Ambulance Girls Under Fire

by Deborah Burrows

  My head jerked up to stare at him in furious amazement. ‘You’ve been spying on me? Did my husband ask you to spy on me?’

  He looked down, seemingly embarrassed.

  ‘What do you want, Eddie?’

  A note of excitement crept into his voice. ‘They’re letting him out. Letting him leave the Isle of Man and come back to London. He’ll be here soon. The week after next. Thought you’d like to know.’

  It was as if he had punched me in my solar plexus, and I couldn’t prevent a shocked gasp. So Cedric was coming back to London. Eddie smirked at my response to his news.

  Head high, walk tall. I straightened my back and raised my chin. I would deal with Cedric when I had to. He knew I wanted a divorce. I had asked him for one in every letter I sent, but so far he had refused to consider it. I could no longer live with him as his wife, which meant he would have to accept a divorce or at the very least a judicial separation.

  ‘How nice for him,’ I said, without enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you. From Mr Ashwin.’

  ‘What message?’ Was Cedric going to agree to the divorce? My heart began to race and I began to hope.

  ‘He wants you to find a place for you both to live.’

  ‘What? Well I won’t be doing that. I won’t be living with him when he returns.’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘That’s the message.’ He gave a smile, almost endearing in his obvious delight. ‘We have a code. Me and Mr Ashwin worked out how to get past the censor by using a code in our letters.’

  ‘I think you misread your code.’

  His sullen, brutish expression returned. ‘I’m just giving the message’

  ‘Is that all, Eddie? I have an appointment to keep.’

  ‘At Bloomsbury House? Why do you go there?’ He seemed to be genuinely puzzled.

  ‘I do work there helping Jewish children, if you must know. And I’m late. So please let go of my bicycle.’

  His pretence of politeness slipped then and his lip lifted in a snarl. ‘You’re a cold bitch, aren’t you? Those bastards have locked him up for eight months and soon he’ll be free and you don’t care at all.’ He spat on the footpath, close to my feet. ‘You don’t deserve him.’

  I looked at his hand on my handlebar. It was very pale and covered with sandy hair. ‘Goodbye, Eddie,’ I said.

  He released his grip, but not before he had given a vicious push to the bike, so that I nearly overbalanced. Annoyed, I rode away without looking back at him.

  It was less chilly than the previous day but that meant the snow had melted into mush, so I had to be careful. The wind stung my cheeks as I rode faster, pushing the bike as fast as I could safely go, enjoying the sense of speed, trying to forget that Cedric would be back in London very soon. As I rounded the corner into Tavistock Road I pondered Eddie’s words.

  Eddie had said I didn’t deserve Cedric. Did I deserve a womanising cad who supported the brutality of Hitler’s regime? I had been eighteen when I married him in 1937, too young to realise the cost of a decision hastily made. I had thought I was desperately in love with the handsome and sophisticated older man who had steered me through social minefields and treated me with courtesy and gallantry.

  Cedric had called me his green girl, his child bride. He said he had chosen me because I was delightfully different from the weary sophisticates he usually squired around. I soon came to realise that he intended me to be a pleasingly naive and socially useful wife who ticked all the right boxes. I had been born into a ‘good’ family, I made an attractive hostess and, given my background, I could be expected to support his political ambitions. What Cedric did not tell me was that he was incapable of fidelity.

  ‘Everybody does it, darling,’ he had replied, with an elegant shrug, when I confronted him three months after our marriage. It was as if my world had shattered into tiny pieces. Recklessly, I had pushed him for names. They were all women I knew. Some had been friends, or I had thought they were. Did I deserve that, Eddie Hollis?

  I was too young to know how to deal with Cedric’s cruelly good-natured cynicism. When I threatened him with divorce, he laughed. ‘But darling,’ he had said, ‘how could you survive if you divorced me?’ I didn’t know how to answer that. Worse, however, was his insinuation that if I pressed for a divorce then my family and my friends and all of London would assume that it was some fault in me that left Cedric unsatisfied and needing to seek solace in other women’s arms. The embarrassment of divorce proceedings would have been too much to bear. Or so I thought. I had only just turned nineteen.

  So I had stayed with Cedric. I was faithful to him because I saw no reason not to be. In the years that followed I achieved a degree of sophistication, and some wisdom. I wasn’t exactly happy, but London is full of amusements and I made friends there. Cedric was charming and he expected very little from me. I played the hostess at his political dinners, I didn’t enquire too much about his political views and I pretended to be deaf to rumours about his constant infidelities. In return he gave me an easy life. What a shallow, snobbish, unthinking creature that Celia had been. Perhaps I did deserve Cedric.

  Everything changed with the war. My husband – who had spoken at rallies where thousands of men, all dressed in black shirts, had chanted fascist slogans and watched him with shining eyes as they shouted their protestations of allegiance – was declared to be an enemy of the nation. The crowds melted away, save for a few diehards like Eddie.

  Cedric was incarcerated and I became the target of hatred and ridicule. Horrible letters arrived. So-called friends disappeared. People I had known since childhood no longer recognised me in the street. When I joined the ambulance service to help the war effort, the press declared it to be a stunt and the numbers of vile letters increased. One summer evening as I left my house in Mayfair, a stranger spat on me and called me a quisling. It was not long afterwards that I moved to the flat in Bloomsbury.

  I was no longer the shallow girl who had been content to be Cedric Ashwin’s wife. Coming to work at the ambulance station had been a life-changing experience for me in so many ways. Not only did I have to cope with unimaginable horror and sadness, for the first time in my life I was part of a team, working alongside people I never would have otherwise met. In many ways it was humbling. All that mattered in the ambulance station was how you did your job, and you were treated according to how you worked, not how your voice sounded. Any snobbery I may have had soon faded as it became clear that I was no better than my colleagues. When the Blitz began we had to cope with the hideous reality of modern warfare and push fear aside to help those who were injured. It was in the ambulance station that I learned to look beyond someone’s class, to see who they were and not judge them according to what social stratum they came from.

  And then something completely unexpected happened. I fell in love. Desperately, passionately and tormentedly in love with a man who insisted that I think for myself. David Levy told me I was a blank page, a tabula rasa with no thoughts of my own, only what I’d been told. David forced me to think about what we were fighting for, about the prejudices I’d accepted all my life. He compelled me to go beyond the limitations of my scanty education and my so-called privileged upbringing, to be more than I had been.

  But David died. And no matter how many times I told myself there was nothing I could have done to save him, I returned to that night in my mind over and over, running through the course of events, trying to understand if there was something I could have done differently, if this or that might have affected the final outcome. The memory was like a physical wound that would not heal. I carried it with me always, could not leave behind the pain and regret. My actions after his death haunted me more. I had been a craven coward. When David died I had said nothing and had allowed his body to lie in a bombed building, undiscovered. I had let his parents hope when all hope was gone.

  David’s parents forgave me, but how could I forgive myself? That was why I worked in Bloomsbury House and helped Dav
id’s mother deal with Jewish refugee children. I wanted to atone. And that was why I was navigating dangerously slippery roads on a chilly December morning.

  My destination, the old Bloomsbury Hotel, was in sight. ‘That Yid place’, as Eddie had called it. The vast, decaying old pile housed the various organisations, as many as twenty of them, that were engaged in looking after people who had fled the Nazis to seek refuge in Britain. The refugees called it ‘Das Bloomsburyhaus’ and the name had stuck, so that it was now officially known as Bloomsbury House.

  It was a rabbit warren of little offices containing the various refugee groups. Mrs Levy’s organisation was the Jewish Children’s Placement Board, which was allied to the Jewish Refugee Committee and was one of several that assisted children who had come to Britain under the Kindertransport scheme.

  The activities of the Kindertransport are fairly well known now. In short, when the plight of Jews and anyone else the Nazis deemed unacceptable became desperate, the British government was persuaded to issue permits for 10,000 unaccompanied children to be brought to England. Thousands of children, mostly Jewish or part-Jewish, were evacuated to Britain between November 1938 and the invasion of Holland in May 1940. Once the children arrived they were met by groups of volunteers. These were not just Jewish groups, but also Quakers, Christadelphians and others. They arranged for the children to live with foster-families, or in hostels, schools or on farms throughout the country.

  On the whole, the scheme worked well. Of course, some children were unhappy, especially the Orthodox Jewish children placed with Christian families, and we had discovered that some of the older children were being used as servants by their host families, but we did our best. I am pleased to say that every child who came to England under the scheme was alive at the end of the war. Sadly, many of their parents were not.

  Since 1938, Mrs Levy’s small organisation had managed to place two hundred mainly German children with foster-parents or in hostels across England. It ran on a shoestring, and for the past five weeks I had volunteered my services. I helped to keep track of the refugee children, checked the reports of their progress, and arranged to move them to another placement when required. I dealt with their special requirements and worked out how best to help them survive in a new country. I found the work very satisfying, especially as it had brought out a hitherto unsuspected flair for organisation in me.

  I hadn’t seen much of Mrs Levy since I had joined the JCPB. She had been badly injured when her home was bombed in November 1940, the same night that David had died. Her legs had been crushed and after several operations she still needed crutches to get around. That meant she had not been able to come to Bloomsbury House very often. In many ways this was a relief to me. I liked and admired Elise Levy very much, but we both knew that given the circumstances of David’s death we were unlikely to ever be close friends. It was a shadow always between us.

  My cheeks were flushed with cold as I chained my bicycle to a bar set into the wall of the building and hurried up the snowy steps into Bloomsbury House’s huge reception hall. The refugees sitting on the uncomfortable benches watched me hopefully as I entered. I walked past them and up the wide staircase to the second floor, where the JCPB had two tiny adjoining rooms.

  When I entered the office Lore Rosenfeld, who managed the JCPB under the direction of Mrs Levy, looked up from behind a pile of papers and gave me a smile. Lore was a chatty lady in her late forties with a halo of wiry black hair. Like Mrs Levy, she was German by birth but had married an Englishman twenty-odd years before and had lived in London ever since. Behind her stood a row of metal filing cabinets, each containing a child’s file. A life wrapped up in cardboard. Some of the files were pathetically small. The thickest were those of the children who had arrived in 1938. By the time the last children arrived, as Holland fell to the Nazis, there was often very little information to work with and an obviously emotionally damaged child.

  ‘I have a real problem for you today,’ she said, as I took off my hat and unwrapped my scarf. ‘Leonhard Weitz.’

  ‘Leonhard Weitz? I don’t recall that name.’

  She handed me a slim file. The photograph showed a boy with a thin white face, round glasses and a mop of dark hair. According to the identity slip he was eight years of age, and had come from Vienna. ‘DOES NOT SPEAK’ was printed at the bottom of the identification card in damning capitals.

  ‘Is the child mute?’ I asked. ‘A medical disorder?’

  Lore gave a brief shrug. ‘Read the attached notes.’

  They told a tragic story. Leonhard’s father, a professor of anthropology at the University of Freiburg, had been deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1937. The boy’s mother died soon afterwards of illness and his two older brothers disappeared in unspecified circumstances in 1939. Leonhard had been recommended to the JCPB by his father’s cousin, and he had arrived in England in April 1940.

  In the view of the psychiatrist who examined Leonhard after his first foster-parents in Manchester sent him back, the boy had been deeply traumatised, possibly by witnessing the death of his brothers. Leonhard had not said a word since his brothers’ disappearance, but there was nothing obviously wrong with his vocal cords. The psychiatrist had diagnosed ‘elective mutism post-trauma’. It was recorded that Leonhard regularly wet the bed and was prone to outbursts of agitation that could become quite violent. A heart-breaking addendum noted: ‘Played violin in the family quartet, and still enjoys listening to music.’

  ‘So he can speak,’ I said, ‘but chooses not to do so?’

  Lore shrugged again. ‘The child is damaged in his mind.’

  I checked the notes again. ‘So… the big problem with him is that he’s been sent back from the second set of foster-parents? Are there no other foster-parents available?’

  ‘That’s your job. Please go through all the records and see if anyone suitable comes up. Otherwise he must remain at the hostel.’

  We both knew it would not be the best solution. A child so fragile would be unlikely to improve as one of many boys in a rowdy hostel.

  I took off my coat and sat down at the smaller desk. ‘I’d better get to work then,’ I said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Wednesday 1 January 1941

  We shouldn’t have been in the house at all. It was the job of the rescue squads to search bombed houses for casualties, but during an air raid as intense as that one was, everyone pitched in. Even the ambulance girls.

  ‘You take her legs.’ Maisie hooked her arms under the old woman’s shoulders. ‘We should hurry. I think Jerry is coming around to have another go at us.’

  ‘He always does. So anxious to deliver Herr Goering’s little presents.’

  The roar of the German bombers, no more than a few hundred feet above us, was almost deafening. Adding to the din was the thunder of the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park, London’s attempt to fight back. I knew Maisie was right: it wouldn’t be long before we’d hear the shrieks of falling bombs.

  Our patient was, mercifully, unconscious.

  Just as I took hold of the thin, lisle-encased legs, a ghastly noise, like the sound of an animal in torment, seemed to rip apart the air. We waited. The house shuddered as the bomb landed nearby with a crash like thunder.

  ‘That one was too close for comfort,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Let’s get out, shall we? And at the double.’

  We hoisted the pathetically light and fragile body and carried it in a sideways shuffle towards the hallway. Half of the house had been ripped away and what was left teetered alarmingly above us as we picked our way down the stairs, navigating through the debris by the light of the burning buildings across the street. Their rosy glow revealed a shining dark trickle of blood from the wound on the old woman’s forehead, which gave me real concern. Head wounds were tricky, and I would have been happier if she were conscious. It was all too easy for someone to slip gently from a concussion into death.

  At last we reached the street wh
ere the Air-Raid Precautions warden and our ambulance were waiting. We took care in lowering the old woman on to the stretcher that was laid out on the icy road and Maisie wrapped her in blankets against the chill of the freezing night air. I knelt to check her condition preparatory to placing her in the ambulance.

  ‘Anyone left inside?’ The ARP warden was a small man with a large moustache that was white with plaster dust. Under his steel helmet, his face was grotesquely streaked with plaster and sweat, giving him a ghoulish appearance. His breath puffed in the cold air as he spoke.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘We shouted out, but it was too dangerous to do a thorough search.’

  The old woman’s eyes fluttered open and she said, ‘Bobby? Where’s my little Bobby?’

  Maisie and I exchanged glances and turned to look at the house behind us. It was already tottering. It wouldn’t last long, and we both had a horror of being caught in a collapsed building.

  ‘Who is Bobby?’ I asked, my voice clipped and urgent. My cousin’s six-year-old daughter, Roberta – a charmer with a cheeky grin, and auburn-haired like myself – was always called Bobby. ‘Is Bobby your granddaughter? Grandson?’

  The old lady’s eyes had fluttered shut. I shook her gently. ‘Tell us about Bobby.’

  ‘My darling,’ she murmured. ‘Five years old—’

  I was up and had bolted into the building before the end of the sentence, conscious only of one thought: We had left a child in a collapsing building. I ran up the stairs as quickly and lightly as I could, guided by the dull beam of my masked torch as it flickered over the white glazed tiles on the staircase walls. When I reached the first floor a voice sounded in the darkness ahead of me.

  ‘Hello, I’m Bobby. What’s your name?’ It sounded like an old woman, not a child, which was puzzling. My torchlight revealed an empty doorway. The door had been blown out by the blast and the room beyond had a curiously light feel to it, which I suspected meant that most of the walls were gone. So I entered carefully.