“Idiot,” said Mary. “Let me fix that for you.”
“Thanks. You’d think I might put it on properly, wouldn’t you? I can bandage an arm recurrent, figure-of-eight or spiral reverse, and I have a brand-new certificate to prove it.”
“It’s always harder on oneself,” said Mary, repinning the band.
“I hope they’ll send us out with a proper nurse just to start with.”
“But you are a proper nurse. Look at you, with your hat and armband. All you’re missing is a fob watch.”
“I’ve had two weeks’ training! I took longer than that to learn to use a gas oven.”
“Well, if we do pick up a casualty, I shall just have to drive us to the hospital quickly.”
“Do you know if we actually have to wear the tin hats, by the way? Only mine makes me look like a mushroom. It’s all right for you tall girls, you can carry it off.”
“You know they become fashionable during the raids.”
Hilda tugged at her lower lip with her teeth. “I suppose . . . but goodness, it’s hard to make anything of this uniform. I’ve tried it like this with the skirt and stockings and I’ve tried it with the trousers, which are just
urgh
. I’ve been up since five, you know.”
Mary said, “You look fine.”
She had simply put on the skirt with which they had issued her, cinched the belt around the jacket, and jammed a pack of Craven “A”s into each pocket. She lit one now.
“Oh,” said Hilda, “are you cold? Let’s sit in the van, shall we?”
Mary’s hands were trembling. It was something they had done since the disaster—a bore, really—and it was sweet of Hilda to pretend it was only the cold. It was pleasant in any case to get into the Hillman. Mary settled in the driver’s seat and cracked the window an inch to let the smoke out. The interior smelled nicely of laundry, which she supposed must have been the cargo until the van was requisitioned.
In the passenger seat Hilda checked her makeup in the mirror. She reapplied her lipstick, clicked the top back on, and said, “Alistair still hasn’t replied to me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mary.
“It was a long shot, but I thought he might at least write back.”
Mary found that she couldn’t hold Hilda’s eye.
Hilda stared. “You aren’t writing to him as well, are you?”
“No,” said Mary, electing to interpret Hilda’s tense as the present simple.
“I suppose he’s just a cad, then,” said Hilda.
“I thought you liked him?”
“Only if he likes me more. Those are the rules.”
Mary nodded. “Sometimes you are almost Christlike.”
Hilda beamed. “You can say you were my first disciple.”
“I’ll say I did your hair.”
Hilda looked at her watch. “I’m terrified, aren’t you? We wouldn’t be doing this if it was really dangerous, would we?”
“You know what you should really worry about? It’s that so many girls have volunteered, it won’t seem exotic anymore.”
“You suppose men won’t care?”
“Goodness, no. Ambulance girls are two-a-penny.”
“You ruin everything.”
“Well you can’t have it both ways, can you? It’s either a dangerous duty, and dashing, or a breathtaking bore, and banal.”
“I liked it better when I was petrified.”
“Then hush and let me work this van out. It’s fine for you, Miss La-Di-Dah with your two weeks’ training. All they gave me was my bus fare here.”
Mary worked the pedals and moved the lever through the three gears in the box, plus reverse. The whole setup was far looser than her father’s Austin Windsor. It would need to be sworn at quite robustly, but she felt it could just about be driven. Now that it was happening—now that the war had put her in uniform and issued her with a steering wheel andclutch—she felt more resignation than excitement. She supposed that there would be chaos now, and fire and furious noise, and yet it seemed much less of an adventure than her class had been. How her nerves had buzzed with it, back then. Now, she felt less alive. Perhaps one died in slices, like a loaf.
“Do you suppose they’ll give us tea?” said Hilda.
“They’ve told me nothing. You’re the one who always knows things.”
“Oh, that’s just gossip,” said Hilda. ‘No one tells me facts.”
“Maybe they’re worried you’d repeat them.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing
something,
even if I am only here to dish out aspirin and sticking plasters. The matron wouldn’t trust me with anything, you know. She had me on bedpans half the time I was supposed to be training, so of course I never caught sight of a healthy man.”
“Well that is rather the point of nursing, isn’t it?”
“But I wanted to go on the ward rounds with the junior doctors. The way the nurses get themselves up, the poor men don’t stand a chance. They’re married with two children and a Labrador before their pulse gets back below a hundred. I wonder if we’re meant to write down any supplies we use or whether someone comes and checks it at the end of the shift? I wonder if—”
Mary put her hand on Hilda’s arm. “You’ll be fine, you know.”
Hilda froze. “Does it show so badly?”
“They wouldn’t have passed you for duty if you weren’t ready.’
“I just can’t stop thinking: what if I make a mistake? What if some poor so-and-so is hurt and I can’t save them?”
“I thought you only cared about the uniform.”
“Yes, but one is not entirely against human life. Oh, did I mention there’s a party tomorrow morning at the hospital? All the girls on nights at St. Bart’s, and as many of the doctors as can be dragged in, even if the nurses have to sedate and rope them. Apparently there’s a boy from obs & gyn who makes a very realistic martini using ethanol. He gets up a whole vat of the stuff and they bring buckets of ice from the morgue, and someone turns up with a gramophone. You will come, won’t you? And you won’t bag the nicest man there, just because you can?”
“Not unless you see him first.”
They laughed with the careful muting Londoners used now, knowing that the war homed in on the sound.
The raid began just before five-thirty and they went down into the crypt of the church, where the area post was set up. The stretcher man, Huw, was already down there. The Air Raid Precautions chief and his messenger were taking damage reports. Two busy telephones and three full ashtrays stood on a carved communion table. On the wall was a pin-board map of four square miles. The bombs, when they got going, got closer.
“Jerry’s on the money tonight,” said Huw.
The ARP chief sniffed. “I assume we are all aware that Jerry suckles from the breast until he is six years old?”
“The men shave their armpit hair,” said Hilda. “ ‘The women plait theirs.”
Everyone winced as a bomb struck close by, resonating in the crypt.
“This is what comes of it, of course,” said the ARP man. “They are up there now, at twenty thousand feet, with fishnets under their flying suits.”
Mary couldn’t bring herself to join in. For her part, she found it hard to imagine that a race with so many peccadilloes could be annihilating her city quite so thoroughly. When the ARP chief sent them out into the night at half past six, it was a relief. Every moment underground made Mary want to run.
Outside, the noise was fearful. There was an ack-ack gun right outside the church, a Bofors letting go dozens of rounds a minute. Red tracer streaked up into a smoky sky impaled on the blue-white lances of the searchlights. Clive, the other stretcher-bearer, was snoring in the backseat of the ambulance. Huw cursed him awake and pushed in beside him, while Hilda took the passenger seat and opened the street map.
It was only a quarter of a mile away but the direct routes were blocked. Mary gunned the Hillman’s little engine and made what speed she dared in the dark streets and the sudden drifts of smoke. Hilda braced herself against the glove box and used her cigarette lighter to read the map.
On Gravel Lane a house was down in the middle of the terrace. The front was blown out and the upstairs floor had swung down on the pivot of the back wall. Another stretcher party was already leaving, with two casualties they had brought out of the mess. Huw and Clive joined a rescue squad to clear the weight of the tiles and the roof joists, after which they would set up their A-frames to lift the collapsed floor. They waved Mary and Hilda away. All the two of them could do was wait.
Mary put on her tin hat, lit a cigarette and sat on the running board of the Hillman with her elbows on her knees and one hand on the back of her neck, trying to smooth out the jitters. A stick of bombs came down a few streets away, the flashes arriving before the bangs. The air was already sour with burning wood and spent explosive. Hilda took the medical bag from the trunk.
“Find shelter,” said Mary. “I’ll fetch you if they bring anyone out.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Then I’ll be fine too, won’t I?”
They sat together with their backs up against the van for whatever protection it gave. Without being asked, their bodies made themselves small.
Hilda said, “It feels wrong, being outside in a raid.”
Mary offered her a sardonic look.
“I mean it feels sort of naughty,” said Hilda. “As if we’re out-of-bounds.”
They waited.
“Look at those searchlights,” said Hilda. “I hope they’ll keep them, after the war. Just think, ordinary people don’t get to see this. I wonder if . . .”
Mary looked to the sky. Perhaps it was true that the searchlights were beautiful. With the night chill, and the endless deadening concussions of the ack-ack, she felt flat. Hilda babbled on, her observations neither irritating nor illuminating. This was how Tom had talked, in that awful raid. She wished now that she had known how to comfort him. How miserable Tom must have been, close to the end. She had tried with a willing heart to love him—to smile as brightly as she ever had. But of course he had known that it was ending. He had been so thoroughly good about it, so careful not to make a scene. This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear Tom. Without the war they might have finished as friends.
Now the rescue crew had their A-frame assembled to lift the collapsed upper floor. When they had made enough of a gap, a man crawled under. After a minute he shouted out. Huw and Clive ran to the van and lifted a stretcher off the roof.
“There’s a man in there. They’re going to bring him out.”
Mary and Hilda ran across the road, Hilda carrying the medical bag.
Hilda called out, “Tell them not to move his head!”
Clive said, “Well they’re hardly going to leave it in there.”
They waited. The drone of bombers continued and the blasts still came, seeming farther away for the moment: the constant nasty crack of the 250-kilo bombs and the occasional punch of a 1000-kilo brute that shook the earth.
The man was brought out after a few minutes, on his back on a pine door that four men carried between them. They set him down in the road. One of the rescue men held up a battery lamp with a blackout shade, casting a slim cone of light. The casualty’s eyes were open.
Hilda knelt. “Was anyone in there with you?”
He shook his head. Hilda felt along his arms and legs, and the man groaned. She cut a trouser leg away.
“You’ve a badly broken ankle, I’m afraid. Does anything else hurt?”
He shook his head again.
“I’ll splint your ankle, then we’ll get you to a doctor. You’ll be fine.”
She administered a syrette of morphine, and in a minute the man’s face relaxed. She worked fast, and soon had him ready to move. She marked a baggage tag with the letters T and M and tied it to the man’s wrist. Huw and Clive strapped the man into the stretcher, secured him on the roof of the Hillman and jumped into the back. In the passenger seat Hilda called out the turns while Mary drove to St. Bart’s Hospital. They delivered the patient and Mary drove the four of them back to St. Helen’s church.
Down in the crypt, in the dim orange light from the bulbs, Huw made them all tea. Hilda shook so badly that she couldn’t hold her cups.
“The state of me!” she said.
“You did a marvellous job,” Mary said.
“Was I all right? I hardly remember a thing.”
“I had no idea a splint could be put on so thoroughly. In another minute you’d have bandaged him up to the eyes, like Tutankhamen.”
Hilda smiled. “I didn’t think we should hang around, with the bombs.”
“What were the T and the M for, by the way?”
“Oh, the tag is for the triage nurse. T is ‘trauma,’ X is ‘internal injury,’ M is ‘morphine given.’ In training we practised on the porters. They feigned injury and we tagged them. We invented codes too. We had D for ‘dishy,’ P for ‘possibly,’ and N for ‘not if I was fat and this was the last man on earth.’ ”
Mary told the others she had to check something on the van. She sat in the cold with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall of the church. The raid droned on, the explosions sometimes close, and she hardly flinched anymore. She thought about the X they had drawn on Tom. When she pictured his face, the X wouldn’t leave it. It was even there in her memory of their walk on Hampstead Heath, when she had tried to get them lost in the mist. It was as if he had always been marked—as if he had known the ending.
When she went back down into the crypt, someone had opened rum. From who knew where, one of the ARP girls had turned up some sugar. It was after eleven, and cloud had rolled in from the estuary to blind the bombers to their targets. The crypt was filling up and becoming more convivial as the raid died away and the stretcher crews returned.
“To the Nazis!” said Clive. “May their Reich indeed come third.”
“May their gentlemen’s nylons never ladder.”
“The Nazis!” they all shouted, but Mary wouldn’t join the toast.
When their mugs were empty Clive filled them again. A dash of tea was added for the sake of decorum, in case the King should walk in.
By three in the morning the raid was as good as over. There was no more ack-ack fire, no more detonations, and just an occasional thin droning overhead as a last, lost bomber sought its way home. In the crypt the conversation had fallen to a murmur. People slept rolled up in their coats.