Ambulance Girls At War Read online

  My grazed knee complained as I walked down into the garage. As I descended our vehicles came into sight, lined up in a row facing the ramp to the street so that we could be out on the road as quickly as possible in a call-out. One of the saloon cars was missing, which meant that the driver must be finishing a job. If you were on a job when your shift finished at seven-thirty, you just kept on going (and never expected overtime). The other saloon was there beside the three grey-painted ambulances.

  The auxiliary ambulances could be anything from an old converted delivery van to a grey wooden box mounted on a saloon chassis. Inside each were racks for four stretchers. Grubby canvas curtains were the rear doors.

  That morning, the drivers and attendants from the previous shift were buzzing around, working hard to make sure that their vehicles were left shipshape and Bristol fashion for the shift to come. I had just raised my hand to acknowledge a wave from one of them when I heard a soft toot. I turned to see a large Bentley saloon rolling down the ramp behind me. It was one of the two donated vehicles used to transport walking (or sitting) wounded. It was me or the car, so I pressed myself hard against the wall and its impressive bulk rolled past me into the garage. Sally Calder, who was driving, gave me a wave as she went by with only an inch to spare.

  The garage exuded its usual smell of wet cement, petrol and oil. All of the vehicles lined up in front of me looked the worse for wear after six months of pummelling by shrapnel and bomb debris, but we’d had no major breakdowns, possibly because we were required to drive them no faster than sixteen miles per hour. This was infuriating when we had badly injured to get to hospital, but frustratingly necessary given the state of the roads, and heaven help the driver who came back with a puncture!

  When I joined the station during the Phony War, some wag had dubbed us the ‘Blinking Amateur Ambulance Station’. In those days, people used to laugh at us and call out insults when we practised bandaging and stretcher-bearing in the streets. It was true that most of us had to learn on the job, but no one could have called us amateurs after a couple of weeks of the Blitz. The insults stopped once the bombs began to fall.

  Celia or I usually drove the reliable old Studebaker, which was a saloon car with a box van body welded to the back. It vied with one of the Fords (usually referred to as ‘the monster’) for most uncomfortable vehicle to ride in, but we were used to it now. At present, it was unattended, so I walked over to it and checked in the back. I was pleased to see that whoever had been the last attendant had cleaned it carefully and left it fully equipped with bandages and blankets. Reassured, I turned to see Celia free-wheeling down the ramp on her bicycle. I gave her a wave and climbed the stairs to the common room.

  Our common room was just above the garage and it was where we relaxed while waiting for the call-out to an incident. In the centre of the room stood a large deal table and some upright chairs. More comfortable chairs were dotted around, along with low tables. Sandbags lined the wall closest to the street and partitioning at the far end formed the station leader’s office and a store room. In the office was the all-important telephone, where the station leader took down the details of the incidents we had to attend. Our shift’s station leader was Jack Moray, a dark-haired man in his late thirties with a wolfish smile. I liked Moray. He was sensible, practical and brave. Who could ask for more in a station leader?

  On another wall of the common room hung a large map of London and a larger map of the West End; these were dotted with pins to show the location of incidents, detours, UXBs, and anything else we needed to know before setting off into bomb-altered London. A board hanging near the maps contained a list of the vehicles in the garage. Moray had chalked up beside these the names of those who had been allocated each machine for the shift. When I checked, as I’d expected, he’d chalked me up as attendant to Celia as driver, in the old Studebaker.

  Over the past year and a half the common room had become more comfortable, but we didn’t spend much of our time there. If there were no incidents to attend, Moray kept us busy. We were expected to make sure that the vehicles were in tip-top condition, and if they were, to spend time cleaning the station or keeping up to date with our first-aid skills. But we were often out of the station. There were always jobs to do in the daytime, even now that daylight bombing had almost ceased. Sometimes we were sent out to deliver supplies to hospitals, or collect road accident victims. Another task was picking up bodies or body parts from incidents and taking them to the nearest mortuary. That was a sombre, thankless task and one I hated.

  I entered the common room to find my colleagues, George Squire, Stephen Armstrong, Sam Sadler and Myra Harris in there. They sang out greetings to me. There were supposed to be ten in our shift, including the station leader, but at the moment it was five men and four women, because Sally Calder had moved to another shift. Rupert Purvis and Doris Powell were absent and I assumed they had not arrived yet.

  ‘Care for a cup of tea?’ asked Harris.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She poured me a cup from the large pot on the table in front of her. Harris was a volunteer, a grandmother in her fifties, who was brusquely efficient and knitted through the worst that Hitler threw at us. I doubt she ever dropped a stitch, no matter how intense the bombing. She could be gruff and managing, but she was also motherly and looked after the group in her own way.

  I sat at the table and took a sip of tea. Through the sliding window into the office, I saw Jack Moray on the telephone. He looked up and nodded a greeting at me.

  ‘Just how tall are you, Halliday?’ asked Sadler. He gave me a cheeky smile. ‘If you don’t mind such an impertinent question.’

  Sam Sadler was also a volunteer; he was in his mid-forties, a cockney spiv who was a band leader in a small nightclub in Soho. He was also the source of our black-market goods. I’d not liked him at all when I first came to the station, when he’d been very pally with a nasty little man called Fred Knaggs, who’d later been gaoled for looting. I’d heard that Moray had told Sadler if he didn’t improve his attitude he’d be sent somewhere much worse than Bloomsbury. Since then Sadler seemed to have become less annoying, more a part of the team. When waiting for a call-out he played innumerable games of patience with a tatty old pack of cards he kept in his pocket, or tried to engage the others in what he called ‘just a little wager between friends’.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Five eleven and a half.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s not the full six foot?’

  I shook my head. ‘The half-inch makes all the difference. Why?’

  ‘Had a little wager on it with the boys.’

  I couldn’t help a laugh. ‘Who won?’

  ‘Me,’ said George Squire. ‘It was just a friendly wager – in sixpences. I judged you at a smidge under eighteen hands. I knows me horseflesh, but I had to imagine you sideways.’

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. I opted for a smile because I liked Squire. He was a tough old former boxer who’d been bombed out of three houses and tended to spend raids humming songs under his breath, often Gilbert and Sullivan.

  ‘Hey, Maisie,’ said Stephen Armstrong, ‘remember how you thought up a rhyme, after that big fire in the City in January?’

  At seventeen, Armstrong was the baby of the Bloomsbury station and would be called up once he turned eighteen later in the year. The boy had found it hard to cope with the job at first, but hardened up as the Blitz went on, and I knew that Squire looked after him when he could.

  ‘Yes. I made it up because they called it the Second Great Fire of London.’

  ‘Well, here’s one I’ve thought up.’ He gave me a smile and began to sing to the tune of ‘Oranges and Lemons’:

  Spitfires and Blenheims, say the bells of St Clements;

  Cost more than five farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s.

  Keep’em flying, I pray ye, say the bells of Old Bailey,

  All through London’s Blitz, say the bells of Shoreditch.

  Downhear
ted? Not we, say the bells of Stepney;

  For we’ll win, don’t you know, says the great bell of Bow.

  He finished with a deep bass, singing the last word in a note down near his ankles.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ I said, laughing. ‘You should send it to the papers. They might give you something for it.’

  ‘What about the last lines of that nursery rhyme?’ said Sadler with a nasty smile. ‘You know, the bit that goes, “here comes a candle to light you to bed and here comes the chopper to chop off yer head”. My kids liked that bit best.’ He made a chopping movement with his hand.

  He was right, of course. That was always the best part of the game, running around trying to avoid the ‘chopper’ on your neck and screaming as it came down. But once you’d seen real decapitated heads – and we all had – it no longer seemed right to laugh about them.

  Armstrong looked uncomfortable, but Sadler persisted, saying, ‘This is a good one: Here come a few flares to light you to bed, and here come’s a parachute bomb to blast off yer head.’

  I saw Armstrong wince, and jumped in. ‘Ugh,’ I said. ‘A bit too close to home, I think. This’ll do: Here comes a Warden to light you to bed, and into the shelter you go now, he said.’

  ‘That’s much better,’ said Harris, looking up from her knitting. Armstrong smiled at me, and blushed when I smiled back at him. He often blushed when Celia or I looked at him.

  Sadler laughed at me. ‘Yer an old softie, Halliday.’

  ‘Good morning, everyone,’ said Celia as she entered the room. She was greeted with smiles and nods.

  Celia was an ‘Honourable’ former debutante, twenty-two and supremely self-assured. Also quite remarkably beautiful, with a mass of copper-beech red hair, dark blue eyes and an alabaster complexion. She was married to one of Britain’s most notorious fascists, Cedric Ashwin, but they were estranged and I’d heard she wanted to divorce him.

  When I first met Celia I’d had my doubts about her because I thought her stuck-up and rather cold. Everything had changed in the new year after she had been buried for hours in the cellar of a bombed house. Since then she had laughed more and was friendlier.

  Newspapers loved to print feature articles about female Air Raid Precaution workers such as ambulance drivers, complete with pictures of the more glamorous ones. Celia and I had appeared in the Evening Standard last September. They made much of her posh upbringing and my dancing. In the photographs I had to show a bit of leg while she pretended to put on her lipstick. It was all for the war effort, so we didn’t mind. Well, I didn’t mind and Celia gritted her teeth and got on with it. The article described us as ‘latter-day Florence Nightingales’ and said that we were only two of ‘the lovely Bloomsbury Ambulance Girls’. That made me laugh, because at nineteen I was probably the only one of the women in my shift who could honestly be called a girl.

  The door opened. Rupert Purvis and Doris Powell came into the room.

  Rupert Purvis was a conscientious objector, an intellectual and also an artist who always seemed to have a sketchbook and pencil in his hand. He affected a Bohemian look. His hair was longer than was usual, he sported a beard and wore a cravat rather than a tie. He had a bit of a ‘thing’ for me, which I did not encourage.

  Harris poured him a cup of tea and he thanked her with a smile.

  Doris Powell was a housewife in her forties and a seemingly never-ending source of the most ridiculous gossip. She had a snub nose, a sweet expression and curly brown hair rapidly turning to grey. I liked Doris, whose snippets of Careless Talk usually made me laugh and were entirely harmless.

  Doris Powell and Myra Harris were volunteers, but Celia Ashwin and I were employees and earned a weekly wage of £2 3s. It was little enough to live on, but I was used to making do on not much and I still managed to send a small sum to my grandparents in Sheffield each week.

  I looked at the people around me and smiled. We had become a tight crew, tempered by the fire of the Blitz, but we were an extremely mixed bag indeed. We ranged in age from seventeen to sixty-four and came from all social classes: chorus girl, debutante, boxer, spiv, schoolboy, bank clerk, housewife, grandmother and artist. Despite that, we worked well together. I was happy to be a part of the team.

  I plodded home after my shift early the following morning, looking forward to a long nap in my top-floor bedroom. As I had told Michael Harker, the Theatre Girls’ Club was a boarding house in one of those enormous old buildings in Greek Street, Soho. It had been set up in the twenties for young dancers and actresses by a former chorus girl who married well.

  That morning I was especially careful when I crossed Charing Cross Road, but there were no big black cars waiting to nearly run me down. My mild disappointment annoyed me and I strode on quickly until I reached the club. Once there I pushed hard on the doorbell and heard it echoing inside. A minute or so later, the door was opened by Millie, our maid, who was holding a grubby polishing rag. She was Irish, like most of the maids in London at the moment, because the Irish Republic was neutral and there was no fear of them being called up or volunteering to join one of the services.

  ‘Good morning, Miss,’ she said in her thick accent. ‘Not so bad, last night, was it? Only one alert, and two hours in the practice room.’ She grinned. ‘Miss Lorna sang to us, and it was grand.’

  The practice room, now heavily sandbagged, was in the basement and we used it as an air-raid shelter. It was quite a jolly place during a raid, as it had an upright piano and as Millie had said, we’d all try to sing through the noise of the planes and guns and bombs. Barres had been placed around the room for the dancers, but the long mirrors that had covered all the walls before the war had been removed in case they shattered in a raid.

  Every day I wasn’t on duty, I practised my dance steps and stretched in front of the only long mirror that remained. (It was laid face-down on the floor when there was a raid). I was determined to keep myself limber because I fully intended to return to France and the dancing life after the war was over.

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said, as she let me into the wide hallway. From the dining room came the smell of toast and bacon, and the noise of nineteen girls eating breakfast. The club’s enormous kitchen was on the ground floor as was the dining room.

  ‘Miss King thinks we’re due for a big one any day now,’ said Millie. There was excitement in her voice. Millie had come over from Cork only a couple of weeks before and air raids were still a novelty to her.

  ‘Hope she’s wrong,’ I said, smiling, and I began the long trek upstairs to my room on the top floor.

  Although the club was kept scrupulously clean, the corridors always smelled of overcooked cabbage, perhaps because overcooked cabbage seemed to be served at every meal. It was lucky for me that the Ambulance Service had put in a canteen at the Bloomsbury station once we went to twenty-four-hour shifts. I only had to eat at the club every second day. It was a glorious thing, not to be too dependent on the cooking of Mrs Mears.

  The club was not palatial by any means, but it was clean and affordable. My weekly pound gave me the narrowest bed that could be called a bed, a thin mattress, much-darned sheets and two threadbare blankets in a room on the top floor, just under the roof garden and chapel. Although my room had three beds in it I didn’t have a room-mate, because very few girls were willing to sleep so close to heaven (in every sense) during the Blitz.

  I plodded up to the first floor. It contained the large drawing room, which was now our common room, along with the office and bedroom of the housekeeper, Miss Edith King.

  I turned at the landing and dragged myself up another flight to the dormitory floor. This was where most of the girls slept, in cubicles divided off from one another by cretonne curtains. They called them their ‘horse-boxes’, but in reality they were very snug and good for gossipy companionship.

  The stairs became narrower. They took me to the third floor and my bedroom. I loved my room. It was the first time I’d ever had a room to myself and I was able to
spread out all my things and really relax in my time off. I even had a view, over Charing Cross Road to the pretty spire of St Giles-in-the-Fields, the one they call the Poets’ Church.

  The only real disadvantage to living there was that the club’s housekeeper, Miss King, was so terribly strict about keeping the rules of the club. The number one rule, and the one most stringently enforced, was NO MEN ABOVE THE FIRST FLOOR. Male friends could be entertained only in the common room, where they were in sight and earshot of everyone else in the club. If a girl was caught with a male upstairs then she was turfed out on her ear, presumably because such an infraction proved that she was a bad influence on the other girls. That rule wasn’t the worry, because I’d sworn off men for the duration.

  But another rule was that, unless Miss King had allowed you possession of the ‘late key’ – which she did only if you had a very good reason indeed – you had to be back by eleven each night. This meant that if a girl was away from the club when a raid started, she had to spend the night in a shelter, or wherever she could find a bed.

  You’d think that the ‘in by eleven’ rule would be relaxed in the middle of a Blitz, but no. To Miss King, a rule was a rule. She personally locked the doors each night at eleven on the dot, and unless you could shimmy up a drainpipe – which some girls could, and did – or you had a friend waiting downstairs, hiding in the darkness and ready to unlock the door at a soft knock, then you were out for the night.

  At last I reached my room. The blackout blinds were still up, so it was quite dark in there. The door clicked shut behind me and I sat on the bed, wondering if I really did need to wash and change into pyjamas or I could go to bed in my underwear, as I was.

  Mam had always insisted that I wash before going to bed. ‘I don’t care how tired you are, Maisie,’ she would say. ‘At a pinch – but only at a pinch, mind you – a tired girl can skip washing her face. But if she doesn’t brush her hair, wash her feet and wash down there before she goes to bed, then she has no self-respect.’