Home for Christmas
Down here in the basement, in the focused quiet of the operating theatre, the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns had to be ignored.
The operation was over. The consultant surgeon had gone to scrub up for the next one. The young patient was being wheeled out of the operating theatre ready for the porters to take him back to the ward where he would be nursed until – and if – he recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the country.
Sister had disappeared – no doubt to make sure that someone brought a cup of tea for Mr Ward the surgeon.
Sally’s boyfriend, George Laidlaw, was one of Mr Ward’s housemen, as the junior doctors were called. George was currently on duty in Casualty, where the flood of patients arriving seemed to increase with every bombing raid.
‘What have we got up next?’ Johnny MacDonald, the anaesthetist, a Scot, asked Sally, tiredly pushing his hand through his thinning ginger hair. Johnny was only in his mid-thirties but tonight he looked closer to fifty, Sally thought, and no wonder. They had almost lost the little boy twice during the op, only Johnny’s skill had kept him going.
‘Amputation that needs cleaning up,’ Sally answered without looking at him. No one liked amputations, and they liked them even less when someone or something else had done the amputating for them – in this case a falling roof slate that had sliced a fireman’s leg off just above his knee as he fought to save a burning building down on the docks.
‘I thought we were going to lose that wee laddie back there,’ the anaesthetist told Sally without saying anything about the next patient.
Sally didn’t reply. The reality was that they would probably lose the little boy anyway, and they all knew it. His little body had been pierced with so much shrapnel that it had left him, in the surgeon’s own words, ‘looking like a sieve’.
Somewhere in the hospital the boy’s mother would be waiting and praying, but there was only so much that even the best surgeon could do, and they did have the best here at Barts, Sally thought proudly, as she made her way to the sluice room to scrub up ready for the next operation. However, no matter how hard she scrubbed her hands Sally couldn’t rid her nostrils of the smell of blood, nor her mind of images of mangled, maimed bodies. The surgeons had been operating non-stop and suddenly, for no reason that she could think of, to her the smell of blood had become the stench of death. She leaned forward and closed her eyes as a surge of nausea gripped her.
The voice of one of the more senior theatre nurses who had already been in the sluice room, a short, stocky girl called Mavis Burton, reached her.
‘Bear up, Johnson,’ she said bracingly. ‘The theatre porters will be bringing the next patient along any minute.’
Immediately Sally snapped out of her uncharacteristic weakness. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally squeamish.’
The other nurse shook her head. ‘It would be hard to be anything else, given what we’ve been seeing. We all know that nurses are supposed to keep their distance and remember that they’ve got a job to do, and that weeping and wailing over injured patients doesn’t help anyone, but I’ve got to admit I’ve seen some things these last few days . . .’ She paused before continuing, ‘Mind you, with St Thomas’ being bombed on the first night of the blitz and its doctors and nurses risking their own lives in the damage to save patients, they’ve rather stolen a march on us in terms of showing the Germans what British medical staff are made of.’
St Thomas’ was the second oldest hospital in London, and there was a degree of professional rivalry between the two renowned establishments. On Sunday night a bomb had destroyed Medical Out Patients and most of college house, where the doctors were housed, killing two of them.
Only the bravery of three doctors, Mr Frewer, Dr Norman and Mr Maling, had saved two of their colleagues, who had been trapped by falling debris and ignited dispensary stores. Of course, no one working at Barts wanted their own hospital to be bombed, but Mavis was right: the bravery shown by St Thomas’ staff had naturally made everyone at Barts feel they had something to live up to.
Two hours later, when Sister Theatre had dispatched her to get herself a cup of tea and have a short break, Sally made her way tiredly to the canteen, almost walking right past George, her boyfriend, who was striding purposefully the other way, his white coat flapping open and his stethoscope round his neck.
‘Oh, George, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise.’ His smile creased his kind face, but he looked as weary as she felt, Sally acknowledged, as he pushed his thick light brown hair back off his face.
George might not be movie-star handsome but there was something about him that was very attractive. He had a kindness and a concern for others, combined with his warm smile and the twinkle in his eyes, that made him popular. Tall and rangy, George had the kind of slight stoop that came from bending over patients’ beds, but like all of those who worked with people whose health and lives had been blighted by the blitz of bombing on London, there were shadows at the backs of his eyes now from witnessing such suffering.
‘Sister’s just sent me to grab something to eat. We’ve got an impossibly full list. I’ve never seen anyone operate with the skill and the speed Mr Ward has shown these last few days. We had this little boy in earlier, peppered with shrapnel . . .’
‘I know. I saw him when he was brought in to Casualty earlier.’ George rubbed his face with both hands. In common with many of the other medics at the hospital, his jaw was showing the signs of stubble that came from working hours that were far too long and then falling into bed, only to be roused within a couple of hours to deal with another crisis.
They exchanged tired smiles, then both of them stiffened in response to a particularly loud explosion.
George reached out to grab hold of Sally protectively, saying when the building didn’t move, ‘Not us this time.’ But his words were inaudible above the pound of the ack-ack guns.
George was still holding onto her, and Sally looked up at him. She had seen those lean, long-fingered hands of his holding patients with such compassion and kindness. That thought brought a lump to her throat. George was such a good man.
‘This so-and-so war,’ he groaned. ‘More than anything else I want to have the time to court you properly, Sally, as you deserve to be courted, but we haven’t got that time. There isn’t time to even kiss you any more never mind court you. I’ve got to get back: Casualty is bursting at the seams with patients we haven’t got beds for already, and by the sound of what’s going on we’re going to have a hell of a lot more to deal with before tonight’s over.’
He lifted one of her hands to his lips and kissed it gently.
Her skin should smell of roses, not carbolic soap, Sally thought sadly, but the look she could see in George’s eyes said that he hadn’t even noticed the carbolic.
‘You’d better go and get your tea and I’d better get back to my patients,’ he said, releasing her.
Sally nodded and hurried down the corridor, pausing to look back when she reached the end. George was still standing where she had left him, watching her.
She was so lucky to have met him. He was kind and loving and fun to be with. He was also a good doctor who one day would be a first-rate doctor. And a first-rate husband?
It was far too soon to be thinking along those lines, Sally knew, even though she also knew that George himself would love to progress their relationship. There had, after all, been another man in her life she had once hoped to marry. Callum.
She was over Callum now. Callum’s refusal to understand the hurt and sense of betrayal she had suffered on discovering that her supposed best friend and her father were involved with one another, had destroyed the feelings she had once had for him. He might have followed her to London after she had fled here, unable to bear to stay in Liverpool and witness the relationship between Morag and her father, but he had not sought her out to beg her forgiveness. No, he had sought her out to tell her that, following their marriage, Morag was expecting a child.
Would she have weakened if he hadn’t told her that his sister and her father were expecting a child? No! She wouldn’t.
She was happy now, Sally reminded herself. Far, far happier than she had ever expected to be when she had left Liverpool. Where she had had one best friend she now had three very good close friends. Where she had loved a man whose loyalty to her above all others she had not been able to rely on, she was now loved by a man who she knew instinctively would always put her first. There was no going back, nor did she want to do so.
Chapter Three
‘But, Mum, you can’t just up and leave London.’
As she spoke Dulcie couldn’t help looking at the firmly tied and bulging sacks of household goods in the middle of the floor of the main room of her family home, the bed linen tied up in a sheet. The family didn’t possess the luxury of proper suitcases. Very few of those living in Stepney did, unless they were the sort that, for one reason or another were constantly on the move. The sort her own parents had always kept clear of and thought were beneath them. The sort that couldn’t go to church unless they’d got enough money to get their good clothes out of hock at the pawnshop.
For Dulcie, seeing her parents’ possessions gathered together came far too close for comfort to the images from the newspapers she had inside her head: the dispossessed of the East End wandering helplessly and hopelessly through the streets of London clutching their sad bundles of whatever they had managed to rescue from their bombed homes.
The last thing Dulcie had expected when Sergeant Dawson had delivered her to the door of her parents’ home, before checking his watch and telling her that she’d got an hour before he came back for her, was that she would find her mother on the verge of leaving London. But her mother’s nerves were so shattered by the relentless bombing that her hands had been shaking too much for her to fill the kettle and make them a cup of tea.
Having taken over that task for her, Dulcie had waited for her mother to say something about her accident and to express maternal concern, but she might as well have not bothered because, despite the fact that Dulcie was on crutches with her ankle in plaster, her mother hadn’t said a word about her injury, merely greeting her with a blunt, ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’
‘You can’t just leave,’ Dulcie reiterated now.
‘Oh, can’t I? We’ll just see about that. It’s all right for you, Dulcie, living in Holborn. That hasn’t been touched. You’re safe. You should have tried living down here since Hitler started bombing us.’
Mary Simmonds’ hand shook so much that she had to put her teacup back in its saucer, spilling some of the tea as she did so.
‘I didn’t get this running for a bus,’ Dulcie felt justified in pointing out smartly as she held out her plastered leg, ‘and I’m going to have to keep this ruddy plaster on for longer than normal on account of me having such delicate ankles.’
When her mother still didn’t say anything Dulcie was unable to prevent herself from adding bitterly, ‘Not that you seem to care that much.’
‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Dulcie. You’ve always been selfish and thinking only of yourself. Not one word have you said about poor Edith. I can’t sleep at night for thinking about what might have happened to your sister, and how she might have suffered. I can’t stay here in London, knowing them Germans have taken her life.’
Tears filled Dulcie’s mother’s eyes, her hands now shaking so badly that she folded them together in her lap as she and Dulcie sat opposite one another on the two hard dining chairs either side of the battered oak table, which had to be pushed up against the wall to make space for people to walk past it. The fire that heated the room was, for once, unlit, the September sunshine cruelly bright on the faded striped wallpaper. The three plaster ducks, which had adorned the wall opposite the fireplace, and of which her mother had been so proud, had been removed, leaving brighter patches of paper. Even the curtains had been taken down, allowing the sunlight to highlight the shabbiness of the room.
It had been in here, on the rag rug in front of the fire, that Dulcie and Edith has squabbled and, indeed, fought, pulling one another’s hair and screaming over the possession of some toy; fights that Edith had always won, of course, because she had had their mother to take her side. Now any sisterly sense of loss was stamped out by Dulcie’s knowledge that her sister had always been their mother’s favourite.
‘You don’t know that she is dead yet,’ she reminded her mother.
Dulcie had never got on with her sister, but deep down, although she wasn’t willing to admit it, there was a small scratchy sore place, an unhappy feeling, because several bombs had fallen on the area where Edith had been.
‘There’s not been any official notice, or anything . . .’ A body, Dulcie meant; concrete evidence that Edith was in fact dead, but she couldn’t say that to her mother. ‘She might just be missing.’ But she offered these words more dismissively than comfortingly.
‘Missing?’ Mary retorted. ‘Of course she isn’t missing. Me and your dad have been to all the hospitals and all the rest centres. I know my Edith: the first thing she would have done once the air raid was over, if she’d been all right, was come home to let me know that she was safe.’ Her voice shook, tears filling her already swollen eyes. ‘No. She’s gone. Killed by Hitler when she was singing her heart out trying to do her best for other people. The theatre she was in took a direct hit, after all. She didn’t have a selfish bone in her body, Edith didn’t. Always thinking of others, she was.’
Always thinking of herself, more like, Dulcie thought, but she knew there was no point in saying that to her mother, who had thought that the sun shone out of Edith’s backside. It felt odd to think that Edith had gone, that they’d never quarrel with one another again, that she’d never see her sister again. Dulcie’s heart started to beat faster, a lump of emotion clogging her throat as unexpected feelings gripped her. There had been no love lost between her and Edith, after all, so there was no cause for her to go all soft about her now. It was a shock, though, to think of her being dead.
Unsettled by her own emotions, Dulcie reached for her mother’s hand but immediately her mother shrugged her off, saying despairingly, ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to go on without Edith. She was the best daughter any mother could want.’
A far better daughter than she was, Dulcie knew her mother meant, the brief moment of sadness and loss she had been feeling overtaken by the bitterness their mother’s favouritism always aroused in her.
‘There’s nothing to keep me here now,’ her mother continued bleakly.
‘What about Dad?’
‘Your dad’s leaving as well. Dunham’s that he works for had their yard bombed and everything in it destroyed, and so Paul Dunham has decided to get out of London and go into business with a cousin he’s got who’s a builder down in Kent. He’s offered your dad a job with him, and there’s a couple of rooms we can have with a chap who’s already working for this cousin of his. We’re going down in Dunham’s lorry tomorrow morning.’
For once in her life Dulcie was silent, struggling to take in everything that her mother had told her and all that she hadn’t said as well.
‘And what about Rick and the Dunhams’ son, John?’ she finally demanded in a sharp voice. ‘What about them when they get leave from the army and find that they haven’t got a home to come to any more?’
‘Your dad wrote to Rick last night to tell him about Edith and what we’re doing.’
‘And I suppose you were going to send me a letter as well, were you?’ Dulcie asked sarcastically, causing a dull flush of colour to spread up under her mother’s previously pale face.
‘Don’t you take that tone with me, my girl. You were the one who chose to move out and go and live somewhere else.’
‘I only moved to Holborn, not Kent, and I came back every Sunday for church,’ Dulcie pointed out, using her anger to conceal the pain burning inside her.
‘Your dad was going to arrange to send a message round to Holborn to let you know that we’re leaving. ‘
‘But you weren’t going to take the trouble to come and see me,’ Dulcie accused her mother, ‘even though you knew I’d got a broken ankle.’
‘Trust you to make a fuss about yourself, Dulcie. Your dad and me knew that you were all right and, after all, a broken ankle’s nothing compared with what’s happened to your poor sister.’
Dulcie didn’t know what she might have said to her mother if there hadn’t been a knock on the door. She looked at her watch.
‘That will be Sergeant Dawson, come to help me get back to Holborn. Luckily for me at least some folk think enough of me to worry about me,’ was her parting accusation as she stood up and reached for her crutches, making her way along the narrow hallway to open the front door.
Despite the justification she felt for simply walking away with Sergeant Dawson and slamming the door behind her without another word, somehow Dulcie couldn’t stop herself turning back into the house and hobbling down the hall.
‘You’d better write and let me know where you’re staying,’ she told her mother in a curt voice, ‘just in case Rick doesn’t get his letter from you and turns up in Holborn, wanting to know where you are.’ She paused, whilst her mother wrote down their new address for her and then, against her will and awkwardly, Dulcie leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled of dust and tiredness mingled with despair.
If she had hoped to feel her mother’s arms coming round her in a maternal hug then Dulcie had hoped in vain because her mother sat rigidly, not kissing Dulcie back or even looking properly at her, staring straight ahead.
It was her mother’s lookout if she was too wrapped up in ruddy Edith to remember that she had another daughter, Dulcie told herself fiercely as she rejoined Sergeant Dawson, pulling the door, with its peeling paint, sharply closed behind her, then carefully negotiating the front step. She certainly didn’t care!
Wearing her London Transport uniform of grey worsted fabric piped in blue, and trying to look as official as she possibly could, Agnes stood at the top of the stairs leading down into Chancery Lane underground station where she worked, watching the crowd of people making their way down to take refuge in the underground in case the night brought yet another attack from the German Luftwaffe.
When Mr Smith, who managed the ticket office, had asked for volunteers to help organise and keep an eye on things in anticipation of the number of people who would want to use the underground to shelter in, Agnes had been the first to shoot up her hand, but not just because she wanted to do her bit. Ted, the young underground train driver with whom she was walking out, and to whom she was going to become officially engaged at Christmas, had told her that he intended to bring his widowed mother and his two young sisters down to Chancery Lane for protection. This would be Agnes’s first opportunity to meet them. Ted had hoped to arrange for them all to meet up at the small café close to the station where Ted and Agnes often went, as Ted had explained to her that his mother was reluctant to invite Agnes round to their home. They lived in a tiny two-roomed flat owned by the Guinness Trust, which provided rented accommodation to respectable but poor working-class families in London.
‘The truth is that there isn’t room for the four of us to sit down together at the table all at the same time, never mind five of us,’ Ted had explained to her, and Agnes had understood. She might have been abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in the orphanage attached to the Row’s local church, but Agnes had seen how proud Olive, her landlady, was of her home and she had quickly grasped what Ted was not saying, which was that his mother felt embarrassed about inviting her to their small home. Or at least that was what Agnes hoped Ted had meant. She couldn’t quite stop worrying that Ted’s mother might think an orphaned girl who didn’t know where she came from was not be the kind she wanted her son to get involved with. Agnes didn’t like thinking about the circumstances of her birth and subsequent abandonment. Doing so made her feel all prickly and upset inside.
Now that the children and staff from the orphanage had been evacuated to the country, the building was used as a drill hall, and potential rest centre, should the unthinkable happen and the area be bombed, making people homeless.
Of course there was no question of her and Ted getting married any time soon. Not with Ted being the only breadwinner in the family and having his mother and two sisters to support. Ted had been honest with her about that, and Agnes fully understood what he had said to her. He wouldn’t have been her good kind Ted if he hadn’t looked after his family.
Ted was off duty at the moment and he’d told her that he would bring his family down early in the evening to make sure they got settled in a good spot before he went back to work, but the stream of people approaching the station was getting heavier now, and Agnes was worried that she might somehow miss them in the crush.
Predictably, of course, Mr Smith had initially thoroughly disapproved of and objected to the public more or less ‘taking it upon themselves’, as he had put it, to have the right to sleep in the underground. But once Winston Churchill himself, of whom Mr Smith was a great admirer, had sanctioned this, his objections had slowed to muttered grumbles about the mess people were making, especially those who had no homes to go to any more, and who brought with them what belongings they had been able to salvage.
Agnes, on the other hand, felt sorry for them. She was so lucky to have her lovely room at number 13 Article Row, her kind landlady Mrs Robbins, and her wonderful friends there, especially Tilly. She didn’t want to think of how it would make her feel if she were to lose any of that.
She scanned the growing crowd of people approaching the steps to the underground, searching for Ted’s familiar face, feeling both excited and nervous at the prospect of meeting his family – and especially his mother – at last.
However, when they did arrive Agnes almost missed them. An elderly woman was so laden with the weight of her possessions that her slow progress was holding other people up. Some were losing patience and starting to mutter complaints so Agnes stepped in to help her.
Once she got her down the stairs, though, the woman refused to let go of her, and Agnes tried not to react to the musty smell of stale sweat and bad breath coming off her as she dragged the girl closer with one grimy hand to insist, ‘I ain’t done with you yet, missie. I want you to find me somewhere comfy to put me bed. I’ve got it rolled up in here.’ She patted the bundle Agnes had taken from her. ‘Sleep in ’yde Park normally, I do.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘I knows all the ways of avoiding the park keepers, an’ all. They won’t catch me, they won’t, and neither will ruddy Hitler.’
As Agnes guided the woman along the platform one small boy protested to his mother, ‘I don’t want her near me, Ma. She stinks.’
It was true, and Agnes was glad to escape from her. She was almost at the top of the steps, struggling to pick her way through the mass of people coming down, when she heard Ted’s voice calling her name. He stood at the top, beaming her a smile.
To other people Ted might be a relatively ordinary-looking young man of middling height, with a wiry frame, mouse-brown hair and ears that stuck out, but to Agnes he was a hero and his bright blue eyes were the kindest she had ever seen.
Immediately she made her way towards him, until he could reach out, grab her hand and haul her onto the top step where he was standing,