Sally’s boyfriend, George Laidlaw, was one of Mr Ward’s housemen, as the junior doctors were called. George was currently on duty in Casualty, where the flood of patients arriving seemed to increase with every bombing raid.
‘What have we got up next?’ Johnny MacDonald, the anaesthetist, a Scot, asked Sally, tiredly pushing his hand through his thinning ginger hair. Johnny was only in his mid-thirties but tonight he looked closer to fifty, Sally thought, and no wonder. They had almost lost the little boy twice during the op, only Johnny’s skill had kept him going.
‘Amputation that needs cleaning up,’ Sally answered without looking at him. No one liked amputations, and they liked them even less when someone or something else had done the amputating for them – in this case a falling roof slate that had sliced a fireman’s leg off just above his knee as he fought to save a burning building down on the docks.
‘I thought we were going to lose that wee laddie back there,’ the anaesthetist told Sally without saying anything about the next patient.
Sally didn’t reply. The reality was that they would probably lose the little boy anyway, and they all knew it. His little body had been pierced with so much shrapnel that it had left him, in the surgeon’s own words, ‘looking like a sieve’.
Somewhere in the hospital the boy’s mother would be waiting and praying, but there was only so much that even the best surgeon could do, and they did have the best here at Barts, Sally thought proudly, as she made her way to the sluice room to scrub up ready for the next operation. However, no matter how hard she scrubbed her hands Sally couldn’t rid her nostrils of the smell of blood, nor her mind of images of mangled, maimed bodies. The surgeons had been operating non-stop and suddenly, for no reason that she could think of, to her the smell of blood had become the stench of death. She leaned forward and closed her eyes as a surge of nausea gripped her.
The voice of one of the more senior theatre nurses who had already been in the sluice room, a short, stocky girl called Mavis Burton, reached her.
‘Bear up, Johnson,’ she said bracingly. ‘The theatre porters will be bringing the next patient along any minute.’
Immediately Sally snapped out of her uncharacteristic weakness. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not normally squeamish.’
The other nurse shook her head. ‘It would be hard to be anything else, given what we’ve been seeing. We all know that nurses are supposed to keep their distance and remember that they’ve got a job to do, and that weeping and wailing over injured patients doesn’t help anyone, but I’ve got to admit I’ve seen some things these last few days . . .’ She paused before continuing, ‘Mind you, with St Thomas’ being bombed on the first night of the blitz and its doctors and nurses risking their own lives in the damage to save patients, they’ve rather stolen a march on us in terms of showing the Germans what British medical staff are made of.’
St Thomas’ was the second oldest hospital in London, and there was a degree of professional rivalry between the two renowned establishments. On Sunday night a bomb had destroyed Medical Out Patients and most of college house, where the doctors were housed, killing two of them.
Only the bravery of three doctors, Mr Frewer, Dr Norman and Mr Maling, had saved two of their colleagues, who had been trapped by falling debris and ignited dispensary stores. Of course, no one working at Barts wanted their own hospital to be bombed, but Mavis was right: the bravery shown by St Thomas’ staff had naturally made everyone at Barts feel they had something to live up to.
Two hours later, when Sister Theatre had dispatched her to get herself a cup of tea and have a short break, Sally made her way tiredly to the canteen, almost walking right past George, her boyfriend, who was striding purposefully the other way, his white coat flapping open and his stethoscope round his neck.
‘Oh, George, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise.’ His smile creased his kind face, but he looked as weary as she felt, Sally acknowledged, as he pushed his thick light brown hair back off his face.
George might not be movie-star handsome but there was something about him that was very attractive. He had a kindness and a concern for others, combined with his warm smile and the twinkle in his eyes, that made him popular. Tall and rangy, George had the kind of slight stoop that came from bending over patients’ beds, but like all of those who worked with people whose health and lives had been blighted by the blitz of bombing on London, there were shadows at the backs of his eyes now from witnessing such suffering.
‘Sister’s just sent me to grab something to eat. We’ve got an impossibly full list. I’ve never seen anyone operate with the skill and the speed Mr Ward has shown these last few days. We had this little boy in earlier, peppered with shrapnel . . .’
‘I know. I saw him when he was brought in to Casualty earlier.’ George rubbed his face with both hands. In common with many of the other medics at the hospital, his jaw was showing the signs of stubble that came from working hours that were far too long and then falling into bed, only to be roused within a couple of hours to deal with another crisis.
They exchanged tired smiles, then both of them stiffened in response to a particularly loud explosion.
George reached out to grab hold of Sally protectively, saying when the building didn’t move, ‘Not us this time.’ But his words were inaudible above the pound of the ack-ack guns.
George was still holding onto her, and Sally looked up at him. She had seen those lean, long-fingered hands of his holding patients with such compassion and kindness. That thought brought a lump to her throat. George was such a good man.
‘This so-and-so war,’ he groaned. ‘More than anything else I want to have the time to court you properly, Sally, as you deserve to be courted, but we haven’t got that time. There isn’t time to even kiss you any more never mind court you. I’ve got to get back: Casualty is bursting at the seams with patients we haven’t got beds for already, and by the sound of what’s going on we’re going to have a hell of a lot more to deal with before tonight’s over.’
He lifted one of her hands to his lips and kissed it gently.
Her skin should smell of roses, not carbolic soap, Sally thought sadly, but the look she could see in George’s eyes said that he hadn’t even noticed the carbolic.
‘You’d better go and get your tea and I’d better get back to my patients,’ he said, releasing her.
Sally nodded and hurried down the corridor, pausing to look back when she reached the end. George was still standing where she had left him, watching her.
She was so lucky to have met him. He was kind and loving and fun to be with. He was also a good doctor who one day would be a first-rate doctor. And a first-rate husband?
It was far too soon to be thinking along those lines, Sally knew, even though she also knew that George himself would love to progress their relationship. There had, after all, been another man in her life she had once hoped to marry. Callum.
She was over Callum now. Callum’s refusal to understand the hurt and sense of betrayal she had suffered on discovering that her supposed best friend and her father were involved with one another, had destroyed the feelings she had once had for him. He might have followed her to London after she had fled here, unable to bear to stay in Liverpool and witness the relationship between Morag and her father, but he had not sought her out to beg her forgiveness. No, he had sought her out to tell her that, following their marriage, Morag was expecting a child.
Would she have weakened if he hadn’t told her that his sister and her father were expecting a child? No! She wouldn’t.
She was happy now, Sally reminded herself. Far, far happier than she had ever expected to be when she had left Liverpool. Where she had had one best friend she now had three very good close friends. Where she had loved a man whose loyalty to her above all others