No Time For Romance Read online

  About the Book

  Lucilla Andrews was only eighteen when, as a volunteer nurse at the beginning of the Second World War, she experienced the grim realities of wartime. Young, inexperienced and coming from a comfortable and sheltered background, she found herself dealing with survivors from Dunkirk and the victims of the Blitz. Seeing these horrors at first hand had a profound and lasting effect upon her, and made her determined to train as a nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital.

  No Time For Romance is her story, the powerful and moving account of a young girl in wartime London, learning the hard way about medicine, injuries and death, as well as love and hope. It is a story both of personal courage and of the courage of the British people at war.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Glossary

  Picture Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  NO TIME

  FOR ROMANCE

  Lucilla Andrews

  To all my fellow-nurses, trained and untrained,

  who worked in all British hospitals,

  at home or overseas, in the

  Second World War

  The reader will not credit that such things could be – but I was there and I saw it.

  IZAAK WALTON, 1593–1683

  Chapter One

  As always, it was the sudden silence that woke me, but that morning in March 1945, for the last time. The silence meant the flying bomb overhead had switched off its engine and within seconds would explode on the ground. By my counting, eight seconds; others varied this from five to fifteen.

  I was sleeping face downwards with a then habitual pillow over the back of my head and neck. I preferred to risk a severed spine to having my face sliced off and had nursed enough flying bomb casualties to know I could have that choice. I was sleeping in my own room on the top and fifth floor of Riddle House, which was the nurses’ home on the Thames-side site of St Thomas’s Hospital, London SE1. The two others, the Nightingale Home and Gassiot House, had been destroyed by enemy action years earlier in the Second World War. By that early morning in March the air attacks were tapering to their end. Our authorities no longer insisted nurses slept in the basement shelters as they had done during the blitzes and when the flying bomb attacks had started in June 1944. For the first few weeks of the attack, between 100 and 150 flying bombs were launched on London daily. Familiarity and fatigue had bred in me not contempt but a passion for privacy. Five years wartime nursing had removed the terror from the thought of facing possible death alone. Death, as I had too often observed, seemed an inexorably lonely yet strangely unfrightening place. I remained terrified by the thought of the mutilating injuries that did not always kill.

  It was that thought that triggered the conditioned reflex that jolted my body from the bed and my voice into counting aloud before my eyes were properly open. Counting, I ran from my room along the top floor and down the stairs round the liftwell. That the lift was elsewhere and out-of-bounds from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. was immaterial as it was the last sanctuary I would have chosen in a building at risk of caving in. I reached the third landing at ‘eight’, and had just flung myself face down on the floor with both arms folded over the back of my head, when the explosion rattled teeth, bones, eardrums and every inch of metal in the liftwell. Riddle House swayed perceptibly then settled, unharmed. It was the only building I was ever in during air attacks to give that odd, reassuring sensation of riding with the punch. All the others had shaken, rocked, groaned, creaked, cracked, spattered glass, bricks, plaster, dust, and the omnipresent blackout screens. I was not in Riddle House during the London Blitz, but whenever I was in the building during the flying bomb and rocket attacks, I noticed that all it did was shed a few blackout screens and clouds of dust. If any plaster came down, it was not on my head.

  I picked myself off the floor, sat on the stairs to get my breath and only then realized one of my set of fourth-year student nurses was sitting a few steps up. We looked at each other and grinned euphorically, triumphantly, because we were still alive. At few moments is life more worth living than in those following the one that could have been one’s last.

  My friend, as myself, was barefoot, but in short-sleeved cotton pyjamas instead of a nightie, with a navy nurse’s uniform cloak slung over one shoulder, and, clutched in her hands, a lipstick and her fiancé’s photograph. Over my cotton nightie was the small fur carriage rug I used on my bed. On the landing floor were my eyelash curlers and the much-mended-with-sticking-plaster red cardboard foolscap file of notes for the books I one day intended to write. I had no recollection of grabbing rug, curlers or notes on my way out; my conditioned reflexes had had good practice.

  There was little time for private notes in the second half of ’44 and early months of ’45 in London. The flying bomb attacks started shortly after D-Day (6th June), the rockets in September. The official name for the flying bombs was V1s (Vergeltungswaffe Eins: Revenge Weapon No. 1). The rockets were V2s. The RAF and London nicknamed the flying bombs ‘doodlebugs’, often shortened to ‘doodles’. In other areas of Britain they were nicknamed ‘buzzbombs’, and in parts of the country well beyond their range, apparently, regarded as a joke.

  These bombs were small automatic aircraft, roughly twenty-five feet long, with noses filled with explosive and tails that spat flames as they streaked jerkily across the sky. The peculiar chug-chug-chug roar of the engines in flight reminded me of the revving of an unsilenced motorbike engine. Before it was launched each bomb was set to a chosen course and to switch off and dive at a chosen point. In flight the bombs looked evil; when they achieved their preset object they caused evil. London learnt to live with them as London had learnt to live with ‘ordinary’ bombs, high-explosive bombs (H.E.s), fire bombs and land mines, but whilst the flying bomb attacks lasted I never met anyone in London, including myself, who did not fear them far more than the rockets, though the latter were politically regarded as the greater menace.

  ‘Mind you, nurse, like as I says to the wife when they fetched us out – seeing as you ain’t gone, gal, and me neither, reckon we’re in luck. But you ought to see the muck as is all that’s left of our street, nurse. That doodle come down on the end house, see, and our whole row go down like a pack of cards – and all but the one in the row opposite, and there it is sticking up like me old dad’s one front tooth. Blast, that’s what. Cruel the blast from them doodles – and no telling what it’ll do! You take me son-in-law, nurse! Caught out, he was, when one come down Kennington way last week – not a stitch – not a stitch left on! Mother naked, wasn’t he – and me daughter she didn’t know where to put her face! Just atween you and me, nurse – tell you straight – can’t be doing with them doodles, I can’t. Different afore. Well, I mean to say, with them old H.E.s and the like you knew what was what. You knew as Jerry was up there bunging ’em down and taking his chances and – well – fair’s fair as you might say. But what’s he a-doing now, eh? Sitting on his backside with them Frogs – if you’ll pardon me French, nurse – and a-pushing a button to lob ’em over! Not right, it ain’t. Oh dear me no, it ain’t right! Is it right what the warden says about your copping another on this lot, nurse? Just come down on one of them ruined blocks? Cor! That’s alright, then, ain’t it? But I can’t be doing with them do
odles …’

  St Thomas’s Hospital stands on the bank of the Thames directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. This site, ideal in peacetime, was rather less so when central London was the eye of the target of enemy air attacks, which happened quite often in the Second World War. My general training lasted from ’41 to ’45. From first to last day every remaining window in St Thomas’s, London, was bricked in, every balcony door at the far end of the long wards had fixed boarding over the former glass panels.

  To work in constant artificial light, with disturbed nights and off-duty postponed, cut short or cancelled at the last moment because another bomb or rocket had landed in our zone became, for a while, a normal way of life. In war as in peace the London hospitals, in general, admitted patients from their own zones, and ours covered a heavily populated area south of the river. With a little experience it was fairly easy to gauge from the sound the approximate distance of any explosion and to know that, if in our zone, within minutes the first casualties would start coming in. In that event staff about to go off, stayed on; staff off-duty, in hearing of the explosion, returned automatically to their wards and departments. I neither remember, nor did I note down at the time, authority asking – much less demanding – this of the staff or medical students. It was something that seemed to happen as regularly as clean aprons were ruined and clean caps wrecked by diving under benches in Casualty, or the heavy ward tables, when a flying bomb’s switch-off overhead interrupted the writing, giving, or receiving of ward reports. As regularly, out of the hospital, one learnt to travel round London by Underground and to dodge at the double between stations.

  ‘You take my tip, miss, and get down the Piccadilly Line. Good and deep that is.’ The policeman who had flattened himself beside me on a pavement by the Waterloo Road helped me up and brushed us both down. ‘As well it’s not wet. You’d not want mud on that nice frock.’ He replaced his helmet and scanned the long trailing silver legs of the great balloons poised like pregnant spiders all over the sky. ‘Seemly, that one come down in the river, but best not to take chances. There’ll be another along sharpish,’ he added, as if advising on the next double-decker bus. ‘Best not to wait for it.’

  When working in an above-ground ward, I enjoyed sorting the dirty, wet, linen dumped in the large, flat-covered bins kept on the ward balconies. In normal circumstances, sorting dirty linen was a junior job, but as first and second year junior nurses needed constant supervision and teaching and there was little time for either during air raids, as a general rule, after the London Blitz, only third and fourth year student nurses worked on rota in St Thomas’s, with the permanent staff of Sisters, Charge Nurses and a few very experienced full-time VADs.

  From a second floor ward balcony overlooking the Thames, in the dark early mornings and the evenings, London in the blackout was either a charcoal etching or a sepia sketch. The fading colour of the buses, trams, and very occasional light-coloured car, merged into charcoal or sepia until illuminated by the new daylight or extinguished by night. Once it was properly dark, for the first few seconds on the balcony, darkness blinded; then, after a few more seconds, London reappeared. The river running slowly and black as oil; the line of seemingly omnipresent coal barges just in front of the hospital floating with the delicacy of feathers; the traffic creeping furtively behind muffled lights, the public vehicle windows black-painted and criss-crossed with anti-blast paper to lessen the dangers of flying glass. Westminster Bridge, a drawing by da Vinci; the Houses of Parliament, a black lace frieze not against but suspended from the opposite sky; the jagged, battered skyline of the City softened in darkness, the curve of St Paul’s come just visible by leaning forward over the cold, flat stone top of the balcony balustrade and peering to the far right. When there was a good moon and the skies were quiet, London looked a medieval city of uncanny serenity. The moonlight filtering palely through the black frieze, laying silver streaks on the river, white swathes on the bridges, transforming the coal barges into the oblong iced sponge-cakes we had at birthday parties when I was a child, moving slowly through the gaping ward windows of the empty roofless ruins and reminding me of the torchlight of a night nurse going round her sleeping patients. Occasionally one of the balloons turning into a solitary silver Japanese lantern, the legs invisible, or just the legs appearing as silver threads swaying in air that whatever the hour, after the ward air, smelt fresh and slightly of salt and tar. Always, before going back into the ward, I gulped in air exactly as if going back to swimming under water.

  On other nights all serenity was shattered and the darkness splashed by the red glow of the arc lights of the rescue squads digging out bodies. Sometimes the bodies were still alive; sometimes the rescuers worked all the following day and still the next night the red glow was there. One night even the river between Vauxhall and Westminster bridges glowed red and the face of Big Ben was touched with pink.

  One evening after an unnaturally quiet day, a Thomas’s houseman and I had drinks at a pub over the river with a houseman and nurse from the Westminster Hospital. We had all been given unexpected free evenings, and, sitting round our corner table in a basement bar, we decided either the RAF had had a bumper day shooting down doodles over Kent and Sussex, or Jerry had for once got his sums wrong and was dropping them short of London. Our hospitals stood on either side of the river. We were shouting each other down as to which had the tougher job, when we heard the first distant chug-chug-chug of the day. We stopped talking as the sound grew louder and at the cut-out dived simultaneously under our table. The explosion was further off than we had expected. We surfaced chorusing joyfully, ‘Bart’s or U.C.H. (University College Hospital)!’. One of the men picked up our scattered glasses and asked what the other girl and myself had muttered as we went down.

  ‘Please God, don’t drop it in Westminster’s (zone)!’.

  ‘Please God, don’t drop it in Thomas’s!’

  The men said they were sorry for God. ‘What’s He supposed to do when you’re both on the job for the one that’s got to get one of us?’

  The following Saturday afternoon a bomb exploded in mid-air and the bits landed harmlessly in the river between our hospitals. I was on-duty at the time and met the houseman on my way to tea. ‘Keep it up, Lu, keep it up! I’m too young and pretty to die!’

  Too many rose-coloured nights, too many days too long and too hideously similar to be remembered individually; too many times when Casualty had no time to spare for warning the wards of incoming patients and the sweating, shirt-sleeved medical students carrying the stretchers would just appear in the ward doorways. ‘Another five— seven— ten— coming up. Where do you want him/her, Sister?’

  The students, all male, did much of the emergency stretcher-bearing as the few porters (more experienced in casualty-work), were needed to help with the flood of casualties in Casualty Hall and for ferrying the more urgent cases to and from the temporary theatre in the basement. The proper theatre block had been blitzed years earlier.

  On one evening of a hideous day, I was sent down to the theatre on a ward errand. The deep, cavernous hospital basement ran roughly the half-mile length of the main ground floor corridor. The uneven ceiling and walls were lined with huge and small pipes, and off the main basement corridor were endless caves of varying sizes, housing workshops, stores, laundry, physiotherapists’ offices, exercise rooms, wards, and the improvised operating theatre. That evening the ‘theatre proper’ was partitioned from the empty ‘anaesthetic room’ by green curtains. Whilst waiting for attention outside the theatre curtains, through a gap I counted five operating tables in action. Each table had its own operating team and, though within touching distance of the tables on either side, each team looked in a private, apparently timeless, world. Only ‘apparently’ as a queue of casualties needing immediate operations still waited in the rabbit warren of tiny examination rooms off Casualty Hall. I learnt later the theatre that day worked non-stop for twenty hours. There were other days when the theatre worked lo
nger.

  On such days, at each reappearance the students’ shirts grew more begrimed with the filth of centuries that encased the grey faces and torn, matted clothes of the women and girls under the grey casualty blankets. Immediate ward treatment of air raid victims had then altered. Instead of, as earlier in the war, instantly removing their clothes, washing the patients and putting them into clean nightgowns, it had been found less shocking – where individual injuries made this possible – to leave them in their own clothes until the shock wore off. The filthy dust hung in the ward air and mingled with the smells of fresh and dried blood, of sweat, and the ugly unmistakable smell of human fear. To be buried alive, whether injured or not can, and usually does, cause acute clinical shock. Once that shock began to wear off, memory and fear of repetition made beads of black sweat glisten on the still grey faces that, whatever the individual age, looked old. This was one reason why air raid casualties who could safely move were, whenever possible, moved out of London within twenty-four hours of admission. Another reason was the need to keep empty beds for the next incoming wave of casualties.

  The wave slackened to a gentle ripple. Then, in an hour our ward filled with old ladies and survivors of an Old People’s Home damaged on the periphery of a rockets explosion. ‘Of course, had it been any closer, nurse,’ an air raid warden removed his no-longer-shiny, black, tin hat, mopped his brow and left a white streak on his blackened face, ‘you’d still have your empty beds.’

  The V2 rockets were uncanny things. They came in silence, too fast to be seen, too fast for any warning or protection from coastal guns, RAF fighters, or the balloon barrage. When one landed, the first survivors knew of it was a blinding flash followed appreciably seconds later by the first almighty explosion. Then, survivors at a safe distance saw great buildings collapsing as dust into a massive crater and heard the second almighty roar of the falling buildings.