Читать книгу Women on the Home Front: Family Saga 4-Book Collection - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 28

Chapter Seventeen

‘Is there any more news about Dunkirk?’ Tilly asked Olive anxiously, having raced home from work to change into her St John Ambulance uniform, ignoring the discomfort of its heaviness in the heat of the early June afternoon. Like the rest of the country, she had far more on her mind than herself.

‘No real news, but according to Mrs Windle the troop trains are still full when they reach London, which must mean something.’

Dunkirk. How quickly the name had become familiar, so that over the space of a handful of days it was on everyone’s lips, the echo of its horror and bravery the beat of everyone’s heart.

Dunkirk – the beach beyond which the British Expedition Force had retreated until they could retreat no further, after the Germans had smashed through the supposedly unsmashable Maginot Line.

Dunkirk – from where not just the might of the British Establishment but the love and bravery of Britain’s ordinary citizens, in their small vessels, had plucked the waiting men to safety, bearing them home across the Channel in voyage after voyage.

Olive and Tilly had seen what Dunkirk had done to once-proud fighting men. Olive manned one of the many WVS tea urns, and Tilly helped the walking wounded when they arrived at St Pancras station, one of the London stations into which troop trains came pouring to disgorge weary retreat-scarred men from the British Expeditionary Force; men who had left behind in France not only their guns and equipment but also their pride.

In three short days Tilly felt she had left her own youth behind her, just as those men had left behind them their dead comrades and their self-belief. The sight of grown men with blank expressions and eyes that constantly looked beyond her, as her St John Ambulance unit worked amongst the wounded, no longer shocked her as it had done that first day.

Men in dirty mud-spattered uniforms, rank with the dried sweat of fear, who couldn’t look her in the eye; men with dirty bandages wrapped around wounds; men who broke down and wept with shame and relief when they were greeted with a hot cup of tea and a warm smile – Tilly had seen them all.

Because it was her turn to drive the WVS van, Olive said that she would take Tilly to St Pancras along with the members of her WVS unit she was due to pick up from the vicarage. Crouched in the back of the van, Tilly was filled with admiration for the way her mother drove, manoeuvring it with the new confidence the last few days had given her. Olive had even been co-opted into ferrying some of the walking wounded to various London hospitals for out-patient treatment.

The most seriously injured men and the stretcher cases had been sent to hospitals closer to the coast, Sally had told them. The London hospitals were only dealing with the more minor cases; cleaning up wounds, before the men travelled onward to take advantage of the two weeks of home leave they had all been granted.

One of Tilly’s jobs had been to check with those arriving at St Pancras that they had sent off one of the postcards they had been issued with on arrival on British shores, to tell their relatives they were safe.

It was as she handed out postcards to those who, for one reason or another, had not already sent them that she had a glimpse of what was concealed behind the men’s blank expressions, as though the thought of those waiting for them at home was the key that turned the lock on their emotions.

This evening the number of men filling the platforms seemed larger than ever.

Craning her neck, Tilly tried to see where the milling mass ended, as she and Agnes stood together with their bag of postcards and their instructions to send those men who looked most in need of medical attention to the St John Ambulance post behind them on the station’s main waiting area, where they would be checked over and dealt with or sent on to hospital for further medical treatment.

Men were caked in a mixture of mud from the retreat across France, sand from the beaches, salt from the Channel and, in some cases, oil as well. After three days Tilly had learned enough to know that oil meant the men had been rescued from torpedoed ships.

Down at the other end of the concourse, closer to the exit, her mother, along with various other WVS groups, would be serving the men tea and biscuits, the first drink, some men told her, they had had since leaving France.

A soldier, grey-skinned and dead-eyed, standing in the line a couple of yards away from them caught Tilly’s eye. He was being supported by the man next to him, who looked equally done in.

‘Grab these two,’ Tilly told Agnes, the two girls stepping up to the men, and only just in time, Tilly recognised as the soldier being supported stumbled, and almost fell into her arms.

‘Sorry, miss,’ his companion, hollow-cheeked with exhaustion, his face grimy with oil and dirt, apologised. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken,’ Tilly assured him, gesturing to her uniform. ‘That’s what we’re here for. Has he got any injuries, do you know?’

She could almost see the soldier, who had been looking defensive and wary, relax a little at her words, as Tilly gently set the semi-conscious man back to his feet so that his companion could once again support him.

Tilly had learned that every soldier seemed to have a pal, a mate, someone from his unit who stood by him and for him, and who took charge of him when he was injured.

‘Shrapnel in his leg. They wanted to hospitalise him when we came ashore but he refused. He’s from up north – Newcastle – and he wants to get home. His brother’s bought it, see, and he wants to tell his mam and dad himself. Doesn’t want them to hear from anyone else.’

Tilly nodded and swallowed back her pity, telling the soldier, ‘That’s all very well but his parents won’t thank him if he makes his own wounds worse. That leg needs attending to.’ They both looked down at where fresh blood was seeping through the grimy bandage wrapped round the other soldier’s thigh.

Tilly could see both relief and gratitude in the companion’s eyes. ‘Just as well he’s out of it,’ he told Tilly with an attempt at a grin. ‘That’s the trouble with these ruddy North-Easterners, they don’t know when they’re down.’

‘Got to get home,’ the injured man suddenly muttered, pulling away from his friend. ‘Got to tell me mam and dad about our Tommy.’

He lurched forward and then stopped his eyes widening with shock before he looked down at his own thigh. Bright red blood was now soaking through the bandage. He put his hand on it and then removed it, staring at his own bloodstained hand.

He was haemorrhaging, Tilly guessed.

‘Quick, Agnes, go and get Mr Ogden. Tell him we’ve got a haemorrhage. We need to lie him down and lift his leg up.’

Almost before she had finished speaking soldiers were moving into action, clearing a space, lying their comrade down. Tilly had her first-aid kit with her, but it contained only the basics, she was reluctant to apply a makeshift tourniquet when there might be shrapnel in the wound that her actions could push in further.

The soldier had opened his eyes, and Tilly could see the panic in them.

‘It’s all right,’ she told him softly. ‘You’re home now, and you’re safe.’

‘Gotta see me mam. Don’t let me die before I’ve seen her,’ he pleaded, tears filling his eyes and running down his cheeks, making clean runnels in the dirt.

‘We won’t let you die,’ Tilly assured him. He had reached for her hand and she held it tightly, and kept holding it just as she held his gaze as Agnes returned with the leader of their brigade and two of the more senior members.

‘It might be a shrapnel wound,’ Tilly told the brigade leader quietly. ‘He wouldn’t let them hospitalise him when he came ashore. He wants to get home to tell his parents about the loss of his brother.’

The other members of the brigade were working quickly and efficiently to stem the bleeding as Tilly spoke, sliding a stretcher beneath the young soldier.

It wasn’t until the soldier was being stretchered away that Tilly looked up and realised that one of the men who had assisted with him was Dulcie’s brother, Rick, although she had to look twice before she could be sure that it was him. There was no sign of the good-looking charm on his face now. Even his curt nod in her direction in confirmation of his recognition of her was a world away from the easy manner she remembered. Not that she had any fondness for Dulcie’s brother now. He had led her on, no doubt to boost his own ego, without thinking how she might feel about his behaviour. She had been such a naive girl then, she thought ruefully with the benefit of nearly six months of extra maturity behind her. An idiot, really, to be taken in by someone as vain as Rick, and not worth wasting her tears on. Well, she knew better now. She was a popular girl, with young men eager to take her out, but Tilly had learned her lesson in one sharp and very painful evening. She would never allow herself to be so gullible or easily hurt again. Nor would she ever be naive enough again to fall for a handsome face. In fact, she was off men, full stop, and had decided that instead of risking getting her heart broken she was going to concentrate on putting her energy into helping as much as she could with the war effort.

Her glance at Rick was cool and professional, letting him know that she wasn’t the silly young girl who had quivered with delight just to be in his arms. Then she saw in his expression and bearing what she had seen in so many returning soldiers. It wasn’t just the loss of friends and comrades that marked them, it was the loss of pride and confidence as well. They had been saved from potential death and imprisonment not by their own endeavours but by the endeavour of others, rescued from France’s beaches like helpless children, as one soldier had already described it to her.

‘You stand there in line waiting, not knowing if you’re even going to make it to the boats. Three days we were standing there waiting. It does something to you inside your head,’ he had told her. ‘It takes something from you that you know you’ll never get back.’

Nodding brusquely at Tilly – how could a girl like her possibly understand the hell that had been Dunkirk? – Rick still felt raw and shocked by what he had experienced. Raw and shocked and shamed by the way they’d had to turn tail and run. It didn’t matter how often he’d heard older, more experienced soldiers saying, ‘He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day,’ his pride, not just in himself but in his country, had been put through a firestorm from which he had emerged harder, angrier and determined to defeat the Germans . . .

Rick turned away from Tilly to rejoin the remnants of his unit. The lad who’d been stretchered away was seventeen. He’d lied about his age so that he could enlist with his older brother, the brother they’d had to leave behind in the mud with his head shot off and his brains splattered all over the road, after an aerial attack by the Luftwaffe. Rick had yelled out a warning but Tommy had been helping a young mother with her children, carrying a young boy too exhausted to walk, as they fled along with others, because the Germans were invading their country.

The mother and her children had died with Tommy, and the dozens of others the Luftwaffe had sprayed with gunfire.

Tommy’s brother had insisted on burying what was left of Tommy, after he had finished throwing up. Rick suspected that the boy had half hoped to be killed himself, watching the risks he had taken afterwards.

It wasn’t glorious and heroic: it was dying on the roadside with your head blown open; it was blackened arms and legs separated from rotting bodies strewn along the road to the coast like lifesize dolls’ limbs; it was fear and sickness, and screams of agony, both physical and mental; it was the fury and frustration of standing in line on the beaches whilst the Luftwaffe blew you apart and the sky above you remained empty of the RAF. It was seeing grown men cry for their mothers, seeing men die slowly over the long hours they waited for rescue; it was feeling that you would die of thirst but knowing you couldn’t risk losing your place in the line.

And after that, being back here in London, seeing people who were clean and not injured and safe, and knowing that they were as alien to you now as though they belonged to a separate race.

It was knowing that nothing ever could or would be the same.

Rick couldn’t risk speaking to Tilly because if he did he was afraid that he would tell her these things that could not be told to anyone, least of all a young girl like her.

It was gone eight o’clock in the evening before the flood of men was reduced to a trickle, and Tilly and Agnes were free to leave their posts and make their way over to where Olive was handing over responsibility for the tea urns to a new group of WVS.

‘We saw Dulcie’s brother,’ Agnes announced as they headed for the parked van, ‘didn’t we, Tilly?’

‘Yes. I had to look at him twice before I was sure it was him,’ Tilly told her mother. ‘All the soldiers look so defeated. It really tears at your heart. It isn’t their fault, after all,’ she defended her countrymen fiercely. ‘Everyone said that the Maginot Line would hold Hitler back. So many of them are angry with the RAF and blame them for not doing more to hold the Luftwaffe at bay whilst they were retreating.’

‘I know,’ Olive agreed. ‘I suppose it’s because the Government feel they need to hold back the RAF to defend the country.’

Tilly saw the looks her mother exchanged with the other WVS members she was taking back to the church hall.

‘You mean in case Hitler tries to invade?’ Tilly pressed her.

There was a brief silence and then Olive admitted tiredly, ‘Yes.’

It had to be faced after all, Olive acknowledged as she drove back to the church hall. Hitler had smashed through the defences of every country he had invaded, and now France too had fallen, something that no one had expected to happen. What was to stop them being next?

‘The Germans will target London first,’ Hilda Blackett, one of the WVS, warned them all, her voice sounding prophetically through the cramped stuffiness of the back of the van, where Tilly and Agnes were sitting hunched up to occupy as little space as possible.

‘Well, if he does let’s hope we’re better protected than the BEF,’ another woman said grimly.

No one challenged her because they had all seen and heard too much to do so, Olive recognised.

It seemed ironic now that she had worried so much that going dancing at the Hammersmith Palais might encourage Tilly to grow up too soon, when over the last four days she had had to grow up so brutally fast with what she was having to witness. Tilly couldn’t be protected from the cruel realities of war, though, not when men not much older than she was herself were returning from Dunkirk with the horror of what they had seen and experienced stamped so clearly on them.

On previous occasions Tilly had enjoyed the drive back to the church hall, happy in the knowledge of a job well done, secretly marvelling at her mother’s skill and very proud of the fact that she was the driver, but tonight the events of the last few days and what they meant weighed too heavily on her for that. The expressions on the faces of Rick and the young injured soldier refused to be ejected from her memory. Such grimness and pain couldn’t be forgotten or dismissed. Tonight she would say a special prayer to add to all her other prayers for the young man she had tended, in the hope that he would live to see his mother.

* * *

News of the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat and the desperate efforts to bring home as many of them as was possible might have the rest of the household at number 13 scurrying around and doing their bit, but Dulcie wasn’t going to allow it to change any of her plans.

Tonight was Saturday night and she was dancing at the Palais just as she would have been on any other Saturday night – especially since Arlene at work had read out to them all the news of David’s marriage with Lydia.

Not that she had ever expected anything else. He had as good as said himself that he had no choice, and it wasn’t as though she had ever tried, or wanted to try, to change his mind. She had done what she wanted to do, proved what she had wanted to prove, and that was an end to the matter. If Arlene thought that it meant anything to Dulcie to have his engagement announcement read out to her then she was wrong. Nevertheless, the fact that Arlene had made a point of showing it to her had rubbed against Dulcie’s pride, as had the sly, almost knowing look that Arlene had given her when she had made a comment about like always marrying like. Dulcie had longed to tell her that David might have married Lydia but he certainly didn’t love her, but she had held her tongue. After all, she hadn’t wanted David herself. Not really. Because if she had done then Dulcie knew she would have made sure that she got him, Lydia and marriage or no Lydia and marriage.

Even so, her pride demanded that the girls she worked with now needed to be shown that she could get a beau who was even more handsome than David. She wasn’t going to have them gossiping about her behind her back and laughing at her, just because David had paid her a bit of attention. That meant having a new and, of course, adoring beau she could flaunt in front of her work colleagues.

A couple of young Australian soldiers caught her eye, but Dulcie speedily dismissed them. They might be tall but they were also gangly. No, her new beau had to be handsome and stand out as special, someone better-looking than David and more eye-catching. She studied the groups of men clustered close to the bar, but they appeared too ordinary for her purpose.

She looked away and then tensed as a familiar group of Italian men came in. They always hovered on the edge of the dance floor, eyeing up the girls, but those in the know were wary of dancing with them, knowing perfectly well what they were after and that they were all destined at some stage to obey their mothers and marry a girl of their own sort. Tonight, though, there was a man with them whom Dulcie didn’t recognise, and she knew she would have done if she had seen him before. For a start he was taller than the others – at least six foot, she reckoned – and broader shouldered too. He even held himself differently, standing tall with his head up, not surveying the dancers surreptitiously but instead focusing on listening to the other man who was talking to him Best of all, though, he was good-looking. Very good-looking, matinée idol good-looking, Dulcie thought with growing satisfaction, and smartly dressed as well. He stood out against the group he was with like a silver coin in a handful of copper, and Dulcie made up her mind there and then that he was ideal for her purpose.

Confidently she got up from her seat at the table, saying over her shoulder to the girl sitting next to her, ‘Save my seat, will you, only I’m just going to the lav.’

Opening her handbag as though in search of a handkerchief, her head down, it was easy for Dulcie to stage manage accidentally bumping into her target and then dropping her handbag in supposed shock.

Of course he would pick it up for her, that was what men did and what Dulcie expected, but what she hadn’t expected was that he would also give her a level look from amused brown eyes, as though he knew perfectly well that what had happened was no accident.

Dulcie, though, didn’t respond to the knowing gleam in his eyes. Instead she thanked him prettily for helping to collect the powder compact and brush that had fallen from her handbag and then, as they both stood up, Dulcie making sure that she was close enough for him to be aware of the scent she was wearing – a tester she had ‘borrowed’ from Selfridges and which she would have to return – before saying in a deliberately husky voice, ‘How kind of you to help me. I don’t know what I can do in return, except offer to dance with you. I’m Dulcie, by the way. What’s your name?’

No red-blooded man could possibly resist her. Dulcie waited confidently for his delighted response.

But instead he bent his head and told her calmly, ‘Raphael – Raphael Androtti, and I must say, Dulcie, that I’m surprised that an attractive girl like you needs to pull a trick like that in order to get a dancing partner. What was it? A bet with your girlfriends?’

Dulcie was stunned into momentary silence. No man had ever spoken to her like that before. By rights he ought to be falling over his own feet with gratitude, and what did he mean, describing her merely as attractive? She wasn’t attractive, she was beautiful.

‘No,’ she denied his allegation, telling him crisply – after all, she had nothing to lose now so there was no point in being sugary sweet with him – ‘I don’t need to make bets about getting someone to dance with me, especially not one of your sort.’

‘One of my sort? What’s that supposed to mean?’

His manner was now as hostile as hers was dismissive.

‘You’re Italian,’ she told him, not mincing her words. ‘Everyone knows that the only reason Italian men come down here is because they’re hoping to get from one of us what they know they’d never get from an Italian girl. That’s why no one wants to dance with them.’

‘Except you.’

‘I was just trying to be kind.’

‘How charitable of you, if that were true. But it isn’t, is it? I saw the way you looked at me when you were sitting down. You targeted me deliberately. Why?’

‘No, I did not,’ Dulcie denied furiously.

The Italian gave an exaggerated sigh that lifted and then lowered his impressively broad chest and then told her very slowly, ‘In Liverpool, where I come from, the only reason a girl drops her handbag in front of a man is because she wants him to notice her, and if you’re going to try to convince me that it isn’t the same here, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you that I don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care what you believe,’ Dulcie snapped.

‘But you did want me to dance with you.’

‘No.’

‘So then why the dropped handbag trick?’

He wasn’t going to stop questioning her until he’d got the answer he wanted, Dulcie recognised, and the only way she was going to get rid of him was by telling him the truth. That way she could satisfy her own pride by making it clear to him that it wasn’t him she was interested in.

‘Someone I work with has recently got married. Her husband – before they were married – was showing a bit too much interest in me, and I thought she’d feel better if she thought I was involved with someone else,’ Dulcie lied smoothly.

‘By seeing you dancing with me?’

‘No,’ Dulcie corrected him. ‘By coming to Selfridges, which is where I work, on the makeup floor. If you’d danced with me and asked to see me again then I could have suggested that you come into the store.’

‘Funny how wrong you can be about a person,’ he told her. ‘Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of girl who puts another girl’s feelings before her own.’

‘Well, that just shows what a poor judge of character you are,’ Dulcie informed him, before stepping past him and marching back to her chair, her back stiff with disdain.

No one had ever spoken to her as the Italian had done, and now Dulcie was angry with herself for telling him as much as she had done. Still, she’d rather have him knowing the truth, or at least a fictionalised version of it, than have him thinking that she had actually been interested in him as a man. The girls in Liverpool could do what they liked, but at least she’d made clear that in London things were different and that she wasn’t in the least bit interested in getting his attention.

At Barts Sally prepared to finish her shift. She had already worked two hours longer than she should have to help with the influx of wounded soldiers. Of the supposedly walking wounded, many had turned out to have far more serious injuries than they had wanted to admit to.

There’d been an awful lot of cleaning of hastily bandaged wounds to do, a lot of removing shrapnel from men who had borne the probing of tweezers with stoic silence, their tears only coming when they spoke in the darkness of the night about fallen comrades and those who had not made it.

Sally was supposed to have been going to the pictures with George Laidlaw after his own shift finished but when they finally met up in the main entrance to the hospital it was so late and they were both so exhausted that they agreed that a cup of tea at Joe Lyons was all they felt up to.

Their friendship had grown over the months. Sally enjoyed George’s company and, of course, they had a shared interest in talking ‘shop’ and a shared understanding of what it meant to be dealing with young men whose battle scars weren’t always only from their physical wounds.

Sally loved her job and the extra responsibility she had been given, but she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t grieved for those boys who came into the theatre and then left it with their lives saved but far too often without a limb. It would have been hard to talk as openly with anyone else as she could with George about her professional pride in being part of a team that saved lives, but her distress at this being at the cost of an arm or a leg.

‘It’s their acceptance of what they’ve been through that does it for me,’ George told Sally as she poured them each a cup of tea. ‘Some of the tales they have to tell . . .’ He paused and shook his head. But Sally knew what he meant.

‘I had to remove half a dozen pieces of shrapnel from a sergeant tonight who swore that all he’d got was a bit of a cut. He never made a sound, but afterwards he cried like a baby when he was telling me about having to leave a dog he’d befriended behind on the beach.’

‘I had a young lad in, leg badly damaged, and I reckon we’ve been able to save it. He reckons he’d have bled to death but for the medic on the naval vessel that picked him up after the boat he’d been in had been shot to pieces.’

Sally nodded, and then picked up her cup so that she could avoid looking directly at him whilst her heart was still thudding so fast. She was a fool to react like that simply because he’d mentioned a naval vessel. Callum could be anywhere, and anyway, what did it matter to her where he was?

‘Some date this is,’ George was saying ruefully as he reached for her hand.

Sally let him take it, but her thoughts weren’t really with him. His mention of the navy had been as effective at holing her defences as Germany’s torpedoes were at holing British ships. Now the unwanted thoughts she had thought successfully blocked were pouring in. And not just thoughts about Callum. She was acutely aware that the baby Callum had told her about would have been born by now. Her father’s child. Her half-brother or -sister. The child of betrayal and adultery.

No one in Olive’s household was more aware of the number of lives that had been lost than Sally. The newspaper lists of shipping losses were something she made herself avoid. After all, why should she worry about Callum when he didn’t mean anything to her any more? She had been out on several dates with George now, and she enjoyed his company. They shared similar tastes in music, both great admirers of Dame Myra Hess and her lunchtime piano recitals at the National Gallery, preferring to attend a concert rather than go out dancing, just as they preferred the theatre to the cinema. George had a good sense of humour, and a manner that made Sally believe that he had the makings of a first-class consultant, although she knew that ultimately his plans were to return to New Zealand and follow in his father’s footsteps as a GP. George hadn’t said anything to her about them putting their friendship on a ‘going steady’ basis, but Sally suspected that he would. And if he did, what would she say to him, Sally asked herself as she entered the hospital, ready to start night duty.

Sally exhaled painfully. The truth was that she liked George, but she didn’t think that right now, with a war on, was the time to get involved in a serious relationship. She had seen the strain and anxiety on the faces of those girls who had serious boyfriends, fiancés and husbands. She’d miss his friendship if she turned him down and he left her life, she knew, but was she really ready to start going steady?