Home for Christmas

by Annie Groves

  ‘What’s that then?’ the pilot officer demanded.

  ‘A very long sharp hatpin,’ she responded sweetly, her response eliciting guffaws of laughter from the other men.

  ‘She’s got you sussed out good and proper, Racey,’ one of them crowed.

  ‘They don’t mean any harm. They’re only boys letting off high spirits really,’ the Wren told Sally in a low voice whilst the pilot officers were ribbing one another. ‘I’ve got four brothers so I’m rather used to all that boyish fooling around. They’re the reason I’m in this uniform. Our grandfather and our father were both naval men so when they joined the Senior Service I thought I might as well follow suit. Not that mine is much of a life on the ocean waves; more a life on a very uncomfortable stenographer’s chair in Bath. I’m Jane, by the way.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not the best of names, these days, given the racy cartoon from the papers.’

  ‘Sally,’ Sally responded, shaking the other girl’s hand whilst she laughed at her mention of the Jane character from the cartoons, who was so famous for shedding her clothes.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve just noticed that you’re wearing black,’ Jane apologised. ‘I hope I haven’t said anything inappropriate.’

  ‘No. I’ve been to visit my late mother’s grave. She died two years ago.’

  ‘Ah. I am sorry. I lost my mother when I was fifteen so I do know how awful it is, but one is constantly aware these days that the sight of someone wearing black could mean that they’ve just lost someone. Are you travelling all the way to London?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally responded. ‘I work at Barts Hospital. I’m a nurse there. And you?’

  ‘To London and then on to Bath. Some of the Admiralty staff are based there, and my job moved with them. A nurse. And you’ve been in the city through the Blitz, I suppose? I salute you for that. I went up for a couple of days on leave to catch up with some old chums and I was scared to death.’

  ‘Hear that?’ Racey spoke up, hearing their conversation. ‘We’ve got a Wren and a nurse.’

  ‘I’m a theatre nurse,’ Sally told them, keeping her face as straight as Jane had done earlier, ‘so rest assured I shall be able to tell my friend exactly where to stick that hatpin for maximum effect, should it prove necessary.’

  The pilot officer who had been standing outside in the corridor smoking now put his head round the open carriage door, obviously having heard her, and said drily, ‘Take no notice of them, please, ladies. They’re still wet behind the ears, and not really fit to be let out alone. Rest assured retribution will be exacted for any misdemeanours.’

  ‘Wet behind the ears? That’s a good one, Quilley, when I’ve had four kills in ten days, and Smoky over there has had five,’ the young man they had called Racey protested.

  The man standing in the doorway was slightly older than the others, Sally could see now in the dim light of the carriage, and a flight lieutenant. He also had that look about him she had sometimes seen on the faces of some of hospital’s surgeons after they had had to deal with a particularly bad night of bombing victims: a mixture of anger, pain and an absolute grim determination to fight to the last breath for their patients’ lives.

  Beneath the joshing from the young men in the compartment, Sally could also see their respect for him. She and Jane need not fear that the young pilot officers’ behaviour would get out of control with him there.

  The train crawled slowly through the darkness, jerking to a halt sometimes for a station with its name blacked out, Sally saw when she lifted the blind, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. The young men had fallen silent, some of them sleeping, others coming and going to smoke. The journey south was taking far longer than the one north to Liverpool, Sally reflected, checking her watch.

  ‘We’ll be pulling into Crewe next stop,’ the flight lieutenant, whose name Sally and Jane had now learned was Quillan, told them. ‘We’ll be there for a good ten minutes, if either of you wants to make use of the facilities or get yourselves a sandwich. I’ll keep your seats for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sally smiled, appreciative of his kindness and good manners. Her thanks were echoed by Jane.

  ‘That was jolly decent of him, I don’t know about you, but I could rather do with a trip to the Ladies,’ Jane confided to Sally, ‘and I had been rather dreading hiking down the train to find a lavatory.’

  ‘Same here,’ Sally admitted.

  Their stop at Crewe was just long enough for Sally and Jane’s trip to the ladies, and then to drink a quick cup of tea before they dashed back to their carriage, pausing on the way to buy some sandwiches from one of the trolleys pulled up close to the carriage windows for those who didn’t want to risk losing their seats by getting off the train.

  The pungent aroma of beer and spirits filling the compartment once the trains set off suggested to Sally that the boys had made use of their time off the train to find a bar, but she didn’t have it in her heart to blame the young men for their self-indulgence. Everyone who had read of the bravery of both the fighter pilots and the bomber crews over the summer, when they had fought so hard to win the Battle of Britain, knew how many brave young men had lost their lives.

  Mercifully the train started to pick up speed, the motion and the time she had been travelling making Sally’s eyes feel heavy.

  ‘Feel free to use my shoulder as a pillow,’ the young man to her left offered.

  He looked about nineteen, Sally thought, a boy really, and still at that slightly swaggering stage of development of boys of that age. Sally shook her head and assured him with a small smile that she was perfectly comfortable as she was.

  In the corridor beyond their carriage some of those passengers who were not fortunate enough to have seats were leaning against the carriage walls. They swayed with the movement of the train, as it gathered fresh speed, whilst others were sitting on kitbags and even on the corridor floor itself.

  ‘Whereabouts in London are you billetted?’ Jane asked. ‘Only I was wondering if we might share a cab once we get off the train, seeing as it’s going to be quite late in the evening before we get in.’

  Sally was just about to answer her when suddenly they heard the sound of planes overhead.

  ‘Dorniers,’ the flight lieutenant, who had been attempting to do a Times crossword announced, repeating in a louder voice, ‘Dorniers, lads. Get down, everyone, get down.’

  Those were the last words Sally heard. Everything was swallowed up in the explosion of noise that followed: exploding bombs, the screech of brakes, the sound of splintering wood, the screams of the injured in a ghastly nightmare of broken carriages and bodies as the train plunged and rolled, flinging her around inside the compartment.

  ‘Mum, that’s the third time in the last half hour you’ve looked at the clock,’ Tilly teased, as the four of them at number 13 sat round the kitchen table, drinking their tea, half listening to the wireless, and half listening for the sound of the air-raid siren.

  ‘I thought that Sally would have been back by now,’ Olive responded. ‘Oh, no, here we go again.’ The air-raid siren had started.

  ‘You just can’t stop worrying about us all like a mother hen with her chicks,’ Tilly laughed, as they all went into their automatic response to the siren, collecting the things they needed to take to the shelter. As Olive herded the girls in front of her out into the damp night air and down the path to the shelter, she was thinking she was glad she’d spotted those offcuts of flannelette in the market during the summer because they’d make smashing new extra-warm siren suits for them for winter.

  Sally was a sensible girl and wherever she was she’d head for the nearest shelter, Olive knew, but she also knew that Sally was bound to have been upset after visiting her mother’s grave, and so she sent up a small mental prayer for her as the other three girls ran into the shelter. Tilly and Dulcie were chattering away like a pair of magpies, whilst Agnes lit the oil lamp, its flame casting a warm glow over their young animated faces. Their futures were so uncerta
in. Life itself was so uncertain. Suddenly Olive wanted to take hold of all three of them and wrap them tightly in her arms, to keep them safe.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was the slow, familiar and deadly warning sound of the rhythmic drip drip of blood that Sally recognised first, a sound to strike horror and fear into the heart of any trained nurse. Dripping blood meant an injured or dying patient. No patient on the wards of Liverpool’s Mill Street Hospital ever dripped blood. Mill Street . . . She wasn’t at Mill Street any more, she was working in London. But she wasn’t in a hospital now . . . was she?

  The train . . . The train had been bombed. Now, with lightning speed, Sally’s awareness of where she was and why came back to her. It was pitch-black inside the compartment, and the air was filled with the sounds of groans and cries. People were hurt, injured, and she was a nurse. Something heavy was lying on top of her, preventing her from breathing properly. Sally tried to move and then tensed when she heard a groan. She was pinned down by another person.

  She mustn’t panic. She was a nurse, Sally reminded herself. First things first. She moved her fingers and then wriggled her toes. All working, thank heavens. The weight – the person pressing down on her – might be making it difficult for her to breathe properly but she could breathe. She could breathe, she could think and she could move her fingers and toes. She could hear more groans now, she realised, and people crying out, mingling with other noises: the kind made by houses when they settled down for the night, but intensified, as though . . . She gave a gasp of fear as suddenly whatever she was lying on shifted. The railway carriage. It had come off the tracks. She could remember now the feeling of it somersaulting over and over, throwing them about.

  ‘Sally, are you OK?’

  That was Jane, her voice thin and unsteady, coming from somewhere to the left of Sally.

  ‘I think so,’ Sally responded. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I think I’m all right as well. There’s something on top of me, though.’

  ‘Same here. Mine’s a person.’

  ‘Lucky you, I think mine’s the luggage rack – and the luggage.’

  At the sound of their weak laughter a male voice said, even more weakly, ‘That’s the spirit, girls.’

  ‘Racey,’ they both breathed together.

  ‘Everyone else, speak up, all of you,’ Jane commanded.

  Silence.

  ‘Christ, they can’t all be dead. They can’t be.’

  There was panic as well as disbelief in Racey’s voice.

  ‘They’re probably unconscious,’ Sally said quickly and firmly. ‘We need a light so that we can see what’s going on.’

  ‘Atta girl,’ Jane praised her.

  Racey announced in a calmer voice, ‘Got a lighter here. Hang on a tick, see if I can get it working.’

  Sally felt as though she were holding her breath during Racey’s three frustrating attempts when they could see the click of the lighter but it failed to ignite.

  However, once he had it alight Sally almost wished he hadn’t.

  She and Jane were both lying on what had been the roof of the compartment. Jane did indeed have the luggage rack lying over her, whilst over Sally herself was the body of one of the pilot officers. His neck was broken and there was a spar of broken wood from the carriage sticking out of his back.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ There was a retching sound from Racey and the lighter was extinguished.

  Somewhere outside the train, and down below them, Sally could see flashes of moving light. Relief filled her, making her tremble. She closed her eyes and then opened them again to check that she wasn’t merely hallucinating. But no, the precious wonderful lights were still there.

  ‘It looks like help’s on the way.’

  ‘We could do with signalling that we’re here. Anyone got a torch?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Mine’s in my pocket,’ Sally answered her, ‘if it’s still working.’

  Now that she knew that the body pinning her down could not be hurt by any movement from her, Sally asked, ‘Are you injured, Racey? Can you move? Can you help me get free? I ought to be doing something to help those who need help.’

  ‘My leg’s buggered up, if you’ll excuse the language, but I can move. Hang on and I’ll try and drag Smarty off you. We called him that because he was always such a smart aleck. Always had an answer for everything. Well, where he’s gone now he’ll have all the answers, won’t he?’

  Sally could hear the choke of emotion in the young airman’s voice.

  ‘You pull him towards you and I’ll try to wriggle the other way,’ she instructed him, adding in the kind of voice normally used by the fiercest ward sisters, ‘but don’t move that leg of yours until I’ve had a chance to have a look at it.’

  Something in that tone must be right, she realised, because Jane gave a weak chuckle and Racey agreed, ‘Too right I won’t.’

  It took them several attempts before finally Sally was able to roll free of the weight of the body, which rolled to the floor with a sickening thump that turned her own stomach.

  ‘Done it,’ she said in a loud voice intended to cover up the horrific sound for the other two.

  Gingerly Sally sat up. As she’d moved she was pretty sure she felt something sharp underneath her – glass from the compartment’s windows, perhaps, or maybe even from the paintings of rural views that had adorned the walls at the back of their seats – and she didn’t want to risk injuring herself. She had been lucky, everything seemed to be in working order, but now that the numbing shock of the blast and the derailing of the train was over, she was becoming increasingly aware of cries for help and groans of pain echoing through the darkness. Not from their own compartment, though. Here there was only that persistent sound of blood dripping. She reached into her pocket and removed her torch, exhaling shakily in relief when it immediately came on, then putting her free hand up to her face in horror when she saw the carnage surrounding her.

  There would be no rescue for those young men who had travelled with them.

  The young man lying on top of her had protected her from the fate that had been his, Sally knew, as she reached out to close his eyes and whisper a small prayer for him. Racey was lying to one side of him with his leg cut open to the bone, the flesh shredded by the glass from the broken window. Hanging out of the window itself was the body of one of the others. Two more had such ghastly wounds to their faces that Sally suspected it was a mercy that they had not lived. Racey was still being sick, moaning their names over and over again.

  Jane was trapped beneath the luggage. Sally went to help her and then stopped.

  ‘I know, devilish isn’t it? Just like cat’s cradle gone wrong,’ Jane said quietly when she saw Sally looking at the mess of netting in which she was trapped, not lying down, as Sally had first thought, but suspended by the netting with nothing beneath her other than some very sharp spears of broken wood, beyond which was a yawning jagged gap where the back of the carriage had been. Through it, the night sky was open to her view.

  They had been in the last compartment of their corridor train, which meant . . . Sally gulped shakily. She could hardly bear to think what that open sky and lack of another carriage meant or what must have happened to those who had been inside it, but somehow she made herself look down through the gap. Below she could see the firefly-like lights of people working, and odd glimpses in those lights of what looked like the tangled wreckage of another carriage, whilst their own carriage had obviously come off the rails and was poised upside down at an angle across the lines on the steep-sided banking. Surely it was going to be impossible for anyone to rescue them without sending the carriage plunging down the steep slope to join the mangled remains of the one already there?

  A terrible sense of hopelessness seized hold of her, and, with it, a fear so intense that Sally actually felt as though it was gripping her throat and her heart. A tide of panic and terror surged through her. They were going to die. There was no one to help her help the others
. There was no one for her to turn to. She felt as though she was completely alone.

  And then inside her head Sally had the most vivid image of her mother, so real that she could almost feel her warm reassuring breath and her familiar touch on her arm. For a handful of seconds Sally simply basked in the image’s comfort. The tide of panic and terror that had threatened to overwhelm her had retreated, leaving in its place the kind of steady calm purposefulness she had learned at her mother’s knee. Taking a deep breath, Sally flashed her torch over the gaping emptiness that had once been the back of their compartment. From what she could see, they were on an embankment that fell away sharply. The tide of panic wanted to come back but she fought against it, clinging to the mental image of her mother’s loving smile, holding her in the warmth of her maternal love. Inside her head, Sally could hear from her childhood the familiar words, ‘It’s all right, darling I’m here.’

  ‘SOS – Morse code. Use torch.’

  Another voice, disembodied, – a paper-dry rustle of sound, no more – had Sally turning her torch in its direction. Flight Lieutenant Quillan was sitting in what had once been the corridor of the train, his hands on his stomach, holding in his intestines.

  He was barely alive, but Sally’s nurse’s instinct had her starting to crawl towards him until he said sharply, ‘No. Keep still. Could send us over the end.’ He stopped speaking to cough up blood, his blood the source of the steady dripping sound she had heard, Sally realised.

  ‘Quilley’s right,’ Racey told her. ‘Give me the torch. I’m nearest to the window. I’ll do the SOS.’

  Sally could hardly bear to watch as he fumbled with her precious torch, and then slowly and painstaking flashed out the Morse code signal. At one point, just as he had started on the third sequence of flashes, the torch slipped out of his hands and rolled away from him. Sally thought they were going to lose it but somehow Jane managed to reach for it.

  Of course, then Racey had to start signalling all over again but finally it was done, the silence between them stiff with fear and hope until, almost miraculously, they saw a torch far more powerful than their own being flashed back in their direction, followed by the movement of many torches as people ran towards the embankment. Voices, hoarse and harsh, sounded both delighted at discovering them and dismayed at their situation.