reading

For the ‘Williams Girls’: my beautiful nieces, Jessamy, Susannah and Esther. And also Annabelle and Bethwyn, who came into the world in 2013 and 2016 and made me ‘Great’.

About the Author

Deborah was raised in Perth, Western Australia, by a wonderful mother who was widowed by the shadow of World War 2 and who loved to tell stories. As a child she always had a book in her hand, even when watching too many classic movies on TV.

She has several degrees in history including a post-graduate degree from Oxford University. She currently lives in Perth, though makes frequent visits to the UK.

About the Book

As death and destruction fall from the skies day after day in the London Blitz, Australian ambulance driver, Lily Brennan, confronts the horror with bravery, intelligence, common sense and humour.

Though she must rely upon her colleagues to carry out her dangerous duties, Lily begins to suspect that someone at her Ambulance Station may be giving assistance to the enemy by disclosing secret information. Then her Jewish ambulance attendant and best friend, David Levy, disappears in suspicious circumstances. Aided, and sometimes hindered, by David’s school friend, a mysterious and attractive RAF pilot, Lily has to draw on all of her resources to find David but also negotiate the dangers that come from falling in love in a country far from home and in a time of war.

CHAPTER ONE

Blood, warm and sticky, was trickling down my forehead. Something sharp must have nicked me as they pushed me through the narrow gap. Never mind, I was inside.

The words disappeared into the darkness as my torchlight flicked over the mess of plaster, wood and debris. In the fug of soot and dust and ash, my breathing was shallow and unsatisfying, which added to the sense of impending doom that had gripped me the moment they shoved me inside.

The trickle of blood on my forehead had become exquisitely itchy. When I lifted my gloved hand to wipe it away, the leather was harsh against my skin and felt gritty. Now my face was bloody and dirty; I probably looked like any child’s nightmare.

Whatever was I – Lily Brennan, schoolteacher from Western Australia – doing here, crawling into the ruins of a bombed house, playing the hero, when the children were most likely already dead?

I had arrived with my ambulance partner, David Levy, to find a familiar scene of devastation, bleached to aquatint by the moonlight. Piles of rubble stood in the middle of what had been a row of Victorian dwellings. They towered in gaunt ruin against the sky, between shapeless wrecks of masonry that showed the signs of a direct hit. Men’s voices, brisk and business-like, emerged from the gloom, between whistles and the occasional shout. Short flashes of torchlight appeared and vanished in the darkness, as rescue workers sought doggedly for signs of life in the ruins.

When I emerged from the ambulance, the warden had looked me up and down as if I were a prize cow at the Royal Show. As he did so, the letters on his tin helmet had stood out brightly in the moonlight: ‘ARP’. They stood for air raid precautions, and I had felt inappropriate laughter bubble up in my chest when I got a good look at him. How could this small man protect anyone from the destruction London had suffered in the past five weeks of air raids? And yet there was a quiet authority in his slow nod to me, and in the way he had then turned to throw a cryptic comment to the men standing behind him.

Levy, who had come to stand beside me, laughed at that, saying, ‘I think she might prefer to be described as slim.’

There had been no answering smile from the warden. Instead, he gestured at the ruins of what had been a house. ‘We’ve got two infants buried under the rubble there,’ he said. His clipped, precise voice did not at all obscure the horror of those words. ‘At least one’s alive – or was alive until a half-hour ago – because we’ve heard a baby crying. We understand they were left sheltering under a solid kitchen table before the bomb hit. Problem is, the place is just holding together. If we disturb the site too much it’ll bring the rest down on top of them. It looks like someone slim – as slim as you, miss – could squeeze through. You’d need to crawl through to the kitchen at the back, find the kids and bring them out. Think you can do that?’

Levy knew I had a horror of tightly enclosed spaces. ‘I’ll go,’ he had said. ‘I’m good at squeezing through ruins. I’ve done it before.’

‘There isn’t the room. You’d never get in.’ The warden sized me up with another quick glance and challenged me with his eyes.

I had always been small for my age. Even now, at twenty-five, I could still be mistaken for a schoolgirl. I always suspected that was because I had been born too early and never really caught up. I was so small when I was born that I really should have died, like the three tiny babies who had slipped away in my mother’s arms in the years before I arrived in the world. And that was why my mother took one look at my little wrinkled body and turned her face from me, unwilling to engage in another losing battle for a child’s life. That I survived was due to my father. He was a fighter, and he fought for me.

A woman who had helped at my birth told him the best chance to keep me alive was to carry me next to his skin, where his strong heartbeat would teach my heart to keep beating when it forgot. So Dad fashioned a pouch for his tiny joey and for two months, until I could suckle and had grown into my skin, he carried me everywhere, pressed against his heart, just as the woman had said. I was no bigger than his hand and he fed me my mother’s milk from an eyedropper, like a little bird. When I was old enough to hear the story he told me that the moment he saw me he knew I would live, because he could see that I was a fighter too.

Most people cannot see that in me. Because I am small and slender people often mistakenly assume that I am fragile. Not the warden.

‘I think you could get to the children,’ he said to me. ‘Get them out. Willing to chance it, miss?’

Now on my hands and knees, crawling over the rough, debris-strewn floor, I took comfort in the thought that, after five weeks of driving an ambulance in this relentless Blitz, I had learned to push fear aside when attending an incident.

Served me right for being smug. Without any warning, my torch dimmed and failed. Darkness enfolded me. My heart thumped painfully and my chest tightened. I tried to breathe my way out of the almost overwhelming panic, but my breaths were shallow and too rapid, and my thoughts would not stay still, so that I couldn’t settle into a plan of action. Snatches of a song, a poem, memories of home came unbidden and left as quickly to resolve into one, dreadful realisation. I’m entombed. I’ll die here, alone in the darkness, far from home.

Then there was anger at my own defeatist thoughts. I pushed them away and shook the torch violently, once, twice, and on the third shake it flickered back into life. As the beam strengthened I exulted in the simple fact of light.

My slow crawl began again and optimism reasserted itself. I would find the children alive and I would get us all out of here. They would probably be afraid of me, with my dirty face and goggly eye shields under the steel hat, but in my three years as a country schoolteacher I had learned how to soothe frightened children. The important thing is to keep calm, speak with authority and show a sense of humour. I used the same tactics in dealing with the injured adults I transported in my ambulance.

The air was dusty, and I sneezed. That immediately reminded me of home and I let my thoughts drift into childhood memory, anything to take my mind off this interminable crawl into darkness. It was always dusty in Kookynie, the tiny gold-mining settlement on the edge of Western Australia’s Great Victoria Desert where I grew up. It was dusty also in the Wheatbelt town of Duranillin, where I had taught in a one-room school and saved the money to make my escape to Europe. My students had been bush kids, independent, cheeky and often rambunctious. I had loved teaching them, probably because I had been just like them myself – until my mother took note of that fact and sent me to boarding school in Perth.

‘Lily needs to learn how to live in society. She’s thirteen and it’s time she learned how to act like a lady,’ she had said, as if Perth were some cosmopolitan centre of civilisation, and her own grandfather had not been convicted in 1850 of stealing a cow, and transported to Western Australia for ten years of penal servitude.

My mother hated people to know of her grandfather’s convict past, but I was proud of what he went on to do with his life after such troubled beginnings. After receiving his ticket of leave, he became a government schoolmaster and a respected member of the community. His son became a bank manager and his grandson – my Uncle Charles – was a judge. Life is often ironic in Australia.

A sharp pain in my knee brought me back to the present as I bumped into something that gave a loud crack. My entire body jerked, and I froze, heart pounding, praying I had not disturbed the precarious jumble around me.

Silence and, except for the narrow band of my torchlight, darkness. I sneezed again and I crawled a few feet more, slowly and more carefully. I wished I were not so alone. My hands were sweaty and sticky inside the thick gloves. I stopped to stifle yet another sneeze as best I could, and I gazed at the destruction exposed by my torchlight.

Splinters of cabinetry, shards of glass and crockery, and pieces of plaster with torn wallpaper attached. The wallpaper was a cheerful yellowy colour scattered with a design of orange berries, the sort of paper that would brighten up a kitchen. Small children would barely notice it as they drank their milk and ate their meals. It would have been there in the background in a room they had thought was as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar, but was now a shattered mess.

‘Hullo? Are you there?’ I called out again, making my voice calm and firm. ‘Please tell me if you are. I’m Lily and I’m here to help you.’

There was no reply. If the children were alive I did not blame them for hiding from a stranger who was waving a torch around in the ruins of their lives. It would be better if I could call them by name, but I did not know their names. So I listened hard for anything that might be a sign as to their presence: a whimper, a sob, a moan. Silence pressed in, broken by creaks and groans from the settling ruins. I could not see the kitchen table they were supposed to have sheltered beneath.

It occurred to me to recite some poetry. My students had loved Edward Lear’s poetry, which is nonsensical enough to surprise and delight small children. A frightened child might be intrigued.

‘Those who watch at that midnight hour,’ I declaimed, ‘From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along,’ – and here I let the torchlight play around me – ‘“The Dong! – the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!”’

It came distinctly, the piping voice of a small child. Oh, God, please let them both be all right. Oh, God, please let them be together and unhurt.

‘It is silly, isn’t it?’ I said into the darkness. ‘Are you hiding? You’re doing a super job at it if you are.’

‘Your mummy sent me to get you,’ I said. ‘She’s waiting for you outside. She wants you to come with me.’

It was a lie, and I hated to use it. They had told me the mother had gone off in another ambulance. I didn’t even know if she was still alive.

I shone the torch in the direction of the voice and from the jumble of wood and plaster a small white face squinted into the light. It belonged to a bright-eyed little boy, about three years old, who was hugging a big torch to his chest. I supposed he had turned it off when he heard me approaching. Grey dust coated his hair and the blue striped pyjamas he was wearing; he seemed to be in a cave, until I realised that he was in fact under the kitchen table. It had saved him when the walls came down on top of it, but I wondered how much longer the table would hold with the ton of rubble it bore.

The boy shook his head. ‘I’m looking after Emily, our baby. She’s asleep.’

Oh, God, please let her not be dead. I had seen too many dead children in the past weeks.

‘It’s all right, sweetheart, I’ve come to take you both to Mummy,’ I said as I crawled across the rubble towards him.

It wasn’t until I was almost at his sanctuary that my torchlight revealed the baby lying on her back on a blanket in front of him. She looked about nine months old and was, just as her brother had said, fast asleep. With a sense of wonder I watched the quick and regular rise and fall of her chest.

‘Emily cried and cried,’ he said. ‘But she’s asleep now, you mustn’t wake her up.’

I reached out a hand to the infant and the boy immediately tried to push me away. ‘Mummy said to wait here. Go away you Dong.’

I backed off a little. ‘How are you, old chap,’ I asked. ‘Are you hurt anywhere?’

He shook his head and shrank back, but said nothing more as I gently felt along Emily’s body to see if there were any indications of injury. She woke as I did so, and gave a high mewling cry of surprise. Her little body was firm to the touch, but her eyes were sunken and she seemed lethargic. I assumed she was dehydrated and prayed that was the worst.

I reached into the hiding place and picked her up, tucking the blanket around her. Her arms wrapped around my neck in a tight, trusting grip that brought hot tears to my eyes. I had thought I was hardened after seeing so much horror and I felt oddly happy to know that tears could still come.

The boy’s voice was sharp, imperative; he was close to hysteria. He was also confused and probably hungry and thirsty and certainly terrified.

‘You’ve been such a brave boy,’ I said. ‘And you’ve looked after Emily so well. Your mummy will be very proud of you. But it’s time for us all to go now. I’ll carry Emily. Can you crawl behind me while I carry Emily?’

‘Like a baby?’ He sounded unenthusiastic. I could not force him to come out, but I could not carry both of them, and neither could I leave him behind.

‘No. Like a—’ My mind was blank. I hugged Emily closer. She had my neck in a stranglehold, but she was too quiet and it worried me. The creaks and moans of the settling ruins above us worried me more, though. The panic I had kept at bay was threatening to engulf me again and I needed to get out. Now.

‘Like a train,’ I said, sparked by a sudden, ancient memory of the game I had played with my younger brother, Ben. ‘Let’s play trains. I’m the engine and Emily is the driver, but we need a coal truck. Could you be a coal truck, d’you think? Grab my ankles and we’ll set off.’

With my right arm tight around baby Emily and gripping the torch, I cautiously turned myself around to face the way I had come. A loud sob sounded behind me. He was close to losing control; I was taking his sister and he was terrified of being alone in the dark. We’re all frightened of that, I wanted to tell him, in a war we’re all afraid of the dark.

I shone my torch down and back towards my feet, dipping Emily as I did so. ‘Quick, grab my ankles. The train must leave on time, but it can’t run without coal.’

‘Leave your torch,’ I said, ‘and take hold of my ankles. Mummy will pick it up later.’

I raised my voice and made a train sound. ‘Woo-oo-oo. All aboard that’s going aboard. The train to Euston station is ready to go.’

‘You should say that it’s about to depart,’ he whispered in a mournful little voice.

I repeated obediently, ‘The train to Euston station is about to depart. All aboard. Where’s my coal truck? Unless there’s coal for the engine we won’t get far. Is there a coal truck around here?’

‘I’ll be the coal truck,’ he said, and I heard the note of excitement in his voice and knew I had him.

Small hands grabbed my ankles. I turned the torch to light our way and slowly, painfully, we began to crawl through the debris of his shattered home, puff, puff, puffing as we went.

‘Woo-woo,’ I said. The smell of dust and charred wood and soot was almost suffocating and I coughed.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Not much further now.’ My knees felt as if they were on fire, and baby Emily was becoming unbearably heavy in the crook of my arm, which was cramping painfully. When I tried to shift her weight a little she whimpered.

‘Engines can’t run without coal,’ he whispered and held tighter to my ankles, a dragging weight behind me as I crawled.

I felt my heart jump when at last I saw the circle of light ahead of me. It was not daylight yet, of course. They would have set up arc lights and erected a tarpaulin to hide them from the bombers. We crawled towards the light and now I could hear the generator. But as they pulled us out I heard a more ominous sound, the growling roar of planes overhead and the heavy thump of ack-ack guns. The raiders had returned.

CHAPTER TWO

Later that night, searchlights still ripped through the darkness in front of us; the shimmering bars met and crossed and swept apart in seemingly haphazard arcs, covering the sky with a lattice of light. German aeroplanes, tiny as toys, wove in and out of the thin greenish beams. They were Heinkel bombers by the waugh waugh sound of their engines; their dreary throbbing was a different tone entirely to the comforting growl of a Spitfire or the rumble of a Hurricane.

We were returning at last to the Bloomsbury auxiliary ambulance station in Woburn Place at the required sixteen miles an hour. The Monster, by which name my ambulance was affectionately known, did not appreciate such a slow pace, and was in danger of overheating.

Strings of red tracer bullets rose up towards the planes as the anti-aircraft guns thundered out shells in rapid succession. The rhythmic whomp whomp whomp whomp pounded my ears as I peered through the dusty windscreen and watched shells burst far above us, like flashes of summer lightning. For all the terror of an air raid, I was transfixed by the beauty of it.

‘Get ’em,’ said Levy, entranced in his own way by the show. ‘Get the bastards.’

Blinking my tired eyes, I ignored him to squint at the small part of the road illuminated by the narrow band of headlights we were allowed to show, and tried to avoid the fissures and potholes and debris left by this and earlier air raids.

I shifted in my seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Comfort was not really possible, given that I was perched on a pile of old newspapers in order to see over the wheel. At least the discomfort kept me awake, a good thing, since I needed all my wits about me to drive the Monster. She was an ungainly beast, a 1937 Ford V8 van with a large box body welded on to her chassis. Inside were four standard metal stretchers, empty at present, as we had dropped off our last patients. Stowed beneath the stretchers were a first aid kit, some basins, and piles of blankets.

The moon was almost full and it illuminated a couple of figures on the footpath, gazing upwards to watch the show.

‘Silly buggers,’ Levy replied. ‘It hasn’t taken long for Londoners to grow accustomed to all this, has it?’

‘Accustomed to what?’ I was suddenly angry, contemptuous. ‘The very real possibility of instant, violent death?’

‘Londoners are a sophisticated lot, Brennan. They need variety. Even air raids acquire a certain monotony after a while.’

Whatever reply Levy made was lost in the shriek of falling bombs. The shriek rose to a crescendo that ended in three crumps as the ‘stick’ of bombs hit the ground in a line of explosions. These had probably landed over a mile away, but the spectators jumped and bolted for shelter. I shook my head to indicate to Levy that I had not heard what he had said, and we exchanged wry smiles.

‘I said, deep down, Londoners love the Blitz,’ he shouted. ‘It’s something big. When it’s over they’ll look back on all this with nostalgia.’

Over to our right the sky was pink and rapidly turning to red. Fires were inevitable during a raid. In early September, on the first night of the blitzkrieg, the docks in the East End had blazed so brightly that all of London was bathed in a red glow that had reminded me of sunset in the desert around Kookynie.

I had a sudden, vivid image of dry red earth dotted with stunted mulga and mallee, of heat shimmering on a far horizon under a sky of intense cloudless blue and sunsets of red fire. I had been away nearly three years now, and although weeks could go by without my giving it a thought, sometimes I missed home so much it was like a physical pain in my chest.

I ventured a look at him. He was scowling, worried about me, although he would never admit it. Even when he scowled, and Levy scowled a great deal, he was ridiculously good looking. I thought he resembled a young Siegfried Sassoon: exotic, intelligent and disturbingly sensual.

I had joined the ambulance service in October 1939, and had been paired with Levy when he arrived at the Bloomsbury station in February 1940. In the eight months we had been working together I had grown to like him very much. Any early tendency I might have had to think about him romantically had soon faded when he had made it clear, although never overtly, that he was simply not interested in me that way. Which simplified matters greatly once the Blitz began, because he was an excellent ambulance attendant and we worked together like a dream. Anyway, a love affair would have been out of place among the horrors we faced each day.

I assumed he had a girlfriend, possibly many girlfriends, as he was handsome and personable when he wanted to be and the war seemed to invite casual flings – but he had never mentioned any. I knew little else about David Levy, other than that he was single, twenty-five, Jewish, had attended Harrow School and then studied English Literature at Oxford. I had no idea what he did when he was not with me in the Monster.

‘Indigestion,’ I said. ‘One of Fripp’s scones sits like a rock in my stomach.’

‘I suspect Nola Fripp of fifth column activities. No one could be such a terrible cook as that girl. When she brings in her culinary experiments I’m sure it’s a ruse to put the entire ambulance station out of action with food poisoning.’

That remark brought a smile from Levy. He had a lovely smile, which he showed too infrequently.

‘Poor old Brennan,’ he said. ‘You need more padding in the seat area. Put on some weight, old girl. I often worry you’ll be blown away in a strong wind, like a pint-sized, curly haired Dorothy, heading for Oz.’

‘Up among the barrage balloons,’ I said, smiling at the image. ‘I’ll hitch a ride on a Spitfire and let it take me somewhere over the rainbow.’

‘I’ve a friend in the RAF. He’s one of Churchill’s Few, but he flies a Hurricane, not a Spitfire. Wasn’t it a hurricane that whisked Dorothy away?’

‘I’m sure you’re right. By the way, a propos of our earlier incident, please don’t do anything so idiotically heroic again. Makes me look bad when you go off alone like that, saving children willy-nilly.’

‘Nonsense. They just had to mention children in danger and you dove into that rabbit hole like a demented Alice. Shocking exhibitionism in my opinion, Brennan.’

Levy wore a serious expression I knew well. When Levy looked serious it meant he was joking and when he appeared bored it meant he was annoyed. The bored look was most often in evidence at the ambulance station. He was not well-liked there, and some cruel jokes had been played on him. The anti-Semitism in the station, and in London generally, was widespread and that fact was still shocking to me.

We all knew what horrors that sort of blind prejudice could bring. Ever since the Nazis had come to power in Germany eight years before, newspapers had reported their increasingly brutal measures against the Jews, from refusing to allocate ration cards to them in Germany, to confiscating their property, to herding them into a crowded ghetto in Warsaw to starve or die of typhus, and massacring them wholesale in Polish villages. And now there were reports of concentration camps being built, just for Jews.

Looking at Levy, seeing his face drawn and his body drooping with exhaustion, the old anger surfaced at the injustice of those who had never bothered to try to get to know him, but were willing to judge him anyway. It was anathema to me to think of condemning someone for what they were rather than who they were.

Anti-Semitism made no sense to me. The only Jews I had known personally before I met Levy were my family doctor in Kalgoorlie and his family, and I had liked them.

I changed down a gear with a crunch. Beside me Levy flinched dramatically at the noise. He thought it was amusing to do this when I crunched the gears or drove into a pothole or over debris. I wished he could take over for a spell, and see how he liked trying to control the Monster during a night raid with only a one-and-a-half inch slit of headlight beam showing. The Monster was a fair cow to manage, especially wearing rubber boots. I needed to double de-clutch after every gear change and my muscles were developing muscles from pulling at the steering wheel.

But Levy was not allowed to drive. He had been rejected for military service because of epilepsy, and it had been impressed upon me that he was under no circumstances to get behind the wheel of one of our precious ambulances.

And I found his theatrics insulting, because I knew I was a good driver. I had learned to drive in my early teens and I prided myself on being able to handle just about anything with wheels. I’d been put through an interesting test of my driving skills when I volunteered for the Ambulance Service. With a full pail of water in the foot well of a car I had to drive around London in the blackout without spilling a drop. That had been a doddle compared to transporting beer in my father’s truck from Kalgoorlie to Kookynie along rough desert tracks.

‘The guns seem awfully close,’ I said. I could feel their rhythmic pounding vibrating in my chest as I turned onto the Euston Road.

A minute or so later a spray of shrapnel clattered onto the ambulance roof and the road around us, making a loud tinkly sound, like cutlery tipped onto a table. Shrapnel – the steel and tin fragments of spent anti-aircraft shells – fell everywhere when the guns were firing. It was more than simply a nuisance and a risk to the ambulance tyres. The fragments were red hot as they fell and they could maim or even kill when they hit exposed flesh. I drove over them carefully and the Monster continued on her rumbling journey.

I mused that shrapnel was just one of the many things that could kill or maim civilians in an air raid. They could also be crushed by fallen masonry, choke on brick dust, be gassed, drown when a burst water main flooded a shelter, burn in a firestorm, be torn apart by bomb fragments, be cut to pieces by flying glass, or succumb to the sheer force of the blast itself.

In my weeks of driving the Monster in this Blitz I had become an expert on death; it haunted my waking hours and my dreams. My greatest horror was the thought of encountering a parachute mine. Even the biggest high explosive bomb was as nothing compared to a naval mine designed to blow up ships. They were dropped over London attached to parachutes to float silently, gracefully downwards wherever the wind took them, and they demolished whole city blocks twenty-two seconds after impact.

I relied on him for directions, as I had not lived long enough in London to be able to navigate through a blacked-out city in which all street signs had been removed. Before we left the station he always checked the wall map that was kept updated as to closed streets and obstructions, but the map could not be relied upon as the closures were apt to change without warning.

The moon illuminated our way to some extent, but it was a mixed blessing. On such moonlit nights the Thames, with its unmistakable twists and turns, was like a path of molten lead that took the raiders straight to the heart of London. We had copped a thrashing tonight because of the full moon.

‘They used to call it a hunter’s moon,’ I said to Levy, raising my voice to be heard over the noise around us. ‘Now we know it as a bombers’ moon.’

‘It’s the same thing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Both end in moonlit death.’ His voice dropped. ‘Look at that!’

We were both silent, watching in awe as scores of bombers flew across the moon. It was a beautiful, chilling sight.

‘Turn right here, please, Brennan,’ said Levy. He was taking me on a circuitous route to avoid the wreckage of the last few weeks. But soon we encountered fresh damage.

A barrier had been set up across High Holborn, where a pile of rubble towered over a burst water main that spouted inside a huge crater on the road. Dark figures crawled over the debris and I wondered how many had been trapped inside the wreckage.

‘That was the Holborn Empire,’ he said in a tight voice. ‘Vera Lynn was to sing there last night.’

Diversion signs directed me into a narrow street where we bumped over more rubble and debris. I drove carefully, but without warning the ambulance thumped down in a sickening lurch, bouncing up again with a crunch.

My heart thudded and I slowed to a crawl as I tried to determine if there was any damage to the chassis or wheels, if anything was out of whack. The engine sounded as loud and rough as always and I let out a breath I barely knew I’d been holding.

‘Damn potholes,’ I said. ‘They’re impossible to see in this blackout.’

‘She’s apples.’ Levy liked it when I spoke ‘Aussie’ and I would sometimes lay it on thick for him.

‘Too right.’ I peered out of the windscreen and frowned at the empty sky. ‘Do you think the raiders have gone?’

‘Probably not,’ said Levy. ‘Turn right here and pull over, if you’d be so kind, Brennan. I need a cigarette, and I’d rather smoke outside this rattle trap.’

He threw me a wry smile and said nothing. I pulled over and switched off the engine. We got out and stood together, leaning against the ambulance as Levy smoked his cigarette. There was a ghost of day over to the east. Dawn was very close.

In front of us a tall brick wall had crumbled to dust, revealing an area of lawn and tall trees. Two big craters pitted the grass and several trees had fallen. Behind us were the usual dirty Georgian houses of Bloomsbury. Most of the windows were gone, because the force of a blast sucked out glass, and the footpath and road were littered with shimmering shards. Dust swirled around us, smelling of smoke.

‘Gray’s Inn Gardens,’ said Levy, gesturing with his cigarette towards the garden. ‘We’re nearly back at Woburn Place.’ He pointed upwards, drew my attention to a tangle of squiggly white lines in the lightening sky to the east. Now a schoolboy grin lit his face. ‘Our boys have been fighting the buggers. Hope they got some of ’em.’ I could hear the excitement in his voice.

We traced together the remnants of the dogfights that had taken place between the RAF and the Luftwaffe not long before.

‘King James Version; it was rammed down our throats at school – perhaps they harboured hopes of my conversion. Isaiah, chapter forty. It’s pretty much the same in Hebrew, and it seems apposite. I know a fighter pilot.’

In my mind’s eye I saw an eager young man, like the ones in the newspaper photographs, a ‘Mae West’ over his shoulder, cigarette in hand, smiling into the camera as he waited to jump into his plane and give what for to the enemy.

‘He says Hurricanes might not be as sexy as Spitfires, but they’re more reliable.’ Levy was still staring into the sky.

My mental picture shifted to a keen-eyed man, leaning against a Hurricane, unsmiling and determined.

Levy looked down at his hands, clasped in his lap. ‘We were at Harrow together; he was another outsider.’

My picture of Levy’s friend shifted again. Now he was a thin faced, dark-eyed man, a twin of Levy with the same ferocious intelligence and intensity, the same goofy sense of humour and innate kindness.

The All Clear sounded, that long steady siren note announcing the raiders had departed from our skies, retreating from the Spitfires and Hurricanes, our daylight defenders.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get back or they’ll send out a search party.’

Levy glanced at his watch. ‘It’s nearly six and we’ve just had the All Clear. You worry too much, Brennan.’

Our sixteen-hour night shift ended at nine. We were on a spell of alternate nights, so after this shift we would not be on again until five o’clock the following afternoon. After three night shifts we had a two-day break, then a week of six eight-hour day shifts from nine until five.

I pressed the starter and the engine sputtered into life. We drove in silence for a while, feeling a little rested after our brief moment of peace. The Monster rattled on through London’s streets. Rich streets or poor streets, after weeks of this Blitz they all shared an air of dusty desolation, a sort of shabby equality.

More than just buildings had fallen in this Blitz. It seemed to me that Jack was as good as his master in a ruined city, and after thirteen months of war the English system of class had become as shaky as a bombed mansion. I exulted in the thought. Australia was a great deal more egalitarian than Britain, but even there I had suffered at the hands of people who thought themselves better by reason of birth. At the boarding school my mother had sent me to were girls who lived in big houses by the river staffed by servants, and some of these girls had delighted in tormenting the small country girl whose father ran a hotel.

People were on the streets now, and they looked up as we drove past. They were pale and many looked tired, which wasn’t surprising after a night in the shelters, but they did not seem miserable or defeated. On the contrary, most appeared cheerful. Some of them waved and smiled at us.

At St Pancras station I was forced into a complicated detour by a large yellow notice, ‘DANGER – UNEXPLODED BOMB’. The Old Grey Mare – the grey painted car allocated to bomb reconnaissance – was parked at the corner. I sent up a quick prayer for the disposal squad, who would be racing the clock to disarm the bomb.

He found it hard to remain silent, and often tried my patience with such pointless remarks. I ignored him to concentrate on the road. We were nearly at the station.

In Woburn Place, opposite Russell Square, not far from the ruddy Edwardian grandeur of the Hotel Russell and around the corner from the Russell Square Underground Station, was a large mansion block called Russell Court. It rather dominated that part of Bloomsbury. The Bloomsbury auxiliary ambulance station was located there and in the building’s basement garage were kept the five ambulances and the six cars used to transport the walking wounded.

By the time we arrived at the station it was an effort for me even to drive down the ramp into the garage, and when I opened my door I nearly fell out of the cabin. The concrete floor seemed to sway as I pulled off my steel hat and, when I removed my eye shield, my eyes were sore and gritty with fatigue. I massaged my scalp with dirty fingers, trying to ease the knots of tension. When I blinked at my watch, the small dial showed six-thirty. I had hoped it was later. Still, if things were quiet now, I could grab some breakfast before helping Levy clean the Monster. We were obliged to leave her spick and span and free of blood for the day shift.

Poor old Monster, the night had added some dents and dings to her body. I saw them as scars of battle and gave her a pat before heading to the women’s washroom to clean off some of the grime.

CHAPTER THREE

Maisie Halliday was in the washroom, also trying to wash away the dirt that collected during a hard shift. She was a tall, dark-eyed girl of nineteen with long legs and a calm disposition, who worked at the Trocadero as a dancer when she wasn’t driving ambulances. She had joined us only a couple of weeks before and I had not had much chance to speak to her, but from what I had seen I was fairly sure I would like her.

I greeted Maisie and looked in the mirror. My face was not just dirty, it was a varicoloured streaky mess of grime and blood. I groaned, picked up a bar of soap and turned on the tap. A few minutes later my skin was clean, but bright red from scrubbing and the icy water.

Maisie looked at her own reflection and laughed. ‘This job is murder on the complexion.’

‘You’re a dancer, aren’t you? I suppose you know how to cover it all up with make-up.’

She nodded. ‘I do, but I wonder sometimes if the little nicks we always seem to pick up at the incidents will mark my face for life. I’m terribly afraid it could hamper my chances at Hollywood stardom when this war is over.’

I wondered if she were serious, until I caught sight of the twinkle in her eyes.

We walked together out of the washroom and headed for the canteen to grab breakfast.

‘Are you really interested in acting?’ I asked, as we tucked into our baked beans and bacon.

Her expression became dreamy. ‘No. I’m a dancer. After this is all over my dream is to head back to France. Before the war I had a peachy job in the Riviera as an exhibition dancer at a big hotel. Good tips and I could laze around on the beach all day, working on my tan.’ She threw me a wicked smile. ‘Lots of rich men, happy to squire me around.’ Her smile faded and she finished bitterly, ‘But the war put paid to all that.’

‘I was in the Riviera for a few months in 1938,’ I said, ‘working as a governess for a Czech family. That was in the winter season, though.’

‘Actually, yes. Count Szrebesky. I looked after his two daughters for a year and a half. The family hovel was in Prague, but they always wintered in the Algarve. Why did you suppose he had a title?’

She grinned and touched her nose. ‘All the titled European families winter in the Riviera. I suppose you speak excellent French.’

‘I do, actually. And German, but I don’t like that language much anymore.’

‘I met a dreamy Frenchman in Cannes in ’38,’ she said on a sigh. ‘But my French wasn’t up to it. We ended up simply smiling and miming, which is no way to further a friendship.’

Now it was my turn to sound bitter. ‘You can’t trust the dreamy titled men on the Riviera. They may be charming to your face, but they’re often rotters.’

‘Therein lies a tale, I’ll bet. What happened?’ she asked sympathetically.

‘It’s a common story, I suppose. Young woman, romantic setting, handsome man. He pursued me until he discovered that I was travelling with the Szrebesky family only as a governess and not as a friend or relation. All of a sudden, my charms were not so charming. He dropped me cold.’ My tone was light, but that was to hide the fact that it still hurt, to have been so abruptly dropped because I wasn’t ‘one of them’.

‘Henri, Comte de Valhubert. He was extraordinarily handsome and ridiculously charming.’

She laughed. ‘Then I expect you’re not the first to have been treated badly by him. The stories I heard about those young aristos.’ She smiled. ‘I’m rarely romantic about such things. Does that make me sound shallow?’

‘No. Sensible. He wasn’t the only one, but was the most charming and the most offensive. First he let me know that it would be unsuitable, pas convenable, as he put it, for us to be seen together in public, given my background. Then he made a pass at me and suggested we go somewhere private instead. For a while I thought I had a sign on my forehead – Australian innocent, open to advances.’

Maisie laughed. ‘It wasn’t you, Lily. Gosh, you might as well say the fox is open to the advances of the hounds.’

‘It hurt me badly at the time,’ I admitted, ‘but I’ve taken it as one of those lessons in life we all need to learn. Mind you, I’m very grateful to have got it learned and put it behind me.’

‘That’s simple. I was a teacher back home in Australia, and I wanted to see the world.’

The answer wasn’t nearly so simple really, but how could I explain to Maisie the almost overwhelming compulsion I had to escape my life as a country schoolteacher and come to Europe.

‘Did the world live up to your expectations?’ she asked. ‘Handsome scoundrels excepted.’

I took a sip of tea while I pondered my answer. Throughout my childhood I had been taught that Europe, and especially Britain, was far superior to Australia in every way. I had accepted this without question. I was also a voracious reader and almost every book I read was set in Britain. I lived in the desert and dreamed of bluebell woods, picnics with Nanny in Hyde Park and snowy Christmases. Once I was able to understand French and German well enough, I read books written in those languages too, and it seemed to me that my life would not be complete until I had seen the countries they described.

So I saved every penny I could from my teaching and begged my parents for assistance. They could see that war was brewing and tried to convince me to stay in Australia, but I had no interest in their words of caution.

‘At first it seemed that I was living in a fairy tale made up of all the books I’d read,’ I said to Maisie. ‘Mind you, I had on pretty thick rose-coloured glasses.’

I had arrived in London on a cold February day in 1938 determined to love the city. And so I did, despite the dark winter days and the reeking smoky air. I had seen only a tiny part of the city, however, before I left for the Continent, and it was not until I returned to England and joined the Ambulance Service last October – was it really only a year ago? – that I first saw the East End slums. Now that had been an education. It was then I realised that there was more to London than glittering Mayfair, the bright West End and quaint Bloomsbury. Nothing could ever make me dislike London, but the East End had been a corrective to my innocent delight in the city.

‘Lily? Are you wool-gathering?’ Maisie had leaned over and tweaked my arm. ‘Did the glasses stay rosy?’

‘For a while – and I still love London, although I’m well aware now that it’s not perfect. I wasn’t here long before the Szrebesky family offered me a job as governess. It was when I arrived in Prague that I really thought I was in heaven. I adore Prague.’

‘I was very fond of the two girls, Leonor and Karolina, and the countess was always nice to me, but the count was a fascist. Charming, but a fascist. I had very little to do with him, thankfully.’

Maisie pushed aside her empty plate and concentrated on what I was saying. ‘So I suppose he would have been happy when Germany made Czechoslovakia a so-called protectorate.’

My surprise that she was interested in this must have shown. She laughed. ‘We’ve all become experts in politics in the last few years. I was in Cannes then, and I thought it was jolly awful of France and Britain to let Hitler take over Czechoslovakia like that.’

‘Count Szrebesky was one of the men who signed the invitation to Hitler to “save” the country,’ I said. ‘And the Germans marched straight in.’

‘I’ve read in the papers that the Nazis don’t treat the Czechs very well.’

‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘they don’t. It wasn’t long before they were persecuting Jews and murdering protesting students.’

Now Maisie seemed surprised, by my vehemence, and I swallowed back my anger. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I was there when the Nazis marched into Prague. I wasn’t able to get out for two weeks, and that was enough time to make me realise what’s in store for Britain if Hitler manages to take control.’

I wished I could be so sure, but I put a smile on my face. ‘No, he most certainly will not,’ I agreed.

We finished our breakfast and moved to the common room where, despite my best intentions, I ended up asleep in an easy chair.

When I awoke, voices around me were spouting nonsense that would have made Hitler proud.

Sam Sadler was mouthing off, as usual. I lay still in my chair, too tired to open my eyes, pretending still to be asleep. Levy obviously was not in the room and nothing I could say would change views held since childhood, heard from parents and neighbours, now entrenched as Truth.

Jews were Different. Their ways were subtle and unknowable. They did not celebrate the great festivals of Christmas and Easter so beloved in English households. They were Different and therefore to be feared and mistrusted. The Germans might be the Enemy, but they were basically Like Us. The Jews, on the other hand, were Different.

Most of the men and women at the ambulance station were decent people who put up with hardship, long hours and poor pay to help out in this terrible war. We were a wide cross-section of society, ordinary people who had taken on great responsibility in these extraordinary times. I liked most of them very much, but I had grown up in a bush pub and I was well aware that people were not always good and motivations were not always simple.

‘The Yids are the only ones making money out of this war. They’re making a killing while the rest of us are dying like flies.’

Sam Sadler again, now joined by Fred Knaggs. Levy referred to them as spivs, but in Australia we would have called them lairs. They wore cheap, tight suits and scented hair oil and they angled their hats low on their foreheads. Somehow they gave the impression of being both shrewd and stupid, these scrawny men with East London accents, sharp features and nervous energy.

When not at the station, Knaggs was a tic-tac man at a local dog track and Sadler apparently moonlighted as a dance-band leader at a nightclub in Soho. Levy and I were convinced their main occupation was dealing on the black market, which made their comments particularly annoying. Certainly, they always had scarce items available for purchase, such as stockings, watches, perfume and food. Many at Woburn Place used their services, but Levy and I kept clear of them. Levy had earned their undying enmity by telling them once that while he couldn’t give a toss about their black-marketeering, if he ever heard they were involved in looting from bombed houses he would report them to the police.

A girlish voice joined the conversation. ‘It’s the Jews that started the Great War. People don’t know that, but it’s true. They wanted the brightest and the bravest in Europe to kill each other.’ That was Nola Fripp; her fast, breathless way of talking always made me feel anxious. My jaw tightened at the offensive words.

‘They want power and wealth,’ she went on, ‘and they’re getting it through the big companies. It’s a conspiracy. The government is too stupid to see it, and anyway, they’ve infiltrated the government and the City.’

I pictured the silly young woman who was talking. In her early twenties, Fripp was thin to the point of emaciation. She was the ambulance attendant no one wanted because she often became hysterical during air raids. Her father was high up in the War Office and I wondered if she was spouting the unofficial official line.

‘Well, a great many people would agree with you that it’s the Jews who really run this country.’