If You Were the Only Girl, page 39
Lucy was still awake when the sirens went off, and it was the same the following night. By this time, Lewis’s department store, seeing the dilemma of the General Hospital, had cleaned out their basement for use as overspill and some medical teams had already been assigned there. Matron noted Lucy’s grey face and the blue smudges beneath her tired eyes, but had no option except to ask her if she would work with the medical teams in Lewis’s for an hour or two as the situation there was desperate. They had been overwhelmed by the number of casualties brought in that night, the hospital itself was bursting at the seams, and she couldn’t spare any of the day staff.
Lucy felt a little like a zombie but she knew she couldn’t refuse, and Jenny elected to go too. As they crossed the town, wearing their regulation steel helmets, Jenny said two sets of hands were better than one, and if she helped they might get away and back to bed quicker. Lucy was glad of her company.
There was a terrific smell of burning and the sky was glowing orange from the many fires still blazing. To the black sooty smell of the swirling smoke was added the stink of cordite and a whiff of gas. However, all this was wiped from Lucy’s mind when she stood at the top of the wide stairwell leading to Lewis’s basement. The steps were covered with blood-soaked clothing and stretchers covered the whole of the basement floor. Only the faces were visible, and all were a reddy-brown colour from the brick dust. A feeling of deep pity stole over Lucy, and when her eyes met Jenny’s she saw she felt the same.
In the end they could do little but sponge the dirt from hands and faces, make the injured comfortable, give them water and so on, while they waited for the doctor to examine them, but she guessed medical attention would be minimal, and for a great many it was far too late to help them.
And it was while Lucy was going down a row with a fresh warm bowl of soapy water that she suddenly came to a dead stop. The young woman she saw was covered in dust, even her hair, and her eyes were closed, but the resemblance … ? ‘Clodagh?’ Lucy said hesitantly, and the young woman’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Lucy?’
Lucy had the desire to lay her head on her friend’s chest and weep, but she knew that would never do. ‘I’m so sorry to see you like this,’ she said. ‘Is Hazel here too?’
She saw even the slight shake of her head that Clodagh made hurt her as she ground out, ‘Hazel’s dead!’
Lucy recoiled in shock.
Clodagh continued, ‘They are all dead: Hazel’s sister, Betty, and her parents, and even her grandparents, who had been living there since they were bombed out last month.’
Lucy felt her eyes fill with tears but she refused to let them fall and resolutely swallowed the lump in her throat as Clodagh said, ‘We were under the stairs. When the bomb hit I was thrown across the room. The rest of the house collapsed on them.’
Lucy was too choked to speak as she gently washed Clodagh’s face.
Clodagh sighed. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘The dust went everywhere, even into my eyes. They still sting.’
Lucy heard the slur in Clodagh’s voice and she said, ‘Stay awake, Clodagh. The doctor will be here soon.’ But it was as if her eyelids were too heavy for Clodagh to keep open any longer.
‘Clodagh!’ Lucy cried in anguish.
Suddenly another nurse was by Lucy’s side. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘S-she … Clodagh is a good friend of mine,’ Lucy said, and the nurse didn’t speak as she lifted Clodagh’s hand and felt for her pulse.
She looked at Lucy with great sympathy as she let Clodagh’s hand fall, and Lucy cried, ‘No! No! She can’t be dead! She was talking to me just a moment ago.’
However, she knew that was how it was sometimes. She was no stranger to death, but didn’t want to accept it for her friend – and she so young – and she sobbed uncontrollably. The nurse alerted Jenny and told her to take Lucy back to the General and for them both to try to get some sleep. Lucy allowed herself to be led away, tears still streaming from her eyes, and Jenny helped her as if she was a child.
She didn’t expect to sleep. Memories of Clodagh flooded into her mind and she was filled with immeasurable sadness. And yet extreme exhaustion claimed her and when her head touched the pillow she fell almost immediately into a deep slumber.
The next day they heard of the extent of the bombing that had destroyed the city centre, wrecking department stores, smaller shops, office blocks and factories. Residential areas had also been flattened, and hundreds of fires burnt in and around the city centre. But it was the injured Lucy felt sorry for. She found it very hard to get over Clodagh’s death and though she knew Clodagh’s parents would probably have been informed by the authorities she wrote to them, describing her as a very good friend. She also wrote to her mother and Gwen, and to Clara and Ada, telling them what had happened. She shed further tears when she remembered the friendship they shared in Letterkenny and then in Birmingham, and she was sorry that circumstances had forced them apart.
Her roommates thought that was part and parcel of growing up. ‘Your lives took different paths, that’s all,’ Babs said. ‘Later, you could have married and moved to different parts of the country. I think that from what you say, Clodagh still thought of you as her good friend and so wasn’t it lovely for her that she was with you at the end.’
‘I never thought of that.’
‘Well, I think death’s a lonely path to tread,’ Babs said. ‘You say she was conscious to the end and so how comforting to know someone you care about is right by your side when you start on that journey.’
Babs’ words made Lucy feel better then but, a few days later, Clodagh’s sorrowful parents attended her sad little funeral. Lucy was glad to see Clara and Cook had come because it helped her cope when Clodagh’s parents spoke so kindly to her, saying they had heard all about her from Clodagh, and she was able to shake them by the hand and said Clodagh had been a great girl altogether. It was when they said it eased their pain to think she was with her at the end that Lucy broke down completely and cried in Clara’s arms.
But life, especially in a hospital, has to go on, and everyone was glad that the intensive bombing had eased a little. As November began, there was only light skirmishes. However, halfway through the month, the news on the wireless was of a raid on Coventry by the Luftwaffe that was so heavy that within a square mile eighty per cent of buildings had been destroyed and well over five hundred people killed. Coventry, like Birmingham, had suffered many raids, but everyone was stunned by the savagery of that one, dubbed by the Birmingham Gazette ‘our Guernica’. It was said that a new word had entered the German language and that was Koventrieren or Coventration, which meant a razing to the ground of a place.
Birmingham waited, aware that what had been done to Coventry could quite easily be done to them because they made so much for the war effort. Five days after Coventry’s ordeal Birmingham’s began. At quarter-past seven the first planes dropped flares and incendiaries to light up their targets. Even in the hospital basement the roar of the planes was louder than anything they had heard before, the bombs falling in clusters so that it was hard to distinguish between them. Some of the explosions were so close and loud that the tremors were felt in the basement. Even Lucy wondered if the basement would hold if the hospital was hit, or if this place they thought was safe would turn out to be their tomb.
Lucy knew that she could not show her own fear in any way, for many of the patients were terrified, some giving little yelps of fright, others keening in a long low moan and others praying, their lips moving constantly. She was even slightly relieved to be called out of the basement because she knew the only way to keep a cap on her fear was to keep busy.
Nothing that she had experienced before, though, could have prepared her for what she saw in the hospital that day. Despite the overspill at Lewis’s, people were still coming in, though the hospital was chock-a-block and the injured lay on stretchers or sat on chairs waiting attention, and others milled about aimlessly. Nearly everyone there was covered in a film of brick dust, either grey or brown, that was ingrained in their hair and their faces where it gilded their eyebrows and eyelashes and rendered eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. The air stank too, the smell of the brick dust, smoke and cordite mixing with the stink of vomit, blood, charred flesh and intense fear.
The noise too was almost deafening, some weeping with despairing sobs that tore at Lucy’s heart, others shouting and screaming. The nurses didn’t even try to keep any sort of order, but moved amongst them, trying to soothe and reassure. A good few patients died before they even had the offer of help, and then the nurses would cover their eyes and move on.
Doctors and nurses who should have finished their shifts stayed on, and others came in regardless of shift. They all worked as hard as possible but there were so many to see to, and more arriving all the time. Lucy was assigned to help one of the doctors and she was glad to be doing something. She stood to one side as he examined one after another. The courage and stoicism portrayed by many of the people, especially the children, could have reduced her to tears, but there was no time for that. She knew that though the doctor tried his best, and so did she, if the lacerations were deep enough, the burns intensive enough, or there were internal injuries as well, their chances of survival were remote.
She thought as the all-clear went off at half-past four that she had dealt with more deaths than she had done in all her years on the wards, and many of those had not been any sort of peaceful passing, but often people in the throes of agony or despair. The injured kept coming, and others uninjured: traumatised, wailing children needing their mothers, distraught women fran-tically searching for their children, elderly parents or any other missing family members. Most couldn’t go home for they had no home nor any clothes other than those tattered and torn that they had on, and no idea what to do.
On Thursday night, Lucy was just finishing her tea when the sirens sounded, and though there was a col-lective groan, in the canteen everyone sprang into action. To start with, it was a repeat of Tuesday’s air raid, but there were more land mines dropped and a large number of low-level attacks, which caused more death and desolation until six hundred fires were blazing.
The hospital was soon bursting at the seams. Ansells Brewery at Aston Cross opened up their cellars to try to ease the crisis, and some doctors and nurses were drafted there to help. Lucy stayed at the General, where the scale of the human tragedy almost overwhelmed her. She worked alongside many others through the raid, doing all she could for the distressed and injured. She tended a fireman who had been caught by the bomb blast in Bristol Road that had fractured three trunk water mains. The city was then without water, and the many fires had to be left to burn.
The following day fires were still blazing. Most people knew that if there was another raid that night, Birmingham would burn to the ground. Thankfully, there was not another raid for many days. Then, on 3 December, fifty bombers attacked the city. There was a lull after that, and Lucy was not the only one to hope that the massive raids were over. However, on 11 December, two hundred bombers attacked the city for thirteen hours. Later, when Lucy read in the paper that two hundred and fifty people had been killed and two hundred and forty-five were gravely injured, she knew a great many of those had arrived at the General and she had been so busy dealing with them that the unprecedented visit from King George passed her by completely. Lucy looked at the pictures in the paper and said, ‘It’s like when Clementine Churchill came. They can’t do anything.’
‘They raise morale,’ Babs said. ‘And you can’t deny it does. Look at them lining the roads and cheering.’
‘Well, if it does that for them it’s got to be a good thing,’ Lucy said. ‘Because many of those poor souls have lost everything. It’s tragic.’
‘Yeah, 1940 has been an awful year,’ Vera said.
‘Well, it is nearly the end of it,’ Lucy said. ‘But I don’t know that 1941 will be any better.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
It really did seem as if 1941 might be a bit quieter than 1940 to start with because in the first three months of the year there were only three raids spread a month apart. They were light, and as bombs fell in Handsworth, Selly Oak and South Yardley they were too far away for anyone at the General to worry about.
Lucy, now back on the day shift, was glad of the respite, for they had their prelims coming up the Wednesday before Easter. They had been going to sit these exams early in the New Year but with the concentrated bombing and the long hours all the student nurses had had to put in because of the raids, Matron had made the unprecedented step of postponing them.
Lucy was fairly certain that she would pass, for, after all her experience dealing with victims of the bombing, her confidence had improved enormously. They’d all had to do procedures that student nurses wouldn’t normally be expected to do at that stage in their career. Often there had been no one around to show them how to do something and they had had to rely on gut instinct. It had sometimes been a scary experience and often very sad, dealing with the badly injured victims, but it had all added to her experience.
Chris was sending her regular letters and each one stressed how much he missed her. He urged her to take care, for she was precious to him. The letters, even though they were sometimes brief, always gave Lucy a warm glow inside. She did miss Chris most dreadfully, but she didn’t say anything because it did no good, and anyway, she wasn’t the only one going through such separation.
All the girls had a week off just before the prelim exams. As Lucy couldn’t go home she took up Gwen’s invi-tation to spend the time at her house. She was looking forward to it because she loved Gwen anyway, and also because she knew that she could talk about Chris to her heart’s content there.
Gwen loved reminiscing about her son, and she also knew that Lucy had gone through the mill with the terrifying raids. She wanted to give her a complete rest so she took a week off from WVS, which was a little easier to do with the Luftwaffe giving them a bit of a break. The weather was kind to them and so she took Lucy on jaunts out on the bus to pretty little villages where it appeared the war had never happened, and, nearer to home, to the areas the public could still go to in Sutton Park
She sympathised with Lucy about Clodagh’s death. Lucy admitted how hard she had found it. ‘It seemed so tragic,’ she said. ‘Mind you, I feel that about all the deaths I’ve had to deal with, but when it’s someone you know, a friend … Oh, I found that very difficult.’
‘It must have been, my dear,’ Gwen said. ‘But you will always have a part of your friend with you in the memories you shared. No one can ever take those from you.’
Lucy had never thought of it that way before and she felt a little easier in her mind. Each day she felt more of the tensions, which she hadn’t even been aware she was carrying, begin to seep out of her. But much as Lucy loved her days out she also enjoyed sitting with Gwen in the evenings before the fire with the meal over and all the jobs done, and encouraging her to talk about Chris.
Gwen would tell her what he had been like as a child growing up, the funny things he had said and done, the places he liked to go to, the games he enjoyed and his favourite food. Lucy lapped it up. She was anxious to know everything there was to know about the man who would be sharing her life when this war came to an end, and Gwen made him come alive for her.
‘He is a lucky man indeed,’ she said to Lucy one evening, ‘to have the absolute love of two women.’
‘Oh, no, I think I am the lucky one,’ Lucy said, and she meant it. He was a wonderful man, and even in his letters he managed to wrap her in his love.
Another time, Gwen said, ‘If I have any regrets it is that Chris’s father didn’t live to see him make it as a doctor. He was always so proud of him and he would have loved you, my dear.’
‘My father would have been astounded to see me too,’ Lucy said, knowing that her father would have been stunned enough and very proud at her becoming a nurse, let alone engaged to a doctor. In Ireland, things like that didn’t happen to people like the Cassidys. You were set in the life you were born into, though it couldn’t be the same in America because her mother had expressed no surprise, only delight when Lucy had written to tell her of her engagement. ‘But if my father had lived,’ she went on, ‘my future would probably have been very different. I doubt I would have left Ireland and probably be married to some burly farmer with three or four weans hanging on to my skirts.’
‘And would you have liked that?’
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘But there … I don’t know … it’s what you do over there. It’s what most girls aspire to. But I like being a nurse, doing something for myself, though I would love children one day.’
‘So if your father hadn’t died, the chances are you would never even have met Chris?’
‘Oh, no, I probably wouldn’t have,’ Lucy said. ‘Isn’t that a dreadful thought? But I didn’t want my father to die. I loved him dearly and missed him for ages.’
‘Oh, Lucy, I don’t doubt that for a minute,’ Gwen said. ‘I have heard you talk of your father before with love in your voice, but when he died you did what you had to do and that has led you here.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy said. ‘Life’s funny, isn’t it?’
‘It can be,’ Gwen said, ‘but it’s very precious and not something to be squandered because you only have one go at it.’
‘And that is why you should grasp every opportunity and make the most of every day,’ Lucy agreed.
Lucy returned to the hospital feeling more rested and optimistic about the future than she had felt in a long while, even about the prelims that her roommates seemed to be sweating over.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said to Vera, who she found was still awake and frantically reading a textbook a long time after the others had gone to sleep. ‘Honestly, a good night’s sleep will do you more good than any last-minute cramming,’
‘Oh, it’s all right for you,’ Vera said. ‘You have an understanding mother, and even if she wasn’t totally understanding she lives on another continent. What did you do on your week off?’
