Blitz

The explosion, when it came, was not so much loud as long, Robin told herself, attempting to use logical thought to control her fear, while at the same time trying to keep her head down and the child in her arms safe as he struggled and screamed at the top of his voice. And then as her ears sang shrilly, she decided it had been loud after all; very loud, a great cracking thunderous roar; and also suffocating. Clouds of plaster dust were filling her nose and mouth and small Billy wriggled against her apron front and began to make choking noises; and automatically she upended him and thumped his back, crouching there behind the big dressings cupboard, until he spluttered and at last, to her intense relief, gasped and then began to bawl again.

‘Are you all right, Nurse Bradman?’ The voice was high and sounded distinctly annoyed. ‘Nurse Chester, where are you? Staff Nurse Puncheon – where are the baby nurses? We’d better start the count at once – ’

‘I’m here, Sister,’ Robin managed, though her voice was husky because of the dust, and coughing, she straightened herself gingerly and peered over the top of the dressings cupboard to see what was happening down the ward, as Billy settled to steady wail. ‘And I’ve got Billy Cooper – ’

‘And I’ve got both the Davidoff twins,’ came from somewhere behind Robin and she turned her head gratefully at the sound of Chick’s familiar drawl, to see her standing there with a kicking toddler under each arm – both of them laughing and clearly believing the whole episode had been entertainment provided just for them – and a face as white as a ghost out of which her eyes peered like the holes in the skull of the skeleton in the nurses’ lecture room.

‘Oh, Chick!’ Robin said and managed to laugh. ‘You look absolutely ridiculous – ’

‘You should see your face, honey bun!’ Chick retorted and came towards her, hoicking the Davidoff twins up on to her broad shoulders as she did so. And then giggled softly as she caught sight of Sister Marshall, who was picking her way over the piles of rubble in the middle of the usually perfectly shining floor. ‘Oh, look at the Old Bat, will you? Now that really has to be the funniest thing ever. Worth being in a raid for, that is.’

And indeed, Sister Marshall did look absurd, her angular body in its usually crisply starched blue dress and huge sleeves looking as though it had been dusted with a giant sugar powderer, and her face as white as her cap and strings peering out ferociously between them at her ruined ward. And Robin giggled too.

‘I can’t see what there is to laugh at, Nurse Bradman!’ Sister Marshall said tartly. ‘Now, get that child out of here and into the first undamaged ward you can find and then come back here at once and we’ll start to clean the place. I can’t have this sort of thing going on in Annie Zunz Ward, and I won’t stand for it!’ And she peered upwards as though the mere power of her voice would penetrate the cracked ceiling and send the German planes scuttling back across the Channel.

And why shouldn’t it? Robin thought, making her way through the rubble towards the big double doors at the end, following the other nurses now emerging from their hiding places, each with a child or two in their arms; she scares the hell out of everyone else, from the consultants down to me.

‘She’s taking this personally,’ Chick murmured in her ear as they managed to get to the doors. ‘Honestly, she’s the best secret weapon this country has. Churchill ought to pack her in a bomb and send her over to Berlin and drop her there. Then it’d all be over and I could go home and – ’

‘You dare,’ Robin said and reached out and punched her friend’s arm affectionately. ‘If we have to have a war to keep you here, then I suppose we’ll have to have a war – ’

‘Stop that chattering, nurses, and hurry up!’ Sister Marshall called down the ward behind them and with a soft groan Chick escaped through the double doors on Robin’s heels.

Outside in the wide corridor it was even worse. There was rubble everywhere and a reek of old plaster and dust and
somewhere beneath it the ominous smell of gas, all mixed up with the usual hospital smells of carbolic and Lysol, because the operating theatre at the end of the corridor was working full tilt, even though the raid was still on. The nurses there were frantically scrubbing instruments and bowls out in the corridor, using great buckets of disinfectant, because their sluice had been battered to uselessness an hour or two earlier. It had been one of the worst evenings ever, and Robin, stumbling a little as they reached the stairs, thought muzzily – it must be after eight thirty. Time I was off duty, surely? And then laughed aloud at the silliness of the notion of ever getting off duty in all this hubbub.

And hubbub there was. Somewhere outside the shattered windows where glass fragments hung precariously on the crisscrossed paper strips, people were shouting and there were bells ringing furiously as yet more firefighting equipment arrived, while inside there were the wails of the frightened children, although the Davidoff twins were still chortling as Chick bounced them on her shoulders and went hurrying down the stairs, picking her way as surely as a goat on a mountain-side.

Robin followed her gratefully, as usual. Ever since she had started as a very frightened junior probationer at the London Hospital in the days of the phoney war last September, when nothing much was happening and people were telling themselves optimistically it would all be over by Christmas, Chick had been her mentor, her friend and her supporter. And Robin felt a sharp pang of guilt as she thought how much she needed her; if she hadn’t happened to have been caught here that September when she’d been touring Europe, she’d have been safely at home in Toronto now, and Robin would have had no one to call her friend – but it was selfish of her to be glad Chick was so far away from her home and family. And, ashamed, she pushed the thought away.

The ward below was full of extra cots and the nurses there were bustling about, trying to settle the now thoroughly aroused new arrivals in some sort of order. Here there was dust, as there was everywhere in the hospital, Robin imagined, but the place hadn’t been damaged and she marvelled at how well the old structure was holding up. Their floor, she knew, had been badly knocked about, but even so, wasn’t totally unusable, and she relinquished Billy to the care of a second-year nurse of Marriot
Ward staff, and turned to go, as Chick, the Davidoff twins now ensconced side by side in the same cot and looking as though they were about to add their bawls to everyone else’s, came and grabbed her arm.

‘Better get back,’ she said. ‘That old fool’ll kill herself before she’ll go off and leave that mess behind. I hate the very sound of her name, but we’ll have to help her.’

‘Oh, she’s not that bad,’ Robin said as they made for the door. ‘Considering how old she is – I mean, she stood up to last week’s bashing well enough and got us all straight again, and now this – you can’t help but be sorry for her.’

‘I rather think I meant something along those lines,’ Chick said with some sarcasm. ‘Anyway, we’d better get back. It’s not over yet – I haven’t heard the all clear, have you? – and Staff Nurse here says she’s heard there’s another gas main fractured over the road and that could go too. It was that which caused the damage to this wing, it seems, not a direct hit or anything – ’

They were half-way up the stairs again by now, the other nurses following with their aprons crumpled and their caps askew, looking like a flock of ruffled geese, and Robin said anxiously, ‘A gas main? Then why did we get so damaged and Marriot Ward didn’t? I mean – ’

‘Ass!’ Chick said indulgently. ‘We’re on the main road side, right? Marriot faces out back. So we got the impact. It’ll be the same on the second and first floors too – Spruce and Willow’ll be pretty shook up – ’

‘Not so bad for them. They’re adult wards –’ Robin said.

‘And full of pretty sick people.’ Chick sounded grim. ‘They admitted dozens after Sunday’s lot. Come on, kid. We’d better get going. There’s a lot to do, and the Old Bat’ll be sure to try to get all the children back up here before the night’s out.’ And she pushed open the big double doors to Annie Zunz Ward and went in.

The lights were on again now behind the makeshift blackouts that had been put up, and down at the far end of the ward Robin could see the burly back of Todd, the ward orderly, fixing the last of them. And not for the first time marvelled at the speed and strength of the man. He said little – though when he did it sounded agreeable for he had a soft Scottish accent that Robin liked – but worked doggedly, no matter what was asked of him.

There had been times when Robin had wanted to protest at the sort of jobs Todd was given; the dirtiest and most effortful were always saved for him, and not just because he was a man and a big one at that. There were other men working in the hospital as porters and orderlies, but they were never treated as harshly as Todd was; but they weren’t conscientious objectors. Robin stifled her impulse to go down to help Todd and went instead to find Sister Marshall for instructions. It was none of her business why the man wasn’t willing to serve in the forces, like every other man with any shred of patriotism and hatred of the Nazis, and anyway he always looked so dour when you spoke to him that it put you off, she told herself.

But he was a great worker, and as the long hours went on in a frenzy of Sister Marshall-inspired cleaning and sweeping and checking of supplies, as the cupboards and cabinets which had been upended and shaken into total disorder were set right, she had many occasions to be grateful to him. Just as she and Chick were struggling to get a particularly heavy cabinet back into position, he appeared beside them and with apparent ease got the thing exactly where it should be; as Robin reached to get at a high shelf that needed cleaning but couldn’t quite manage it, he arrived beside her, all six foot three inches of him, and dealt with it for her. And though he did no more than nod his awareness of her thanks and said not a word, she felt better because he was there.

At three o’clock they stopped and Todd was sent to fetch tea for them all from the canteen in the basement, where the big shelters were, which he brought in a great enamel jug, a thick brew of particularly strong tea well laced with sweetened evaporated milk and extra sugar. And although at first Robin found it revolting, she discovered it gave her a powerful lift and took a second mugful, curling her now filthy hands round its comforting warmth contentedly, Sister Marshall with some huffing and puffing unearthed a tin of chocolate biscuits for them all and they sat there, half a dozen nurses and the bad-tempered Staff Nurse Puncheon and now much less annoyed Sister Marshall, recovering from it all.