In times of war, how do you know who to trust?
Celia Ashton has driven ambulances throughout the Blitz for the Bloomsbury Auxiliary Ambulance Depot. Cool under fire, she revels in her exciting and extremely dangerous job.
When her husband, a known Nazi supporter, is released from prison, Celia refuses to return to her unhappy marriage. Instead she joins forces with Simon Levy, a man who appears to despise her, to help a young Jewish orphan. In so doing she discovers that one ruthless traitor can be more dangerous than any German bomber, and that love can cross any boundary.
Deborah Burrows was raised in Perth, Western Australia, by a wonderful mother who was widowed in World War II and who loved to tell stories. As a child she always had a book in hand, even when watching her favourite 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. She is the author of Ambulance Girls.
Also by Deborah Burrows
Ambulance Girls
To the Williams boys: my brothers, Bevan, Mark and Vaughn, who are and always have been so supportive and loving; my nephews Dylan and Darcy and my new great-nephew, Jesse.
‘Watch out, Ashwin!’ Maisie Halliday’s voice was thin and high, almost a scream. ‘For God’s sake, run. The whole thing is coming down on top of you.’
I glanced up at the wall beside me. Maisie was right: the bricks were rippling and it was obviously close to collapse, but I hesitated, unsure if I had really heard a voice calling out from the ruins. Then I tasted dust. My heart gave a thump and, acting on pure instinct, I turned and made an attempt at a frantic dash to safety. It was more of a clumsy waddle, as I was weighed down by my heavy waterproof, rubber boots and gas mask, all of which made it difficult to move quickly, especially as the ground was boggy from water used to put out the fire and uneven with rubble from the building’s earlier collapse. I staggered through mud, water, cinders and charcoal, slipping and sliding and almost falling several times.
When I reached the roadway I bent over, rested my hands on my knees and pulled in a few ragged breaths. From behind me came the roar of collapsing bricks mingled, surprisingly, with cheers. I realised why when I raised my head. Fires were burning out of control around me and the scene was bright as daylight; my ungainly retreat to safety had been witnessed by rescue workers and firemen. I threw them a grin and a wave and plodded across the road to Maisie, who was standing beside our ambulance.
As I got closer I saw the scowl on her usually serene face.
‘Bit of a close shave, that,’ I said lightly, and smiled at her as I took off my steel helmet. Smoke swirled around me in a sudden eddy, making me cough as I pulled out my handkerchief. Scraps of charred paper floated past us in the heated air.
‘It was far too close,’ Maisie replied, in a stiff angry tone.
I didn’t reply. Instead I swiped the handkerchief across my sweaty face. When I glanced at the linen it was blackened. Blackened face, dirty uniform. I must look like a guy, I thought. Penny for the old guy? I gave a laugh at the thought that one national newspaper had described me as ‘the loveliest debutante of 1937’.
‘How can you laugh, Ashwin? You nearly died.’ Maisie sounded close to tears.
I put away the soiled handkerchief. ‘But I didn’t die. So no need to fuss.’
Maisie’s voice rose. ‘Why do you always rush into danger? You’re not invincible, you know.’ She was really angry, which surprised me, as Maisie was usually remarkably even-tempered. ‘I don’t want to attend another funeral,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Not so soon after David Levy’s.’
I no longer felt like laughing. The pain of David’s death two months before was as raw as the burns on my cheeks from the falling embers. But Maisie didn’t know about David and me, and she never would. I straightened my back, raised my chin and assumed the mask of chilly reserve that served me well in such situations. Head high, walk tall.
‘I’m sorry to have frightened you,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard a voice calling out and I simply reacted.’
‘Well, it was a daft thing to do. That’s what the rescue squads are for.’ Maisie tried for a disgruntled tone, but her sunny nature won through and she gave me a smile. ‘I’m just glad you weren’t hurt.’
I glanced back at the pile of bricks that was all that remained of the wall and raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, so am I.’
Maisie laughed. She was nineteen, and a dancer when she wasn’t an ambulance attendant. Her slim, tough dancer’s body was allied to a face with the dark luminosity of a Raphael Madonna. I liked her, and she was always friendly enough to me, but we weren’t close. I suspected she distrusted my class on principle.
‘Aren’t you ever afraid?’ she asked.
‘There’s no time for fear,’ I replied, waving at the scene around us.
The ancient City of London was alight and burning out of control after the night’s incendiary attack by the German bombers. Above us, massed battalions of low-flying aircraft were still dropping yet more of the little deadly devices, interspersed with high-explosive bombs that made the ground shake. Firemen, with smoke-blackened faces and dripping uniforms, sweated on the ends of wriggling hoses, fighting a futile battle against the flames. Rescue workers, grey with choking plaster dust and ash, combed through the charred and smoking ruins. Fire engines, trailers and pumps were dotted around, barely visible in the thick smoke.
As usual, the noise was almost overwhelming. The crash of bursting shells, the whine of falling fire-bombs and the scream of larger high-explosive bombs were accompanied by the constant throb and moan of aircraft engines and the shrilling and clanging of ambulance and fire-brigade bells. The thump of pneumatic drills as roadmen worked on a burning gas main that shot blue flames high up into the sky. The song of the guns: the thud of the big anti-aircraft guns, the bark of the smaller mobile guns and the sharp rattle of machine guns firing on descending flares. And behind it all, the roar of fires burning out of control.
With every gust of the breeze great clouds of pale smoke filled with sparks rolled down and burst over those who fought to save what they could. The high roof of a warehouse, burning fiercely, had become a grid of bright beams against the darkness beyond. Leaping flames formed a halo around the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral on its hill above us because, amazingly, the cathedral still stood, silhouetted against a blood-red sky. I sent up a quick prayer that it would survive the firestorm.
It was an awesomely beautiful sight, the City of London in flames. I felt humbled, and also terribly sad, to witness it. David had loved the City, with its maze of narrow lanes and all its history. Its annihilation would have caused him terrible grief.
An angry voice cut through the din. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, Ashwin?’ Our station officer in charge, Jack Moray, stood in front of me, hands on hips, scowling. ‘Getting yourself killed won’t help anyone.’
I shrugged. ‘I thought I heard someone calling out to me.’ I made my tone nonchalant. ‘Would you be so kind as to ask heavy rescue to check the area? In case someone is trapped in the ruins. In a cellar, perhaps.’
Moray gave a jerky nod. His lips were thin and flat against his teeth and his face was taut with anger. ‘Less than an hour ago, a brick wall just like that one –’ he gestured towards the pile of bricks across the road ‘– collapsed and killed four firemen. If you don’t stop taking such insane risks, I’ll stop sending you out to incidents. I mean it, Ashwin. You can stay behind at the station and man the phone instead of Fripp.’
I knew it was an empty threat. Nola Fripp was more trouble than she was worth at an incident because she was scared of loud noises and tended to shriek and run for cover when she was needed to tend the wounded. Moray had taken to leaving her at the station and attending incidents himself if required. No one wanted Fripp on the road in an air raid.
I nodded, and said as if repeating a lesson, ‘I understand. No more risks.’
Unless I have to.
Maisie flinched at the sound of an explosion nearby.
‘They’re dynamiting the buildings to the south to prevent the fire from spreading,’ Moray told her. He shook his head, as if in wonderment. ‘Even the roads around the cathedral are on fire. They’re wooden block roads and they’re burning. An amazing sight. It’s like you’d imagine the roads of Hell.’
‘Any more casualties for us?’ I asked.
Maisie and I had been to hospital with three loads of casualties already that night, but we knew that we’d be working until well after daylight.
‘Mobile first-aid station in Farringdon Street has four waiting for you. Burns, lacerations and broken limbs…’ He gave me a meaningful look. ‘From falling walls.’
‘I could read a book out here,’ said Maisie, as we walked away. ‘It’s so bright.’
‘The pages would be blood red.’
A loud slithering sound came from above and we dodged backwards as a dollop of hot lead from the roof of the old building beside us came down where we had been walking.
‘That singed my uniform,’ said Maisie. She gave an unconvincing laugh. ‘You don’t expect to be sent to your maker by a melting roof.’
‘I expect just about anything nowadays.’
We collected the patients and carried them in stretchers to the ambulance. It was tricky, as the whole area was boggy and slippery with ice and mud and water, and we were forced to dodge the coiling hosepipes that covered the roads. As soon as we slid the final stretcher into the rails in the ambulance body, Maisie climbed inside and I drove away from the burning City at the regulation sixteen miles per hour. Maisie’s voice floated in from the back. She was reassuring our patients.
Fleet Street was on fire and as the warden directed me into a diversion I noticed with a weary sadness that the wedding-cake steeple of St Bride’s Church had been hit. The once beautiful church was a skeletal shell and the ruins were burning furiously. The ever-growing inferno lit up the ruined streets so effectively that it was as if I was driving in full daylight. For once it was easy to see my way and I had no need of my ambulance’s shuttered headlights to show me the holes and bomb craters in the road ahead.
My ambulance was a tough old bird, and we rolled along uncomfortably through the fire-bright streets. If bomb craters blocked our way, I drove on the footpath. Eventually we arrived and I parked in the hospital yard. When I climbed out to help Maisie with the wounded, flakes of blazing stuff – rags or paper – floated past on the wind like grey snowflakes. They coated Maisie’s tin hat and coat.
‘What’s it from?’ asked Maisie, as we carried the first patient to the hospital entrance.
‘I think it’s all that remains of the books in Paternoster Row.’
At the hospital entrance a medical student was sitting with a pile of large brown envelopes. On these he recorded each patient’s number and any identifying information. The young man had a bony, pleasant face, but his eyes were leaden with exhaustion and his voice was raspy as he greeted us.
‘I hear they’re calling it the Second Great Fire of London,’ he said, ‘because the entire City is on fire. Is it true?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Maisie. ‘We’ve lost most of the Wren churches, and Guildhall is burning, which is awful, but it looks like they’ve saved St Paul’s.’
‘At least that’s something.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘I wonder if they’ll make up a rhyme this time around.’ At Maisie’s look he said, ‘You must remember it. In sixteen hundred and sixty-six, London burned like rotten sticks.’
As I drove back to the beleaguered City, a searchlight sword struck out across the sky. Others soon joined it, until there was an intricate tracery of light through which flew small objects like ominous black birds, ones that that carried death under their wings.
Beside me, Maisie laughed, which confused me until she said, ‘I’ve thought of a rhyme.’
‘A rhyme?’
‘A nursery rhyme, like the one the medical student recited. Here goes: In December nineteen forty, Goering’s planes left London in flames.’
‘It doesn’t scan,’ I protested.
She was silent for a while, then said, ‘What about: In nineteen forty in December, German raiders turned London to embers.’
‘That one doesn’t really rhyme.’
‘Oh, you’re a tough audience, Ashwin. Goering’s planes were London’s bane? No. That is awful. Fire. Mire. Byre. Lyre. Shame there’s no spire on St Paul’s,’ she muttered. ‘Then again, all those Wren churches have gone, and they all had spires.’
I parked the ambulance near Ludgate. In our absence, the fires in the City seemed to have increased in intensity. The dome of St Paul’s was silhouetted against a sky of yellow and green and red, with great billows of smoke around it. Clouds of sparks fell around us as we headed towards the mobile first-aid post in a haze of smoke, ready to collect our next batch of wounded. The heated air scorched my skin.
To my astonishment, Maisie gave a shout of laughter. ‘Got it,’ she said. ‘Listen.’
And, against a backdrop of roaring flames and billowing smoke, and above the hiss of hoses and the shouts of rescuers and the clanging of fire engine and ambulance bells, Maisie declaimed her poem into the heart of the inferno before us:
‘In sixteen hundred and sixty-six,
London burned like rotten sticks.
In nineteen forty, it happened again,
The Luftwaffe came and left London aflame.
But try as they might they’ll never break her
Just like before, we will remake her.’
In May 1940, not long after my husband, Cedric Ashwin, was incarcerated under Regulation 18B as a Nazi sympathiser and potential fifth columnist, I moved out of the Mayfair townhouse we had shared for the two and a half years of our marriage and into a small serviced flat on the Gray’s Inn Road.
My flat was in St Andrew’s Court, which had been built only six years before. I liked the clean vertical lines and stark white walls of the building, which were softened by blue metal window frames and delicate iron balustrades on each balcony. As I couldn’t boil an egg, I also liked the service restaurant. It was below the street level, so you could only hear bombs that dropped very close by and you hardly heard the guns at all when you were eating. And because St Andrew’s had been constructed of tough, modern concrete, the air raids had not caused any real damage to the fabric of the building itself.
Another benefit was that St Andrew’s was close to Bloomsbury Auxiliary Ambulance Station, in Woburn Place, near Russell Square, where I worked as an ambulance driver. St Andrew’s was also close to my other workplace, the Jewish Children’s Placement Board in Bloomsbury House, on the corner of Gower Street and Bedford Avenue. For the past five weeks, on my days off, I had been working at the JCPB as very bad typist and reasonably efficient clerk.
It was to Bloomsbury House that I was heading on that chilly December morning, the day after the firestorm, the last day of 1940. I wheeled my bicycle on to Gray’s Inn Road and had just steadied myself ready to push off from the kerb when someone called out my name. I turned around to see Eddie Hollis leaning against the wall of the building next door.
‘Good morning, Eddie.’ My voice was cold and my face unwelcoming.
Eddie was one of Cedric’s most ardent admirers. He was a colourless sort of man, with thinning dark-blond hair and blue, rather protruding, eyes. His neck was thick, but he had surprisingly small ears. Before the war he had been an active blackshirt. As such he had delighted in tormenting those he considered to be his inferiors, specifically any Jew who lived in London. I had not seen him since my husband had been incarcerated and it was not a pleasure to see him now. In the past eight months I had distanced myself from Cedric’s followers and I didn’t want to encourage visits from Eddie Hollis.
Eddie peeled away from the wall and slunk across the footpath to stand next to me. He put a restraining hand on my handlebar.
‘You off to that Yid place then?’ Eddie’s tone was just as offensive as his words. It was concerning that he not only knew where I lived but also about my work at Bloomsbury House. Had he been watching me, my husband’s grubby little acolyte?
‘Why do you go there?’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like it. I told him all about it and he’s not happy.’
My head jerked up to stare at him in furious amazement. ‘You’ve been spying on me? Did my husband ask you to spy on me?’
He looked down, seemingly embarrassed.
‘What do you want, Eddie?’
A note of excitement crept into his voice. ‘They’re letting him out. Letting him leave the Isle of Man and come back to London. He’ll be here soon. The week after next. Thought you’d like to know.’
It was as if he had punched me in my solar plexus, and I couldn’t prevent a shocked gasp. So Cedric was coming back to London. Eddie smirked at my response to his news.
Head high, walk tall. I straightened my back and raised my chin. I would deal with Cedric when I had to. He knew I wanted a divorce. I had asked him for one in every letter I sent, but so far he had refused to consider it. I could no longer live with him as his wife, which meant he would have to accept a divorce or at the very least a judicial separation.
‘How nice for him,’ I said, without enthusiasm.
‘I’ve got a message for you. From Mr Ashwin.’
‘What message?’ Was Cedric going to agree to the divorce? My heart began to race and I began to hope.
‘He wants you to find a place for you both to live.’
‘What? Well I won’t be doing that. I won’t be living with him when he returns.’
Eddie shrugged. ‘That’s the message.’ He gave a smile, almost endearing in his obvious delight. ‘We have a code. Me and Mr Ashwin worked out how to get past the censor by using a code in our letters.’
‘I think you misread your code.’
His sullen, brutish expression returned. ‘I’m just giving the message’
‘Is that all, Eddie? I have an appointment to keep.’
‘At Bloomsbury House? Why do you go there?’ He seemed to be genuinely puzzled.
‘I do work there helping Jewish children, if you must know. And I’m late. So please let go of my bicycle.’
His pretence of politeness slipped then and his lip lifted in a snarl. ‘You’re a cold bitch, aren’t you? Those bastards have locked him up for eight months and soon he’ll be free and you don’t care at all.’ He spat on the footpath, close to my feet. ‘You don’t deserve him.’
I looked at his hand on my handlebar. It was very pale and covered with sandy hair. ‘Goodbye, Eddie,’ I said.
He released his grip, but not before he had given a vicious push to the bike, so that I nearly overbalanced. Annoyed, I rode away without looking back at him.
It was less chilly than the previous day but that meant the snow had melted into mush, so I had to be careful. The wind stung my cheeks as I rode faster, pushing the bike as fast as I could safely go, enjoying the sense of speed, trying to forget that Cedric would be back in London very soon. As I rounded the corner into Tavistock Road I pondered Eddie’s words.
Eddie had said I didn’t deserve Cedric. Did I deserve a womanising cad who supported the brutality of Hitler’s regime? I had been eighteen when I married him in 1937, too young to realise the cost of a decision hastily made. I had thought I was desperately in love with the handsome and sophisticated older man who had steered me through social minefields and treated me with courtesy and gallantry.
Cedric had called me his green girl, his child bride. He said he had chosen me because I was delightfully different from the weary sophisticates he usually squired around. I soon came to realise that he intended me to be a pleasingly naive and socially useful wife who ticked all the right boxes. I had been born into a ‘good’ family, I made an attractive hostess and, given my background, I could be expected to support his political ambitions. What Cedric did not tell me was that he was incapable of fidelity.
‘Everybody does it, darling,’ he had replied, with an elegant shrug, when I confronted him three months after our marriage. It was as if my world had shattered into tiny pieces. Recklessly, I had pushed him for names. They were all women I knew. Some had been friends, or I had thought they were. Did I deserve that, Eddie Hollis?
I was too young to know how to deal with Cedric’s cruelly good-natured cynicism. When I threatened him with divorce, he laughed. ‘But darling,’ he had said, ‘how could you survive if you divorced me?’ I didn’t know how to answer that. Worse, however, was his insinuation that if I pressed for a divorce then my family and my friends and all of London would assume that it was some fault in me that left Cedric unsatisfied and needing to seek solace in other women’s arms. The embarrassment of divorce proceedings would have been too much to bear. Or so I thought. I had only just turned nineteen.
So I had stayed with Cedric. I was faithful to him because I saw no reason not to be. In the years that followed I achieved a degree of sophistication, and some wisdom. I wasn’t exactly happy, but London is full of amusements and I made friends there. Cedric was charming and he expected very little from me. I played the hostess at his political dinners, I didn’t enquire too much about his political views and I pretended to be deaf to rumours about his constant infidelities. In return he gave me an easy life. What a shallow, snobbish, unthinking creature that Celia had been. Perhaps I did deserve Cedric.
Everything changed with the war. My husband – who had spoken at rallies where thousands of men, all dressed in black shirts, had chanted fascist slogans and watched him with shining eyes as they shouted their protestations of allegiance – was declared to be an enemy of the nation. The crowds melted away, save for a few diehards like Eddie.
Cedric was incarcerated and I became the target of hatred and ridicule. Horrible letters arrived. So-called friends disappeared. People I had known since childhood no longer recognised me in the street. When I joined the ambulance service to help the war effort, the press declared it to be a stunt and the numbers of vile letters increased. One summer evening as I left my house in Mayfair, a stranger spat on me and called me a quisling. It was not long afterwards that I moved to the flat in Bloomsbury.
I was no longer the shallow girl who had been content to be Cedric Ashwin’s wife. Coming to work at the ambulance station had been a life-changing experience for me in so many ways. Not only did I have to cope with unimaginable horror and sadness, for the first time in my life I was part of a team, working alongside people I never would have otherwise met. In many ways it was humbling. All that mattered in the ambulance station was how you did your job, and you were treated according to how you worked, not how your voice sounded. Any snobbery I may have had soon faded as it became clear that I was no better than my colleagues. When the Blitz began we had to cope with the hideous reality of modern warfare and push fear aside to help those who were injured. It was in the ambulance station that I learned to look beyond someone’s class, to see who they were and not judge them according to what social stratum they came from.
And then something completely unexpected happened. I fell in love. Desperately, passionately and tormentedly in love with a man who insisted that I think for myself. David Levy told me I was a blank page, a tabula rasa with no thoughts of my own, only what I’d been told. David forced me to think about what we were fighting for, about the prejudices I’d accepted all my life. He compelled me to go beyond the limitations of my scanty education and my so-called privileged upbringing, to be more than I had been.
But David died. And no matter how many times I told myself there was nothing I could have done to save him, I returned to that night in my mind over and over, running through the course of events, trying to understand if there was something I could have done differently, if this or that might have affected the final outcome. The memory was like a physical wound that would not heal. I carried it with me always, could not leave behind the pain and regret. My actions after his death haunted me more. I had been a craven coward. When David died I had said nothing and had allowed his body to lie in a bombed building, undiscovered. I had let his parents hope when all hope was gone.
David’s parents forgave me, but how could I forgive myself? That was why I worked in Bloomsbury House and helped David’s mother deal with Jewish refugee children. I wanted to atone. And that was why I was navigating dangerously slippery roads on a chilly December morning.
My destination, the old Bloomsbury Hotel, was in sight. ‘That Yid place’, as Eddie had called it. The vast, decaying old pile housed the various organisations, as many as twenty of them, that were engaged in looking after people who had fled the Nazis to seek refuge in Britain. The refugees called it ‘Das Bloomsburyhaus’ and the name had stuck, so that it was now officially known as Bloomsbury House.
It was a rabbit warren of little offices containing the various refugee groups. Mrs Levy’s organisation was the Jewish Children’s Placement Board, which was allied to the Jewish Refugee Committee and was one of several that assisted children who had come to Britain under the Kindertransport scheme.
The activities of the Kindertransport are fairly well known now. In short, when the plight of Jews and anyone else the Nazis deemed unacceptable became desperate, the British government was persuaded to issue permits for 10,000 unaccompanied children to be brought to England. Thousands of children, mostly Jewish or part-Jewish, were evacuated to Britain between November 1938 and the invasion of Holland in May 1940. Once the children arrived they were met by groups of volunteers. These were not just Jewish groups, but also Quakers, Christadelphians and others. They arranged for the children to live with foster-families, or in hostels, schools or on farms throughout the country.
On the whole, the scheme worked well. Of course, some children were unhappy, especially the Orthodox Jewish children placed with Christian families, and we had discovered that some of the older children were being used as servants by their host families, but we did our best. I am pleased to say that every child who came to England under the scheme was alive at the end of the war. Sadly, many of their parents were not.
Since 1938, Mrs Levy’s small organisation had managed to place two hundred mainly German children with foster-parents or in hostels across England. It ran on a shoestring, and for the past five weeks I had volunteered my services. I helped to keep track of the refugee children, checked the reports of their progress, and arranged to move them to another placement when required. I dealt with their special requirements and worked out how best to help them survive in a new country. I found the work very satisfying, especially as it had brought out a hitherto unsuspected flair for organisation in me.
I hadn’t seen much of Mrs Levy since I had joined the JCPB. She had been badly injured when her home was bombed in November 1940, the same night that David had died. Her legs had been crushed and after several operations she still needed crutches to get around. That meant she had not been able to come to Bloomsbury House very often. In many ways this was a relief to me. I liked and admired Elise Levy very much, but we both knew that given the circumstances of David’s death we were unlikely to ever be close friends. It was a shadow always between us.
My cheeks were flushed with cold as I chained my bicycle to a bar set into the wall of the building and hurried up the snowy steps into Bloomsbury House’s huge reception hall. The refugees sitting on the uncomfortable benches watched me hopefully as I entered. I walked past them and up the wide staircase to the second floor, where the JCPB had two tiny adjoining rooms.
When I entered the office Lore Rosenfeld, who managed the JCPB under the direction of Mrs Levy, looked up from behind a pile of papers and gave me a smile. Lore was a chatty lady in her late forties with a halo of wiry black hair. Like Mrs Levy, she was German by birth but had married an Englishman twenty-odd years before and had lived in London ever since. Behind her stood a row of metal filing cabinets, each containing a child’s file. A life wrapped up in cardboard. Some of the files were pathetically small. The thickest were those of the children who had arrived in 1938. By the time the last children arrived, as Holland fell to the Nazis, there was often very little information to work with and an obviously emotionally damaged child.
‘I have a real problem for you today,’ she said, as I took off my hat and unwrapped my scarf. ‘Leonhard Weitz.’
‘Leonhard Weitz? I don’t recall that name.’
She handed me a slim file. The photograph showed a boy with a thin white face, round glasses and a mop of dark hair. According to the identity slip he was eight years of age, and had come from Vienna. ‘DOES NOT SPEAK’ was printed at the bottom of the identification card in damning capitals.
‘Is the child mute?’ I asked. ‘A medical disorder?’
Lore gave a brief shrug. ‘Read the attached notes.’
They told a tragic story. Leonhard’s father, a professor of anthropology at the University of Freiburg, had been deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1937. The boy’s mother died soon afterwards of illness and his two older brothers disappeared in unspecified circumstances in 1939. Leonhard had been recommended to the JCPB by his father’s cousin, and he had arrived in England in April 1940.
In the view of the psychiatrist who examined Leonhard after his first foster-parents in Manchester sent him back, the boy had been deeply traumatised, possibly by witnessing the death of his brothers. Leonhard had not said a word since his brothers’ disappearance, but there was nothing obviously wrong with his vocal cords. The psychiatrist had diagnosed ‘elective mutism post-trauma’. It was recorded that Leonhard regularly wet the bed and was prone to outbursts of agitation that could become quite violent. A heart-breaking addendum noted: ‘Played violin in the family quartet, and still enjoys listening to music.’
‘So he can speak,’ I said, ‘but chooses not to do so?’
Lore shrugged again. ‘The child is damaged in his mind.’
I checked the notes again. ‘So… the big problem with him is that he’s been sent back from the second set of foster-parents? Are there no other foster-parents available?’
‘That’s your job. Please go through all the records and see if anyone suitable comes up. Otherwise he must remain at the hostel.’
We both knew it would not be the best solution. A child so fragile would be unlikely to improve as one of many boys in a rowdy hostel.
I took off my coat and sat down at the smaller desk. ‘I’d better get to work then,’ I said.
We shouldn’t have been in the house at all. It was the job of the rescue squads to search bombed houses for casualties, but during an air raid as intense as that one was, everyone pitched in. Even the ambulance girls.
‘You take her legs.’ Maisie hooked her arms under the old woman’s shoulders. ‘We should hurry. I think Jerry is coming around to have another go at us.’
‘He always does. So anxious to deliver Herr Goering’s little presents.’
The roar of the German bombers, no more than a few hundred feet above us, was almost deafening. Adding to the din was the thunder of the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park, London’s attempt to fight back. I knew Maisie was right: it wouldn’t be long before we’d hear the shrieks of falling bombs.
Our patient was, mercifully, unconscious.
Just as I took hold of the thin, lisle-encased legs, a ghastly noise, like the sound of an animal in torment, seemed to rip apart the air. We waited. The house shuddered as the bomb landed nearby with a crash like thunder.
‘That one was too close for comfort,’ said Maisie.
‘Let’s get out, shall we? And at the double.’
We hoisted the pathetically light and fragile body and carried it in a sideways shuffle towards the hallway. Half of the house had been ripped away and what was left teetered alarmingly above us as we picked our way down the stairs, navigating through the debris by the light of the burning buildings across the street. Their rosy glow revealed a shining dark trickle of blood from the wound on the old woman’s forehead, which gave me real concern. Head wounds were tricky, and I would have been happier if she were conscious. It was all too easy for someone to slip gently from a concussion into death.
At last we reached the street where the Air-Raid Precautions warden and our ambulance were waiting. We took care in lowering the old woman on to the stretcher that was laid out on the icy road and Maisie wrapped her in blankets against the chill of the freezing night air. I knelt to check her condition preparatory to placing her in the ambulance.
‘Anyone left inside?’ The ARP warden was a small man with a large moustache that was white with plaster dust. Under his steel helmet, his face was grotesquely streaked with plaster and sweat, giving him a ghoulish appearance. His breath puffed in the cold air as he spoke.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘We shouted out, but it was too dangerous to do a thorough search.’
The old woman’s eyes fluttered open and she said, ‘Bobby? Where’s my little Bobby?’
Maisie and I exchanged glances and turned to look at the house behind us. It was already tottering. It wouldn’t last long, and we both had a horror of being caught in a collapsed building.
‘Who is Bobby?’ I asked, my voice clipped and urgent. My cousin’s six-year-old daughter, Roberta – a charmer with a cheeky grin, and auburn-haired like myself – was always called Bobby. ‘Is Bobby your granddaughter? Grandson?’
The old lady’s eyes had fluttered shut. I shook her gently. ‘Tell us about Bobby.’
‘My darling,’ she murmured. ‘Five years old—’
I was up and had bolted into the building before the end of the sentence, conscious only of one thought: We had left a child in a collapsing building. I ran up the stairs as quickly and lightly as I could, guided by the dull beam of my masked torch as it flickered over the white glazed tiles on the staircase walls. When I reached the first floor a voice sounded in the darkness ahead of me.
‘Hello, I’m Bobby. What’s your name?’ It sounded like an old woman, not a child, which was puzzling. My torchlight revealed an empty doorway. The door had been blown out by the blast and the room beyond had a curiously light feel to it, which I suspected meant that most of the walls were gone. So I entered carefully.
‘Bobby?’ I called.
‘Hello, I’m Bobby.’
I ran the beam of my torch around what was left of the room. In a corner was a large cage, in which an almost entirely bald parrot cowered. Great tufts of grey feathers lay on the cage floor, and I assumed they had been plucked out in terror by the creature.
‘Bobby?’ I asked. I gave the creature a wry smile as I picked my way through the debris on the floor, heading for the cage.
‘Hello, I’m Bobby. What’s your name?’
‘How do you do, Bobby?’ I looked around warily. The walls were only just holding together. ‘My name is Celia Ashwin.’
I hoisted the cage, which was not heavy but was bulky and difficult to manage, and began to retrace my steps.
The shriek of a falling bomb split the air apart.
We had been taught that a bomb travels at a speed of 150 miles an hour. Sound travels at 700 miles an hour. A bomb dropped from 20,000 feet will take about a minute and a half to land. The whistle we hear as it falls is made by the air resistance and begins about a minute after the bomb is released. So we have thirty seconds to find shelter before the bomb hits. Not enough time to get out of a tottering house carrying a parrot cage. I began to run, hampered as ever by my rubber boots and bulky waterproof. Bobby and I had just reached the staircase leading to the ground floor when the world pitched alarmingly.
This is death, I thought, and I fell into a pit of roaring oblivion.
I opened my eyes to darkness, unable to take a proper breath. Something hard jabbed into my back, heavy objects pinned down my legs, chest and shoulders and my head throbbed and ached. At first I thought I must be in bed, having a nightmare. So I tried to sit up and struggle out of the dream, to will myself to wake up, but I couldn’t move. Then I had the shocking realisation that the nightmare was real, that I had been bombed or the house had collapsed and I was entombed under the rubble. In that one startled moment everything in my mind was clear and still. The impossible really has happened. I am going to die.
Every sense was heightened: the utter darkness, the taste of dust in my mouth, its scent filling my nostrils, the pain in my back and legs and shoulders and head, the heavy silence. I tried to scream, but instead I coughed and gasped for breath.
‘Oh God,’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t let me die here alone.’
David had died like this, alone in a bombed house, his body crushed. No, he had been already dead when the walls caved in on top of him. I tried to take a breath and again was choked by the dust. David. Perhaps this was my punishment for leaving him to die alone.
A new prayer formed in my mind: If I’m going to die, then please let it be quick.
I slipped into a jumble of fragmentary dreams. I was in the stable yard at Goddings, my childhood home. It was a place I had loved, only now the horses were crowded around me so tightly that I was being suffocated by their big heavy bodies. I was dancing with David in the flat in Caroline Place, whirling around with him to the scratchy music of the phonograph, laughing and wishing we could dance to a real band in a nightclub because he was handsome and a good dancer and I loved him. But our affair was secret, and we could never be seen together in public. I rested my head on his shoulder and thought, Just at this moment, I am happy.
A voice, close at hand, screeched, ‘Hello, I’m Bobby. What’s your name?’
I seemed to emerge from a great distance. There was a brief sense of dusty blackness all around me and then I was again in the Goddings stables, struggling to escape from the press of horses that were suffocating the breath out of me. I tried to push them away, to shout at them, ‘Get off me.’ This triggered another violent fit of coughing. Panicked, I fought for breath between the coughs, until I crashed again into the void.
It was a spring morning and shafts of dappled light danced over the bright grass and lit the massed bluebells that marched up the bank into the forest. Sunshine sparkled on the water in front of me. The river flowed swiftly in the valley behind Goddings, the big old red house that seemed as old as time and was my home. Even at six, I knew it was the ‘big house’, the Manor, and when Father drove through the village the older men would touch their foreheads because he was so important. Father had dark-red hair. So did I, and my brother and my sister.
I had overheard Mr Fettiplace, the postman, say that you always knew a Palmer-Thomas by their red hair and the Devil’s own temper. When I had told Nanny, she had said Saul Fettiplace should learn to mind his tongue.
Goddings was not visible from the glade but I knew it was just over the hill. Inside the house were Nanny, who I loved, and the servants, who were my friends. Helen, my sister and my enemy, also lived there. And, when he was not at school, so did my brother Tom. Father and Mummy lived at Goddings, but I feared Father, who was often angry, and I was in awe of Mummy, who was dark-haired and beautiful and always smelled divine. Nanny could be hugged, but Father and Mummy were rarely touched.
I examined the grey thing held firmly in my fist. It had been half buried in the damp earth beside the river. Something, a fox or a badger, had disturbed the soil and brought it to the surface. At first I had thought it was a buckle or a bit of scrap metal, but something drew me to look more closely. So I dipped it into the water and a small medallion was revealed, in the shape of an old-fashioned sailing ship with little people on the deck and on the high prow and bow. There was a ring at the top for attaching it to a chain.
‘What’s that?’ Helen had come up behind me. Her hair glowed red in the sunshine.
‘It’s mine,’ I said, in my piping six-year-old voice. My hand closed over it and I raised my chin defiantly.
Helen and I existed in a constant state of war. As she was five years older, Helen usually won but I was not made for capitulation and would fight on until all hope was gone. This was usually when Helen went to Father for support. She was his favourite child. Tom and I knew this and accepted it. It formed a bond between us.
I jumped out of reach as Helen moved to snatch the object, but the stony ground beneath my toes and the cold touch of the water on my bare feet meant I was trapped. The river ran too fast for me to escape that way.
‘It’s mine,’ I repeated, ‘I found it.’
‘It might be valuable.’ Helen’s voice was thick with self-satisfaction. ‘We should show it to Father.’ Quick as a striking snake, her hand darted out to grasp my arm. Helen’s eleven-year-old strength was unassailable. Once she had the object she held it up close to her eyes.
‘It’s mine,’ I wailed. ‘I found it.’
Now Helen had it, the little grey medallion had become the most important thing in my life and I knew I would die if she did not give it back.
‘Why is Celia crying? What is it?’ Tom’s voice cut through my howls. He slithered down the bank, heedless of the bluebells and of the state of his clothes, and in a smooth, decisive movement he snatched the object from Helen. He stared at it. ‘It’s a pilgrim badge,’ he said.
My tears vanished. Tom was ten and I adored him with a fierce, possessive love. Tom would give the medallion back to me.
‘I found it. There.’ I pointed to the place to provide proof of its finding and thus of ownership. ‘So it’s mine.’
‘Yes, it’s yours if you found it,’ he agreed, but he kept hold of the object and was examining it closely.
‘What’s a pilgrim badge?’ Helen’s voice was cold. She seemed not to care that Tom had the object, but I somehow knew how annoyed she was. ‘It’s an ugly old thing anyway.’
‘It’s hundreds and hundreds of years old,’ said Tom.
‘We must show it to Father if it’s old.’ There was a self-important note in Helen’s voice. ‘It might be valuable.’
I became anxious, fearful again of losing it.
Tom frowned at Helen. ‘Celia found the badge and now it’s hers. If I hear you’ve pinched it from her – or if you tell Father about it – then your coral beads will go missing. For ever.’
My hopes rose. Helen loved her coral beads much more than an ugly old pilgrim badge.
‘I’ll tell Father,’ said Helen, through gritted teeth.
Tom shrugged. ‘I don’t care if you do. All I’ll risk is a whipping, and I’m used to those at school. But you’ll lose your beads.’ His look hardened. ‘For ever.’
‘It’s a piece of silly old junk anyway,’ said Helen. As she flounced away she shouted back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll hide the beads where you can’t find them.’
Tom called a warning after her, ‘I’ll find them.’
He peered down at the badge with a wistful look in his eyes. ‘It’s grand.’
‘You can have it,’ I said, because I loved my brother more than anything in the whole world, more even than my pony, Arrow, or my Labrador, Goldie.
‘No.’ He handed it to me. ‘Finders keepers. It’s yours, fair and square.’
I took it and held it close to see all the details. Each of the little men on the boat had beards and wore long robes. ‘Are they the Wise Men?’ I asked.
‘They’re pilgrims,’ he said. ‘It’s a talisman. That means a good-luck charm. You keep it safe and it’ll keep you safe. See you safely home.’
The scene shifted. I was crying in my bedroom. Helen had come in and was screaming, ‘Hello, I’m Bobby.’
I didn’t want to speak to Helen. She had pinched my arm when we were having tea with our parents and when I screeched Father had called me a stupid little fool and ordered me out of his sight.
‘They hate you, you know.’ Helen looked smug. ‘Father thinks you’re stupid and Mummy thinks you’re ugly. They wanted another boy and they got a stupid ugly girl instead. Right now – right at this very moment – they are deciding whether to send you away and adopt a boy instead. I think they will.’
‘No,’ I screamed. ‘I won’t go.’
‘Bye bye, Celia,’ said Helen. ‘It’ll be so nice to have another brother.’
A voice rang out: ‘Hello, I’m Bobby. What’s your name?’
I emerged from darkness to find myself facing a red-carpeted staircase lined with stern-faced Yeomen of the Guard. I was in Buckingham Palace and it was the evening I was to be presented to the new King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The royal couple were holding their first Court since the Coronation the month before, in May 1937. I was nervous, and struggled to keep my face fixed in the calm mask I had perfected over the years. Head high, walk tall. The bouquet of spring flowers in my right hand gave off a faint sweet scent as I fixed my eyes on the glittering headband of the debutante in front and ascended, step by terrifying step, hoping not to stumble. The gown I wore was beautiful, with broderie anglaise appliqued on a dark cream taffeta underskirt, but the bodice was tight as a corset and I found it difficult to breathe.
The long lace train was looped over my arm and was another worry. It was the veil of Alençon lace that had been worn by our mother at her wedding and it attached to my gown at the shoulders. When I was in the Throne Room it would trail the required eighteen inches along the floor behind me. Helen had been presented five years before and it had been her train also; she had warned me how slippery it was. I found it almost impossible to keep it steady over my long white glove that clung like a vice on to my arm. The kid gloves were an integral part of the outfit, and were designed to fit so tightly that I had despaired of ever getting them on. But Norton, my mother’s maid, had the knack. With a fixed grimace, Norton had tugged the fine kid upwards until each glove finished halfway up my upper arms and then she deftly wielded a special buttonhook to close the line of tiny pearl buttons stretching up from each palm.
The slow, stately ascension of young women continued. I was uncomfortably conscious of my ungainly headdress of three ostrich feathers attached to a lace veil. A similar headdress was being worn by each of the two hundred debutantes that evening, but many of the feathers were rented and smelled quite musty. Ahead of me a girl sneezed, which made me want to giggle. The feeling soon passed. My head ached from the pins that kept the horrid thing fastened high and tight, but I kept the slight smile playing on my lips. I shifted my thoughts to imagining the bluebell glade in the early spring. I could almost feel the cool breeze off the river.