Ambulance Girls
Page 15
Moray shrugged and went into the office.
I had fallen into bleak despair. Levy was more than an hour late, which had never happened before. My imagination was running riot, fuelled by Sadler’s comments. I saw Levy in an accident, as an injured Blitz victim, or worse.
In the office the telephone rang and we all jerked with surprise. It was abruptly silenced as Moray picked it up. The mood seemed to sharpen into a fixed awareness of Moray on the telephone and what it meant for us during the shift ahead. Levy always said that he inhaled more smoke in the common room than on the bomb sites, as he lit cigarette after cigarette, trying to settle his nerves. Once you were out in the Blitz there was little time for fear.
‘I suspect we’re in for another rough shift,’ Harris said, still knitting. ‘Moon’s full, and London’s wide open to them.’
‘Moon’s no use to them if there’s a solid layer of cloud over the city,’ growled Sadler.
‘They say the Italians are bombing us too now,’ said Armstrong. ‘They’ll dump their bombs anywhere.’
The sliding window into the office opened and Moray poked his head through.
‘A car is needed in Tavistock Gardens – a car accident, not a war injury. Armstrong?’
The boy collected the chit and disappeared.
I picked a tattered novel out of the small bookcase, a murder mystery set in an Oxford college. Levy had gone to Trinity College in Oxford, I recalled. I tried to lose myself in the book, but I kept reading the same passages over and over.
At seven o’clock the silence was broken by a long sustained scream, rising and falling like banshee wail. It was the Warning siren, announcing that raiders had been sighted on their way to London. Celia returned to her seat and began to leaf through her magazine.
‘Listen to moaning Minnie,’ said Sadler.
Maisie rushed out of the room, heading for the ladies’ washroom to throw up. She was always physically ill at the sound of the siren, but she never missed a callout.
The first rumble of distant explosions began half an hour later, followed by the thumping percussion of the guns. Then the swish and crump of falling bombs, still some distance away. The guns’ thunder became constant and as the crumps came closer, the building shook. I gave up any attempt to read a book that jerked in my hands.
The telephone rang and was silenced as Moray picked it up. We all exchanged glances, united by the knowledge of what probably lay ahead of us that night. I felt the usual anxiety, like a cold ribbon of fear snaking through my gut. At this time I usually shared a look with Levy, who would calm me with a whispered joke or a smile.
Moray poked his head through the window. In his hands were paper chits, on which he had written the addresses and some details of incidents that Central Command had assigned to us.
‘Prepare for a bad shift,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of planes are coming over, they tell me, just like Coventry last night. We’ve an incident in Doughty Street. I need a car and an ambulance. Is Armstrong back yet? No? Harris, you and Sadler take it. Ashwin, you take a car.’ Harris and Celia rose and went to the window to collect the chits.
Moray caught my eye.
‘Levy still not turned up?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’ve got Fripp.’ He waved another piece of paper. ‘Incident in Judd Street. Needs two ambulances. Halliday and Squire, you’re on that one as well.’
Fripp went over to collect the chit. I put down my book and got to my feet. The night’s work was beginning, and I was going out into that chaos without Levy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nola Fripp’s eyes were pale green, like a gooseberry. Her father was something big in the War Office and her mother ran all sorts of war-related committees. Fripp spoke well and dressed well, wore lipstick, rouge and mascara every day, and had her hair regularly and expensively set, but somehow none of it worked. She always, I suspected, would look nondescript.
She was undoubtedly intelligent and had passed the first aid course easily, but her fear of loud noises made her a liability during an air raid. This night was no different. When we drove to our first incident she cringed back in her seat, and as the raid thundered around us and fire lit up the night, she screeched at me to, ‘Pull over so we can find a shelter.’
I ignored her and continued driving.
At another incident the stretcher-bearers were busy and the warden asked us to go into a bombed house to collect our patient.
Fripp refused point blank. ‘You know that’s the job of the stretcher-bearers, Brennan.’
In theory, it was the task of stretcher squads to find the injured and remove them from a bomb site into the ambulances. In practice, the stretcher squads often had such heavy calls on them that drivers and attendants did the stretcher work as well. Tonight was one of the worst raids I had yet experienced, and the stretcher squads were too busy to help us.
‘The stretcher squads are flat out.’
‘It’s not our job,’ she repeated.
‘We can’t leave the poor chap inside the ruins. Come on, Fripp. We must get him out.’
She shook her head. ‘The whole building is about to topple.’
‘All the more reason to get him out now.’
Eventually one of the firemen went in with me and helped me carry the patient to the ambulance.
It was a long, difficult shift and throughout it Fripp was panicky and critical.
Towards dawn we were at last heading back to Woburn Place in driving rain, taking a roundabout route because of diversions. I turned into a street of Georgian terraces. There was a gap in the row where a house had taken a direct hit that reminded me of the gap-toothed smiles in my infants’ class. Fripp gave a loud sniff.
‘You think you’re so special, Brennan. So heroic. You and that Jew boyfriend of yours.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend. You know I had a—’
‘Yes, yes. We all know you had a boyfriend who died at Scapa Flow. You soon forgot him when you met Levy, didn’t you?’
‘David Levy is not my boyfriend,’ I repeated firmly. ‘But he is my friend, so just be quiet, will you. I’m worried about him.’
Fripp made a soft snorting sound.
‘Why do you hate Levy so much?’ I asked, genuinely curious.
‘He’s a nasty stinking Jew,’ was Fripp’s reply.
‘That’s no answer,’ I snapped.
‘It’s the only one you’re—’
She broke off with a little scream and cowered in her seat at the loud roaring sound directly overhead. A plane was coming in low. I ducked down as far as I could behind the wheel, knowing we might well be strafed, despite the red cross on our roof. I twisted the wheel and increased speed, trying to make us harder to hit. Fripp screeched more loudly as the road lit up in another sudden flash of white light. Bullets hit the road in front of us. I jammed on the brake and there was a sharp hammering on the ambulance roof, as if someone had uploaded a tray full of tin cans on us.
For a moment I was sure we had been hit. Then I saw the small cylindrical missiles that were falling around us, each hitting the roadway with a sharp crack before beginning to hiss and spit and ignite in a white-green flash. The plane roared away, up into the sky.
‘Damn,’ I said. My heart was thumping wildly and I took a deep breath to steady myself. ‘Incendiaries. They’ll bring the raiders back.’
Incendiary bombs were dropped in batches and each bomb contained thirty-six small canisters of phosphorus. I parked the ambulance, waiting for the thumping of my heart to subside and watched the dark figures that had appeared from the buildings around us and were running around dumping sandbags on to the devices. Incendiary bombs could do little damage on the road; the ones that fell through roofs or windows were the real danger. Unless the fire wardens could get to them they would spit and hiss until the phosphorus inside them exploded into flames.
‘There’s no need to swear,’ said Fripp, in such a prissy voice I was tempted to let fly with every ex
pletive I knew. I stayed silent. Eventually I stopped shaking.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Fripp, her voice high and terrified. ‘Let’s get out now.’
It was clear that she was close to hysteria, so I pressed the starter and then the accelerator. As the Monster picked up speed we experienced a series of small jolts.
‘What is it?’ shrieked Fripp.
‘The incendiary devices,’ I shrieked back at her. ‘I can’t avoid running over them.’
On Barnsbury Road we were diverted into smaller streets because of a gas leak, but even these were pitted and strewn with debris. The narrow beam of my louvred headlights picked up bricks, tiles and fragments of furniture on the road and the crunch of broken glass was loud under my wheels. Dark figures were crawling over mounds of wreckage in a desperate search for survivors, but moving lightly, carefully, so as not to disturb further the silting plaster and drown those beneath with dust. Above us, the raiders still circled in a ceaseless roar. The noise of the guns was almost deafening.
I stopped the ambulance at the direction of a warden. He came up to us and shouted into my window.
‘You from Dolphin Square?’
‘No. Bloomsbury.’ We could not pick up injured who were not on our chit. There were strict instructions about that.
‘Then get out of here. This way’s blocked. Turn around and go down the street to your left.’
A bright column of yellow fire roared into the darkness a block away, bathing the scene in a sickly greenish glow. The sound of fire bells grew louder until they ceased in a screech of brakes. We heard men shouting, followed by the hiss of water.
‘Gosh,’ I said as we slowly drove away. ‘They really copped it. This raid is the worst yet.’
Fripp was quiet for a while, until she sat up straighter and electrified me by saying, ‘None of this would be happening if we’d just agree terms with Germany.’
The ambulance lurched as I pulled too sharply on the wheel. I corrected, slowed and twisted to look at her face; it was a ghoulish grey in the pre-dawn light.
‘Agree terms with Hitler? Are you insane?’ I thought about what Sadler had said. ‘Are you a communist?’
She pursed her lips. ‘Of course I’m not a communist. And you want to know what’s insane? Making London put up with this night after night. Churchill’s got a special shelter with all the conveniences. It’s the poor old ordinary Londoners who are bearing the brunt of it, just like those we picked up tonight. Britain can’t withstand Germany on its own. Not now France has capitulated. The rest of Europe knows it. Why don’t we?’
‘We’ll never give in to the Nazis,’ I said. My voice was shaking in my outrage. ‘How can you even think it?’
‘You’re not even English, Brennan. It’s not your country that’s going to lose everything because Churchill’s too stubborn to see sense.’
‘Australians are British citizens, you ninny. More importantly, I care about freedom.’
‘What? The freedom to die? Germany is just too powerful. They might not have invaded this year, but we’ll see paratroopers and barges come spring. This Blitz is designed to soften us up. We’d be better off negotiating terms now, from a position of strength.’
I was so angry that I didn’t trust myself to talk, and drove back to the station in a furious silence.
‘I know you’re all fired up with this idea of freedom,’ she said, as we cleaned the Monster at the end of our shift. ‘Whatever that word actually means. But Germany’s just too powerful. We can’t win.’
‘The RAF has decimated the Luftwaffe,’ I said, scrubbing furiously and not looking at her. The water from the garage tap was freezing and my hands were nearly numb with cold. ‘And we will win this war, because the alternative is barbarism.’
She gave a high-pitched giggle. ‘You are silly, Brennan. The government is lying to us about the air war. The RAF isn’t doing nearly as well as the propaganda makes out. That’s what my father says, and he should know. Moray knows, too. The anti-aircraft guns are practically useless. I think it’s a scandal that we’re not being told the truth.’ She put down the rag she was using and turned to look me straight in the eye. ‘Britain is going to lose, and if we don’t realise it soon we’ll throw away any chance to negotiate favourable terms with Germany.’
It occurred to me that this was not something Fripp would think up on her own. I wondered if I should report her for spreading defeatism. And report her chatty War Office father! But I knew I would not do it. I hated the idea of informing. That was what they did in Nazi Germany. And while I hated her stupid ideas about politics, underneath the bluster I could sense her fear. She was scared of an uncertain future. I was scared, too.
‘You don’t know just how terrible the Nazis are,’ I said. ‘I saw what they did in Czechoslovakia.’
‘The Germans like the British. They’d treat us differently.’
I made a soft snorting sound. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘they like us so much they’re trying to bomb us to smithereens.’
And as to what ‘terms’ they’d insist upon – the thought was terrifying. I knew how the Nazis would treat Levy and his family, and that was just one reason we had to keep fighting. Anyway, Britain wasn’t alone in her fight against the Axis powers. She had the Empire. She had Australia!
‘They will treat us differently if we just see sense,’ she insisted.
‘You are being very naive,’ I said.
‘We’ll see who’s naive.’
There was no point arguing. I finished cleaning the Monster and dashed to the office without bothering to wash off the grime of the night. I was desperate to know if there was any word from Levy, or about him.
I knocked quickly and entered without bothering to hear Moray’s response. He was sitting behind the desk, which was covered with incident reports and maps and pamphlets and other paraphernalia.
‘Any news about Levy?’
Moray looked up from a pile of papers and frowned.
‘No. Nothing.’
‘Have you telephoned anyone? Bothered to ask?’ My voice was shrill, and his frown deepened.
‘I’ve been busy, Brennan. Almost every one of London’s boroughs was bombed during the night. Westminster Abbey and School, the National Portrait Gallery, Euston station, Wellington Barracks and four hospitals were hit. A dozen factories, hundreds of houses. They’ve been using a new type of delayed action bomb – and it’s already been nicknamed Satan. It’s the most intense raid we’ve had yet, and one missing man isn’t high on my list of priorities.’
I turned away from him, my hands clenched into tight fists, fighting back the tears.
‘Brennan.’ His voice was softer and I looked up. ‘When the All Clear sounded – twenty minutes ago – I rang the number Levy gave for his next of kin.’
‘Did you—’, I began to ask, but he shook his head.
‘I didn’t even get the number unobtainable sound. So I rang the exchange and the operator tried the number. She said the line is out of order. You know what that means.’
He ran a hand across his stubbled chin. Moray had been on duty all night taking calls and his face had a pinched, exhausted look.
‘I asked Sadler about his Soho story and he admitted that he made it up. But I think Levy’s family have been bombed out. If he was in the house when it was hit, then . . .’
I shrugged, refusing to give him the pleasure of showing my misery. He stood and walked around the desk to stand beside me. To my astonishment he put a hand on my shoulder. I was too tired to shake it off.
‘I’ll ring around the hospitals, see if anyone of his description has been brought in.’
I shrugged his hand away. ‘It’s the end of my shift and I’m going home. I’ll find him.’
Moray continued to stand beside me for a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. When he returned to his desk I turned to walk out of the office.
Fripp pushed by me to enter the room. The door didn’t quite shut behind her and I hea
rd her high rather whiny voice complaining about me.
‘Brennan is impossible. She never takes cover during a raid. I hate going out with her. And she’s so high and mighty. Tried to lecture me about freedom.’
Moray sniggered.
I walked away.
* * *
By now I was so tired that coherent thought was difficult. I had to know if Levy was hurt – I wouldn’t consider the alternative – and it seemed that the only way to find out was to contact his parents. They were rich and probably on the phone, but I did not want to ask Moray for their address and telephone number because it upset me just to speak to him.
Jim would know their number, and I wanted to see Jim. I desperately wanted to see Jim. He was Levy’s friend. He knew Levy’s family, where they lived. We could go there together.
Only I did not know Jim’s actual address. All I knew was that he was living in a flat in Half Moon Street, Mayfair.
I tried to work out what to do. It was likely that his mother’s friend was on the phone, but Jim’s name would not be in the directory because the flat belonged to his mother’s friend. I did not know her name. Think, Lily. Celia knew Jim, well enough to visit him in hospital. She might know his address. If she did not, I would simply have to ring the bell of every house in Half Moon Street, because I would not go back into that office to ask Moray for the Levys’ address.
The common room was filling with people rostered for the day shift. ‘Anyone seen Ashwin?’ I called out.
Someone said, ‘She headed off a couple of minutes ago.’
I ran out of the room into the garage. Celia was standing beside her bicycle, bending down to place clips on her trousers. I ran across to her, spoke without a greeting.
‘Do you know Jim Vassilikov’s address?’ My voice sounded sharp, a staccato bark. ‘He told me he was living in a flat in Half Moon Street, but not the number. All I know is that it belongs to a friend of his mother’s.’
Celia did not look up, or even acknowledge me. She continued to carefully adjust the clip on her leg. Perhaps I had sounded rude. I took a breath and when I tried again, I heard a wheedling tone in my voice.