Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Mary and Hilda ran across the road, Hilda carrying the medical bag.

Hilda called out, “Tell them not to move his head!”

Clive said, “Well they’re hardly going to leave it in there.”

They waited. The drone of bombers continued and the blasts still came, seeming farther away for the moment: the constant nasty crack of the 250-kilo bombs and the occasional punch of a 1000-kilo brute that shook the earth.

The man was brought out after a few minutes, on his back on a pine door that four men carried between them. They set him down in the road. One of the rescue men held up a battery lamp with a blackout shade, casting a slim cone of light. The casualty’s eyes were open.

Hilda knelt. “Was anyone in there with you?”

He shook his head. Hilda felt along his arms and legs, and the man groaned. She cut a trouser leg away.

“You’ve a badly broken ankle, I’m afraid. Does anything else hurt?”

He shook his head again.

“I’ll splint your ankle, then we’ll get you to a doctor. You’ll be fine.”

She administered a syrette of morphine, and in a minute the man’s face relaxed. She worked fast, and soon had him ready to move. She marked a baggage tag with the letters T and M and tied it to the man’s wrist. Huw and Clive strapped the man into the stretcher, secured him on the roof of the Hillman and jumped into the back. In the passenger seat Hilda called out the turns while Mary drove to St. Bart’s Hospital. They delivered the patient and Mary drove the four of them back to St. Helen’s church.

Down in the crypt, in the dim orange light from the bulbs, Huw made them all tea. Hilda shook so badly that she couldn’t hold her cups.

“The state of me!” she said.

“You did a marvellous job,” Mary said.

“Was I all right? I hardly remember a thing.”

“I had no idea a splint could be put on so thoroughly. In another minute you’d have bandaged him up to the eyes, like Tutankhamen.”

Hilda smiled. “I didn’t think we should hang around, with the bombs.”

“What were the T and the M for, by the way?”

“Oh, the tag is for the triage nurse. T is ‘trauma,’ X is ‘internal injury,’ M is ‘morphine given.’ In training we practised on the porters. They feigned injury and we tagged them. We invented codes too. We had D for ‘dishy,’ P for ‘possibly,’ and N for ‘not if I was fat and this was the last man on earth.’ ”

Mary told the others she had to check something on the van. She sat in the cold with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall of the church. The raid droned on, the explosions sometimes close, and she hardly flinched anymore. She thought about the X they had drawn on Tom. When she pictured his face, the X wouldn’t leave it. It was even there in her memory of their walk on Hampstead Heath, when she had tried to get them lost in the mist. It was as if he had always been marked — as if he had known the ending.

When she went back down into the crypt, someone had opened rum. From who knew where, one of the ARP girls had turned up some sugar. It was after eleven, and cloud had rolled in from the estuary to blind the bombers to their targets. The crypt was filling up and becoming more convivial as the raid died away and the stretcher crews returned.

“To the Nazis!” said Clive. “May their Reich indeed come third.”

“May their gentlemen’s nylons never ladder.”

“The Nazis!” they all shouted, but Mary wouldn’t join the toast.

When their mugs were empty Clive filled them again. A dash of tea was added for the sake of decorum, in case the King should walk in.

By three in the morning the raid was as good as over. There was no more ack-ack fire, no more detonations, and just an occasional thin droning overhead as a last, lost bomber sought its way home. In the crypt the conversation had fallen to a murmur. People slept rolled up in their coats.

The all-clear sounded at four-thirty, and Hilda shivered with relief.

“Thank god. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”

“Are we still going to the party?’ said Mary.

Hilda nodded, and checked her makeup. “Bloody Hitler. It’s one thing to keep a girl up all night, but it’s quite another to leave her looking it.”

“Look on the bright side. You didn’t kill a soul, and I didn’t put a scratch on the van.”

Clive was snoring in a corner so they left him to it and went upstairs with Huw. As they stood making their goodbyes, a flash lit the whole sky. The glare lingered in their eyes and the sound of an explosion came, huge and heavy, followed by a crashing of falling debris that lasted for half a minute.

“Wonderful,” said Huw, in the silence.

Hilda had jumped back inside the doorway. “What was it?”

“Delayed-action bomb. Big one.”

Hilda thought. “Mary, bring the van up front. I’ll go downstairs and get the address when it comes in. Huw, would you wake up Clive?”

Mary drove. The searchlights had all been extinguished and there was only a dull orange glow on the underside of the clouds, reflecting the fires in the east. The narrow slits of the headlights were not enough. Twice Mary almost crashed, pulling up hard a few feet from a wall, then reversing to make the turn she had missed. She felt disconnected from the reality of it. The war, the fires, the driving — one saw it all through slits.

At Billiter Street they understood straight away that it would be nothing like the first callout. A crowd was pressing, in various states of dress from pajamas to duffel coats, with a policeman struggling to keep them to one side of the street. With the raid over, people had been making their way home from the public shelters. And now this. Mary used the horn and nosed the ambulance through the crowd.

When they got to the center of the damage there were a dozen houses down in one terrace. The ones where the bomb had hit were simply gone, while those at the blast’s extremity gaped open. The scene was ten minutes old, and no one knew which houses had been occupied. People milled in the dark and yelled for their families. More police arrived and tried to push people back. An ARP patrol searched by torchlight in the shattered houses.

A woman was struggling with the police, demanding to look for her son. She was hysterical, hitting out.

Mary took her arm. “We can look for him. Tell me where he is.”

The woman pointed at a house. The front was gone, and inside Mary could see ARP men playing their torch beams over the interior walls. It was not a wallpaper she would have chosen.

The missing boy’s mother said that they had just got back from the shelter at the corner of the street, and that she had left her boy inside while she went to fetch a candle from a neighbor.

“Wait for us here,” said Mary.

She went into the house with Hilda. They climbed over the pile of brick that had been the front wall. They found the ARP men picking through the front room and the kitchen at the back.

“Anyone?” said Mary.

The men shook their heads.

“Upstairs then,” she said to Hilda.

They went up together. The banister was gone, fallen into the hallway below, and the stairs hung from the party wall they were keyed in to. The staircase swayed, but it held. There was a stair runner up the middle of the treads, patterned with a broad stripe up the center. At the head of the stairs was a bathroom, and by the flame of Mary’s lighter they could see there was no one in it. The ceiling was down, the contents of the attic poking through the joists in a muddle of albums and suitcases.

On the landing that ran back parallel with the stairs, there was a fecal smell in the air — a soil pipe must have cracked. The landing gave on to two bedrooms. Hilda took the first and Mary the second. They trod as softly as they could, since the floor was unsupported at the street end and the whole thing was bouncing nastily. She flicked on her lighter, looked for a moment, then snapped it off and knelt in the dark, forcing breath in and out of her body. In the snap of light she had seen a boy lying still, his face gray, his body covered in shreds of blue flannel pajamas and some foul-smelling mess that must have come from the broken waste pipe.