Blitz - Book 4 of the Poppy Chronicles Read online

  BLITZ

  THE POPPY CHRONICLES IV

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-071-4

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  Copyright © 1990 by Claire Rayner

  Published in Great Britain in 1990 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited 91 Clapham High Street London SW47TA

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Applied for

  ISBN 0 297 84022 3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London

  For Nina and Peter Angel

  with love

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Meddlers

  A Time to Heal

  The Burning Summer

  Sisters

  Reprise

  The Running Years

  Family Chorus

  The Virus Man

  Lunching at Laura’s

  Maddie

  The Performers

  1 Gower Street

  2 The Haymarket

  3 Paddington Green

  4 Soho Square

  5 Bedford Row

  6 Long Acre

  7 Charing Cross

  8 The Strand

  9 Chelsea Reach

  10 Shaftesbury Avenue

  11 Piccadilly

  12 Seven Dials

  The Poppy Chronicles

  1 Jubilee

  2 Flanders

  3 Flapper

  1

  The explosion, when it came, was not so much loud as long, Robin told herself, attempting to use logical thought to control her fear, while at the same time trying to keep her head down and the child in her arms safe as he struggled and screamed at the top of his voice. And then as her ears sang shrilly, she decided it had been loud after all; very loud, a great cracking thunderous roar; and also suffocating. Clouds of plaster dust were filling her nose and mouth and small Billy wriggled against her apron front and began to make choking noises; and automatically she upended him and thumped his back, crouching there behind the big dressings cupboard, until he spluttered and at last, to her intense relief, gasped and then began to bawl again.

  ‘Are you all right, Nurse Bradman?’ The voice was high and sounded distinctly annoyed. ‘Nurse Chester, where are you? Staff Nurse Puncheon – where are the baby nurses? We’d better start the count at once – ’

  ‘I’m here, Sister,’ Robin managed, though her voice was husky because of the dust, and coughing, she straightened herself gingerly and peered over the top of the dressings cupboard to see what was happening down the ward, as Billy settled to steady wail. ‘And I’ve got Billy Cooper – ’

  ‘And I’ve got both the Davidoff twins,’ came from somewhere behind Robin and she turned her head gratefully at the sound of Chick’s familiar drawl, to see her standing there with a kicking toddler under each arm – both of them laughing and clearly believing the whole episode had been entertainment provided just for them – and a face as white as a ghost out of which her eyes peered like the holes in the skull of the skeleton in the nurses’ lecture room.

  ‘Oh, Chick!’ Robin said and managed to laugh. ‘You look absolutely ridiculous – ’

  ‘You should see your face, honey bun!’ Chick retorted and came towards her, hoicking the Davidoff twins up on to her broad shoulders as she did so. And then giggled softly as she caught sight of Sister Marshall, who was picking her way over the piles of rubble in the middle of the usually perfectly shining floor. ‘Oh, look at the Old Bat, will you? Now that really has to be the funniest thing ever. Worth being in a raid for, that is.’

  And indeed, Sister Marshall did look absurd, her angular body in its usually crisply starched blue dress and huge sleeves looking as though it had been dusted with a giant sugar powderer, and her face as white as her cap and strings peering out ferociously between them at her ruined ward. And Robin giggled too.

  ‘I can’t see what there is to laugh at, Nurse Bradman!’ Sister Marshall said tartly. ‘Now, get that child out of here and into the first undamaged ward you can find and then come back here at once and we’ll start to clean the place. I can’t have this sort of thing going on in Annie Zunz Ward, and I won’t stand for it!’ And she peered upwards as though the mere power of her voice would penetrate the cracked ceiling and send the German planes scuttling back across the Channel.

  And why shouldn’t it? Robin thought, making her way through the rubble towards the big double doors at the end, following the other nurses now emerging from their hiding places, each with a child or two in their arms; she scares the hell out of everyone else, from the consultants down to me.

  ‘She’s taking this personally,’ Chick murmured in her ear as they managed to get to the doors. ‘Honestly, she’s the best secret weapon this country has. Churchill ought to pack her in a bomb and send her over to Berlin and drop her there. Then it’d all be over and I could go home and – ’

  ‘You dare,’ Robin said and reached out and punched her friend’s arm affectionately. ‘If we have to have a war to keep you here, then I suppose we’ll have to have a war – ’

  ‘Stop that chattering, nurses, and hurry up!’ Sister Marshall called down the ward behind them and with a soft groan Chick escaped through the double doors on Robin’s heels.

  Outside in the wide corridor it was even worse. There was rubble everywhere and a reek of old plaster and dust and somewhere beneath it the ominous smell of gas, all mixed up with the usual hospital smells of carbolic and Lysol, because the operating theatre at the end of the corridor was working full tilt, even though the raid was still on. The nurses there were frantically scrubbing instruments and bowls out in the corridor, using great buckets of disinfectant, because their sluice had been battered to uselessness an hour or two earlier. It had been one of the worst evenings ever, and Robin, stumbling a little as they reached the stairs, thought muzzily – it must be after eight thirty. Time I was off duty, surely? And then laughed aloud at the silliness of the notion of ever getting off duty in all this hubbub.

  And hubbub there was. Somewhere outside the shattered windows where glass fragments hung precariously on the crisscrossed paper strips, people were shouting and there were bells ringing furiously as yet more firefighting equipment arrived, while inside there were the wails of the frightened children, although the Davidoff twins were still chortling as Chick bounced them on her shoulders and went hurrying down the stairs, picking her way as surely as a goat on a mountain-side.

  Robin followed her gratefully, as usual. Ever since she had started as a very frightened junior probationer at the London Hospital in the days of the phoney war last September, when nothing much was happening and people were telling themselves optimistically it would all be over by Christmas, Chick had been her mentor, her friend and her supporter. And Robin felt a sharp pang of guilt as she thought how much she needed her; if she hadn’t happened to have been caught here that September when she’d been touring Europe, she’d have been safely at home in Toronto now, and Robin would have had no one to call her friend – but it was selfish of her to be glad Chick was so far away from her home and family. And, ashamed, she pushed t
he thought away.

  The ward below was full of extra cots and the nurses there were bustling about, trying to settle the now thoroughly aroused new arrivals in some sort of order. Here there was dust, as there was everywhere in the hospital, Robin imagined, but the place hadn’t been damaged and she marvelled at how well the old structure was holding up. Their floor, she knew, had been badly knocked about, but even so, wasn’t totally unusable, and she relinquished Billy to the care of a second-year nurse of Marriot Ward staff, and turned to go, as Chick, the Davidoff twins now ensconced side by side in the same cot and looking as though they were about to add their bawls to everyone else’s, came and grabbed her arm.

  ‘Better get back,’ she said. ‘That old fool’ll kill herself before she’ll go off and leave that mess behind. I hate the very sound of her name, but we’ll have to help her.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not that bad,’ Robin said as they made for the door. ‘Considering how old she is – I mean, she stood up to last week’s bashing well enough and got us all straight again, and now this – you can’t help but be sorry for her.’

  ‘I rather think I meant something along those lines,’ Chick said with some sarcasm. ‘Anyway, we’d better get back. It’s not over yet – I haven’t heard the all clear, have you? – and Staff Nurse here says she’s heard there’s another gas main fractured over the road and that could go too. It was that which caused the damage to this wing, it seems, not a direct hit or anything – ’

  They were half-way up the stairs again by now, the other nurses following with their aprons crumpled and their caps askew, looking like a flock of ruffled geese, and Robin said anxiously, ‘A gas main? Then why did we get so damaged and Marriot Ward didn’t? I mean – ’

  ‘Ass!’ Chick said indulgently. ‘We’re on the main road side, right? Marriot faces out back. So we got the impact. It’ll be the same on the second and first floors too – Spruce and Willow’ll be pretty shook up – ’

  ‘Not so bad for them. They’re adult wards –’ Robin said.

  ‘And full of pretty sick people.’ Chick sounded grim. ‘They admitted dozens after Sunday’s lot. Come on, kid. We’d better get going. There’s a lot to do, and the Old Bat’ll be sure to try to get all the children back up here before the night’s out.’ And she pushed open the big double doors to Annie Zunz Ward and went in.

  The lights were on again now behind the makeshift blackouts that had been put up, and down at the far end of the ward Robin could see the burly back of Todd, the ward orderly, fixing the last of them. And not for the first time marvelled at the speed and strength of the man. He said little – though when he did it sounded agreeable for he had a soft Scottish accent that Robin liked – but worked doggedly, no matter what was asked of him.

  There had been times when Robin had wanted to protest at the sort of jobs Todd was given; the dirtiest and most effortful were always saved for him, and not just because he was a man and a big one at that. There were other men working in the hospital as porters and orderlies, but they were never treated as harshly as Todd was; but they weren’t conscientious objectors. Robin stifled her impulse to go down to help Todd and went instead to find Sister Marshall for instructions. It was none of her business why the man wasn’t willing to serve in the forces, like every other man with any shred of patriotism and hatred of the Nazis, and anyway he always looked so dour when you spoke to him that it put you off, she told herself.

  But he was a great worker, and as the long hours went on in a frenzy of Sister Marshall-inspired cleaning and sweeping and checking of supplies, as the cupboards and cabinets which had been upended and shaken into total disorder were set right, she had many occasions to be grateful to him. Just as she and Chick were struggling to get a particularly heavy cabinet back into position, he appeared beside them and with apparent ease got the thing exactly where it should be; as Robin reached to get at a high shelf that needed cleaning but couldn’t quite manage it, he arrived beside her, all six foot three inches of him, and dealt with it for her. And though he did no more than nod his awareness of her thanks and said not a word, she felt better because he was there.

  At three o’clock they stopped and Todd was sent to fetch tea for them all from the canteen in the basement, where the big shelters were, which he brought in a great enamel jug, a thick brew of particularly strong tea well laced with sweetened evaporated milk and extra sugar. And although at first Robin found it revolting, she discovered it gave her a powerful lift and took a second mugful, curling her now filthy hands round its comforting warmth contentedly, Sister Marshall with some huffing and puffing unearthed a tin of chocolate biscuits for them all and they sat there, half a dozen nurses and the bad-tempered Staff Nurse Puncheon and now much less annoyed Sister Marshall, recovering from it all.

  Outside the flames still flickered in spite of the efforts of the firemen, as they could see when they turned out the lights and lifted a blackout from one glassless window and looked out across the road. The once familiar row of shops and buildings there was pitted with gaps where bombs had fallen, so that it looked like an old man’s teeth, and heaps of smoking, flaming rubble replaced the tobacconist’s and the pub on the corner where the housemen sneaked off to get some rest and recreation and the more racy of the nurses sometimes joined them. Chick looked mournfully at the tobacconist’s and sighed.

  ‘Bang goes my best black-marketeer,’ she said gloomily. ‘He always had a packet of Weights under the counter for me. Now what’ll I do?’

  ‘Give up smoking?’ Robin suggested and Chick threw her a look of mock horror.

  ‘Do you want me to give up living?’ she said. ‘Listen, what’d life be worth without sneaking off for a crafty drag behind the Old Bat’s back?’

  ‘She’s not so bad,’ Robin said and looked back over her shoulder to see where Sister Marshall was in the dimness. ‘Those chocolate biscuits had to be hers, you know. They were never supplied by the Bursar’s office.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not such an old toad,’ Chick said carelessly. ‘Listen, hon, when do you think she’ll let us off duty?’

  ‘Fourpence gets you a quid she’ll make us wait till four and then fetch the children back to have their treatment here before their breakfasts.’

  ‘But there aren’t any windows. They’ll freeze!’

  ‘Hardly,’ Robin said drily. ‘It’s been as hot a September as anyone can remember – and that’s not just the bombs. No, you’ll see. She can’t bear not to have her patients under her own eyes.’

  And so it was. By the time they were allowed to go off duty, the children, in the cots and beds that Sister Marshall had somehow repaired or scrounged, with Todd to help her do it, were back in Annie Zunz and bouncing around shouting for attention with as much verve as if they’d not lost half the night to the German bombers, and Robin had scurried about among them with clean nappies and bottles of milk and rusks as though she had five feet all running at the same time with each one of them aching miserably. She felt as though she had been working for uncountable hours.

  And indeed she had; yesterday should have been her last day on duty, which meant she should have gone off last night at eight thirty, to come on in the morning and work till noon, and then off to bed ready to come back with the Daughters of Dracula, as everyone called the night staff, at eight o’clock. As it was, she had, like everyone else, worked a straight twenty hours and she was beginning to feel very odd in consequence. Her head was spinning and her eyes felt heavy and gritty, but she didn’t feel sleepy any more. There had been moments during the night when she hadn’t been able to hide her jaw-cracking yawns, finding it impossible to avoid Sister Marshall seeing her gaping wide, but Sister Marshall who, for all her famous tetchiness and demands for perfection on her ward, was a good enough soul as everyone agreed, had pretended not to notice and sent Todd to get some more tea for them all.

  But now, as the pearly light of the late summer morning crept through the cracks in the blackout and Todd could at last take the hideou
s things down as the hospital carpenter arrived with boards to close off some of the windows, and some precious glass to reglaze enough of them to give the ward some daylight, Robin was on the point of exhaustion. Together with Chick and Staff Nurse Puncheon and the three first-years, Moriarty and McCulloch and Brown, she stood drooping in front of Sister’s desk, waiting to be sent off duty at last, and yearning for rest. And Staff Nurse Puncheon snapped at her, ‘Stand up straight, Bradman, for heaven’s sake. We don’t want Sister seeing you looking like that, do we? And do tidy your cap! Busy or not, you don’t have to look like a guttersnipe.’

  Robin reddened and pinched Chick’s arm hard, knowing her friend was about to make some sort of retort, and that would never do; unlike Sister Marshall, the Staff Nurse, a singularly sour young woman with heavy overhanging front teeth that gave her a perpetually angry look, and a rather spotty complexion, was never known to be anything but thoroughly vindictive. To get on her wrong side could be disaster for any young nurse, especially one who had straight teeth and a smooth complexion. That was well known to raise Puncheon’s ire to fever pitch. So, they both subsided and Robin did all she could to straighten her cap and stand up straight, as Sister Marshall, by some miracle looking as neat as she always did, came hurrying along the ward towards them.

  ‘Well now, nurses,’ she said briskly. ‘You’ve all done very well. I’m most impressed by your efforts, and reports of your good work will go to Matron. Thank you very much. We’ve been lucky – none of the children were hurt and they will soon be doing very well again, though they’ll need some extra naps today, no doubt. For yourselves, it’s high time you went. Nurse Puncheon, you may take the rest of the day off, and I won’t expect to see you till seven tomorrow morning. I can get a relief to hold the fort – ’