She had been determined to make something of herself as a young girl, and to not wind up like her mother and too many women she knew like her. By sheer grit and determination, she had gotten a scholarship to a state nursing school before the war, became a nurse and then a midwife, and had worked as a midwife in Poplar in the East End. She had remained faithful to her roots. When the bombing of London started, she had joined the army and later the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron as soon as it was formed. She had had a boyfriend when the war started. He’d been shot down and killed over Germany in 1941. She hadn’t loved another man since, and didn’t want to. She concentrated on her work.
She was twenty-six years old, although she was so small she looked like a child at times. But she was all woman and all heart, and fought like a cat, or the street fighter she was, any time she felt she needed to defend someone or something she cared about. She fought for her patients’ lives harder than any nurse Pru had ever known.
They’d had their share of run-ins at first. Emma had a profound distrust of anyone from the upper classes, and she got into arguments with Pru constantly until she finally realized that Pru wasn’t snobbish and didn’t give a damn where Emma had grown up, or that she was from the East End. They had been best friends ever since. She teased Pru at times about where she came from, and Pru returned the favor by calling her an “East End guttersnipe.” The insults they cheerfully exchanged horrified anyone who heard them, only to realize later that the two women loved each other and would have died defending each other. Emma had punched a soldier in a pub once when she thought he had insulted Pru, and a bar fight had broken out all around them. The two women had escaped before the police arrived, and they laughed all the way back to their barracks.
Pru felt bad about the boy she’d heard Emma had lost that day. She knew how hard Emma took her losses and that she always considered it a failure on her part. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t save them all. They tried to, but sometimes the damage was so great that even extreme measures didn’t make a difference. The worst part of their jobs was the men they lost, although the time saved by airlifting them out of the battle zones and flying them back to the hospital saved many of them. It was a new fight for the nurses and the corpsmen every day.
Emma stirred as Pru changed into her nightgown and slipped into her bed across from Emma’s. Emma popped her head up, with her short bright red hair sticking up like a pixie’s. She was half asleep.
“Is that you?” Emma asked sleepily.
“No, it’s Claudette Colbert,” Pru said with a grin.
“Oh shut up, did you eat?” she asked, lying down again. They took care of each other since no one else did. They were combat buddies in the best sense of the word.
“No, I went to the hospital to check on one of our boys. We almost lost him on the way back.”
“I lost one today,” Emma said sadly, wide-awake now, when she thought of it. “We tried everything. Terrible chest wound. He died halfway back. We should have taken off sooner, but we didn’t have a full load yet, and they took too long to bring the others on.”
“You can’t guess at that, Em. He might have died anyway. I lost one like that last month. It happens.”
“He was twenty years old, just a kid.”
“They’re all kids. There are no old men on the battlefields. They’re all boys, who should never have to be there.” Emma nodded and didn’t speak for a minute.
“A load of Americans arrived today. I saw them when I came in. They talk and laugh a lot,” Emma commented, and Pru smiled.
“That’ll liven the place up. I met a few of them on my way in. They were nice.” The Australians were usually jolly too, and good fun.
“I guess so.” Emma was slower to warm up to people than Pru was, and she was always a little suspicious of new faces in their midst.
“We should try to get to meet them. We’ll be flying with them soon,” Pru commented.
“I hope they’re good,” Emma said seriously.
“I’m sure they will be. And in the end, we all figure it out as we go.” Emma nodded agreement and closed her eyes again. “Get some sleep. You look knackered,” Pru told her.
“I am. I have to be up at three-thirty. We fly at four tomorrow.”
“Me too.”
“Wake me, if I don’t get up,” Emma said, as she turned on her side, and was already half asleep again.
“Night, Em. Sleep tight,” Pru whispered and closed her eyes, trying to forget the images of the day. She didn’t know how she’d survive it sometimes, if it weren’t for her friends, like Emma and Ed. They gave each other the strength to do it all again every day. She wondered if any of the Americans who had arrived would turn out to be good friends too. Time would tell.
* * *
—
The alarm Emma had set the night before went off at three-thirty, which gave them both just enough time to roll out of bed and into their flight clothes, head down the hall to brush their teeth, wash their faces, and comb their hair, and then run down the stairs, and grab a cup of coffee, rush out to a car and head to the tarmac less than a mile away. Or if there was no car, they ran there. They had the time calculated down to the last second, without a minute to spare, to get every last second of sleep they could before facing another day.
The wartime coffee was bitter, and sugar was rationed, but tea was hard to come by. Neither Emma nor Prudence took the time to eat breakfast. Their corpsmen would bring them something from the mess hall, even if it was a single piece of toast and an apple, or a paper cup of porridge. It was enough to start the day.
Their planes were side by side on the tarmac, and their pilots were already there, checking the engines. Ed drove up minutes after Pru got there. He looked fresh and alert, and he smiled when he saw her. Emma had already climbed the ladder into her own C-47 and was checking the supplies. They had used a lot the day before, and her corpsmen had restocked them. Ten minutes later, they were ready to go. Pru glanced at the empty beds on her plane. They were ready for twenty-four men to be brought back to the base.
“Where are we headed?” she asked the pilot. He had the flight plan and the map. She put her parachute on as they taxied down the runway a few minutes later. They went where the battles were hottest, and where they’d been radioed in code that the need was greatest. They would have the wounded ready for them on litters when they arrived.
“We got a call an hour ago. Luftwaffe hit about eighty miles from here. They have thirty-nine men injured. It won’t take us long to get there. They’ve got the boys ready to load, we can take twenty-four and another transport will pick up the fifteen or sixteen walking wounded after us,” he said matter-of-factly, in the jargon that was familiar to her now.