He went on to explain that the bomb had dropped on the south side of the east wing, by the Milk Bar. ‘Thank God it’s Sunday and it wasn’t open,’ he said, crossing himself. ‘Usually, at eleven in the morning, it’s packed with patients and staff having elevenses.’
Verity waited and watched as a steady stream of people came out, nurses pushing men in wheelchairs, and cleaning and kitchen staff wearing overalls or aprons. There were men on crutches, others with arms in slings or bandages around their heads, most of these led by nursing staff. There were rescue and ambulance men going in as others came out, and soon some of the injured appeared. The first ones had what looked like minor injuries, small lacerations on the face, or were supporting an arm which was hurt. But then the more badly injured began to come, holding a dressing over an eye, a shirt or trousers soaked in blood.
Yet still there was no sign of Ruby.
The ambulance men were bringing the seriously injured out on stretchers, but she had no need to rush forward to see each face. Ruby’s red hair was enough to identify her, even from a distance.
Fear started to bubble up inside Verity. She wanted to rush into the hospital and search for her friend. But each time she stepped forward the burly man pushed her back.
‘Marilyn!’ she yelled out, seeing a woman Ruby was friendly with, coming out with a man on crutches. She had come to the house several times, and Verity knew she worked alongside Ruby. ‘Have you seen Ruby?’
The man was directed towards a bus which was taking some of the patients to another hospital, and Marilyn left him and came over to her. ‘She should be out by now,’ she said. ‘As far as I know, the only people left are those trapped under rubble and –’ She stopped short, and it was clear she had nearly said ‘the dead’. ‘Of course, she could’ve come out another door round the back and be helping with patients. Have you looked there?’
Verity thanked her and ran back to the road, then down the drive on the other side of the building which overlooked the sea. The grounds of the old hotel were huge, and there were crowds of people standing up on the banks at the side of the garden watching the rescue work.
The damage to the building was horrendous; the bombs had gone down through the roof to ground level, shattering everything in their path. If Ruby had been on that path she couldn’t have survived.
Verity found another girl she knew slightly, and asked her if she’d seen Ruby.
‘I did before the bombing,’ she said. ‘She passed me on the stairs going up to the second floor.’
‘What time was that?’ Verity asked, her heart sinking even further.
‘Just before –’ The girl stopped, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, how tactless of me! But I’m sure Ruby’s fine, go and ask that big man with the dark hair. He’s in charge of the rescue team.’
That was how it was for almost an hour. Passed from one person to another, and no one could say whether Ruby was still in the hospital or not.
By now the death count had risen to ten. She heard there were more inside, and Verity was sure the next body brought out on a stretcher with a blanket over them would be Ruby.
Verity knew the part of the building where the bombs had dropped quite well, because Ruby had taken her to the Milk Bar several times and shown her the operating theatre too. She decided she was going in to search for her friend. The worst that could happen was that she’d be ejected forcibly. But as volunteers, both male and female, were arriving to help in the rescue, she saw no good reason why she shouldn’t be one of them – although, in an ordinary coat over a skirt and jumper, she wasn’t exactly dressed for rescue work.
Seeing a group of rescue workers going in from the back of the building, she tagged along behind as if part of their group.
The staircase they made their way up was intact, but windows had been torn out beside it, and there was broken glass, chunks of plaster and lumps of brick everywhere, so they had to pick their way through it carefully. The leader of the group asked that they all remain silent once they went into the corridors approaching the bombed section, so they could hear any cries for help. He also warned them to watch where they were walking, as the bombing may have loosened beams. If they should come across a person trapped by fallen beams or masonry, they were to call for help, but not try to get the person out alone until the experts had assessed the situation.
As one girl had said she’d seen Ruby on the second floor just before the bombing, when the group reached that level Verity let them all go on up further, then made her way gingerly along the corridor towards the point where the bombs had created a void down through the hospital.
A cold wind was coming in off the sea, blowing loose plaster, odd sheets of paper and even small items of clothing around. At one point a blue hospital gown flew towards her, flapping in her face.
She wrestled herself clear of it. ‘Ruby!’ she called out. ‘If you can hear me, shout or bang something.’
She stood still and listened. She could hear the wind, creaking timbers, and glass showering down somewhere, but no cry for help. She called again and again, each time edging nearer to the void.
When she was finally within a yard of it, she stopped short, suddenly aware how dangerous it was. From a distance the floorboards looked safe, but close up she could see they were merely held together by a couple of nails at her end; to step on to them would be like walking the plank. The walls of some wards were still intact, some with a patient’s notes still hanging on a hook above where the bed had been. Peering down, she saw a bed two floors below, the iron twisted and buckled like it had been crushed by a giant fist.
‘Ruby!’ she called out. ‘Ruby, if you can hear me, make some noise!’
Then suddenly she heard something, a faint sound that was almost like a mewing cat.
‘Ruby!’ she called again. ‘If that’s you, try to do better.’
Again the mewing sound, and in a flash of intuition she realized whoever was making it was just terrified and unable to really speak.
‘That’s better, I understand you are really scared, but keep making some kind of sound so I can work out where you are,’ she said, edging forward and keeping close to the corridor walls, as she thought the floor was probably safer there.
A step forward and the floorboard shifted under her feet, hanging down precariously. If she’d taken a bigger step, she saw she would have slid down to where the twisted bedstead lay two floors below.
But she could now see to the right of the void, into a room with its far wall blown away.
‘Ruby, or whoever you are!’ she called again. ‘I’m right on the edge of a huge hole. Try to say something, to help me find out where you are. I can’t move any further forward.’
‘Here … at back of hole,’ a faint but familiar voice called back. ‘Blown here by blast … trapped under heavy joist.’
‘Ruby, thank God you’re alive!’ Verity exclaimed. ‘Hold on, I’ll go and get the rescue team. Are you badly hurt?’
Again the mewing sound, and Verity realized it had taken all Ruby’s strength and willpower to say where she was. She was obviously badly hurt, or she would have cracked a joke.
‘Just be brave a little longer,’ she called back. ‘I’ll soon get you out.’
Verity retraced her steps and ran full tilt down the stairs and outside. She saw the big, dark-haired man who she’d been told was head of the rescue team, and went straight to him.
‘My friend, the receptionist, is trapped up on the second floor by the void the bomb made. She’s badly hurt. I can’t see her, but she said she was thrown by the blast and is trapped by a joist. Please save her?’
‘There are many people trapped,’ he said. ‘I’ll get to your friend as soon as I can.’
Verity caught hold of the sleeve of his overalls. ‘I don’t think she can hang on much longer. She’s a brave person, but she’s making this horrible mewing sound which I know is because she daren’t shout out in case everything comes down around her.
So please, please go to her now!’
He looked down at her, and half smiled. ‘You put forward a good case for her. Okay. Second floor, you say?’
She went to follow him and another two men who went with him, but he ordered her back. ‘Stay there!’ he shouted. ‘And what’s her name?’
‘Ruby,’ she called back. ‘She’s got red hair.’
Verity went round to the part of the garden where she could see right into the destruction the bomb had caused. The ground at the bottom was a mound of still-smoking brick, plaster and timber debris. She craned her neck up to see if she could spot Ruby on the second floor, but she couldn’t. But she saw a glimpse of the big rescue man; he was standing where she had stood, and he appeared to be giving his companions instructions.
Then to her astonishment she saw him flipping over the edge of the floorboards. She gasped involuntarily, thinking he had fallen, but when he suddenly stopped in space, swaying in the wind, she realized he was tied to a rope and looking for Ruby.
There was so much noise all around her, she couldn’t hear what was going on up there, and not knowing was agony. She knew she ought to find a telephone and ring Wilby, who would be frantic by now, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away.
She could see the big man pointing to something at the back of the void, and then he was gesticulating as if giving instructions to his companions.
It looked as if a rescue was really in hand.
It was another two hours before they finally got Ruby out. It was three thirty by then. She was the last of the forty-five injured to be brought out, and there were nineteen dead.
Service casualties were taken to Melksham, but Ruby, being a civilian, was taken to Torquay’s general hospital, where it was found she had a serious back injury, a broken leg and a broken arm, along with many lacerations all over her body from flying glass and masonry.
Wilby hugged Verity when she got back home at just after five. ‘How is Ruby now?’ she asked, her voice shaking with emotion.
‘Very poorly,’ Verity sighed. ‘But she’s alive, and we should be so grateful for that. Apparently, she was wedged against a wall just by a joist. If it had moved, she’d have dropped down on to the debris on the ground floor and almost certainly been killed. I wanted to stay at the hospital with her, but they wouldn’t let me.’
Verity had eventually telephoned Wilby while she was waiting for Ruby to be brought down by her rescuers. Wilby had walked down to the Palace to collect Verity’s bicycle, and Verity had gone with Ruby in the ambulance.
‘She drifted in and out of consciousness in the ambulance,’ Verity went on to say. ‘When she did come round, she said she was afraid she’d never dance with Luke again. I’m terrified she might never walk again.’
‘Did they say she might not?’ Wilby’s eyes widened in horror.
Verity nodded and began to cry. ‘They were taking her in for an operation as I left. They said it all depends on what they find.’
‘Don’t cry, sweetheart.’ Wilby pulled her into her arms, but she was crying too. ‘I can’t believe God could be cruel enough to take the use of her legs when he’s just fixed her up with the man of her dreams.’
‘We have to telephone Luke,’ Verity said, her voice muffled because her face was buried in Wilby’s chest.
Neither of them spoke again for some time. They just stood there in the kitchen, wrapped together crying. Both of them knew Ruby would never accept having to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. The chances were she’d drive Luke away too, because she’d never believe he was staying with her out of anything but a sense of duty.
A series of snapshot pictures kept running through Verity’s mind as she held on to Wilby. The hungry, ragged girl she’d met on the heath who seemed to know so much more about life than her. There was the fun-loving extrovert who dazzled her when she came to stay with her and Wilby. She didn’t think about the interlude when Ruby wouldn’t forgive her, but moved on to how it was Ruby who saved her life by getting her out of that Morrison shelter and to the hospital.
Then there were these last couple of years here together. They’d healed each other with laughter and love, and recently Ruby had allowed herself such big dreams for her future with Luke.
Surely fate couldn’t be savage enough to snatch that from her?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
February 1943
‘Just one more go,’ Wilby urged Ruby. They were in the dining room, which Wilby had turned into a bedroom for Ruby when she came home from hospital a week before Christmas. They were unsure then if she would ever walk again, despite the best efforts of a Mr Ernest Clitheroe, a top surgeon and spinal injuries specialist.
Ruby wasn’t paralysed; she could move her legs when lying on the bed. And yet back in hospital, when she had tried to stand, her legs had just given way. Clitheroe was baffled. He hadn’t expected her to be able to walk immediately – her leg muscles had atrophied during her three-month stay in hospital – but he believed the exercises he had given her would strengthen them.
Wilby insisted on bringing her home for Christmas. She felt certain that most of the problem was in Ruby’s head. While in hospital she had grown very insecure and depressed, she didn’t believe she would ever walk again, and feared that Luke couldn’t possibly love a girl in a wheelchair.
It didn’t help that Luke was now stationed somewhere near Cambridge, and he’d only managed to get one thirty-six-hour pass to travel to see her, back in December. It was just too far and too complicated a journey to attempt on a twenty-four-hour pass. Yet there was absolutely no evidence he was beginning to back away from Ruby; he wrote to her almost every day, and since she’d been back home he telephoned every night when he wasn’t on duty.
Wilby and Verity had made the dining room into an attractive bedroom, so Ruby could be wheeled easily into the kitchen, and outside the house once the weather improved. There was a downstairs lavatory too. But they had no intention of allowing Ruby to think she would stay in the wheelchair, or have to be helped into bed and on to the lavatory for ever. Wilby had got a pair of sturdy parallel bars made so that Ruby could practise walking.
This was what they were doing this morning. Wilby sat Ruby on the edge of the bed, and then lined the bars up in front of her. Supporting her weight on her hands, she had to take steps forward. She had managed just one step the first time, rising to three or four since, but today she had actually walked to the end of the bars. She couldn’t seem to turn to walk back, and she hauled herself back to the bed using her hands and arms.
‘I can’t do it again,’ Ruby insisted. ‘My legs just stopped working, and it hurts my hands and arms too much when they have to take my weight. But I’ll try again tomorrow.’
Wilby was disappointed. Once she’d got Ruby to take a couple of steps she’d expected that, within a few days, she’d be walking everywhere. But she couldn’t let the disappointment show.
‘You did marvellously. Luke is going to be so thrilled when you tell him.’
Ruby’s mouth drooped. ‘Wouldn’t it be kinder to let him go?’ she sighed. ‘I love him so much, but I’m no use to man nor beast.’
‘That is a really stupid thing to say,’ Wilby said briskly. ‘Luke loves you, and we all know you are going to walk again. You just have to believe that. Now I’ll just help you into the wheelchair, and we’ll do a few leg lift exercises.’
Wilby went to the kitchen after she’d finished helping Ruby. She left her sitting in her wheelchair by the window, just staring into space.
She was seriously worried about the girl. Brian and Colin were at school, Verity was at work, but when they were home Ruby seemed brighter and more positive. Wilby had realized now that this was an act, and she was very afraid Ruby was slipping into a state of complete apathy which she might never come out of.
It had been touch and go for her in the first couple of weeks after the bombing, and while under sedation for the pain she’d said some very odd things. The gener
al gist seemed to be that she believed she had bad blood. She didn’t know her father, and her mother was a drunken prostitute who thought of no one but herself.
Wilby sensed that inside Ruby’s head a small voice was telling her she had no right to a happy future. She suspected this voice had always been with her, but after she rescued Verity and they were so happy to be back together again, the voice was silenced for a time. This terrible accident had brought the voice back, and to Ruby it must seem that being unable to walk was her punishment for daring to think she could ever escape the fate that had been planned for her.
This was, of course, all absolute hokum. But Wilby knew that when people got such ideas into their head, they were difficult to remove. She thought what was needed was a distraction, to get Ruby thinking about something – or someone – other than herself and her predicament.
But what?
Verity appeared to be the most likely person, but she hadn’t got any problems that needed solving. Bevan was in Cambridgeshire too, and Verity was delighted when he telephoned. They exchanged letters almost as often as Ruby and Luke, and she looked forward to him getting leave and coming here. But she wasn’t in love with him, and no help or advice could make that happen, either.
Verity loved her job too. She was in her element climbing telegraph poles, she didn’t mind how cold or wet it was, she took a pride in keeping telephone lines working. Recently she’d taken up a real interest in wirelesses too, and she’d enrolled in an evening class to learn how they worked, and to repair them. She’d mentioned that once the war was over she might open an electrical goods shop and do wireless repairs on the side.
The only thing Wilby could think of which wasn’t quite right in Verity’s life, apart from her stepfather, was this chap Miller. She often spoke of him, always with affection, and from what she said it seemed entirely out of character for him to take up with another girl.
As for the stepfather, Wilby often thought there was more there than Verity had ever admitted to. She was terribly cautious with men, as if she’d experienced something really bad in the past. She had, of course, had all those beatings, but Wilby didn’t think it was that, she thought it went back much further, to when Verity was still a child.