When the Lights Come on Again (45 page)

He was interrupted before he could attempt to reassure her.

‘There’s a girl here,’ shouted Jim. ‘A nurse who’s brought in a badly injured baby. She says there’s no doctors down in Clydebank. I vote we go with her. Is anyone else game?’

Dominic Gallagher was unable to give much thought to whether the planes overhead were Heinkel 111s or Junker 88s. By quarter to ten, fifteen minutes after the main
Luftwaffe
squadron had arrived, all of the telephones were out - not to mention the electricity and water supply. Communication was crucial and the team of teenage messenger was standing by, the boys ready to criss-cross the town on their bikes.

‘But Liz! You can’t come with us! It’s not safe.’

Adam shook his head. ‘Don’t waste your breath, Jim. You’ll get nowhere with this one. She’s stubborn as a mule.’ He gave Liz a swift smile, doing his damnedest to put some reassurance into it. I’ll take my car. Jim, you’ll come with me. You too, Liz. That’ll leave more room in the ambulance for the others.’

‘We’ll need supplies,’ she said. Her voice sounded odd. Rusty, as though she hadn’t used it for a while.

One of the sisters was there before her, making up bundles of bandages and dressings, wrapping them up in hospital sheets like so many washerwomen’s bundles. She put one into Liz’s hands.

Adam turned to the woman and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Sister MacDonald, you’re a brick. Have we got morphia in here? I imagine pain relief’s going to be quite crucial.’ His voice was grim.

It was Sister MacLean who answered him. ‘We are not permitted to give you morphia.’ Her voice was carefully expressionless. ‘You’re all students. The Medical Superintendent insists, therefore, that you are not qualified to administer it. Furthermore, he declares that he will accept no responsibility for anything which any of you do tonight’

The students looked at her for a moment in shocked disbelief. ‘Then may God forgive him,’ said Adam fiercely. ‘Come on, Liz!’

Nowhere was safe. Not even the shelters. Several of them took direct hits, killing everyone inside. Terrified of suffering that fate, many people had elected to stay in their buildings. Neighbours gathered together, some in their reinforced closes, others in ground-floor flats. They sat in lobbies and hallways if they had them. If they didn’t, they picked a spot as far away as possible from the windows and the awful dangers of flying glass.

Other people rushed out into the open, terrified by the thought of sitting on the ground floor of three- and four-storey tenements with all that masonry above them. Some of them spent the night in the park - and lived.

One of the planes which had taken off from Stavanger in Norway dropped a parachute mine on one of the Holy City terraces. The front wall was completely blown off and thrown across the street. Helen Gallagher, tucked between Conor and her father as the family sat in the reinforced tenement close, was sucked clean out of the building by the blast. Her last recollection was of her father trying to grab her. Then nothing. Only blackness.

First-aid posts had to be hurriedly moved to other sites when their original locations were hit. A school which housed one of them was one of the first places to go up. Along with the timber store at Singer’s, it made a wonderful beacon for the incoming German pilots, guiding them to their prey.

‘At least,’ said Peter MacMillan laconically to a fellow warden, ‘we’ve got enough light to see by. It makes a nice change.’

‘Why are we going this way?’ asked Liz, as they headed along Highburgh Road towards Great Western Road, following the ambulance. She was breathless after the run to Morag. Fortunately, the little car had been parked not too far away. ‘Wouldn’t Dumbarton Road be quicker?’

‘Think about it, Liz,’ urged Adam. ‘We’ll have to go into Clydebank from the top - along the Boulevard and drop down that way. Dumbarton Road could well be impassable. They’ll be trying to hit John Brown’s and Rothesay Dock, although they’ll be going for Singer’s too, I expect— Oh, hell, I’m sorry.’

He took his hand briefly off the wheel and laid it on her own. She was convulsively clutching the bundle of dressings and bandages.

John Brown’s and Rothesay Dock. Her parents’ house was sandwiched between the two. And Helen’s home was only yards away from Singer’s.

Oh, please God, let Helen and the baby be safe. And Mother and Father. And Grandad too. With a guilty start, Liz realised that everyone would be sending up the same sort of prayer. Not at the expense of anyone else, God. Oh God, not that.

‘Are you sure you’re all right about this? About coming?’ Adam swung the wheel to turn them from Hyndland Road into Great Western Road.

‘I’ll have to be, won’t I? I’m not going to be much bloody use to anybody otherwise.’

‘Good girl.’

They drove in silence past the handsome villas on Great Western Road and the grounds of Gartnavel, the rambling Victorian psychiatric hospital set in its own grounds behind Bingham’s Pond. They passed through the man-made cavern of the red sandstone tenements at Anniesland Cross. When they emerged from them they got a full view of the night sky over Clydebank.

‘God Almighty!’

‘What pretty colours,’ drawled Jim Barclay from the back seat. Liz rounded on him, eyes blazing as brightly as the flames in front of them.

‘That’s my home town that’s burning!’

The lad’s face crumpled and he stretched a hand forward to her. ‘Och, MacMillan, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I’m trying to pretend that I’m not scared to death, that’s all!’

She found his hand and squeezed it. ‘I know,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘I know.’

‘Maybe we should all say a wee prayer,’ muttered Adam. Youthful cynicism forgotten, they did so.

‘Shall I try St Jude as well?’

‘Every saint you can think of,’ said Adam. ‘We’re not proud. I can think of a poem which might be appropriate, too. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred, perhaps. What the fu—’

Liz blinked. She’d rarely heard him swear. Given that he’d stamped down hard on the brakes in order to prevent Morag disappearing down a large crater which had materialized in front of them, she was disposed to let it go. Just this once.

He reversed and swerved over on to the other carriageway of the Boulevard to get around the obstruction. Liz glanced over at the fields to her left. The open area between the road and East Kilbowie was full of bright lights.

‘Incendiaries, I think,’ muttered Jim Barclay. ‘At least they won’t do much harm there.’

‘Here goes,’ said Adam a few minutes later, as he pulled off the Boulevard into Kilbowie Road. ‘Where to, Liz? I’m not sure how far we’ll be able to take the car.’

‘Radnor Park Church Hall,’ she said breathlessly: ‘There’s a first-aid post there. It’s not far. Keep going along Kilbowie Road as far as you can.’

There were people everywhere: lying on stretchers, slumped in chairs, being brought in by rescue parties. First-aiders were doing what they could, but the relief was palpable when the white-coated medical students entered the room. A shout of welcome went up.

‘Nice to be appreciated at last,’ muttered Jim Barclay. As they passed through the rows of stretchers and camp beds, heading for the people who seemed to be in charge, a middle-aged man, his face smeared with grime and streaks of blood, lifted a hand and gripped Adam’s sleeve.

‘God bless you for coming, son. God bless you.’

Adam patted him gently on the shoulder. It was the one part of him which seemed to be uninjured. Standing behind Adam, waiting for him to move on, Liz glanced down at the grey blanket which covered the lower half of the man’s body. It was curiously flat. Then she realized. He had lost his legs.

She wanted to be sick. Behind her, Jim gripped her elbow. She heard Adam’s voice through a buzzing in her ears.

‘We’ll be right with you, sir. Give us a minute or two to get organized.’

He moved on, his white sleeve now stained red.
The patients come first. The patients come first.
Liz forced down the bile rising in her throat and plastered a smile onto her face.

‘God bless you too, pet. We need a few bonnie nurses to go with the handsome doctors, is that no’ right?’

Like Adam, she put a comforting hand to the man’s shoulder. ‘Nae bother,’ she said. ‘We didnae want to miss out on the excitement.’

Incredibly, the blood-stained face broke into a smile. ‘Aye, better than Guy Fawkes Night this, eh, hen? Imagine yon young doctor calling me
sir
! And him so well-spoken too.’

Half an hour later the man died in Liz’s arms. She laid him gently down and went on to the next person who needed her. She was desperately worried about her own people: her parents, Helen, her grandfather, the Gallaghers. Every moment she dreaded turning round and seeing one of her own loved ones lying there with terrible injuries.

She dealt with it in the only way she knew how - in the only way possible. As the bombs fell all around them, Liz cleaned wounds, bandaged limbs, applied dressings and gave what reassurance she could to dazed and distressed people.

In a strange way she was helped by the sheer awfulness of it all. Was she really in Clydebank, her own familiar little home town? Could this horror actually be happening?

It was a night when she saw the best and the worst of humanity. A line of Robert Burns came back to her:
man’s inhumanity to man
. She wondered about the people who had chosen to unleash this awful suffering on a civilian population, snug in their houses on a cold March night, listening to the nine o’clock news on the wireless.

She tended a mother who was desperately clutching a baby. Liz suspected the poor little mite was dead. It was... and Liz persuaded the girl to let go of her precious burden.

‘We have to identify the dead, Nurse,’ someone murmured in her ear,
sotto voce
so that the young mother didn’t hear. ‘As far as we can. Some luggage labels for you.’ And so, dry-eyed, Liz coaxed the Christian name and surname of the child - a little girl - out of the shocked mother, and tied a luggage label around the tiny blood-stained wrist.

There was inhumanity on the ground too: people who thought only of themselves, who wanted their injuries treated now - before others who were much more seriously hurt. Liz also knew there would be people out there taking advantage of the situation. There would be looting going on. But her abiding memory was of people’s courage and care for each other.

The messenger boys were risking their young lives to keep the control centre and the first-aid and ARP posts in touch with each other. Ambulance drivers were taking their lives in their hands to transport the badly injured to hospitals outside the danger zone.

Rescue workers, dashing from close to close as the bombs dropped, were saving other people’s families whilst desperately worried about their own. They spoke also of men and women crawling back into the wreckage of their ruined buildings to comfort neighbours who were trapped.

There were the badly wounded people who, seeing the fear in others’ faces, made jokes in the midst of their pain. As she moved among the injured, Liz heard little snatches of conversation.

One man reported being blown out of his house and waking up to find himself surrounded by packets of tea.

‘What did you do?’

‘Stuffed a few of them in my pockets, of course. Would you like one, Doctor?’

Another, garrulous with relief because both he and his wife had survived a bomb which had buried several of their neighbours, was now making fun of his better half.

‘We were in the close and she wanted to go back up to the hoose. To check that the fire was still in, if you please! Well, says I to her - it’s Jerry who’s keeping the home fires burning for us the night! And he’s making a bloody good job of it, tae!’

Shortly before midnight they heard that the whisky bond at Yoker Distillery had sustained a direct hit. That provoked an unreasonable amount of hilarity.