by David Black
The Bonny Boy
David Black
© David Black 2018
David Black has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
About the author
To the West Mersea Yacht Club's "Man Book Club" – no finer body of seafarers ever set sail.
One
The reek of smoke and high explosives was still in the air, even though it was Monday morning now; it was two days since the raid.
Shirley was driving her ambulance back into Glasgow city centre along the Dumbarton Road, just passing the big red brick façade of the Drysdale Pumps factory on her right. The factory, which took up all the space between the road and the River Clyde, was miraculously untouched, while a couple of hundred yards up ahead, on her left, rubble from a collapsed sandstone tenement spilled out into the street.
Behind that obvious scar, a parallel back street – Langholm Street – had been wiped off the map.
On the Saturday, a stick of 500lb bombs had come plummeting unannounced out of what had been a bright spring morning, and landed in a near perfect straight line.
The bombs had missed their target by almost a quarter of a mile. A single high-flying Jerry had been after the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, which had been lying in the nearby Rothesay Dock, completing her stores after a refit in the Fairfield’s yard further up the river.
Shirley had been here that Saturday morning, helping remove the dead and wounded civilians that Jerry did hit.
All the rescue vehicles and fire engines and ambulances were gone now, just like the spring sunshine; and the traffic was light, just like the current persistent drizzle, which was doing little to get rid of the smell. She slowed down to negotiate the rubble.
In the back of Shirley’s ambulance was a noisy, young pregnant woman, laid out on a stretcher, fully clothed in a faded floral print dress all bunched and tented over her belly, with a baggy pink cardigan struggling to meet on top; she was more grumbling and complaining than in any real distress. Her aunt was with her, propped against the far corner of the big cab. She was wrapped in a cheap, shapeless blue coat and had a scarf knotted around her head that emphasised her bony cheeks and the poverty-grey of her skin. She was smoking a cigarette and gazing at the roof like she was trying to wish herself back to better days. You could tell she’d long since given up on offering any comfort to her irascible niece.
Shirley was taking the girl, for she wasn’t much more than that, to the city’s Rottenrow Maternity Hospital. The father-to-be had had to call out the GP over the weekend and the doctor had diagnosed ‘complications’ in her pregnancy, and as she was over seven months gone, he thought it best she be ‘admitted for tests’. The father-to-be had left for work in John Brown’s shipyard by the time Shirley had arrived, and just the aunt remained to help Shirley get the girl and her shopping bag with her nightie and scant toiletries down two flights of tenement stairs and into her ridiculously huge Austin K2 ambulance parked at the kerb.
A big mug of steaming cocoa awaited Shirley in the canteen after this run. She’d been on duty in the West End drivers’ pool all weekend, and once she’d dumped this patient, and then this stupid big military fort-on-wheels, she could head back to her digs and sleep for a week.
That was when the air raid warden had stepped out into the middle of the road, waving his arms. She crunched down through the gears to bring her three-ton beast to a halt. The warden stuck his head in through the near side canvas flap of the driver’s cab. ‘We need ye tae come an’ help us, Miss,’ he said. He was a middle-aged man, his face caked in dust, turned to paste by the rain; he wore a dented tin hat perched on the back of his head, its scratched white “ARP” stencil still just about visible. ‘There’s a wee boy doon a hole an’ we don’t know hoo tae get him oot wi’ oot hurtin’ him.’
Shirley was too tired to argue or discuss; she just nodded and grabbed her own tin hat and gas mask bag, and the small first aid kit. The girl in the back could wait.
‘Oi! Where you goin’!’ called the auntie from the back of the ambulance. ‘She’s no’ leavin’ me, auntie!’ This, plaintively, from the prostrate girl. Shirley didn’t reply. ‘Ah asked you a question!’ Said the auntie.
‘I’m going on a picnic,’ said Shirley over her shoulder.
The ARP – Air Raid Protection – man led her back along Dumbarton Road and then up a side street. He cut a tallish, scrawny figure, with his filthy siren suit that looked like he’d been wearing it for a month, bagging and clinging on him as he slouched along.
Shirley stepped out behind him. She was also wearing a set of those a dull blue overalls, topped off with an old, battered khaki ATS cap with the badge sliced off to keep her neat bob of chestnut hair out the way. It was doing its best to succeed. She was almost as tall as the warden, a leggy girl, who unlike the warden fitted into her suit rather pleasingly in all the places where the warden didn’t, smeared and battered though it was. As a Women’s Voluntary Service ambulance driver, it wasn’t the uniform she’d originally been issued; WVS drivers were supposed to wear a rather fetching French blue ensemble, with a tunic and skirt, and a dainty peaked cap with a bow in front. It didn’t take long to realise that was a laugh, not with the job they had to do. Which was why Shirley wore the siren suit.
Even the ATS girl drivers wore them on duty, and you often saw pictures of Churchill in one. It was the fashion for the age. The no-nonsense harridan who ran the drivers’ pool approved; Mrs Fletcher, whose husband was “in commerce” and who’d sacrificed her peacetime life as a domestic tyrant to transfer her skills to the war effort, had no truck with spit and polish. As far as Mrs Fletcher was concerned, ambulance drivers only had one job – saving folk’s lives.
‘I don’t care what uniform you’re wearing,’ she used to say in her strident Kelvinside posh to the newcomers who erred on the side of punctiliousness. ‘You’re not here to go on parade with the Brigade of Guards. If what you’re wearing isn’t splattered with blood and snotters, then I’ll know you’re not getting stuck in enough!’
The other thing you’d have noticed right away about Shirley was that she was impossibly young.
Looking west along Dumbarton Road, Shirley could see the world going about its business: people on the street, going to shops, standing on stoops and in tenement close entrances, chatting. But the houses immediately around them were dead. All residents evacuated. The houses still standing might have looked safe enough, but Shirley knew from experience the blast from bombs the size Jerry had used probably meant most of them would be unstable; they were liable to fall down without warning.
They came to the corner of Langholm Street. There were a couple Bedford MWD trucks in ARP blue with half a dozen other wardens gathered around the base of a low promontory of rubble. And there were two other men there, in soft hats and gabardine trench coats. Again, from experience, she knew they’d be from the City Engineer’s department, assessing what to do with the mess.
To an inexperienced eye, the scene would have been a jaw-dropping cataclysm. It was a mini Himalayan range of collapsed masonry, stretching the length of the entire street, punctuated with random, still-standing fragments of wallpapered walls,
with odd sections of floor still jutting from them, torn carpet shreds flapping and a dresser, or a wardrobe here and there, precariously poised. But Shirley, having seen it all before, barely noticed.
One warden, crouched a little way up the low rubble promontory, she did notice. Presumably he was looking down the hole.
‘He’s still awake, the wee laddie,’ said her scrawny warden as they walked up, ‘But we’re no’ getting’ much sense oot him. It looks like he was late for school this morning and took a shortcut. And the rubble collapsed under ’im.’
Shirley scrambled up the little rise of collapsed brickwork, and peered over the lip. No-one interrupted her.
The boy hadn’t fallen far, no more than five feet. But quite a lot of the lip of the hole had fallen in after him. It was mostly brick and timber; none of the huge sandstone blocks that made up most of the rubble on the street and no heavy weights seemed to be pinning him. That would make things a lot easier when it came to dragging him out because the space he was lying in was very tight. He was face down in the hole, but all she could clearly see was his head, upper body and right arm. The rest was under the jumble of wreckage. Well, the sooner she got down there, the sooner she’d know what to do. She eased herself into the hole, dropping that last foot, and setting off a small avalanche of mixed debris. A lump of dislodged mortar hit the boy on the cheek, and he let out a yelp.
‘Oh, sorry! Sorry!’ she said in her most soothing voice, before leaning back and gesturing for her first aid haversack. The crouching warden passed it down.
Crouching herself now, she ran her eyes over the boy. He was matted in dust; she couldn’t tell if he was pale or not, nor the colour of his hair, which was a pudding-bowl cut and so thick now with dust, it was like matting. She could see he had on a rough, collared shirt and a sleeveless pullover, and his school tie seemed to be dragging his head to the side. The boy’s eyes were far away and he was trembling all over. She didn’t like the look of his free arm.
‘Hello,’ she said softly in his ear, ‘My name is Shirley and I’m an ambulance driver, and I’m going to get you safe home to your mum. You’re going to be just fine now that I’m here. So, there.’
The boy’s eyes flickered and he grimaced. His breathing was in shallow gasps. Shirley thought: He’s in pain. The arm was her first concern. She ran her hands gently along its length. The boy winced. As she thought, it was broken. Not a fracture; there was a snap there in the fore arm – the ulnar. An artery ran down the edge of that bone, and she was about to start dragging him out of rubble. The arm needed splinting; and in case the snapped bone nicked the artery a tourniquet needed to be applied under the armpit. She was about to get to work when she paused. The boy was obviously in shock. And until now, the shock was distracting him from the pain. She bent over and studied his face. His eyes looked back at her full of fear.
He was about 10 years old at the most, she reckoned, but maybe the dust made him look older – and the trembling. The hole they were in seemed so much smaller now. She smiled at him and reached back for her haversack. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘You know mine. I’m Shirley.’
‘Duncan,’ said the boy.
‘Duncan,’ said Shirley, fumbling in the sack. ‘Duncan was the name of my first boyfriend … bet you didn’t know that?’
She had the syrette of morphine now. Cotton wool and antiseptic to wash a clean a patch of skin on his arm.
‘But I can tell you’re much better looking than my old boyfriend …’ she said, steadying herself, only too conscious that she was no medic, just a driver with basic first aid, ‘… despite all that muck all over you.’
The syrette was a flexible tube with a needle attached; you inserted it under the skin at a shallow angle and squeezed. The tube held a full adult dose, but that would kill a child as young and frail as this wee lad. She had to stop and estimate how much to give him. It was something she could dither over all day.
‘Now I’m going to give you a wee jag,’ she said, swabbing his arm, ‘just in case, when I get you out …’ she inserted the needle, ‘… it turns out you’re even more handsome than I thought …’ and then she began squeezing the drug slowly, ‘… and I’ll be forced to give you a kiss … there.’ She withdrew the needle, and swabbed. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it?’ Then she bent to give a big reassuring smile that she didn’t feel. He stared back at her. She was close enough to see tiny particles of dust crumble off his forehead as he frowned; and then slowly an idiot grin began to creep onto his face.
She’d never had a boyfriend called Duncan. She was only making that up for something to talk about. Because growing up, Shirley Lamont, aged 19, had been a wild, tousle-haired girl with a mind of her own; and although she had the looks to catch the eye of many of the local beaus, she had been too scary for them. And anyway, as far she was concerned, there had only been one lad she could ever be bothered with, and now they weren’t talking anymore. She was thinking about him now as she snapped off two pieces of wooden lathing from the rubble around them.
‘Right, I’m just going to lift this arm,’ she said. ‘Tell me if it hurts.’
And she slapped the pieces of wood along his arm and began to swaddle tightly with elastic bandage. ‘This is to stop you picking your nose,’ she said, all clipped and efficient. She thought she heard him giggle. Once the splint was attached she slipped the tourniquet round his upper arm and tightened. It would start to hurt soon, so she would need to work fast to get this rubble off him.
‘Are ye really gonnae kiss me?’ said the boy, his eyes twinkling. ‘Jings!’
‘I might,’ she said, sounding all femme fatale, but smiling down at him as she began to clear a tangle of bricks and wooden lathing off his lower back and right leg. Her real first boyfriend was called Harry, short for Harris, and she wondered where he was right now. Stupid bugger. Why did all boys … men … have to be such stupid buggers? She was thinking that thought, staring at the wall of rubble pressing down on young Duncan’s left leg, when a scab of it detached itself in slow motion. It was an instinctive action to lean in over the boy, so most of it, when it fell in on them, landed on her back. There wasn’t much, and when it hit her it was no worse than getting belted by a hockey stick. She waited for the last lump of debris to peel off, then when she was sure the rubble had quietened down, she raised herself up and what had fallen in, tumbled off her.
‘Are you all right Duncan?’
‘Something’s sticking into ma leg,’ said the boy.
‘Are you awright doon there?’ It was the warden calling from up top, calling from beyond the lip of the hole. Shirley couldn’t see him because he wasn’t leaning in anymore, not wanting to collapse the lip any further with his weight. He must have heard the rubble falling.
‘We’re fine,’ she said over her shoulder.
Then she started picking away at what was pressing on the boy’s right leg. She could see some sort of split wooden stave. But it was when she sat up again, to push a strand of unruly chestnut hair back into the ATS cap, that she suddenly stopped breathing. She knew what she was looking at right away – the scarred green paint job and the curve of the metal casing.
‘Fuck!’ she said out loud.
‘What is it?’ yelled the warden.
‘You said a bad word!’ giggled Duncan. ‘I’m telling! I’m tellin’, you’re smellin’!’
She was aware of a shadow above her. It was the warden leaning over, looking down. ‘Fuck!’ he said, too.
Shirley thought of her Harry and wondered what he would do in a situation like this. Submarines were tight places too, and that was where he was – on a submarine. She knew the answer before she even asked the question – get the hell out of there!
‘It’s just an old tank!’ Shirley called up over her shoulder, but both she and the warden knew it wasn’t.
‘A tank! A panzer tank?’ yelled Duncan with drug-fuelled glee, obviously thinking to himself he was being super-funny.
‘A water ta
nk, you daft wee bugger!’ said Shirley, thinking that keeping it a joke was a good idea. ‘Now shut up and behave yourself, or I’ll start tickling you, then you’ll see what’s funny.’
Thinking to herself, that’s was quite funny. It calmed her, that and the thought of Harry watching her. She thought about her two brothers too; they were in tanks. What would they be saying to her? That was enough to get the grim determination going. She put her back against the bomb. Another 500-pounder. Had to be. All the rest had been 500-pounders. Except this one – the last one in the stick had been a dud. But how dud? Just because they didn’t go off right away, didn’t mean they weren’t going to go off eventually. She put her back to the bomb and felt the steel through her siren suit, and then she jammed her arm down behind the last wedge of rubble pinning Duncan’s leg.
She levered; and she levered again. And a tiny explosion of bricks and mortar propelled itself out from a cat’s-craddle of wooden lathing, and Duncan was free. She kept her back against the bomb. The bloody thing suddenly felt wobbly. She grabbed Duncan by his pullover and yanked him to his knees.
‘Ooh-ya!’ he yelled.
‘Grab him, quick!’ she called up to the warden. She saw his boot come down and seek purchase on the opposite wall of the hole, and suddenly Duncan’s legs disappeared upwards out of her line of sight. ‘Goat ’im!’ she heard the warden yell, and then his boot too, vanished. She was alone in the hole, not daring to move, absently wondering whether 500lbs was the total weight of the bomb, or whether that was just the explosives, and the bomb and its steel casing together were a hell of a lot heavier.
She daren’t move, or the bomb might tumble. There wasn’t room in the hole for the warden to come down and help her. She didn’t know what to do, and as she sat with her back wedged, contemplating the enormity of this, she heard the two Bedfords start up and drive off. Her shock was only momentary. Of course they were getting out the way; what was the point in hanging about and being blown to kingdom come too? She put her head back and felt the cold drizzle on her face; she was just too knackered to wallow in any melodramatic thoughts.
