Saturday night, the bombing lasted from dusk until almost dawn. The spring night had been balmy, the sky clear, and the moon full. In short, perfect conditions for the Luftwaffe to drop their bombs on London. The enemy planes had come, squadron after squadron bringing terror and destruction.
In the cramped space of the Anderson shelter, with her parents and their chubby dachshund, Amy slept fitfully. The explosions were unusually close, their noise penetrating the earth-covered shelter. Dirt sifted down from the joints in the tin ceiling.
Amy’s long legs hung over the end of the too-short cot. The close, dark space echoed with her father’s snores, the intermittent grunts of the dog Winston, and the ceaseless clack of her mother’s knitting needles. During the previous fifty-six consecutive nights of bombing, ever since the beginning in September of 1940, Amy’s mother was somehow able to knit by candlelight or even in darkness. She had produced three dozen long, woolly scarves to donate to those bombed out of their homes.
At dawn, when the all-clear sounded, Amy stumbled inside the house to fall on her bed for an hour of real sleep before her alarm jangled her awake again. There was no avoiding it. She had to go to work even though it was Sunday. In the best of times, hospitals never closed, and these were not the best of times. Amy worked as a nurse’s aide at St. Stephen’s and on mornings after heavy bombing, the intake unit overflowed with patients needing attention.
She sniffed at the underarms of her blouse and sighed. It would have to do. Washing laundry was increasingly difficult, what with the air raids and the demands of her job, not to mention soap rationing and coal shortages that limited the use of hot water. She sprayed her underarms with cologne and dressed in the same blue serge suit she had worn the day before. She slipped the armband with the red cross and the St. Stephen’s emblem up over her sleeve and went downstairs to the kitchen.
The room was deserted, except for Winston, who slept curled in his blanket-lined basket. After a sleepless night knitting, her mother, as usual, would be upstairs in her bed. She would probably be there half the day, sleeping soundly while the house gathered dust. A half-empty pot of weak ersatz coffee stood cooling on the counter where Amy’s father had left it before setting off to Paddington Station. The trains never took a holiday, and he always worked the early shift on weekends.
Amy poured a portion of coffee into a small pot and set it on the stove to reheat. She toasted a slice of the rough, dark bread and spread it with margarine and carrot jam. When the coffee was hot, she filled her cup, added a spoonful of condensed milk, and stirred. She slumped into the chair and sipped the warm, milky brew, dreaming of real coffee. In the quiet kitchen, her mind drifted to better days ― days of white bread and butter, of the aroma of fresh coffee, of quiet nights and long-ago mornings when she was eager to go to school. She had loved school and dreamed of going to university, but now everything had changed. Amy’s head jerked, and she realized she had dozed off. She glanced at the wall clock. She was going to be late.
The walk to St. Stephen’s normally took her little more than ten minutes, but this morning, when the bombs had fallen so close the night before, who knew what she might find. Amy straightened her skirt, checked her hair in the hall mirror as she passed it, and let herself out the door.
The street seemed peaceful enough. A few pedestrians were out, women with shopping bags over their arms headed for the queues, the newspaper seller at his stand on the corner. When she turned onto the main road, a red, double-decker bus trundled along the rutted street. Passengers filled every seat and hung onto the overhead straps.
Closer to the hospital, things began to change. One home had lost its roof, and the chimney lay in the street, little more than a pile of bricks. The house next door stood completely open on one side, the entire outer wall missing, the rooms open to view like a doll’s house. The street was dotted with torn clothing, a single shoe, and cracked dinnerware. Amy gazed up at the private rooms on display. Ahead, she passed a headless doll sitting upright on a chunk of concrete as if waiting to be rescued.
Relieved to be almost at her destination, Amy rounded the corner. Ahead, a scene of devastation filled the street. The block had taken a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb. Buildings had been reduced to heaps of rubble, wall fragments and steel girders jutting at odd angles, smoke and steam rising through the stones.
An ambulance waited nearby. Two lady attendants stood at the rear doors, one holding an empty stretcher at the ready, the other sorting through a box of bandages. Rescue crews and firemen clustered around a gaping crevice in the middle of the wreckage. They were moving debris as fast as they could, passing the bits back along a line of workers in a frantic effort to clear the entrance. Amy sucked in her breath. There must be people trapped underneath.
She stood, calculating the best way to detour around the rescue scene and get to St. Stephen’s. With a direct bomb hit right in the neighborhood, the emergency section would be swamped.
A female Air Raid Precautions warden directed volunteers who pulled at the chunks of concrete. The warden kept looking around frantically as if searching for someone in particular. Suddenly she waved her arms in Amy’s direction. “Nurse! Nurse! We need your help,” she yelled.
Amy looked around. She could see no nurse. But there she stood in her blue suit with the red-cross emblem and the St. Stephen’s logo on her armband. The warden was still waving and motioning toward her. Amy hurried over to the activity centered around the opening to the black hole. She did have some first-aid training, mandatory for working at the hospital. Perhaps there was some way she might be of help.
As she approached the group of rescuers, Amy became aware of an unearthly sound coming up from underground. As a child, she had once visited relatives who lived on several wild acres in Scotland, and she had gone out with her uncle one morning to check his traps. She would never forget the high-pitched scream of a hare caught in the iron jaws of one of those traps. After that morning, she could never eat rabbit again. The terrible sound coming from the depths of the crater of debris was like that rabbit’s death scream.
The ARP warden eyed Amy closely. “What’s your hip measurement?” she asked abruptly.
Amy was stunned by the question, but she answered automatically. “Thirty-three inches, I think.”
The warden exchanged glances with an elderly man standing with a leather doctors’ bag at his feet. He nodded. “She’s the best we’ve got,” he said.
The female warden turned to Amy, and her eyes were serious. “I’m going to ask you to do something that will be quite terrible, but it will be of great help to someone badly injured down in that hole.” She shook her head. “None of us can do it. We need someone slender like you. You’re the only one who might be able to slip through the opening. We don’t know if it’s a man, or a woman, or a child. But they need your help.”
Amy looked around. The ARP warden was stocky, buxom, and broad across her bottom. The doctor had a rotund belly and stood leaning on his cane, his wisps of gray hair slicked to an almost bald head. The two ambulance drivers were both mature women with full busts and hips. And the firemen and others lifting stones, bricks, and jagged pieces of concrete all had broad shoulders and muscled arms. As she looked around, the agonizing scream undulated up from the depths again.
Silently, Amy nodded her head. She would have to do what was needed. Perhaps her beanpole figure would finally be of some use.
The doctor began to issue instructions. She must take off all her outer clothing. Right down to her brassiere and knickers. Any loose fabric could snag on the unstable debris and bring more down, starting an avalanche. First, she would have to go down into the hole with a torch to see if she could reach the injured person and administer aid. She must come up to report to the doctor and then return to do whatever he directed.
When Amy stood in nothing but her underwear, the female ARP warden took her hand and squeezed it. “You’ll be ok, dear. But remember to hold your arms to your sides and keep your body as rigid as possible when they lower you. At the narrowest part there’s barely an inch of leeway.” Then she led Amy toward the gaping hole. She clipped a lanyard with a torch at one end to Amy’s bra strap and told her to hold the light in her teeth on the way down so she could see what was ahead.
Two of the burliest, muscular workers stood on each side of her and waited. Finally, Amy nodded. “I’m ready,” she said and put the small torch between her teeth. The two men leaned down, clasped her firmly around her bare thighs, upended her, and lowered her headfirst into the black opening of a nightmare. As she descended, the strong hands holding her moved down her legs until they were clasping her around her knees. Their grip was tight and never wavered.
Once she was through the narrow crevice, she entered a low space filled with the awful smells of sewage and blood. She took the torch from her mouth and swung its beam around the hellish scene. Directly below her, only a foot beyond her reach, a great chunk of concrete lay across the arms and chest of the man whose scream turned to a moan when he saw her. A heavy iron beam crushed his legs. But worst of all was his face, the lower half of it smashed and mangled so badly Amy could not tell where his mouth was. His eyes were black and filled with terror.
Amy sucked in her breath. She had to say something, but what? Finally, she murmured the only soothing words she could think of. “Try to keep calm. I’ll get help.” The face trembled below her. “I’ll be back,” she said. She could feel the blood pooling in her skull and her eyes stung. She angled her head upward and yelled, “Up! Pull me up!” Then she put the torch back in her teeth and held her body rigid as the men’s hands lifted her into the daylight.
As soon as she had her feet on solid ground, a sudden nausea took hold of her. She yanked the torch from her mouth and leaned over to vomit against her shoes.
When her retching subsided, Amy wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, turning her head to spit away the sour taste in her mouth. Across the street, she saw a sight so common, so every day, it took her breath away. An elderly woman stood on the sidewalk. She was short, her hair in silver braids wrapped around her head. She pushed a pram and held a toddler against her shoulder with her free arm. The little girl frowned. She pushed at a fringe of blond bangs and pointed across toward Amy.
Amy felt her stomach begin to heave again and bent over, turning her back toward the child. When she could finally stand, one hand at her mouth and the other at her stomach, the old woman and her charge were gone. It was as if they had been a hallucination.
The doctor clasped her shoulder as she choked out what she had observed in the hole.
“You need to go down again,” he said. “I’m afraid the only help we have for him is to speed him to oblivion.” He gave her a bottle of chloroform and a cotton mask. “Be careful not to breathe this yourself,” he said. “And you have to go lower this time, but don’t worry, whatever happens the men will hold tight and pull you up.”
Then she was back in hell for a second time. She could feel the strong hands clasping her ankles. She did what was necessary, her arms and hands moving like an assemblage of clockwork automation. With the torch clamped in her teeth, she poured the chloroform on the mask. She held the cloth over the bloody remains of the man’s face and whispered. “Breathe deeply, if you can. That’s right, deeper…” An animal-like grunt. A small convulsion and twitch of what was left of his cheek. And then he was still.
Amy’s hands trembled, and she dropped the bottle of Chloroform. It thumped against the man’s shoulder and spilled onto his shirt. She held her breath and quickly swung the torch light around the dark space that extended far back under a low ceiling of bent girders and twisted pipes. There were grisly fragments from other bodies in the hole, but there was no one else she could help. The stench of death filled her nostrils, and she was getting light-headed. She yelled to the team to pull her up. At the top, she crumpled to her knees and retched until there was nothing left. But still her stomach heaved.
The kind warden brought her the folded pile of her clothing. “You did very well, my dear,” she said and placed her hand on Amy’s arm. “We couldn’t save him. But at least you gave him peace at the end. Remember that.”
Amy dressed in the shadow of the ambulance. One of the attendants handed her a mug of hot tea, and she sipped it slowly. Finally, she straightened her back and looked down the street. “I’m late for work,” she said and turned toward St. Stephen’s. After she had walked a block, she realized that she did not know any of those people’s names. Not the warden’s or the doctor’s or the two men who had held her tightly so she would not slip into the underworld. And she was nameless to them too.
At St. Stephen’s, the head matron asked why she was so late. Amy looked up, barely understanding the question, and mumbled, “The bombing. The bombs made me late.”
The matron tut-tutted. “We all have the bombs,” she said.
Amy clamped her mouth shut and turned away. All day she followed instructions like a zombie. She wrapped bandages around wounds, helped the doctor smooth out the plaster on a cast, handed a nurse the gauze and needle to stitch up a woman’s gashed leg. These chores seemed so trivial after her morning. When her shift was over, she walked home in the gathering twilight, taking the long way round to avoid the bombed buildings where she had helped a man to die.
When she got home, her father was already in bed, probably hoping for a few hours of quiet sleep before the air raid siren wailed. Her mother, who could be irritatingly talkative in the evenings, brought her a dinner of cabbage and boiled potatoes.
“I’m sorry,” Amy said as she pushed the plate away. “I’m too tired to eat. And please don’t ask me to talk.”
“But, Amy. What’s happened …?”
“Not now, mother. I can’t talk about it yet,” Amy said, her voice little more than a whisper. She curled her body into the cushions of the sofa. She was so exhausted she could not climb the stairs to her room. She faintly heard the sound of water from the faucet and the clank of cutlery as her mother cleaned the kitchen.
The ghastly scenes of the morning began to unspool in her mind. Then she heard the scritch of doggy nails on the wooden floor and a plaintive whine. The soft wetness of the dog’s nose nudged her hand. She opened her eyes and looked into the doleful face of the dachshund. “That’s how I feel too, Winston,” she said. She reached down and scooped up the dog. He was unexpectedly heavy in her arms. He curled against her on the couch and snorted one of his muffled grunts.
Amy stroked the dog’s soft coat and rubbed his velvety ears. She had never cared much for Winston. He was her father’s dog, not hers. But tonight, Amy welcomed his warm breath on her face.
K. (Kathryn or Katie) Lang-Slattery writes in several genres. Her published works include two connected, historical fiction novels, based on true family stories; a travel memoir, a three book children’s series; and articles, essays; and short stories for her Substack, Wherever the Word Leads. In addition to writing, Kathryn enjoys reading, painting, cooking, and traveling internationally. She lives near the Pacific Ocean, only steps from her childhood home.