Mary put her hand on Hilda’s arm. “You’ll be fine, you know.”
Hilda froze. “Does it show so badly?”
“They wouldn’t have passed you for duty if you weren’t ready.’
“I just can’t stop thinking: what if I make a mistake? What if some poor so-and-so is hurt and I can’t save them?”
“I thought you only cared about the uniform.”
“Yes, but one is not entirely against human life. Oh, did I mention there’s a party tomorrow morning at the hospital? All the girls on nights at St. Bart’s, and as many of the doctors as can be dragged in, even if the nurses have to sedate and rope them. Apparently there’s a boy from obs & gyn who makes a very realistic martini using ethanol. He gets up a whole vat of the stuff and they bring buckets of ice from the morgue, and someone turns up with a gramophone. You will come, won’t you? And you won’t bag the nicest man there, just because you can?”
“Not unless you see him first.”
They laughed with the careful muting Londoners used now, knowing that the war homed in on the sound.
The raid began just before five-thirty and they went down into the crypt of the church, where the area post was set up. The stretcher man, Huw, was already down there. The Air Raid Precautions chief and his messenger were taking damage reports. Two busy telephones and three full ashtrays stood on a carved communion table. On the wall was a pin-board map of four square miles. The bombs, when they got going, got closer.
“Jerry’s on the money tonight,” said Huw.
The ARP chief sniffed. “I assume we are all aware that Jerry suckles from the breast until he is six years old?”
“The men shave their armpit hair,” said Hilda. “ ‘The women plait theirs.”
Everyone winced as a bomb struck close by, resonating in the crypt.
“This is what comes of it, of course,” said the ARP man. “They are up there now, at twenty thousand feet, with fishnets under their flying suits.”
Mary couldn’t bring herself to join in. For her part, she found it hard to imagine that a race with so many peccadilloes could be annihilating her city quite so thoroughly. When the ARP chief sent them out into the night at half past six, it was a relief. Every moment underground made Mary want to run.
Outside, the noise was fearful. There was an ack-ack gun right outside the church, a Bofors letting go dozens of rounds a minute. Red tracer streaked up into a smoky sky impaled on the blue-white lances of the searchlights. Clive, the other stretcher-bearer, was snoring in the backseat of the ambulance. Huw cursed him awake and pushed in beside him, while Hilda took the passenger seat and opened the street map.
It was only a quarter of a mile away but the direct routes were blocked. Mary gunned the Hillman’s little engine and made what speed she dared in the dark streets and the sudden drifts of smoke. Hilda braced herself against the glove box and used her cigarette lighter to read the map.
On Gravel Lane a house was down in the middle of the terrace. The front was blown out and the upstairs floor had swung down on the pivot of the back wall. Another stretcher party was already leaving, with two casualties they had brought out of the mess. Huw and Clive joined a rescue squad to clear the weight of the tiles and the roof joists, after which they would set up their A-frames to lift the collapsed floor. They waved Mary and Hilda away. All the two of them could do was wait.
Mary put on her tin hat, lit a cigarette and sat on the running board of the Hillman with her elbows on her knees and one hand on the back of her neck, trying to smooth out the jitters. A stick of bombs came down a few streets away, the flashes arriving before the bangs. The air was already sour with burning wood and spent explosive. Hilda took the medical bag from the trunk.
“Find shelter,” said Mary. “I’ll fetch you if they bring anyone out.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Then I’ll be fine too, won’t I?”
They sat together with their backs up against the van for whatever protection it gave. Without being asked, their bodies made themselves small.
Hilda said, “It feels wrong, being outside in a raid.”
Mary offered her a sardonic look.
“I mean it feels sort of naughty,” said Hilda. “As if we’re out-of-bounds.”
They waited.
“Look at those searchlights,” said Hilda. “I hope they’ll keep them, after the war. Just think, ordinary people don’t get to see this. I wonder if . . .”
Mary looked to the sky. Perhaps it was true that the searchlights were beautiful. With the night chill, and the endless deadening concussions of the ack-ack, she felt flat. Hilda babbled on, her observations neither irritating nor illuminating. This was how Tom had talked, in that awful raid. She wished now that she had known how to comfort him. How miserable Tom must have been, close to the end. She had tried with a willing heart to love him—to smile as brightly as she ever had. But of course he had known that it was ending. He had been so thoroughly good about it, so careful not to make a scene. This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear Tom. Without the war they might have finished as friends.
Now the rescue crew had their A-frame assembled to lift the collapsed upper floor. When they had made enough of a gap, a man crawled under. After a minute he shouted out. Huw and Clive ran to the van and lifted a stretcher off the roof.
“There’s a man in there. They’re going to bring him out.”
Mary and Hilda ran across the road, Hilda carrying the medical bag.
Hilda called out, “Tell them not to move his head!”
Clive said, “Well they’re hardly going to leave it in there.”
They waited. The drone of bombers continued and the blasts still came, seeming farther away for the moment: the constant nasty crack of the 250-kilo bombs and the occasional punch of a 1000-kilo brute that shook the earth.
The man was brought out after a few minutes, on his back on a pine door that four men carried between them. They set him down in the road. One of the rescue men held up a battery lamp with a blackout shade, casting a slim cone of light. The casualty’s eyes were open.
Hilda knelt. “Was anyone in there with you?”
He shook his head. Hilda felt along his arms and legs, and the man groaned. She cut a trouser leg away.
“You’ve a badly broken ankle, I’m afraid. Does anything else hurt?”
He shook his head again.
“I’ll splint your ankle, then we’ll get you to a doctor. You’ll be fine.”
She administered a syrette of morphine, and in a minute the man’s face relaxed. She worked fast, and soon had him ready to move. She marked a baggage tag with the letters T and M and tied it to the man’s wrist. Huw and Clive strapped the man into the stretcher, secured him on the roof of the Hillman and jumped into the back. In the passenger seat Hilda called out the turns while Mary drove to St. Bart’s Hospital. They delivered the patient and Mary drove the four of them back to St. Helen’s church.
Down in the crypt, in the dim orange light from the bulbs, Huw made them all tea. Hilda shook so badly that she couldn’t hold her cups.
“The state of me!” she said.
“You did a marvellous job,” Mary said.
“Was I all right? I hardly remember a thing.”
“I had no idea a splint could be put on so thoroughly. In another minute you’d have bandaged him up to the eyes, like Tutankhamen.”
Hilda smiled. “I didn’t think we should hang around, with the bombs.”
“What were the T and the M for, by the way?”
“Oh, the tag is for the triage nurse. T is ‘trauma,’ X is ‘internal injury,’ M is ‘morphine given.’ In training we practised on the porters. They feigned injury and we tagged them. We invented codes too. We had D for ‘dishy,’ P for ‘possibly,’
and N for ‘not if I was fat and this was the last man on earth.’ ”
Mary told the others she had to check something on the van. She sat in the cold with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall of the church. The raid droned on, the explosions sometimes close, and she hardly flinched anymore. She thought about the X they had drawn on Tom. When she pictured his face, the X wouldn’t leave it. It was even there in her memory of their walk on Hampstead Heath, when she had tried to get them lost in the mist. It was as if he had always been marked—as if he had known the ending.
When she went back down into the crypt, someone had opened rum. From who knew where, one of the ARP girls had turned up some sugar. It was after eleven, and cloud had rolled in from the estuary to blind the bombers to their targets. The crypt was filling up and becoming more convivial as the raid died away and the stretcher crews returned.
“To the Nazis!” said Clive. “May their Reich indeed come third.”
“May their gentlemen’s nylons never ladder.”
“The Nazis!” they all shouted, but Mary wouldn’t join the toast.
When their mugs were empty Clive filled them again. A dash of tea was added for the sake of decorum, in case the King should walk in.
By three in the morning the raid was as good as over. There was no more ack-ack fire, no more detonations, and just an occasional thin droning overhead as a last, lost bomber sought its way home. In the crypt the conversation had fallen to a murmur. People slept rolled up in their coats.
The all-clear sounded at four-thirty, and Hilda shivered with relief.
“Thank god. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”
“Are we still going to the party?’ said Mary.
Hilda nodded, and checked her makeup. “Bloody Hitler. It’s one thing to keep a girl up all night, but it’s quite another to leave her looking it.”
“Look on the bright side. You didn’t kill a soul, and I didn’t put a scratch on the van.”
Clive was snoring in a corner so they left him to it and went upstairs with Huw. As they stood making their goodbyes, a flash lit the whole sky. The glare lingered in their eyes and the sound of an explosion came, huge and heavy, followed by a crashing of falling debris that lasted for half a minute.
“Wonderful,” said Huw, in the silence.
Hilda had jumped back inside the doorway. “What was it?”
“Delayed-action bomb. Big one.”
Hilda thought. “Mary, bring the van up front. I’ll go downstairs and get the address when it comes in. Huw, would you wake up Clive?”
Mary drove. The searchlights had all been extinguished and there was only a dull orange glow on the underside of the clouds, reflecting the fires in the east. The narrow slits of the headlights were not enough. Twice Mary almost crashed, pulling up hard a few feet from a wall, then reversing to make the turn she had missed. She felt disconnected from the reality of it. The war, the fires, the driving—one saw it all through slits.
At Billiter Street they understood straight away that it would be nothing like the first callout. A crowd was pressing, in various states of dress from pajamas to duffel coats, with a policeman struggling to keep them to one side of the street. With the raid over, people had been making their way home from the public shelters. And now this. Mary used the horn and nosed the ambulance through the crowd.
When they got to the center of the damage there were a dozen houses down in one terrace. The ones where the bomb had hit were simply gone, while those at the blast’s extremity gaped open. The scene was ten minutes old, and no one knew which houses had been occupied. People milled in the dark and yelled for their families. More police arrived and tried to push people back. An ARP patrol searched by torchlight in the shattered houses.
A woman was struggling with the police, demanding to look for her son. She was hysterical, hitting out.
Mary took her arm. “We can look for him. Tell me where he is.”
The woman pointed at a house. The front was gone, and inside Mary could see ARP men playing their torch beams over the interior walls. It was not a wallpaper she would have chosen.
The missing boy’s mother said that they had just got back from the shelter at the corner of the street, and that she had left her boy inside while she went to fetch a candle from a neighbor.
“Wait for us here,” said Mary.
She went into the house with Hilda. They climbed over the pile of brick that had been the front wall. They found the ARP men picking through the front room and the kitchen at the back.
“Anyone?” said Mary.
The men shook their heads.
“Upstairs then,” she said to Hilda.
They went up together. The banister was gone, fallen into the hallway below, and the stairs hung from the party wall they were keyed in to. The staircase swayed, but it held. There was a stair runner up the middle of the treads, patterned with a broad stripe up the center. At the head of the stairs was a bathroom, and by the flame of Mary’s lighter they could see there was no one in it. The ceiling was down, the contents of the attic poking through the joists in a muddle of albums and suitcases.
On the landing that ran back parallel with the stairs, there was a fecal smell in the air—a soil pipe must have cracked. The landing gave on to two bedrooms. Hilda took the first and Mary the second. They trod as softly as they could, since the floor was unsupported at the street end and the whole thing was bouncing nastily. She flicked on her lighter, looked for a moment, then snapped it off and knelt in the dark, forcing breath in and out of her body. In the snap of light she had seen a boy lying still, his face gray, his body covered in shreds of blue flannel pajamas and some foul-smelling mess that must have come from the broken waste pipe.
“Hilda,” she said. “Could you come as quick as you can?”
Outside, the mother was still shouting, the fear in her voice more awful now the crowd was quietening down. Mary made sure that the place she was kneeling couldn’t be seen from the street. She flicked her lighter back on, and set it on an upended toy box.
“Oh,” said Hilda when she came in.
They knelt beside the boy’s body. Hilda put her ear to his mouth.
“Anything?” said Mary.
Hilda shook her head. The mess was not from a broken pipe. The boy’s insides were out.
“Oughtn’t we to pump his chest?” said Mary.
“How should I know?” said Hilda in a small voice. “It might make it worse.”
“Worse how?”
Hilda knelt very still with her back straight.
“Come on, Hilda, what shall we do?”
“I think it might be hopeless,” said Hilda.
“But there must be something we can do. There must have been something in the training?”
“I’m sorry,” said Hilda, covering her face with her hands.
The boy was brown-haired, slight, eight or nine years old. His eyes were open and his gray face was fixed in an agony that was hard to look at. In his bedroom there were postcards on the wall: silhouettes of every aircraft type. On a chest of drawers was a trophy collection of the kind boys had: fallen iron splinters, a brass shell case from a Bofors gun, a scrap of tortured aluminium that looked as if it might have flown. The metal on its ridges had been polished to a shine by the boy’s fingers. Outside, the mother in a raw voice was shouting, “Mouse! Mouse!”
Mary stood, took her lighter and left the room. Outside on the warped landing, she fought back nausea. The stripe along the center of the carpet was not a pattern after all. Even now the stain was widening as the sisal took it up. Mary lit a cigarette. The boy had been downstairs when the bomb hit and he had dragged himself up to his room, and died.
“Hilda?” she said.
Hilda came, and Mary passed her the lit cigarette. Hilda couldn’t hold it, and so Mary held it to her lips for her
while she drew on it, then exhaled.
“What are we doing?” said Mary. “What are the two of us doing?”
Hilda hugged herself tight around the stomach. “Don’t.”
“Remember after that first raid? When we took a cab to see the mess?”
“But everyone was doing it, it wasn’t just—”
Mary cut her off. “Do you think we’ve seen enough now?”
“But it’s different now. We’re helping.”
“Are we?” said Mary. “How many rooms are there in your flat?”
“Oh I know what you’re trying to do, but—”
“Isn’t it awful? I’ve honestly never counted. Two dozen rooms in my house, I should think, and six in your flat, and hardly a bomb has touched Pimlico. If we truly wanted to help, we could have hosted this whole street in your place and mine, instead of digging through their rubble.”
“We do what we can.’
“We visit by night and we fly west at dawn. We are ghouls, I’m afraid. We are monsters.”
Hilda closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall. “So what would you have us do?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never done anything, have we? We’ve no talent but conversation.”
“Then go and talk to the policeman who’s with the mother. Have her taken somewhere. Then bring Huw and Clive. Quickly, while I can still cope.”
Mary stared for a moment, until understanding passed between them.
“Oh,” she said.
When Mary came back with Huw and Clive, Hilda had rolled the dead boy in the rug that he had bled on in his bedroom. They took up the runner on the stairs and the landing, and made a second roll from that. They carried both rolls out on stretchers, each covered with the standard gray blanket, and secured them on the roof of the Hillman.
At dawn, the sun rising through smoke, they delivered the boy to Moorgate. In fine cursive Hilda wrote in the mortuary logbook that the child had died instantly and with no suffering, in a tidy and well-kept home. This was what the mother would read when she came for her son’s body.