“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.