EILEEN AND THE CHILDREN MADE FIVE RUNS TO AND FROM St. Bart’s with Dr. Cross over the next few hours with no opportunity to get away from him. When they returned to St.
Bart’s, he never even got out of the ambulance. Instead, he had Eileen back up to the entrance, where attendants unloaded the patients while he gave instructions to the house officer through the window and was told their next assignment.
“St. Giles, Cripplegate,” he’d say to Alf. “Do you know where that is?” and they were off again.
On the third run, Eileen had said, “We’re nearly out of petrol,” hoping she’d be sent to fill the tank when they arrived back at St. Bart’s and they could escape, but Dr. Cross had simply asked the incident officer for a tin, which he’d poured into the tank as flames licked less than five feet away.
We’ll have to make a run for it when we arrive back at St. Bart’s this time, Eileen thought.
But they didn’t go back. At the last moment the incident officer leaned in to say, “Injured ARP warden in Wood Street. St. Bart’s wants to know if you can pick him up on the way back.”
“Tell them yes,” Dr. Cross said.
“But what about the patient in the back?”
“He’s stable for the moment,” the doctor said, and they took off for Wood Street through streets filled with reddened smoke and lined with orange flames, maneuvering around spills of bricks and sparkling, sputtering incendiaries.
“HE,” Dr. Cross said as Eileen edged past a huge crater.
Alf nodded. “Five-hundred-pounder.”
I thought Mike said they didn’t drop any HEs, Eileen thought. And he said the raids were over by midnight.
But even though the all clear had gone while they were on the way back from Moorgate, she could still hear the low growl of the planes, and so could Binnie.
“ ’Ow come they done the all clear when them bombers is still comin’?” Binnie asked.
“It ain’t bombers makin’ that sound, you noddlehead,” Alf said. “It’s the fires. Ain’t it?” he asked Dr. Cross.
“Yes,” Dr. Cross said absently, wiping the windscreen with his hand to clear it, but it wasn’t the windscreen. It was the smoke, which seemed to be growing thicker by the moment as the number of fires increased.
When it began to rain a few minutes later, Eileen thought, Good, that should help put out the fires, but all it did was send up smothering clouds which came down over the streets like a blackout curtain.
Even Alf couldn’t find his way in it. He got them lost twice, and even when he was able to tell which way to go, more often than not the route was blocked with debris or with fire pumpers and miles of snaking hose.
They detoured around fallen masonry and a broken gas main shooting a jet of flame across the road. It was impossible to avoid all the broken glass—it was everywhere, testament to the HEs Polly had said the Luftwaffe hadn’t dropped.
Eileen drove cautiously over it, praying she wouldn’t get a puncture and strand them in the midst of the flames. She backed, turned, bore left in response to Alf’s directions and then right, trying to get to the incident and the injured warden and then trying to find a way back to St. Bart’s in an endless nightmarish round of darkness and flame and smoke.
Occasionally, a gust of wind would blow the smoke aside, and she’d catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s dome, floating above the smoke. It was never any closer, always just out of reach. Even if she could somehow have got free of Dr. Cross and the patients in the back, she couldn’t have got to it. When they tried to go to Creed Lane, a soot- blackened warden had stopped them and said, “You can’t get through this way. You’ll have to go round by Bishopsgate to Clerkenwell.”
“Bishopsgate?” Alf said. “That’s miles. Can’t we take Newgate?”
The warden shook his head. “The whole of Ludgate Hill’s on fire.”
“Even St. Paul’s?” Dr. Cross asked anxiously.
“Not yet, but it won’t be long now, I’m afraid.”
“What about the fire brigades? Can’t they do anything?”
He shook his head. “Can’t get to her, and even if they could, there’s no water. She hasn’t a chance.” And he gave them directions to make their way back to Bishopsgate.
“There’s got to be some way to go to Creed Lane without goin’ all that way,” Alf said after the warden walked away. “Try Gresham. Second left.”
But Gresham Street was a solid wall of flame, and so was the Barbican. They ended up having to go all the way to Bishopsgate after all, and by the time they reached Creed Lane, the burn victim had died.
“Young woman in her twenties,” the incident officer said, shaking his head. “Flames jumped the lane.”
He indicated the body that lay in the street, covered with a gray blanket. “That coulda been you if I wasn’t navigatin’,” Alf said to Eileen.
“She should have been in a shelter,” the incident officer said. “She’d no business being out in this.”
“Can Alf and me go look at the body?” Binnie asked.
“No,” Eileen said. They had no business being out on the streets in this either. “Is there a shelter near here?” she asked the officer. “These children—”
“You can’t leave us here,” Alf said. “We’re your assistants.”
“But your mother will be worried about you—”
