Blitz - Book 4 of the Poppy Chronicles

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’m interested in people of all sorts.’ She tried to smile then, hoping he could tell from her voice that she meant kindly. ‘That’s why I’m a nurse. Because I like being with people. It’s not because I like to see people in pain or anything. I just like being with them.’

  ‘Aye? Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ he said and lapsed into silence.

  They stayed there for a while listening to the crumps of bombs becoming ever fainter, and longing for the all clear, and then she said, ‘Tell me, Todd, why are you a conchie?’

  ‘Ye gods, do you have to call me Todd like that?’ he burst out and there was real venom in his tones. ‘I’m no’ your servant!’

  She stared at him in amazement. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t understand what you – ’

  ‘If it’s too much trouble to call me Mr Todd then – ’

  ‘Mr Todd?’ she said. ‘But isn’t that your first name?’

  He was the one who stopped short.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I thought Todd was your first name. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, but it was the only name I ever heard anyone call you and – ’

  ‘Ah, to damnation wi’ it!’ he said and shook his head. ‘I’ve made a fat fool of mysel’, have I not? I’m sorry, Miss Bradman, I meant no – ’

  ‘My name is Robin,’ she said steadily. ‘I told you that.’

  ‘And mine is Hamish.’

  She caught her breath, a sudden desire to laugh bumbling up in her. It wasn’t the odd name, well, not really; but it wasn’t a common one and what with the events of the afternoon and the oddness of this whole conversation, it was all she could do to regain her composure. But somehow she managed it and said gravely, ‘I’m pleased to know it, Hamish. And I’m sorry I didn’t before.’

  ‘No need to fash yerself,’ he said and smiled again and his uneven teeth glimmered in the dimness and then she could laugh.

  ‘Such a funny word! I know it’s Scots, but I never know exactly what it means – ’

  ‘It’s no’ Scots so much as French,’ he said. ‘Did ye not do the language at school? Ne fâchez vous – don’t disturb yourself, don’t be angered – we’ve a good deal of the French in Scotland. Dour, d’you see, comes from the French for hard – dûr – and there are others – ’

  ‘You’re a very interesting person!’ she discovered and again reddened. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! That sounds – I didn’t mean to be so rude. It’s just that on the ward, only seeing you do the buckets and scrub the pans and so forth – ’

  ‘Aye,’ he said grimly. ‘Always the dirtiest jobs they can find for me. Because I’m that dirty thing, a man with conscience.’

  There was a little silence and then she said, ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘What’s to tell you? I canna’ fight and kill. Indeed, I will na’. It’s as simple as that. So I came here to work instead.’

  ‘But you can’t want the Nazis to take over the world?’ she said wonderingly. ‘They will if they can.’

  ‘Aye, so we’re told,’ he said. ‘And have every reason to believe, the way they’re behaving now is – it’s sickening. But all the same I believe all life is sacred. I canna’ take it, nor can I inflict pain. It’s not a thing I can do. So, I do this work instead.’

  ‘It’s a pity you’re not a woman. Then you could be a nurse,’ she said, and he laughed.

  ‘Oh, I could join the army and say I wanted to be a stretcher-bearer or a medical orderly, but there’s no guarantee that they’d let me. And I might find myself with a gun put in my hands and then what? Do I turn and refuse and make it worse for the other men? Better to stay here. As for training as a nurse – I could for the mental hospitals, I dare say. They use male nurses. But I don’t want that. After this horrible war is over, as God willing it will be, I’ll be back to university.’

  ‘Back to – ’

  ‘I want to take my master’s degree. I’ve got my bachelor’s. I’m a biologist,’ he said simply and she stared at him again, seeing him in a whole new light.

  ‘But what waste to be emptying bedpans and scrubbing crappy mackintoshes!’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you doing that sort of work now? It must be more useful than this – ’

  He shook his head. ‘The only sort of work that is useful in biology right now is warfare,’ he said bitterly. ‘They’re even thinking of germ bombs. It makes me sick – faugh!’ And he made the expressive sound deep in his throat and she felt a little chill of cold move in her.

  ‘I see,’ was all she could say, and that weakly, and he laughed then.

  ‘It’s difficult for you to understand. That I can hate the Nazis for the dreadful things they’re doing and yet not feel able to take up a gun against them?’

  There was a silence and then she said. ‘Well, yes. I’m sorry, but I do. It’s just that – I thought we all had to be in this together.’

  ‘I am in it,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I? Here at the hospital. Even scrubbing babies’ crappy mackintoshes is a contribution, isn’t it? It releases people like you to do more important work.’

  She managed a smile. ‘I suppose so. I wish I really understood though. I have so many friends, you see –’ And then she stopped.

  He nodded. ‘I know. In the services.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘One’s in the Navy.’

  He made a face. ‘Oh, God, that’s awful. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Me too,’ and then stopped suddenly. ‘Are you religious? Is that it?’

  He laughed. ‘Because I call on the name of God from time to time? Bad habit that. Just slang for me, I’m afraid. Me, I’m a real freethinker. Agnostic, you know? Not an atheist, mark you. That’s as arrogant as being a theist – I mean, swearing there’s no god is the same really as maintaining there is. Neither side have any evidence either way. Me, I don’t know, and don’t care too much. I think people matter most.’

  She leaned forwards then and touched his arm, suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. ‘Oh, I am glad you said that. I think I’m the same really. I’ve never talked about it, but it matters to me. I mean, I think about such things sometimes. Especially when – ’

  She was never to know why she did it, but the words came tumbling out of her.

  ‘I’m a quarter Jewish, you see. I had a Jewish grandfather. I have this Jewish aunt – well, great-aunt really. She’s lovely. But my father, and now my stepfather – they’re just the usual English thing, you know, Church. Not that they go much, but they belong and I sometimes feel a bit bewildered by it all.’

  ‘I can well see you would,’ he said. And then lifted his head. Somewhere outside the long-awaited wail had started in the distance and they listened hard and then it started up close by and the shelterers took a deep sigh of relief and got to their feet, reaching for their knitting and their books and talking and laughing loudly in deep relief that this was another air raid over and done with and they were not hurt.

  ‘I’d love to talk some more about this,’ Robin said, a little shyly and she straightened her somewhat creaking knees and brushed the dust of the shelter wall from her trousers and shirt. She didn’t look at him.

  ‘Aye, well, mebbe we can at that,’ he said. ‘If there’s time in Casualty. Not that it’ll be likely.’ He squinted outside as the warden came and opened the door. There was the all too familiar dust in the air again and the sickening reek of cordite and he sighed. ‘If it’s like this now, God help us all when it gets dark –’ And then his eyes glinted with humour as he looked at her. ‘If you’ll forgive my use of the deity’s name!’

  She laughed too and then watched as he went walking away across the courtyard, his long legs covering the ground quickly, as she waited for Chick to emerge with her armful of Davidoff twins. What a very odd day this was turning out to be, she thought, as she looked up at the sky, now a rich blue with the last rays of the September afternoon. Even among odd days which were the normal thing now, this one had given her a great dea
l to think about.

  6

  By seven o’clock, Poppy’s battered knee had swollen so badly she had to limp, and she felt dreadful. There wasn’t time to think about it as the first all-clear of the night offered only a half hour’s respite before the warning wailed its swooping notes again, but it sat at the back of her consciousness like a thick black cloud that threatened to overwhelm her at any moment.

  Maria had gone when she had reached the canteen, leaving a note that said cryptically, ‘I been and gone I had to see you tomorrow as per arrangements as usual yrs truly Maria Randall (Mrs),’ and there had been a knot of wardens on their way on duty waiting and clamouring for their evening meal before they went. She had barely had time to put on her apron before she was dishing out the mince and potatoes that Maria had mercifully left bubbling ready on the stove.

  The first wave of evening regulars went and she had a moment or two then for herself, and she used them to take off her stockings, pulling the tattered threads from her bloodied knee very gingerly, though it stung dreadfully, and then putting on iodine and a makeshift bandage. She was almost in tears of pain by this time and had to be very firm indeed with herself as she swallowed a couple of aspirin and then limped around the canteen collecting dirty dishes and washing up, and leaving the serving counter clean and ready for the next onslaught. To be so upset and tearful just because of a fall? It was ridiculous. And then she sighed and began to slice bread with some ferocity.

  It wasn’t the fall, of course it wasn’t. It was that wretched Bernie who had upset her, and she brooded over him as she spread the margarine and then fish paste to make the piles of sandwiches that would vanish in no time once the night raids started in good earnest, as they very soon would. You could almost tell the time by those wretched planes. But it wasn’t the raids that had upset her, nor was it the fall. It was definitely Bernie; and the more she thought about him the more ferociously hard and fast she worked.

  He was hateful, totally hateful, she told herself. To have come slinking around Jessie as he had, and to have been here in London for two years without her knowing it – and then a different sort of anger filled her. How could Jessie have been so devious with her? To have hidden the fact so well had been an act of downright betrayal, she thought hotly, a dreadful thing to have done to her –

  But she couldn’t sustain her anger for long, not against Jessie. As she had said herself so piteously, what was a mother to do? The fact that Bernie had behaved disgracefully didn’t alter the fact that he was her son, and a much beloved one at that. It was inevitable that Jessie would try to protect him.

  As long as he didn’t go near Chloe again, Poppy thought and then stopped spreading fish paste to stare sightlessly ahead. Chloe was hardly her problem any more. Since her marriage and that dreadful, indeed positively disgraceful and all too public divorce, she had lived in her own flat, a very handsome if rather small place, in Bryanston Square. She was her own woman now, for good or ill. How could it be otherwise? She was thirty-two, well beyond her stepmother’s control. But for all that Poppy felt a responsibility for her. When she had married Chloe’s father, in those dark and painful days during the last war, she had taken on Chloe too, like it or not. She had been a dreadfully spoiled child and remained so, whatever Poppy had tried to do for her, and though her affair with Bernie and the miserable outcome of it had brought her a little closer to her stepmother, still she had gone her own headstrong way; and Poppy sighed and bent her head again to her sandwiches.

  Maybe it wouldn’t all start up again, she told herself then, trying to be optimistic. Chloe’s no longer the silly girl she had been a dozen or so years ago. What with her job at the War Office (what was it? wondered Poppy – something vaguely secretarial was all she knew, and that it seemed to give her an amazing amount of free time) and her special friends there, she had become a decidedly snobbish young woman. She went out and about only with senior officers, and rarely deigned to go below the rank of major, though she would sometimes be seen with a captain. Lieutenants were certainly of no interest unless they happened also to be rich in their own right, or titled (and there had been one or two of those, Poppy remembered) so perhaps she would scorn a civilian like Bernie, even if he did try to make contact. Poppy cheered up then even more as another thought bubbled up; because he hadn’t attempted to do so yet and he’d been back from America for two years, maybe that boded well?

  The sirens began their closer clamour then, and she lifted her head and waited fearfully and then almost at once the other noise began; the roar of guns from the ack-ack batteries that had been set up well to the north, in Hackney’s Victoria Park, and which were loud even at this distance. She sometimes doubted that they did any good; she had never heard of a plane being brought down by one of them around here, but it was like the searchlight that sprang up as the planes came over. They made people on the ground feel that at least someone somewhere was trying to fight back. The worst thing about the raids was the feeling of being so utterly helpless, crouching in shelters like terrified rabbits in burrows, while the Germans overhead sat there like scornful winged demons, raining down death and horror.

  Heavens, she thought, I must be low to be thinking such morbid thoughts, and pulled back her shoulders and took a few deep breaths to restore her to her usual state of common sense. The aspirin had started to have an effect so that her knee just throbbed heavily now, but her mood had lifted a little; and it was just as well it had. There were more crumps as bombs fell somewhere fairly near and then she heard the shriek of the bells as the fire engines came thudding through the streets overhead.

  They’ll start coming in soon, she thought, the walking casualties and the people caught outside the shelters and the workers and drivers – and she sighed, and checked that both the urns were full and bubbling and that she had the milk ready in the cups. Preparation, she always told her staff, was the key to fast service, and she had to be sure not to forget it herself, now she was working on her own. And for one brief moment she even regretted the absence of the egregious Mrs Crighton.

  But only for a moment, because the door was pushed open as the first people arrived – a fireman leading one of his mates who had a blackened face and whose eyes were half closed above swollen cheeks.

  ‘Got a blast from a gas flare,’ explained the fireman after he’d settled the injured man at a table. ‘Can you take care of ’im for us till the ambulance can take ’im? There’s bin a direct hit over at Fieldgate Street, by Vine Court. They’re digging ’em out now. The Warden’s post ’as gone an’ all – ’

  She lifted her head quickly. ‘The Post? What about old Arthur?’

  The fireman shook his head and began to make his way back to the door. ‘Sorry, ducks, but he was one of the dead ones. Three there was. Was he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ Poppy said dully. ‘A friend of mine –’ And she looked over her shoulder at the tin hat Arthur had given her and which was hanging on the hook behind the side door and thought – please, don’t let him be dead because he didn’t have his tin hat –

  ‘Rotten luck it was,’ the fireman said. ‘Crushed right across his chest, he was. Never stood a chance, lying there looking just as he usually did, only with this bleedin’ great rafter across him.’

  ‘Not – not his head then?’

  The fireman looked at her sharply. ‘No, love. Does it matter?’

  ‘He gave me his tin hat to get me back here safely – I was caught outside in the alert at five o’clock – ’

  The fireman shook his head and opened the door. ‘Never give it a thought, ducks. He was wearing one.’ And went. And Poppy took a deep shaking breath and carried a cup of very hot sweet tea over to the man sitting so quietly slumped at the table.

  He was shocked, but as far as she could see the damage to his face wasn’t too bad and as she went and collected cold wet cloths to put across his forehead and to pat on his flaming cheeks, she was grateful again for the nursing experience she had been
given during the last war as part of her FANY’s training. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, she thought as she worked on the injured man, and got a sudden vision of herself in the uniform, and then banished it. She was just a canteen supervisor in this war, one with a bit of first-aid training, admittedly, but only a caterer and cleaner-upper. She had enough on her plate without getting notions about getting back into uniform again. And she patted the grateful fireman on the shoulder and left him to sip his tea as again the doors opened and another group of people came in.

  From then on it was bedlam. She poured tea and refilled urns and made more and more sandwiches and was grateful when some of the men collected the used cups and saucers and plates for her and brought them back to be washed up. Being single-handed on a night like this was hell; but it did at least have the virtue of keeping her mind off other, more personal things.

  Or did until around eleven, when one of the ambulance drivers, his face streaked with dirt and his uniform blood spattered, came and asked for ‘some tea and a bit of grub, ducky. I never got no dinner today on account I overslept after last night being such a bugger, beggin’ your pardon for the language, and I ain’t et nothing since ten o’clock this morning.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Poppy said and her face crumpled. ‘There was some mince and potatoes but that all went ages ago. I’ve only these few sandwiches left – ’

  The man picked up one of the thin sandwiches mournfully and lifted a bread slice to inspect the filling.

  ‘Fish paste,’ he said lugubriously. ‘Nothin’ to eat since ten o’clock and all I get now is fish paste. Don’t it break yer ’eart? What I’d like to ’ave, if I could ’ave what I liked, would be a nice fried egg samwidge. My old Mum, she used to give ’em when I was tired and couldn’t eat a proper big dinner. “Eggs, Sid,” she used to say to me. “Eggs is nature’s treasury of food, eggs is. As full of meat as anythin’ could be an’ as good as steak.” An’ she’d fry me an egg in a nice bit o’ butter and put on a bit o’ pepper, you know, for a relish, and slap it between two big slices of new bread and I tell you, that was a meal that was.’ And he sighed. ‘Never mind, ducks. No eggs around these days for the askin’ is there? Not down ’ere in the East End anyway. All gone up West, I dare say, to the clubs and the fancy caffs where they can get big money for ’em. I’ll ’ave this and be glad to get it. Never say no if there ain’t somethin’ else to say yes to, my Mum used to say – ’