Ambulance Girls

by Deborah Burrows

  ‘I hear it’s different with your own,’ I said.

  ‘Gosh, I hope so,’ said Pam.

  ‘Don’t you need to be at the shelter?’ I said.

  ‘Tell me all about it tomorrow,’ she said, and ran out of my flat, slamming the door behind her.

  Katherine came over and adjusted the fit of the gown. I felt like I had just acquired a fairy godmother.

  To my delight, when I arrived at his flat and removed my coat, Jim actually blushed. I took it as a compliment. He made me a cocktail and we chatted about my day, but he seemed preoccupied.

  ‘Jim, is something the matter?’ I asked.

  He held out his hand and when I came across to him, he pulled me down to sit next to him on the couch.

  ‘Lily,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s get married.’

  He was pale but his gaze was steady and his face very serious.

  ‘Oh Jim, I don’t know,’ I said, and he winced. ‘It still seems so early, there’s so much we don’t know about each other, about what will happen in the war.’

  His eyes became shadowed, and his jaw tightened. ‘You became engaged to that naval lieutenant after knowing him only a few weeks.’

  I shook my head. ‘Exactly. And that was a mistake. I was naive then, immature. I didn’t know him at all.’

  ‘It was only a year ago, Lily, and you do know me.’

  ‘It was a hundred years ago. It was before the Blitz. We’re both all keyed up about the war and Levy’s death. Either of us could be killed or wounded; anything could happen. This is no time to make such huge decisions.’

  He shook his head. ‘Marry me, Lily, and we can chance it together. I won’t ask you to stay here. I’m happy to come to Australia after the war, make our home there.’

  I was running out of arguments. There remained the question that most haunted me. I had to ask it.

  ‘Why do you want to marry me, Jim?’

  ‘I want to marry you because I love you. I want to share all my life with you, not just the days and nights you can spare me. I want to have a family with you.’

  ‘We’re like Ashwin and Levy,’ I said, hesitantly, though my heart exulted to hear him say he loved me. ‘Celia and David loved each other, but they knew it would never work. It’s like that with us. We’re just too different.’

  ‘That’s not true. How can you think such nonsense?’

  ‘It’s not just me. Celia told me that you and I have no future because we’re like fish and fowl. She should know.’

  He seemed to consider this. ‘I suppose I’m the fowl.’

  ‘What? Why would you say that?’

  He touched his nose. ‘This bally thing. It’s always described as hawkish or beaky.’

  I laughed without thinking, and felt better for it. ‘So that makes me the cold fish?’

  He smiled. ‘Never that.’

  ‘I need time.’

  ‘Of course. But, just tell me . . .’ He looked away and said, lightly, as if the answer was of no consequence. ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. He looked at me then, held my gaze steadily, smiling. ‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘I love you.’

  The sky was clear with a few small clouds and the moon was a bright crescent in the western sky. The moon, together with the bluish ‘star-light’ of the filtered street-lamps, illuminated our way as we walked along Riding House Street. An air raid was in progress, and the planes were loud overhead, but no bombs seemed to be dropping in our area.

  We were hoping to find a taxi near Broadcasting House. It was a chilly night, and I had belted my heavy coat over Katherine’s gown for warmth. Our breath puffed white before us with each exhalation.

  The walls of All Souls Church loomed, and I ran my gloved hand along the dressed stone. Jim’s torchlight had just picked out the chipped stone steps of the church’s semi-circular portico when we both flinched at the shrieking, whistling noise of a large bomb falling. I instinctively crouched down as protection against blast. Jim crouched beside me, his arms around my shoulders. This is it, I thought. This is death.

  The noise filled the air for a few seconds and then abruptly ceased, as if it had been cut off in mid-air. I leaned into Jim, my heart thumping wildly, but the explosion I expected did not come.

  After a few seconds came the sound of something clattering along a roof in the square ahead. The Germans usually dropped incendiary bombs to ‘light up’ the raid, and I assumed it was the canisters of phosphorus hitting the roof of Broadcasting House.

  ‘Incendiaries,’ I said. ‘We may be able to assist in dealing with them.’

  We walked on closer to the square and I waited for the little bombs to hit the road, but there was nothing to be heard.

  ‘That’s odd,’ I said, peering at the dark bulk of the BBC building across the square. ‘It certainly sounded like incendiaries, but where are they?’

  I stepped back and Jim’s arms folded around me.

  ‘Can’t see any taxis,’ he murmured into my hair. ‘We could walk down to Regent Street.’

  ‘It’s strange that there are no incendiaries,’ I repeated uneasily, over the low roar of the bombers. He didn’t seem to realise how odd this all was. What had happened to the bomb we heard falling?

  Footsteps sounded behind us.

  ‘What’s all this then?’

  We swung around to see a policeman walking towards us. The moonlight illuminated the white ‘P’ on his steel hat.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ I said to him. ‘We heard incendiaries dropping, but where are they?’

  ‘Look,’ said Jim.

  A large, dark and shiny object rolled silently out of the gloom of Langham Place, heading for Broadcasting House. It had almost reached the lamp post in the middle of the road opposite the Langham Hotel, but then it appeared to hesitate and retreated into the shadowy darkness from where it had come.

  ‘What was that?’ I hissed.

  ‘I think it’s a taxi, miss,’ said the constable.

  ‘But it was silent. This doesn’t make sense.’

  The sound of footsteps came from the direction of Broadcasting House, and out of the shadows strode two more policemen.

  ‘That you Bill?’ said our policeman. ‘Syd?’

  ‘We were told by a gentleman over there that there’s something peculiar on the road,’ said one of them.

  ‘We saw it,’ said our policeman. ‘It came in from Langham Place.’ He gestured towards where the object had retreated. ‘Funny thing is, it made no noise.’

  ‘We’ll check it out,’ they replied.

  They disappeared into the gloom.

  ‘Look,’ Jim said, and pointed up.

  A large mud-coloured cloth, at least twenty-five feet across, was falling softly and silently into the square. It gently collapsed on to the road and disappeared into the darkness of the tarmac about forty feet away from us. I had a mental image of the children’s game of drop the hanky, only this handkerchief had been dropped by a giant.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked, fear making my voice shrill.

  ‘They’ve been doing repair work on Broadcasting House,’ said the policeman. ‘Looks like a tarpaulin has come loose.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jim. ‘I don’t like it.’

  I was still loosely wrapped in his arms and I felt the tension in his body.

  A shout rang out from Langham Place and the two policemen came running out of the darkness. They shouted again. It was unintelligible to me, but Jim whirled around, took firm hold of my arm and pulled me along behind him as he ran at breakneck speed along Riding House Street back towards his flat. I could hear his laboured breathing and I felt the fear in his hard, painful grip on my arm as I struggled to keep up in my high heels.

  A loud swishing noise came from behind us, almost as if a plane were diving through the air with its engine off, or a gigantic fuse was burning.

  It all made sense to me now. I had the calm realisation that, although we were almost certainly going to die, I had
been trained for exactly such an event. I would do my best to survive and to keep Jim alive. Twenty-two seconds. That was the time we had until detonation and a blast that could explode lungs and tear heads from bodies and destroy everything around us.

  ‘Down,’ I shouted, dragging on his arm to make him stop. ‘We need to get down. Now!’

  He stopped running. His breathing was laboured as I tugged him into a low crouch.

  ‘Flat down,’ I shrieked. ‘We need to lie flat. And grab something, or we’ll be blown on to the railings or walls.’

  ‘The lamp post,’ yelled Jim, pulling me over to it.

  I stretched out flat on the pavement with my head towards the swishing noise and I grabbed tight hold of the post and shut my eyes. Jim lay on top of me, covering my body entirely with his, painfully crushing me into the tarmac as he took firm hold of the post.

  My world had contracted into mere sensation: the taste of blood from where I had bitten my cheek, the smell of Jim’s woollen greatcoat and the damp tarmac under my face, the heavy weight of Jim’s body on mine.

  ‘I love you,’ said Jim.

  The world exploded into a blinding wild white light. A colossal rush of air lifted his body up and away from me for a few terrifying seconds. I held tight to the lamp post with all my strength, holding on against the blast wind. Jim’s body landed back on top of me with a thump and I felt the tension in his muscles as he clung doggedly to the post. His body pressed down on me, pushing me onto the road.

  Then followed a great roar, as if my handkerchief-dropping giant were now an enormous lion bellowing its rage. An excruciating pain filled my ears, closely followed by a high-pitched whine, loud and unceasing, that blocked out all other sounds.

  I had lost my hold on the post and now clung to the kerb, but the weight of Jim’s body anchored me in place. I felt him shudder violently, as if something had struck him. It caused us both to lurch sideways, but Jim’s grip on the post held. My fingers were cramping as I continued to clutch the kerb. Jim’s body lurched again as something else struck him, this time with greater force. Now he was a limp, dead weight on top of me. His hands must have fallen away from the lamp post, because then we were apart and he was swept away, leaving me open to the elements, at the mercy of the blast wind. My hands lost their grip on the kerb. I scrabbled at the concrete, but my grip faltered and I, too, moved along like so much flotsam. But the force of the blast must have been weakening, because my progress was a stately, inexorable sweep along the road. A body – Jim’s body? – bumped me. I tried to grab him, keep him with me, but he slipped out of my grasp away into the darkness. After a minute, or an hour, or an eternity, all movement finally ceased and I was still.

  Again, my world was purely sensation. Darkness. The scent of cordite and smoke. The taste of blood. A ceaseless, maddening whine that drowned out all other noise. Pain in my head and my legs and my chest. Pain in my face and my arms. When I tried to move, my body would not obey me.

  Jim. Where was Jim? Shout, Lily. I opened my mouth and I cried out, but I heard no sound other than the ringing in my ears. I pushed up, to kneel on the road. My coat and Katherine’s gown were in tatters, but held in place by the belt. The light of a torch was in my eyes. Someone was helping me to stand upright. It was a woman, an ambulance officer. She was speaking to me, but I heard nothing.

  I looked around, desperate for Jim. My heart gave a thump as I saw him lying face down on the road, about ten yards from me, apparently unconscious. Not dead, I prayed. First aid workers fussed over him, but he seemed as floppy and unresponsive as a rag doll. Please not dead. His greatcoat had been ripped into shreds by the blast, and most of his clothes were gone. One arm was at an unnatural angle. By the aid workers’ torchlight I saw that the bare skin of his back and his legs was blackened. Blood trickled from a wound on his head. The team placed him face down on a stretcher and carried him away. Please Jim, don’t be dead.

  A nurse wearing a steel hat took hold of my face and turned it towards her. She shone her torch into my eyes, palpated my body. She said something I could not hear over the ringing in my ears. I touched my ear and shrugged. She mimed an enquiry into my health.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, although I heard no words. I looked at the retreating ambulance. ‘Is he alive?’

  She nodded, but did not smile and her gaze seemed to slide furtively away from mine. She propped me against the wall of a building, leaving me there while she went to assess other casualties.

  The whine in my ears seemed to have intensified, which added to my feeling of unreality as I looked around me. I was in a scene from Dante’s Inferno, illuminated by a reddish-yellow light. The air was hot, and reeking black smoke billowed from blazing buildings. Some distance in front of me a car burned. Pieces of brick, masonry and glass of all sizes lay strewn as if by my roaring, handkerchief-dropping giant. Black shapes were dotted around, some crouched over other black shapes, others standing still or moving about in a seemingly aimless manner. Fire engines arrived; water flowed from their hoses. I heard nothing over the constant whine that filled my ears.

  The nurse in the steel hat returned and walked me to the first aid post in Broadcasting House. Briskly efficient women bathed my face and used tweezers to pull pieces of stone and tar out of my skin. I wondered if I would be scarred for life, and if Jim would mind. Then I remembered. He might be dead, or dying at this very moment, and time seemed to stop.

  I was somewhere else and someone was forcing me to sip a hot sweet liquid, but my whole body seemed to be shaking, and it spilled out of the cup and down my chin. Someone forced the cup back to my mouth and tipped it up so that I had to drink. I opened my eyes and looked up, and it was Katherine, holding an empty cup. She tried to smile and said something I could not hear.

  ‘Where am I?’ I had no idea how loudly I was speaking.

  From the movement of her lips, she might have been saying Middlesex Hospital.

  ‘How is Jim?’ The world seemed to stop as I waited for her response.

  She shook her head.

  My whole body seemed to clench as darkness rose up and enveloped me and I fell into blessed oblivion.

  I was drifting upwards, and as I gained a sort of consciousness my thoughts wandered from one subject to another in sharp flickers of memory. The wind cutting a flat swathe through a field of wheat . . . red dust swirling . . . the green flash of cockatoos against a sky of burnished blue . . . the campfire scent of bacon and damper on a cold desert morning . . . my infants’ class, laughing at a story I told . . . a dozen red roses in a blue lustre bowl . . . the melancholy refrain of Valse Russe . . . the long tapered fingers of Jim’s hand on my arm.

  Jim. I could see his face so vividly I had to open my eyes.

  I was lying in a bed, between white sheets that smelled of carbolic. My limbs felt heavy, my head ached and my face, arms and legs stung as if badly grazed. My ears reverberated still with the endless ringing. My chest hurt when I breathed. I lay still, unwilling to worsen the pain.

  Jim. Is Jim alive? I must have cried out, because a doctor came to my bedside and spoke to me. I looked at him, uncomprehending. He mouthed, ‘Morphine?’

  I shook my head in a very small movement. ‘Flight Lieutenant Vassilikov.’ I could not hear my words, only the dreadful whine. I tried again. ‘Jim Vassilikov?’

  The doctor shrugged and mimed incomprehension. I did not know if he could not understand me or if he had no news of Jim’s condition. I found myself crying, weeping silently, and I tried to push myself up, to make him understand and answer me. The doctor said something to someone behind him. I felt the prick of a hypodermic needle and I fell into darkness again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When I opened my eyes again my ears were still ringing, but more softly than before. I rolled my head to the left and counted four beds. To the right there were two more. On the small table beside the bed was a carafe of water, a glass and a straw basket filled with grapes. Celia Ashwin was sitting next to m
e, reading a newspaper.

  ‘Jim,’ I said. It was a scratchy sound and muffled, but I could hear it. ‘How is Jim?’

  Celia looked up. ‘Broken arm,’ she said, in her usual cool, dispassionate tone. ‘Head injury that will probably cause some scarring. They’re worried about some residual deafness in one ear. The previous lung injuries were exacerbated, which is a shame, but they think he’ll recover nicely and be discharged next week.’

  My eyes filled with hot tears. ‘Thank you. It was a parachute bomb, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did many die?’

  ‘Five, including a policeman. Luckily you and Jim were shielded somewhat from the blast. You know Jim saved your life?’

  I nodded. He had anchored me, prevented me from being blown against a railing or a wall, stopped the blast from exploding my lungs or my body being torn apart.

  ‘Would you care for a drink of water?’

  I nodded and she held my head steady as I sipped.

  ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘It’s Friday afternoon. You were injured Wednesday night – broken ribs, mild concussion – so you’ve been here a day and a half. You became very agitated yesterday, and they kept you doped up.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve been spending time between both your bedsides. The grapes are from the Levys. They asked me to send you their good wishes.’

  ‘The Levys? Asked you?’

  ‘I’ve been helping Mrs Levy in her charity work with Jewish refugees.’

  I had a sudden suspicion that I was in a dream. Nothing was making sense. Celia saw my expression and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Atonement,’ she said, in a very matter of fact way. ‘Mrs Levy understands my need to atone.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And I’m useful to her because I’m efficient and I have good contacts.’