being an ambulance driver. One went where the V-1 had already been, not where it was going.
But it wasn’t their sound that mattered. It was the sudden silence, the abrupt cutting off of the engine, and that would be easy to recognize. At any rate, she was bound to hear one soon. They were coming over now at the rate of ten an hour, and the FANYs were working double shifts, driving to incident after incident, administering first aid to the injured, loading them onto stretchers, transporting them to hospital, and—when they arrived at an incident ahead of Civil Defence, which often happened—digging victims, alive and dead, out of the rubble. And they were still ferrying patients from Dover to Orpington.
It was far more than they could handle, and the Major began lobbying HQ for more FANYs and an additional ambulance. “Which she’ll never get,” Talbot said.
That’s true, Mary thought. Every available ambulance was being sent to France.
“Not necessarily,” Reed said. “Remember, she got us Kent. And this is the Major,” and Camberley promptly started a betting pool on how long it would take her to obtain the ambulance.
The FANYs had shifted effortlessly from arguing over frocks to tying tourniquets and coping with grisly sights. “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand,” Fairchild told her, and as they waited with a stretcher while a rescue team dug a shaft down to a sobbing woman, Parrish said calmly, “They’ll never make it to her in time. Gas. Are you going to the dance with Talbot on Saturday?”
“I thought you were,” Mary managed to say, trying not to think about the gas. She could smell it growing stronger, and the woman’s cries seemed to be getting correspondingly weaker.
“I was, but Dickie telephoned. He has a forty-eight-hour pass, and I was wondering if I might borrow your blue organdy, if you’re not wearing it anywhere on—oh, look, they’ve got her out,” Parrish said and took off at a trot across the rubble with the medical kit, but it wasn’t the woman, it was a dog, dead from the gas, and by the time they got the woman out, she’d died, too.
“I’ll telephone for a mortuary van,” Parrish said. “You didn’t say whether you needed your organdy this weekend.”
“No, I don’t,” Mary said, appalled at Parrish’s callousness, and then remembered she was supposed to have driven an ambulance during the Blitz. “Of course you can borrow it.”
Away from the incidents they never discussed what had happened there or their lives before the war. They were like historians in that respect, focusing solely on their current assignment, their current identity. Mary had to piece together their backgrounds from clues they dropped in conversation and a copy of Debrett’s she found in the common room.
Sutcliffe-Hythe’s father was an earl, Maitland’s mother was sixteenth in line to the throne, and Reed was Lady Diana Brenfell Reed. Camberley’s first name was Cynthia and Talbot’s Louise, though they never called each other by anything but their last names. Or nicknames. As well as “Jitters” Parrish, there was a FANY at Croydon they referred to as “Man-Mad,” and they’d dubbed an officer several of them had gone out with “NST,” which Camberley explained meant “Not Safe in Taxis.”
Maitland had a twin who was serving in the Air Transport Service, Parrish had an elder brother who’d been captured by the Japanese in Singapore and a younger one who’d been killed on the HMS Hood, and Grenville’s father had been killed at Tobruk. But to listen to their conversations, one would never have known that. They gossiped, complained about Bela Lugosi (which was refusing to start), about the dampness of the cellar, about the Major’s habit of sending them after supplies when they were off-duty. “She sent me to Croydon last night in the blackout, to fetch three bottles of iodine,” Grenville said indignantly.
“Next time, tell me and I’ll go,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said from her cot. “I’m not sleeping anyway with these wretched alerts going off every ten minutes.”
“Then you can go to the dance with me on Saturday,” Talbot said.
“I thought Parrish was going with you,” Reed said.
“She has a date.”
“I’d only yawn the whole evening,” Sutcliffe-Hythe said. She turned over and pulled the blanket over her head. “Make Grenville go with you.”
“She won’t,” Reed said. “She’s finally had a letter from Tom in Italy. She plans to spend tomorrow writing him.”
“Can’t that wait till Sunday?” Talbot asked.
Reed gave her a withering look. “You’ve obviously never been in love, Talbot. And