man – kind, as well, as his offer to escort Dulcie on her visit to see her mother had proved. Dulcie might insist that she could manage perfectly well on her crutches, but Olive had had awful mental images of the air-raid siren going off and Dulcie, all alone, being knocked over in the rush to reach the nearest shelter.
‘I saw Sally just before I left work today,’ Tilly informed her mother once they were seated at the kitchen table, with its fresh-looking duck-egg-blue, pale green and cream gingham tablecloth, trimmed with a border of daisies, eating the simple but nourishing meal of rissoles made from the leftovers of the special Sunday roast Olive had cooked in celebration of Tilly’s birthday, and flavoured with some of the onions Sally had grown in their garden, served with boiled potatoes and the last of the summer’s crop of beans.
‘She said to tell you that she doesn’t know when she’ll be home as she’s offered to sleep over at the hospital whilst they are so busy. They’ve had to bring back some of the staff who were evacuated to the temporary out-of-London hospital Barts organised when war was announced.’
Tilly put down her knife and fork, and told her mother quietly, ‘Sally said to tell everyone that we should all sleep face down and with a pillow over our heads. That’s what all the nurses are doing, because of the kind of injuries people have been brought in with.’
Olive could see that Tilly was reluctant to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Olive too had heard dreadful tales of the kind of injuries people had suffered.
Picking up her knife and fork again, Tilly wished that Sally’s advice hadn’t popped into her head whilst she was eating, stifling her appetite; no one with anything about them even thought of not clearing their plate of food, thanks to rationing.
As though she had read her thoughts Olive told her firmly, ‘Come on, love, eat up. We can’t afford to waste good food. There’s plenty from the East End right now that are homeless and with nothing but the clothes they’re standing up in who would give an awful lot to be safe in their homes and eating a decent meal.’
Olive’s familiar maternal firmness, reminiscent as it was of the days when Tilly had been much younger, made the girl smile, although the truth was that right now there wasn’t very much to smile about for any of them.
‘Suture, please, Nurse.’
The surgeon operating on the young child lying motionless on the operating table didn’t need to tell Sally what he required. She already had everything ready for him to sew up the wounds to the little boy’s body, from which he had just removed several pieces of shrapnel.
Having evacuated most of its staff out of London and closed down all but two operating theatres, which had been moved down to the basement for safety, Barts, like all London hospitals, was now having to cope with a huge influx of patients, many of whom, like this little boy, had very serious injuries indeed.
Those patients who could be moved were being sent out to Barts in the country for treatment, but those whose injuries were too severe, too life-threatening for treatment to be delayed or a long journey undertaken, were having to be operated on here, despite the bombs falling all around.
Down here in the basement, in the focused quiet of the operating theatre, the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns had to be ignored.
The operation was over. The consultant surgeon had gone to scrub up for the next one. The young patient was being wheeled out of the operating theatre ready for the porters to take him back to the ward where he would be nursed until – and if – he recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the country.
Sister had disappeared – no doubt to make sure that someone brought a cup of tea for Mr Ward the surgeon.
Sally’s boyfriend, George Laidlaw, was one of Mr Ward’s housemen, as the junior doctors were called. George was currently on duty in Casualty, where the flood of patients arriving seemed to increase with every bombing raid.
‘What have we got up next?’ Johnny MacDonald, the anaesthetist, a Scot, asked Sally, tiredly pushing his hand through his thinning ginger hair. Johnny was only in his mid-thirties but tonight he looked closer to fifty, Sally thought, and no wonder. They had almost lost the little boy twice during the op, only Johnny’s skill had kept him going.
‘Amputation that needs cleaning up,’ Sally answered without looking at him. No one liked amputations, and they liked them even less when someone or something else had done the amputating for them – in this case a falling roof slate that had sliced a fireman’s leg off just above his knee as he fought to save a burning building down on the docks.
‘I thought we were going to lose that wee laddie back there,’ the anaesthetist told Sally without saying anything about the next patient.
Sally didn’t reply. The reality was that they would probably lose the little boy anyway, and they all knew it. His little body had been pierced with so much shrapnel that it had left him, in the surgeon’s own words, ‘looking like a sieve’.
Somewhere in the hospital the boy’s mother would be waiting and praying, but there was only so much that even the best surgeon could do, and they did have the best here at Barts, Sally thought proudly, as she made her way to the sluice room to scrub up ready for the next operation. However, no matter how hard she scrubbed her hands Sally couldn’t rid her nostrils of the smell of blood, nor her mind of images of mangled, maimed bodies. The surgeons had been operating non-stop and suddenly, for no reason that she could think of, to her the smell of blood had become the stench of death. She leaned forward and closed her eyes as a surge of nausea gripped her.
The voice of one of the more senior theatre nurses who had already been in the sluice room, a short, stocky girl called Mavis Burton, reached her.
‘Bear up, Johnson,’ she said bracingly. ‘The theatre porters will be bringing the next patient along any minute.’
Immediately Sally snapped out of her uncharacteristic weakness. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally squeamish.’
The other nurse shook her head. ‘It would be hard to be anything else, given what we’ve been seeing. We all know that nurses are supposed to keep their distance and remember that they’ve got a job to do, and that weeping and wailing over injured patients doesn’t help anyone, but I’ve got to admit I’ve seen some things these last few days . . .’ She paused before continuing, ‘Mind you, with St Thomas’ being bombed on the first night of the blitz and its doctors and nurses risking their own lives in the damage to save patients, they’ve rather stolen a march on us in terms of showing the Germans what British medical staff are made of.’
St Thomas’ was the second oldest hospital in London, and there was a degree of professional rivalry between the two renowned establishments. On Sunday night a bomb had destroyed Medical Out Patients and most of college house, where the doctors were housed, killing two of them.
Only the bravery of three doctors, Mr Frewer, Dr Norman and Mr Maling, had saved two of their colleagues, who had been trapped by falling debris and ignited dispensary stores. Of course, no one working at Barts wanted their own hospital to be bombed, but Mavis was right: the bravery shown by St Thomas’ staff had naturally made everyone at Barts feel they had something to live up to.
Two hours later, when Sister Theatre had dispatched her to get herself a cup of tea and have a short break, Sally made her way tiredly to the canteen,
