When Agnes had been taken under the wing of a young underground train driver, both she, and then romance, had bloomed, and the young couple were now going steady.
Olive smiled as she reflected on Agnes’s quiet happiness now, compared with her despair the first time she had seen her.
‘Agnes said this morning that she had volunteered to stay on at work this evening now that London Transport has agreed to open Charing Cross underground station as a shelter if there’s an air raid.’
Tilly nodded. There had been a good deal of pressure from people, especially those who were suffering heavy bombing raids, to be allowed to take shelter in the underground where they felt they would be safer than in some of the other shelters. After initially refusing, the authorities had changed their mind when Winston Churchill had agreed with the public, and certain stations were to be opened for that purpose.
‘What about Dulcie?’ Tilly asked.
‘She’s been dreadfully worried about her family, especially with her sister being missing, and them living in Stepney, although she’s pretended that she isn’t. She went over to the East End this afternoon.’
‘With that ankle of hers in plaster, and her on crutches?’ Tilly protested, horrified. ‘Especially now that she’s been told she’s got to keep the plaster on for an extra two weeks.’
Dulcie hadn’t liked that at all, Olive acknowledged ruefully, although when the hospital doctor she had seen before she had been discharged into Olive’s care had told them both that it was because Dulcie’s ankles were so slender and fine-boned that they wanted to take extra care, Dulcie, being Dulcie and so inclined to vanity, had preened herself a little.
‘It’s all right,’ Olive assured her daughter. ‘She hasn’t gone on her own. Sergeant Dawson has gone with her. He’s got a friend who’s a policeman over there who he wanted to look up, so he said that he’d go with Dulcie and make sure that she can manage. She should be back soon, but you and I might as well go ahead and have our tea.’
As she spoke Olive glanced towards the clock, betraying to Tilly her concern for the lodger whom initially Olive had not been keen on at all.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Tilly comforted her mother. Olive smiled and nodded in agreement.
What Tilly didn’t know was that Olive’s concern for Dulcie wasn’t just because of the threat of the Luftwaffe’s bombs, and her broken ankle. It had shocked and disconcerted Olive when she had visited the small untidy house in Stepney to tell Dulcie’s mother that Dulcie had broke her ankle after being caught in a bomb blast, to recognise that Dulcie was not being sharp or mean when she had said that her mother preferred her younger sister, but that that was the truth. Olive knew that, as the mother of an only and beloved child, she wasn’t in a position to sit in judgement on a mother of three, but she had understood in an instant, listening to Dulcie’s mother, that the deep-rooted cause of Dulcie’s chippiness and sometimes downright meanness to others was because she had grown up feeling unloved by her mother.
And yet despite that, since the bombing had started and in spite of Dulcie’s attempts to conceal it, Olive had seen how anxious the girl secretly was about her family, living as they did near the docks, which were the target of Hitler’s bombing campaign.
Being the loving, kind-hearted person she was, Olive was now concerned that Dulcie might be hurt by her visit to her old home. Olive had seen for herself when she had gone there on Sunday that Dulcie’s mother was beside herself with anxiety for her younger daughter, whilst in contrast she had hardly shown any concern at all for Dulcie.
Not that Olive would discuss any of this with Tilly. Dulcie’s home situation was her private business until such time as she chose to air it with the other girls in the house. She hadn’t said anything about her concern for Dulcie to Sergeant Dawson either, their neighbour at number 1 Article Row, though he would have understood that concern, Olive knew. He and his wife had, after all, had more than their fair share of personal unhappiness through the loss of the son who had died as a child. Mrs Dawson had never really recovered from the loss and was now something of a recluse. Olive felt rather sorry for Sergeant Dawson, who was by nature a friendly and sociable man – kind, as well, as his offer to escort Dulcie on her visit to see her mother had proved. Dulcie might insist that she could manage perfectly well on her crutches, but Olive had had awful mental images of the air-raid siren going off and Dulcie, all alone, being knocked over in the rush to reach the nearest shelter.
‘I saw Sally just before I left work today,’ Tilly informed her mother once they were seated at the kitchen table, with its fresh-looking duck-egg-blue, pale green and cream gingham tablecloth, trimmed with a border of daisies, eating the simple but nourishing meal of rissoles made from the leftovers of the special Sunday roast Olive had cooked in celebration of Tilly’s birthday, and flavoured with some of the onions Sally had grown in their garden, served with boiled potatoes and the last of the summer’s crop of beans.
‘She said to tell you that she doesn’t know when she’ll be home as she’s offered to sleep over at the hospital whilst they are so busy. They’ve had to bring back some of the staff who were evacuated to the temporary out-of-London hospital Barts organised when war was announced.’
Tilly put down her knife and fork, and told her mother quietly, ‘Sally said to tell everyone that we should all sleep face down and with a pillow over our heads. That’s what all the nurses are doing, because of the kind of injuries people have been brought in with.’
Olive could see that Tilly was reluctant to elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Olive too had heard dreadful tales of the kind of injuries people had suffered.
Picking up her knife and fork again, Tilly wished that Sally’s advice hadn’t popped into her head whilst she was eating, stifling her appetite; no one with anything about them even thought of not clearing their plate of food, thanks to rationing.
As though she had read her thoughts Olive told her firmly, ‘Come on, love, eat up. We can’t afford to waste good food. There’s plenty from the East End right now that are homeless and with nothing but the clothes they’re standing up in who would give an awful lot to be safe in their homes and eating a decent meal.’
Olive’s familiar maternal firmness, reminiscent as it was of the days when Tilly had been much younger, made the girl smile, although the truth was that right now there wasn’t very much to smile about for any of them.
‘Suture, please, Nurse.’
The surgeon operating on the young child lying motionless on the operating table didn’t need to tell Sally what he required. She already had everything ready for him to sew up the wounds to the little boy’s body, from which he had just removed several pieces of shrapnel.
Having evacuated most of its staff out of London and closed down all but two operating theatres, which had been moved down to the basement for safety, Barts, like all London hospitals, was now having to cope with a huge influx of patients, many of whom, like this little boy, had very serious injuries indeed.
Those patients who could be moved were being sent out to Barts in the country for treatment, but those whose injuries were too severe, too life-threatening for treatment to be delayed or a long journey undertaken, were having to be operated on here, despite the bombs falling all around.
Down here in the basement, in the focused quiet of the operating theatre, the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns had to be ignored.
The operation was over. The consultant surgeon had gone to scrub up for the next one. The young patient was being wheeled out of the operating theatre ready for the porters to take him back to the