Page 48 of Strangers in Time
A LL F ALL D OWN
A S THEY JOINED STREAMS of people rushing along, Molly looked up to see if the German planes were really coming. This was an entirely new experience for her and the anxiousness she felt echoed that reality.
Oliver caught her look and said, “They’re not here yet, Molly. Another siren will sound, and then we’ll have around ten minutes or so before, well…”
They passed a demolished “street shelter,” which had been mass-erected early in the war and designed to hold fifty people, protecting them from “bomb splinters.” However, they had a serious design flaw, namely that a bomb blast would suck out the walls, leaving the nine-inch-thick concrete roof to fall on the unfortunate inhabitants. Oliver had happened on one such catastrophe during his air warden duties, and seeing the result had made him and his fellow air warden retch.
Ten minutes later, they raced down the steps of the tube station along with many other worried-looking people.
Oliver identified himself as an air warden to another warden in uniform who was on duty, and they both helped to get everyone in and situated before securing the entrance to the tunnel.
When he was done with this, Oliver settled next to Charlie and Molly on the station’s platform and waited.
“Do you think they’re really comin’?” Charlie asked Oliver.
“While it is cloudy and raining, the wind is calm, so there is a possibility. And the civilian watchers have become very good at their jobs, unfortunately from so much practice.” He looked reassuringly at Molly. “We’ll be all right. This station is quite deep.”
Tense minutes slipped by after the second warning siren had gone off. Then the drone of plane engines could be heard. So many that everyone looked up in surprise.
It was so eerily quiet down here that they heard one man mutter, “Come on, you bastards, just chuck it at us and be done.”
Oliver slipped his arms around the children, pulling them together and down and hovering over them, as though his slender body could shield them from what was coming.
The sounds of the aircraft engines thudded ever closer, and the anti–aircraft guns commenced firing. Each blast of the weapons made Molly’s body jerk. And then came the whine of falling bombs, shrieking higher and higher as they drew closer to the earth.
As the first munitions struck, the explosions seemed to reach right through the top of the station as though an earthquake had just breached London.
Oliver bent lower over the children and grunted in pain as a falling piece of ceiling tile hit him on the shoulder. Another bomb struck nearby, and the floor under them seemed to shift violently with the impact. Farther down the Underground line they heard screams and what sounded like a wall collapsing. Thick dust and smoke shot through the tunnel, making them all gag.
Molly had her hand clenched around Charlie’s. She had never been this frightened in her life. She wondered at how Charlie and Mr. Oliver could have endured something like this on an almost nightly basis for months on end during the Blitz.
She managed to catch Charlie’s gaze. Molly could tell he was scared. Yet he smiled bravely at her and said, “It’s all right, Molly. The Jerries don’t aim too good most times.”
She nodded and managed a weak smile in return, but, in truth, she felt nauseous and her pulse was throbbing in her ears.
As more bombs landed, the explosions were interlaced with sirens, screams, and sounds of panic from above. Inside the tube station babies shrieked, and children cried, as did some of the adults. A full two hours passed with nearly unrelenting explosions that shook all of them to their souls. Molly thought that nothing in hell could ever match this experience. And then the whines and impacts and explosions slowed, and then abruptly ceased. Everyone sat paralyzed in seeming disbelief that it was over and they were still alive.
After ten minutes of quiet passed, Oliver slowly straightened and let go of Molly and Charlie. He rubbed his injured shoulder where the tile had struck him.
“Okay, we should hear the all clear soon,” he said. “But we must wait until then. They could be sending in a second wave.”
Molly looked at him with a stunned expression. “A… s-second wave?”
“But perhaps not tonight,” he said in a reassuring tone.
Two minutes later the all clear siren mercifully sounded. Some started to make their way to the exits, while others settled down to spend the night underground just in case the Luftwaffe returned to try to kill them.
When they reached the surface, they could smell smoke and hear screams and sirens, and an explosion or two, probably as ruptured gas lines ignited. Flames rose high into the sky, turning night into near day and heating the air so much they could all feel the enhanced warmth on their skin and the smoke in their lungs.
They watched as firemen battled numerous blazes with hard streams of water and people rushed past them in all directions.
“Looks like they hit us pretty badly,” said Oliver dejectedly.
“Help me! Please!” someone nearby cried out.
They rushed toward the sounds and found a man lying amid some heated, smoky rubble. He was bleeding and his face was ashen.
“Children, go and get help while I see to him,” said Oliver as he knelt next to the injured man. “As a warden I’ve had first aid training.”
Instead, Molly pushed past him and ran her gaze over the man. He was holding his arm where blood was soaking through his ripped shirt sleeve. She examined the wound and the ominous blood flow.
“Mr. Oliver, do you have a torch?”
He produced one and shone it where she directed, on the man’s arm.
She told the man to count to ten and that this would hurt a bit, but she had to do it. She glanced at Oliver and Charlie and said quietly, “If you could hold him still.”
They did so while she took the torch and then inserted her gloved finger inside the wound. The man cried out and would have thrashed around had he not been held tightly by Charlie and Oliver.
“Okay,” said Molly. “I’m done. You can let him go.”
“What did you do?” whispered Oliver.
She whispered back, “I managed to nudge a torn blood vessel back in alignment. It won’t fully stop the bleeding but it slowed it considerably. Had I not, I doubt he would live. Now I need to slow the blood loss even more.”
She took off her hat, tore the sash from around it, and looked at Oliver. “I need you to hold his arm very tightly while I wrap this around it.” She turned back to the wounded man and said firmly, “You must remain very still. Do you understand? This will not hurt like before, but it is necessary. All right?”
He nodded, his pale features in anguish.
Oliver held the arm where Molly told him to and she very carefully chose the location before slowly wrapping the sash around the man’s upper arm, and tying it off to form a tourniquet. She then checked the blood flow and was relieved to see that it had diminished quite dramatically.
She looked down at the man. “You’re going to be fine, but you need to remain quite still. Charlie, run and get help. He needs to go to hospital straightaway.”
Charlie raced off and came back a minute later with a policeman. Molly told him what was needed, and he rushed off blowing a whistle. While he was gone Molly checked the tourniquet and wiped the sweat and blood off the man’s face. She had also used a clean handkerchief from her pocket to pack the wound. “Close your eyes and breathe in and out slowly and calmly,” she advised. “That will lower your heart rate, which will slow your loss of blood. Help will be here soon.”
“Where did you learn to do all that?” asked an amazed Oliver.
“At hospital in Leiston.”
The constable returned with an ambulance and two medics. Molly told them her diagnosis and that the injured man needed to remain very still and the tourniquet kept in place.
Out of earshot of the wounded man she said, “Before you transport him you’ll need to bind the injured arm to his body. I resettled the artery as best I could but it’s still damaged. And I had to apply the tourniquet quite tightly because of the volume of blood loss. Remember to tell the surgeon it’s the brachial artery. When he gets to hospital he will require immediate surgery. You can’t keep such a tight tourniquet on indefinitely or else the lack of blood flow will permanently damage the limb, and it might need to come off. Now, do you have morphine?”
One of the medics, who had listened to her with growing incredulity, said, “Yes, but—”
She interrupted. “Then let me have a syrette of it to give to him. That will sedate him for the trip to hospital and also for his surgery.”
The medic blurted out, “Give you morphine ? You’re just a child!”
Oliver stepped forward and said, “Um, I’m a doctor, and my daughter is just repeating what I said before you arrived.” He looked at Molly, his expression embarrassed. “She wants to be, um, a nurse , when she grows up.”
The medic looked much more at ease. “Ah, right you are. Do you want to give him the shot of morphine then, Doc?”
Oliver became quite pale. “No, you chaps go right ahead.”
After they took the injured man away, Charlie said, “That was amazin’, Molly.”
Oliver added, “I’m sorry about all that, Molly. He thinks I’m a doctor, but you were the one who saved that man’s life. I carry first aid material when I patrol and I know how to patch and bandage, but nothing like you just did.”
“I just hope he’ll recover. I tried to sound confident in front of him, but the wound was quite serious.”
They walked back to Molly’s home.
However, they found it no longer existed.