The Pommerys turned nearly all the guest rooms into dormitories and hired local girls to help take care of the children. The government urged all parents to send their children out of the cities, on relocation programs to keep them safe from the bombing. Many children had already been killed. Families in the countryside all over England were volunteering to take them in and house them. Few people took as many as the Pommerys, but they had an enormous home. They had twenty-four children staying with them, and four village girls to help them. Prudence pitched in whenever she wasn’t at her nursing classes. The operation ran surprisingly smoothly. Lord and Lady Pommery called them their adopted grandchildren and faced the situation with kindness and good humor. Four and a half years later, in the spring of 1944, nearly half the children had lost their parents, either in combat or during the bombing of London. They would be placed in adoptive homes after the war. But in the meantime, they remained with the Pommerys in Yorkshire. In some cases, brothers and sisters had been placed with them, but in many cases, siblings had been separated. The youngest child they had there was nearly six now, and the oldest had just turned eighteen and was about to enlist in the army. Running the house and supervising the children was a full-time job for Lady Pommery. The children attended the village school, and the Pommerys had acquired their own school bus. Lord and Lady Pommery took turns driving the bus to school, and thoroughly enjoyed it, almost as much as Prudence had enjoyed her nursing classes. She had graduated in February 1942, and was a volunteer nurse at the local hospital for a year after she graduated. Then she decided to enlist in the RAF Nursing Corps and went to London.
She had been there for a year when she volunteered for the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron. She had been there for three months, in a combined unit with American air forces flight nurses, and some British and Australians. They flew on Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo planes, heavy, dependable two-engine planes perfectly suited to short flights and heavy cargo. They carried up to twenty-four litter patients, and sometimes the walking wounded. The patients were tended to by a nurse and two medical corpsmen on each flight. A flight surgeon and senior nurse oversaw the squadrons from the ground. The planes flew into areas of heavy fighting and brought out as many wounded as they could, those who could be saved and would survive the journey. They had to do rapid triage when they picked up the wounded, and there were sometimes terrible decisions to make. But they saved many lives by removing the wounded by plane instead of ambulance, which was slow going and often over rough terrain. They lost far fewer patients transporting them by air. The planes faced all the perils of battle themselves, at risk of being shot down by the enemy. And with men and cargo on board, the army was not allowed to mark the planes with the red cross and were considered legitimate military targets. They were given fighter plane coverage when possible, which wasn’t always the case.
Prudence had been part of the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron bringing the wounded back to the hospital at the airbase for over a year now, and she loved every minute of it. She was twenty-five years old. She was considered senior and very skilled among the air evacuation nurses because she was fully trained and very competent. Many of the others weren’t experienced and had minimum training. Many of them were in fact civilians in uniform, but without official rank. Pru was a proper nurse in the RAF.
Her brothers had flown countless missions over Germany in the RAF. Her younger brother, Phillip, was the more daring of the two at twenty-four, maybe the best pilot, and willing to take more chances. Max was twenty-seven, and more cautious by nature. Both were superb pilots. They teased their sister for her work on the flying ambulances, and said she did it to pick up men. But both were well aware of the risks the crews of the air evac transports took, and were secretly very proud of her. She had also been a courageous young girl, who tried to compete with her brothers as a child, on foot or on horseback, racing her bicycle down a lane, or climbing a tree higher than they did. And no matter how badly battered she was, she never cried when she got hurt. It was something Max had always admired about her. He readily admitted now that he had cried more often than she did. Phillip was the terror of the threesome, a daredevil who would stop at nothing and seemed to have nine lives. He had used several of them since he started flying for the RAF. He was famous for the many times he had extricated himself from what looked like disaster.
When Pru came back from her mission that afternoon, she was told that there were American flight nurses arriving the next day. She was excited to hear it. She had worked with American flight nurses before, and she found them efficient, brave, well trained, and a pleasure to work with. They never complained, and adapted to every situation, no matter how hard. And she had fun spending time with them after hours. They enjoyed a good time as much as she and the other RAF nurses did.
Her brothers were legends in the RAF, and extremely popular with her women friends. It was no secret who her parents were, although no one made a fuss about it. The children of many aristocrats, in fact most of them, had enlisted in the RAF, the navy, and the army, and were defending their country valiantly. Pru was greatly respected as a nurse on the medical air evac transports. She was said to be fearless, which she insisted wasn’t true. But she was modest to the point of humble, unassuming, and tireless, and one of the best nurses in the squadron. She was well liked by every corpsman who ever worked with her, and good fun at the pub afterwards, they claimed. She could drink them under the table and show up fresh as a daisy the next day.
“I have brothers,” she said with a wink whenever they commented on her fearless behavior and ability to drink without showing any sign of it, and show up on time the next day in good humor.
“I would hate her if I didn’t love her so damn much,” Ed Murphy, the corpsman who worked with her most often said about her. “I swear, you could run her over with a bus, and she’d pop up, hop on the plane, and work for twenty hours without complaining. She’s not human.” No one who worked with her had ever met anyone who didn’t like her. She never pulled rank without a good reason to do so, and even then, only in extremis. She was never unfair in her decisions, and never traded on her aristocratic lineage. She got the job done, did everything humanly possible to save her patients, and was ready to take off again the next day—on every mission they were assigned, on two hours’ sleep if she had to, and sometimes with no sleep at all.
All in all, Prudence Pommery came from a lovely family of caring, responsible, compassionate people, and Pru had a heart of gold.
The night the American flight nurses arrived, she came back from the airstrip after seeing all her patients put into ambulances. She had filled out her reports and sent all the paperwork to the hospital with Ed Murphy. The dormitory was exploding at the seams with the new arrivals when she came in. She stopped at the front office to inquire about them.
“Are the Yanks in?” It sounded like there was a party going on upstairs, or several of them. She could hear voices and laughing, and girls calling to each other in the halls as they settled in.