Ambulance Girls At War

by Deborah Burrows

  I waited outside the club for Lily and Jim to arrive in a taxi. In my pocket was Michael’s birthday card, which had arrived that morning, together with a long letter containing a great many blacked-out sections and lots of mush. It had been more than sixteen months since I had seen him and (reading between the lines) it seemed from his last letters that after participating in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, he was now fighting in Italy.

  The Warning hadn’t yet sounded, and the streets were full of people, including many American soldiers. American troops had begun to pour into Britain, to prepare for what everyone knew would be the second front – the invasion of Europe – sometime later that year. I could only hope that one day Michael would be among them, so at least we could spend some time together before he was sent into yet more danger.

  A taxi pulled up and Jim and Lily waved at me from inside. I climbed aboard.

  ‘We’re picking the others up on the way,’ said Jim and gave directions to Celia and Simon’s townhouse.

  They were waiting outside, enjoying the fading twilight together. Celia, as beautiful as ever, was dressed in a pale green frock that made the most of her svelte figure.

  ‘Honestly, Celia,’ said Lily as she entered the taxi, ‘how do you manage to get your figure back so quickly after each baby? It’s only three months since Susannah was born and look at you.’

  Lily was right, Celia did look remarkably well for a mother of two. Baby Susannah had joined the family in January. Motherhood had given Celia a glow of warmth and contentment that in my opinion, enhanced her looks. Lily’s son, also called David, had been born in November 1943, and although Lily hadn’t quite regained the almost ethereal slimness that had characterised her before, I thought she looked better for it.

  ‘Do you think it might be confusing, both your sons being called David?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Lily. ‘Once the war is over our Davy will be in Australia and Celia’s David will be here.’

  ‘I can’t see too many people confusing Davy Vassilikov with David Levy,’ said Simon. ‘We all wanted to honour David, and so we did.’

  ‘Tell us all the ambulance station gossip,’ said Lily, who had left the station eight months before. ‘You’re the last Ambulance Girl left at Bloomsbury.’

  ‘You’d find it very different,’ I said. ‘Sadler was transferred in January to an East End station, as deputy station leader, no less.’

  Celia laughed. ‘So no more cheap black-market goods for you all. I saw Squire last week and he tells me he’s most annoyed about it.’

  I smiled. ‘We do miss his dodgy wares. Purvis has gone also. He transferred to a station in Chelsea last month.’

  ‘Armstrong’s still in the medical corps?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia. ‘Squire keeps in touch with him. Stephen’s an excellent orderly apparently. He was at the awful battle at Anzio, and was mentioned in dispatches.’

  ‘Harris and Powell? Moray?’

  ‘Moray is the same as ever,’ I replied. ‘Harris just became a grandmother for the fifth time, and still mothers the lot of us.’ I laughed. ‘Powell’s latest rumour is that Jerry has invented a death ray – you know, like Flash Gordon – and he’ll begin zapping us in a week or so.’

  ‘I find ordinary bombs bad enough,’ said Simon. ‘Do you think this baby blitz is going to last long? The raid last Tuesday was a very bad one.’

  ‘It was, but the attacks have been tailing off,’ said Jim. ‘We’re mauling their bomber force badly and lots of German planes are being shot down. I doubt they can afford to lose so many.’

  ‘It’s Hitler’s retaliation for our devastating bombing raids on German cities,’ said Simon.

  ‘Speaking of babies,’ I said, determined to change the subject, ‘where are yours tonight?’

  ‘Davy is being looked after by Jim’s godmother,’ said Lily. She laughed. ‘Or, rather, by his godmother’s Irish maid. She’s a sweet girl. Comes from a family of thirteen and is a dab hand with babies.’

  ‘Our two are with my parents,’ said Simon.

  Celia smiled. ‘David simply adores his grandfather, and Elise is delighted with a girl, after raising four boys.’

  ‘Have your parents formally adopted Leo, then?’ I asked. Leonhard Weitz was a ten-year-old Jewish orphan from Austria who had been taken in by the Levys.

  There was a martial glint in Celia’s eye. ‘Yes, but I insist that we share him. I won’t give him up completely, so he spends a fair amount of time at our house. He loves David and Susannah, but Bobby is the main attraction.’ Bobby was Celia’s African Grey parrot.

  The Hungaria was as elegant as ever. We had just settled ourselves at our table when Jim stood and looked at me. ‘Care for a dance, birthday girl?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  It was like entering a beautiful dream, whirling around the dance floor with a tall, handsome RAF officer. I had just begun to lose myself in the music when Jim smiled at someone behind me.

  ‘May I cut in?’

  Jim surrendered me to Michael and bowed out gracefully with a smile.

  ‘When did you get back?’ I asked. My voice was calm, although my heart was beating so fast that I felt giddy.

  He was very tanned, but I thought he was too thin. His face looked harder; new lines bracketed his mouth and fanned out from the corners of his eyes, but his eyes were as blue and his smile was just as devastating as before.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he said. ‘I wanted to surprise you for your birthday. So I phoned Jim and here I am.’ He twirled me past a clumsy couple and closer to the band. ‘Happy birthday, sweetheart.’

  ‘Have you been posted to England? Close to London?’

  ‘Close enough to see you whenever I have leave. I’m here for a few months, anyway.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I knew what that meant. Michael was in training. He would be part of the invasion force that would cross the Channel to France in the summer.

  The music stopped and we stood together on the quickly emptying dance floor.

  ‘Are you here long enough for a wedding?’ I asked.

  ‘Pushy female, aren’t you,’ he said, smiling. Then he sighed. ‘Not yet, Maisie. We’ll wait until this business is over with.’

  Michael asked the taxi driver to drop us a couple of blocks from the club, and we walked through the streets of Soho together under a shining river of diamonds, bright enough to hurt my eyes. The waning moon was a pale sliver of faded silver, outshone by the glory of the Milky Way in a blacked-out London. It was slow going, as Michael kept pulling me into the shelter of doorways for long, slow kisses as we learned again the contours of each other’s bodies after two long years apart.

  ‘It’s been hell being away from you for this long,’ he said, and gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I’ve nearly gone mad some nights, imagining you in love with some other guy, someone better than me.’

  ‘You’re such a chuff,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘You’re sure you want to marry a chuff?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘When it’s all over, I’ll come back and I’ll marry you. I promise.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It really is a mug’s game to fall in love during a war. I never want to know such fear again, especially as Captain Michael Harker had been one of the first on to the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Thankfully, he got through without any serious injuries.

  I’d been so busy, that I’d had little time to dwell on his absence. Not long after D-Day, Hitler made sure that London was again on the front line. It was like the Blitz all over again, but in many ways worse. The pilotless V rockets were Hitler’s final vicious attacks on the capital. We called the V-1s doodlebugs because of their whining, whirring noise. You could tell from how loud the noise was when it cut out if it was going to land near you. When it did, it brought devastation. Thousands came over, between fifty and a hundred each day and all through the night, causing terrible damage and injuries and loss of lif
e. Our pilots shot them down, and many were caught in the cables of our barrage balloons, but most got through. The V-2 rockets carried a one-ton explosive warhead. Unlike the doodlebugs, there was no warning before they hit, and we had no defence against them. Thousands of Britons died from these twin horrors and tens of thousands were injured, most of them in London.

  Saturday 21 April 1945

  By the day of my birthday, we’d not seen a rocket over London for a month. It seemed that the city was holding its breath, hoping that the attacks were over, but too scared to speak the hope out loud.

  Michael was somewhere in Germany. I hadn’t seen him since late May 1944.

  The Hungaria was still elegant, and again I celebrated with the Ambulance Girls. Lily had come up from Oxford for the night. Once the V-1 attacks began Jim had insisted that Lily and Davy move away from London to live with his godmother, who had fled the capital to escape the new terrors. Oxford had never been bombed. Powell’s rumour was that Hitler had wanted to use the university city as his capital when he invaded Britain.

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely there,’ said Lily. ‘So peaceful after London. But I do miss all my friends.’

  ‘You never thought of leaving London, Celia?’ I asked.

  She exchanged a look with Simon. ‘No. It’s a personal choice whether or not to leave and we understand completely why Jim wants Lily and Davy away from here, but we see remaining in London as a stand against the Nazis.’

  ‘Especially with all of the horror stories coming out of Germany right now,’ said Simon.

  ‘Any news about your grandparents in Germany?’ asked Jim.

  ‘No. Nor about my uncles and aunts and cousins. In all, my mother’s family in Austria and Germany number fifteen. There’s been no news from, or about, any of them since 1939.’ He shook his head. ‘We expect the worst.’

  ‘You’ll know soon enough,’ said Jim. ‘We’ll take Berlin in days, and I guarantee that in less than a month Germany will surrender. It’s nearly over.’

  ‘To peace,’ said Celia, raising her glass. ‘To Maisie, on her twenty-fourth birthday, and to peace at last.’

  Victory in Europe was declared a month later, and victory over Japan came in August. After almost six years of war, London and all of Britain celebrated almost hysterically. I stood with Moray, Squire, Powell and Harris among the crowds who massed in Trafalgar Square, and followed as Squire’s strong arms pushed through to the gates of Buckingham Palace. There we cheered the King and Queen and Winston Churchill when they appeared on the balcony.

  But it wasn’t long before the reality of our brave new world sank in. It was a world of ruined cities and devastated countryside, of damaged people and bereaved families. It was a world with the atom bomb.

  And yet, it was also a world of hope.

  Sunday 21 April 1946

  On my twenty-fifth birthday I was again at the Hungaria, but this year only Celia and Simon celebrated with me, because Lily and Jim had gone to Australia in September 1945. Celia was pregnant yet again, and looked very well indeed.

  ‘We want a big family,’ she said. ‘In a way, I suppose, it’s to make up for those who were lost.’

  Not one of Mrs Levy’s family in Germany and Austria had survived the German camps. I began to murmur something trite and Celia stopped me with a smile.

  ‘And anyway, I love being pregnant,’ she said. ‘What I dislike is how people congratulate Simon, who’s done none of the hard slog, when the babies are born.’

  ‘I know I get out of it all very easily,’ said Simon. ‘So I make a point of accepting all congratulations with appropriate modesty.’

  ‘Any news about Michael?’ asked Celia, rolling her eyes at her husband.

  I gave her a crooked smile. ‘He’s still in Europe, but hopes to get back here soon. And then we’ll be married at last.’

  ‘When he does come back you might like to drop in on Katherine Carlow. Do you remember her? The fashion designer who lives in my old flats. She’s a very good friend of Lily’s and is holding a present for you from her.’

  Before I could ask for details Simon smiled at someone behind me and I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Care to dance, birthday girl?’ said Michael. It was the first time I’d seen him in nearly two years.

  ‘When did you get back?’ I asked, as he held me close and whirled me around the dance floor.

  ‘Yesterday. I pulled in a few favours and got a ride on a plane. I was determined to be here for your birthday.’

  I sighed. ‘Twenty-five. I’m old.’

  ‘You’re beautiful. And speaking of age, I’m thirty-four next birthday. You want to marry such an old man?’

  I put up a hand to wipe away my tears. ‘Of course I do. I’m not an idiot.’

  He pinned me with his cool gaze. ‘You’re sure, kid?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I want to be married here,’ I said, gesturing at the pretty church of St Giles-in-the-Fields. It was the next morning and I was determined to get things moving. ‘I love this place. They call it the Poets’ Church. And anyway, I live in this parish.’

  Michael laughed. ‘St Giles? The Rookery was in the streets around here.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Rookery. It’s another word for slum. This area around St Giles was one of the poorest parts of London, notorious for its drunkenness and debauchery. Dickens wrote about it.’

  His arm snuck around my waist, evidently as an example of the latter. I stepped out of his embrace and faced him, hands on hips.

  ‘Is there anywhere around here that is not mentioned somewhere in one of Dickens’s books?’

  ‘Nope.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s go inside and ask to speak to the vicar.’

  A short while later, as we ate lunch in the Victory Restaurant, I began to make notes on the back of an envelope I’d found in my handbag.

  ‘I think it’ll have to be Saturday the twenty-seventh of May. Just over a month. Doesn’t leave much time for the dress, but Celia says I can borrow one of hers.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘No. I want you to wear a dress of your own.’

  ‘I don’t have the coupons,’ I said, and gave him a cool look as he began to argue. ‘Getting the dress is up to the bride. I’m not a beggar maid to be clothed by you, Michael Harker.’

  He put up his hands. ‘Okay, okay. Getting the dress is your job.’

  But he looked so disappointed that I took his hand. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll have a proper wedding dress. I promise.’ I had another thought and made a note. ‘Granddad will need money for the train from Sheffield.’

  ‘Check,’ said Michael. ‘What about the wedding breakfast?’

  ‘Celia has offered her townhouse and her cook. You’ll need to supply the food and drinks though. Don’t you Americans have unlimited supplies of both?’

  Michael smiled. ‘Not unlimited, but sufficient, I think. Let me get this straight. All I’m expected to do is make sure your granddad is here and well turned out, arrive at the church on time and arrange for the booze and food.’

  ‘Check,’ I said. ‘And supply my wedding ring.’ I smiled at the sapphire engagement ring he had given me and tried to imagine it coupled with a gold band.

  A thought struck me as I sipped my tea. Lily’s friend Katherine, who was apparently holding something from Lily for me, was a dress designer and an absolute wiz at making clothes. If I could find some nice fabric, perhaps she’d make me up a wedding dress.

  ‘Would parachute silk do?’ asked Katherine.

  I gasped. ‘Can you get some?’

  ‘Lily did. Apparently Jim was owed a few favours, and Lily asked him to procure a silk parachute for you.’ Katherine smiled. ‘She left it with me and suggested it would make a lovely wedding dress. Celia said not to tell you until we knew for certain you’d be getting married.’

  ‘Oh, Katherine, a silk wedding dress. How wonderful.’

  She went into her bedroom and returned with a large piece of paper, which she smoothed
out on her table. The pencil flew across the page. ‘Three-quarter sleeves gathered at the shoulder, a cross-over bodice and a ruched skirt,’ she said. ‘Full length, of course, and slightly longer at the back to form a small train. Side opening with hook-and-eye fastenings, I think.’ She looked at me. ‘Have you got a veil?’

  ‘Celia says I can borrow the veil of Alençon lace that she wore when she was presented at Court. I think it was her mother’s wedding veil.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Katherine, and sketched in a veil.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said, gazing at her drawing. ‘Could you really make it in time? The wedding’s only a month away.’

  ‘Piece of cake.’

  They say that it’s a happy bride the sun shines upon, and the sun shone on the day of my wedding. It made a halo of Granddad’s white hair as he got out of the taxi. He turned to offer me his hand, looking very dapper in the new suit Michael had bought him. There were tears in his eyes as he bent towards me.

  ‘You look grand, lass,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’

  I took his hand and stepped out into the sunshine. After smoothing my long skirt, enjoying the feel of the silk against my hand, I twisted around to shake out the train. The world was sepia, as I viewed it from behind Celia’s exquisite lace veil. I held a bouquet of white roses because I was a Yorkshire lass, and I felt as if I were walking on air.

  Granddad escorted me up the seven steps to the grand doors that led into the church. The organist played ‘The Wedding March’ and Granddad and I slowly processed down the aisle towards Michael, who stood in front of the altar looking handsome in his uniform and more than a little nervous.

  He turned and saw me, and his smile lit the old church.

  EPILOGUE

  We Ambulance Girls went our separate ways after the end of the war. Lily and Jim settled in Australia, where Jim became a barrister and then a judge. Lily not only looked after their two boys, but also became quite famous as an author of children’s books in her home country.