frailty of life. The patient, who had been trembling convulsively, suddenly went still, the grip of his hand slackening.
They were still several yards from safety and the shelter, but Grace realised she had something far more important to deal with now than her own safety.
Bending towards the bed, she told the porter quietly, ‘I think we need the padre, if you can find him for me, please, John.’
They said that you always remembered your first death, but for Grace each one brought her that same sense of loss and pain, and that wish that things could be different and that her patient might live.
What was easier now, though, was to hold tightly to the slackened hand and quietly recite the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Sister, in that calm all-seeing way of hers that Grace so admired, seemed to materialise on the opposite side of the bed out of nowhere, her own hands competent and professional as she reached for the dying man’s other hand, checking his pulse against her watch, then talking quietly to him once Grace had finished her prayer.
He had gone before the padre managed to reach them, but the formalities of respect had still to be gone through, the blessing said, and a doctor summoned, a space found for the ritual and respect accorded to the newly dead even in the midst of a bombing raid that could take their own lives at any minute. A well-trained nurse did not abandon her patient to protect her own safety.
Grace waited until the doctor gave the brief nod of his head that signalled that the body was to be taken to the morgue before accepting her own dismissal from Sister and continuing on her way to the shelter.
It was three o’clock. Her eyes felt dry and gritty from smoke, brick dust and uncried tears. When this war was over she would cry an ocean of them, but not now – not when, as their vicar had said from the pulpit on Sunday morning, with every strong heartbeat of hope and courage and the belief that they would prevail they were driving back the enemy, just as with every weak heartbeat of fear they were inviting defeat.
Now instead of thinking about the bombs and worrying about her own danger, she would think instead of Seb and how much she loved him. Like her, Seb was on duty tonight. He was based at Derby House, down near the docks. They tried to time their off-duty hours so that they could be together if at all possible. Nurses weren’t allowed to wear engagement rings, so Grace kept hers hidden, wearing it on a fine chain beneath her uniform. When she felt afraid, like she did now, just knowing that it was there and that Seb loved her was enough to calm those fears.
The air-raid shelter was crowded, but a nurse whom she vaguely recognised shuffled along to make room for her, welcoming her with a tired smile.
None of them had taken her full off-duty hours, snatching a few hours of sleep instead and then going back to work, knowing how desperately her skills were needed.
The remorseless throb of aircraft engines overhead made Grace want to cover her ears. They couldn’t go on like this much longer, being attacked night after night, everyone said so, talking about the effect the unrelenting attacks were having on people’s morale in low hesitant whispers. The unthinkable, the unbearable, had begun to drift into people’s minds, obscuring hope in the same way that the smoke-and dust-filled air was obscuring the sky.
‘Lord knows where we’re going to put them as gets injured tonight,’ the other nurse sighed wearily. ‘The whole hospital’s already bursting at the seams.’
Grace nodded. It was true, after all. Patients were already having to lie on makeshift beds in corridors. The operating theatres were working at full capacity, with extra surgeons coming in from surrounding towns, including Manchester, and now the staff were facing shortages of supplies, the hospital authorities unable to restock fast enough to cope with the demand. Some patients, like the boy who had died earlier, were so badly injured that there was nothing that could be done for them other than to try to relieve their pain, and even that wasn’t always possible. Word had gone round on the grapevine when Grace had been in the dining room earlier that with the city almost cut off from the rest of the country, morphine was to be kept for those patients who could survive and not given as palliative care to those who would not, for fear of the supply running out.
War was such a cruel thing, its horrors thankfully unimaginable to those who had not experienced them. Grace had seen people whose bodies were so badly damaged that if anyone had told her three years ago about such injuries she would have thought they were trying to frighten her.
She closed her eyes, trying to blot out the sound of the continuous waves of incoming bombers and focus instead on the bursts of gunfire from the ack-ack guns. How much longer could Liverpool survive such an onslaught? Not much longer, she suspected. The Germans were bombing the heart out of the city and its people, destroying its buildings, smashing its infrastructure, maiming and killing its people, knowing how much the whole country depended on the vital necessities – raw materials and foodstuffs – that those Merchant Navy convoys whose port was Liverpool struggled to bring in from across the Atlantic.
Cutting off that vital lifeline would be like cutting off the flow of blood to a patient’s heart – and only death could follow.
Down in the protected underground buildings beneath Derby House, Seb couldn’t help worrying about Grace. He loved her so much and she was so very brave, as he already had good cause to know, never flinching from putting the safety of her patients first.
Derby House was the Headquarters for Joint Strategic Planning, a combined operation involving both the Navy and the RAF, and Seb had seen the devastating losses the conveys were suffering thanks to the speed and accuracy of Hitler’s U-boats.
Churchill had given orders that no effort must be spared in capturing from the Germans one of their Enigma machines. These cipher machines sent signals between the U-boats and their HQ close to Paris, using special codebooks, and if one could somehow be acquired, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park would be able to decipher singals and so warn convoys of the U-boats’ whereabouts. But thus far no Enigma machine had been captured and the shipping losses continued to be very heavy.
Seb was part of a secret RAF Y Section, set up to listen in on and speedily record enemy Morse code messages, and he was waiting for the particular sender he was currently monitoring to start transmitting again. It was at times like this, with an air raid going on, the city devastated by what it had already endured, and other men putting their lives at risk to protect what was left of it, that Seb wished that he was playing a more active role in the country’s defence himself.
At the beginning of the war when he had been approached to work for SOE, using his radio operator’s skills to teach French Resistance cells the skills they would need, Seb had been working in the field in France in conditions of such personal danger that he had truly felt that he was doing his bit. But then with the German invasion of France and the BEF being driven back to Dunkirk, Seb had been recalled to England.
Dunkirk, everything it had been and everything it now represented for the way in which, by some miracle, tens of thousands of soldiers had been rescued from the beaches of northern France, was etched on his soul for ever. He had been lucky, but so many had not.
Back in Liverpool he had expected to be handling Morse code messages sent from France by members of SOE secretly landed there and from the groups of French Resistance he had helped train. Instead he had been put in charge of some newly trained Y Section recruits, dealing with military messages passed between the enemy.
Churchill insisted on seeing
