Home for Christmas

by Annie Groves

  Mr Smith, who had emerged from his office looking, Agnes noticed, every bit as spruce as though he had only just arrived at work and not spent the night there, glared after them disapprovingly.

  ‘Disgraceful, carrying on like that. And at a time like this,’ he told Agnes.

  ‘Perhaps they were trying to cheer themselves up,’ she replied.

  ‘Make a nuisance of themselves, more like.’

  ‘I’ve heard that at some of the undergrounds they’ve had people organising singsongs,’ Miss Wood confided to Agnes, when Mr Smith had gone ‘up top’ to see ‘what was what’. ‘I can’t see Mr Smith encouraging that here.’

  Agnes didn’t like to think of how much more damage the bombs must have done overnight. The noise had been dreadful.

  Would Ted have time to come into the office to see her? He’d want to see his family safely home, of course, and then he’d have to come back to work himself. She wasn’t going to think about Ted’s mother not speaking to her. Agnes swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Ted was her hero and she wanted so very much for his family to like her. There was no getting away from her shaming background, though. As one of the other children at the orphanage had told her, ‘If your ma leaves you outside the orphanage and then scarpers, that means that you’re a bastard and that you’ve got bad blood in you ’cos your pa didn’t want to marry your ma.’

  Agnes had known from the way that Ted talked about his mother and their family life that being respectable was important to her. This thought brought another lump to Agnes’s throat, and her eyes began to sting.

  It was daylight when Sally left the hospital, with the kind of misty smoke haze hanging over the city that September mornings could bring. But this was a different kind of haze: small black smuts and even hot cinders were floating down from the sky. She could smell burning in the air, a smell with which all Londoners were becoming familiar. This morning’s smoky haze smelled unpleasantly of tallow fat. In the direction of the docks a red glow lay on the sky like a painful raised weal on a patient’s flesh, betraying the savagery of the wound they had suffered.

  Just as Sally had left, one of the theatre porters, also going off duty, had told her with real shock in his voice, ‘St Paul’s nearly got it last night. Dropped an eight-hundred-pound bomb on it, Jerry did. Landed right in front of the steps and would have blown the whole front to bits, but someone up there,’ he had gestured towards the heavens, ‘wasn’t going to let Hitler get away with that.’

  Now Sally felt impelled to go and view the cathedral herself – just to make sure it wasn’t damaged.

  Of course, the area around it had been cordoned off, and a crowd had gathered at a safe distance. From what she could see, soldiers, the Home Guard, policemen and fire fighters were all busy working by the steps.

  ‘Got to dig the bomb out, and that will take some doing,’ a man standing next to Sally informed her.

  ‘They’ll have the bomb disposal lot in, of course,’ another man put in, older and possibly ex-military himself, from his upright bearing.

  As comments and opinions flew back and forth – East End accents mingling with upper class and the falsely ‘refined’ tones adopted by those who wanted to ‘better themselves’ – the fate of Sir Christopher Wren’s cathedral drew the people of the city together in a common cause.

  Once she had assured herself that St Paul’s was undamaged, Sally started to make her way back to Article Row. At least working nights meant that she was avoiding the sleeplessness of night raids. She’d never thought it lucky to be doing night shifts before, she smiled to herself ruefully, acknowledging the shouted, ‘Watch out for the hoses,’ from a fireman with a nod of her head, as she stepped carefully over them.

  From the evidence of the large basket on the other side of the street, incendiaries had obviously been dropped. These bombs were easy enough to put out if one was swift to collect them on a shovel and douse them in water or sand before the chemicals inside them exploded, but the baskets in which they were dropped contained hundreds, and even the most fleet-footed fire watcher couldn’t possibly extinguish them all. Once the fires took hold, no building was safe. Apart from shattered windows, the buildings either side of the road seemed to be intact, although from the evidence of so many hoses, their interiors would now be soaked and damaged, Sally thought sympathetically.

  A flat-bed lorry was parked at the end of the street, a salvage team working busily to clear up the mess of roof slates, and broken glass. Sally could see two men removing broken glass from one of the windows, one of them giving a warning shout to the other as a large piece from higher up fell towards him.

  As though she was watching it in horrific slow motion Sally saw the man giving the warning putting out his hand towards his workmate; saw this man looking up and then stepping back and stumbling; the glass catching the morning light; the sticky tape that had once secured the edges rolled back in pale brown ringlets. She saw the glass slicing into the first man’s arm; the bright plume of arterial blood shooting upwards; the silence and then the frantic surge of men towards their injured comrade.

  Sally ran to the men. ‘Don’t try to remove the glass,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m a nurse. Barts.’

  The men immediately fell back respectfully, except the one supporting the injured man.

  ‘He needs to get to hospital,’ he told her unnecessarily, his voice gruff with shock.

  ‘Yes,’ Sally agreed, kneeling down beside the injured man, who was now looking, to her, that familiar shade of grey-green white that came with shock and loss of blood. ‘But first we need to tourniquet his arm.’ Because if they didn’t he wouldn’t get there at all, at least not alive, Sally recognised, although she didn’t say that to the men.

  ‘There’s a first-aid kit in the cab of the fire engine,’ a fireman who had come to offer help told her. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Sally gave a small silent prayer of thanks for the insistence of the powers that be that first-aid kits were carried, whilst she applied what pressure she could to the artery still pumping out blood.

  ‘Pity we can’t get the Thames to give us that kind of pressure for our pumps,’ another of the firemen who had now gathered around joked in that way that men do when they are desperately concerned.

  ‘I’ll be all right, Nurse, if you can just take this glass out of me arm,’ the injured man assured her in a thready thin voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to do that. Doctors all over London will go on strike if a mere nurse takes over their duties,’ Sally responded. ‘We need an ambulance or, failing that, stretcher,’ she told the other men without turning her head.

  She was already concerned that her patient might lose his arm, and she dare not risk trying to remove the glass in case she caused even more damage. Her comment about doctors, though, seemed to reassure them because they started telling her that they’d rather have a nurse treating them than a doctor any day. Meanwhile Sally had seen some men hurrying away in search of an ambulance, and the nearest ARP post.

  Two of the firemen were back, one carrying the fire engine’s first-aid kit, which was placed on the ground and opened for her.

  ‘I’ll need a nice short straight piece of wood for the tourniquet,’ she told them, and almost before she had got the tourniquet bandage in place, exactly what she needed had been produced.

  It was a relief to get the tourniquet on. The man had already lost a serious amount of blood, and was now unconscious. Sally didn’t like the colour of him, or the weakness of his pulse, now that his body had gone into shock from the accident. She hoped that an ambulance turned up soon, because she didn’t hold out much hope of his surviving for very much longer without proper medical attention.

  ‘Here comes the stretcher.’

  Sally turned to see two ARP wardens hurrying towards her with it.

  ‘It’s going to be a while before we can get an ambulance to you. The ambulance service has been overwhelmed with calls,’ on
e of the wardens told her.

  How long was ‘a while’? The man desperately needed hospital attention. Sally looked towards the empty flat-bed lorry belonging to the salvage crew and made up her mind.

  ‘We can get him onto the stretcher and then, provided he wasn’t the driver of the lorry . . . ?’ She paused.

  ‘He wasn’t, miss, I mean, Nurse,’ one of the men told her. ‘John here is the driver.’

  John, bashful and very young, removed his cloth cap as he was pushed forward by the others, and rubbed a hand over his dust-covered face before confirming that he was indeed the driver.

  The main problem, as far as Sally could see, was going to be the piece of glass firmly embedded in her ‘patient’s’ arm and which must stay there.

  ‘I’ll need enough men to get . . .’ she paused and John the driver supplied her patient’s name, as ‘Eric’, revealing two missing teeth as he did so.

  ‘. . . We need to get Eric onto the stretcher and then into the lorry as carefully as possible. I’ll stay with him and hold onto his arm and the glass. We need to keep both as still as we can,’ she explained to the men.

  If one of the many newspaper photographers recording the devastation left by the bombs had been around, he would have got a photograph like no other, Sally thought ruefully when, in order to carry out her instructions, the salvage men, along with the firemen, formed a group to lift not only their workmate, but Sally herself, bodily into the back of the flat-bed truck.

  Not that any of the men took advantage of that intimacy – far from it; their reluctance to look at Sally as they lifted her assured her of their respect.

  Instead of an ambulance siren to speed their progress, an ARP warden rode with Sally and the four men who were holding down the stretcher, and the warden blew his regulation whistle to clear the way.

  The only time they were stopped was when a policeman stepped out into the road in front of them, tilting back his helmet as he demanded to know why the warden was blowing his whistle when there wasn’t an air raid on. However, as soon as the situation was explained to him they were waved on their way with great alacrity.

  Although Sally’s amateur stretcher-bearers had made a Herculean effort to keep the stretcher steady, when she could see the entrance to Bart’s casualty department ahead of them Sally felt very relieved. Eric was still unconscious and his breathing had become worryingly shallow and fast. Her own fingers were practically numb from holding his arm with one hand and the glass with the other, and she was praying that she could continue to keep hold. At least he wasn’t losing blood any more, thanks to the tourniquet.

  The very moment they came to a halt an indignant ambulance driver came rushing over to the lorry.

  ‘You can’t park here, mate. This is for ambulances only.’

  ‘This is an emergency,’ Sally could hear the ARP warden telling him from the passenger window of the driver’s cab. ‘Take a look in the back and see for yourself.’

  The next minute an ambulance driver’s head appeared over the side of the lorry, his eyes widening as he took in the scene at a glance.

  ‘Cor blimey,’ he exclaimed, then called out to his partner, ‘Frank, get some porters here, will you, mate?’

  Once again all the men studiously avoided looking at Sally as she was lifted out of the lorry along with her patient, and it was with great relief that she found Sister Casualty waiting to take over the minute they got inside the hospital.

  Sister Casualty’s sharp knowledgeable eyes took in the situation at a glance, her voice calm and modulated into the tone that Sally remembered being taught to use in extreme emergencies so as not to frighten the patients, as she instructed the porters, ‘Straight to the top of the queue for this one, I think, please,’ before giving Sally a brisk nod of her head and asking almost casually, ‘Would you like someone else to take over there for you, Nurse?’

  ‘I’ll hang on, if that’s all right, Sister. Might as well see it through,’ Sally responded in the same almost off-hand tone, as though there were no emergency at all.

  Despite the heaviness of the Casualty staff’s workload, within seconds – or so it seemed to Sally, who was beginning to feel slightly light-headed – Eric was in a hospital bed with her still holding both his arm and the piece of glass, the curtains had been pulled round the bed and the senior registrar was bending over Eric’s arm.

  ‘Did you see what happened, and if so, any idea how deep it’s gone in, Nurse?’ he asked her.

  ‘At least as far as the bone, I think,’ Sally responded. ‘Definitely deep enough to cut an arterial vein.’

  ‘Mmm. If you can hang on we’ll give him a shot of morphine and then take a proper look.’

  Sally nodded.

  ‘Not one of these nurses that is likely to faint on me are you?’

  ‘Nurse Johnson is a theatre nurse, Mr Pargiter. I doubt anything is likely to make her faint,’ Sister Casualty’s voice came to Sally’s rescue, leaving Sally to marvel at Sister Casualty’s knowledge – until she caught a glimpse of George standing behind her.

  ‘Come and have a look at this, Laidlaw,’ the senior registrar told George. ‘Damn near sliced the whole arm off, by the looks of it. But for the quick thinking of this nurse, the chap wouldn’t be here now.’

  ‘It was nothing. I just happened to be passing when the glass fell. He and some other men were demolishing a burned-out building.’

  Sister Casualty herself administered the morphine. She had arrived accompanied by a slightly green and very round-eyed nurse – still a probationer, Sally saw from her uniform – and a more senior nurse pushing an instrument trolley.

  ‘Heart’s beating a bit too fast for my liking,’ the senior registrar told George. ‘What we’ve got to hope is that we can get the glass out without it breaking. Didn’t happen to see what it looked like before it went in, did you, Nurse?’

  ‘Long and sharply pointed V-shape,’ Sally responded.

  ‘Mmm, well, at least that means that it isn’t likely to have splintered already on impact with the bone, but we’ll be lucky if the tip doesn’t break off when we remove it. What I want you to do, Nurse, is to keep holding the glass steady but move your hands up a little so that I can get hold of it.’

  Sally could see the look Sister Casualty was giving her. A look that said she would be letting all Barts’ nurses down if she misjudged things. George, on the other hand, was giving her a look of total reassurance. She just hoped his faith in her was justified. She could almost feel the silence in the small curtain-enclosed area as she very slowly and carefully moved one hand and then the other further up the glass. Her whole body felt as though it were trembling inside, but she knew she must not allow that tremor to get into her hands.

  Even when Mr Pargiter had placed his hands on the glass below her own, Sally hardly dare so much as exhale in case she jarred the glass.

  ‘Come over here, Laidlaw, and see if you can tell just what we’re dealing with,’ the senior registrar instructed George.

  Watching her boyfriend carefully exploring the site of the wound with one of the instruments from the trolley, his whole concentration on his task and the patient, Sally was filled with fresh admiration and respect, not just for George but for the hospital that had trained him.

  ‘One side’s pressed up close to the bone. Hitting it must have deflected the glass.’

  ‘What I want you to do now is get under the tip of the glass and support it, but first we’ll need you and Nurse Johnson to hold his forearms steady, if you please, Sister.’

  At a brief nod from Sister Casualty, Sally went to Eric’s injured arm whilst Sister Casualty took the other arm.

  Now Sally really was holding her breath. Eric was still unconscious, now thanks to the morphine, but it was still possible that he might jerk his body – with potentially fatal consequences – under the exploration George had to carry out unless they held him still.

  George leaned over the patient. Sally clenched her teeth when she heard t
he sound of the metal instrument grating against the glass.

  ‘Got it?’ Mr Pargiter asked.

  ‘Yes,’ George confirmed.

  ‘Right.’

  Slowly and carefully the senior registrar started to lift the glass from Eric’s arm, the involuntary flinch Sally could feel gripping the muscles of his upper arm automatically causing her to press down on it more firmly.

  ‘Got it.’

  There was a note of quiet satisfaction in the senior registrar’s voice, and a good deal of pride in Sally’s heart when he added, ‘Nice work, Laidlaw. Now we need to get him cleaned up. Not sure whether or not he’ll be able to keep his arm, mind you. Still, he’s a lucky blighter that you were around, Nurse.’

  A little later, setting off for the second time in one morning for number 13 and her bed, Sally promised herself that this time she would go straight back without taking any diversions. She was so tired that she dare not even blink in case she fell asleep.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Hello, Kit. I haven’t seen you all week. Are you going to St John Ambulance tonight?’ Tilly asked Christopher Long, catching up with him when she saw him walking down the Row in front of her, no doubt making his way to work.

  Kit, who lived with his recently widowed mother at number 49, was in the civil service. He was also a conscientious objector, something that Nancy in particular was inclined to make disparaging remarks about. Tilly felt sorry for Mrs Long, but more so for Kit, with his awkward uncoordinated walk, and his introverted nature.

  ‘I won’t be there tonight,’ he answered her. ‘I won’t be able to make it.’

  ‘You aren’t not, not coming because one of the girls was so silly and mean the other week, are you?’ Tilly asked, remembering how unkind another member of their group had been to Kit when he had first joined.

  ‘No,’ he answered her shortly, increasing his pace.

  ‘Then why aren’t you coming?’ Tilly persisted, hurrying to keep up with him. ‘I wanted to practise my bandaging on you,’ she teased him, hoping to bring a smile to his face, but, if anything, he looked even more miserable.