Angel of the North

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘If you’ll wait another half an hour until the blackout ends, I’ll bring Dad’s car round, and drop you off. If we can get through the streets, that is,’ Charles said.

  ‘No. It’ll be quicker to walk straight there than walk to your house and then drive.’

  ‘Not for me. I’ll have to walk back.’

  ‘I’m not forcing you to come, Chas! Go home! I’ll be there before the blackout finishes.’

  ‘No. I’ll walk with you,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s be off.’

  Chapter 4

  The infirmary was heaving with injured people, many completely stupefied by their nightmare ordeal, others weeping and distraught, and a couple screaming uncontrollably.

  ‘Nurse!’ one of the Casualty sisters called. ‘Take that to the incinerator. Quickly.’

  Marie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as a severed limb was thrust into her hands – a woman’s blackened leg, blown off at the knee.

  ‘Go. Go on,’ Sister urged, ‘and get back here double quick.’

  Marie ran as fast as she could with the sickening object, and was never so glad as when she got it out of her hands.

  Dr Steele spotted her in the throng as soon as she returned.

  ‘You there!’ he shouted, over the hubbub. ‘Yes, you there, that nurse with the blond hair! What’s-your-name! Nurse Larsen! My colleague says you can suture. Come and put a couple of stitches in this chap’s hand.’

  But as she started towards him, Marie was stopped by two women ambulance drivers with a stretcher case. The patient they were bringing in looked as if someone had set about her head with an axe. Half her scalp was torn away and hanging over her face, and her hair was matted with a mixture of drying blood and thick dust, which also caked her chest. Her clothing and stockings were torn, and her shoes missing.

  ‘Anybody with her?’ she asked, instinctively curling her fingers round the woman’s wrist to feel for a pulse. ‘Any family? Have we got a clue who she is?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Parachute mine,’ one of the drivers said. ‘Shelter on Ellis Street took a direct hit; they reckon there must be dozens killed. Lucky for her she hadn’t reached it. Scores of people injured round there as well; the nearer first-aid stations are chock-a-block.’ She nodded towards the woman on the stretcher. ‘She was buried under a pile of rubble. If it hadn’t been for a dog yapping its head off, the rescue workers wouldn’t have found her so quickly. She’ll be lucky if she’s still got a home to go to. Ellis Street’s completely wiped out.’

  Ellis Street! A terrible apprehension seized Marie. She looked wildly round. ‘Sister! Sister!’ she called, still trying vainly to feel a pulse. The ring on the woman’s pallid left hand looked exactly like her own mother’s wedding ring. Marie froze, too terrified to move the hair and see who it was beneath that filthy, blood-caked mess.

  Sister was soon beside her, lifting back the hair herself, revealing the bloodless face beneath. ‘Get her into a cubicle, and stay with this one, Larsen. We’ll get plasma up as fast as we can, and we’d better send blood for crossmatching. She’s going to need a surgeon. She’ll have a stinking headache when she comes round – if she ever does.’

  ‘You there!’ Dr Steele again. ‘Nurse Larsen! Come and attend to this patient – at once!’

  Marie’s face had turned ashen.

  ‘What’s the matter, Larsen?’

  ‘It’s my mother,’ she whispered.

  This was the horror that Marie had deliberately pushed out of her mind since the start of the war – the chance that someone she loved would come through those doors badly injured, or even dying. She clung onto the stretcher as the madhouse around her began to recede, struggling with her whole being against this nightmare that could not be happening and must not be happening.

  ‘What’s the matter with the girl? Has she gone deaf?’ Dr Steele’s muffled words reached Marie as though through a fog as Sister got her to a chair and thrust her head between her knees.

  The sound of screaming was the first thing she was aware of as the blackness ebbed away. She lifted her eyelids to find herself gazing into eyes like brown pebbles behind a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, and recognized the junior houseman who had taught her to suture.

  ‘All right? It’s not like Nurse Larsen to turn squeamish. Take a few deep breaths.’

  ‘I knew it,’ she said, struggling to her feet and looking around her. ‘I just knew.’ Her mother was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘The woman the ambulance just brought in; it’s my mother. Where’s she gone?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his face full of concern. ‘No one told me, or if they did I didn’t hear for the racket in here. The doctors are with her now, then she’ll be sent to one of the wards. It’ll be better if you don’t see her for a while, until they get her tidied up.’

  Tidied up. So that’s what you do with a woman whose scalp is ripped away and pulled over her face, Marie thought, you tidy her up. She had an insane urge to laugh at the strange choice of words. ‘No. I’ve got to see her now,’ she said. ‘God, can’t anybody stop that woman screaming?’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s just watched her husband roast to death, trapped between two burning rafters.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Marie shuddered.

  ‘Listen, there’s nothing you can do that’s not being done already,’ the junior houseman insisted, ‘and if I know Dr Steele, he won’t have you there. The WVS canteen’s outside. Get a cup of tea; hot and sweet. And then pull yourself together and come straight back here. We need every pair of hands we can get.’

  No doubt Dr Steele wouldn’t want her there, Marie thought as she leaned against the wall sipping tea in the crowded waiting room, away from the busy treatment areas. His tolerance level for any display of emotion was practically nil. Emotional display had never been the Larsen way, either. It had never been needed; the ties of love were deep and loyalty a given, making display superfluous. But seeing her mother’s injuries, Marie doubted that she could have kept her distress in check. Tears stung her eyes at the thought of her mother and she bent nearer to the cup to hide her face, inhaling the steam, trying to calm herself.

  If her mother was as badly injured as that, what about her father? She hoped to God he hadn’t reached the shelter either, and was safe somewhere. But if he hadn’t been in the shelter, he would have been with her mother at the hospital. Since he’d been invalided out of the army after the Great War, they’d been like a pair of bookends, hardly ever more than a few yards apart, unless they’d been at work.

  If he were alive and well, he’d come in search of his wife. If she didn’t see him soon, it could only be because he was either dead or lying badly injured somewhere. It was hard to know which was worse but she was helpless either way; she had no hope of finding him, miles away on the other side of the bridge. She would have to wait, and pin her hopes on the rescue services. The only useful thing Marie Larsen could do was to pull herself together and get on with whatever needed to be done here and now, to throw herself into work, and treat these injured people as she’d want her dad to be treated, if he arrived at any of the other hospitals or first-aid stations.

  She gulped down the last of her tea and went back to work, trying not to think of her own concerns until the staff on the late shift reported for duty. Then she went to the ward, where she found her mother still unconscious, but clean and very nicely ‘tidied up’. Her breathing was shallow and rapid and she looked bloodless, almost as white as the bandages that bound her head, and the pillow she rested on.

  ‘She’s in a critical condition; the doctor’s been in to see her every quarter of an hour. She’s had three pints transfused but,’ the ward sister grimaced and said, with a slight but significant shake of her head, ‘it’s touch and go – no point telling you anything else.’

  Marie knew that, and she dreaded to think what the outcome might be, even if her mother surv
ived. Her external injuries, the ones they could see, were bad enough. But what was happening on the inside? What about brain damage? Even if she survived, she might never be able to work again. She might need to be looked after for the rest of her life.

  Well? Well then, she would have to do it. Marie took the work-worn hand that rested on top of the blankets, and held it to her lips. It felt cold. Someone had removed her mother’s false teeth and her mouth was hanging open, making her look much older than her years and terribly vulnerable. Marie had never felt more helpless in her life.

  Sleep had always come easily to her. Before the air raids she would fall asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow and hardly stir until she awoke the following morning, bright and eager for the challenges of the day, with enough energy and stamina to keep her going for sixteen hours at a stretch.

  Not so this night. Marie lay in bed in the Nurses’ Home and closed eyes that were swollen with crying. She had nothing to disturb her but the monotonous tick-tock of the alarm clock and the beating of her own heart, yet sleep evaded her. After a long day of horror piled upon horror, she was tired in a way she had never known before, not only the tiredness of sheer physical exhaustion, but also the tiredness of anxiety and apprehension, of dread – dread of the future and what it might bring. She felt like a traitor for abandoning her mother to the pain and fear she would feel when she came round and found herself in a strange place, with none of her family near. Her mother, the mainstay of the family – always rushing off to work or rushing home, and at home forever busy, always doing – now lying completely still, and looking as if she might never get up again. The fact that her mother was in good hands and that Marie herself could be there in two minutes if needed was small consolation. And where was her father? Was he dead, or trapped and in pain under a mass of broken bricks and concrete? She felt crushed at the mere thought of it.

  And then there were Pam and Alfie. Tomorrow she would have to find out about travel arrangements to Bourne, to go and tell them what had happened. They were overdue a visit anyway. No one had been to see them since they’d been evacuated in February. The journey to the south of Lincolnshire was a long one, and time and money were short. So the days had slid into weeks and the realization that it was now the middle of April came as a bit of a shock.

  Marie made up her mind. She couldn’t write such terrible news to them; she’d have to tell them face to face, and it wouldn’t be easy. Telling Pam would be the worst, and Marie dreaded the floods of tears and near hysteria that would be her reaction to the news. Pam had always been their mother’s shadow.

  It wouldn’t be quite such an ordeal telling Alfie, Marie predicted. Nothing seemed to make an impression on him for long; trouble seemed to slide off him like water off a duck. He’d be upset, but nothing like Pam. It was to be hoped that Mam would be much better before she went, and Dad would have been found alive and well.

  Chapter 5

  At the crack of dawn on the Saturday, six days after the bombing of the shelter, Marie stood alone in the kitchen making sandwiches. Her mother was showing feeble signs of recovering, but Marie had still heard nothing about her father. The rescue services could tell her nothing, and there was no one else to ask.

  She had been to see Ellis Street for herself, and her heart had plummeted when she saw the devastation. Broken walls stood like jagged teeth above piles of rubble. It was impossible to tell whose houses they’d been. Whether he’d been in the shelter or in Ellis Street, Marie was hard put to hang on to any hope of seeing her father alive again.

  Fighting back a rising wave of tears, Marie opened the loaf of Mother’s Pride she’d bought on the way home from the hospital the day before, imagining what her parents would have thought of it. Bought bread! The waste of it! The sheer, near-criminal laziness of women who bought shop bread! Her mam and dad would have been shocked. But with so many poorly patients after the raids Marie’s life had been all work and worry, and sleep – when complete exhaustion forced it – so that the Larsen family rule book had been thrown overboard.

  As she scraped off the last of the potted beef clinging to the sides of the bowl she saw her dad making it as clearly as if he were beside her, carefully covering the top with clarified butter the way he always did and putting it in a paper bag, and then in the cupboard away from dust and flies. Unless there were a miracle this would be the last of her dad’s potted meat she’d ever taste. She had reported him missing, but she knew that if he were alive, she’d have heard from him by now. Unless he were trapped, and hurt . . .

  She shuddered, fought down the unbearable thought, and concentrated on wrapping the sandwiches in greaseproof paper and putting them in her bag. She wouldn’t take a flask. They were heavy to carry when full, and a nuisance when you had to lug them back home empty. Surely one of the families would offer her a cup of tea. She’d given them warning she was coming, after all.

  Charles drove her down to Corporation Pier in time for the 7.30 ferry to New Holland. ‘I hope you don’t get stuck there, miss the bus, or anything. I’d like us to have a final evening together before I go.’ He drew out his wallet, and held out a five-pound note. ‘Just in case you need it.’

  She hesitated, and took it. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not necessary. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.’

  She gave him a quick kiss, and followed the other passengers up the ramp.

  On the ferry Marie stood and watched him out of sight, breathing in the mud and salt-laden smell of the River Humber on the fresh moist April air – a tonic after hours spent indoors at the hospital and at home. She stayed on deck for a while, looking at the rippling water, listening to the crying of the gulls, as they wheeled round the sky, completely free. Free of care.

  A smartly dressed woman with beautifully cut hair came to stand near her. ‘Nice day, isn’t it? Nice to get away from Hull for a change.’

  Marie guessed she must be in her late thirties, and she was obviously very well off. ‘Lovely,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’m going to see my little boy,’ the woman volunteered. ‘He’s ten. He’s staying with my sister and her husband in Sleaford; they’ve got no children. I try to go at least once a week, if I can, although it’s quite expensive. I’m glad he’s there, though. Hull’s been such a hellhole this year, what with the air raids. If it’s only a false alarm, it still puts your nerves on edge. Even if there’s no raid, you’re sleeping with one eye open, just waiting to have to jump out of bed, get dressed again and go down to a freezing cold shelter. I don’t think I’ve had a decent night’s sleep for weeks; it wears you out. You can hardly blame people for chancing it, and staying in bed.’

  ‘They might as well, for what use the public shelters are,’ Marie said bitterly. ‘A whole lot of people were killed in the shelter on Ellis Street a few nights ago. My mother hadn’t quite got there, so she escaped, but her injuries are terrible. My dad went into the shelter, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since. I’m praying he’ll turn up, but there’s not much hope. It took a direct hit from a one-ton bomb. The whole street was completely flattened. They reckon about fifty people were killed, and there were scores badly injured.’

  ‘How awful. We’ve had no tragedies like that so far in my family, but you hear of such horrible things happening, you wonder how long you can get away with it. And even if nothing terrible happens, it’s so disruptive to business. We had to evacuate the office six times in one day not long ago. And this new air-raid insurance the government’s making people get! Forcing you, whether you want to have it or not. In one way, you feel safer having it, but then it’s another expense on top of everything else. They always seem to be dreaming up some new way of getting money off us, as if they didn’t take enough already. And then the cost of this trip every week! And it’s a lot dearer if there isn’t an excursion running.’

  ‘Why do you do it,’ Marie asked, ‘if you know he’s safe, and in good hands?’

  �
�I don’t want him to think we’ve forgotten him. And I don’t want him to end up thinking more about them than he does about me.’

  ‘I’m sure he won’t,’ Marie said, and wondered fleetingly if there were any danger of Pam and Alfie forgetting their own parents. From what her mother had said about the tears Pam had shed when they were evacuated, there was certainly none in her case. Alfie had taken it all in his stride, but his loyalty lay with his own family, Marie was sure of it. There might be some danger of their new families getting too attached to them, though. They were both attractive children and although he was a scamp, Alfie had some very winning ways.

  The other woman frowned. ‘I’m not. They spoil him rotten.’

  ‘Why not go to Sleaford and stay with him then? Quite a few women have evacuated with their children.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, but it’s not so easy for a grown woman to live in someone else’s home, is it? And then, I’ve got to think of my husband. There are far too many easy women about.’

  ‘Don’t you trust him?’

  ‘I don’t trust them! Especially the young ones whose husbands are away in the Forces. Some of them, well, if their own man isn’t there to give them what they want, they’ve no scruples about getting it from someone else’s, have they?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Marie, finding it hard to believe that any woman whose husband was fighting for his country would do such a foul thing.

  ‘How old are your children?’

  ‘I’m not married. I’m going to give my brother and sister the bad news about my mam and dad. They’re in Bourne, at different addresses. I hope they’re not very far apart. I hope I can manage to spend a bit of time with them before I have to get the bus back.’