All Clear

Binnie balked. “I don’t think we should go this way. What if that lady’s there?”

“What if she is?” Alf said. “We ain’t doin’ nothin’, only walkin’ past. This way’s the nearest.”

“All right,” Binnie agreed reluctantly, dropping her voice to a whisper, “but tiptoe.”

“Tiptoeing will look suspicious,” Eileen whispered back. “Just walk past normally. She won’t even notice us.”

Binnie didn’t look convinced. “She looked like she was the sort who don’t miss a trick.”

Alf nodded. “Like the ticket guard at Bank Station.”

“That’s your guilty conscience speaking,” Eileen said. “She was no such thing.” She started confidently down the corridor.

The door to the dispensary stood half open. Inside, the woman who’d helped her was counting out white tablets with a metal stick, her head bent over the tray.

Don’t look up, Eileen willed as they passed.

She didn’t. Eileen opened the door, and they scooted through it. She’d counted on the darkness hiding them once they were outside, but the drive was nearly as bright as the corridor had been. The cloudy sky above them was orange-pink, and the hospital buildings cast odd, wrong-angled, blood-red shadows across the ambulance parked there.

Eileen made Alf and Binnie climb in back. “Get down so they can’t see you till we’re away from the hospital,” she said, putting the key in the ignition and hoping she could start it. It had been running when the rescue worker had handed it over to her.

She pulled on the choke and let the clutch out, praying for the engine to catch.

It did, and then promptly died. “Come on,” Alf said from the backseat. “’Urry.”

Eileen tried again, pulling the choke out slowly and easing up steadily on the clutch as the vicar had taught her. This time it didn’t quite die, and she glanced in the rear-vision mirror and began to back away from the door.

A fist pounded on the passenger-side window.

Eileen nearly jumped out of her skin and killed the engine.

A man in a white coat was standing there knocking. “We’re for it now,” Alf said.

“Step on it!” Binnie ordered, leaning over the seat. “Go!”

“I can’t!” Eileen said, trying desperately to start the engine.

It wouldn’t catch. The man, in his sixties, opened the door and leaned in. “Are you the young woman who brought in the ambulance driver?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said, getting in. He was carrying a black leather bag. “Mrs. Mallowan told me you were out here. Thank goodness you hadn’t left. I’m Dr. Cross. I need you to take me to Moorgate.”

Both children had ducked down out of sight. “Moorgate?” Eileen said.

He nodded. “There’s a young woman at the tube station there. She’s too badly injured to be moved.” He shut the ambulance door. “We’ll have to treat her at the scene.”

“But I can’t—I’m not a real ambulance driver—”

“Mrs. Mallowan told me you’d been recruited to bring the injured driver and the lieutenant in.”

“She can’t take you,” Alf said, popping up from the back.

“Good Lord, a stowaway,” Dr. Cross said, and as Binnie appeared beside him, “Two stowaways.”

“We’re ’er assistants,” Binnie said. “She can’t take you to Moorgate. She’s got to go to St. Paul’s.”

“To pick up a patient?”

“Yeah,” Alf said.

“One of the fire watch was injured,” Eileen said.

“They’ll have to send another ambulance.”

He reached across and honked the horn. An attendant appeared in the doorway. “As soon as Dawkins gets back,” the doctor called to him, “send her to St. Paul’s!”

He turned to Eileen. “All right, let’s go.”

“We ain’t sure it’ll start,” Alf said.

“It wouldn’t before,” Binnie added.

And if I can’t start it, Dr. Cross will have to find some other transport, Eileen thought, and yanked roughly on the choke the way she had on her first driving lesson.

The ambulance started up immediately. She put it in gear and let out the clutch with a motor-killing jerk that didn’t do anything either. The motor was practically purring.

“Turn left onto the street,” the doctor directed, “and then left on Smithfield.”

Eileen began to back out of the courtyard. An ambulance was pulling in. Why couldn’t it have been here five minutes sooner?

She slowed, trying to think of something she could say to persuade him to take the other ambulance.

Two men in helmets and overalls were clambering out of the back. They pulled out a man on a stretcher. Attendants converged on them.

“Hurry,” the doctor said to Eileen. “We haven’t much time.”

Paradoxically one might say that the most important incident of that night was one that failed to happen.

—W. R. MATTHEWS, DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S,

WRITING ABOUT THE NIGHT OF

29 DECEMBER 1940

St. Paul’s Cathedral—29 December 1940