“I don’t suppose they have any blankets they can spare?”
“I’m afraid not. Our post was always short.”
“Oh, well, ask in Dover if they have any. And tell Lieutenant Fairchild I know all about the pool and that I will not allow any premature declarations of victory at my post.”
“Yes, Major,” she said and went to find Fairchild, who wasn’t at all alarmed that the Major knew.
“At least she didn’t forbid us to have it,” she said, shrugging. “Come along, we’re leaving.”
They drove south through Croydon and then turned east, straight down the middle of what in two days would be Bomb Alley.
I should have had all the rocket times and locations implanted instead of just the ones in southeast London, Mary thought, even though that wouldn’t have been possible. There’d been far too many—nearly ten thousand V-1s and eleven hundred V-2s—so she’d focused on the ones which had hit the area around Dulwich, those that had hit London, and the area in between. But not the area between Dulwich and Dover.
Mr. Dunworthy will have a fit when he finds out I’ve been in Bomb Alley, she thought. But they would only be doing this till the V-1s began coming over. After that they’d have their hands full dealing with the incidents in their immediate area.
The route to Dover wove through a series of twisting lanes and tiny villages. She did her best to memorize it, but there were no signposts to go by, and on the return trip she had to devote all her attention to the patient they’d picked up. “He’s to have surgery on his leg,” the nurse said as he was loaded into the ambulance. She lowered her voice so he wouldn’t hear, “I’m afraid amputation may be necessary. Gangrene.” And when Mary climbed in the back with him, she could smell a sickening sweet smell.
“He’s been sedated,” the nurse had told her, but before they were five miles out of Dover, he opened his eyes and asked, “They’re not going to cut it off, are they?” and what had nurses in 1944 said in answer to a question like that? What could anyone in any era say?
“You mustn’t think about that now,” she said. “You must rest.”
“It’s all right. I already know they are. It’s queer, isn’t it? I made it through Dunkirk and El Alamein and the invasion without getting injured, and then a bloody lorry turned over on me.”
“You shouldn’t talk. You’ll tire yourself out.”
He nodded. “Soldiers getting killed all round me on Sword Beach, and I didn’t get so much as a scratch. Lucky all the way. Did I ever tell you about Dunkirk, Sister?”
He must think she was his nurse in hospital at Dover. “Try to sleep,” she murmured.
“I thought I wasn’t going to make it off. I thought I was going to be left behind on the beach—the Germans were coming up fast—but my luck held. The chap who took me aboard had been pulled off Dunkirk two days before, and had come back to help get the rest of us off. He’d made three crossings already and the last one they’d nearly been torpedoed.”
He was still talking when they reached the War Emergency Hospital in Orpington. “I nearly drowned, and he jumped in and saved me, hauled me aboard. If it hadn’t been for him—”
Talbot opened the doors, and two attendants came out to unload the stretcher. Mary scrambled out, holding the plasma bottle aloft. An attendant took it from her. “Good luck, soldier,” she said as they started into the hospital with him.
“Thank you,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for him, and for your listening to me—”
“Wait!” Fairchild said, leaping past Mary and inside. “You can’t take that blanket. It’s ours.”
“Oh, no,” Mary said to Talbot. “I completely forgot to ask in Dover if they had any blankets.”
“I did. They didn’t.”
Fairchild came back, triumphantly carrying the blanket. “Did you ask if they had any extras to spare?” Talbot asked her.
“They don’t. I nearly had to wrestle them to get this one back.”
“What about Bethnal Green?” Mary suggested. “Could we go by the post there on the way home and check to see if they—?”
“No, we already asked them, the day of the applecart upset,” Talbot said.
Which meant she’d have to think of some other way to get to Bethnal Green to confirm the attack. Perhaps she could borrow a bicycle after she went off duty. But the Major sent her and Reed to