bellowed at me.

  I gave up any further attempt at examination. ‘I’ll bandage your head and then we will take you into the ambulance,’ I said, speaking louder still, and more slowly. ‘Mr Levy will be looking after you on the way to hospital.’

  The old man looked up at Levy. ‘Does she know what she’s doing, this kid?’ he yelled.

  ‘Speak louder,’ I muttered. ‘They might not have heard you in Liverpool.’

  Levy raised his torch to shine at his mouth and he said, loudly and distinctly, in his beautiful accent, ‘She’s bloody brilliant. Best driver in the service. Now won’t you shut up and let us work.’

  And with that, everything seemed to calm down and the old man lifted his head so that I could bandage the worst of the wounds.

  I had seen it time and again when we attended at a bomb site. It was more than just Levy’s clear upper class voice, although that always made an impression when it could be heard. I had decided it was his air of being completely in control. He spoke and acted as if he expected people to listen to what he was saying and to do what he asked them to do. And people usually listened and obeyed.

  ‘Honest to God, miss, it was like the end of the world had come,’ the old lady whispered, shivering under her blanket as Levy finished wrapping the bandage around her thin arm. ‘Is the house going to be all right? Was anyone else hurt? They’ve not told us anything.’

  I gave a false, reassuring smile. How could I tell her that the house behind them was listing badly and I suspected it could not be saved? How could I tell her that the family next door had all been killed?

  As we took the couple to the ambulance I heard Levy humming something. I listened closely and realised it was the music hall song, ‘Is ’e an Aussie, Lizzie, is ’e?’

  ‘Shut up, Levy,’ I said.

  ‘Right-oh.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was close to dawn when we headed back to Woburn Place. Our patients had been dropped off at hospital and the drone of the raiders was becoming fainter.

  A thought struck me.

  ‘Levy, do you think Goering gives the pilots specific instructions about where to drop their bombs?’

  He laughed. ‘We’re talking about Germany. I suspect they’re given specific instructions about when and how to scratch their backsides.’

  ‘Be serious, how can trashing the West End or the City or the outer London suburbs help the German war machine?’

  ‘Maximum terror, Brennan. You know that. They want to destroy our morale so we’ll be a crushed people when they invade.’ He lowered his voice to imitate a German accent. ‘Then you English pigs vill be taken en masse to Poland and work as slave labourers under ze lash.’

  ‘Fat chance of that!’

  He laughed.

  I thought about what Levy had said, and said slowly, ‘I really don’t think this bombing will achieve what Hitler thinks. It seems to me that, in the middle of such suffering and hardship, the heroic side of human nature takes over. Haven’t you noticed how friendly and helpful people are being to each other?’

  ‘Yes, we have very friendly looters.’

  ‘Speaking of looters, do you think Knaggs will go to jail?’

  He shook his head. ‘More likely a fine. Knaggs was lucky. Didn’t have much on him when he was caught. Doubt he’ll return to the station though.’

  ‘He was very upset when you caught him. Someone like that has friends, nasty friends who might—’

  ‘You worry too much, Brennan.’ He was peering out of his window. ‘Do you know where we are, right now?’

  Levy asked me that often when we were driving around in the dark. He adored London with a passion matching that of Dr Johnson, who had declared that to be tired of the city was to be tired of life. Levy knew its history and often told me stories about the places we visited. I was well aware what misery this constant bombardment was causing him, as he saw so much of what he loved being destroyed.

  ‘Soho,’ I replied. ‘Vice and crime. The Windmill and its naked girls. Lots of foreigners and probably lots of spies. The only place in London where you can get decent coffee and koláč.’

  Levy shifted in his seat beside me. The passenger’s seat was probably as uncomfortable as the driver’s, I thought.

  ‘And looters, black marketeers, thieves, pickpockets and extortionists,’ he declared in a sombre voice. ‘All here in Soho, our Latin Quarter.’

  Then, in a brighter tone. ‘D’you know where the name Soho comes from?’

  ‘No.’ I knew he’d delight in enlightening me.

  ‘It was a hunting cry, from the time when all this was woodland and the king and his knights hunted deer and wild boar here.’

  ‘So ho!’ I said, with spirit, over the rumble of the engine.

  ‘So ho, indeed. Only nowadays it’s we Londoners who are the prey.’

  Levy pulled himself up straight and peered out of the window again. ‘Do you know where we are now, Brennan?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue, Levy. Somewhere near Soho?’

  In the gloom I could feel, rather than see his smile.

  ‘Turn right at the next corner, please.’

  I followed Levy’s directions through the darkened streets, as he took us back by a circuitous route. He did that sometimes, guided me into areas of London he particularly liked or that he wanted to tell me about. We had been in trouble more than a few times for not returning directly to base.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Not much further. Right here and then sharp left.’

  We emerged on to what even I recognised as the Embankment. In front of us the Thames was an opalescent shimmer in the moonlight.

  ‘Mrs Coke will be sending out a search party,’ I said. It would be one more black mark against us, one we really did not need. My fear was that she would assign Levy to another driver,
separate us, just as I used to separate the troublemakers in the class when I was teaching. Levy made a gesture that indicated his view of the importance of Mrs Coke.

  ‘Pull over, if you’d be so kind, Brennan,’ he said.

  ‘Levy, we can’t stop here. We should go back to Woburn Place.’

  ‘I need a cigarette. And I’m not about to let that upstart fraudster dictate my movements.’

  I pulled over and switched off the engine.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it outside.’

  We got out and stood together, leaning against the ambulance.

  ‘What did you mean about Mrs Coke?’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘You’ll be annoyed.’

  ‘What have you done, Levy?’

  ‘Let’s not spoil the moment, Brennan.’

  He refused to say more, and so I put away my worries and simply enjoyed the quiet time as Levy smoked his cigarette and the sky lightened around us.

  ‘The ladies’ bridge is coming along nicely,’ said Levy.

  The new Waterloo Bridge, still in the process of being built, stood starkly incomplete over the river. Londoners called it the ‘ladies’ bridge’ because, in the absence of the men who had been called up or were being used for war work, it was mainly women who were constructing it.

  I turned to look at the river. In the hour before dawn it was wide and quiet and beautiful. It had been flowing through London since the city was merely a few huts on a muddy bank, I mused, and it would probably continue to flow when all around us was dust. Sometimes bombs fell into the river and it swallowed them whole. The Thames would survive whatever the Luftwaffe threw at it. Would London?

  ‘I used to tell my students back in Australia that London was the biggest city the world has ever known,’ I said. ‘To give them some idea of its size I’d say that if we took all the people in Perth, and all the people in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart, and then every other resident of Australia and added to that lot the whole population of New Zealand, still you would not have totalled the inhabitants of Greater London.’