“Maybe you’re right,” Emma conceded. “I always expect people to think less of me because I’m from Poplar and they can hear it. And people are such snobs sometimes.”
“Not here, and anyone worth a damn as a human being won’t care. I know this is a ridiculously snobbish country, but let’s hope the war changes that. You’re every bit as good as I am, and possibly a better nurse. These girls are American. They didn’t grow up with all that crap that you and I did, which tries to keep everyone in their place, and has for centuries. You’re much smarter and far more educated than all the posh girls I’ve ever known. All they had were dancing lessons, how to do watercolors, and they were taught French. Most of them are so dumb, they bore me to sobs and I can’t sit through lunch with them. It didn’t sound like Alex was too enchanted with her world either before she enlisted and came out here. That way of life just doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore, not to me, and maybe not to her either. Give her a chance.” Emma nodded and made her peace with it. Pru always made so much sense, and she was so fair.
* * *
—
The first day that Lizzie went out with Pru and her corpsmen, her knees were shaking as they climbed the ladder to the plane. She had heard so much about their missions by then that she wondered if she would be equal to the nursing requirements, or even if their plane would be shot down. It happened. Several of the flight nurses and air evac crews had been killed. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. But she was more worried about doing the right things as a nurse than getting killed herself.
Pru could see how nervous she was, and tried to reassure her, as they checked supplies and made sure that all their beds were ready.
“Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you.” Pru smiled at her.
“I’m more worried that I won’t know what to do for the men in an emergency. This is my first combat mission.”
“You’ll be fine, Liz,” Pru said confidently, and remembered what Lizzie had said about Audrey’s brother. It was a sad story, but there were so many like it, in England too. She felt sorry for Audrey too. Pru could only imagine how she would feel if one of her brothers died. She worried about them all the time, particularly Phillip, who was a daredevil. Her older brother, Max, was only a few years older than Phillip, but had always been more cautious, even when they were children. “You just have to treat each case individually. The corpsmen do triage as soon as the men come on, and they tell us who to take care of first. They do a lot of the initial work for us. Some of the soldiers just need to be made comfortable for the flight. And when needed, we give them morphine if they’re in too much pain, so they sleep. There’s only so much we can do up here. We can’t fix them. We’re kind of a medicalized taxi service, and now and then we have to deal with a real medical emergency. But most of it is fairly straightforward, and obvious when they come on. We know what we’ve got on the flight, and some of them are ambulatory. They’re not all at death’s door. Some are, and then you just do what you can, and pray they hang on till we get back to the base. Stay close to me or Ed, and you’ll find your feet very quickly.” Pru had confidence in her as a nurse, more than Lizzie had in herself.
She introduced Lizzie to both corpsmen, and then the pilots a few minutes later. Their second corpsman was Charlie Burns, a lively Scotsman and an excellent medic. Ed Murphy was the best corpsman Pru had ever worked with, and he knew far more than most corpsmen did. His medical knowledge was impressive.
“He should have been a doctor,” Pru said to Lizzie as they took their jump seats for takeoff and strapped in.
“I wanted to go to medical school,” Lizzie said conversationally as they taxied down the runway. “My father wouldn’t let me. He’s a cardiologist and my mother is a nurse, or was until she had children. My brother is an orthopedist now, and my younger brother left medical school to enlist after Pearl Harbor. My father thinks being a doctor is too much for a woman, and they should get married, stay home, and have kids. So I went to nursing school, which was what my parents wanted. But I wanted to be a doctor, not a nurse.”
“Maybe you can do that after the war,” Pru suggested.
“Do what?” Ed entered the conversation. He’d been talking to Charlie Burns about going up to London on the weekend. Someone had told him about a jazz club that was a great place to meet women, and he wanted Charlie to come too.
“We’re talking about medical school,” Pru filled him in, and he looked immediately interested.
“I couldn’t afford to go before the war, but there should be educational opportunities for veterans after the war. My mom needed my help with my brothers and sisters, so I took a lot of jobs to help her out. But they’ll all be old enough to work by the end of the war. I still have my dream about becoming a doctor.”
“You’re lucky,” Lizzie said quietly. “My father wouldn’t let me go.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a woman.”
“So? How many women do you know willing to jump out of an airplane with a parachute or take on a job like this?” he asked, and she smiled.
“No one I can think of who would be crazy enough.”
“Exactly. So I think you could handle being a doctor. That’s pretty tame, if you can stand the years of studying. Were you a good student?”
“Good enough,” she answered. She liked him. He was direct and easy to talk to, and he thought the same thing about her. He didn’t know anything about her history, but he thought she was a very pretty woman.
“Where are you from?” he asked as they leveled off, heading for the battle lines on the border of France.
“Boston,” she said, and he smiled.
“I have a cousin there, a crazy guy, he owns a fish restaurant. He’s been there for years, and he’s 4-F, so he’s still there, doing a booming business while we’re here risking our asses with the damn Germans. Why are you here, by the way?”
“It made sense. I was stationed in San Francisco before this, and I didn’t feel like I was doing enough, so I signed up for air evac transport in the air forces.”
“Good girl.” He nodded as his eyes searched the sky for oncoming fighter planes. “I had the same idea. I lost my fiancée in the first year they bombed London. Driving an ambulance didn’t seem good enough after that.”
“I lost someone too,” she said softly, “at Pearl Harbor.” He nodded, and neither of them spoke for a few minutes after that. The pilot had just warned them that they were ten minutes from their destination. Both corpsmen left their seats and checked the beds and supplies again. They were ready. They started their descent a few minutes later, and the pilot warned them that getting in might be tricky, and getting out even more so. They were close to the German lines.