Ambulance Girls Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  Copyright

  About the Book

  On duty during London’s Blitz…

  As death and destruction fall from the skies day after day in the London Blitz, Australian ambulance driver, Lily Brennan, confronts the horror with bravery, intelligence, common sense and humour.

  Though she must rely upon her colleagues to carry out her dangerous duties, Lily begins to suspect that someone at her Ambulance Station may be giving assistance to the enemy by disclosing secret information. Then her Jewish ambulance attendant and best friend, David Levy, disappears in suspicious circumstances. Aided, and sometimes hindered, by David’s school friend, a mysterious and attractive RAF pilot, Lily has to draw on all of her resources to find David but also negotiate the dangers that come from falling in love in a country far from home and in a time of war.

  About the Author

  Deborah was raised in Perth, Western Australia, by a wonderful mother who was widowed by the shadow of World War 2 and who loved to tell stories. As a child she always had a book in her hand, even when watching too many classic movies on TV.

  She has several degrees in history including a post-graduate degree from Oxford University. She currently lives in Perth, though makes frequent visits to the UK.

  For the ‘Williams Girls’: my beautiful nieces, Jessamy, Susannah and Esther. And also Annabelle and Bethwyn, who came into the world in 2013 and 2016 and made me ‘Great’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tuesday 15 October 1940

  London

  Blood, warm and sticky, was trickling down my forehead. Something sharp must have nicked me as they pushed me through the narrow gap. Never mind, I was inside.

  ‘Hullo,’ I called out. ‘Anyone there?’

  The words disappeared into the darkness as my torchlight flicked over the mess of plaster, wood and debris. In the fug of soot and dust and ash, my breathing was shallow and unsatisfying, which added to the sense of impending doom that had gripped me the moment they shoved me inside.

  The trickle of blood on my forehead had become exquisitely itchy. When I lifted my gloved hand to wipe it away, the leather was harsh against my skin and felt gritty. Now my face was bloody and dirty; I probably looked like any child’s nightmare.

  Whatever was I – Lily Brennan, schoolteacher from Western Australia – doing here, crawling into the ruins of a bombed house, playing the hero, when the children were most likely already dead?

  But what could I do? Really, there was no choice.

  I had arrived with my ambulance partner, David Levy, to find a familiar scene of devastation, bleached to aquatint by the moonlight. Piles of rubble stood in the middle of what had been a row of Victorian dwellings. They towered in gaunt ruin against the sky, between shapeless wrecks of masonry that showed the signs of a direct hit. Men’s voices, brisk and business-like, emerged from the gloom, between whistles and the occasional shout. Short flashes of torchlight appeared and vanished in the darkness, as rescue workers sought doggedly for signs of life in the ruins.

  When I emerged from the ambulance, the warden had looked me up and down as if I were a prize cow at the Royal Show. As he did so, the letters on his tin helmet had stood out brightly in the moonlight: ‘ARP’. They stood for air raid precautions, and I had felt inappropriate laughter bubble up in my chest when I got a good look at him. How could this small man protect anyone from the destruction London had suffered in the past five weeks of air raids? And yet there was a quiet authority in his slow nod to me, and in the way he had then turned to throw a cryptic comment to the men standing behind him.

  ‘She’ll do; she’s thin enough.’

  Levy, who had come to stand beside me, laughed at that, saying, ‘I think she might prefer to be described as slim.’

  There had been no answering smile from the warden. Instead, he gestured at the ruins of what had been a house. ‘We’ve got two infants buried under the rubble there,’ he said. His clipped, precise voice did not at all obscure the horror of those words. ‘At least one’s alive – or was alive until a half-hour ago – because we’ve heard a baby crying. We understand they were left sheltering under a solid kitchen table before the bomb hit. Problem is, the place is just holding together. If we disturb the site too much it’ll bring the rest down on top of them. It looks like someone slim – as slim as you, miss – could squeeze through. You’d need to crawl through to the kitchen at the back, find the kids and bring them out. Think you can do that?’

  Levy knew I had a horror of tightly enclosed spaces. ‘I’ll go,’ he had said. ‘I’m good at squeezing through ruins. I’ve done it before.’

  ‘There isn’t the room. You’d never get in.’ The warden sized me up with another quick glance and challenged me with his eyes.

  I had always been small for my age. Even now, at twenty-five, I could still be mistaken for a schoolgirl. I always suspected that was because I had been born too early and never really caught up. I was so small when I was born that I really should have died, like the three tiny babies who had slipped away in my mother’s arms in the years before I arrived in the world. And that was why my mother took one look at my little wrinkled body and turned her face from me, unwilling to engage in another losing battle for a child’s life. That I survived was due to my father. He was a fighter, and he fought for me.

  A woman who had helped at my birth told him the best chance to keep me alive was to carry me next to his skin, where his strong heartbeat would teach my heart to keep beating when it forgot. So Dad fashioned a pouch for his tiny joey and for two months, until I could suckle and had grown into my skin, he carried me everywhere, pressed against his heart, just as the woman had said. I was no bigger than his hand and he fed me my mother’s milk from an eyedropper, like a little bird. When I was old enough to hear the story he told me that the moment he saw me he knew I would live, because he could see that I was a fighter too.

  Most people cannot see that in me. Because I am small and slender people often mistakenly assume that I am fragile. Not the warden.

  ‘I think you could get to the children,’ he said to me. ‘Get them out. Willing to chance it, miss?’

  I had smiled and said, ‘Of course.’ What else could I do?

  Now on my hands and knees, crawling over the rough, debris-strewn floor, I took comfort in the thought that, after five weeks of driving an ambulance in this relentless Blitz, I h
ad learned to push fear aside when attending an incident.

  Served me right for being smug. Without any warning, my torch dimmed and failed. Darkness enfolded me. My heart thumped painfully and my chest tightened. I tried to breathe my way out of the almost overwhelming panic, but my breaths were shallow and too rapid, and my thoughts would not stay still, so that I couldn’t settle into a plan of action. Snatches of a song, a poem, memories of home came unbidden and left as quickly to resolve into one, dreadful realisation. I’m entombed. I’ll die here, alone in the darkness, far from home.

  Then there was anger at my own defeatist thoughts. I pushed them away and shook the torch violently, once, twice, and on the third shake it flickered back into life. As the beam strengthened I exulted in the simple fact of light.

  My slow crawl began again and optimism reasserted itself. I would find the children alive and I would get us all out of here. They would probably be afraid of me, with my dirty face and goggly eye shields under the steel hat, but in my three years as a country schoolteacher I had learned how to soothe frightened children. The important thing is to keep calm, speak with authority and show a sense of humour. I used the same tactics in dealing with the injured adults I transported in my ambulance.

  The air was dusty, and I sneezed. That immediately reminded me of home and I let my thoughts drift into childhood memory, anything to take my mind off this interminable crawl into darkness. It was always dusty in Kookynie, the tiny gold-mining settlement on the edge of Western Australia’s Great Victoria Desert where I grew up. It was dusty also in the Wheatbelt town of Duranillin, where I had taught in a one-room school and saved the money to make my escape to Europe. My students had been bush kids, independent, cheeky and often rambunctious. I had loved teaching them, probably because I had been just like them myself – until my mother took note of that fact and sent me to boarding school in Perth.

  ‘Lily needs to learn how to live in society. She’s thirteen and it’s time she learned how to act like a lady,’ she had said, as if Perth were some cosmopolitan centre of civilisation, and her own grandfather had not been convicted in 1850 of stealing a cow, and transported to Western Australia for ten years of penal servitude.

  My mother hated people to know of her grandfather’s convict past, but I was proud of what he went on to do with his life after such troubled beginnings. After receiving his ticket of leave, he became a government schoolmaster and a respected member of the community. His son became a bank manager and his grandson – my Uncle Charles – was a judge. Life is often ironic in Australia.

  A sharp pain in my knee brought me back to the present as I bumped into something that gave a loud crack. My entire body jerked, and I froze, heart pounding, praying I had not disturbed the precarious jumble around me.

  Silence and, except for the narrow band of my torchlight, darkness. I sneezed again and I crawled a few feet more, slowly and more carefully. I wished I were not so alone. My hands were sweaty and sticky inside the thick gloves. I stopped to stifle yet another sneeze as best I could, and I gazed at the destruction exposed by my torchlight.

  Splinters of cabinetry, shards of glass and crockery, and pieces of plaster with torn wallpaper attached. The wallpaper was a cheerful yellowy colour scattered with a design of orange berries, the sort of paper that would brighten up a kitchen. Small children would barely notice it as they drank their milk and ate their meals. It would have been there in the background in a room they had thought was as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar, but was now a shattered mess.

  ‘Hullo? Are you there?’ I called out again, making my voice calm and firm. ‘Please tell me if you are. I’m Lily and I’m here to help you.’

  There was no reply. If the children were alive I did not blame them for hiding from a stranger who was waving a torch around in the ruins of their lives. It would be better if I could call them by name, but I did not know their names. So I listened hard for anything that might be a sign as to their presence: a whimper, a sob, a moan. Silence pressed in, broken by creaks and groans from the settling ruins. I could not see the kitchen table they were supposed to have sheltered beneath.

  It occurred to me to recite some poetry. My students had loved Edward Lear’s poetry, which is nonsensical enough to surprise and delight small children. A frightened child might be intrigued.

  ‘Those who watch at that midnight hour,’ I declaimed, ‘From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along,’ – and here I let the torchlight play around me – ‘“The Dong! – the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!”’

  ‘That’s silly.’

  It came distinctly, the piping voice of a small child. Oh, God, please let them both be all right. Oh, God, please let them be together and unhurt.

  ‘It is silly, isn’t it?’ I said into the darkness. ‘Are you hiding? You’re doing a super job at it if you are.’

  ‘I’m waiting for Mummy. You go away you Dong.’

  ‘Your mummy sent me to get you,’ I said. ‘She’s waiting for you outside. She wants you to come with me.’

  It was a lie, and I hated to use it. They had told me the mother had gone off in another ambulance. I didn’t even know if she was still alive.

  I shone the torch in the direction of the voice and from the jumble of wood and plaster a small white face squinted into the light. It belonged to a bright-eyed little boy, about three years old, who was hugging a big torch to his chest. I supposed he had turned it off when he heard me approaching. Grey dust coated his hair and the blue striped pyjamas he was wearing; he seemed to be in a cave, until I realised that he was in fact under the kitchen table. It had saved him when the walls came down on top of it, but I wondered how much longer the table would hold with the ton of rubble it bore.

  The boy shook his head. ‘I’m looking after Emily, our baby. She’s asleep.’

  Oh, God, please let her not be dead. I had seen too many dead children in the past weeks.

  ‘It’s all right, sweetheart, I’ve come to take you both to Mummy,’ I said as I crawled across the rubble towards him.

  It wasn’t until I was almost at his sanctuary that my torchlight revealed the baby lying on her back on a blanket in front of him. She looked about nine months old and was, just as her brother had said, fast asleep. With a sense of wonder I watched the quick and regular rise and fall of her chest.

  ‘Emily cried and cried,’ he said. ‘But she’s asleep now, you mustn’t wake her up.’

  I reached out a hand to the infant and the boy immediately tried to push me away. ‘Mummy said to wait here. Go away you Dong.’

  I backed off a little. ‘How are you, old chap,’ I asked. ‘Are you hurt anywhere?’

  He shook his head and shrank back, but said nothing more as I gently felt along Emily’s body to see if there were any indications of injury. She woke as I did so, and gave a high mewling cry of surprise. Her little body was firm to the touch, but her eyes were sunken and she seemed lethargic. I assumed she was dehydrated and prayed that was the worst.

  I reached into the hiding place and picked her up, tucking the blanket around her. Her arms wrapped around my neck in a tight, trusting grip that brought hot tears to my eyes. I had thought I was hardened after seeing so much horror and I felt oddly happy to know that tears could still come.

  ‘Leave Emily alone.’

  The boy’s voice was sharp, imperative; he was close to hysteria. He was also confused and probably hungry and thirsty and certainly terrified.

  ‘You’ve been such a brave boy,’ I said. ‘And you’ve looked after Emily so well. Your mummy will be very proud of you. But it’s time for us all to go now. I’ll carry Emily. Can you crawl behind me while I carry Emily?’

  ‘Like a baby?’ He sounded unenthusiastic. I could not force him to come out, but I could not carry both of them, and neither could I leave him behind.

  ‘No. Like a—’ My mind was blank. I hugged Emily closer. Sh
e had my neck in a stranglehold, but she was too quiet and it worried me. The creaks and moans of the settling ruins above us worried me more, though. The panic I had kept at bay was threatening to engulf me again and I needed to get out. Now.

  ‘Like a train,’ I said, sparked by a sudden, ancient memory of the game I had played with my younger brother, Ben. ‘Let’s play trains. I’m the engine and Emily is the driver, but we need a coal truck. Could you be a coal truck, d’you think? Grab my ankles and we’ll set off.’

  With my right arm tight around baby Emily and gripping the torch, I cautiously turned myself around to face the way I had come. A loud sob sounded behind me. He was close to losing control; I was taking his sister and he was terrified of being alone in the dark. We’re all frightened of that, I wanted to tell him, in a war we’re all afraid of the dark.

  I shone my torch down and back towards my feet, dipping Emily as I did so. ‘Quick, grab my ankles. The train must leave on time, but it can’t run without coal.’

  Instead he switched on his own torch.

  ‘Leave your torch,’ I said, ‘and take hold of my ankles. Mummy will pick it up later.’

  He looked very uncertain.

  I raised my voice and made a train sound. ‘Woo-oo-oo. All aboard that’s going aboard. The train to Euston station is ready to go.’

  ‘You should say that it’s about to depart,’ he whispered in a mournful little voice.

  I repeated obediently, ‘The train to Euston station is about to depart. All aboard. Where’s my coal truck? Unless there’s coal for the engine we won’t get far. Is there a coal truck around here?’

  ‘I’ll be the coal truck,’ he said, and I heard the note of excitement in his voice and knew I had him.

  Small hands grabbed my ankles. I turned the torch to light our way and slowly, painfully, we began to crawl through the debris of his shattered home, puff, puff, puffing as we went.

  ‘Woo-woo,’ I said. The smell of dust and charred wood and soot was almost suffocating and I coughed.

  He sneezed.

  ‘My knees hurt,’ he said.