by Annie Groves
‘There’s someone up there alive.’
‘Four of us, tell them,’ Sally urged Racey.
But he needed no instructions to cup his hands together and yell, ‘Up here, mate, up here.’
‘We could do with getting the Flight Lieutenant rescued first,’ Sally told the others.
A small muffled sound that could have been laughter, a sigh or a sob, broke from the place where Lieutenant Quillan was.
‘You girls will go first,’ he told them, a strength in his voice that Sally would have thought impossible, given his mortal injuries.
‘He’s right,’ Racey agreed, his voice much weaker now.
‘It could take some time to get me free from my cat’s cradle,’ Jane’s voice was light and controlled but Sally could well imagine how she must be feeling, knowing that she was trapped.
In that instant Sally made up her mind about what would happen, given that she out of all four of them, was neither badly injured nor trapped.
‘I am a nurse, you three are my patients,’ she pointed out calmly, ‘and I don’t leave here until all three of you have been safely removed.’
There was a small silence and then Jane reached for her hand and whispered, ‘Thanks for that. In truth, I was in a blue funk at the thought of being left here on my own.’
‘You, up there. How many of you are there?’ a voice disembodied by a loud-hailer demanded.
Cupping her hands together, Sally shouted back, ‘Four of us, two who need medical treatment, and one who is trapped. What’s left of the compartment isn’t very stable either.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you all out. Just hold tight. How bad are the injured? Can you tell?
‘I’m a nurse,’ Sally responded. ‘One man’s leg is badly cut, and the other . . . she paused and then said firmly, ‘. . . the other needs urgent attention and should be rescued first.’
‘No. Won’t make it. You girls go first.’
Sally flashed the torch in the Flight Lieutenant’s direction, taking care to keep the light off his injuries.
‘It’s over for me,’ he continued, every breath he drew a physical effort for him. ‘Don’t mind, though. Wife and baby already gone. Blitz bomb. No point in trying to hang on.’
He was looking straight at her, his gaze fixed on hers: the gaze of a dying man, Sally recognised helplessly as she watched the blue eyes glaze over.
‘Sally?’ Jane’s hand tightened on her own. ‘You know what I wish more than anything else?’
‘That we weren’t here?’ Sally suggested.
Jane gave a small laugh. ‘Besides that. I wish that I hadn’t been so damned prim and proper and decent, and that when the boy I was going to get engaged to asked me to spend his last weekend of leave with him I had done. His ship was torpedoed three days later, and now this, and it all seems such a waste somehow, “being good”. I can’t imagine any memory I’d like to have more right now than that of lying in his arms after . . . afterwards . . . I’m sorry,’ Jane apologised when Sally didn’t say anything. ‘I’m being fearfully embarrassing, talking like this.’
‘No you aren’t,’ Sally assured her fiercely. ‘We’re brought up to behave in a certain way, to do the right thing and to . . . to deny ourselves certain things, because that’s the way our parents were brought up, but our lives aren’t like theirs.’
Down below them, equipment was being gathered, including a fire engine with its long ladder.
In the corridor the Flight Lieutenant drew in a long slow breath and then paused before exhaling it in a telltale rattle.
A searchlight had been set up for the rescue crews to work by, its bright glare making Sally blink and shield her eyes.
‘I can see a ladder,’ Jane told her, both of them gasping as the action of embedding the long ladder in the embankment next to their damaged compartment set it moving and tilting a little more.
‘Hang on, won’t be long now,’ the man with the loud-hailer called up to them, trying to keep their spirits up, Sally suspected. But to her surprise it wasn’t very long before two helmeted firemen appeared on the ladder alongside the compartment, their faces smeared in mud.
‘We’ll get you down first, love, seeing as you aren’t trapped,’ the one closest to her told Sally.
‘No,’ Sally argued. ‘I’m not leaving until I know my patients are safe.’
A brief nod of his head, and then their rescuers were crawling towards them, two of them working to free Racey whilst the other whistled between his teeth when he saw Jane, calling back down the ladder, ‘Two more men up here.’
Sally tried to distract herself from her own danger by monitoring Racey’s groans as he was lifted free of the debris that had been pinning him down.
‘The chap in the corridor’s a goner. Leave him and get the girl free,’ instructed one of their rescuers.
‘You don’t have to stay with me,’ Jane told Sally.
‘I want to,’ Sally responded, and it was true. Jane may not be a pal, but they had been travelling together. Sally herself could easily have been the one trapped and Jane the one who could have walked away, and how would she be feeling right now, suspended above an almost vertical drop into nothingness in the dark, if Jane had walked away and left her, Sally asked herself.
The men knew what they were doing: two of them were using their axes to cut expertly through the mess of luggage rack and splintered wood imprisoning Jane, whilst a third man stayed below her, holding her steady as they worked. Twice Sally felt the compartment shift. The second time it rocked wildly and sickeningly for several seconds whilst one of their rescuers cursed and then apologised, and they all held their breath. Sally prayed for it to steady and hold firm, easing out a leaky breath of relief when it finally did.
After that the men worked even more swiftly, the banter they had been exchanging earlier was replaced by a tense silence.
Finally, though, Jane was free, and one of the firemen took hold of her in a fireman’s lift, heading for the ladder, as another reached for Sally.
Racey had already been carried to safety but there was one thing Sally still had to do before she could leave now that she no longer had to hold Jane’s hand in support.
‘Hey, what are you doing? This thing’s liable to go any second now,’ the fireman warned Sally angrily as she crawled away from him, heading for where the Flight Lieutenant lay.
In death his head had slumped forward and Sally held it gently, as she closed his eyes and whispered a blessing. Only then did she feel able to turn back to the fireman to nod her head and say calmly, ‘I’m ready now.’
‘Ruddy daft thing to do,’ grumbled her rescuer as he hoisted her up and started down the ladder.
Against his back Sally told him, ‘No it wasn’t. He gave up his seat for us and made his men do the same. If he hadn’t then we’d be the ones who are dead now and he could be alive.’
She had no idea whether or not the fireman had heard her, given the position she was in, but it didn’t matter.
Never had the earth felt so wonderful beneath her feet, Sally thought when she was finally standing upright on it and was free to see the full horror of what had happened to the train. Crushed carriages littered the steep embankment, rescuers moving amongst the debris, rows of bodies were already laid out on stretchers and ambulances were standing by on the wet road several yards away.
A crashing crunch sound caught her attention and Sally looked up to see the compartment they had been in topple down the embankment, disintegrating as it did so. They had been rescued just in time.
Someone was placing a blanket round her shoulders. A kind, tired-looking St John Ambulance man.
‘How many . . . ?’ Sally began, and then had to stop before asking again, ‘How many?’
‘We’ve found less than a hundred still alive,’ he told her, anticipating her question. ‘Someone must have been looking after you, love.’
‘Yes. Yes,’ Sally agreed emotionally, remembering how in the darkness she had
been so sure she had felt the warmth of her mother’s hand. Others might say, were she to tell them about that feeling, that she had imagined it, but Sally, for all her practical nature, wasn’t so sure. In the air around them, rank with the smell of death and destruction, she was sure there was an elusive hint of her mother’s Parma violet toilet water.
Chapter Fifteen
‘. . . and then we – that is, the walking wounded, so to speak – were driven to the nearest station so that we could continue on our way to London.’
‘Oh, Sally, what a dreadful experience.’ Olive reached for Sally’s hand and gave it a small squeeze.
Olive had been due to attend a WVS meeting earlier in the evening, but she was glad now that she had paid attention to what at the time had seemed to be an illogical impulse to change her mind. She never normally missed her WVS meetings but the instinct to stay at home had been so strong that she had felt unable to ignore it.
One look at her lodger’s face when Sally had arrived back had been enough for Olive to take Sally into the kitchen immediately and sit her down whilst she made them each a cup of tea, and mentally thanked that impulse – perhaps passed somehow from one mother to another across the ether – so that she could be here for Sally.
Now all Olive could do was listen whilst Sally told her in short, almost reluctant sentences, some of the details about the ordeal she had been through. Sally’s voice was shaking as she said, ‘Jane – that’s the Wren I told you about – and I travelled back to London together, and that helped. Racey, the young pilot officer, should be all right, although I think the injuries to his leg will mean that he’s left with a permanent limp, but the others . . . I’m sorry,’ Sally apologised as Olive pushed her own clean handkerchief into her hand. ‘I don’t know why I keep going on about it. It’s best forgotten. I’m being so weak.’
‘It’s only right that you should want to talk about it, Sally. Right for you and right for those poor young men as well. If I was mother to one of them I wouldn’t like to think that the manner of their death was pushed under the carpet. And as for you being weak – no such thing. It takes strength to accept the reality of something so horrible.’
‘I thought we were all going to die,’ Sally admitted. ‘I really did.’
And then, ridiculously, she was behaving like a little girl and not a professional nurse, Sally thought helplessly as she burst into tears and allowed herself to be taken into Olive’s arms and comforted.
‘I thought I was going to die,’ Sally repeated to Olive, once she was able to speak through her tears. ‘I felt so alone and afraid, and then somehow it was as though my mother was there. I know that sounds silly.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Olive assured her. ‘Just before my husband died, I looked towards the end of the bed and although I couldn’t see him, somehow I just knew that he was standing there. I could feel his lovely kind nature and his gentleness. There aren’t always logical explanations for those things we experience in our times of greatest need Sally, and in my opinion we shouldn’t look for them. We should simply accept that what we felt in our hearts was heard.’
‘Miss Simmonds, is that dust I can see on the floor behind your counter?’
‘It’s all this bombing, Miss Cotton,’ Dulcie sought to excuse herself. ‘Makes ever such a lot of dust in the air. Gets everywhere, it does.’
‘That’s as maybe, Miss Simmonds, but one place it must not be allowed to get is here in this department. This is Selfridges, remember. See to it that you remove it at once.’
The arctic tones of the floor manager had Dulcie giving her a disgruntled look, as she turned her back and continued on her eagle-eyed inspection of her domain.
‘It’s not my job to keep the floor clean,’ Dulcie complained to Lizzie. ‘It’s the cleaning staff wot’s supposed to do that.’
‘If Miss Cotton comes back and you haven’t cleaned it up you’ll be for it, whether or not the cleaners should have got rid of it. She’ll go over your counter with a magnifying glass. Remember when she made Milly from Dorothy Gray clean her counter top so many times with ethylated spirits that she passed out? I’m going for my dinner break now,’ Lizzie informed Dulcie, disappearing speedily, leaving Dulcie with no one to complain to, and no escape either from the task of opening the cupboard underneath her counter to remove a small brush and dustpan.
It wasn’t right, it really wasn’t, her having to get down on her hands and knees in her clean overall just because of a few specks of dust. Angrily brushing, Dulcie was building up a good head of self-righteous steam when from above her a male voice said, ‘Hey, I thought you said you were a beautician. Where I come from we call folks who polish floors cleaners.’
Wilder. Dulcie stood up so fast she felt dizzy from the combination of the rush of blood to her head and the rage she felt at being discovered by him involved in such a menial task.
He was wearing his own American Eagles version of a flying ace’s uniform: beige-coloured, immaculately cut trousers, and a matching shirt over which he wore a heavy leather thick-lined flying jacket, a white silk scarf knotted casually round his neck. He looked . . . he looked exactly what he was, Dulcie thought, and that was far too cocky, and too pleased with himself. That didn’t mean, though, that she was going to let some other girl walk off with him, of course. Nor was she going to let him think he could walk all over her, so she smiled mock coyly at him.
‘Well, I suppose I am a bit too fussy, but I can’t abide my counter looking anything less than absolutely perfect. That’s the kind of person I am,’ she told him.
‘Is that right?’ Wilder leaned across the glass counter top and gave her a long slow smile. ‘Well, forgot the floor cleaning, Cinderella, how about I take you out instead?’
‘You mean tonight?’ Dulcie asked, intending to pretend that she couldn’t make it and that he’d have to choose another night.
But to her astonishment he shook his head and told her with a devil-may-care grin, ‘I mean now.’
Now?
Dulcie looked at him. ‘But I’m working.’
‘You call cleaning floors work? Come on, wouldn’t you rather be having fun with me?’
Of course she would, Dulcie admitted inwardly, but even so . . .
‘I can’t just leave,’ she pointed out primly.
‘Sure you can. You can say you got sick and had to go home.’ He looked at the watch on his wrist. ‘Meet me outside the front entrance in half an hour. It will be worth it, I promise you.’
He’d gone, disappearing into the mêlée of shoppers before Dulcie could refuse. Of course she couldn’t possibly do what he had suggested. It wouldn’t be right at all. The trouble was, though, Dulcie thought that she was getting tired of doing the right thing, and tired of the war, as well, with its blackouts and its rationing and all the other things that were making life so grey and dull, even without the bombing. She craved nice things – pretty clothes, scent, lipstick – and most of all she craved the kind of excitement that a man like Wilder would bring to her life, she admitted.
‘Don’t have the hot pot,’ Lizzie, who had just returned from her break, warned her. ‘I did and there wasn’t a scrap of meat in it.’
‘Don’t mention food to me,’ Dulcie shuddered. ‘I’ve been feeling ever so unwell, proper sickly.’
‘Well, you don’t look it.’
‘I might not look it, but I feel it. I nearly passed out when I stood up just now,’ Dulcie insisted giving a theatrical shiver. ‘Ooohhh, I keep going all hot and cold. I shouldn’t be surprised if I was coming down with something ever so nasty.’ She was feeling slightly light-headed, Dulcie decided, but it was a light-
headedness that came from the surge of excitement now rushing through her rather than anything else. Dulcie liked making her own rules and being the one who decided what she should and should not do. The thought of escaping from the dullness of her work and the heavy supervision of Miss Cotton filled her with a heady sense of power.
‘Whe
re are you going?’ Lizzie asked worriedly as Dulcie stepped out from behind her counter.
‘I’m going for my break,’ Dulcie answered her.
‘But you just said you couldn’t eat a thing.’
‘I couldn’t. I’m going for a bit of a lie-down.’
‘You’ll have to tell someone if you’re going to do that,’ Lizzie warned her.
‘I am going to. In fact, I think I’ll go up and see the nurse,’ Dulcie answered her promptly, as she sped away before Lizzie could ask her any more questions.
Half an hour, Wilder had said. Dulcie judged things perfectly, so that she was walking up behind him whilst he stood outside the store, exactly thirty-five minutes after he had left her, just as he checked his watch and then started to walk away so that she had to reach for his arm to stop him.
The smile he gave her when he turned and saw her held rather more triumph than Dulcie would have liked but on this occasion she was prepared to overlook it, she decided magnanimously.
‘So where are we going?’ she asked.
‘It’s a surprise. Come on.’
There was no chance for her to demand an answer to her question, Wilder was already hailing a taxi, and then ushering her into it, the answer given when he leaned forward and told the driver, ‘The Ritz Hotel.’
The Ritz? Wilder was taking her to The Ritz for her dinner? No, for her lunch, Dulcie mentally corrected herself, her cheeks pink with excitement and delight as she watched the familiar London streets pass by through the taxi window, until they were pulling up outside the famous hotel.
Having paid off the taxi, Wilder offered Dulcie his arm. Gleefully Dulcie took it. Instead of feeling guilty about the way she had fibbed at work, she actually felt triumphant and glad about what she had done. Because if she hadn’t she wouldn’t be here, would she, walking into the lobby of The Ritz Hotel on the arm of a good-looking man who obviously knew how to treat a girl as she deserved.