Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  The note in his voice led me to change the subject.

  ‘You said they’d found you another job. Here in London?’

  ‘Yes, in London. I start next week.’

  ‘Anything exciting?’

  ‘I’m going to be sitting behind a desk.’

  ‘Just sitting?’

  ‘Occasionally I’ll get up and walk around.’ He was obviously not going to tell me what he would be doing.

  ‘My uncle was here in the last war,’ I said. ‘He told me that he spent his time sitting behind a desk, not doing much. He was an intelligence officer, of course, doing top secret stuff.’ I meant it as a joke.

  There was no reply. When I turned to look at him, Jim was staring at a point over my shoulder. Two red blushes stained his cheeks and I caught the wry smile. I realised that I’d guessed correctly and began to mumble something – anything – when he gave a laugh.

  ‘Look, Lily, they’ve put me into a rather boring job. It’s probably exactly what your uncle was doing in the last war. Reading reports, filling in forms and basically being terrifically bored while my chums are risking it all up there.’ He pointed upwards. ‘What I’ll be doing is not exciting and it’s not dangerous and it’s not that important.’

  I nodded dutifully. ‘Of course. I understand.’

  That was exactly what Uncle Charles would have said. Jim was intelligent, could speak several languages and was posh. He had to be in counter-intelligence and it was probably very important indeed.

  ‘What did you read at Cambridge?’ I asked, to change the subject again.

  ‘Law. I was called to the bar just before the war, at the Middle Temple.’

  I made a groaning sound. It was inadvertent, and he threw me a quick look of surprise.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘My uncle’s a judge.’

  Jim seemed amused. ‘I take it he’s not your favourite uncle.’

  In fact I loved my Uncle Charles dearly, but he was able to annoy me more than just about anyone I knew, for two reasons. First, he rarely lost his temper, no matter what provocation I gave him; secondly, he never gave an opinion unless he had thought it through from every angle. This meant, annoyingly, that he was almost always right.

  ‘He’s my only uncle and I love him. It’s just that he’s so very . . . sure of himself.’

  ‘A professional failing, I suspect,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘I’m told I can be insufferably smug at times.’

  I had a sinking feeling that Jim Vassilikov would turn out rather similar to my Uncle Charles.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Our lunch arrived and we applied ourselves to the food.

  ‘You were born in Western Australia, yes? I must admit to a frightful degree of ignorance about the place.’

  So I told him about my home and myself. He drew me out, led me to speak of my parents, and how my mother had been a respectable schoolteacher heading towards spinsterhood when she fell irrevocably in love with the most unsuitable man.

  ‘My father. A big red-headed Irish-Australian who had just bought the Kookynie pub with money he’d won at the races, or so he said.’

  ‘How did your uncle the judge take it?’

  ‘The whole family was horrified. My mother is very determined, however, and they grew to accept the match. Uncle Charles – he wasn’t a judge then – is very fond of my father now. They’re complete opposites, but they seem to understand each other. It helps that my father has a head for business. He’s done well for himself, despite the Depression. He moved my mother back to Perth a few years ago, to her delight.’

  ‘And the marriage worked?’

  ‘They’ve been happily married now for thirty years. My mother is very soft-spoken, but her word is law to Dad.’

  ‘I’m not surprised by that,’ he said, giving me a speaking look.

  I made a face at him and then laughed. ‘Mum is much tougher than I am, if that’s what you’re getting at. But she’s also sweet. She says stupidity is the eighth deadly sin, but she values kindness above all virtues.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with her there. My mother is . . . formidable. I don’t think anyone would describe her as kind, or sweet, but she is truly admirable in her way.’

  When I asked him to elaborate, he refused, and changed the subject to my age. ‘Just how old are you, if that’s not too impertinent a question?’

  ‘Older than I look. I’m twenty-five, nearly twenty-six because I was born in January.’

  ‘What date in January?’

  ‘The twelfth,’ I replied. ‘1915.’

  His boyish smile appeared. ‘Morning or evening?’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a follower of astrology.’

  ‘Australia is a few hours ahead in time from Russia, isn’t it?’

  I thought about it. ‘Yes, but I don’t know how many hours. I was born near dawn on the twelfth of January.’

  He actually grinned.

  ‘What?’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s so special about that?’

  ‘I was born in St Petersburg, close to midnight on the eleventh of January, 1915. Perhaps we’re cosmic twins, born at the same time, half a world apart.’

  ‘If so, we’ve nothing else in common. According to my mother it hit one hundred and six in the shade on the day of my birth.’

  ‘It would have been well below freezing in St Petersburg. Always is, in January.’

  ‘Don’t you have some sort of title? I should warn you that my great-grandfather was transported to Western Australia as a convict, and my father is suspiciously reticent about his misspent youth.’

  ‘We have more than one of those in my family.’

  ‘Titles?’

  ‘Criminals.’

  ‘It’s all very mysterious, this title of yours. Levy wouldn’t tell me anything about it.’

  His mouth became a hard line. ‘My father was murdered because of his title. I hate it and I don’t use it.’

  I was embarrassed for bringing up another subject that so obviously upset him and I tried – clumsily – to lighten the mood. ‘Just tell me you’re not related to the late Tsar.’

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed to relax, and the ironic smile appeared. ‘You must know that every White Russian émigré is the unacknowledged heir to the Romanov throne.’

  ‘You’re not? Are you?’

  ‘I’m definitely not the heir, acknowledged or otherwise, to the Romanov throne.’

  I laughed. ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘Anyway, none of our Russian titles is worth tuppence now the Bolsheviks run the show.’

  ‘Do you remember much about Russia?’

  He settled back in his chair. ‘Not much. I was only five when my father was killed and my mother fled the country. We drifted around Europe for a while before ending up here. I became a naturalised citizen once I turned twenty-one. My mother preferred France and eventually settled there.’

  ‘I’m thinking your mother must have smuggled out the family jewels, if she could afford to send you to Harrow.’

  A smile touched the corner of his mouth. ‘We left Russia without any money at all, and just a few of my mother’s jewels,’ he said. ‘My mother worked in Paris as a dressmaker. All we have, we’ve earned ourselves, except that a family friend paid my fees at school and at Cambridge. I was an outsider at Harrow because I was a foreigner, and a poor one at that.’

  ‘Levy said you were both outsiders. I thought that meant you were Jewish, too. But you’re not, are you?’

  ‘Jewish? Good God, no. I’m Russian Orthodox.’

  He gave a soft laugh. ‘I didn’t mind Harrow, after the first year or so, which was hellish. David hated the place to the end, but I enjoyed the sports and liked some of the masters. The boys could be difficult, but David was his own worst enemy in many ways, arguing with boys, masters, anyone he thought wrong, or stupid. Not following rules, often behaving badly. And often with good reason, I must admit.’

  ‘I like that about him,’ I said, ‘but
it makes his life difficult at the station as well. And there’s also the anti-Semitism – the nasty comments, practical jokes.’

  ‘He got that at school, pretty hard.’ Jim shook his head. ‘You know, one thing they really drummed into us there was the Old Testament. They do that at all the public schools. “I must be a gent,” we’d say, “for I know who begat Zerubbabel.”’

  ‘Who did?’ I asked.

  ‘Shealtiel.’

  ‘And I could have sworn it was Zeruprattle.’

  He grimaced to acknowledge the weak joke. ‘It used to infuriate David that they never really acknowledged that Jehu son of Nimshi and Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and all the others we had to learn off by heart were actually Jews. Or that Jesus was born a Jew.’

  The conversation drifted to where we were living.

  ‘I’m living in a flat in Half Moon Street, in Mayfair.’

  ‘Half Moon Street? Jeeves and Wooster?’ I thought it had to be a joke, but he nodded.

  ‘The flat belongs to a friend of my mother’s who has gone into the country to escape the bombs. She allows me use it when I’m in town.’

  When we had finished our lunch we stood uncertainly in the doorway to the cafe. ‘It’s stopped raining,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘If you’d like, we could walk for a while, before I take you home.’ He gestured towards the Strand.

  I said in a sing-song voice, ‘Let’s all go down the Strand?’

  ‘Have a banana!’ chimed Jim softly, finishing the title of the old Music Hall song. ‘I wonder what we’ll find.’

  I laughed. ‘A lot of bomb damage I suspect. But, by all means, let’s go down the Strand.’

  So we wandered along, past damaged buildings and sandbags and shelter notices. Past Charing Cross station and the Eleanor Cross, both sandbagged for protection, but looking somewhat battered. Outside the Savoy was a large water tank for fighting the inevitable fires. All the little shops were sandbagged, their windows boarded over.

  ‘Not exactly a cheery stroll,’ remarked Jim.

  ‘I like to see what damage they’ve done. The papers tell us nothing.’

  We passed the entrance to Aldwych, curving away like a boomerang, and then Somerset House was spread out alongside us. The site reached all the way to the Embankment, where I had stood with Levy on a still morning just a couple of weeks before and watched the Thames. Like all the buildings we had seen, the facade was pitted with shrapnel scars and its windows had been shattered. We peeped through the entrance. The central courtyard was a mess of rubble. Both the south and west wings had been badly hit, quite recently. We turned away and continued our walk.

  The church of St Mary le Strand loomed up in the middle of the street, like a medieval island set about with rusty rails. Amazingly, it seemed to be untouched, although the buildings around it were badly damaged and there was a bomb crater in the road not ten yards from the church’s doors.

  Further on along was Australia House, where Pam worked. It held pride of position at the farther end of the sweeping Aldwych curve and rather resembled a massive, snub-nosed flat-iron. Pam had warned me that it had been battered by bombs, but I thought the damage did not seem too severe.

  It was when I looked across the open space in front of its main doorway to another medieval island in the Strand that my heart seemed to stop. The area around St Clement Danes Church had been hit. The church itself was a shambles and its stained glass lay in pieces on the ground. Some of the walls were still standing, though, and the spire still reached for the sky.

  ‘I was here in April for the Anzac Day service,’ I said. ‘They draped Australian and New Zealand flags over the chancel.’ Its loss hit me harder than I would have thought. Because the church was so close to Australia House, it had been regarded almost as a sanctuary for Australians during the Great War. It had become traditional for services associated with any Australian anniversary or event to be held there.

  ‘At least St Paul’s Cathedral is still standing,’ said Jim. ‘The High Altar was hit the other day, but that’s all.’

  ‘At least we still have St Paul’s,’ I agreed.

  St Paul’s had had a narrow escape in September when a massive time bomb – weighing a ton – had landed in front of the steps. The bomb had penetrated deep into the earth but failed to explode, and the Royal Engineers disposal squad spent three days working to remove it. According to the newspapers, when it was finally carted away to the Hackney Marshes and deliberately exploded, the crater it made was a hundred feet deep and houses miles away had rattled.

  I could not think of any loss that would more devastate Londoners than the loss of St Paul’s, other than that of Big Ben, which had not yet missed striking an hour. St Paul’s and Big Ben: they were London’s two talismans. But I hated to see St Clement’s like this.

  We turned away from the damaged church and continued down the Strand. We passed the studded doors of the mock gothic Royal Courts of Justice, now pitted with shrapnel scars, to reach the fiery-looking dragon that marked the beginning of Fleet Street. And so we entered the City, where medieval London linked fingers with the present.

  I loved the City, with its laneways and narrow streets and smoke-grimed walls of huddled buildings. When I first arrived in London I would often wander there, trying to feel the presence of those that had walked the City in the centuries before me.

  Sometimes, in my solitary rambles, I felt that I had almost caught a glimpse of the City’s ghosts. The feeling intensified when black-gowned lawyers brushed past me, arguing the meaning of those strange terms in legal French that my uncle could rattle off at whim. I would walk the narrow lanes and imagine leather-jerkined apprentices from the medieval guilds, Elizabethan gallants with ruffs and short swords, footpads hiding in the dark alleys, rough Jacobean sailors up from the docks and looking for a female or a fight, Regency dandies, Victorian lamp-lighters and grubby little chimney-sweeps.

  I had no such fantasies that afternoon. The Luftwaffe had hit the City hard in the past weeks. The old places were open to the sky now and the ghosts of my imagination had fled the carnage.

  Jim turned into a narrow laneway to the right.

  ‘I heard that they hit the Temple a few weeks ago, both my Middle Temple and the Inner Temple,’ he said. ‘If we’ve time, I’d like to take a look.’

  I agreed and we wandered down a narrow, winding laneway in which a touch of past centuries still remained, despite plaster dust swirling around and a curious feeling of lightness, which hinted at damage to the buildings behind the dark walls.

  ‘Your uncle the judge would have come here in the last war,’ said Jim. ‘The Temple Church is a wonder. It was built by the Knights Templar, and like all their churches, it’s round.’

  We had reached a set of serious iron gates guarded by a porter, diminutive and wizened, who looked as if he had stepped straight out of one of Dickens’ novels.

  ‘Mr Vassy,’ he said. ‘How nice to see you, and in uniform, too. Come to see the damage?’

  ‘How bad was it, Cartwright?’

  ‘Bad enough. In September a big one fell near the Middle Temple Hall and blew a large hole in the eastern wall. Then, on 15 October, we had a parachute bomb. It wrecked Elm Court and blew the masonry through the east end of the Hall.’

  ‘How bad was the damage?’

  The porter grimaced. ‘Bad enough, I’m sorry to say. The minstrels’ gallery was smashed to pieces and the lovely screen was shattered.’

  ‘Can it be repaired?’

  ‘Course it can, sir,’ said the porter brightly. ‘They gathered up all the pieces and put them into sacks. And it will be made good as new, once we’ve given Hitler his marching orders.’

  Jim frowned. ‘The windows?’

  ‘Bless you, sir, they were removed for safety at the outbreak of war. The Inner Temple copped it, too. A bomb tore through the oak ceiling of the Hall. Knocked about them bronze statues and the wood panelling. But the main damage was to the clock tower: one side wa
s ripped out.’

  Rain began to fall as we walked into the gardens and we put up our umbrellas. The clean-up crews were long gone, leaving behind them a flat sea of mud that lapped at the walls of a gothic-looking building of grubby brown and white stone. Some of its windows were covered in boards and a big hole in one wall was shored up with wood. The acrid smell of soot hung heavily in the air, despite the rain. Other buildings had been damaged also, and a fountain in the paved square was smashed, but not irretrievably.

  Jim gestured towards the fountain.

  ‘Reputedly the oldest permanent fountain in London. It dates from the 1680s. Do you know your Dickens? In Martin Chuzzlewit, it was here that Ruth Pinch meets John Westlock.

  Jim stared at the Hall.

  ‘That is probably the finest example of an Elizabethan Hall in London,’ he said. ‘Shakespeare played Twelfth Night there. It survived the Great Fire of London. The carved screen was so beautiful, Lily. I wish you could have seen it. I hate all this.’

  He grabbed hold of my arm, and said urgently, ‘London is being swept away in the night. We need to look at the city, try to remember how it was – before all this.’

  I felt a little giddy, wondered how to respond. ‘I never saw the Temple before the bombing. I can’t remember London the way you and Levy do.’

  Jim released me abruptly and stood still, gazing again at the broken Hall. The only sounds were the steady beat of rain on my umbrella, on the gravel path and the muddy ground. Water pooled and ran in dirty rivulets through the soil.

  ‘Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie, Open unto the fields, and to the sky,’ I murmured, thinking of all the ruins I’d seen in the last months. Then, more loudly, ‘I’m as sure as the porter at the gate that once this war is over they’ll rebuild and reconstruct and all this will be beautiful again.’

  ‘It won’t be the same.’

  ‘It will still be London. And there will still be places of great beauty and grandeur. Including the Inns of Court.’

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Watching him, I saw again the melancholy that lingered just beneath his skin, imprinted on the bone, perhaps, when the five-year-old boy saw his father being dragged away to death.