Audrey’s eyes strained to the limit as she drove. She wouldn’t think about all the disaster stories she’d heard—crashing into cows or vehicles in the dark, driving off the road into swamps and fields. Seated beside her, the instructor gave no hint of how well or poorly Audrey was doing until they came to a final stop back at the training center.
“Very good, Miss Clarkson. You may remove your mask.” The instructor made no move to get out of the vehicle as she scribbled on a form, so Audrey didn’t either. “Of course, you realize, Miss Clarkson, that this isn’t your final test.”
Audrey’s perfect, inbred posture failed her for a moment as her shoulders slumped in disappointment. “It isn’t?”
“No. You won’t know if you’ve passed the real test until you’re called to a disaster site for the first time. That’s something we cannot simulate, nor can we truly prepare you for it. Do you think you can handle the sight of severed limbs scattered around a bomb site or dead bodies burned beyond recognition?”
Audrey swallowed, searching for a reply. “I couldn’t say. One would be foolish to speculate. I hope to keep my mind on the fact that I’m there to do my job and transfer the living to hospital.”
“I wish you luck, Miss Clarkson.”
“Thank you.” Audrey ran her hand through her sweaty hair, matted and itching from the gas mask. She no longer resembled the girl who’d grown up in Wellingford Hall, the debutante who’d had an audience with the queen. That Audrey was gone. It was just as well—she never liked her much anyway.
“I noticed that you signed up for the same postings as Eve Dawson when you leave.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She wondered how Eve had survived the confinement of her gas suit.
The instructor gave Audrey a hard look. “Wouldn’t you rather partner with someone from your own class?”
The question startled her. “Um . . . No, ma’am, I wouldn’t. I would much rather partner with Eve Dawson.”
The woman opened her door with a sigh as if to convey to Audrey that she was making a terrible mistake. “If that’s what you wish. I hope you won’t regret it.”
JANUARY 1941
Eve awoke to the sound of distant explosions. Bright flashes like lightning pierced the edges of the blackout curtains. The Nazis were bombing Liverpool again. The roar of destruction filled the night even though the ATS ambulance base where she and Audrey were posted was several miles from the city. Eve sat up and peered at the watch Alfie had given her. Two thirty in the morning. She rose and put on her uniform and a warm jersey, knowing they would surely be called out into the cold night. Audrey rolled over and squinted at her.
“What are you doing? What time is it?”
Eve held up her hand. “Listen . . .” The rumbling was continuous, like an unending thunderstorm. “The Nazis are bombing Liverpool. It sounds bad. They’ll be calling us any minute, so we’d better get dressed.”
Audrey rubbed her eyes, then stood to put on her clothes, as well. They shared the former hotel room with two other girls, who also climbed from their beds to get ready. The knock on their door came a few minutes later. “Oh, good. You’re all ready,” the night supervisor said when she saw them. “Let’s go.”
Eve had driven on several ambulance runs in the two weeks since she and Audrey had qualified as drivers. So far, their work involved evacuating civilian patients from Liverpool hospitals to safer ones outside the city. Judging by tonight’s powerful explosions, this run would be different.
“No wonder they made us run all the time at the training center,” Audrey said as they jogged from the hotel to the vehicle garages. The streets were empty except for drivers and medical orderlies racing to their ambulances. Inside the call center, telephones shrilled incessantly and volunteers hurried to copy down urgent assignments.
“I have a feeling this is going to be bad,” Eve said. “Are you ready, Audrey?”
“I think so. How about you?”
“I’d rather do this than sit in a bomb shelter.”
They assigned her and Audrey to the same site—a technical college on Durning Road in Liverpool. Eve quickly pored over her map, waiting for the medical orderlies to arrive—young men exempted from fighting as conscientious objectors.
“Remember the night we sailed from Folkestone to Dover?” Audrey asked as they hurried toward their assigned vehicles. “We had no idea that it was only the beginning of our war adventures, did we?”
Eve recognized a tremble of fear in Audrey’s voice. “You’ll do well, Audrey. You’ve become very courageous since that night.”
“I’ll see you there,” Audrey said.
Eve quickly scribbled her name, destination, and the time into the vehicle logbook, then started the engine. She set off toward Liverpool, aware that the city was the Nazis’ number one target after London. It was a port city, vital for deliveries of food and war supplies from across the Atlantic. The Nazis attacked nearly every second night. Now she and Audrey drove into the thick of that battle, the city already engulfed in smoke and flames.
Eve’s progress slowed as she neared the city, bumping over fire hoses, dodging piles of rubble in the streets, detouring around craters that devoured the road. At last she turned on to Durning Road. ARP wardens and AFS volunteers who’d cleared a path for the ambulances waved her forward. Eve’s heart stopped when she saw the enormous pile of rubble that once had been the technical college, recognizable only by a dangling sign on a fragment of wall. Swarms of workers frantically tunneled into the debris. Eve parked her vehicle as close as she dared and climbed out. Audrey pulled up behind her as a civil defense worker hurried forward.
“We think there are close to three hundred people trapped inside,” he said. “See those two trams?” He pointed to what was left of them, half-buried beneath the collapsed building. “When the alert sounded, they stopped here so the passengers could get to the public shelter in the basement.”
“Dear God . . . ,” Eve whispered. Buried alive. Her greatest fear.
The orderlies unloaded stretchers from the ambulances. “Where have they put the casualties?” one of them asked.
The worker shook his head. “We haven’t found any yet. Any living ones, that is. We’re still digging.”
“Got an extra shovel?” the orderly asked.
“Follow me.”
Eve grabbed her first aid kit, and she and Audrey waded into the melee. Above them, Nazi planes continued their attack, splitting the air with the screams of falling bombs, shaking the ground with the thunderous roar of explosions. Searchlights crisscrossed the skies along with the deafening reply of antiaircraft guns. Eve had experienced the horror of battle in London’s East End, but Audrey hadn’t. She startled and flinched with every blast, instinctively ducking and covering her ears, but she bravely continued forward to where rescuers had tunneled into the basement bomb shelter, and workers and civilian volunteers pulled bloodied, mangled bodies from the wreckage. Hundreds of bodies. Some mere children. Crushed beyond recognition. None of them alive.
The grisliness halted Eve in her tracks. Her first aid kit fell to the ground as it slipped from her grasp. She was going to be sick. She couldn’t do this. But then Audrey was beside her, leaning against her, trembling and weeping with her as they held each other up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Audrey sobbed. “I didn’t want to fall apart. . . . I wanted to be strong . . .”