Blitz (2 page)

Outside the flames still flickered in spite of the efforts of the firemen, as they could see when they turned out the lights and lifted a blackout from one glassless window and looked out across the road. The once familiar row of shops and buildings
there was pitted with gaps where bombs had fallen, so that it looked like an old man’s teeth, and heaps of smoking, flaming rubble replaced the tobacconist’s and the pub on the corner where the housemen sneaked off to get some rest and recreation and the more racy of the nurses sometimes joined them. Chick looked mournfully at the tobacconist’s and sighed.

‘Bang goes my best black-marketeer,’ she said gloomily. ‘He always had a packet of Weights under the counter for me. Now what’ll I do?’

‘Give up smoking?’ Robin suggested and Chick threw her a look of mock horror.

‘Do you want me to give up living?’ she said. ‘Listen, what’d life be worth without sneaking off for a crafty drag behind the Old Bat’s back?’

‘She’s not so bad,’ Robin said and looked back over her shoulder to see where Sister Marshall was in the dimness. ‘Those chocolate biscuits had to be hers, you know. They were never supplied by the Bursar’s office.’

‘Oh, she’s not such an old toad,’ Chick said carelessly. ‘Listen, hon, when do you think she’ll let us off duty?’

‘Fourpence gets you a quid she’ll make us wait till four and then fetch the children back to have their treatment here before their breakfasts.’

‘But there aren’t any windows. They’ll freeze!’

‘Hardly,’ Robin said drily. ‘It’s been as hot a September as anyone can remember – and that’s not just the bombs. No, you’ll see. She can’t bear not to have her patients under her own eyes.’

And so it was. By the time they were allowed to go off duty, the children, in the cots and beds that Sister Marshall had somehow repaired or scrounged, with Todd to help her do it, were back in Annie Zunz and bouncing around shouting for attention with as much verve as if they’d not lost half the night to the German bombers, and Robin had scurried about among them with clean nappies and bottles of milk and rusks as though she had five feet all running at the same time with each one of them aching miserably. She felt as though she had been working for uncountable hours.

And indeed she had; yesterday should have been her last day on duty, which meant she should have gone off last night at eight thirty, to come on in the morning and work till noon, and
then off to bed ready to come back with the Daughters of Dracula, as everyone called the night staff, at eight o’clock. As it was, she had, like everyone else, worked a straight twenty hours and she was beginning to feel very odd in consequence. Her head was spinning and her eyes felt heavy and gritty, but she didn’t feel sleepy any more. There had been moments during the night when she hadn’t been able to hide her jaw-cracking yawns, finding it impossible to avoid Sister Marshall seeing her gaping wide, but Sister Marshall who, for all her famous tetchiness and demands for perfection on her ward, was a good enough soul as everyone agreed, had pretended not to notice and sent Todd to get some more tea for them all.

But now, as the pearly light of the late summer morning crept through the cracks in the blackout and Todd could at last take the hideous things down as the hospital carpenter arrived with boards to close off some of the windows, and some precious glass to reglaze enough of them to give the ward some daylight, Robin was on the point of exhaustion. Together with Chick and Staff Nurse Puncheon and the three first-years, Moriarty and McCulloch and Brown, she stood drooping in front of Sister’s desk, waiting to be sent off duty at last, and yearning for rest. And Staff Nurse Puncheon snapped at her, ‘Stand up straight, Bradman, for heaven’s sake. We don’t want Sister seeing you looking like that, do we? And do tidy your cap! Busy or not, you don’t have to look like a guttersnipe.’

Robin reddened and pinched Chick’s arm hard, knowing her friend was about to make some sort of retort, and that would never do; unlike Sister Marshall, the Staff Nurse, a singularly sour young woman with heavy overhanging front teeth that gave her a perpetually angry look, and a rather spotty complexion, was never known to be anything but thoroughly vindictive. To get on her wrong side could be disaster for any young nurse, especially one who had straight teeth and a smooth complexion. That was well known to raise Puncheon’s ire to fever pitch. So, they both subsided and Robin did all she could to straighten her cap and stand up straight, as Sister Marshall, by some miracle looking as neat as she always did, came hurrying along the ward towards them.

‘Well now, nurses,’ she said briskly. ‘You’ve all done very well. I’m most impressed by your efforts, and reports of your good work will go to Matron. Thank you very much. We’ve
been lucky – none of the children were hurt and they will soon be doing very well again, though they’ll need some extra naps today, no doubt. For yourselves, it’s high time you went. Nurse Puncheon, you may take the rest of the day off, and I won’t expect to see you till seven tomorrow morning. I can get a relief to hold the fort – ’

‘Oh, I’ll work, Sister,’ Puncheon said, with the sort of radiant and self-sacrificing smile on her face that always made Chick mime violent vomiting. ‘It’s no trouble to – ’

‘No, Staff Nurse,’ Sister Marshall said firmly. ‘I have made the arrangement I want. Nurses Chester and Bradman, you are due on night duty, are you not? Take tonight off, and report on Wednesday night. I will deal with Matron’s office on that. You are both to go to Casualty. Take care of yourselves down there. It won’t be as easy as it was here, you know.’

‘No, Sister,’ said Chick and glowed, tired as she was, and Robin was amused. Old Chick loved to be where the biggest hubbub was, adoring the busyness of Casualty, though Robin herself shrank from it; anything could come in through the great doors to the vast tiled waiting hall, any sort of injury and any sort of danger; but if Chick was to be there too, she told herself, she could cope well enough – perhaps.

‘ – if you don’t mind, Nurse Bradman.’ She heard Sister Marshall’s voice and realized she had been talking to her and reddened.

‘I’m sorry, Sister, I was – I didn’t hear.’

‘That was very apparent. Go to bed, nurse, at once. I’ve told the rest of you when to return on duty. Now go and have a good breakfast and take care of yourselves. You’ll need all the energy you’ve got to see you through the rest of these difficult days. But it’s all excellent training for you. Make the most of it.’

And Robin again managed not to laugh aloud at the familiarity of Sister Marshall’s harangue and went gratefully trailing over to the Nurses’ Home for the bath and bed she so ached for. It had been another hellish night, but they’d survived it. They could again.

Considering how exhausted she had been when she had fallen into bed at seven, Robin slept poorly. The noise from the streets outside made by the lorries and fire appliances still trying to deal with the effects of last night’s raids, and the heat of the September afternoon that built up steadily in her small room on the ground floor of the Nurses’ Home, combined to make her toss restlessly and dream fitfully. And at two in the afternoon she gave up the struggle, and rolled over on to her back to lie with hands clasped behind her head, staring at the golden glowing blind over her window, and letting confused thoughts drift in and out of her head.

She’d never get any studying done for the Anatomy and Physiology exam, she told herself, and considered for a while getting up and spending the rest of the day studying till it was time to go on duty; and then banished the idea as fast as it had come. The work would have to be done eventually, air raids or no air raids, with the October exams looming, but she couldn’t be expected to do any work today, not after last night’s efforts, shaky though her knowledge was of the heart, its arteries and nerve supply and the structure and function of the eye. Maybe they’d have a quiet night on Casualty and she’d be able to do some then, she thought optimistically; and then grinned at herself in the dim afternoon light. Quiet, on Casualty, in these incredible days? A ridiculous notion.

Her mind drifted away; she should have phoned Ma before falling into bed, weary as she had been; Ma always fretted so when there were raids – and when weren’t there, these nights? – and she’d be getting herself into a proper lather. I’ll call her soon, Robin promised herself drowsily, and let a picture of her
mother and the Norland Square house unfold in front of her eyes. The small room on the second floor that was hers with all her childhood dolls and books still scattered about; the nursery at the top of the house, with its rocking horse and doll’s house, and the contrast of the drawing room on the first floor, with its exotic, if now rather shabby, decor of Bakst fabrics and Eastern cushions. Her own father had designed that room, Ma had told her, and both she and David wanted to keep it that way as long as they could, though it had been done so long ago – before the First War even, the Great War, as they called it. Ha! thought Robin, remembering last night; it couldn’t have been greater than this one, and went on with her memory’s tour of the house that was home. She ended in the comfortable cluttered kitchen down in the basement with its scrubbed wooden table and the old rag rug, washed almost white now, in front of the shiny blackleaded range, and old Goosey pottering about and making a fuss of everyone who came within reach. Robin’s lips curved; dear old Goosey must be over eighty now, and still thinking she ran the house for her beloved Mrs Poppy and Mr David and the children, when in reality she was as much a burden to Poppy as a help. Not that anyone would ever dream of letting the old darling know that. Her place in the Deveen family was too important for that.

Deveen, thought Robin and yawned. Would I like to be called Robin Deveen now? They’d asked her, just after they’d married, what she wanted to do. She could have changed her name to match her stepfather’s and mother’s if she chose; but even at the age of only eight she’d known what she wanted.

‘It wouldn’t be fair, would it, David?’ she’d said, and the grown-up Robin, in her crumpled hot bed in the Nurses’ home in Whitechapel Road could almost hear her own childish treble in her memory’s ears. ‘I mean, I know I never saw my father and he never saw me, but he was my father. Mummy explained about that. It wouldn’t be right, would it? Not after him being in the Great War and everything.’

‘You’re absolutely right about that, Robin.’ David had said gravely. ‘I couldn’t agree more. You are
absolutely
right. But I’ll tell you what – you can borrow my name if you ever need it. Okay? There may be times when it could come in handy to have another label to use. You never know.’

Robin had laughed at the time, quite convinced that was just
another of David’s sillinesses, but he’d been right. There had indeed been lots of times, when Chloe was being particularly ghastly, when Robin had yearned to stop being a Bradman, the way Chloe was, and had wished to be a Deveen like David and Ma. Like the time Chloe had got divorced; and at that memory Robin turned over in bed with a convulsive movement and tried to banish Chloe from her mind.

But she wouldn’t go and Robin lay curled on her side, still staring at the oblong of golden blind and thought about Chloe. So beautiful, so selfish, so unkind, so thoughtless, the nastiest sister – well, half-sister – anyone could possibly have. The divorce had been awful because Chloe, out of sheer horridness, according to fourteen-year-old Robin, had reverted to her single name, and plastered it all over the newspapers. Going to school all through that summer had been frightful, simply frightful. The other girls had stared at her and whispered as one nastiness after another came out in court and was published with lip-smacking relish in papers like the
Daily Mirror
(oh, the shame of it!) and the
Daily Sketch
(oh, the even greater shame!). Which had been a strange experience for Robin, because she had always been popular with everyone as a lively person and a good hardworking one, too. Chloe had made it all so horrible that Robin had begged her mother to take her away from school and Poppy had been inclined to refuse (‘It’s such a good school, darling, and you’re doing so well. This’ll soon be forgotten, honestly it will!’) but it had been David who had made it possible to go on, and get over it, and prove his Poppy was right.

‘You have to give people the chance to be themselves,’ he had said in that soft American voice of his which never changed, however long he lived in England and which Robin had come to love as much as she had once hated it. ‘Chloe is what she is, a sad and sorry lady, and we just have to live with that. Pretending she isn’t your sister won’t help. You’ll know she is, you see, and that means other people will too. Stick with it and you’ll like yourself a whole lot more than you would if you tried to duck out. Give it a shot, anyway.’

And she had, and they had been right, Ma and David; it had ended with Chloe divorced and given lots of money from it – because her husband had been immensely rich, as rich as he was nasty, it seemed – and everyone at school had got all excited
about Fay Wray in
King Kong
and swooned over Greta Garbo in
Queen Christina
and forgotten the Chloe fuss and that had been that. Chloe had gone on her usual way, though she hadn’t married again (thank heaven, thought Robin), and everything had been fine.

Until the war had started and it all got so horrid, if in a different way. And Robin turned on to her back again and scowled at the blind. The first days had been so disagreeable, what with Ma and David having to do so much with their work, and at the same time persuade Lee and Joshy to be evacuated. Lee had been sensible enough but Joshy had not, and had screamed and sulked and made no end of a fuss.

‘For all the world,’ Lee had said with all the scorn of a sophisticated eleven-year-old, ‘as though he were four instead of eight. Do shut up, Joshy. You’re making it worse for everyone. I’ll be there to look after you.’

Poor old Joshy, thought Robin as she saw the image of her small half-brother scowling in her mind’s eye, the shock of black hair that always fell into his eyes in its usual tangle and his dark eyes staring pugnaciously through it. Poor Joshy. Twice he’d run away already; and twice they’d made him go back. He must drive Goosey’s nephew potty, she thought, trying to keep an eye on him on that rambling farm in Norfolk. She remembered it well, from the times Goosey had taken her there to visit when she’d been small and Ma and David had first married. She’d hated it at first, had been angry with David for taking up so much of Ma’s time when Robin had always had her to herself, but it had got easier and easier as time had gone on and now the thought of life without David was insupportable. And she smiled at the blind, thinking of her stepfather, who always managed somehow to make her laugh.