* * *
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After Dan left at the end of July, almost two months after the navy’s invasion of Normandy, the Germans were pummeling the British even harder than before. British cities took a beating, and even the countryside was being hit hard. There were bombings in Yorkshire, near Pru’s parents’ home, which worried her. So far they’d been lucky. Her brothers hadn’t been wounded, and her parents were well.
Due to the increased activity of the Luftwaffe, they sometimes put two nurses on a flight, and they gave them a fighter escort for some of their missions. It was somewhat reassuring, but their missions had become more dangerous with more intense fighting on the ground. Emma was assigned to one of Pru’s missions, and they enjoyed working together.
They were on their way to their pickup location, on their second mission of the day, with two fighter escorts, when there was a strange staccato sound from the engine. Reggie checked his dials carefully, and looked first at his copilot, then at Pru. Ed had a day off, which was rare for him, but he and Lizzie had synchronized their days off to be together, and Pru had two new corpsmen with her.
“What’s up?” she asked Reggie, and he looked at her in dismay. “We’ve got an engine failure in the right engine.” And two minutes later, he turned to her. “We’re going down, Pru. Put your parachutes on,” he told the crew. He radioed their position in code, and he knew the fighter pilots would communicate it to the base. He showed a hand signal to one of the fighter pilots, and the plane started going down fast. Pru looked at Emma, and she looked scared. They both had their chutes on, and Pru grabbed a backpack of supplies for an emergency like this one, with a limited amount of food, a thermos of water, and a gun. The corpsmen did the same, and Reggie shouted at them. There was no controlling the plane. The copilot had opened the rear door and Reggie ordered them all to jump. Pru let Emma go first and followed her as closely as she could. She thought the corpsmen were right behind them, so they’d land near enough to each other. What they had to avoid now was getting caught by a German patrol, when they landed in the vicinity of battle lines.
Emma took a long time to pull her rip cord, but she finally did and the chute opened sharply, then she drifted gently down clear of the tree line. This was the part she had hated most in their training, but she made a smooth landing and got rid of her chute quickly, under a thicket of bushes. There was no sound of gunshots nearby, although they could hear heavy artillery in the distance. And another C-47 was going to have to pick up the wounded Pru’s flight wouldn’t reach now. She made a sharper landing than Emma but got rid of her chute swiftly too. They headed into the trees as silently as they could. Pru put a finger to her lips and Emma nodded. They started walking away from the German front toward where they believed the British line was, near the French border. But technically, they were behind enemy lines now. The plane had come down hard in a field, and damaged a wing, but there was no explosion. The crew had made a smooth getaway too, in the opposite direction. They knew to spread out rapidly. Pru and Emma had no idea where they were and didn’t see them again after they landed.
They walked steadily until nightfall, but didn’t see any houses or farms. They wouldn’t have approached them anyway, since they were in occupied territory on the frontier of France.
They had no idea where they were by the time it was fully dark, and they hadn’t stopped to eat all day. They finally sat down and ate some of their meager supplies, then sipped some of the water. Pru figured they had a long walk ahead of them the next day. They weren’t far from a road, and heard a German patrol go by that night.
By then, everyone on the base knew what had happened, from the fighter pilots who had seen it all, and reported to the base immediately, to the commander of the evac unit. The nurses were worried about them. They hadn’t had a plane go down in months, but at least their fighter escort said there had been no sound of ground fire after everyone bailed out of the plane. It was a tense night while everyone waited for the two nurses and their crew to show up somewhere and make contact.
By midmorning the next day, the pilot, copilot, and corpsmen had made it to a safe house on the border. They had been picked up and were back safely by that night. But Emma and Pru still hadn’t turned up. Lizzie, Audrey, Alex, and Louise were worried sick about them, as were the other nurses in their squadron. Two days later, three since they’d bailed out of the plane, they were officially listed as missing in action by the War Office, and Pru’s parents were notified. Two more days, and their squadron leader was fairly sure they’d been picked up by a German patrol or there would have been some sign of them along the way. They used a reconnaissance plane, and the other C-47s were keeping an eye out for them. They were the first women who would have been picked up by the Germans. By six days after bailout, it seemed fairly certain that they were either dead or in a German prison camp by then, and had probably been moved deeper into Germany.
Lizzie felt sick every time she thought about it, and Ed was suffering from extreme guilt for having taken a day off. He and Lizzie had found a small inn near the base, where they could rent a room and spend a few hours together, enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, and give wings to their love.
A week after Pru and Emma had bailed, it seemed certain that they were either prisoners or dead. In either case, their whole squadron was deeply shocked and mourning two women who were so greatly appreciated and beloved by their colleagues.
Ed and Lizzie were coming back from the mess hall on the eighth day, looking ravaged, when a farmer’s truck drove onto the base carrying bales of hay, and two bedraggled figures hopped off the truck. Ed stared at them and gave a shout. He screamed to anyone who could hear him.
“They’re back!!! They’re back!!” People came running. Lizzie threw her arms around them, and within minutes, nurses poured out of the barracks. Emma and Pru reported to their commanding officer, looking as though they had been shipwrecked, and smelling of dead fish. They had walked across a good part of France and been smuggled across the channel in a small fishing boat by a boy and his father. The farmer had given them a ride to the base from the coast.
“What happened?” Everyone wanted to know.
“We had a few disagreements about the map,” Pru said with a grin, glancing at Emma, who looked sheepish. “Don’t ever bail out of a plane with a girl from the East End. She’s never been out of the city.”
“I’m a midwife, not a bloody explorer,” Emma said defensively, but they had made it back to the base safely, with no harm done. They were hungry, tired, and filthy, with scratches on their faces and hands from the bushes they had walked through and hidden under. Someone brought them each a plate of food, and they were ravenous. They went back to their barracks afterwards to shower, as the two women looked at each other and grinned, and their friends hovered around them.
“I thought we were as good as dead for a while there,” Pru admitted. “There were more German patrols out than taxis in Leicester Square, but the gods must have been with us, because they never saw us. We spent a lot of time lying under bushes and sitting in thickets, but we made it.” They hadn’t eaten in two days, but they knew enough not to overeat when they first got back. They both slept for fourteen hours after everyone left them in their room to recover from their ordeal. And Ed had cried in Lizzie’s arms, in relief that they’d made it back safely.