Diana worked twelve-hour shifts. When she was on the night shifts, her life was inverted, a mirror world in which she was
awake during a nighttime of dark and flashing light, of noise and screams, and asleep in the full light of day, in the back
room of the Warrens’ house, amid quotidian noises — footsteps on the sidewalks, people talking, voices calling across the garden
fences, dogs barking, the occasional vehicle grinding past — and dreams of burning houses and shattered bodies.
Her ambulance unit was based in Clerkenwell in what had once been commercial garages and an underground meat store. The first-aid
post was next door in a converted butcher’s shop. She traveled back and forth to the unit by Tube — the Northern Line, one of
the deepest and therefore one of the safest. In the afternoon there were long lines of people waiting outside the station
for four o’clock, when they were allowed down to find shelter. When she traveled back in the morning from the night shift,
they were there on the platforms, rows of them huddled beneath blankets. You had to step over them. It was like stepping over
a plowed field and trying not to muddy your shoes.
“Oi, mind where you’re putting those dainty feet, miss,” people called.
“Can’t you mind where you’re fucking walking?”
“Can’t you see we’re fucking sleeping?”
The smell was almost unbearable at times — the stench of unwashed bodies, the smell of damp and dirty clothing, the stink of
urine, the stink of feces. They used the tunnels as lavatories, shitting in the darkness and wiping themselves with bits of
newspaper. Man reduced to the level of beast, living in caves, soiling himself, not caring. Promiscuity was rife; that’s what
Meg said. And much of the Tube wasn’t even safe from the bombs. The station at Bank suffered a direct hit, and rumors put
the deaths at more than one hundred. A high-explosive bomb could go fifty feet down through solid ground; that’s what people
said.
If she was lucky she would get back to the Warrens’ by nine o’clock in the morning. She’d let herself in with the key they’d
given her and call out, “It’s me!” and go straight upstairs to her room. Often she just fell asleep on the bed there and then
in her clothes. Exhaustion was like a dense liquid flowing in her veins, deadening her mind and her limbs, pulling her down
into a world where she rehearsed the nightmare of the night’s work — the burning houses, the shattered bodies, a world picked
out by the orange glow of flame and the play of searchlights against the sky, like swaths of chalk drawn across a school blackboard.
Only sometimes did she find the energy to get undressed and have a wash first. The bathroom was a shack tacked onto the back
of the house and was accessible only through the kitchen. She would knock on the kitchen door for politeness, and Mr. Warren
would call out, “It’s all right, it’s quite safe to come in. I’m tied up.” The same damn joke, every day.
“You want to watch him, dearie,” Mrs. Warren warned her proudly. “He fancies the girls, he does. Now, how about a spot of
breakfast?”
But she never felt hungry: faintly sick, usually, faintly revolted. “No thank you, Mrs. Warren. Just a cup of tea will do
fine, thank you.”
“Got to feed yourself up, you know. Mustn’t go without. Looking peaky, you are.”
“I don’t really feel very well.”
The woman examined her closely. Her eyes were tiny, like currants embedded in dough. But not shining and friendly: calculating
and suspicious. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s that muck you eat at the canteen, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Probably.”
Occasionally she thought of Guy, but life in London was so different from what she knew before, so stark in its contrasts,
that she found it hard to conjure up any images of home or friends or countryside. She’d had letters from him, letters from
another world.
My Darling Porpoise,
he wrote,
when will we see each other again?
In her mind he was wedded to the mountains, whereas now she inhabited an urban landscape where the cliffs were gutted buildings
and the hills were piles of rubble, where plants were alien, intrusive things that sprouted between the paving stones or in
the wreckage of bombed houses. She was not wedded to this new existence — that would be altogether too pure a relationship,
too sanctified. She was living in sin with it. That’d do. In this new, fallen world the choughs were starlings and the doves
were pigeons and the soughing of the wind was the wail of the air-raid siren. Guy Matthewson seemed too distant, in time and
space and in another dimension that she could not quite identify — relevance perhaps.
Dear Porpoise,
My tribunal has turned me down. So I’m appealing because it’s an outrage. If they had accepted my registration, I would have
been happy to volunteer for something useful. I mentioned the fire brigade…
I think about you a great deal. I am sure you are very brave there under the bombs, but oh, it is such a terrible thing to
put you and the whole country through. My own battle sometimes seems paltry. Take care of yourself, my sweet.
With love, Guy.
What did she think of that? She couldn’t really tell. Sometimes she thought the whole world of him, but at other times he
just seemed a dream in this new, twilight nightmare that she inhabited.
Sometimes she was on duty at the first-aid post itself, but often during a raid, she went out with one of the crews. It all
depended on what was needed. Besides the driver, each vehicle carried a stretcher bearer and, occasionally, a nurse. At the
start the nurse had been in full uniform: skirt and apron and stupid starched cap that you had to fold in a special way out
of a semicircle of linen. It was damn silly trying to clamber over rubble in a skirt and black stockings, so the idea of traditional
uniform had been abandoned soon enough. Now they wore overalls, with just a red cross armband to show what they were.
Night duty varied. Things might be pretty quiet when all the activity was in another sector. They didn’t commit ambulances
from one sector to another if they could help it because you never knew what was coming next in your own area; so some nights
you just spent a whole watch talking or playing cards and listening to the bombers over someone else’s head and to the cough
of distant antiaircraft fire. On nights like that, Diana learned a new skill: to talk about nothing. It was a knack people
had — to talk about nothing, to exchange one anecdote for another, none of them of interest, each designed to prove a point
that was, in itself, of no interest either. Families, friends, enemies —
he
did this;
she
did that; why don’t they do the other? A whole night’s conversation that left no imprint in the mind. It was a kind of anesthetic,
dulling the sensibilities to other issues, other cares, other needs.
But when the call was in their sector, chaos barged into their lives. Phones would ring, orders would be shouted, sirens would
scream, and the vehicles would drive out of the garages to the latest incident. They would pick their way through the streets,
make detours down side roads to get around obstructions, ease their way past rubble, crunch with painful slowness over shards
of broken glass, bump over fire hoses that writhed across the roadway like snakes in a demented nightmare jungle. And end
up in some forgotten street where flame roared and buildings collapsed and people died.
The driver she liked working with best was called Bert. She had expected almost everyone in London to be called Bert, but
in fact, he was the only Bert she encountered. “Albert Jones, Esquire,” he said, giving her a look. “But if you’re very good
to me, you can call me Bert.” Because he had been a taxi driver in peacetime, Bert could always find a way around obstructions.
“I got the Knowledge, ’en I?” he would explain mysteriously, and the Knowledge took on extraordinary proportions in Diana’s
mind, as though it were a great philosophy — the secret of life or something. He would peer through the windshield into the
dust of an explosion and say, “Just like a fucking pea-soup fog, if you’ll forgive my French,” but he always seemed to know
where he was. The vehicle — a Ford V-8 motorcar converted into an ambulance — would creep around corners and down alleyways, and
somehow it would always find its way to their incident.
They always called them “incidents.” It was a bureaucratic euphemism. At first it had been “occurrence,” but then “incident”
had caught on. The etymology of disaster. It might be high explosive, in which case there would be collapsed buildings and
people buried, and the injuries would be contusions and fractures and internal hemorrhaging. Or it might be land mines, parachuted
gently down through the night sky to explode at street level and blast people and buildings into unrecognizable fragments.
Or it might be oil bombs and incendiaries, in which case the casualties would be burns. The burns were the most terrible,
with whole bodies charred and scorched and the skin peeling off to show fiery red beneath. The pulse would flutter away into
oblivion under the anxious press of her middle finger; what had been a face would be torn open to the whole world like one
almighty scream, life itself evaporating from the gaping mouth.
In her memory one incident merged into another, a confusion of sight and smell and sound. Above all, sound. The concussion
of high explosive and the crack of the antiaircraft batteries, the rattle of incendiaries falling on roofs and sidewalks,
the throbbing of the pumps and the rhythmic droning of the bombers, high up and invisible above the underlit ocher clouds.
She scrambled over scree slopes of rubble, carrying splints, carrying bottles of saline drip, bandages, tourniquets. “Nurse!
Nurse, over here!” was the call. She stumbled and struggled; she wriggled into tunnels cleared through the rubble to get to
buried bodies and deliver shots of morphine; she helped ease shattered limbs from beneath house beams; she applied splints
as they lifted bodies out, and tied tourniquets to staunch the bleeding. Sometimes they dispensed with the splints and just
tied ankles and legs together; sometimes the only tourniquet was her own thumbs, pressed deep into the slime of a bloody thigh.
The wounded were often coated in a fine powder of dust. Mixed with blood, the dust turned into a kind of mud. The stench of
drains, the stench of gas from broken mains, the stench of damp from old cellars, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the hard,
sulfurous smell of high explosive enveloped her. Sometimes a burning gas pipe lit up the scene with a hellish light. Sometimes
a whole backdrop would be a burning building, smuts flying high into the lurid orange cloud, the flames the color of burns:
a crimson tainted with black, a bone whiteness at the heart. Hell was the obvious metaphor. Dante’s Inferno, a medieval world
of plague and torment with devils silhouetted against the light playing whips of water into the heat. Overhead the drone of
invisible aircraft and the barrage balloons like maggots against the putrid flesh of the clouds, and the great rush of sound
that was a falling bomb, falling through four miles of air, rising in pitch to a shriek before it vanished somewhere over
the rooftops and there was the gust of an explosion and the tremor of the ground shock. You never had time to hear the one
that got you; that’s what people said. Bert explained it to her, and his explanation carried some kind of weight: “Them bombs
travel at something near the speed of sound, see? Which means they sort of like, catch their own sound up, see? So you don’t
hear it. Not until the last second anyways.”
It never happened to her. It seemed strange. You felt so vulnerable down there on the ground with the bombers sliding above
the clouds and the bombs coming down like a celestial lottery, and yet always falling somewhere else. Did it mean that she
was somehow chosen? Or was she perhaps excluded?
“Just fucking lucky, darling,” said Bert, touching wood. “Let’s hope it lasts.”
And then the all-clear sounded its long lament, and a chill dawn seeped into the littered streets of the city like lymph leaking
into a wound. The heavy-rescue teams would be at work throughout the daylight hours, pulling the rubble aside with their hands,
shifting beams, tunneling in toward the distant murmur or the muffled cry or the stifled appeal for help, for light, for life.
The ambulance would make its way through the streets to drop its burden of wounded wherever it was convenient, or wherever
there were beds, or just wherever they could actually reach — Barts or the Royal Free or the London Hospital on Mile End Road,
anywhere — and then make its way back to the unit in silence.
The day shift would be waiting for their return. Reports were to be written and handed over. There was a washroom in the ambulance
station where you could rinse your face. And a gas ring for boiling a kettle. And home was the room at the back of the Warrens’
house, fifteen minutes on the Tube if it was running.
Darling Porpoise,
Today I heard from the appeal board, and the news seems a bit better. I have to appear before them next week…. I am sure you
will think of me and wish me luck…
On one occasion Mr. Warren was evidently not tied up when Diana knocked on the kitchen door. “Come in,” he called, and when
she opened the door, he stood up and blocked her way. Mrs. Warren was nowhere to be seen.
“Gone to the shops,” he explained with a grin. “They say there’s a shipment of fruit just in.
Bananas
.”
'
Diana attempted a smile. “May I pass, please? I need the bathroom.”
But Mr. Warren didn’t move. “Wouldn’t you like a banana, dear?” he asked. “Long and thick and with a bit of a curve to it.
Bit pointy at the end so it slips in your mouth easy. How does that sound?”
“I want a bath more than anything,” she replied, not really understanding, not hearing either his words or even his tone.
He was standing right in front of her, his head at the level of her chest, his weasel face peering up into hers. Before she
could step back, before she could even flinch, he put his left hand up and grabbed her shoulder. He was smaller than she was,
but far stronger. And quicker too, seeing that she had been on duty for the last twelve hours and was stunned with exhaustion.
As he grabbed her with one hand, he slid the other inside her dressing gown.