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‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Chick said tartly. ‘You certainly look as though you’re a different person to the one we worked with, so have a go. Where are you two off to?’

Robin was mortified. She wouldn’t have asked the question had her life depended on it, though God knew she wanted to. The sight of Hamish looking so very well spruced up had rendered her almost speechless. And then angry. It wasn’t that she felt she had any right to be consulted about his comings and goings; they were, after all, only friends and no more than that. She had no special claims on him and would have been very alarmed had he attempted to consult her on all he did or planned to do, but still the sight of him so obviously prepared as he was to meet her half-sister had filled her with a great rush of feeling, and she had to admit to herself, shaming thought though it was, that it was sheer jealousy.

And that had confused her. Staring at her hands, which were now quite still instead of rolling swabs, she tried again to deal with that. Hamish was a friend, that was all; or was it all? That was the thought that had been forced to the surface of her mind by his appearance that morning, and she still hadn’t answered it satisfactorily. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about such matters as boyfriends and falling in love, or that she wasn’t aware of how important they could be. Didn’t she hear the other nurses talking interminably about their own adventures – or lack of them – until her head buzzed with it? It was just that she didn’t know what her own feelings were. Yet she suspected they were a good deal stronger than she had realized, for why otherwise would that morning encounter have upset her so?

It had been Chloe who had answered Chick’s question. ‘Oh, nowhere you’d be interested in,’ she had said airily and moved
forward to link her arm with Hamish’s in a proprietorial fashion. ‘I just happened to know of a marvellous exhibition all about Scottish involvement with the English, you know, James the First and the Fourth and all that stuff, not to speak of Bonny Prince Thingummy. It’s at the London Museum, so that’s where we’re off too. Toodle-oo, my dears!’ And she had swept Hamish away into her small car and with a last flip of her hand out of the window had taken it noisily out of the gates and into the Whitechapel Road.

They had stood there in silence for a moment and then Chick had said disgustedly, ‘Well, what a stupid lie that was!’

‘What?’ Robin said vaguely, still trying to deal with the confusion of feeling she had experienced.

‘I said that was a stupid lie. Of course they’re not going to any museum! She must think we’re really barmy to swallow that!’

Robin had looked at her, trying to pay sensible attention; it was difficult but she had to try.

‘Why?’

‘Because everyone knows they’ve closed the museums, or most of ’em, for the duration. Sent all the exhibits off to Devon or somewhere to keep them safe, and shut up shop. So why try and tell us that’s where they’re going?’

Robin had felt her face go stiff with dull anger. ‘Hamish wouldn’t lie though –’ she had to say it, knowing him as she did. He might be quiet, but that he was honest and cared a great deal about what he regarded as right and wrong was undoubted.

‘Wouldn’t he!’ Chick had said and taken her arm and forced her to start the walk to the dining room, and ultimately bed. ‘He lied over that message that wasn’t sent, didn’t he?’

‘But that was different –’ Robin had said, and then no more. They had both dropped the matter as though they’d agreed to, but it had rankled with Robin and it still did.

Since that morning she had seen Chloe’s car twice more in the yard, and had hurried on, her head down, affecting not to have noticed. But all the same, she had been stung, and had kept well out of Hamish’s way ever since. If that was what he wanted, she had told herself furiously, that’s what he can damn well have. I don’t care tuppence.

She jumped than as Staff Nurse Meek’s voice came from
behind her, as strident as ever, if not more so. ‘If you’ve nothing better to do than stand there cuddling that cotton wool, Nurse Bradman, I’ll find something for you. One of these drunks has been sick in the far cubicle. Go and clean it at once – ’

‘I’ve done it, Staff Nurse.’ This time it was Hamish’s voice that made Robin’s head snap round and she stared at him as he went stomping past them with his covered bucket and mop and he looked at Robin with a faint smile and then at Nurse Meek with an expression of stolid stupidity which, had Robin not been so angry with him, would have made her laugh aloud.

‘Oh, trust you two to hang together!’ Meek shrilled. ‘It’s no more than I’d expect from the likes of you, Bradman – hanging around with domestics. It’s all you’re fit for, isn’t it? Well, then – ’

It started suddenly, almost overhead, and they all stood silently as the noise swooped on them and then Hamish said loudly, ‘I didn’t hear them start over the docks the way they usually do –’ just as another siren took up the clamour.

Sister Priestland, hitherto locked in her office, appeared from nowhere out of the tiled floor, surging into the middle of the waiting hall like a very small but very wind-filled galleon, her full bust seeming to pull her forwards.

‘Right!’ she called. ‘Get yourselves together and start moving, everyone. There’s sure to be big trouble here soon. Get those drunks on their way as fast as you can and make sure every cubicle is set up and ready. I want all the available blood there is and then plasma, and the wards checked for available beds. Nurse Bradman, leave those drums and get the anaesthetic equipment checked. Nurse Chester, I want dressing packs and drips sets in every cubicle, and Todd, bring in all the spare oxygen and nitrous oxide cylinders as well as the CO
₂
– ’

The instructions came out in a steady stream and the whole department seemed to scatter in a maelstrom of movement as the sirens went on and on shrieking overhead and others took up the noise. And then there was the even more ominous sound of planes, flying low and in large numbers. The London Hospital’s Casualty Department braced itself for a heavy night.

The readiness was the easy part. Within fifteen minutes of the sirens sounding the alarm, the Casualty department was poised and able to deal with a positive flood of casualties. The drunks were gone, banished for treatment elsewhere in the hospital – Robin never did find out where – and the benches in the waiting hall all stretched silent and glossy with the polish imparted by thousands of serge-clad East End bottoms over the years. But the casualties didn’t come. The sirens stopped their noise and the doctors and nurses braced themselves for the usual din of whistling bombs and explosions and gunfire to come but none of it did – not even the ack-ack response from Victoria Park they were so used to – and still there were no ambulances shrieking up to the doors outside, still no stretchers dragged in by sweating First Aiders and ARP post wardens.

It was Dr Landow who found out what was going on. He went out into the street to see what was happening, which scandalized the gate porter, Thomas, who believed that everyone but himself must be kept within doors while an alert was in progress, and came back to head for the phone in Sister’s office. When he emerged his face was grim.

‘It’s different this time,’ he said, and Sister, who had set her nurses to rolling those interminable cotton wool swabs on the principle that they’d get tired out from doing nothing at all, turned her head and said drily, ‘We’d guessed as much. What is it? Gas? I’ve just the three emergency respirators, you know. It’s the one I’ve always told everyone we’d not be able to handle so well – ’

He shook his head. ‘Not gas, thank God. Not really all that many people either, which is what matters most. It’s the City – ’

‘The City?’

‘I’ve talked to them at Bart’s and Guy’s. They’re pounding the city with fire bombs. None of your big stuff, but it’s doing terrible damage. It’s burning like crazy, according to old Geoff Lovell at Guy’s. He says the Thames is at low tide and the fire service have no pressure in their hoses and there are whole streets burning and nothing to stop ’em. It’s 1666 all over again.’

‘The City,’ Sister Priestland said and then rubbed her eyes with the heels of both hands. ‘Bloody vandals,’ she said loudly. ‘Bloody vandals!’

The nurses stared at her, amazed and shocked. Sister Priest-land to swear? And even as they looked at her she blushed and muttered something that sounded as though it might have been an apology.

‘It’s the only description,’ Sam Landow said. ‘Wren’s London up in flames – it’s worse than vandalism. But at least it’s not too many people. Most of the buildings are empty and locked at weekends, you see, especially now, between Christmas and New Year. Most of the people they’re getting in at the other hospitals are firefighters and wardens and so forth – hang on – here we go!’

They had all heard it, and pushed the dressing preparation trolley into its cubbyhole and made for the big doors as a group, ready to take their first patients. It was Sam Landow who opened the big doors and the stretchers came bustling in, and with them the reek of burned rubber and cloth and leather.

They filled the cubicles at once, but unlike the bedlam caused by other raids, especially of high explosives, there were few bewildered people sitting or lying in the waiting hall until they could be treated. The place was well in control of the amount of work there was, and Robin and Landow, who were working together in her usual far cubicle, had actually finished their patient and seen him, his dreadfully blackened face well covered with vaseline gauze, off to his bed in the ward, and had stopped to tidy their dressing trolley when Sister Priestland put her head round the curtain.

‘Dr Landow,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your obs. training, haven’t you?’

He lifted his chin sharply. ‘Yes – Got one coming in?’

She shook her head. ‘Guy’s called. They’ve got a domiciliary
case calling from Fenchurch Street, would you believe. Caretaker’s wife at a bank – in the first stage, they said. The woman sent for a midwife but all theirs at Guy’s are out or involved in the pressures they’ve got on their Casualty department and they can’t help at Bart’s either. Our midwives have a full ward and can’t go and anyway they want a doctor. The girl’s had a pre-partum haemorrhage already – ’

‘Jesus, why didn’t they admit her?’ He was half-way out of the cubicle. ‘I’ll deal with it. Give me the address. And Sister –’ He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. ‘I’ll need another pair of hands. Can I take Nurse Bradman here? She’s deft enough to make up for not having a midder training and she takes orders well – can you spare her?’

‘Off you go, Nurse.’ Sister Priestland nodded at Robin and she, staring with shock at them both, opened her mouth to speak, closed it and then opened it again like a half-witted fish.

‘No time for that,’ Sam Landow said briskly. ‘Come on.’ And she was off, almost running behind him.

He stopped at the instrument cupboard. ‘Get me dressing towels, big swabs, some small ones and a roll of gamgee,’ he instructed over his shoulder as he pulled items out of the cupboards. ‘And a bottle of Lysol and some mercurochrome and ask Sister for a sterile drum of gowns and gloves. They’ll have nothing there, I’m sure.’

Staff Nurse Meek came surging across the waiting hall and tried to put herself in between Robin and Sam.

‘I’ll deal with this, sir,’ she said smoothly. ‘Nurse, get back to your work. Now, Doctor – ’

‘No, thank you, Nurse Meek,’ he said firmly and handed the instruments he’d collected to Robin. ‘Sister’s sent Nurse Bradman to help me. Put those in the bag you’ll find in the corner of the office, nurse, and make sure all its bottles are full, will you? There should be spirit, some carbolic acid and silver nitrate as well as the other things I asked you for. I’ll check the ergotamine and the needles and suture materials. Excuse me, Nurse Meek.’ And he pushed his way past her.

And Staff Nurse Meek, who didn’t know whether to be more mortally offended because Dr Landow had addressed her simply as ‘Nurse’ instead of her justly entitled ‘Staff Nurse’ or because she had been passed over in favour of a much-hated junior, stood there blankly without a word to say. That was,
Robin decided, the sweetest moment of her entire life so far.

But there was a great deal more to come. She had pulled on her cape, well aware that it was a cold night and prepared to be chilled to the marrow, but when she got into the yard and followed Sam Landow’s headlong rush towards the parked cars on one side, she was startled to find that the wind that was blowing strongly from the west was a warm one. But it was not the normal warmth of a spring breeze. It came in hot gusts and brought thick flakes of soot and the stench of burning wood, and beneath that an even more ominous smell that she preferred not to think about. There couldn’t be that sort of smell, could there? Not
people
–

The car bore a large white cross painted on its roof and on both the front doors, as well as white paint on its mudguards and running boards, and she bundled herself into it as fast as she could as Sam Landow stowed the bag and the dispensary basket, now containing the dressings drum and the extra lotions he’d asked for, on the back seat, and then came and clambered in himself.

‘I’ve been expecting calls like this from the beginning,’ he said, as he pulled the steering wheel round and hauled the car into the main road. ‘Painted the crosses on, the lot, to be ready, but this is the first time I’ve needed it. But it’ll show the rest of ’em I was on the right tracks. They’ll stop laughing at me now – ’

‘Who laughed?’ Robin almost gasped it as she hung on grimly, for the car was not as well equipped with springs as it was with white crosses, and the bumping was horrendous.

‘Oh, the other fellows in the mess – listen, I’d better give you a quick lecture on the normal delivery. Listen hard. It should help. Don’t think you can remember it all at once because you can’t, but once we’re there and in the thick of it you’ll have an idea what’s going on. So, here goes.’

She would never forget the next ten minutes, not if she lived to be a hundred, Robin decided. As the crazily painted little car careered along the Whitechapel Road towards the crimson glow that now filled the sky ahead, she listened to his shouted account of a baby’s birth. She knew the basic female anatomy and physiology well enough, but had only the sketchiest notion of what happened to the anatomy when it was in full working order, and listening now as he spoke of the cervix dilating and
the infant pushing its head against the perineum she began to feel decidedly alarmed. It wasn’t just the fact that they were heading for the centre of what looked like the most incredible inferno, but that she was to help someone with what was obviously a great deal more complicated procedure than she would ever have imagined. He spoke of the baby’s neck flexing, of the crowning of the occiput and the risk of the umbilical cord being round the neck and how to deal with it after the presenting shoulder delivered –