Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“You know what you should really worry about? It’s that so many girls have volunteered, it won’t seem exotic anymore.”

“You suppose men won’t care?”

“Goodness, no. Ambulance girls are two-a-penny.”

“You ruin everything.”

“Well you can’t have it both ways, can you? It’s either a dangerous duty, and dashing, or a breathtaking bore, and banal.”

“I liked it better when I was petrified.”

“Then hush and let me work this van out. It’s fine for you, Miss La-Di-Dah with your two weeks’ training. All they gave me was my bus fare here.”

Mary worked the pedals and moved the lever through the three gears in the box, plus reverse. The whole setup was far looser than her father’s Austin Windsor. It would need to be sworn at quite robustly, but she felt it could just about be driven. Now that it was happening — now that the war had put her in uniform and issued her with a steering wheel andclutch — she felt more resignation than excitement. She supposed that there would be chaos now, and fire and furious noise, and yet it seemed much less of an adventure than her class had been. How her nerves had buzzed with it, back then. Now, she felt less alive. Perhaps one died in slices, like a loaf.

“Do you suppose they’ll give us tea?” said Hilda.

“They’ve told me nothing. You’re the one who always knows things.”

“Oh, that’s just gossip,” said Hilda. ‘No one tells me facts.”

“Maybe they’re worried you’d repeat them.”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing something, even if I am only here to dish out aspirin and sticking plasters. The matron wouldn’t trust me with anything, you know. She had me on bedpans half the time I was supposed to be training, so of course I never caught sight of a healthy man.”

“Well that is rather the point of nursing, isn’t it?”

“But I wanted to go on the ward rounds with the junior doctors. The way the nurses get themselves up, the poor men don’t stand a chance. They’re married with two children and a Labrador before their pulse gets back below a hundred. I wonder if we’re meant to write down any supplies we use or whether someone comes and checks it at the end of the shift? I wonder if—”

Mary put her hand on Hilda’s arm. “You’ll be fine, you know.”

Hilda froze. “Does it show so badly?”

“They wouldn’t have passed you for duty if you weren’t ready.’

“I just can’t stop thinking: what if I make a mistake? What if some poor so-and-so is hurt and I can’t save them?”

“I thought you only cared about the uniform.”

“Yes, but one is not entirely against human life. Oh, did I mention there’s a party tomorrow morning at the hospital? All the girls on nights at St. Bart’s, and as many of the doctors as can be dragged in, even if the nurses have to sedate and rope them. Apparently there’s a boy from obs & gyn who makes a very realistic martini using ethanol. He gets up a whole vat of the stuff and they bring buckets of ice from the morgue, and someone turns up with a gramophone. You will come, won’t you? And you won’t bag the nicest man there, just because you can?”

“Not unless you see him first.”

They laughed with the careful muting Londoners used now, knowing that the war homed in on the sound.

The raid began just before five-thirty and they went down into the crypt of the church, where the area post was set up. The stretcher man, Huw, was already down there. The Air Raid Precautions chief and his messenger were taking damage reports. Two busy telephones and three full ashtrays stood on a carved communion table. On the wall was a pin-board map of four square miles. The bombs, when they got going, got closer.

“Jerry’s on the money tonight,” said Huw.

The ARP chief sniffed. “I assume we are all aware that Jerry suckles from the breast until he is six years old?”

“The men shave their armpit hair,” said Hilda. “ ‘The women plait theirs.”

Everyone winced as a bomb struck close by, resonating in the crypt.

“This is what comes of it, of course,” said the ARP man. “They are up there now, at twenty thousand feet, with fishnets under their flying suits.”

Mary couldn’t bring herself to join in. For her part, she found it hard to imagine that a race with so many peccadilloes could be annihilating her city quite so thoroughly. When the ARP chief sent them out into the night at half past six, it was a relief. Every moment underground made Mary want to run.

Outside, the noise was fearful. There was an ack-ack gun right outside the church, a Bofors letting go dozens of rounds a minute. Red tracer streaked up into a smoky sky impaled on the blue-white lances of the searchlights. Clive, the other stretcher-bearer, was snoring in the backseat of the ambulance. Huw cursed him awake and pushed in beside him, while Hilda took the passenger seat and opened the street map.

It was only a quarter of a mile away but the direct routes were blocked. Mary gunned the Hillman’s little engine and made what speed she dared in the dark streets and the sudden drifts of smoke. Hilda braced herself against the glove box and used her cigarette lighter to read the map.

On Gravel Lane a house was down in the middle of the terrace. The front was blown out and the upstairs floor had swung down on the pivot of the back wall. Another stretcher party was already leaving, with two casualties they had brought out of the mess. Huw and Clive joined a rescue squad to clear the weight of the tiles and the roof joists, after which they would set up their A-frames to lift the collapsed floor. They waved Mary and Hilda away. All the two of them could do was wait.

Mary put on her tin hat, lit a cigarette and sat on the running board of the Hillman with her elbows on her knees and one hand on the back of her neck, trying to smooth out the jitters. A stick of bombs came down a few streets away, the flashes arriving before the bangs. The air was already sour with burning wood and spent explosive. Hilda took the medical bag from the trunk.

“Find shelter,” said Mary. “I’ll fetch you if they bring anyone out.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Then I’ll be fine too, won’t I?”

They sat together with their backs up against the van for whatever protection it gave. Without being asked, their bodies made themselves small.

Hilda said, “It feels wrong, being outside in a raid.”

Mary offered her a sardonic look.

“I mean it feels sort of naughty,” said Hilda. “As if we’re out-of-bounds.”

They waited.

“Look at those searchlights,” said Hilda. “I hope they’ll keep them, after the war. Just think, ordinary people don’t get to see this. I wonder if…”

Mary looked to the sky. Perhaps it was true that the searchlights were beautiful. With the night chill, and the endless deadening concussions of the ack-ack, she felt flat. Hilda babbled on, her observations neither irritating nor illuminating. This was how Tom had talked, in that awful raid. She wished now that she had known how to comfort him. How miserable Tom must have been, close to the end. She had tried with a willing heart to love him — to smile as brightly as she ever had. But of course he had known that it was ending. He had been so thoroughly good about it, so careful not to make a scene. This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear Tom. Without the war they might have finished as friends.

Now the rescue crew had their A-frame assembled to lift the collapsed upper floor. When they had made enough of a gap, a man crawled under. After a minute he shouted out. Huw and Clive ran to the van and lifted a stretcher off the roof.

“There’s a man in there. They’re going to bring him out.”