Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  ‘My parents had a lot of trouble having children,’ I said. ‘They were all born too early. I was the first to live past a few days, and two more died after me. It wasn’t until Ben came when I was eleven that I had a sibling.’ I was silent for a moment, thinking of my poor mother and the five little graves in the red earth of the Kalgoorlie cemetery. ‘We lived in the middle of nowhere and I was terribly lonely, so when I was six I was given a puppy. I called him Prince, because I loved fairy tales.’

  ‘Prince?’ Jim’s laugh was more like a sob. ‘So you call your dogs Prince in Australia. What do you call princes?’

  ‘Mate,’ I replied. ‘Or “you bastard”. We don’t much go in for princes, or anything like that, at home.’ Which was an oversimplification and perhaps a lie. ‘Except for the British royal family, of course. We adore them.’

  Jim leaned across and kissed me. It was a gentle kiss, hesitant, improvised, and in it I tasted the salt of his tears. When I responded, he put his arms around me and drew me closer, so that his body was hard against mine, warm and so very alive. And as his kiss deepened I felt the familiar sweet pain, the ache deep inside me, the yearning for more. I pressed myself against him and gave up trying to think.

  He spent the night in my flat, in my bed. He held me close until I slept, lying quietly beside me. When the All Clear sounded at five-thirty the next morning we were already awake, lounging in bed, in each other’s arms. I felt jittery, anxious, wondering what we had started and how it would end. Jim, by contrast, seemed for the moment entirely at ease, playing with my hair, teasing my curls through his fingers.

  ‘I like that sound,’ I said, as the long sustained note sounded. ‘The All Clear always makes my spirits rise.’

  ‘I hate sirens.’

  He pushed aside the bedclothes and went to pull across the heavy curtains and open first the blackout blind and then the French doors, to stand on the balcony. He was dressed in his trousers and vest and the red glow in the sky was bright enough to give a rosy cast to the milky skin of his arms and shoulders.

  ‘Fires in the City,’ he said. ‘As usual.’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ I said. ‘You’ll freeze.’

  He turned his head; his face was an indistinct blotch but I saw the white teeth as he smiled.

  ‘It takes more than this to freeze me.’ But when he slid into bed beside me his skin was cold as iron. I snuggled in closer, warming his body with mine, as the red glow of the burning City lit the early morning darkness.

  We talked of Levy as we lay together, warm and sleepy, but it made me too sad to think of my friend in the past tense. And so our discussion drifted.

  ‘Tell me about Helen Markham,’ I said.

  I was snuggled against him, pushing aside the ornate gold cross he always wore, to put my ear to his chest and feel the rise and fall of each breath and listen to his heart beating through the thin cotton of his vest. My voice was calm, although I was pleased about the darkness because Levy always said I gave too much away in my face. I had to know more about this. She was a hateful woman and it unnerved me that Jim had ever been in love with her.

  ‘She was Helen Palmer-Thomas then. I met her when I first arrived at Cambridge. She was visiting her brother and was a couple of years older, beautiful and sophisticated. What we in the RAF call “lush”.’

  It was as if my own heart had twisted, it was such a sharp, strange pain. I knew I would never be described as lush.

  ‘She quite literally picked me up. I never thought to marry her,’ he went on, ‘although I think that’s probably what she expected. I just wanted to laze about in bed with her, reciting good poetry and writing bad. She wanted my title, I think. Is it all right to be telling you this?’ He said, but rushed on, giving me no chance to respond, ‘I probably sound like a bit of a cad. I had little experience of girls before Cambridge, no idea what to expect, really. And there it was, on a plate . . .’ He trailed off, as though he didn’t know how to finish.

  Was this a way to tell me he didn’t want to marry me, either? That if he didn’t want to marry the daughter of a lord, he certainly wouldn’t consider marrying the daughter of an Australian publican. Was that why he had not wanted to take matters further the other night? Was he afraid that might lead me into false assumptions?

  Well, I don’t want to marry you either, I thought. There’s no need to humiliate me.

  ‘What ended it?’ I asked.

  ‘With Helen? It took me a while, but I grew up.’

  ‘Got bored with her?’ Would he tire of me so easily? Just what was he trying to tell me?

  ‘No. Yes. In a way, I suppose. When we met I was very young, I didn’t really know . . .’ His heart was racing, beating fast in his chest where my cheek lay against it. I wondered what he was gearing himself up to say and my own heart began to thump.

  ‘I went a little mad for a while,’ he said.

  ‘Mad about her?’

  ‘I think I went a bit mad in general.’ His voice drifted away, and then he said, tersely, as if he wanted to get it over with, ‘There’s something you should know, Lily. I joined Helen’s set for a while.’

  ‘What do you mean, joined her set?’

  ‘The ones she ran around with all belonged to the January Club and the National League of Airmen. She wanted me to join them. I’m ashamed to say I did.’

  ‘So? What were they all about?’

  ‘The League was a pressure group through which Lord Rothermere and Oswald Mosley promoted the expansion of British air power.’ He laughed, dismissively, as if he had been a fool. ‘It was 1935. Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it?’

  I nodded, rubbing my head up and down against his chest.

  ‘Only the purpose of the League was to join forces with Germany and America to attack, as they put it, “the enemies of the White race, human sub-species”.’

  ‘Jews?’

  ‘Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, slavs – you name it, they were agin it.’

  I felt the thudding of his heart, the tension in his body and I began to feel a prickle of apprehension.

  ‘And the January Club?’ I asked.

  ‘That was a group set up to encourage support for the British Union of Fascists. I hated communism so much, I—’

  ‘You became a bloody fascist?’ I tried to pull away, but he held me close, forced me to listen.

  ‘I’m not a fascist, Lily. I hate what Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and Mosley stand for. Hate it. I love this country and I’ll fight to keep it safe from Hitler, and that’s because Britain follows a rule of law I believe in – one that at least tries to protect the weak and deal fairly with all its citizens. I’m no fascist.’

  ‘But you did follow Mosley and the British fascists for a while.’

  He drew in a breath. ‘I did. I’m not proud of it.’

  ‘Why? How could you do that, Jim?’

  ‘Look, I was nineteen, in love, trying to work out what I really believed in. Mosley is a charismatic man and, like me, he loves to fly. But I mistrust anyone who thinks they have all the answers and after a while – too long, maybe – I understood what he really was.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’ My voice came out cold, suspicious.

  He laughed, but without any mirth. ‘Cambridge did. I read a lot. What I was reading made more sense than what I was hearing from Mosley and from Helen’s crowd. Eventually I found the Club uncongenial and the League ludicrous, so I bowed out, as graciously as I could. Helen and I had some terrific rows about it because she’d fallen hard for all their blather. The scales, as they say, fell away from my eyes. We agreed to go our separate ways. That’s the story.’

  I cut to the chase. ‘Why tell me all this?’

  He seemed surprised. ‘I needed you to know the truth about me. That despite a dubious beginning, I loathe all that fascist tripe as much as I loathe the communist claptrap.’

  ‘Do you still have feelings for Helen?’

  ‘No. And nor for anyone else,
for that matter.’ His heartbeat had quickened again. ‘Just you.’

  ‘Oh.’ I hesitated, then rushed in as usual, addressing the faint outline of his head, lit by the fiery glow from the windows. ‘We’re very different, Jim. Our backgrounds—’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’ He reached out and pulled me close so we were each on our side, looking one another in the eyes.

  ‘Do you remember the first time we met?’ he said. ‘You’d come off duty after a hard day.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You took my breath away.’

  ‘I don’t recall that you looked particularly overwhelmed.’

  ‘You came through that door like a whirlwind, drenched and dirty and bloody and exhausted, yet unbowed. And then you smiled.’ His chest rose and fell in a sigh.

  ‘Hah. I must have looked like something the cat had dragged in. Through a hedge, and across the barnyard.’

  ‘You looked magnificent. You terrified me.’ He began to play with my hair again, twisting it around his long fingers.

  ‘You hid it well.’

  ‘You put me in my place when you spoke French.’

  ‘You still managed to ask me out.’

  ‘It terrified me more to think that I might never see you again.’

  ‘Come to think of it, you didn’t ask me out. You vaguely suggested that you might perhaps be at a concert the following day.’

  ‘I spent a sleepless night, wondering if you would turn up. I’m not usually so gauche.’

  ‘You’d already bought the tickets when I arrived. What if I hadn’t turned up? Would you have picked up a passing stray female?’

  ‘I would have gone to the concert alone and spent the time working out a way to meet you again.’

  ‘Now that’s a good answer, flight lieutenant,’ I murmured, kissing him. He responded warmly, then he stopped and pulled his head back to look at me again.

  ‘Lily, I’m – I can’t be casual about love. Not any more.’

  I became very still. My mind was whirling, trying to work out what he meant. It was far too soon to talk of marriage. There was only the sound of our quiet breathing to disturb the silence in the room.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  He breathed a laugh. ‘I suppose it means . . . tread softly.’

  I knew the poem by Yeats, and I loved it. I reached up to kiss him. This time he responded without hesitation, and when we moved together I forgot about my concerns, forgot the sound of bombers overhead, forgot the war and even Levy.

  I woke again at seven-thirty and watched the fire-red sky become pearly dawn and lighten into a bright morning. I lay still, listening to Jim’s soft breathing, until I propped myself up on an elbow to watch him sleep. He lay sprawled beside me, utterly abandoned to sleep in the manner of a small child. His face was relaxed and peaceful. He had thrown off some of the blankets and I studied the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, watched the flutter of a pulse at the base of his throat, under the Adam’s apple.

  His body was lean and rangy, and he would have been gaunt but for the subtle ridge of muscle under the milky-white skin. A scattering of pale caramel-coloured freckles on his shoulders matched those across the bridge of his nose. He seemed young and terrifyingly fragile. I flinched as he shifted slightly, murmured something, frowned, nearly woke and drifted again into oblivion.

  I had known him for such a short time, and now here he was, in bed beside me on a cold November morning. I could hardly contain all these big feelings, the exquisitely painful tugs of protectiveness, delight and fear. It was the war, I thought. It stripped away the usual defences, forced quick decisions. It made you act without really thinking. But surely all lovers needed a touch of blindness before they could jump across the abyss in front of them. If anybody really thought about falling in love – considered the consequences – they would never, ever do it.

  What did we really want from each other? Marriage? I thought not. We were too different, and I wanted to go home to Australia and to my family after the war. This was a wartime romance, and if I saw it as such I might be able to leave England with my heart intact.

  The timbre of his breathing had changed. He opened one eye, then the other and looked at me. Smiled.

  ‘Good morning, sleepyhead,’ I said.

  He reached out for me and pulled me close.

  He said he was worried about my reputation. Questions would be asked if he breakfasted with me in the service cafe, and my reputation would suffer. Questions also would be asked if I failed to turn up for breakfast. It was a valid point. I did not want to fall victim to society’s double standards.

  Temptation abounded in a London that thronged with the remains of the shattered continental armies and troops from all parts of the Empire. When life seemed so very fragile many women found it easy simply to give and accept pleasure, found it easy to fall in love.

  Married women, to whom the wartime separation from their husbands had become unendurable, were shocked to discover themselves so vulnerable to temptation. Young brides who had only known their husbands for a few weeks of marriage were desperately lonely and willing to take solace where they could find it. Unmarried girls facing death every night wanted to experience all that life could offer, rather than die in unfulfilled ignorance.

  The stakes in these games of love were far higher for women than for the men they slept with. A woman with a ruined reputation not only faced terrible guilt but also risked being shunned by friends and family, while the consequences of unwanted pregnancy might be utter disaster. I had taken precautions, but the worry was always there, and it was, inevitably, the woman’s worry.

  I knew all that. And right now I had an attractive man in my flat and I lived in a hotbed of gossip.

  ‘No one could expect me to ask you to leave during an air raid,’ I said.

  ‘But they may wonder why we didn’t go down to the basement.’

  That was true. If we had spent the night in the basement shelter then no one would have thought anything of it. But to spend a night in my flat . . . Nancy was the talk of the building. I did not want to face the censure that she did, but surely it was my business who stayed in my flat.

  ‘I don’t care about my reputation,’ I said, trying to force myself to believe it, ‘not in London anyway. And no one really cares about that sort of thing any more. At least we’re both single. For goodness, sake, Nan—’

  I broke off, horrified that I had been about to tell on her. We in St Andrew’s all knew about Nancy’s escapades, but Jim knew her husband, who obviously did not.

  I jumped up and pulled on my dressing gown. ‘Cup of tea? You have first bath.’

  He came into the kitchen a little while later, dressed in his uniform, flushed from his bath; he leaned against the doorjamb and watched me fuss about.

  ‘Nan used to be a mousy little thing,’ he said. ‘The sort of woman who lived for her family, always put them first. Quiet, home-loving. Married at twenty, then the doting mother to their honeymoon baby. Happy with her life in a Hampshire village.’

  ‘Nancy?’ I squeaked. ‘Our Nancy Parrish?’ I had always seen her as shallow, grasping and venial, interested only in fashionable people and fashionable clothes. When she referred to her husband she gave the impression that he was an inconvenience who was conveniently out of the picture. She talked about her son as if he was an absent pet, not a small child who was undoubtedly missing his mother. I had assumed that she had always been such a woman.

  ‘Yes, Nancy Parrish. Bob adores Nan, but he’s heard things. He’s worried. It was out of character for her to dump Teddy on her mother and come up to London to work. She could get a job closer to home, but she’s stayed here despite the Blitz.’

  I handed him a cup of tea and took a sip of my own.

  ‘Bob wrote and asked me to see her, to report back on what I found.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I gave him a version, not too specific. Living in London has changed her.
She loves the excitement of it all. Loves the anonymity. Loves her new life.’

  I had to know. ‘Did she . . .?’

  ‘Ask me to stay the night? Yes.’

  ‘Were you tempted?’

  Jim looked down at his tea, intently, as one would do to read the leaves, plan an action, think up a lie. When he looked up, though, he held my gaze steadily.

  ‘No. Bob is an old friend and a fine man and he does not deserve that.’ He smiled a little. ‘And I kept thinking about an Australian ambulance driver I’d just met and was hoping to meet again.’

  Who had ended up giving him exactly what Nancy had offered. Did he assume then that we would end up in bed? Girls all over London were sleeping with pilots. Could I trust his fine words said in the dark?

  We finished our tea in silence. I rinsed the cups. Watched the water swirl around and disappear like dreams into the darkness beneath.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘Lily,’ he said, ‘I’m not seeing anyone else and don’t intend to if you are willing to put up with me.’ He ducked his head, rather boyishly. ‘As I told you last night, I’ve never been much of a lothario, actually.’

  I smiled at that. ‘And I’ve never been whatever the female equivalent is.’

  ‘You have breakfast downstairs. You do need to eat. And something more appetising than mouldy bread, dried egg and pilchards.’

  I laughed. ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ll breakfast nearby. I have an errand this morning, so I’ll pick you up at twelve? I want to drop into my flat and then we can spend a lazy Sunday afternoon together.’

  ‘An errand? On Sunday morning?’

  He seemed strangely embarrassed, and then a little defiant. ‘I usually attend church on Sunday morning if I’m in London. There’s a Russian Orthodox church in Buckingham Palace Road.’

  ‘Do you go every Sunday?’ I wondered why I was so surprised, given the antique cross he always wore, and I’d seen him cross himself at Levy’s body.

  ‘When I can. Orthodox churches are not that common in England. I’d drifted away from it all, but then I took to the skies and began to do battle with Jerry, and . . .’ He looked at me. ‘Is it a problem?’