Ambulance Girls Read online

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Not much further now.’ My knees felt as if they were on fire, and baby Emily was becoming unbearably heavy in the crook of my arm, which was cramping painfully. When I tried to shift her weight a little she whimpered.

  ‘Let’s put more coal into the engine, shall we?’

  ‘Engines can’t run without coal,’ he whispered and held tighter to my ankles, a dragging weight behind me as I crawled.

  I felt my heart jump when at last I saw the circle of light ahead of me. It was not daylight yet, of course. They would have set up arc lights and erected a tarpaulin to hide them from the bombers. We crawled towards the light and now I could hear the generator. But as they pulled us out I heard a more ominous sound, the growling roar of planes overhead and the heavy thump of ack-ack guns. The raiders had returned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Later that night, searchlights still ripped through the darkness in front of us; the shimmering bars met and crossed and swept apart in seemingly haphazard arcs, covering the sky with a lattice of light. German aeroplanes, tiny as toys, wove in and out of the thin greenish beams. They were Heinkel bombers by the waugh waugh sound of their engines; their dreary throbbing was a different tone entirely to the comforting growl of a Spitfire or the rumble of a Hurricane.

  We were returning at last to the Bloomsbury auxiliary ambulance station in Woburn Place at the required sixteen miles an hour. The Monster, by which name my ambulance was affectionately known, did not appreciate such a slow pace, and was in danger of overheating.

  Strings of red tracer bullets rose up towards the planes as the anti-aircraft guns thundered out shells in rapid succession. The rhythmic whomp whomp whomp whomp pounded my ears as I peered through the dusty windscreen and watched shells burst far above us, like flashes of summer lightning. For all the terror of an air raid, I was transfixed by the beauty of it.

  ‘Get ’em,’ said Levy, entranced in his own way by the show. ‘Get the bastards.’

  Blinking my tired eyes, I ignored him to squint at the small part of the road illuminated by the narrow band of headlights we were allowed to show, and tried to avoid the fissures and potholes and debris left by this and earlier air raids.

  I shifted in my seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Comfort was not really possible, given that I was perched on a pile of old newspapers in order to see over the wheel. At least the discomfort kept me awake, a good thing, since I needed all my wits about me to drive the Monster. She was an ungainly beast, a 1937 Ford V8 van with a large box body welded on to her chassis. Inside were four standard metal stretchers, empty at present, as we had dropped off our last patients. Stowed beneath the stretchers were a first aid kit, some basins, and piles of blankets.

  The moon was almost full and it illuminated a couple of figures on the footpath, gazing upwards to watch the show.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘bombing as entertainment.’

  ‘Silly buggers,’ Levy replied. ‘It hasn’t taken long for Londoners to grow accustomed to all this, has it?’

  ‘Accustomed to what?’ I was suddenly angry, contemptuous. ‘The very real possibility of instant, violent death?’

  ‘Londoners are a sophisticated lot, Brennan. They need variety. Even air raids acquire a certain monotony after a while.’

  ‘I’d hardly call this one monotonous.’

  Whatever reply Levy made was lost in the shriek of falling bombs. The shriek rose to a crescendo that ended in three crumps as the ‘stick’ of bombs hit the ground in a line of explosions. These had probably landed over a mile away, but the spectators jumped and bolted for shelter. I shook my head to indicate to Levy that I had not heard what he had said, and we exchanged wry smiles.

  ‘I said, deep down, Londoners love the Blitz,’ he shouted. ‘It’s something big. When it’s over they’ll look back on all this with nostalgia.’

  Over to our right the sky was pink and rapidly turning to red. Fires were inevitable during a raid. In early September, on the first night of the blitzkrieg, the docks in the East End had blazed so brightly that all of London was bathed in a red glow that had reminded me of sunset in the desert around Kookynie.

  I had a sudden, vivid image of dry red earth dotted with stunted mulga and mallee, of heat shimmering on a far horizon under a sky of intense cloudless blue and sunsets of red fire. I had been away nearly three years now, and although weeks could go by without my giving it a thought, sometimes I missed home so much it was like a physical pain in my chest.

  ‘What’s up, Brennan? You’re looking rather gruesome.’

  I ventured a look at him. He was scowling, worried about me, although he would never admit it. Even when he scowled, and Levy scowled a great deal, he was ridiculously good looking. I thought he resembled a young Siegfried Sassoon: exotic, intelligent and disturbingly sensual.

  I had joined the ambulance service in October 1939, and had been paired with Levy when he arrived at the Bloomsbury station in February 1940. In the eight months we had been working together I had grown to like him very much. Any early tendency I might have had to think about him romantically had soon faded when he had made it clear, although never overtly, that he was simply not interested in me that way. Which simplified matters greatly once the Blitz began, because he was an excellent ambulance attendant and we worked together like a dream. Anyway, a love affair would have been out of place among the horrors we faced each day.

  I assumed he had a girlfriend, possibly many girlfriends, as he was handsome and personable when he wanted to be and the war seemed to invite casual flings – but he had never mentioned any. I knew little else about David Levy, other than that he was single, twenty-five, Jewish, had attended Harrow School and then studied English Literature at Oxford. I had no idea what he did when he was not with me in the Monster.

  How could I tell him I was feeling homesick? I smiled and took refuge in a lie.

  ‘Indigestion,’ I said. ‘One of Fripp’s scones sits like a rock in my stomach.’

  ‘I suspect Nola Fripp of fifth column activities. No one could be such a terrible cook as that girl. When she brings in her culinary experiments I’m sure it’s a ruse to put the entire ambulance station out of action with food poisoning.’

  I loved to hear Levy talk. He sounded like a BBC announcer imitating the King.

  ‘And I’ve got a numb bum,’ I said, which was true.

  That remark brought a smile from Levy. He had a lovely smile, which he showed too infrequently.

  ‘Poor old Brennan,’ he said. ‘You need more padding in the seat area. Put on some weight, old girl. I often worry you’ll be blown away in a strong wind, like a pint-sized, curly haired Dorothy, heading for Oz.’

  ‘Up among the barrage balloons,’ I said, smiling at the image. ‘I’ll hitch a ride on a Spitfire and let it take me somewhere over the rainbow.’

  ‘I’ve a friend in the RAF. He’s one of Churchill’s Few, but he flies a Hurricane, not a Spitfire. Wasn’t it a hurricane that whisked Dorothy away?’

  ‘I think you’ll find it was a tornado.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. By the way, a propos of our earlier incident, please don’t do anything so idiotically heroic again. Makes me look bad when you go off alone like that, saving children willy-nilly.’

  ‘I was press-ganged into it.’

  ‘Nonsense. They just had to mention children in danger and you dove into that rabbit hole like a demented Alice. Shocking exhibitionism in my opinion, Brennan.’

  Levy wore a serious expression I knew well. When Levy looked serious it meant he was joking and when he appeared bored it meant he was annoyed. The bored look was most often in evidence at the ambulance station. He was not well-liked there, and some cruel jokes had been played on him. The anti-Semitism in the station, and in London generally, was widespread and that fact was still shocking to me.

  We all knew what horrors that sort of blind prejudice could bring. Ever since the Nazis had come to power in Germany eight years before,
newspapers had reported their increasingly brutal measures against the Jews, from refusing to allocate ration cards to them in Germany, to confiscating their property, to herding them into a crowded ghetto in Warsaw to starve or die of typhus, and massacring them wholesale in Polish villages. And now there were reports of concentration camps being built, just for Jews.

  Looking at Levy, seeing his face drawn and his body drooping with exhaustion, the old anger surfaced at the injustice of those who had never bothered to try to get to know him, but were willing to judge him anyway. It was anathema to me to think of condemning someone for what they were rather than who they were.

  Anti-Semitism made no sense to me. The only Jews I had known personally before I met Levy were my family doctor in Kalgoorlie and his family, and I had liked them.

  I changed down a gear with a crunch. Beside me Levy flinched dramatically at the noise. He thought it was amusing to do this when I crunched the gears or drove into a pothole or over debris. I wished he could take over for a spell, and see how he liked trying to control the Monster during a night raid with only a one-and-a-half inch slit of headlight beam showing. The Monster was a fair cow to manage, especially wearing rubber boots. I needed to double de-clutch after every gear change and my muscles were developing muscles from pulling at the steering wheel.

  But Levy was not allowed to drive. He had been rejected for military service because of epilepsy, and it had been impressed upon me that he was under no circumstances to get behind the wheel of one of our precious ambulances.

  And I found his theatrics insulting, because I knew I was a good driver. I had learned to drive in my early teens and I prided myself on being able to handle just about anything with wheels. I’d been put through an interesting test of my driving skills when I volunteered for the Ambulance Service. With a full pail of water in the foot well of a car I had to drive around London in the blackout without spilling a drop. That had been a doddle compared to transporting beer in my father’s truck from Kalgoorlie to Kookynie along rough desert tracks.

  ‘The guns seem awfully close,’ I said. I could feel their rhythmic pounding vibrating in my chest as I turned onto the Euston Road.

  ‘Probably a mobile unit,’ Levy replied.

  A minute or so later a spray of shrapnel clattered onto the ambulance roof and the road around us, making a loud tinkly sound, like cutlery tipped onto a table. Shrapnel – the steel and tin fragments of spent anti-aircraft shells – fell everywhere when the guns were firing. It was more than simply a nuisance and a risk to the ambulance tyres. The fragments were red hot as they fell and they could maim or even kill when they hit exposed flesh. I drove over them carefully and the Monster continued on her rumbling journey.

  I mused that shrapnel was just one of the many things that could kill or maim civilians in an air raid. They could also be crushed by fallen masonry, choke on brick dust, be gassed, drown when a burst water main flooded a shelter, burn in a firestorm, be torn apart by bomb fragments, be cut to pieces by flying glass, or succumb to the sheer force of the blast itself.

  In my weeks of driving the Monster in this Blitz I had become an expert on death; it haunted my waking hours and my dreams. My greatest horror was the thought of encountering a parachute mine. Even the biggest high explosive bomb was as nothing compared to a naval mine designed to blow up ships. They were dropped over London attached to parachutes to float silently, gracefully downwards wherever the wind took them, and they demolished whole city blocks twenty-two seconds after impact.

  ‘Turn left at the next street,’ said Levy, and I nodded.

  I relied on him for directions, as I had not lived long enough in London to be able to navigate through a blacked-out city in which all street signs had been removed. Before we left the station he always checked the wall map that was kept updated as to closed streets and obstructions, but the map could not be relied upon as the closures were apt to change without warning.

  The moon illuminated our way to some extent, but it was a mixed blessing. On such moonlit nights the Thames, with its unmistakable twists and turns, was like a path of molten lead that took the raiders straight to the heart of London. We had copped a thrashing tonight because of the full moon.

  ‘They used to call it a hunter’s moon,’ I said to Levy, raising my voice to be heard over the noise around us. ‘Now we know it as a bombers’ moon.’

  ‘It’s the same thing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Both end in moonlit death.’ His voice dropped. ‘Look at that!’

  We were both silent, watching in awe as scores of bombers flew across the moon. It was a beautiful, chilling sight.

  ‘Turn right here, please, Brennan,’ said Levy. He was taking me on a circuitous route to avoid the wreckage of the last few weeks. But soon we encountered fresh damage.

  A barrier had been set up across High Holborn, where a pile of rubble towered over a burst water main that spouted inside a huge crater on the road. Dark figures crawled over the debris and I wondered how many had been trapped inside the wreckage.

  ‘That was the Holborn Empire,’ he said in a tight voice. ‘Vera Lynn was to sing there last night.’

  Diversion signs directed me into a narrow street where we bumped over more rubble and debris. I drove carefully, but without warning the ambulance thumped down in a sickening lurch, bouncing up again with a crunch.

  My heart thudded and I slowed to a crawl as I tried to determine if there was any damage to the chassis or wheels, if anything was out of whack. The engine sounded as loud and rough as always and I let out a breath I barely knew I’d been holding.

  ‘Damn potholes,’ I said. ‘They’re impossible to see in this blackout.’

  ‘Is the old rust bucket all right?’ asked Levy.

  ‘She’s apples.’ Levy liked it when I spoke ‘Aussie’ and I would sometimes lay it on thick for him.

  ‘I take it that means all is well.’

  ‘Too right.’ I peered out of the windscreen and frowned at the empty sky. ‘Do you think the raiders have gone?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Levy. ‘Turn right here and pull over, if you’d be so kind, Brennan. I need a cigarette, and I’d rather smoke outside this rattle trap.’

  ‘Don’t you get enough smoke at the incidents?’

  He threw me a wry smile and said nothing. I pulled over and switched off the engine. We got out and stood together, leaning against the ambulance as Levy smoked his cigarette. There was a ghost of day over to the east. Dawn was very close.

  In front of us a tall brick wall had crumbled to dust, revealing an area of lawn and tall trees. Two big craters pitted the grass and several trees had fallen. Behind us were the usual dirty Georgian houses of Bloomsbury. Most of the windows were gone, because the force of a blast sucked out glass, and the footpath and road were littered with shimmering shards. Dust swirled around us, smelling of smoke.

  ‘Gray’s Inn Gardens,’ said Levy, gesturing with his cigarette towards the garden. ‘We’re nearly back at Woburn Place.’ He pointed upwards, drew my attention to a tangle of squiggly white lines in the lightening sky to the east. Now a schoolboy grin lit his face. ‘Our boys have been fighting the buggers. Hope they got some of ’em.’ I could hear the excitement in his voice.

  We traced together the remnants of the dogfights that had taken place between the RAF and the Luftwaffe not long before.

  Levy murmured, ‘They shall mount up with wings as eagles.’

  ‘The Bible?’ I asked.

  ‘King James Version; it was rammed down our throats at school – perhaps they harboured hopes of my conversion. Isaiah, chapter forty. It’s pretty much the same in Hebrew, and it seems apposite. I know a fighter pilot.’

  ‘The one who’ll take me over the rainbow in his Hurricane?’

  ‘The very chap.’

  In my mind’s eye I saw an eager young man, like the ones in the newspaper photographs, a ‘Mae West’ over his shoulder, cigarette in hand, smiling into the camera as he waited to jump into his plane
and give what for to the enemy.

  ‘He says Hurricanes might not be as sexy as Spitfires, but they’re more reliable.’ Levy was still staring into the sky.

  My mental picture shifted to a keen-eyed man, leaning against a Hurricane, unsmiling and determined.

  Levy looked down at his hands, clasped in his lap. ‘We were at Harrow together; he was another outsider.’

  My picture of Levy’s friend shifted again. Now he was a thin faced, dark-eyed man, a twin of Levy with the same ferocious intelligence and intensity, the same goofy sense of humour and innate kindness.

  The All Clear sounded, that long steady siren note announcing the raiders had departed from our skies, retreating from the Spitfires and Hurricanes, our daylight defenders.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get back or they’ll send out a search party.’

  Levy glanced at his watch. ‘It’s nearly six and we’ve just had the All Clear. You worry too much, Brennan.’

  Our sixteen-hour night shift ended at nine. We were on a spell of alternate nights, so after this shift we would not be on again until five o’clock the following afternoon. After three night shifts we had a two-day break, then a week of six eight-hour day shifts from nine until five.

  I pressed the starter and the engine sputtered into life. We drove in silence for a while, feeling a little rested after our brief moment of peace. The Monster rattled on through London’s streets. Rich streets or poor streets, after weeks of this Blitz they all shared an air of dusty desolation, a sort of shabby equality.

  More than just buildings had fallen in this Blitz. It seemed to me that Jack was as good as his master in a ruined city, and after thirteen months of war the English system of class had become as shaky as a bombed mansion. I exulted in the thought. Australia was a great deal more egalitarian than Britain, but even there I had suffered at the hands of people who thought themselves better by reason of birth. At the boarding school my mother had sent me to were girls who lived in big houses by the river staffed by servants, and some of these girls had delighted in tormenting the small country girl whose father ran a hotel.