Most British women could not drive: it was still a man’s job here. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions,’ Daisy said. ‘Where am I taking the ambulance?’
‘St Bart’s. Do you know where it is?’
‘Of course.’ St Bartholomew’s was one of the biggest hospitals in London, and Daisy had been living here for four years. ‘West Smithfield,’ she added, to make sure he believed her.
‘Emergency ward is around the back.’
‘I’ll find it.’ She jumped in. The engine was still running.
The warden shouted: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Daisy Fitzherbert. What’s yours?’
‘Nobby Clarke. Take care of my ambulance.’
The car had a standard gearshift with a clutch. Daisy put it into first and drove off.
The planes continued to roar overhead, and the bombs fell relentlessly. Daisy was desperate to get the injured people to hospital, and St Bart’s was not much more than a mile away, but the journey was maddeningly difficult. She drove along Leadenhall Street, Poultry, and Cheapside, but several times she found the road blocked, and had to reverse away and find another route. There seemed to be at least one destroyed house in every street. Everywhere was smoke and rubble, people bleeding and crying.
With huge relief she reached the hospital and followed another ambulance to the emergency entrance. The place was frantically busy, with a dozen vehicles discharging maimed and burned patients into the care of hurrying porters with bloodstained aprons. Perhaps I’ve saved the mother of these children, Daisy thought. I’m not completely worthless, even if my husband doesn’t want me.
The girl with no hair was still carrying her baby sister. Daisy helped them both out of the back of her ambulance.
A nurse helped Daisy lift the unconscious mother and carry her in.
But Daisy could see that the woman had stopped breathing.
She said to the nurse: ‘These two are her children!’ She heard the edge of hysteria in her own voice. ‘What will happen now?’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ the nurse said briskly. ‘You have to go back.’
‘Must I?’ said Daisy.
‘Pull yourself together,’ said the nurse. ‘There will be a lot more dead and injured before this night is over.’
‘All right,’ said Daisy; and she got back behind the wheel and drove off.
On a warm Mediterranean afternoon in October, Lloyd Williams arrived in the sunlit French town of Perpignan, only twenty miles from the border with Spain.
He had spent the month of September in the Bordeaux area, picking grapes for the wine harvest, just as he had in the terrible year of 1937. Now he had money in his pockets for buses and trams, and could eat in cheap restaurants instead of living on unripe vegetables he dug up in people’s gardens or raw eggs stolen from hen-coops. He was going back along the route he had taken when he left Spain three years ago. He had come south from Bordeaux through Toulouse and Beziers, occasionally riding freight trains, mostly begging lifts from truck drivers.
Now he was at a roadside cafe on the main highway running southeast from Perpignan towards the Spanish border. Still dressed in Maurice’s blue overalls and beret, he carried a small canvas bag containing a rusty trowel and a mortar-spattered spirit level, evidence that he was a Spanish bricklayer making his way home. God forbid that anyone should offer him work: he had no idea how to build a wall.
He was worried about finding his way across the mountains. Three months ago, back in Picardy, he had told himself glibly that he could find the route over the Pyrenees along which his guides had led him into Spain in 1936, parts of which he had retraced in the opposite direction when he left a year later. But as the purple peaks and green passes came into distant view on the horizon, the prospect seemed more daunting. He had thought that every step of the journey must be engraved on his memory, but when he tried to recall specific paths and bridges and turning points he found that the pictures were blurred, and the exact details slipped infuriatingly from his mind’s grasp.
He finished his lunch – a peppery fish stew – then spoke quietly to a group of drivers at the next table. ‘I need a lift to Cerbere.’ It was the last village before the Spanish border. ‘Anyone going that way?’
They were probably all going that way: it was the only reason for being here on this southeast route. All the same, they hesitated. This was Vichy France, technically an independent zone, in practice under the thumb of the Germans occupying the other half of the country. No one was in a hurry to help a travelling stranger with a foreign accent.
‘I’m a mason,’ he said, hefting his canvas bag. ‘Going home to Spain. Leandro is my name.’
A fat man in an undershirt said: ‘I can take you halfway.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you ready now?’
‘Of course.’
They went outside and got into a grimy Renault van with the name of an electrical goods store on the side. As they pulled away, the driver asked Lloyd if he was married. A series of unpleasantly
